"D.W.A.H., by Himself."
It is a profile. The eye has almost disappeared under the brow, the mouth is tightly closed to a degree that is quite unpleasant and there is a deliberate exaggeration of a slight defect he actually had—a tendency for the lower jaw to protrude a little. This little defect hardly any of his friends seem to have noticed, for most of them execrate it as a libel in the otherwise admittedly beautiful photograph at the beginning of this volume. The expression in the sketch is above all—dubious.
So did Donald see himself.
For the rest of us no doubt the lessons Mr. Haselden has for us in his caricatures, "ourselves as we see ourselves" and "as others see us," are necessary. But not for Donald. The drawing is pasted into an album which contains mainly Oxford College groups, and there is a certain unpleasant resemblance between it and his full face presentment in one of the groups—in which he has "the group expression" rather badly. Assuming it to have been drawn at Oxford, or not very long after he left, I think it must belong very nearly to a time when he was going off abroad on one of his long trips, and I had the sympathy of a dear old lady friend of ours on having to part with him. I remember replying, "Yes, it always seems as if peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety went with him when he goes!" She laughed a good deal, and then said, seriously, repeating over to herself the stately mounting sixteenth century phrases, "But it's quite true, you know!" I hardly think, though, that I should have said it of the young man in the sketch!
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.