I
never saw him but he was surrounded by a little crowd, who abused him
behind his back, but could not resist his fascination.
I often tried to analyse this, for I felt it as much as anyone, and
though I honestly could not bear him, I could never resist going to
see him whenever opportunity arose. I suppose he offered the charm
of the unexpected to that mass of undergraduates who, for all their
matter-of-fact breeziness, are curiously alive to the romantic. It was
impossible to tell what he would do or say next, and you were kept
perpetually on the alert. He was certainly not witty, but he had a coarse
humour which excited the rather gross sense of the ludicrous possessed by
the young. He had a gift for caricature which was really diverting, and
an imperturbable assurance. He had also an ingenious talent for
profanity, and his inventiveness in this particular was a power among
youths whose imaginations stopped at the commoner sorts of bad language.
I have heard him preach a sermon of the most blasphemous sort in the very
accents of the late Dean of Christ Church, which outraged and at the same
time irresistibly amused everyone who heard it.
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