THE GLOOMY DEAN

Evening Star, Issue 19004, 28 July 1925, Page 11

THE GLOOMY DEAN

Returning from the United States, the Doan of St. Paul's (says a correspondent of the London ‘ Observer ’) may reflect upon the, fact that no English Ghurehman, and perhaps no English public man, has in recent years been the centre of discussion in any way comparable to that stirred up by himself. On his arrival in New York he told the reporters Unit lie thmmlit lie could manage to survive twenty-one days of exile in a dry country. In the hour of departure he congratulated them upon the success with which they had destroyed his privacy. Ido had made in the interval no secret of his feeling that America, for a man of his hind, is almost an uninhabitable nlaec, " Idle the Press was informed (bat its enterprise bad gone far towards spoiling Ids visit. Upon this point there. are a few things to be said, and they should ho said with the plainness that, the dean himsclt can appreciate, (crtainlv he has no cause for complaint in his reeep Lion. The interviewers who caught him on the steamer plied him with r.uestinns which gave him a first-rate opening, and he took advantage of it, in a way that delighted them, 'they challenged Jn’iu, not only on a, dozen or more of the subjects upon winch be had written outspoken essays, from modernism lo hiilli control, hut also on certain local_ topics', such as'the great cathedral of Now York, which were much more explosive than he knew. It was after ho had gone to Yale University, to deliver the Boechcr lectures on preaching, that things went wrong. The Press reports infuriated him. His lectures, ho declared, were for the few; the newspapers should have known boiler than to treat them as matter for the many. Now, it is.impossible in believe that Dr Inge did not know the answer to that. For fifteen years ho has been a public character, with a surprising talent for getting into the headlines." Hence his Yale course was news every morning for a week.

But the clean had a second and very interesting complaint. The reporters made an aflirightjng botch of Ids first lecture, and their capital hlunder was almost unimaginable. Dr Inge, exercising his well-known genius for {(notation. read a gorgeous passage from one of the most fa,incus of the Fathers, which included a .scornful reference to the ancient custom of applauding in chiii’ch. Looking np from his manuscript as he came to flic “end of quote,” he said : “ All (his is Chrysostom.” Next day lie was outraged to find that from end to end of, the American Continent ho had been reported as relinking the practice of applauding sermons ! 'Phis and similar catastrophes provoked him to remark that the editors had sent their baseball reporters to his lectures.

The dean, however, may have lea mod that the Press was by no moans without its defence, ft was offered by the representative of the ‘ Boston Transerint.’ Reporting the dean ns ho read was, he said, “ well-nigh impossible; and the manuscript, in close handwriting. bad to be hurriedly gone over by half a dozen reporters, while the lecturer stood by in apprehension. What wonder that the quotation .marks should be missed.’' The dean, of course, does -not realise that, as one admiring bearer said to mo, he reads in the old English clerical manner, “ not giving a darn for the audience.” The blame belongs, I suggest, properly with the Yale authorities. They knew the circumstances, and were aware of the danger. Tito lectures were till in writing; some nnrlions wore already in proof. They should have taken the obvious precaution of preparing an advance summary for the Press.

As it is, this most courageous and provocative of English Churchmen has left America, with his task half undone, and some of it misdone. Speakers of tiro dean’s kind are at best heavily handicapped across the Atlantic. They are imperfectly heard; their special enunciation makes the mother tongue sound iri American ears like a strange language; their reliance upon the papertolls against them in that land of extempore, or memorised, speech. But, all the same, the dean achieved an immense success of publicity. Most of what he said was already in his books; but now it has gone out, ns from the muezzin of. the . Woo I worth building. Mora than eyex dean Jg j*