Page:Hare and Tortoise (1925).pdf/99

 then draw together into the sound of hammer on steel, and scatter into a laugh which is like a shower of sparks. If I were a sculptor I would model him in bronze fifteen feet high and label him the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first. If I owned a monopoly of the world's industry I would make him general manager. If I were the sovereign people I would cheerfully and in a sort of helpless awe make him dictator, all the while deploring and failing to understand his views. He would simply thunder forth policies in a voice full of chromatic thirds, and with frantic, nervous huzzahs I would bear him shoulder-high to the throne."

Dare struck Keble as a philosopher who through excess of physical energy had turned to mechanical science. Or perhaps a born engineer whose talent for organizing matter had a sort of spiritual echo. At one moment he would make his facts support his philosophical speculations; at the next his philosophy, like a gigantic aeroplane, would mount into the sky with tons of fact stowed away in neat compartments. The result was that Keble didn't know whether to marvel at the load Dare could mount with, or be alarmed at the whirling away into space of so much solid matter.

"Contact with this chap," wrote Keble, "has taught me this, that to me who,—it must alas be admitted,—am merely on the brink of understanding my epoch, individuality has seemed almost an end in itself, as though the object of life were achieved