CHAPTER II.
DEAN INGE _Some day, when I've quite made up my mind what to fight for, or whom to fight, I shall do well enough, if I live, but I haven't made up my mind what to fight for--whether, for instance, people ought to live in Swiss cottages and sit on three-legged or one-legged stools; whether people ought to dress well or ill; whether ladies ought to tie their hair in beautiful knots; whether Commerce or Business of any kind be an invention of the Devil or not; whether Art is a Crime or only an Absurdity; whether Clergymen ought to be multiplied, or exterminated by arsenic, like rat; whether in general we are getting on, and if so where we are going to; whether it's worth while to ascertain any of these things; whether one's tongue was ever made to talk with or only to taste with._-JOHN RUSKIN.
When our day is done, and men look back to the, shadows we have left behind us, and there is no longer any spell of personal magnetism to delude right judgment, I think that the figure of Dean Inge may emerge from the dim and too crowded tapestry of our period with something of the force, richness, and abiding strength which gives Dr.Johnson his great place among authentic Englishmen.
His true setting is the Deanery of St.Paul's, that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive mournfulness which suggests the hatchment of Melpomene.

Even the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from recalling Crabbe's memorable lines: Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean, With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene; Presents no objects tender or profound, But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around.
Here in the midst of overshadowing warehouses--and until he came hither at the age of fifty-one few people in London had ever heard his name, a name which even now is more frequently pronounced as if it rhymed with _cringe_, instead of with _sting_--here the Dean of St.Paul's, looking at one moment like Don Quixote, at another like a figure from the pages of Dostoevsky, and flitting almost noiselessly about rooms which would surely have been filled for the mind of Dickens with ghosts of both sexes and of every order and degree; here the great Dean faces the problems of the universe, dwells much with his own soul, and fights the Seven Devils of Foolishness in a style which the Church of England has not known since the days of Swift.
In appearance he is very tall, rigid, long-necked, and extremely thin, with fine dark hair and a lean grey clean-shaven face, the heavy-lidded eyes of an almost Asian deadness, the upper lip projecting beyond the lower, a drift of careless hair sticking boyishly forward from the forehead, the nose thin, the mouth mobile but decisive, the whole set and colour of the face stonelike and impassive.
In repose he looks as if he had set himself to stare the Sphinx out of countenance and not yet had lost heart in the matter.

When he smiles, it is as if a mischievous boy looked out of an undertaker's window; but the smile, so full of wit, mischief, and even gaiety, is gone in an instant, quicker than I have ever seen a smile flash out of sight, and immediately the fine scholarly face sinks back into somnolent austerity which for all its aloofness and immemorial calm suggests, in some fashion for which I cannot account, a frozen whimsicality.
Few public men, with perhaps the exception of Samuel Rogers, ever cared so little about appearance.

It is believed that the Dean would be indistinguishable from a tramp but for the constant admonishment and active benevolence of Mrs.Inge.As it is, he is something more than shabby, and only escapes a disreputable appearance by the finest of hairs, resembling, as I have suggested, one of those poor Russian noblemen whom Dostoevsky 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.