 Though he embraced innovation and modernism in the arts, his great love was for the rural England and London of his youth, forever destroyed by the first world war.The political and social consequences of progress and technology were realities that made him uneasy, and he was a man of tender nostalgia for his own Merry England.In spite of the "aggressiveness of temper and the somewhat rhetorical extravagance of mind" mentioned in his obituary from The Times, he was loved and respected by all who knew him, as was his larger-than-life, eccentric personality.