HEROISM cxxxvii 



of the original dose is much worn out, leaving Adam's descend- 

 ants with the knowledge that there is such a thing but uncer- 

 tain where/' His growing sense of this ambiguity made him 

 less swift to condemn but no less stimulating in counsel. ' You 

 grant yourself certain freedoms. Very well/ he would say, ' I 

 want to see you pay for them some other way. You positively 

 cannot do this : then there positively must be something else 

 that you can do, and I want to see you find that out and do it/ 

 Fleeming would never suffer you to think that you were living, 

 if there were not, somewhere in your life, some touch of heroism, 

 to do or to endure. 



This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when His love 

 men begin to lie down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and 

 Respectability, the strings of his nature still sounded as high a 

 note as a young man's. He loved the harsh voice of duty like 

 a call to battle. He loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, a 

 brave word, an ugly virtue ; everything that lifts us above the 

 table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon. This with no 

 touch of the motive-monger or the ascetic. He loved his virtues 

 to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved 

 the jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus ; not the Robes- 

 pierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of man's 

 unequal character ran through all his thoughts. He could not 

 tolerate the spirit of the pickthank ; being what we are, he 

 wished us to see others with a generous eye of admiration, not 

 with the smallness of the seeker after faults. If there shone 

 anywhere a virtue, no matter how incongruously set, it was 

 upon the virtue we must fix our eyes. I remember having 

 found much entertainment in Voltaire's Saill, and telling him 

 what seemed to me the drollest touches. He heard me out, as 

 usual when displeased, and then opened fire on me with red-hot 

 shot. To belittle a noble story was easy ; it was not literature, 

 it was not art, it was not morality ; there was no sustenance in 

 such a form of jesting, there was (in his favourite phrase) ' no 

 nitrogenous food ' in such literature. And then he proceeded to 

 show what a fine fellow David was ; and what a hard knot h&was 

 in about Bathsheba, so that (the initial wrong committed) honour 



