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, or equivocation; with a superb but sometimes calamitous disregard of his own interests. [Illustration: MACDOWELL IN 1892]