Of course one cannot help admiring the tenacious way in which he carried out his great work under unfavourable conditions.  Yet there is something ridiculous in the picture of his rowing about in a boat on the Regent’s Park Lake, with an amanuensis in the stern, dictating under the lee of an island until his sensations returned, and then rowing until they subsided again.  As a hedonist, he distinctly calculated that his work gave the spice to his life, and that he would not have been so happy had he relinquished it.  But there is nothing generous or noble about his standpoint; he liked writing and philosophising, and he preferred to do it even though it entailed a certain amount of invalidism, in the same spirit in which a man prefers to drink champagne with the prospect of suffering from the gout, rather than to renounce champagne and gout alike.

The man’s face is in itself a parable.  He has the high, domed forehead of the philosopher, and a certain geniality of eye; but the hard, thin-lipped mouth, with the deep lines from the nose, give him the air of an elderly chimpanzee.  He has a hand like a bird’s claw; and the antique shirt-front and small bow-tie denote the man who has fixed his opinions on the cut of his clothes at an early date and does not intend to modify them.  Quite apart from the intense seriousness with which the sage took himself, down to the smallest details, the style of the book, dry as it is, is in itself grotesquely attractive.

There is something in the use of solemn scientific terminology, when dealing with the most trivial matters, which makes many passages irresistibly ludicrous.  I wish that I could think that the writer of the following lines wrote them with any consciousness of how humorous a passage he was constructing—­

“With me any tendency towards facetiousness is the result of temporary elation, either . . . caused by pleasurable health-giving change, or more commonly by meeting old friends.  Habitually I observed that on seeing the Lotts after a long interval, I was apt to give vent to some witticisms during the first hour or two, and then they became rare.”

I can’t say that the life is a sad one, because, on the whole, it is a contented one; but it is so one-sided and so self-absorbed that one feels dried-up and depressed by it.  One feels that great ability, great perseverance, may yet leave a man very cold and hard; that a man may penetrate the secrets of philosophy and yet never become wise; and one ends by feeling that simplicity, tenderness, a love of beautiful and gracious things are worth far more than great mental achievement.  Or rather, I suppose, that one has to pay a price for everything, and that the price that this dyspeptic philosopher paid for his great work was to move through the world in a kind of frigid blindness, missing life after all, and bartering reality for self-satisfaction.

Curiously enough, I have at the same time been reading the life of another self-absorbed and high-minded personality—­the late Dean Farrar.  This is a book the piety of which is more admirable than the literary skill; but probably the tender partiality with which it is written makes it a more valuable document from the point of view of revealing personality than if it had been more critically treated.