Nothing in the man suggests the title of his most popular book
_Outspoken Essays_--a somewhat boastful phrase that would, I think, have
slightly distressed a critic like Ste.-Beuve--and nothing, except a
certain firm emphasis on the word _truth_, suggests in his conversation
the spirit that shows in the more controversial of his essays. On the
contrary, he is in manner, bearing, and spirit a true mystic, a man of
silence and meditation, gentle when he is not angered, modest when he is
not challenged by a fool, humble in his attitude to God if not to a
foolish world, and, albeit with the awkwardness inevitable in one who
lives so habitually with his own thoughts and his own silence, anxious
to be polite.
"I do not like being unpleasant," he said to me on one occasion, "but if
no one else will, and the time requires it--"
It is a habit with him to leave a sentence unfinished which is
sufficiently clear soon after the start.
In what way is he unpleasant? and what are those movements of the time
which call in his judgment for unpleasantness?
Of Bergson he said to me, "I hope he is still thinking," and when I
questioned him he replied that Bergson's teaching up to this moment
"suggests that anything may happen."
Here you may see one of the main movements of our day which call, in the
Dean's judgment for unpleasantness--the unpleasantness of telling people
not to make fools of themselves.
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