Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

TRIBUTES AND RESOLUTIONS 49
left his mark upon us. Tempestuous and tormented,
vulnerable and faulty, but beyond all, human, he too
might have said out of the agony of untold struggles:
(I quote) "It is a struggle worthy of fine souls to tell the
truth — but it is a far greater struggle to know what the
truth is.
It is that struggle, being the only precious thing
I have, that I bequeath to you. There is nothing more I
can say, save to wish you well. ' ' The thing we call happiness
is for very few. It comes to none who think deeply in any
positive form. It was not meant for him at all. Only a
broken spirit can compromise with essentials and he faced
both his own problems and those of other people unflinchingly.
All could feel his bigness while few understood it,
because he deliberately cast about himself an illusion that
was not easy to penetrate. He was armed with a subtle
sort of bluff. There was no insincerity in this. Through
deep-rooted characteristics that may have been racial it
was actually necessary, in him, to self-preservation. It
developed chiefly, I think, through his dread of the penetrating
sort of curiosity that he feared might sometime
uncover in him such weaknesses as were constantly
being
uncovered, for his scrutiny, by others. With the rarest
delicacy, he could meet and treat, even to the healing point,
many of these mental sores. It revolted him, however, to
think that in even the gentlest way others might intrude
upon the precious privacy of his reserve. This wall of stern
control became so habitually his refuge that it was in the
end a definite self-deception. But beneath and beyond it
his life will stand forever as a passionate protest against
every form of sham. As for his death — well — a great
scientist wrote over the grave of one who had blazed that
path ahead, even as in life he had blazed all others, "We
have loved the stars too well to fear the night."