; 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.

Farrar was probably the exact opposite of Herbert Spencer in almost
every respect. He was a litterateur, a rhetorician, an idealist, where
Spencer was a philosopher, a scientific man, and a rationalist. Farrar
admired high literature with all his heart; though unfortunately it did
not clarify his own taste, but only gave him a rich vocabulary of
high-sounding words, which he bound into a flaunting bouquet. He was
like the bower-bird, which takes delight in collecting bright objects
of any kind, bits of broken china, fragments of metal, which it
disposes with distressing prominence about its domicile, and runs to
and fro admiring the fantastic pattern. The fabric of Farrar's writing
is essentially thin; his thoughts rarely rose above the commonplace,
and to these thoughts he gave luscious expression, sticking the flowers
of rhetoric, of which his marvellous memory gave him the command, so as
to ornament without adorning.

Every one must have been struck in Farrar's works of fiction by the
affected tone of speech adopted by his saintly and high-minded heroes.
It was not affectation in Farrar to speak and write in this way; it was
the form in which his thoughts naturally arranged themselves. But in
one sense it was affected, because Farrar seems to have been naturally
a kind of dramatist. I imagine that his self-consciousness was great,
and I expect that he habitually lived with the feeling of being the
central figure in a kind of romantic scene. The pathos of the situation
is that he was naturally a noble-minded man. He had a high concep