Death of the Dean

His eyes were like caves in his pale face, and his thin lips and thin fingers often writhed with nervous shyness when he talked. But what Britain's famed Gloomy Dean said was unshy enough to jolt generations of Britons. He approved of divorce, birth control ("We are breeding from the bottom and dying off at the top"), euthanasia, and in certain cases suicide (he thought condemned criminals, for instance, should be allowed to kill themselves as they wished). He disapproved of democracy, cosmetics, Martin Luther, Roman Catholicism and revolutionaries (whom he advocated shooting down "like mad dogs").

In his impregnable position as Dean of St. Paul's in London (1911-34), he had to be neither a respecter of persons nor a mincer of words. Once, when the late Queen Mary commented on the beauty of a service at St. Paul's, the Dean replied: "I assure you, Ma'am, I find it most irksome." As for the church, it was "only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak to the half-converted."

The Very Rev. William Ralph Inge ("My name rhymes with king, not binge"), K.C.V.O., F.B.A., D.D., was born in 1860 at Crayke, Yorkshire, with enough clerical antecedents to staff a cathedral. He was one of the brightest scholars in Cambridge history and was a professor of divinity there in 1911 when Prime Minister Asquith appointed him to the deanery.

Inge's attitude toward religion was strongly mystical -at least eight of his 30-odd books deal with one or another aspect of mysticism. His attitude toward the world was strongly pessimistic; though he always objected to it, his nickname, "The Gloomy Dean," was well earned. Long before depression and world war had taken their toll, he predicted England's decline to a thinly populated agricultural nation of no importance; the only hope he saw for civilization was to have the Asians take over and run things on a simplified basis. Presumably, such a basis would mean hard lines for misfits. The Dean sometimes lashed out at medicine for keeping alive people nature would have got rid of "with perhaps greater wisdom."

After his retirement, he lived quietly in the country, writing books and articles and intermittently swooping down on human fatuity with the kind of epigram that kept him well established as one of the last castings of a great mold of Englishman : crankily individualistic, knottily paradoxical, brilliantly articulate. "I know as much about the afterlife as you -nothing," Dr. Inge told an interviewer last July. "I don't even know there is one . . . I have no vision of 'heaven' or a 'welcoming God.' I do not know what I shall find. I must wait and see."

He had to wait until he was nearly 94. A few weeks ago Dr. Inge fell ill of bronchitis, and last week he died.

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