PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS


In his personal intercourse with the world, MacDowell, like so many
sensitive and gifted men, had the misfortune to give very often a
wholly false account of himself. In reality a man of singularly
lovable personality, and to his intimates a winning and delightful
companion, he lacked utterly the social gift, that capacity for ready
and tactful address which, even for men of gifts, is not without its
uses. It was a deficiency (if a deficiency it is) which undoubtedly
cost him much in a material sense. Had he possessed this serviceable
and lubricant quality it would often have helpfully smoothed his path.
For those who could penetrate behind the embarrassed and painful
reticence that was for him both an impediment and an unconscious
shield, he gave lavishly of the gifts of temperament and spirit which
were his; even that lack of ready address, of social adaptability and
adjustment, which it is possible to deplore in him, was, for those who
knew him and valued him, a not uncertain element of charm: for it was
akin to the shyness, the absence of assertiveness, the entirely
genuine modesty, which were of his dominant traits. Yet in his contact
with the outer world this incurable shyness sometimes, as I have said,
led him into giving a grotesquely untrue impression of himself: he was
at times _gauche_, blunt, awkwardly infelicitous in speech or silence,
when he would have wished, as he knew perfectly how, to be
considerate, gentle, sympathetic, responsive. On the other hand, his
shyness and reticence were seemingly contradicted by a downright
bluntness, a deliberate frankness in matters of opinion in which his
convictions were involved; for his views were most positively held and
his convictions were often passionate in intensity, and he declared
them, upon occasion, with an utter absence of diplomacy, compromise,