Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/18

12 would have stood in the way. Though capable of reasonable compromise, and able to make allowances for difference of view and valuation, he would never have consented to the sort of bargaining which statesmen, perhaps, must employ. Nor would he ever have consented to use the art of language to play upon the passions of a public, or to mask meanings because it is inconvenient to declare them.

As regards the man himself, it may be unmeaning to say that he was excessive in such honesty and independence. But it may be true that he had more self-sufficiency than is consistent with easy adaptation to society. For there was a vein of almost puritanic sternness which resented overmuch the acceptance of social standards, and threw more than most could bear upon the individual judgment and the individual will. It is excellent that every society should contain a scattering of such powerful, self-reliant men and women; but it would hardly be a society that was wholly composed of them.

I wish my memory served to enable me to illustrate from word and incident the force of his personality, at once simple, subtle, trustful and confident. It was all focussed in his intellectual process. I spoke of him as original and romantic. In working with him on some line of economic reasoning, my constant effort was to draw him away from some difficult and novel mode of approach to what appeared to me the most simple and. direct argument.