sky loved to place in the dismal and sordid
atmosphere of a lodging-house, there to shine like golden planets by the
force of their ideas.

But when all this is said, and it is worth saying, I hope, if only to
make the reader feel that he is here making the acquaintance of an
ascetic of the intellect, a man who cares most deeply for accurate
thought, and is absorbed body, soul and spirit in the contemplation of
eternal values, still, for all the gloom of his surroundings and the
deadness of his appearance, it is profoundly untrue to think of the Dean
as a prophet of pessimism.

When he speaks to one, in the rather muffled voice of a man troubled by
deafness, the impression he makes is by no means an impression of
melancholy or despair; on the contrary it is the impression of strength,
power, courage, and unassailable allegiance to truth. He is careless of
appearance because he has something far better worth the while of his
attention; he is aloof and remote, monosyllabic and sometimes even
inaccessible, because he lives almost entirely in the spiritual world,
seeking Truth with a steady perseverance of mind, Goodness with the full
energy of his heart, and Beauty with the deep mystical passion of his
soul.

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