more afterwards that nothing of that or of any other sort need really
have rested on him with a weight of obligation, and in fact I cannot but
think that life might have been seen and felt to suggest to him, in an
exposed unanimous conspiracy, that his status should be left to the
general sense of others, ever so many others, who would sufficiently
take care of it, and that such a fine rare case was accordingly as
arguable as it possibly _could_ be--with the pure, undischarged
poetry of him and the latent presumption of his dying for his country
the only things to gainsay it. The question was to a certain extent
crude, "Why need he be a poet, why need he so specialise?" but if this
was so it was only, it was already, symptomatic of the interesting final
truth that he was to testify to his function in the unparalleled way. He
was going to have the life (the unanimous conspiracy so far achieved
_that_), was going to have it under no more formal guarantee than
that of his appetite and genius for it; and this was to help us all to
the complete appreciation of him. No single scrap of the English fortune
at its easiest and truest--which means of course with every vulgarity
dropped out--but was to brush him as by the readiest instinctive wing,
never over-straining a point or achieving a miracle to do so; only
trusting his exquisite imagination and temper to respond to the
succession of his opportunities. It is in the light of what this
succession could in the most natural and most familiar way in the world
amount to for him that we find this idea of a beautiful crowning
modernness above all to meet his case. The promptitude, the perception,
the understanding, the quality of humour and sociability, the happy
lapses in the logic of inward reactions (save for their all infallibly
being poetic), of which he availed himself consented to be as
illustrational as any fondest friend could wish, whether the subject of
the exhibition was aware of the degree or not, and made his vivacity of
vision, his exercise of fancy and irony, of observation at its freest,