A Plea for a Mild Interest in Dean Inge

Abstract

There is in drama a situation where one man on the stage holds a secret, which he shares with the audience, but wishes to keep hid from the other players. He never gives the secret away on the stage, yet he acts all the time in the presence, so to speak, of the fact kept thus hidden. It is only the presence of that fact that fully explains what he says, by giving a second and deeper significance to his words. Where the other characters in the play will be able to see only a normal, even necessary flow of words, the audience may be able to see a strain, a definite turn given to the conversation, a deliberate undercurrent introduced. It is tremendous fun for the audience.

This goes to explain much of the enjoyment derived from a recent reading of Dean Inge’s Protestantism. A Catholic will see at once what another man may not be table to see, namely, that Dean Inge writes in the presence of a certain fact, the Catholic Church; that he cannot altogether rid himself of its presence ; that when he is writing about something apparently different he will be, perhaps unconsciously, referring back to it; that this—a normal exposé of Protestantism—is in truth a painful, straining affair; that what would seem to be the logical sequence of statement is a sequence adopted for a purpose ; and that many things written have twa planes of meaning, the often calm surface being not the more interesting or instructive.