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.”

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.  Humanity must not go over in a body to Mr. Micawber.

Anything may happen?  No!  We are not characters in a fairy tale, but men of reason, inhabiting a world which reveals to us at every point of our investigation one certain and unalterable fact—­an unbroken uniformity of natural law.  We must not dream; we must act, and, before we act, we must think.  Human nature does not change very greatly.  Bergson is apt to encourage easy optimism, to leave the door open for credulity, superstition, idle expectation; and he is disposed to set instinct above reason, “a very dangerous doctrine, at any rate for this generation.”

What is wrong with this generation?  It is a generation that refuses to accept the rule and discipline of reason, which thinks it can reach millennium by a short cut, or jump to the moon in an excess of emotional fervour.  It is a generation which becomes a crowd, and “individuals are occasionally guided by reason, crowds never.”  It is a generation which lives by catchwords, which plays tricks, which attempts to cut knots, which counts heads.