Page:My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (1908).djvu/20

14 and kept for use. For he would fetch from his business life, from various sports, and from special studies in military history and other branches of the wide arts of "strategy" which always interested him, peculiarly apt and forcible illustrations for some philosophic position he was seeking to maintain.

Those who did not know Mummery personally may be disposed to think that this attempt formally to analyse and set out his qualities of mind is excessive or, at any rate, unnecessary. But those who were brought into personal relations with him will, I think, be glad of some opportunity to revive their recollection of one who, though only known to fame in a particular and narrow line of achievement, will remain to them the image of a really great man. For all those qualities of body and mind which made him climber and thinker were firmly knit together to compose his character in the fuller and distinctively moral aspect. The strain of austerity, of which I have spoken, combined with a dislike for the mere artificial uses of society, prevented him from seeking or attaining popularity in any large sense; but his friendliness and the peculiar sense of absolute reliability which belonged to everything he said and did, won for him an intense feeling of respect, and, among those who were much with him, an affection which will last out their memory of him.

In this writing of my friend I am hampered only by one feeling of reluctance, due to a knowledge that the last thing he craved was open praise,