Author Description

From the beginning of VOL. II. CHAPTER I, CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT BEFORE we take up the narrative which George Tyrrell; too soon abandoned, it may be well to supplement the portrait which he gave us in the first volume by a further description of the man himself, as known to his friends, and as known also to his enemies or critics. Such description is chiefly authoritative as drawn from his own utterances, of which there are plenty available as frankly self-revealing as those of the autobiography. They may, indeed, possess even higher authority in the matter of portraiture than those of the former document, being instantaneous photographs and not records of the past. From very opposite quarters a good deal of advice has been tendered to the compiler of this life by those chiefly interested in one or other aspect of the work and character of its subject. There are Catholics whose only desire is to justify him to their co-religionists, as there are anti-clericals for whom his chief importance lies in the use that can be made of his name and writings in their particular campaign; there are those who care only for his constructive, and those who care chiefly for his destructive work. A "protective" biography would indeed be a strange contradiction as succeeding to the autobiography we have before us, and with the first volume of this life to serve as a model, it has been the ambition of the compiler of the second that its subject should move through its pages just such as he was, with his strength and his weakness, his greatness and his littleness, his sweetness and his bitterness, his utter truthfulness and what he himself calls his "duplicity," his generosity and his ruthlessness, his tenderness and his hardness, his faith and his scepticism. If the sum total be displeasing to a few his biographer may regret it, but I know that he would not. I seem [he wrote on September 3rd, 1900, to one whom we will call throughout this volume V.] of late y