is apparently the very effect of the Pacific life as those who dip into
it seek, or feel that they are expected to seek, to report it; but it
reports itself somehow through these pages, smilingly cools itself off
in them, with the lightest play of the fan ever placed at its service.
Never, clearly, had he been on such good terms with the hour, never
found the life of the senses so anticipate the life of the imagination,
or the life of the imagination so content itself with the life of the
senses; it is all an abundance of amphibious felicity--he was as
incessant and insatiable a swimmer as if he had been a triton framed for
a decoration; and one half makes out that some low-lurking instinct,
some vague foreboding of what awaited him, on his own side the globe, in
the air of so-called civilisation, prompted him to drain to the last
drop the whole perfect negation of the acrid. He might have been waiting
for the tide of the insipid to begin to flow again, as it seems ever
doomed to do when the acrid, the saving acrid, has already ebbed; at any
rate his holiday had by the end of the springtime of 1914 done for him
all it could, without a grain of waste--his assimilations being neither
loose nor literal, and he came back to England as promiscuously
qualified, as variously quickened, as his best friends could wish for
fine production and fine illustration in some order still awaiting sharp
definition. Never certainly had the free poetic sense in him more
rejoiced in an incorruptible sincerity.




IV


He was caught up of course after the shortest interval by the strong