Sprung from an old Yorkshire family, Charles Stephen Dale was yet sufficient of a Cockney to justify both his friends and his enemies in crediting him with the Celtic temperament.  Nevertheless, he was essentially a modern, insomuch that his contempt for the writings of dead men surpassed his dislike of living authors.  To these two central influences we may trace most of the peculiarities that rendered him notorious and ultimately great.  Thus, while his Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike “the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks,” it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords.  Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should have its place in the formation of his character.  Conversely, he was nothing without a reason.

These may seem small things to which to trace the motive forces of a man’s life; but if we add to them a third, found where the truth about a man not infrequently lies, in the rag-bag of his enemies, our materials will be nearly complete.  “Dale hates his fellow-human- beings,” wrote some anonymous scribbler, and, even expressed thus baldly, the statement is not wholly false.  But he hated them because of their imperfections, and it would be truer to say that his love of humanity amounted to a positive hatred of individuals, and, pace the critics, the love was no less sincere than the hatred.  He had drawn from the mental confusion of the darker German philosophers an image of the perfect man—­an image differing only in inessentials from the idol worshipped by the Imperialists as “efficiency.”  He did not find—­it was hardly likely that he would find—­that his contemporaries fulfilled this perfect conception, and he therefore felt it necessary to condemn them for the possession of those weaknesses, or as some would prefer to say, qualities, of which the sum is human nature.

I now approach a quality, or rather the lack of a quality, that is in itself of so debatable a character, that were it not of the utmost importance in considering the life of Charles Stephen Dale I should prefer not to mention it.  I refer to his complete lack of a sense of humour, the consciousness of which deficiency went so far to detract from his importance as an artist and a man.  The difficulty which I mentioned above lies in the fact that, while every one has a clear conception of what they mean by the phrase, no one has yet succeeded in defining it satisfactorily.  Here I would venture to suggest that it is a kind of magnificent sense of proportion, a sense that relates the infinite greatness of the universe to the finite smallness of man, and draws the inevitable conclusion as to the importance of our joys and sorrows and labours.  I am aware that this definition errs on the side of