the
retrospect is only worth a thought now, because it illustrates a duality
which seemed to him, and is, very simple; but to many is baffling in its
very simplicity. When I say his weapon was logic, it will be currently
confused with formality or even frigidity: a silly superstition always
pictures the logician as a pale-faced prig. He was a living proof, a
very living proof, that the precise contrary is the case. In fact it is
generally the warmer and more sanguine sort of man who has an appetite
for abstract definitions and even abstract distinctions. He had all the
debating dexterity of a genial and generous man like Charles Fox. He
could command that more than legal clarity and closeness which really
marked the legal arguments of a genial and generous man like Danton. In
his wonderfully courageous public speaking, he rather preferred being a
debator to being an orator; in a sense he maintained that no man had a
right to be an orator without first being a debater. Eloquence, he said,
had its proper place when reason had proved a thing to be right, and it
was necessary to give men the courage to do what was right. I think he
never needed any man's eloquence to give him that. But the substitution
of sentiment for reason, in the proper place for reason, affected him
"as musicians are affected by a false note." It was the combination of
this intellectual integrity with extraordinary warmth and simplicity in
the affections that made the point of his personality. The snobs and
servile apologists of the _regime_ he resisted seem to think they can
atone for being hard-hearted by being soft-headed. He reversed, if ever
a man did, that relation in the organs. The opposite condition really
covers all that can be said of him in this brief study; it is the clue
not only to his character but to his career.

If rationalism meant being rational (which it hardly ever does) he might
at every stage of his life be called a red-hot rationalist. Thus, for
instance, he very early became a Socialist and joined the Fabian
Society, on the executive of which he played a prominent part for some
years. But he afterwards gave the explanation, very characteristic for
those who could understand it, that what he liked about the Fabian sort
of Socialism was its hardness. He meant intellectual hardness; the fact
that the society avoided sentimentalism, and dealt in affirmations and
not mere associations. He meant that upon the Fabian basis a Socialist