Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/49

 wrote to his friend Mr. Lynd shortly before his death, it "oppressed him with horror." I do not think it out of place to recall here a brief obituary notice he wrote of Mr. Sheehy-Skeffington, whom he loved, as Mr. Lynd so truly says, for the "uncompromising and radically gentle idealist he was"—

"It would be difficult at any time to convey in the deadness of language an adequate sense of the courage, vitality, superabundant faith, and self-ignoring manliness which were the characteristic things we associated with Francis Sheehy-Skeffington. To me, writing amidst the rumour of camps, the task is impossible. There are clouds that will never lift.

"He was to me the good comrade of many hopes, and though the ways of this scurvy and disastrous world led us apart, he remained to me an inextinguishable flame. This 'agitator,' this 'public menace,' this 'disturber' was wholly emancipated from egotism, and incapable of personal hatred. He was a man who had ranged the whole world of ideas, and rather than my own words I would use those of the great whom we agreed in admiring. I could style him with Guyau—

'Droit comme un rayon de lumière, Et, comme lui, vibrant et chaud;—'

or put in his mouth the proud and humble faith of Robert Buchanan—