I am now going to make a comment or two on my brother’s word-pictures as I should if he were by my side.  But first I should like his readers to know and realize that both were written before the period of what I may call Donald’s “Renaissance,” a period that can be roughly marked by the publication of his first book, The Lord of all Good Life.

Up to then he had been struggling in vain for self-expression.  How he had worked the amount of MSS. he has left alone proves—­for we have it on a friend’s testimony that “he tore up much of what he wrote”; and he also had experienced and suffered, violating his natural “timidity” and his in some ways, precarious health, for he had never got over certain weaknesses engendered by his illness in Mauritius—­in his struggle to get a true basis for a solution of the meaning of life and of religion.  What cost him most was the knowledge that he was frequently doubted and misunderstood by many of those whose approbation would have been very dear to him.  This is proved by his constantly expressed gratitude to the one or two who never doubted him for one moment.

With the writing of this book, as we know, all his difficulties began to clear away, and at the same time he began to reap the harvest of love and admiration that he had sown in his toils to produce it.  And the result was he opened out like a flower to the sun!  No one can doubt this for a moment who has read his book of a year later, The Student in Arms, and rejoiced in the radiant happiness of its inspiration.

He had more than once said to me during the past two years, “You know it makes a tremendous difference to me when people really like me.”  No longer was it a case of “one friend at a time.”  The period for that was over and done with.  He had come into his own.  He was ready for a universal brotherhood, and no hand would ever be held out to him in vain.

It is impossible to believe that he does not now know of and appreciate all the beautiful tributes that have come to him since his “passing”—­from the perfect wreath of immortelles weaved by Mr. Strachey to the sweet pansy of thought dropped by a little fellow V.A.D. of mine who said beautifully and courageously—­though knowing him solely through his book—­“We feel since he gave us his thought that he belongs a tiny bit to us, too,” thus voicing the feeling of many.

I believe the paper entitled “My Home” to have been written at Oxford, and “School” not so very long after.  In any case, I have definite proof of their both belonging to Donald’s pre-"Renaissance” period, for the friendship with F——­, that began at “the Shop” and went under a cloud for a time, was renewed with fresh vigour in 1914, and has burned brightly ever since.  Only last July was I sent by him a letter of F——­’s from the trenches, with the injunction, “Please put this among my treasures,” and there is an allusion to a story told in this letter in the article entitled “Romance” of the present volume.