Page:Essays in Philosophical Criticism (1883).djvu/17

 dencies of youth. The first was the distinctness with which he lived by conviction and not by impulse. No man could be less pedantic; he had, indeed, a kind of humorous grasp of character and situation which made pedantry always impossible to him. But it seemed to be for him a moral impossibility to act at all, unless he had thought out his course and come to clearness of decision regarding it. Hence at times his manner might quench or repel the ready fire of immediate youthful sympathy in those around him, and might seem to keep even those who were most intimate with him at a distance from his life. Really, however, no one was more capable of friendship, and he was one with whom every tie which he bad once formed only grew stronger with time, and was unaffected even by absence and want of intercourse.

The other characteristic was the intensity of his political and intellectual interests. In this respect his character seemed to invert the usual order of development. What is called the ‘enthusiasm of humanity,’ or at least a sympathy with great intellectual and political movements, was with him a primary, and one might almost say an instinctive, passion; and it was rather out of this and, as it were, under its shadow, that for the most part his personal feelings and affections grew up. Hence he was, in some sense, intellectually old in his youth, and he seemed to become younger at heart— less restrained and self-centred, and more open to individual interests— as he grew older.

He was, in the best sense, a democrat of the democrats. I use this word for want of a better, but what I mean is, that from a somewhat exclusive interest in the essentials of humanity — in the spiritual experiences in which all men are alike — and from a natural disregard for the outward differences of rank and position and even of culture, by which these essentials are invested and concealed, his sympathies were always with the many rather than with the few. He was strongly inclined to the idea that there is an ‘instinct of reason’ in the movement of popular sentiment, which is often wiser than the opinion of the so-called educated classes. The belief in the essential equality of men might, indeed, be said to be one of the things most deeply rooted in bis character, though it showed itself not in any readiness to echo the commonplaces of Radicalism, but rather in an