a Utopian. Kettle
was always too much of a pessimist--he himself would have said a
realist--to yield easily to romance. As a very young man he edited in
Dublin a paper called _The Nationist_, for which he claimed, above all
things, that it stood for "realism" in politics. Some men are driven
into revolution by despair: it was as though Kettle had been driven into
reform by despair. He admired the Utopians, but he could not share their
faith. "If one never got tired," he wrote in a sketch of the
International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart in 1907, "one would always
be with the revolutionaries, the re-makers, with Fourier and Kropotkin.
But the soul's energy is strictly limited; and with weariness there
comes the need for compromise, for 'machines,' for reputation, for
routine. Fatigue is the beginning of political wisdom." One finds the
same strain of melancholy transmuting itself into gaiety with an epigram
in much of his work. His appreciation of Anatole France is the
appreciation of a kindred spirit. In an essay called _The Fatigue of
Anatole France_ in _The Day's Burden_ he defended his author's
pessimistic attitude as he might have defended his own:

A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams, as a
thundercloud is stabbed by lightning, is a type of spiritual life
far from contemptible. A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music
of consummate prose, is an attitude and an achievement that will
help many men to bear with more resignation the burden of our
century.

How wonderfully, again, he portrays the Hamlet doubts of Anatole France,
when, speaking of his bust, he says: "It is the face of a soldier ready
to die for a flag in which he does not entirely believe." And he goes
on:

He looks out at you like a veteran of the lost cause of intellect,
to whose soul the trumpet of defeat strikes with as mournful and
vehement a music as to that of Pascal himself, but who thinks that
a wise man may be permitted to hearten himself up in evil days with
an anecdote after the manner of his master Rabelais.

Kettle himself practised just such a gloom shot with gaiety. He did not,
however, share Anatole France's gaiety of unbelief. In some ways he was
more nearly akin to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, with his religion and his
love of the fine gesture. Had he been a Frenchman of an earlier
generation, he would have been famous for his talk, like Villiers, in