ecialised" in the region of private direction and
advice; but I doubt if he ever did quite enough general pastoral work of
a commonplace and humdrum kind to supplement and fill out his experience
of human nature. He never knew people under quite normal conditions,
because he felt no interest in normal conditions. He knew men and women
best under the more abnormal emotion of the confessional; and though he
used to maintain, if challenged, that penitence was a normal condition,
yet his judgment of human beings was, as a consequence, several times
gravely at fault. He made some unwise friendships, with a guileless
curiosity, and was obliged, more than once, to extricate himself by
summary abandonments.

He wrote of himself once, "I am tired to death of giving myself away,
and finding out too late.... I don't like my tendency to agree with
people wildly; my continual fault has been to put on too much fuel."
Like all sensitive people, who desire sympathetic and friendly
relations, he was apt to discover the best of new acquaintances at once,
and to evoke in them a similarly genial response. It was not till later,
when the first conciliatory impulse had died down, that he discovered
the faults that had been instinctively concealed, and indeed repressed
by his own personal attractiveness.

He had, too, an excessive confidence in his power of managing a critical
situation, and several times undertook to reform people in whom
corruption had gone too far for remedy. He believed in his power of
"breaking" sinners by stern declarations; but he had more than once to
confess himself beaten, though he never wasted time in deploring
failures.

Mr. Meynell, in his subtle essay which prefaces my brother's little book
of poems, speaks of the complete subjugation of his will. If I may
venture to express a different view, I do not feel that Hugh ever
learned to efface his own will. I do not think his temperament, was made
on the lines of self-conquest. I should rather say that he had found the
exact _milieu_ in which he could use his will to the best effect, so
that it was like the charge of powder within the gun, no longer
exploding itself vaguely and aimlessly, but all concentrated upon one
intense and emissive effort. Because the one characteristic of the last
years of his life was his immense enjoyment of it all. He wrote to a
friend not long before the end, when he was feeling the strain upon him
to be heavier than he could bear; af