LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE THE LEAVES OF THE TREE THE LEAVES OF THE TREE STUDIES IN BIOGRAPHY BY ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON FELLOW OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Non sum propheta , . . sed armentarius sum, vellicans sycomoros. LONDON SMITH, ELDER, far CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1911 [All rights reserved] Printed by BALLANTYNK, HANSON !* Co At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh TO REGINALD JOHN SMITH ONCE MY FAGMASTER, NOW MY PUBLISHER, ALWAYS MY FRIEND, / DEDICATE THIS BOOK NOTE MY thanks for valuable criticism and advice, in the course of producing these biographical studies, are due to the Bishop of Wakefield, the Bishop of Norwich, the Archdeacon of Ely, Colonel H. W. Feilden, the Rev. Charles Green, and Mr. H. A. Newton. I may also be allowed to express my special gratitude to Mr. Reginald Smith, K.C., who not only be- spoke the series for the Cornhill Magazine, in which these chapters first appeared, but who gave me at every point the most sympathetic counsel and encouragement. ARTHUR C. BENSON. September 1911. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY i II. BISHOP WESTCOTT 21 III. HENRY SIDGWICK 49 IV. J. K. STEPHEN 78 V. BISHOP WILKINSON 108 VI. PROFESSOR NEWTON 132 VII. FREDERIC MYERS 163 VIII. BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 187 IX. HENRY BRADSHAW . . . .212 X. CHARLES KINGSLEV . . . 230 XL BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN . . 260 XII. MATTHEW ARNOLD . . . 284 EPILOGUE .... . 310 vU THE LEAVES OF THE TREE INTRODUCTORY IN this volume, I exhibit a little gallery of portraits. The only conditions imposed upon me were that they should be portraits of men whom I had known well enough to describe with some degree of personal vivacity, and that they should also be people the effect of whose influence and character I had to some extent experienced ; not mere remote figures, whom I had seen like statues at the ends of vistas, with everlasting gestures of frozen emotion, or whose voices I had publicly heard conversing or expostulating, persuading or explaining ; but actual persons, whose remarks had been addressed sincerely or intimately to myself, and with whom I had been in some sort of direct relation. This was a grateful task, and one which I accepted with genuine delight. But when I came to consider the question more closely, I foresaw certain very real and positive difficulties. I determined to write with the utmost candour and frankness ; and this in the first place creates a difficulty, because even men who have enjoyed a certain degree of publicity, though they A 2 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE belong in a sense to the whole world, yet are in a sense private property as well. I should not myself claim any property in the illustrious dead, however nearly they might have been related to myself. I cannot conceive objecting to anything being said or written of any one whom I had known well or loved, after their death, provided only that it were true. Indeed, our whole attitude of mind about the dead seems to me strangely narrow and artificial. We talk freely enough about the living, and do not hesitate, in an intimate circle, to discuss plainly the faults and failings of those whom we love. The only reason why we do not discuss such things more openly with people outside the intimate circle is a relic of barbarism, a desire to safeguard our friends, and not to put a weapon into the hands of possible foes. But death removes all that ; and the idea of trying to preserve a reputation unblemished at the expense of truth, to guard a man's memory by suppressing facts, seems to me hopelessly insincere and faint- hearted. To doctor a record, so as to make it into an attractive romance, is a childish, almost a savage thing. The old phrase, De mortuis nil nisi bonum, is often misinterpreted ; it does not mean that one must indiscriminately praise the dead, but rather that one ought not to say anything about them if one cannot praise them. But both principles alike seem to me to be vicious, in sacri- ficing honesty to decorum. There are, of course, people whom it is better not to write about at all, or even to read about ; whom, indeed, it is better to forget altogether, if one can people of mean, INTRODUCTORY 3 cruel, treacherous, or selfish dispositions, whose example is only valuable because it shows one what to detest, and whose whole existence gives one a sort of ugly, shuddering doubt about the plans and purposes of God people who have made havoc of their own lives and of the lives of those about them, whose death would have been at any time desirable, and the earlier it had occurred so much the better for the world. But even so I am not quite sure, because one would not think of applying the same principle to works of imagina- tion ; and books or plays which show the horror and misery of such lives can do more good than a multitude of sermons. Besides, I believe that the only way of getting at the secret of the world is to employ the scientific method, not blinking the facts which make against the theories which we should like to be able to maintain. Perhaps it may be said that the study of diseased souls should be left to moral pathologists and psycho- logists. It is not a good thing for ordinary people to read the details of diseases, because the uncon- scious imagination is capable of playing very dis- agreeable tricks and inducing a debilitating sort of imitation. And thus it is perhaps better that the study of crimes and moral failings should be left to professed moralists and philosophers, whose business it is to arrive at theories by analysis and comparison ; unless, indeed, such sad histories are glorified and uplifted by art and inspiration, in which case they may become true and moving pictures, and lead people to turn their backs upon the beginnings of evil. 4 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE But when it comes to dealing with men who have played upon the whole a noble part in life, whose vision has been clear and whose heart has been wide, who have not merely followed their own personal ambitions, but have really desired to leave the world better and happier than they found it in such cases, indiscriminate praise is not only foolish and untruthful, it is positively harmful and noxious. What one desires to see in the lives of others is some sort of transformation, some evidence of patient struggling with faults, some hint of failings triumphed over, some gain of generosity and endurance and courage. To slur over the faults and failings of the great is not only inartistic, it is also faint-hearted and unjust. It alienates sympathy, it substitutes unreal adoration for wholesome admiration, it afflicts the reader, conscious of frailty and struggle, with a sense of hopeless despair in the presence of anything so supremely high-minded and flawless. Such writing turns human beings into stones and statues. It deprives them of humanity and lovableness. The figures whom one really loves and worships, in history and fiction, are the people with great virtues and great faults, not the stainless, unruffled, icy saints who picked their way daintily through the mire. For, after all, in life there is plenty of dirt and even blood about, and one cannot come out of it with feet unsoiled and garments unstained. The men whose lives and memories have affected human beings deeply have been men like David and Socrates, St. Augustine and St. Paul, St Francis and Mahomet, Dr. Johnson and Walter INTRODUCTORY 5 Scott, Ruskin and Carlyle men of large hearts and passionate impulses, who, in spite of faults and sorrows, have made a gallant and heroic business out of life, and who encourage one to desire goodness, because their goodness seems such a beautiful and attractive thing. No one ever wanted to be good like pious ^Eneas or King Arthur, or desired even dimly to adopt the attributes of the Eternal Father as depicted by Milton ! Of course, the one thing which differentiates the noble man from the ignoble is his power of caring passionately and desperately about other people, and of spending himself for their happiness and welfare. The great spirits of the world do not want to compel other people to be good and wise, to be obeyed and admired. They only want to share their joy in all that is noble and pure, be- cause it brings them such radiant and incalculable happiness ; they feel that if they could only explain it all to others and put it in the right light, it would save so much horrible misery and despair. The sorrows of the great-hearted are the agonies of seeing things go wrong and being unable to help. It is the dreadful load of preventible misery that crushes the life out of those who care for others. They cannot just warn and advise, and then shrug their shoulders at the sight of men and women drifting into wretchedness. They feel all the horror of nightmare, when one seems to be bound hand and foot, and forced to see some idiotic tragedy enacted before dumb lips and staring eyes and helpless hands. Of course, to read the lives of men of the heroic 6 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE type has its discouraging side. One realises how cold and faint-hearted one is, how pettily selfish, how sensitively vain. One despairs of ever being able to feel or to care like that ! But the more that one knows of the secret processes of mind and soul, the more clear it becomes that to keep one's thought and heart desirously set upon what one knows to be high and true, is the one chance that such influences will creep by viewless channels into the mind. Below reasoning faculties and conventional practices, there seems to be in every one of us a spirit of ancient lineage and blind processes, which acts surely and stubbornly on some hidden determination of its own. One sees men of tranquil fancies and logical sense spun off their feet by the surge and rush of some elemental passion. One sees vivid, sensitive, imagi- native people, of sweet nature and uplifted thought, acting stubbornly and persistently, in spite of suffer- ing and sorrow, in obedience to some vile desire, hating and abhorring it, and yet with no power to withstand the tragic impulse. These are the deep and dark secrets of life, the pages in the world's book which we must read for all our shuddering reluctance. But I do not think that there is anything which so clearly shows the weakness of our belief in the permanence of individuality, our lack of faith in immortality, in spite of our loud and glib pro- fession to the contrary, as the low-spirited way in which we persist in thinking and speaking of the dead as if their human life were all, as if the record were closed and the progress arrested. INTRODUCTORY 7 If we really felt sure we should encounter the spirits of those we have loved in some other sphere, we should be ashamed to look them in the face if we had praised them insincerely, understood them feebly, poured nauseous unction over their memories, embalmed them with luscious and heady spices, hidden them away securely in the tomb. What can the soul, in its path among the stars, care about the nodding hearse-plumes and the brandished handkerchief ? Who that is freed from the low-hung skies, the sickly light of earth, its noisy clamours, its mean whispers, could care to have the record of his life wrapped in specious disguises and in rank perfumes ? Does not every one hope that with the putting off of the poor body he may also put off at least some of the superficial and despicable faults of temperament uneasy vanities, mean ambitions, petty cowardices, comfortable vices ? Who that had a grain of sincerity in his soul would not desire that if anything were said of him at all, in record or monument, it should at least be utterly and transparently sincere ? Nothing can excuse a biographer for unreality, or exaggerated praise, or suppression of the shadows of temperament, except the absolute conviction that the soul whom he so undertakes to bedaub and adorn is utterly and entirely dead and perished ; in which case a biography means a mere gushing attempt to relieve, at any sacrifice of truth and sense, the equally faithless sorrow of bereaved friends and relations. There was a time when, though I was not sincere 8 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE enough to admit it, and indeed urgently proclaimed the contrary, I did practically, though not con- fessedly, hold the belief myself that death was indeed the end of soul and body alike. I professed myself a Christian believer, but I did, as a matter of fact, think of the dead as gone and ended. But of late I have come to feel very differently. Let me speak frankly, and say that the opposite truth has come home to me through intense and prolonged suffering of a most grievous kind, through the sight of mental torture in the case of more than one very dear to myself, through ambitions deeply and justly disappointed, through the realisation of great moral cowardice in myself, and ugly desires for material satisfaction. Through sorrow and bitter humiliation, through a process of stern emptying of the soul, through the severe denial of joy and light, one blessed truth has dawned upon me. I have seen and perceived that the soul is a very ancient and tenacious and long-lived thing ; that its past is not bounded by birth or its future by death ; that it is like a thread in a tapestry, that emerges for an instant to complete a picture, to give a touch of bright colour or haunted shade, and disappears again behind the woof to emerge again, who knows, in a different scene. I would not here indulge in vague theories as to the reappearance of the spirit, but it seems to me certain that it is at least of as imperishable stuff as the matter which clothes it. And, further, that while we see matter, when life ceases to animate it, quietly sink back into the common stock, only INTRODUCTORY 9 to be reanimated again in other forms of animal or herb, so the stuff of the soul may well sink back for awhile into some silent reservoir of life, to be impelled some future day, by laws of which at present we can have no cognisance, into some other living and breathing form. And just, too, as the primal atom into which all matter is ulti- mately resolved has no quality that we know of, but gains its quality as muscle or tissue, as the hue or scent of the flower, from juxtaposition and admixture, so may it be with the soul. Whatever happens, it is in everything that we are merged, and not in nothing. And then, too, this sense of identity, whatever it is, is the only thing of which I am wholly and absolutely certain in a world that may be but a world of shadows ; and thus, a cessation of identity is the one inconceivable thought, because the sense of identity is the parent of all thought and impression. It seems to me to matter little whether the metaphysician says Sum ergo cogito or Cogito ergo sum. Consciousness is not the cause of existence, but it may well be the proof. I do not think that memory can exist apart from the material brain. But that seems to me an unimportant matter ; what matters is that I should still be able to feel, under whatever change of scene and circumstance, that I am still myself. I do not feel sure that memory persists, but the effect of life exists, and the self that rises from the ashes of the old is the self that has been moulded by the act, the word, and the thought. Of this I am sure, that the self of every man is a thing far stronger and older than the petty io THE LEAVES OF THE TREE accidents that for a time enshrine it ; and, though we are in a sense subject to material laws, yet we are in a much truer sense independent of them and stronger than them. And thus one comes to perceive that the thing which matters in the history of every soul is not the amount of our achievement and success, or the materials in which we work, but the quality of our acts and words and the method by which we produce them. We are utterly taken in, as a rule, by the material environment. A man in a great position, a monarch or a statesman, a priest or a writer, may be merely as a worm in a fruit. We congratulate the worm not on its energy, but on the size of the fruit which it has the oppor- tunity of devouring 1 Meanwhile, a man without opportunity, immured in a trivial round of duty, and among dull and uncongenial companions, may be as a delicate flower of wreathed petal and poignant fragrance, that fulfils its sweet destiny unobserved in some untrodden woodland. The point is the beauty and singleness of our aim, and the nearness with which we achieve it, not the accident of wealth and fame or the incident of social impressiveness. Does this seem more than an old and weary truth one of the maxims that we throw aside with our childish copybooks ? I do not know ; it is not so to me. One of my commonest ex- periences nowadays is to stumble upon some such frozen aphorism, which seemed in childhood but a tangle of ugly words, and to perceive in the light of experience that it is a gem of truth INTRODUCTORY n crystallised from countless generations of human hope and suffering ; and so, too, as one gets older, one learns the same sort of truth about persons. Then, one was impressed by brilliant and meteoric persons, who performed gracefully and effectively, with flourish and charm ; and one valued and rated the performance more highly if one believed that neither effort nor patience lay behind it. It was the charm, the captivating grace that mattered ; and if to that was added a superficial modesty and courtesy, which abstained from calling attention to the act or the word and claimed no deference or attention, then the victory seemed complete. But one put aside as so much humble drudgery the failures of clumsy people, however painstaking and persevering they might be. The easy triumph, that was the sign of true merit ; worse than that, one thrust aside the faithful and serviceable affections and courtesies of the ungraceful and the obscure, the patient attempts to conciliate and win. Good-humour, goodwill, enthusiasm, virtue, temperance, relia- bility how little one thought of them in com- parison with grace and radiance ! The years have passed, and a certain sorting has taken place. I will not say that the charm and the brilliance of some of my contemporaries have not had their reward. They have been re- warded, because the world does value such things, does crown them. Some of these attractive figures have added patience to their brilliance, have de- veloped industry ; but some have lapsed in their flight, and trail their pinions in the dust. Others 12 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE of no brilliance or distinction have won their way by sincerity and kindness and trustworthi- ness. But the best test of all and it is here that the old maxims still seem to me to err is whether a man in his maturity gathers com- placency about his efforts. To be contented is success, to be complacent is failure. To be pleased with life, or at all events to be interested in life, to trace the sincere goodwill, the steadfast pur- pose, the wise affection of the Father of all in the retrospect of past years enough, at least, to enable one to look forward, with a deep curiosity, a lofty emotion, to the pages which yet remain to be turned that is the right attitude for all who live by faith at all. One learns not to ex- pect everything, and yet to hope for anything ; one learns to trust the design of God rather than one's own prudence and prescience ; and this is to be contented. But the complacent man learns to give the credit to his own industry and sagacity rather than gratefully to acknowledge his good fortune. He despises the fortunes of others, with- out caring to investigate the causes of their failure. He sees nothing hopeful or invigorating in defeat ; he treats sorrow and illness as ugly interruptions to his own well-matured plans. He thinks of a man's life as a printed and bound memoir, finished and complete, and glorifies his faithlessness and his lack of imagination by the name of sterling common-sense. But all this has to be unlearned some time ; because the only hope is to recognise that performance is nothing except in so far as it exalts and cleanses the INTRODUCTORY 13 soul ; and the complacent man is thus like a child which builds a sand-fort upon the beach, and rejoices in having defied the tide, if its punctual ebb spares the precarious bastion. Yet the old proverbs would have us believe that the memory of a well-spent life is a thing which one may take out like a hoarded jewel, and regard with satisfaction and delight. It is not so ; past triumph brings often but a fear that one may do less worthily, or it is swallowed up in an anxious care for some further ambition, some peak yet unclimbed. The happiest of all are those who have learned quietly to disregard such things altogether, who take marks of the world's confi- dence gratefully and soberly, and care only for the quality of work and not for its outward attractiveness. I was talking the other day to a conspicuously successful man, a man who, what- ever he has done, has always succeeded in being praised for it who has been lauded for his common-sense when he has done or said a popular thing, and for his courage and straightness when he has done or said an unpopular thing. He said to me, with entire frankness, that he could not pretend that he had not been successful he knew that he had succeeded far above his deserts, and he thought it probable that he would have a time of just as unreasonable censure ; that he was quite prepared for it, and believed that he was not dependent upon praise. That is the right spirit in which to live and to look forward to life! Now, in the portraits which I am going to 14 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE draw, I mean to try to make them illustrative of character rather than mere records of personality. I do not mean that I am going to force my por- traits to conform to a type, but I have searched for types rather than for features. Every one, after all, is unique ; but, for all that, one may divide human beings into broad classes, and I have chosen my figures for contrast rather than for individual distinction. In estimating a man, like a work of art, one has to discover what his aim was, and how far he realised it. It is the close- ness of realisation rather than actual performance that is interesting and inspiring. The lives that are worth depicting are lives lived on a conscious design, however meagre may be the materials in which the actor has worked. The lives that are not worth regarding are the drifting existences, the lives whose sails are filled with the breath of others' thoughts, and which veer and tack without a port or a goal. A conscious aim, no matter how simple, is what glorifies a life. A purpose formed and held to modified, perhaps, and enlarged is the measure of the divine. I dare not here enter into the intricate question as to how far it is in a man's power to form aims and to carry them out. The power of carrying out aims seems to me a gift, like all other gifts ; and as to the forming of an aim, there must, I think, be some process of begetting and quickening, or, at least, the ripening of some seed within the soul. Perhaps the reason why I hesitate is that I have myself felt sorrowfully the lack of some consistent guiding principle. It is not for want of seeing the need of it, and the INTRODUCTORY 15 greatness of it ; it is the lack of some tenacity of execution. But the lives that I have chosen are lives in which there has been both aim and execution. And here I will make no pretence that my aim has been merely to draw characteristic portraits of interesting figures. I believe that the best chance of quickening one's own aim is to see it quickened and enlarged and produced in the lives of others ; and my intention is this and no other : alere flammam, as the old saying goes to feed the flame. The characters, then, that I shall try to depict are characters that seem to have been endowed with some clearness of vision ; that have foreseen the end in the beginning, and have persistently pressed to a goal in sight ; that have not, like faint-hearted or inquisitive pilgrims, been drawn aside to stroll in by-paths or to drowse in sleepy hollows ; that have not been distracted by passing fancies or preoccupied with private cares ; that have not tried feebly to please and charm every one whom they met ; that have not submerged all sense of approval and disapproval in the vague desire to be at ease in all companies ; who, however much they may have sympathised and compassionated and even suspended judgment about others, have still had some bright and secret criterion of their own. There are many men and women in the world for whom the ultimate court of appeal, in matters of right and wrong, of beauty and ugliness, of force and weakness, is the average opinion of the world in general. They are always straining their ears to catch it \ they are elated and serene if it approves, 16 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE they blanch and repent if it disapproves. But the guides and leaders of the world are the men who concern themselves very little with what others think of their acts and deeds. They do not consciously despise opinion or wantonly affront it. But they are far more afraid of the verdict of their own consciences than of any other verdict ; and they fear and value the stern or joyful voice of conscience, not because they are serene in egotism, but because it seems to them the voice of some larger spirit with whom they are in contact. Such men as these regard their own timidities and weak- nesses as they regard their own pains and ailments as things which it is both courageous and pleasant to disregard and triumph over, not things to propitiate and make weak terms with. It is not that I have only drawn pictures of uncompro- mising idealists. It is not every one who is affected by the thought of virtue as by a high strain of music or as by a piece of glowing rhetoric. The aims and objects of some of those whom I shall draw were simple and prosaic enough. Yet they held to them ; and it is their tenacity upon which I lay stress. One need not, I think, discourage oneself at finding that one's interest in personality and in- dividuality outruns one's zeal for movements and causes. The people who can take broad and hopeful views of life are the people who can generalise and idealise. But one may be made differently. Speaking for myself, I find that I have a quick eye for what is minute and particu- lar ; and if one has a very vivid and acute sense INTRODUCTORY 17 of detail, one tends to lose the broad effects of light and colour. But these are only two different ways of looking at life, and one must make the best of one's limitations. I shall therefore make no attempt to draw broad conclusions, but only to render details as faithfully as I can. The microscope is as useful as the telescope. The mistake is to turn the microscope upon a star, or the telescope upon the arrowy plumage of the moth. Here my work will be microscopic ; for the wonder of life is that, whether it is seen near or far, there appears to be the same fidelity of law, the same fertility of invention, the same inscrutable care of form and process ; and as far as the mystery goes, the frozen horns of some gigantic mountain are no more and no less astounding than the crystalline geometry of the smallest snow-flake that lodges on the monstrous ledge. The soul can be awed and thrilled as deeply by the wonder of the starry flower that breaks from the tangle of the woodland at the call of spring, as by the drift of suns that powder the floor of night ; and here in these few pages I shall try my best to depict what is the first and last of wonders the soul of man, confining such vastness of perception, such infinite dreams, in a frame so insignificant and so feeble. The sense of the distinctness of life must come first, and only thus can we draw near to the sense of its boundlessness and its infinite horizons. I write in a day of high summer and golden light. In a brief interval, between the labour of the morning and the labour of the evening, B i8 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE I found myself walking in the grassy avenue of a great park. To right and left ran the leafy aisles, and doves hidden in their branching retreats cooed drowsily, as though they had found peace and were satisfied with it. The buttercup and the clover carried down out of the golden air the flash and lustre of the sun, and the happy breeze came wandering softly down the sun-warmed spaces just touched with a delicacy of summer fragrance that seemed the crown of perfect health, so wholesome and so sweet it was. Far away the great house blinked drowsily through its sun- blinds, while at the farther end came a glimpse of wold and wood, so liquid and crystalline of hue that it seemed like the glowing of a quiet gem or the shoaling of some azure sea ; the whole thing so perfect, with so settled, so living a peace, that one could not conceive of it as anything but perennial and abiding, without beginning or end. Yet think of it ! But six generations ago the great house must have stared and glowed like a hot coal tumbled on a carpet, a crude mass of red brick. Along these branching avenues strings of carts and gangs of men must have gone trailing through the oozy mud : the avenue itself an absurd quadruple line of guarded wisps ! What faith to have thus slashed and cumbered the quiet earth, with no hope of seeing the pomp or dignity of it all, for the sake of the descendants whom one would never know, and who might, as likely as not, crop the matured oaks to pay gambling debts, and mortgage the beloved acres for a song or worse than a song I INTRODUCTORY 19 It is hard, surely, to think that the house that came out of the soul of a man should be more lasting than the soul that made it. And, further still, how impossible to believe that the soul itself, through its complacencies and satisfactions, as well as through its sorrows and agonies, is not surely climbing heavenward. For the native air of the spirit is peace and joy, and it is these that we try to capture and seize, when we ought to be earning them patiently and with the fear that looks forward rather than backward. And of one thing we may be certain, that our times of sorrow and dismay are but the natural signs that we are mounting fast we need not fear them 1 What we have rather to fear are the times when we recline in indolent content. So long as the soul lingers among external events, progress is delayed ; for, when they are over, they are past like the flying shadow of a cloud. They have no interest, no power in themselves, but only in so far as they affect the soul. It is re- corded that the great writer Flaubert was pained at contact with the bourgeois mind, not because such people thought and felt differently from him- self, but because they did not really think and feel at all. They were interested only in events. Their trivial volubility, using the language of emotion without either thinking or feeling, was what horrified him. One need not be pettily introspective. One may live whole-heartedly in events, causes, people ; but the victory consists in feeling it all deeply, and even morbid feeling is better than apathy or content. 20 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE It is, after all, feeling that constitutes life and pro- gress ; insensibility is death. But nothing must stand in the way of the soul or delay it. Nothing, not even love itself, can ever make up for the loss of personal freedom and personal emotion. Those who seem to escape from discipline are not to be envied ; they have further to go. As Walt Whitman said, in one of those supreme flashes of insight which atone for so much that is tedious and categorical in his writings : "Through life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted ; Through anger, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way." II BISHOP WESTCOTT THE words " Dr. Westcott," so familiar from my earliest childhood, are like a charm that enables me to summon up a whole set of pictures from the past. I can see a little alert figure in dark clerical garb, with an old sunburnt wide-awake, a grey plaid folded round the shoulders and hanging in a loose end behind, walking with quick, short steps, the head a little bowed, and an old sketch-book clasped to the chest. The face is pale and firmly lined, the hair and big whiskers dark, wavy, and strong. Again, I can see the beach of a sunny Normandy watering-place, the shingle crowded with little bathing-huts, children digging, nurses sitting, a crowd of bathers in the surf. To right and left of them a big spring-board on wheels projects into the slowly swinging sea. A small figure comes quickly down to the edge, throws off a pair of straw-soled sandals and a loose white wrapper, appearing in a bathing-costume striped with red, goes quickly up the board, and takes a clean, quick header into the sea, reappears, and swims out with vigorous strokes. Who would have thought to find a Regius Professor of Divinity so habited and so engaged ? As John Silver says, 22 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE in Treasure Island, "You wouldn't look to find a Bishop here ! " Or I can see an oak-panelled room with leaded casements in the Divinity Schools at Cambridge. At the table sits the Professor, with grey tumbled hair, in silk gown and scarf he is just going in to lecture rapidly turning over some papers on the table ; he looks up at a question with a quick glance of his large bright eyes, and a smile of wonderful brilliance lights up his face. A few moments later I can see him again in the high desk of the great lecture-room. Every place in the hall is occupied ; there are dons, ladies, undergraduates, students from Girton and Newn- ham. He is saying a prayer with intense earnest- ness, his face flushed and working, and he begins to lecture in a clear voice of great range and with marked and singular emphasis, his eyes downcast and occasionally uplifted, but seldom dwelling on the audience, and every now and then wreathed into a rapt smile. Or, again, I can see him in his episcopal robes, the face more heavily lined than ever, the hair fast turning white, but still full and wavy ; the whole figure exhibiting a strange mixture of un- affected dignity, deep holiness, and an almost shrinking personal modesty. These are some of the many pictures that rise in the mind. But face and voice stand out pre-eminent. The face itself changed greatly in the years in which I remember him. There was in old days more gravity, solidity, and even militant sternness, though it always had the power of breaking out BISHOP WESTCOTT 23 into a prodigal smile. That smile was so char- acteristic and so extraordinarily brilliant that I have often wondered how the effect was produced. I suppose that the moving lips and cheeks exposed to view more of the large and brilliant eyes, be- cause it gave the effect of some access of clear light, almost of sunshine. It was a smile, too, that was winning, conciliating, encouraging. And yet there was, for all its eagerness, a touch of timidity about it, as of one who did not feel secure of affection. It was appealing rather than kindly, childlike rather than paternal. Then, too, there was the amazing mobility of the face. The mouth was large and expressive, but gave the impression at once of intensity and self-control. The whole face was covered with wrinkles, but they seemed signs of animation and energy rather than the marks of weariness or suffering. The impression was one of immense vitality and vivacity, of activity of thought and endless variety of interest ; of a man who looked at life not from one point of view, but from many, and whose energies had been repressed rather than dissipated. And then there was the voice, of which the very cadence sounds in my ears as I speak. It could be at once mirthful, provocative, and awestruck. The one thing it could not be was monotonous. It was jerked out and expelled from the lips rather than spoken : the syllables emphasised, the consonants outlined. It varied instantly with the mood, expressing wonder, emotion, and enthusiasm. Indeed, the pitch changed so rapidly, the intonation swept up and 24 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE down so swiftly, that it was almost physically fatiguing to listen to it long, because it demanded such sympathy and such attention. The little " Eh ? " in reply to a statement that was either obscure or surprising, was almost formidable, if it had not been for the patent deference of the speaker. I used to feel sometimes, in the course of a public utterance of Westcott's, that the less important points were so intensely underlined, given with such concentration of seriousness, such solemn momentousness, that there was hardly any emphasis left for climax or peroration I To be much with him, to hear him discuss a subject about which he felt deeply and on what subject did he not feel deeply ? was undoubtedly a mental strain ; and his own obvious and natural humility gave one an overshadowing sense of purity and high-mindedness which was indeed almost discouraging from its quality. At the same time his humility, sincere as it was, is not a very easy quality to define. A friend who knew him well said that he was humble to God but not exactly humble to man. He did not undervalue his own work, nor did he over-estimate the wisdom, sagacity, clear-sightedness, or disinterested- ness of others. While he had a very high personal ideal, and was deeply conscious how far short of it he fell, he was very hard to persuade or to convince, and did not modify his opinions in deference to the opinions of others. He was in fact humble rather than modest, and his self- effacing demeanour was rather a social than an intellectual or moral quality. No one ever had BISHOP WESTCOTT 25 less vanity, but he was not without a touch of noble pride. I shall not attempt in these few pages to trace his view of life, much less to sketch the scope of his Christian teaching. Speaking frankly and personally, I find both difficult to apprehend. But he put it all I had almost said hurled it into his innumerable books and pamphlets. I find his style at once bewildering and fatiguing. A critic once said that Westcott's writings resembled the French definition of metaphysics as the art of bewildering oneself methodically. He used, it appears to me, theological terminology in an eclectic and poetical sense. Words were not to him scientific definitions so much as large symbols. His books seem to me to have suggestive and illuminating things in abundance by the way. But he loved paradox and incompleteness ; he detested explanations and definitions. " Poetry," he once said, " is, I think, a thousand times more true than history." He could not write poetry in the technical sense, though in early days he often tried his hand at verse. But all his work seems to me intensely poetical, and the light shines through it rather than from it. His output was enormous. There are over a hundred items in his bibliography, and ten years ago nearly 300,000 of his volumes had been sold. But for all that, I believe that men find inspiration and animation rather than exact or logical thought in his writings. He had some great ideas which dominated him. He believed that the incomplete- ness of life was the earnest of its final fulfilment ; 26 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE he believed in the paramount obligation of work ; he believed in the corporate solidarity of humanity. In all this he was a prophet ; and if he had had the instinct for style, the power of metaphor, the sense of melody, the parabolic vision, he might have been a very great prophet indeed. But it needs a semi-philosophical, semi-theological train- ing to understand his terminology ; and thus his work exacts a greater intellectual strain than the ideas which he laid stress upon required. His books remain technical and intellectual, and those who can get into the swing of his thought, follow his quick transitions, and for whom his language is invested with associations, can apprehend some- thing of his secret. Part of the obscurity of his style comes, I think, from the singular absence of connecting particles a lack replaced in his verbal utterances by gesture, look, and emphasis. I doubt if, apart from his textual labours, he can be called a scientific theologian ; and I am not sure, though I say this with deference, that a very much needed and a really noble message is not partially buried under his obscure and involved sentences. Let me touch upon a few points in his life. He was born in 1825, his father a distinguished botanist, who lived a secluded life at Birmingham. He had plenty of militant blood in his veins, several of his stock being soldiers, conspicuous for energy and simple, if narrow, piety. He was one of the brilliant pupils of Prince Lee, a schoolmaster who, in a few short years at King Edward's School, contrived by wonderful dominance, both of intellect BISHOP WESTCOTT 27 and character, to send up to the universities an almost unparalleled number of religious and scholarly pupils. Prince Lee's boys regarded him with an almost fanatical reverence and admiration. He developed in them a tremendous seriousness, an intense enjoyment of work, and an extraordinary enthusiasm for virtue. His teaching was admirable, though he pressed too hardly on the nuances of words. He crammed words with shades of mean- ing which, if insisted upon, would be fatal to the elasticity of language. I am sure that in the case both of Westcott and of my own father, Archbishop Benson, the effect of Lee's teaching on their deliberate style was disastrous. Writing in their hands became a task of portentous compression and almost frenzied tension. Prince Lee did not succeed as a bishop, partly from the austerity of his standard, partly from a radical want of sympathy. But as a teacher, where his superiority was unassailed, he was wholly and amazingly successful. As a boy Westcott was hot-tempered, laborious, high-minded. He never played games, he detested sport, he kept himself from other boys. He took a vivid interest in social questions, and was a con- vinced Chartist. He was a fearless opponent of all tyranny and oppression in the school, and it was the fact of his interfering to protect a little boy from bullying which led to his acquaintance with the girl, Miss Whittard, who afterwards became his wife. His amusements were botany, architecture, and sketching. He had in many ways a very artistic nature, loved pictures and music, and was a 28 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE highly accomplished draughtsman. But there was nothing boyish or childish about him. His biog- raphy gives a large number of letters which he wrote as an undergraduate to Miss Whittard. With due allowance for the date of these letters, they must be confessed to be a dreadfully heavy and in- structive series. Words are, of course, only con- ventional symbols of emotion, but love-making conducted in such solemn terms seems a rather appalling business. Westcott's natural seriousness and his amazing industry did, no doubt, tend to seclude him from life, to limit the range of his sympathies, to diminish his humanity. But width must often be sacrificed to the sharpness of the cutting edge, and what the Puritan misses in insight he gains in effectiveness. I attribute to Westcott's secluded bringing-up a certain unevenness of appeal, a lack of tolerance, and, what is even more marked, a certain timidity about life, which would have vanished upon a nearer acquaintance. He had the cultured virtue of the upper middle-class, and while he accepted the social standards of his upbringing as the normal and permissible range of comfort, he hastily labelled an equally conventional if more elaborate standard of comfort as a degrading sort of luxury. This he could never throw off. When it came to him to have a carriage of his own, he drove in it with his back to the horses, shrinking and ashamed. He kept up his hot-houses and would not eat the fruit. He tired himself to death by carrying his carpet-bag. He could not bear to be helped into his coat. I remember his going, with a fearful curiosity, to a State concert with my BISHOP WESTCOTT 29 mother, and returning in a state of agitation and perplexity. " It was horrible, horrible ! 1 cannot find any place for it at all in my scheme of life." Yet it shows an absence of real simplicity to be thus at the mercy of externals. It was partly due to his very perceptive and impressible nature, his intense sensitiveness to the form and aspect of things ; but it was also due to a real conservatism of view, of a temperament moulded upon certain lines, and suspicious of everything which does not conform to the same type. Just as the Puritanical view of money, which regards the mention of it as impossible, and considers it dishonourable to accept any pecuniary obligation, ends by making money far too potent and serious a consideration, so the Puritanical view of liberal life has its dangers and exalts a certain type of comfort, which is not more justifiable than any other, into a sign and symbol of domestic virtue. After taking a brilliant degree he was Senior Classic he settled for a time at Trinity and took pupils ; and now began his close association with his three like-minded friends, Hort, Lightfoot, and my father. He spent very solitary days of work and thought ; and there is a delightful tradition, probably wholly fanciful, that, speaking in later life of this period, he said that he remembered one day in which he had only made two remarks, both soliloquies. On getting up in the morning, he exclaimed at the thought of the long day of work before him, " Oh, dear ! " and on going to bed at night, ruefully contemplating the inadequate results of the hours, he had said " Dear me I " He seems at 30 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE this time from his letters to have felt unsettled in mind and depressed, anxious, in spite of his great successes at Cambridge, about his future in life, and troubled by sceptical doubts, the nature of which is not very clear. One would like to have known more about this part of his inner history. His later faith was of a peculiar fervent character, and not only made light of difficulties and contra- dictions, but almost exulted and luxuriated in them : so that it is hard to discern in what the crisis con- sisted. I am inclined to believe that he found his earlier and simpler creed of too rigid a character, and felt like the Sons of the Prophets when they said, "The place is become too strait for us." I think it is probable that he had desired to explain too much, and to have too logical and minute a scheme of dogma ; the deliverance of which he speaks was, I believe, a realisation that the know- ledge that suffices for faith must be of its nature incomplete, or there is no room for faith at all ; and that dogma must always be as the slender crescent of reflected light by which in darkness both sun and moon may be inferred. He seems, too, to have felt a strong inclination to the secluded life of contemplation, and shrunk from a world in which there seemed so much to distract and dis- tress, such slender and imperfect ideals, such a preponderance of thoughtless indifference and selfish materialism. But the light came in fullest measure. He was ordained, he accepted a Harrow mastership, and he married. There followed a period of hard and active practical work. He was not a wholly successful schoolmaster. He was BISHOP WESTCOTT 31 never a disciplinarian, and his estimate of boy- nature was at fault. The best schoolmasters are those who treat boys courteously, sensibly, and firmly, and take for granted that they will behave like reasonable human beings, while, on the other hand, they are perfectly prepared for their behaving both thoughtlessly and unreasonably on occasions, and are never taken by surprise. Westcott's own secluded youth, high-minded and mature, absorbed in thought and study, had afforded him but slender experience of the facts of life, of the unstable moral equilibrium of boyhood, of its perfectly natural touches of savagery and selfishness. He seldom expressed an opinion at a masters' meeting, and his sermons in the chapel were ineffective from his weak and inaudible voice. He acted as assistant to Dr. Vaughan, and afterwards to Dr. Butler, in teaching the sixth form. But though the normal boy did not understand him or appreciate him, his teaching, his intellectual and moral enthusiasm, his guileless zeal, had a very great effect upon the more thoughtful and intelligent boys. The present Arch- bishop of Canterbury, who was a boy at Harrow at the time, has told me that the better boys respected Westcott immensely, were fully aware that they were in contact with a mind of very impressive quality, and not only learned more from him than from any other teacher, but owed everything to his stimulating and suggestive methods of handling his subjects. His theory of teaching was based on his memories of Prince Lee. He used minute verbal elucidation, but he held that the first duty of the teacher was to stimulate rather than to summarise 32 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE knowledge. " How can a teacher give what he has not got ? " he said long years after. " Information is of no value. People seem to think that when the organisation is complete they have everything. At Harrow we used to teach in what was almost a hay-loft, but I hope we put something into the boys, or far better, got something out of them." He added, " I still believe in teachers, but that is an obsolete faith." I remember, too, once hearing him say that the most disastrous theory of teaching was that of handing out knowledge like so many coins, to be put away in the learners' mind. " The best teacher shows the boys where the ore is, encourages them to dig for it, and inspires them to do the coining for themselves." But the most astonishing thing about his work at Harrow is that he was able to do so much private theological work side by side with the work of his mastership. The Introduction to the Study of the Gospels and The Gospel of the Resurrection were both written at Harrow, besides other books and articles. His mind was much occupied in these years with the idea of community life. Half in fancy and half in earnest he used to sketch the details of what he called a Ccenobium, the point of which was that it was to be a species of college for an association of Christian families, living a more or less common life. He thought that this would combine the ideals of family life, on which he set great store, with the discipline of labour and plain living. It was a relief to him to be offered a canonry BISHOP WESTCOTT 33 at Peterborough in 1869. He accepted it eagerly, though the income was small and he had a big growing family, with seven sons to be educated. He laid down plans for a very simple and laborious life, and was much beloved in the place for his courtesy and sympathy. He was fond of letting himself at night with his private key into the Minster, and spending an hour of contemplation and prayer. He delighted greatly in the accessories of worship, the Cathedral music, and the noble and varied architecture of Cathedral and Close. There is a delightful vignette of him in his Peterborough days, sketched by Canon Scott Holland, to whom he had been previously unknown, and who thus records his astonishment at the first sight of him. He was told the Canon was in the Minster deliver- ing an address, and found him in a side-chapel. Was this indeed the great Westcott ? "This tiny form, with the thin small voice, delivering itself, with passionate intensity, of the deepest teach- ing on the mystery of the Incarnation to two timid ladies of the Close, under the haughty contempt of the solitary verger, who had been forced to lend the authority of his poker to these undignified and new-fangled efforts." But the purely canonical life was of very brief duration. In 1870 he was elected Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, where he did much to organise the Theological School and to raise the standard of Divinity teaching. His audiences at first were scanty, but grew every year, till at the end of his time he had nearly three hundred students. He gave additional lectures, and devoted much C 34 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE time to personal intercourse with his men, by whom he came to be regarded with extraordinary deference and affectionate reverence. He used to be at his best at the simple Sunday suppers at his house in Scroope Terrace, at which he talked freely and eagerly upon all sorts of subjects, with that mixture of courtesy, affection, and irony that was so characteristic of him. While I was myself at Cambridge he was elected to a Fellowship at King's, and threw himself into the life of the college. It is from this period that my own most vivid memories of him date. He gave at one time a course of devotional addresses in one of the side-chapels to any undergraduates who cared to come. I remember the excitement with which one went after dark into the huge, rich, echoing chapel, dimly lighted ; and I can see him still, his face all working with emotion, delivering his address to a handful of young men. His humility was almost painful. He pleaded like a struggling fellow-Christian, not as one who spoke with authority or even experience. I re- member well thinking that it would have been more impressive if he had shown a calmer dignity, and the incessant crackling of the papers straightened and re-straightened in his nervous hands evoked at first a sort of compassion : but at the end of one particular address I can remember having a flash of perception, and realising what a much more deeply impressive thing it was to see his obvious reluctance and timidity, than if he had spoken volubly and serenely. He held, too, an informal conversazione on BISHOP WESTCOTT 35 Sunday afternoons in his room at King's, a big bare place close to the Parade, on the ground floor. Tea was served strong, uncompromising, college tea ; the Professor, flushed and tremulously courteous, with one hand squeezed in the other and both clasped against his breast, used to talk with a mixture of ardent conviction and startling deference to a little group. Then a short paper was read, followed by a discussion. The strangest things happened. Westcott generally slipped on to his knees, before he began, beside the table. On one occasion a paper of the crudest and most elementary scepticism was read by a bluff and self-confident undergraduate, who found to his dismay that, when he had finished, the Professor was kneeling beside him, his face buried in his hands. When the reader had recovered from the shock, he added a few words defining his position, and said bluffly at the end, " Don't you think so, Dr. Westcott ? " " I have never even ventured to formulate such a question, but I am so thankful that you can," was the reply, with an ingratiating smile. We were certainly not at all afraid of him he was far too cordial for that but I think he bewildered us a good deal, and gave us plenty to think about. A paper was once read, casting some scorn upon liturgical observance. The discussion followed, and some one said, " Surely the life is the sacrifice ? " "Yes, indeed," said the Professor, "but there is room for the hymn and the incense and the white garments of the priest." I think we were often disconcerted by what seemed a paradoxical incon- clusiveness about him. Nothing ever seemed to 36 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE please him more than to confront two apparently contradictory truths. " I don't know what to think," said a simple-minded undergraduate to him once, on some such occasion ; " both those statements seem true, and yet, either excludes the other." " Yes, that is so," said the Professor with a brilliant smile. " I am always so thankful when I can get down to a contradiction then I really feel I am on safe ground." Thinking it all over now, I cannot help feeling that, considering his audience, he was too frank. He obviously did not intend to satisfy us ; he wished to make us think and to realise that knowledge is incomplete. But he rated our abilities and our zeal for truth too highly. The result was that some of the simpler sort " walked no more with him." They had hoped to be told what to believe, and found themselves confronted with hazy generalities. But it was a gallant attempt, and we were all touched by his giving up, not only so much time, but what was evidently his best and sincerest thought, to us. He used to depart completely exhausted. He held the Canonry with his Professorship, and resided at Peterborough in the vacations, but his life there was brought to an end some years later by a singular misunderstanding with Bishop Magee. The Bishop expressed his serious dissatis- faction with Westcott for giving up so much time to Cambridge, and neglecting the examination of ordination candidates at Peterborough. Westcott thereupon resigned the post of Examining Chaplain. The Bishop replied, indicating that Westcott's Canonry had been bestowed upon him to pay BISHOP WESTCOTT 37 for his services as Chaplain. Westcott thereupon, in a letter of infinite spirit, resigned his Canonry as well. The affair reflected little credit on Magee's judgment, and the matter produced nothing short of consternation at Peterborough. But what was thought outside of the affair was shown by the fact that my father, then Archbishop, at once made Westcott his chaplain, with Magee's full consent, it must be said, and Mr. Gladstone appointed him Canon of Westminster. Magee and Westcott were for a time estranged, but before the former's death they were generously and affectionately reconciled. Westcott rejoiced very much in his Westminster work. By dint of constant lecturing to large audiences, his voice, once weak and faint, had gained resonance and strength, and he became a very impressive and noble preacher. One tiny incident of his Westminster work is so characteristic that I cannot here help mentioning it. He was proceeding in state up the choir behind the verger, through the crowded seats, to the pulpit, when his surplice-sleeve knocked down an umbrella standing at the end of a pew. The owner was disconcerted to see the Canon stoop down, retrieve the umbrella, pre- sent it to him with a smile and a bow, while the verger went solemnly on and out of sight, unaware that he was being deserted by his dignified charge. Westcott began to cherish the hope of ultimately giving up his Cambridge work and devoting him- self entirely to Westminster. He had refused three deaneries Exeter, Lincoln, and Norwich. Characteristically enough, his increasing popularity at Westminster was a source of extreme disquiet 38 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE to him. He wrote to his wife that it gave him " a sadness of heart which is hard to bear." " It is an opportunity to be used, and I don't see how to use it. On the other hand, to some I am a cloud, and I don't see how to help it." Then in 1889 came the death of his dear com- rade, Bishop Lightfoot. My father was very anxious that Westcott should succeed to the vacant See of Durham, and was consulted by the Queen, who concurred ; but for three months Lord Salisbury hesitated, and propounded alternative suggestions ; till at last the offer was made, and produced a sore struggle. Westcott was an elderly man of sixty- four, worn with prodigious work. He had been a student and a preacher all his life, and he had come singularly little in touch with the world ; he knew little of parochial work or diocesan admin- istration. The state and pomp of the position were wholly distasteful to him. Long ago he had said to Dr. Vaughan at Harrow, much to Vaughan's surprise, that he felt he might be called upon some day to rule, and now in the evening of life he was summoned. He made a clean sweep of preferences and fears alike, and wrote to Lord Salisbury that he did not feel justified in declining the heavy charge laid upon him. It was thought by many to be a rash experiment. He wrote to his son : " In the prospect of such a charge every thought of fitness vanishes. There can be no fitness or unfitness, but simply absolute surrender. I think that I can offer all ; and God will use the offering." I remember his consecration very well. The con- trast between his extreme modesty, almost dejection, BISHOP WESTCOTT 39 of demeanour and the thrilling earnestness of his responses, which seemed to turn a promise into a prayer, was very marked. And thus he went north, and faced his tremendous work with patient dignity. Of course, the most startling and most dramatic event of Westcott's episcopate was his intervention in the great coal-strike of 1892. Matters were extremely serious. The owners proposed to reduce wages, the men stood out against the reduction. There was, no doubt, right on both sides. Owners cannot be compelled at all events, under existing laws of property to run a business at a loss. On the other hand, with great profits behind them, and probably before them, they ought to be prepared to renounce profits for a time rather than dislocate labour interests. The men, on the other hand, thought the reduction excessive. Westcott had no practical experience in finance, though he had always been a student of economics ; but the point at issue was a simple one. The one hope was in compromise. His position gave him the power of intervening, and his combination of sympathy and justice made him a judicious arbitrator. His in- tense earnestness did the rest. " I had to speak as my office enabled me to speak," he said afterwards. A conference between owners and men was held at Auckland, and a compromise was arrived at. It was a happy day for Westcott, and a great triumph for the secluded and unpractical don, as some people persisted in thinking him to be. After that date he enjoyed the fullest confidence and respect in his diocese. Otherwise his episcopate presents no very salient features. The fact is that he was 40 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE a tired man, worn out by excessive labour. He worked as Bishop with great zeal and vigour, and made several notable utterances, but his theological writing, which he had hoped to continue, was gradually abandoned. But, though physically frail, his mind was vigorous enough and his enthusiasm unabated. He had great sorrows to bear in the deaths of friends like Benson and Hort. His wife, a gracious, dignified, motherly woman, whose manner brought a sense of comfortable tranquillity with it, died at Auckland. She had taken all household cares off his shoulders, she had brought up their large family with loving patience, and she had initiated many good works in the north. He lost his youngest son, who was engaged in Mission work in India. But he had many joys as well. All his seven sons took Orders, and two of them are now Missionary Bishops. He died at last, after a speedy but painful illness, fearless and uncomplaining. One of his last recorded sayings is so charac- teristic of him that I cannot refrain from repeat- ing it. He lay dying, and the end was obviously near. The gong sounded for supper, and he desired those of his children who were beside him to go down to the meal. They were counting the precious moments that remained, and excused themselves from leaving him. The Bishop with a faint smile said, "The family discipline leaves much to be desired." One can hardly look dispassionately at this beautiful, laborious, and devoted life ; but one may be forgiven for wondering whether almost too much of it was not swallowed up in indefatigable BISHOP WESTCOTT 41 and scholarly labour. I verily believe that Westcott exalted daily work to a higher place in the Christian scale of virtues than the Gospel at all events pro- vides any justification for. The Gospel seems to accept work as a normal condition of life, but sets no store upon heartrending industry. His was a very rich nature, and touched life at many points ; below the scholar lay a very artistic temperament, keenly alive to many forms of beauty, to art, music, and literature. It seems as though, with a noble self-abnegation, Westcott rather deliberately starved this side of himself. Of course it is true that a temperament must develop on its own lines, and there was never a man who had a stronger sense of duty, or a more tremendous power of carrying out his own purposes. But there is something ascetic, even hermit-like, about his view of life. He read very little literature. I have heard him speak with real horror of the music of Wagner. He described with great eloquence an effect which he had heard in one of Wagner's overtures, when a great ghostly waft of horns broke out across the strings. " It filled me with terror," he said ; " it was so satisfying ! but the message of art is to point to something further and higher ; and when it satisfies it is sensual." But this is a somewhat atrophied view ! It has always seemed to me that Westcott's work might have taken a larger sweep. His was so poetical a nature that he might have effected some sort of reconciliation never more needed than in these days of specialism between religion and art. But from mere unfamiliarity he seemed to have a sort of terror of all spiritualising agencies except 42 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE those that were technically religious. And this fact is all the more puzzling when one remembers that in the forefront of all his ideas was the solidarity of humanity its corporate obligations, its corporate interdependence. This was the doctrine which he preached with all his might ; and yet there were many natures and many views of life which were antipathetic to him. In spite of personal humility, he judged society hardly and severely. It was not so with individuals. But even here I believe that he was, for all his eager sympathy of mien and manner, an essentially solitary man. He was not an egotist, because he lived so much in his work, in great ideas and causes ; but he was an absorbed man, and his views of life were spectatorial rather than intimate. He was a convinced idealist. It was this that made Browning so congenial an author to him, though he could not adopt Browning's immediate tolerance and fervid optimism. He had, too, closely studied the works of Comte, and always maintained that he understood Comte better than any one else did. Some one once said contemp- tuously in his presence, talking of a proposed scheme, " It is building castles in the air ! " " But where else should you build them ? " said Westcott. " If they are not built in the air they will be of the earth, earthy." And again, he once said, "A man should be prepared to die for his profession, as in the case of the doctor or the soldier. A shop- keeper must not object if his profession is regarded with less respect, if he cannot die for it." He kept constantly before his mind the thought of the BISHOP WESTCOTT 43 continuity of life after death. " Most of our errors in conduct arise from confining our life by limits of time and space. Threescore years and ten, and sense-impressions as if they were all ! " Yet he disliked very much being called a mystic, because he thought that it was used with an innuendo, and signified unpractical. He concerned himself much with the practical detailed points of conduct. Some one once said to him that enthusiasm was the first necessity for excellence of work. " No doubt ! " said the Bishop, " but St. Francis of Assisi was an excellent man, yet he would have been an impossible curate 1 However good the other work of a man is, he must keep his engage- ments." And, speaking on the same subject, he said with much energy, " Ignorance combined with indifference may be disastrous enough, but Heaven defend us from ignorance combined with zeal ! " And there is a pleasant story of how at Peter- borough, in a Chapter meeting, there was a conver- sation, after the business had been done, about the old Cathedral statutes. Some one present said that the Chapter did not discharge their ancient obliga- tions, and pointed out a passage in which it was said that the Canons should lovingly admonish and advise one another. Westcott, with an intense smile, said : " I am sure we have all of us the utmost confidence in our mutual affection. I am afraid we have not the same confidence in each other's capacity for giving either admonition or advice ! " Something of his extreme energy in ordinary talk evaporated, before the end. May I admit that it seemed to me to make him even more attractive? 44 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE When I first remember him, he used, in familiar intercourse, to come out of the intense abstraction of his work like a man refreshed, beaming with intellectual ardour and Christian combativeness. But, as I have said, there was a sense of strain. One seemed so near to the engines, and they worked so prodigiously fast. The whole machinery of the man physical, nervous, intellectual exerted itself so devouringly. His very face, as he talked, took on a variety of guises in a few minutes : every facial muscle was hard at work, and I can hardly fix the recollection of his face in repose. Even as I call it up on the background of my mind, it grows pale, flushes, breaks into a smile, concen- trates into a frown, the lip comes out, the brows corrugate, the great eyes flash from underneath, the veins stand out. And with his talk, too, it was the same it was ingenious, fantastic, provocative, unexpected, perverse, ironical, exalted by turns. One never knew what view he would take of a subject. I remember once, when my father and Lightfoot disagreed on a point they were discussing, Lightfoot said, " We will appeal to Westcott : he will agree with me." " Yes," said my father, " but for my reasons ! " Neither could he take a light view of a question. If a question arose as to the respective merits of two kinds of biscuits, or the advisability of wearing shoes or boots to walk in, one would find that Westcott had devoted a great deal of thought to the question, that he had a strong view on the subject, and that the deepest ethical principles were somehow involved. We were not exactly afraid of him as children he was BISHOP WESTCOTT 45 too kindly for that but there was an awe about him. One was afraid, if one asked him a question, of being taken too seriously. I never saw him for a single instant unemployed. If on a hot summer afternoon we sat by the sea, and a cockshy was set up, Westcott threw stones at it, with a deadly intent- ness, far harder and quicker than any one else. He never seemed tired in those days, or, if he was tired, it took the form of greater exertions. But at the end of his life he was more tranquil and gentler, though the old fire was always there to flash out if it was evoked. His relations with others always puzzled me ; though he was the most faithful of friends and the tenderest of fathers, he was essentially lonely in spirit. He preferred walking alone, and to his family he was, at all events in early days, even more of an august institution than a person. He once said, speaking of the death of his son in India, that he felt almost nearer to him after death, than when half the world divided them. He did not need people, though he suffered them gladly. He felt the responsibility of his relations with others more than he felt the instinctive need of companionship. Indeed, I have often thought that if he had felt those responsibilities a little less, and loved people in themselves a little more, he would have understood the world better. He was reserved, it was true, and believed in reserve ; but I do not think that he had the hankering after love and affection so characteristic of my father, nor did bereavement mean to him an aching sense of loss. He bore his sorrows with an almost painful fortitude. 46 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE Perhaps it may be said that his devotion to life and duty and his faith in immortality were so strong, that even if friends and loved ones were called away, there was life on the one hand still to be lived, and that he did not think of the circle as smaller than before. But that is, after all, an intellectual kind of consolation, and men whose faith is strongest have often sorrowed most deeply. And partly, too, I expect he thought of grief as a luxury that must not be indulged. But the real truth about the people who can rest upon ethical or religious consolations is always that they are in less need of consolation than others, by virtue of temperament and will. Westcott was a warm- hearted man, but work and duty meant more to him than direct relations with others ; and it is always true that people who live much in ideas and causes, and who feel strongly about humanity in general, care less about individuals in particular. His letters, I think, show plainly that the great losses of his life never prostrated him with suffering. But there remains a spirit which, for energy, high-mindedness, purity, and devotion, was one among ten thousand. I do not think that the pastoral or missionary spirit was very strong in him. He lived on so high and austere a level of thought himself that neither through experience nor imagination could he sound the depths of human nature. Wickedness, cruelty, sensuality, meanness, were not only horrible to him they were inconceivable. Thus his heart did not go out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel ; it rather BISHOP WESTCOTT 47 yearned after a peaceful, duty-loving, strenuous ideal. I remember once sending him a little book of poems. He found time to read it and to write to me about it, but he selected one of a timid and even pessimistic tone for special comment, and said, " Life has better hopes and lessons for you in store than that ! " And the whole tone of his letter was, under its eager kindness, the tone of Evangelist in the Pilgrim's Progress when he found the pilgrims wandering dismayed among the thunder-breeding crags. One had no business to be there ! I believe him to have been not only a man of stainless heart and immense energy, but a real man of genius genius perhaps a little obscured by the conditions of his life. But the strongest part of his message was not so much in what he said and wrote, as in his example. " The only people with whom I have no sympathy," he once said, "are those who say that things are easy. Life is not easy, nor was it meant to be " ; and again, in a different mood, tl Faith is a power for life, not a thesis which can be maintained successfully." But he did not ever make the mistake of thinking that work was in itself an end. "The value of routine work," he once said very characteristically, " is to relieve and steady." To relieve ! that is the cry of the man of tumultuous emotions and eager desires, who knows that his one safety lies in labour. But I feel that, if such a comment can be made, his self-conquest was almost too complete, his will too dominant. There was a sense of con- finement about him, of austerity too relentlessly 48 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE pursued. The Puritan, for all his strength, loses sumething of the meaning of life. He avoids gardens where it is lawful to walk, for fear of imagined delay. He misses something of the brightness of the morning, the golden falling of the western light. But :t is perhaps ungenerous even to criticise one who walked so warily and intently, and who in all the dust and heat of the day never lost sight of what he called " the unseen greatness of life." Ill HENRY SIDGWICK HENRY SIDGWICK was born in 1838, the son of a clergyman, Headmaster of Skipton Grammar School. His grandfather, William Sidgwick, was a self-made man, a wealthy cotton-spinner, who had married a Miss Benson ; and thus my father, Archbishop Benson, was Henry Sidgwick's second cousin. The other members of the family who survived infancy were William Carr Sidgwick, formerly Fellow and Tutor of Merton College; Arthur Sidgwick, a Rugby Master, and later Tutor of Corpus College, Oxford ; and my mother. There was a marked intellectual bent in the whole clan. I once made out a careful record of their performances. I forget now the exact details, but I think that it came out that something like twelve members of the united families had taken first-classes at the University, and that over twenty of them had published books of some kind or another. I sent the particulars to Sir Francis Galton, in answer to one of his circulars, and he replied that it was the most remarkable case of kindred aptitude that had ever come under his notice. Henry Sidgwick was at school at Rugby, where his widowed mother resided. He was not pro- 50 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE ficient in athletics, and lived a rather secluded school-life, with the background of a very happy home-circle. My father was then a Rugby Master, and lived with the Sidgwicks. Henry Sidgwick went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of seventeen, as a Scholar. Though he had a year of ill-health, he came out as Senior Classic and a Wrangler. He was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity, and took up the study of Moral Philosophy. He held a College Lectureship, and was eventually made Professor of Moral Philosophy. He married in 1876 a sister of Mr. Arthur Balfour, and he died in 1900, at the age of sixty-two, after a brief illness. Such is the summary of a life which, as far as external incidents go, must seem extremely un- eventful, though it was full of intellectual and social activities. Apart from his teaching and his books, Henry Sidgwick took a very active part in the administration of the University. Much of his time in later years was given to the work of the Psychical Society, and the investigation of spiritualistic phenomena. He was one of the chief pioneers of women's education ; and the close of his life was spent at Newnham College, of which his wife was the Principal. He used to say laughingly that he supposed he was one of the few people in England whose position in his home was simply that of husband of the occupier. The analysis of academical politics is an in- tricate business, and, to outsiders, a peculiarly uninteresting one. It will suffice to say that Sidgwick's position at Cambridge was a singular HENRY SIDGWICK 51 one. When he first took a hand in University organisation, he was looked upon as rather an un- practical man, with dangerously subversive tenden- cies, and with so marked a power of seeing both sides of a question that he could never be depended upon to follow a definite line. He ended by being one of the most trusted and respected members of the oligarchy which rules Cambridge, distinguished "for public spirit, for fairness, for industry in investigation, for dialectical skill." The Bishop of Bristol, who held for many years a prominent place in the administration of the University, said that if Sidgwick had been present at a meeting, and had fairly discussed a matter, the members of the particular Board at least knew this that there was not any obviously better plan to be conceived, and that they had not lost sight of any main considerations. Professor Henry Jackson, replying to the criticism that Sidgwick was a man who "sat on the fence," said that it was a complete mistake. "The man who 'sits on the fence' is one who, whether he has or has not definite convictions, is reluctant to de- clare himself. . . . Sidgwick's conclusions were often compromises, and might change surprisingly ; but they were always exactly thought out, con- fidently affirmed, and eagerly defended." At the same time the fact cannot be overlooked that, in matters of policy, Sidgwick's mind was liable to great and scrupulous oscillations, which be- wildered supporters and opponents alike ; this arose partly from a genuine and deep-seated diffidence, and still more from a conscientious 52 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE dread of not doing full justice to the opinions of those with whom he began by disagreeing. Of his direct educational work it may be said that Henry Sidgwick was undoubtedly a teacher for the few rather than for the many. He once accepted a Mastership at Rugby from Temple, and wisely withdrew his acceptance. He began his teaching work by instructing the pass-men at Trinity ; and he used to tell an amusing story about this. One evening at a party he saw one of his class, who had just taken his degree, making his way across the room, with great diffidence, to speak to him. The man drew near, and then, said that he wished to express his gratitude for Sidgwick's lectures. They were the best lectures, he said, he had ever attended, with the exception of Professor Kingsley's History lectures ; and then, to salve the wound which might have been in- flicted by the comparison, he added : " But, of course, Professor Kingsley's lectures are intended to improve the mind." Sidgwick's main work was done in Moral Philo- sophy. His classes were never large, the subject not being one which attracted many students ; but the result was that the quality was high, so that for years he had in his hands the opportunity of affecting and forming perhaps the most subtle and lucid minds of the successive Cambridge generations. The names of Maitland, of Arch- deacon Cunningham, of Mr. Arthur Balfour, may serve as instances of men who recognised in Sidg- wick the most inspiring intellectual force they had ever encountered. As a teacher he was admirably HENRY SIDGWICK 53 patient and sympathetic, made the kindliest efforts to overcome shyness, to elicit a statement of diffi- culties genuinely felt, and thought no time wasted in making an intricacy clear. His pupils learnt from him to be transparently honest and sincere in thought, and left him determined that they would suspect dogmatism, banish prepossessions, and arrive steadfastly at conclusions, however much they might dread or dislike the results. Above all, he had not the least desire to make disciples or to enforce opinions. " I would not if I could," he said, " and I could not if I would, say anything which would make philosophy my philosophy popular." It is difficult to summarise his work as an original writer, or to make any forecast of the value which posterity may attach to his books. What constitutes the chief difficulty is that he was intensely interested in the practical problems of his day, both ethical and political ; but public discussion shifts its channel, and an appeal to principles, which appear inevitable and all-im- portant in one decade, seems a barren and unsub- stantial argument in the next. It is, too, perhaps true to say that his historical sense was not strong, and that his metaphysical mind tried to measure by ratios and modes what is incapable of being measured by these means. So I will leave his books to justify themselves ; their lucidity and thoroughness are indisputable, and they contained, in certain directions, for his own generation, the maximum of attainable and communicable truth. It may be said, speaking generally, that Sidgwick envied the faith that issued in action. But he felt 54 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE still more strongly that the time had not come in philosophy to formulate conclusions, that the philosopher was still feeling his way, and that the only enthusiasm he could dare to nourish was the ardour of the quest. He felt himself bound upon a narrow path and upon an uncertain journey. The one hope was to be perfectly sincere with himself, and to do analytical work, however un- productive, which would not need to be done again. The same principle actuated him in his work for the Psychical Society. There was current an immense mass of vague records and fluid traditions of abnormal experiences, loosely believed to be supernatural. There might or there might not be definite truth underlying these stories, which might possibly even afford scientific evidence of the continuance of the life of the soul. But Sidg- wick had no desire to welcome or anticipate indi- cations of this for his own personal satisfaction. He rather determined patiently to wade through the mud, to sift the rubbish-heaps of human imagination, to explore the dreariest, most humili- ating, most diseased province of human thought, the craving after self-persuasion, the hysterical self-deception, the yielding to delusive terrors, the exaggerations of morbid hallucinations. His aim in all that was not the desire to say, "Am I justified in believing this to be true ?" but "Am I justified in believing that I have excluded all possibilities of deception ? " The eventual result is that certain scientific probabilities are slowly emerging, that much hasty theorising has been shown to be unsound, and that many HENRY SIDGWICK 55 mysterious phenomena have been traced to their material original. Henry Sidgwick always seemed to me to belong, both in temperament and in appearance, to the type of the Sage. He was so wise and mild and benignant ! He took people as he found them, talked as graciously and as dexterously to the youngest and least conspicuous as to the learned and famous. He seemed to feel it both his duty and his pleasure to do his best for the entertain- ment of the adjacent person, whoever it might be, not to seek for congenial and appreciative people ; and in a mixed company he seemed never to suffer from the temptation, to which I have known virtuous men of eminence to succumb, to gravitate secretly but surely, as by some hidden attraction, into the proximity of other men of eminence. He must have taken care, no doubt, to select suitable topics, because his topics always seemed appropriate to the company ; but the scaffolding of the building was never visible : it appeared to be but a stream of easy talk, of light cast upon common things, so that they shone transfigured. He used to say that he had in early days been very shy, but that, realising that it was a social duty to talk, he had determined always to talk, whether he had anything to say or not. It may be doubted whether the literal observance of this rule would tend in all cases to social ease ; but with him it manifested itself in a quiet geniality, which was so natural and so self-possessed that it made the shyest interlocutor natural too. He 56 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE was more than ready, too, to follow a lead. He did not soliloquise, nor monopolise the talk ; there was no sense of performance about it. He had the art of weighing and appreciating the simplest reply, and the spontaneous and kindly attention he gave to any contribution to the conversation was of itself subtly flattering. He liked to elicit opinion, and could give the crudest sentiment a deft twist that made the author of it rate his own conversational powers more highly. One left his society, feeling indeed that he had talked well, but also feeling that one had oneself made solid additions to the talk, and affected the line of argument. For instance, he was often with us at Addington, and I used to feel that my father, much as he loved Henry Sidgwick, had a sort of terrified disapproval of his habits of thought. But though the ecclesiastical atmosphere was alien to Sidgwick, his talk with my father was mainly on ecclesiastical lines ; and he seemed anxious to learn, for sympathetic reasons and not for contro- versial purposes, the current tendencies of Anglican thought and activity. " I am always impressed here," he wrote at Addington in 1885, "with a strange sense of the vitality of the Church of England, and its power of functioning intellectually and morally in the atmosphere of modern scientific and social thought. At Cambridge I get into the way of regarding it as something that once was alive and growing, but now exists merely because it is a pillar or buttress of uncertain value in a complicated edifice that no one wants just now to take to pieces. Here, however, I feel rather HENRY SIDGWICK 57 as if I were contemplating a big fish out of water, propelling itself smoothly and gaily on the high- road." The above extract is highly characteristic of him, in its humorous detachment, and in its anxiety to see the inner spirit of an institution even though it was on lines antagonistic to his own ideas. But I realised early, by some sort of unconscious divination, that there existed a sense of disappointment and even disapproval in my father's mind about my uncle. My father was to the bottom of his soul an ecclesiastic. He realised, as few people I have ever known did, the vital force of religion, the beautiful traditions and poetical appeal of Christianity, as interpreted and developed by the Church. Thus, though the tie between the two was deep rather than close, my father could never quite banish from his mind the thought that Henry Sidgwick's brilliance and consummate reasonableness might sow the seeds of doubt in the minds of us children ; and though he loved him truly and respected him infinitely, he could not but regard him as a very formidable antagonist to the cause which he himself had most deeply at heart. There was just this amount of gene between the two that there was a large province of thought which had to be tacitly ignored. My father had no intention of discussing religious questions with Sidgwick, while Sidgwick had no sort of wish to initiate discussion. But when the two were once securely launched upon a safe sub- ject, such as literature or Cambridge reminiscences, the give-and-take was delicious. I shall never forget an evening spent at Hill- 58 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE side, the Sidgwicks' Cambridge house, in my early undergraduate days. It was a small party, and the principal guests were Professor Seeley and Lord Bowen. It always remains in my mind as the most brilliant conversation I have ever heard. Seeley came out of his shell, and talked shrewdly and paradoxically, with the air and mien of a comfortable abbe. Bowen, whose appearance, I know not why, reminded me of an intelligent Board-school Master, was no doubt the most attractive talker of the three, because of the extra- ordinary power of transition that he possessed. His humour was entrancing so delicate and so lambent ; and he was able, too, to express deep emotion, without the least sense of incongruity or affectation. But even so, I remember feeling that my uncle carried off the palm, because his talk seemed so entirely uncalculated, and devised though that is hardly the right word, because there was no touch of artificiality about it to draw out and set off the brilliance of his guests. At the other end of the scale I remember a party at Cambridge, at which a lady was present whom it was thought desirable to ask, but who was little used to social functions. She suffered at first from obvious nervousness ; but it fell to Henry Sidgwick to take her in to dinner, and he began to talk to her at once about the education of her children. The bait proved incredibly suc- cessful : it was probably the only subject in the world on which she had both views and ex- perience ; and she left the house with the manifest consciousness of having had an agreeable evening, HENRY SIDGWICK 59 having held her own with an eminent man, and having appeared in the light of a brilliant educa- tional theorist, with the additional advantage of having been enabled to put her theories to a practical test. Yet Sidgwick, too, had his social crises to endure. He used to say that once, at an evening party, his hostess brought up to him a young and beautiful damsel, like Iphigenia to the altar, and said, " Mr. Sidgwick, here is a young lady who wishes to have the pleasure of being presented to you." The maiden stared at him with wide fawn- like eyes, while he in vain endeavoured to think of something appropriate and impressive to say. When at last a thought came into his mind, he said that he realised that it would have sufficed if it had been said earlier, but that after so long a pause something more striking was required. The same terrible process continued, thoughts arriving belatedly and each of inadequate weight, till at last the hostess, observing the imbroglio, came and led the young lady away again, without a word having passed between the pair. The memory of this was so haunting, Sidgwick said, that he at once set to and devised a remark, which he claimed would be appropriate, interesting, and amusing, on any occasion, at any hour, to any person of any age, sex, or nation. But he refused ever to part with so precious a talisman, and the secret was never known. He had a wonderful verbal memory, and could quote copiously and accurately. He told us once that he had discovered a method of defying sea- 60 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE sickness on a Channel crossing which was to take his stand in some secluded part of the vessel, and to pour out audibly and rhetorically his re- pertory of English verse, accompanying it with a good deal of emphatic gesticulation. He said that he could go on repeating poetry continuously, if he did not force the pace, for about a couple of hours. I believe that the first experiment was successful, and that he secured immunity from nausea. But he said that, the second time that he tried it, he was interrupted by one of the officers, with a message from the captain begging him to desist, on the ground that some of the lady passengers were frightened by his behaviour, being under the impression that he was mentally deranged. He complied with the request, and, deprived of its intellectual prophylactic, his brain succumbed to physical sensations. But part of the charm of his literary talk, of which I had considerable experience, was that he could, and did, illustrate his points with apt and beautiful quotations, most feelingly delivered. As a rule people who can quote authors at length can rarely be persuaded to desist. One of the most tiresome conversations I have ever heard was one that took place between two accurate phonetic men, lovers of Dickens ; and as Carlyle said of Coleridge's talk, to sit still and be pumped into never can be an exhilarating process. While, on the other hand, the men who have a critical appreciation of an author can seldom support their arches on solid piers of evidence, and still less pro- duce that evidence with dramatic or lyrical emphasis. HENRY SIDGWICK 61 I always felt that the intellectual side of Henry Sidgwick's mind overbalanced and cast into the shade the poetical and imaginative side. He wrote a few lyrics which are felicitous and moving, and I have heard him confess that he sincerely envied the poetical vocation. He had too a really wonder- ful gift for improvising stories, which he was perfectly ready to exercise for us as children. I can remember even now the details of the story of the King who was haunted by a gnat-like voice in his ear that said "Dig," and when at last he yielded to the suggestion, and found an abundance of curious things, said " Deeper," till at last he came to a room where everything was green. It was a story of epical volume, and a chapter was always ready for us. And I can still recollect the thrill with which I once realised, as a small boy in my grandmother's house at Rugby, the blissful fact that every one else in the house but Uncle Henry and myself was going out to dinner ; how I stole upon his secure hour, and demanded that the story of the Green Room should be finished ; how he put his book aside with a laugh, and, while I played with the buttons of his waistcoat, the strange and beautiful denoutnent unrolled itself so that for a day at least I was in the proud position, among my envious brothers and sisters, of knowing what had really happened, and withholding the information. In appearance, in later years, Henry Sidgwick was the only man I have ever seen who had some- thing of the nobleness of mien, the kindly dignity, and the unapproachable antiquity of the elders in Blake's designs of the Book of Job. He wore his 62 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE massed hair rather long, in ambrosial waves, like a Greek god. His beard, of fine silky texture and irregular outline, seemed to flow liquidly from his face rather than to have been applied to it. As a rule, a man with so full a beard seems either embar- rassed by it or involved in it, and to peep from its tangled brake like a face from the bush. But with him it adorned and amplified his finely chiselled features, his great brow, and clear-cut nose. He was small of stature, and had very delicate hands, which he used much in gestures that were elucida- tory rather than emphatic. He often played with his beard, stroking it or lifting it to his face. His features in repose, with the uplifted eyebrows, had a pensive, almost melancholy air. But this was transfigured in talk by the sweetest and most child- like of smiles. His voice was soft and high-pitched, and had at times a note of weariness about it. But he could modulate it very beautifully for emphasis or emotional effect ; while his reciting of poetry was one of the most thrilling and enchanting things I ever heard. He began in a high chant, with a rich rhetorical cadence. May I confess that it seldom failed to bring tears to my eyes, perhaps not less because at the end of a quotation I have often seen the water stand in his own ? His stammer was well known, but he had so trained himself to disregard it, that he never gave any sense of awkwardness or of delay to his hearers. He used to throw his head back to disengage an unruly con- sonant, and, strange to say, the impediment became a positive ornament to his talk, enabling him to bring out a point with a quaint and charming emphasis. HENRY SIDGWICK 63 He had, too, many little attractive mannerisms. It used to be a pleasure to me to see how daintily and leisurely he manipulated his food, with a sort of bird-like selection. He had, too, an absent- mindedness which is to me an invariable charm, because it gives a sense of tranquil absorption in a train of thought, a quiet aloofness from mundane things. He was sensitive about this, and disliked feeling that he had behaved in an unusual manner. I remember once, when he was staying with us at Truro, he was standing at the end of breakfast on the hearthrug, sipping his tea and discussing some subject with great animation. The bell rang for chapel, and he walked down the dark passage with us, continuing his talk, holding the cup in one hand and emphasising his points with the spoon in the other. Not until he had taken his place in the stalls did he become aware that he was acting in an unaccustomed manner. I remember his look of sudden bewilderment, and his relief when the sym- pathetic butler, who had been awaiting his oppor- tunity, came up and with a deferential bow removed the cup, as though it were a semi-ecclesiastical ceremony. He was wholly indifferent to dress, but contrived, by a sort of natural dignity and grace, to look well in whatever he wore. He affected a large, black, soft hat of a clerical type, or on state occasions a tall hat. He was always a conspicuous figure. In Cambridge the most" characteristic thing about him was that he frequently ran in the street, even in cap and gown. This had its origin in his being told by his doctor to take more exercise, and advised to 64 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE ride ; he pleaded lack of time, but on eliciting the fact that running was better exercise than walking, he determined to put as much exercise as possible into necessary transits. He put in Who's Who, under the head of his recreations, " Novel-reading and a little walking " ; but he was not deficient in agility, and I remember him as a very keen and perfectly efficient lawn-tennis player. One characteristic of him was his apparently in- variable cheerfulness. He laughed often, a low, musical, rather lazy laugh, which gave a sense oi great contentment. His diary is rather a melan- choly record ; but this was not at all the case with his talk, which was always light, humorous, and comfortable. He talked a good deal about himself, his views and experiences ; but this never gave the least impression of egotism : what he said about himself seemed always said by way of comparison, or confirmation of the experiences of others. And then one had a sense of intimacy in all one's talks with him ; he gave himself ; he was never aloof or impersonal. Some eminent philosophers whom I have known never seemed to be really there. Their voices whispered drily of mortal things, but one felt that what they said was merely like rain drop- ping from clouds which sailed above the earth, and evacuated expressions rather than mingled with life. But Henry Sidgwick was always intensely human, interested in his circle, taking his part, anxious to establish communication with fellow-travellers, as merry and wise as old Master Gaius in the Pilgrim's hostel. He never gave the sense of being pre- occupied in important work, but anxious, not on HENRY SIDGWICK 65 principle but by instinct; to join in anything that was going forward. I remember being once deeply touched, just after I left Cambridge, by something that he said to me. He made me a gentle apology for not having seen more of me as an undergraduate. I did see him as a matter of fact fairly often, being every now and then bidden to come and lunch with him in his rooms in College at the end of his morning's work, or dining at Hillside. But he added that he had always known and felt that my father was uneasy about his possible influence on my religious views, and that he had therefore made up his mind that he would not raise such questions at all, and that he would not en- courage me to discuss such things ; and that this had ended in his seeing less of me than he had wished. He added that he hoped that I should not misunderstand it, or put it down in any way to a lack of affection ; for indeed it was rather the reverse. I do not think that I ever heard such a thing said more feelingly and delicately, and it gave me a sense of justice and high-mindedness which was intensely impressive. Let me frankly admit that I always have con- sidered the case of Henry Sidgwick to be a difficult one for any one to meet, who claims that a particular religious faith or a particular re- ligious denomination monopolises the produc- tion of a special type of character. Henry Sidgwick was brought up in orthodox Christianity ; he was a serious and convinced Christian as a boy ; he had a more or less definite intention of taking E 66 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE Orders. These tendencies were fostered both in his own home, where his mother was a devout High Churchwoman, of the old-fashioned type, and still more by my father, whose influence over Henry Sidgwick at an impressionable time was very great. Indeed, I do not imagine that he ever submitted himself in his life so completely to the dominance of a single personality as he did to my father's. He speaks of my father's " unquestioned rule " over his mind in his school-days and early under- graduate time : " When I did what he advised . . . it was not from awe of him and fear of blame, but from a conviction that he was right and a desire to be like him." Yet he gave up all dogmatic faith. While in later life he grew to regard Christianity, from the sociological point of view, as indispensable and irreplaceable, he said that he found it "more and more incomprehensible how any one whom I feel really akin to myself in intellectual habits and culture can possibly find his religion in it. My own aliena- tion from it is all the stronger because it is so purely intellectual." He goes on to say, " I am glad that so many superior people are able to become clergy- men, but I am less and less able to understand how the result is brought about in so many thoroughly sincere and disinterested and able minds." To speak with entire candour, the difficulty with him was to base any system of religion upon alleged facts, which he could not test, and which he did not believe to be true. He felt that in a matter of such infinite and vast importance as subscribing to an ontological explanation of the HENRY SIDGWICK 67 universe, he could not possibly found an active faith upon assumptions which he thought so un- warrantable. And yet I have always considered Henry Sidg- wick to be, on the whole, the one man I have known who, if he had been a Christian, would have been selected as almost uniformly exhibiting perhaps the most typical Christian qualities. He was so sincere, so simple-minded, so unselfish, so sympathetic, so utterly incapable of meanness or baseness, so guileless, so patient, of so crystalline a purity and sweetness of character, that he is one of the few men to whom one could honestly apply in the highest sense the word "saint." I have heard this particular point discussed by some who knew him and loved him, and deeply regretted his dissidence from Christian beliefs. I have heard it deliberately said by one such, that his Christianity was so instinctive, by inheritance and temperament and education, that it could not be uprooted by what was a merely intellectual scepticism. But if the deliberate abnegation of a particular form of a religious faith is attended by no sort of moral deterioration ; if, on the con- trary, a character year by year grows stronger and purer, more devoted and unselfish, and at the same time no less appreciative of the moral effect of a definite belief, it becomes impossible to say that such qualities can only spring from a vital and genuine acceptance of certain dogmas. Dogmas are, after all, intellectual things, and some of the best Christians I have ever known would have been unable to explain, if indeed they could have 68 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE correctly repeated, the clauses of the Nicene Creed. I have indeed often wondered whether the accept- ance of dogma is not rather a symptom of spiritual affinity than a cause of spiritual pro- gress a case, in fact, of the anima naturaliter Christiana. Indeed I say frankly that though the spiritual ideas of Christianity seem to me the highest and noblest that the world has ever seen, or is indeed likely to see, it seems to me impossible to believe that of the various Christian denomina- tions, we should find, if we knew all, that one is in possession of the exact truth of the matter, and that all others are in error ; and why I should myself claim to be an Anglican, is because the Anglican Communion appears to me to have the note of Christian liberty in a higher degree than any other Christian denomination. Henry Sidgwick's agnosticism was not militant, and had no touch of proselytism about it. He wrote to my mother nearly thirty years ago, after a discussion of religious matters : " You see, I do not want to bring you to my position. I am not sorry exactly to be in the position myself ; it has grave defects and disadvantages, but I feel in a way suited for it ; I regard it as an inevitable point in the process of thought, and take it as a soldier takes a post of difficulty. But I cannot take the responsi- bility of drawing any one else to it though neither can I take the responsibility of placing obstacles in the way." He realised to the full the eager hopeful- ness that would naturally result from the vivid acceptance of a comprehensive and definite faith. And he kept, as he once wrote, strict silence with HENRY SIDGWICK 69 regard to theology, because, while he could not discover an adequate rational basis for the Christian hope of happy immortality, he felt that the loss of such a hope from the minds of average human beings, as now constituted, would be an evil of which he could not pretend to measure the extent ; he thought, indeed, that a dissolution of the existing social order might follow the loss of such an ideal. But his own private belief was that humanity was growing more sympathetic, and that the more that this sympathy increased, the more would the results of human action on other human beings supply adequate motives for goodness of conduct, and render the expectation of personal immortality and of the actual truth of Christian dogma less import- ant. He was disposed to question the validity of spiritual experience. He thought that just as a vision of the Virgin or of a saint appearing to a contemplative anchorite might be subjective, so he believed that the gain in moral strength, the accession of life-giving hope, the tranquillisation of selfish desires, which seemed to come as an answer to prayer, might be subjective too. What has always appeared to me so beautiful about his attitude was the utter absence from it of any sense of intellectual contempt or mental im- patience. To him the man who was conscious of spiritual experience was simply enviable. He never tried to prove that this was a sign of intellectual inferiority. He had far too much respect for others' convictions, and tenderness for their aims and needs, to treat the matter as a sceptic often treats it as a case of dangerous and perverse yo THE LEAVES OF THE TREE illusion of which he must try to rescue the victims. And thus Sidgwick exhibited the truest kind of tolerance, very far from the dogmatism that masquerades under the guise of tolerance and is intolerant of any form of spiritual assertion. He knew only too well the unhappy isolation of the intellectual life. He saw as it were the happy flock inside the fold, and himself outside. But this did not lead him, as it often leads a jealous sceptic, to desire at all costs to break down the security of the shielding wall, even though he could not so far sacrifice his sense of truth, his own patient analysis of actuality, as either to pretend to himself or to others that he was within, or to express his belief, with a sympathetic compromise, that the security of wall and gate might somehow turn out to be an objective one ! In early days, before he made up his mind to resign his Fellowship the acceptance of which involved at that time a formal expression of belief in the distinctive tenets of the Church of England he sometimes spoke with bitterness of his position, because he felt a sense of insincerity about it : ' I am so bankrupt of most things men desire, that I would at least have a sort of savings- bank pittance of honesty. . . . To be a humbug in one thing is to make a terrible breach in the citadel of morality. . . . You see the greatest humbug of all is to pretend I do these things for the sake of my mother. I wish to heaven I did ! Then had I been a better man. ... At any rate, says Trevelyan, do something ; sound advice ; but something has hamstrung me.' HENRY SIDGWICK 71 But after he had resigned his Fellowship, thereby sacrificing a competence and a position, these spectres were laid, the clansum pectorc volnus was healed. Henceforward his wise and serene tolerance, the reward of his utter unworldliness, grew and increased. And yet the record of his life as a whole, with all its subtlety and sense, its kindliness and sym- pathy, tends to give an impression of sadness, of endurance, almost of conscious failure, and of disappointment gently borne. Speaking generally, one would not much relish a biography which gave one an impression of conscious success ; but the lives of successful men, as a rule, give the sense of active interest and unconscious happiness, with here and there perhaps a touch of sorrow and gloom. But the life of Henry Sidgwick, judged by ordinary standards, may be considered successful, if it is success to be famous, to be influential, to be respected, honoured, and loved ; and thus one finds oneself wondering what it was that he hoped to do which he did not do, and why there should be a feeling of a shadow and a burden often urgently present and seldom very far away. There were the materials for happiness, one would have thought, in the life of a man who found apparently the life for which he was best suited, whose prosperity was on the whole uninterrupted, who lived upon equal terms with the most interesting figures of the day, whose career was never hampered by any serious ill- health or untoward circumstance, who never fell and bled among the thorns of life, who never 72 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE succumbed to any base or mean temptation, who carried out a programme of work with the approval and admiration of all concerned. If this is not a happy life, where can a happy life be found ? It is possible to conceive a Pharisaical critic saying that it was a life of which the spiritual glow was sacrificed to a cold intellectual ideal, and that a man who wilfully dismissed from his horizon the normal and traditional hopes of humanity was bound to be penalised. But in the presence of so high-minded, unworldly, and unselfish a life as Henry Sidgwick's this criticism seems a kind of blasphemy, a sin against the Spirit for the sin against the Spirit is the mis- interpretation of all that is pure and true. No, the explanation of it lies elsewhere. Part of it was, no doubt, temperamental. There was a strain of melancholy in his nature which was distracted, no doubt, by work and activity, but which emerged when the frame was exhausted, and the brain wearied. Moreover, his biography does not give a complete impression. It seems at first sight that to let a man tell his own life-story by diaries and letters is the nearest you can get to the truth of him. But in the case of hard brain-workers, especially if they have a strain of sadness in their temperament, the self-made record is not really the truest portrait. The diary is the record of the silent and introspective mood. Henry Sidg- wick tended to confide to his journal the thoughts with which he was too brave, too kind, too un- egotistical to trouble the peace of others. And the letters, too, are documents composed in the HENRY SIDGWICK 73 intervals of hard work not exactly for recreation, but for the sake of keeping alive the human rela- tions which he treasured so dearly. But he did not expand in letters as he did in conversation, and those who were nearest to him say that he wrote them with a certain unwillingness of the flesh, and aimed at conciseness of statement rather than at the free imparting of intimate thought. Indeed he regarded letter- writing as somewhat of an interruption to his work. At the end of his life he expended much ingenuity in trying to con- fine his letters to a single page. He certainly must have given up a good deal of time to writing letters ; he kept up close relations with his family and friends, and whenever a correspondent asked him a question or appealed to him for his opinion, he gave full measure, and answered patiently and kindly, with a great desire to do full justice to his correspondent's difficulties, and to give what- ever help he could bestow. But his real and vital medium of communication was familiar talk, and this is the one effect that can hardly be re- produced, except in the rare cases where a Johnson meets with a Boswell. I suppose that a man's congenial method of expression is conditioned by his pace of thought. If he thinks more quickly than he writes, his letters are apt to be either disjointed or concentrated. And it always seems to me that Henry Sidgwick composed rather than wrote letters. Many of them are intensely in- teresting, when he was trying to elucidate some subject upon which he felt deeply. But his geniality, and the humour which was so strong 74 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE a feature of his talk, evaporated in his letters ; and though they do full justice to his kindness, his seriousness, and his intellectual power, they give little hint of his lightness of touch, his serene deliberateness, and his overflowing interest. It would be wrong to call him a disappointed man. But he was aware of his great powers and did not underrate them, modest as he was. It is not uncommon for inexperienced and impres- sionable youths, coming up to the University and meeting with men of erudition and ability, framed in the attractive setting of College courts, stately chapels, solemn halls, studious rooms look- ing on to quiet gardens, to think that the life of the Don is one of unworldly grace and refined dignity, and to embrace with ardour the prospect of serene leisure, competently endowed. Then in middle age there comes an awakening. Men begin to wonder whether after all they are really doing any of the work of the world. They find themselves immersed in academic politics, stereo- typed teaching, intellectual intrigues, petty interests. They see their own contemporaries, of possibly inferior mental power, stepping into the wider influences, the larger realities of the world, and they begin to be haunted by a sense of failure. There are many disappointed men at Cambridge, and even perhaps at Oxford. Something of this shadow one feels touched the life of Sidgwick. He had restless periods when he formed dim ideas of leaving Cambridge. In later life this was succeeded by a more serene mood. The inestimable accession of happiness which his HENRY SIDGWICK 75 marriage brought him, the wider social and political circle to which it introduced him, his own unques- tioned position at Cambridge, the outside honours which came richly to him, his delight in the pros- perity of Newnham and the increasing range of female education all this consoled and sustained him. But it comes out clearly enough in the diary that there was a time when he felt that he had sacrificed great powers to a futile sort of treadmill, when his designs seemed to be thwarted and his hopes disappointed. There is one very remarkable passage in his biography, when one of his colleagues told him plainly that he was a comparatively ineffective man, and endeavoured to give reasons. Sidgwick faced the criticism with sincere interest and without any personal resentment. I do not think I know any piece of self-analysis which is so just and at the same time so little introspective. The danger of introspection is that it tends to glory both in credit and discredit. It takes compliments as sincere, and censure as testifying to a refined sensitiveness of nature, unfitting its possessor for commonplace efforts. But there was no trace of this weakness in Sidgwick. He had been accused of academic sterility, of failing to attract men on a large scale. He admitted that it was so, but added that, feeling as he did that the deepest truth he had to tell was by no means "good tidings," he naturally shrank from exercising on others the personal influence which would make men resemble him. I know no personal statement which is at once so humble and so free from morbidity or self-deprecia- 76 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE tion, and at the same time so perfectly just, both to himself and his critic. But still, making all allowances for his instinctive lack of hopefulness and buoyancy, and assuming that the proportion is not fairly represented that no record remains of the "heart affluence" of dis- cursive talk, or of the hours of happy and uncon- scious energy there remains a shadow which cannot be explained away. To me it needs no explanation at all. It is the inevitable result of an extraordinary clearness and fairness of vision. A man who looks closely and without bias at the fabric of the world must be aware of the grossness and the faultiness of the texture. The greater the restraint and purity of his own life is, the more must he be aware of the inroads of sin, of the impatience and un- reasonableness of human nature, of the horrible waste of time and energy all along the line, of the miserable obstacles with which the path of those who desire justice, order, and peace is en- cumbered. I doubt if a clear-sighted man, living a strenuous and unselfish life, with lofty and beautiful ideals, can ever be a very happy one. Happiness comes either to the unperceptive or to the indifferent, or to those who embrace with a fine unreasonable- ness and a rich impulsiveness, a theory of universal goodwill, which is not wholly borne out by facts, but is no doubt the most effective way of dealing with them. To myself, the inspiration of such a life as Henry Sidgwick's is not the inspiration which comes of ardent discipleship, but that which HENRY SIDGWICK 77 is derived from the blessed fact that such unstained and flawless lives are possible among mankind. Such lives mark the high-water level of the race, and their development shows that there is some secret and beautiful force at work which can and does produce spirits of so fine a temper. I will not say that it seems to me a noble thing in him to have discarded the unreasoning optimism of humanity, which accepts an explanation of the world because it is encouraging rather than because it is true ; for this was the natural and inevitable outcome of Sidgwick's character. He could not have done otherwise ! But what is inspiring about it is that a man should realise that he is not justified by his lights in accepting a hopeful view of the world, and yet be enabled to live so serene and devoted a life ; and that one who could not believe in personal immortality, could yet love so tenderly and faithfully, and never, under any circumstances, under any weakness of body or infirmity of spirit, choose the purer and nobler course because of any expectation or hope of ultimate reward. IV J. K. STEPHEN WHEN I entered College at Eton in 1874, Jem Stephen, as he was always called, had been there three years. I do not remember my first actual sight of him, but he was so entirely unlike other boys that, once seen, it was impossible to forget him. He had a very big head with fine, clear-cut features, large and rather terrific eyes, a strong, expressive mouth, and a solid chin. He wore his hair, which curled slightly, somewhat long, and parted in the middle. The expression of his face was severe to grimness in repose it was eminently a judicial face though it lit up with an irrepres- sible smile. He gave the impression of enormous strength. He was very sturdily built, and walked in a slow, ungainly, and almost shuffling manner, holding his hands stiffly at his sides, his fingers extended. He was very much of a hero among the smaller boys for several rather inconsequent reasons. He played the odd game of football known as the Wall Game with remarkable skill and endurance, he was extremely good-natured, he did very little work, he defied authority, he was extra- ordinarily and perennially amusing, and he had the most copious and prodigious flow of elaborate bad language that ever issued from human lips. It was 78 J. K. STEPHEN 79 not obscene language, and he always bore an absolutely stainless character, but it was incredibly direct and supremely opprobrious ; and on the rare occasions when he lost his temper, the terror of the situation was much modified by the amazing variety of expression with which he gave the rein to his feelings. I first made friends with him in rather an odd way. College at that time was divided into cliques, and rather sharply divided. During my first year at Eton, the peace was kept by the efforts of two boys ; the first was Binney, the Captain of the School, who afterwards died at Repton, where he was a master. He was a quiet, unimpressive boy, but with much force of character. Next to him came Herbert Ryle, now Bishop of Winchester, whose unaffected dignity and good-humoured kind- liness made strife impossible. When these two left the School in 1875, a different set came into power. They were some of them boys with a good deal of character more than one has risen to high dis- tinction in the world and with a strong sense of duty. But the leaders were intensely conventional and conservative, meant to use their authority on familiar lines, and hopelessly misjudged the boys with whom they did not sympathise. Next to these came a very remarkable set of boys indeed, to which Stephen belonged. There was C. Lowry, now Headmaster of Tonbridge, the embodiment of quiet force and good-natured independence ; there was Spring Rice, now Sir Cecil Spring Rice, British Minister in Sweden ; Vassall, now Father Vassall-Philips, the Redemptorist ; W. O. Burrows, 8o THE LEAVES OF THE TREE now Archdeacon of Birmingham ; and others of the same active-minded type. All these were much under the influence of Mr. Oscar Browning, who was always on the look-out for any signs of intellectual enthusiasm ; he threw his house and his library open to them, he taught them History, and deliberately tried to awaken their interest in books and art and ideas. But this attempt to encourage culture found very little sympathy at Eton. Opinion was cautious and ideals were restricted. There were three or four masters on Mr. Browning's side, men whose influence in the direction of all that is interesting, beautiful, and noble has since been recognised ; and who can say how much it has not done to widen the restricted horizon of Eton boyhood ? But these men were in the minority. Hornby, the Headmaster, was a courteous and gracious man, of restrained emotions, and whole- some, if conventional, views of life. He favoured the reactionary party among the masters, which was led by men of great force and energy, and followed by the timid, the cautious, and the con- servative elements. The ideal of this section was sound enough so far as it went, and it was per- haps the best adapted to win the confidence of the British parent. It was a sort of muscular Christianity. The ideal boy was the boy of pure life and high training, who believed what he was taught, did as he was told, read the prescribed books, and set a good example of activity, re- spectability, and decorum. I have not the slightest wish to decry this ideal. The mischief of it was J. K. STEPHEN 81 in its rigid application : it was not wide enough nor sympathetic enough. The men who upheld it did so vigorously and complacently. They pooh-poohed the idea of intellectual culture, and thought it all rather dangerous and subversive. The result was that while they hauled in their net full of little fishes, they did not see that the biggest fishes were escaping them. The set to which Jem Stephen belonged was full of ideas, and took nothing for granted. They did not do justice to the good sense and thorough- ness of the masters who took the other side. One of their most revolutionary notions w~as that age and standing in the school should be no bar to friendship, and so they deliberately made friends with several small boys who seemed inclined to be interested in the same things. Of course the proceeding was not approved of by the Sixth Form set ; and they were not wholly unjustified in their disapproval. I was myself one of the small boys who were taken up by the reformers. I entered upon easy relations with them, in blissful ignorance of any disapproval, and with extreme pleasure and de- light. We used to go to breakfast-parties with them, and often carried up our books in the long evenings to sit and work and talk in the rooms of our older friends. We were not in the least unduly encouraged. We heard a great deal of exciting and amusing talk, and we were treated rather lively younger brothers might be by good-humoured elder brothers. The bigger boys of the set lived very simple F 82 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE and blameless lives ; but they made it no part of their business to take a strong line on moral questions. They just went their way, full of plans and absurdities, intensely interested in books and in each other, and making very pronounced fun of the virtuous and conventional authorities, whom they quite unduly despised. They were nick- named, I remember, by their opponents, the High Souls, and Jem Stephen, whose talent for invent- ing sobriquets was unrivalled, retorted by calling these the Bludgers, which amiable characterisation they long enjoyed. One frail memorial of their intellectual activities remains in a schoolboy paper called the Etonian, which ran for a year in the early seventies, and contains both poetry and prose of remarkable promise, though its esoteric humour can hardly be interpreted except by a contemporary. Things quieted down ; though there was one untoward incident when Jem Stephen made in public an ironical imitation of the tone and manner of the Captain of the School, in his presence, and was requested to submit to a caning in conse- quence. It seemed then like a chapter out of the French Revolution. The incident was dis- cussed high and low. He was too high up in the School and too prominent for such indignities. But the upshot of it was that he asked the advice of Mr. F. W. Cornish, now Vice-Provost of Eton, who very sensibly advised him to submit and submit he did, with the agreeable result that for the next few evenings, when the unpopular Captain came into the Hall at supper, all the boys rose J. K. STEPHEN 83 in silence and walked straight out. I have often admired the courage with which the object of our hostility faced the odium. Sustained by a consciousness of right, he followed us out, to all appearances entirely untroubled by the demon- stration. One picturesque scene remains to this day in my memory. Jem Stephen was, among other things, a hopelessly unpunctual boy. He was so often late for Chapel that he received an intimation that he must amend his ways or the consequences would be serious. The ceremonial of the service was impressive. The Sixth Form assembled in the ante-chapel with the choir. When the Provost and Headmaster appeared, the organ struck up, and the Sixth Form, carrying their tall hats in front of them as though they were consecrated vessels, stalked solemnly in. Then followed the choir, and when the dignitaries appeared, all the boys stood up. The Headmaster, Hornby, sat in a stall some way up the chapel. Provost Goodford, a quaint little figure in high collars and straggling white tie, stumbled up the steps to his stall, while the alert figure of Hornby, with his bright eyes and his long black whiskers, passed lightly and swiftly down the central gangway. At this moment the portentous figure of Jem Stephen appeared, glaring in at the glass doors of the screen, which had been closed by the verger. He waited until Hornby's head was bowed in prayer ; then he passed through the doors, closed them, and walked up the aisle with extreme dignity, keeping his glance fixed upon the Headmaster. It was exactly timed. Just as he 84 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE slipped into his place, Hornby rose refreshed, wholly unaware of the interruption, and perhaps a little puzzled by the broad smiles of the Collegers. Another recollection remains with me. I was the possessor in those days of an alarum clock, and it seemed to me the height of bliss to be awakened by it at five in the morning. I suppose I had an obscure idea of being beforehand with the work of the day. Jem Stephen, who was invariably behind- hand, implored me to call him regularly at that hour, and if possible to call him again a little later. He occupied in those days a big room in the Upper Passage of College, the ceiling of which was supported by an iron post, upon which the security of the whole building was supposed to depend. I can remember often going in, and finding Stephen, with his gigantic form very scantily covered, plunged in a slumber so deep that it seemed im- possible to rouse him. At last a hollow voice would say, "Oh yes all right thanks." I went off to rouse some other claimants, looked out of the window at the end of the passage at the playing- fields with the dew on the grass, the sheep already cropping, and the screen of high-towering elms behind, and thought how pleasant and exciting it all was. On looking again into Jem Stephen's room, sleep had again prevailed. I would beat upon his shoulder. He would sit up in bed, glaring at me without a sign of recognition. Suddenly consciousness would return. " I have been to sleep again ! Horror ! " (that was a mild specimen of his terms), and he would hurl himself out of bed, divesting himself as he did so of a very J. K. STEPHEN 85 exiguous nightshirt, and plunge straight without a word into a big bath, entirely oblivious of my services. And there is another scene that I remember. It was at a harmless and noisy institution called College Supper, a festivity which took place at the end of the Christinas half. It was primarily a football supper, but most of the prominent boys in College were asked. A good deal of beer was drunk, and songs were sung. It was known that Jem Stephen would sing a song. He had a liking for music, but not much idea of formal melody. When the time came he rose with great dignity and with a terrible glare down the table. He began, producing a louder volume of continuous sound than I have ever heard from a human throat. I have forgotten now what the song was ; some slight variations in tone and rhythm led us to believe that he had a tune in his mind. He made no pauses of any kind. The chorus joined in when it could, forming nothing but a faint and gasping back- ground to the original solo. But the song con- tinued to pour out without any apparent reference to the audience. It was irresistibly amusing from its intense and majestic solemnity. Stephen wore from end to end the same air of profound gravity mingled with righteous anger. The guests were helpless with laughter. I remember boys with their heads on their hands in uncontrollable convulsions ; others rising from the table and leaning against the wall entirely overcome. At the end he made a grave bow and sat down ; and the cessation of the incredible sound made a sort of shocking silence 86 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE only broken by the exhausted laughter of the spectators. It was some time before any one else could recover himself enough to sing. At the end of his time at Eton I got to know him better still. He was anxious, I think, to keep up his friendship with some juniors who were likely to remain in the school for even then, one felt that he had a passionate sort of devotion to the place, which never failed him, and hated the thought of separation from Eton. He used to stray into my room and talk there, leaning his great back against the door-post. He was never still ; he was always kicking something or playing with something, or breaking something -petulcus, as they say in Latin as if conscious of his enormous strength, and as if it fretted him not to use it. He was eccentric in dress, and everything he wore looked too small for him as indeed it mostly was. He delighted in getting the smallest ties he could all the bigger boys at Eton wear white ties in a bow and in tying them in the smallest possible bows between the flaps of the largest possible collar. I think he enjoyed giving amusement ; and his ungainly motions were extraordinarily mirth-provoking. I remember one day, at "Absence," when he had ar- rived late, seeing him borrow a hat and a gown from the smallest Colleger, and advance into the middle, under the eyes of the Headmaster, with immense dignity and gravity. On one occasion it fell to me to row with him in a sweepstake. He pulled as hard as he could, sending the water up in great spirts. I could not do anything to keep the head of the boat straight ; we shipped a quantity of J. K. STEPHEN 87 water, and the "cedar," as it was called a sort of low-built gig, with very high rowlocks was soon under water. Jem Stephen continued to row majestically as we sank, and rowed till the water was up to his chin. Then he spurned the boat from under him, and swam to the shore like a great sphinx, leaving me to look after myself. I was not, I remember, exactly at ease with him, though I felt it a great honour to be selected as his friend. I was always overshadowed by a sense of his cleverness, quickness, and ability, and was afraid of not being up to the mark in talk. He was in reality very shy, and it was a great mistake to feel ill as ease, because he was not only un- critical, but delighted in any one who would talk to him frankly and easily ; indeed I do not think he ever enjoyed the company of his intellectual equals as much as the company of amiable and unaffected people of inferior ability, who liked being with him, and said what they thought, with- out any idea of trying to be brilliant or interesting. Neither do I think he cared about a let -a-tete par- ticularly. He liked a group. One was conscious in a tete-a-tete with him of a certain gene on his part. He was of an emotional nature always, but found it very hard to express his feelings ; and I was aware in those days, especially just before the time came for him to leave the School, that there was some hidden flow of feeling about him, a heartfelt craving which he could not express even to himself. He left Eton in 1878, and went up to King's with a scholarship. He wrote to me a good deal 88 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE in those days, in his odd, hurried, irregular hand- writing, the lines sloping at all angles. They were wonderful letters for a boy to write. I knew that dimly then, though I hardly guessed how wonderful. They were extravagantly absurd and fantastic, never about anything in particular. They would be very cryptic to the ordinary reader, because of their allusions and nicknames. We started a magazine at Eton in those days, The Eton Rambler, a short- lived and very pretentious periodical. Stephen sent us a good many little contributions, now in- cluded in his collected poems, which stand out like jewels among the worthless stuff we wrote. The maturity of all he produced was conspicuous. He was very indignant with me at times for not answering his letters more promptly and fully. I remember a letter of rhetorical invective dashed off in verse, which began : " What means this silence ? Is't a seemly thing Thus to provoke a friendly elder's ire ? Take notice then, that if thou answerest not, A second letter follows close on this, Third close on second, fourth as close on third, And angry postcards rain as thick as hail That slew Egyptia's cattle. . . ." He often came down to Eton in those days, playing football and lounging about, with endless interludes of talk. He did not often seem to be working, nor was he ever serious. But there was a difference. His mind, always mature, took on a new tinge. His work was more congenial ; for at Eton he was always an indifferent classical scholar, and he turned at Cambridge to History and J. K. STEPHEN 89 Law. He threw himself into the free discussion of political and social problems, and he was early elected a member of the Apostles' Club, which undertook high-heartedly the reform of the world by the light of pure reason. He became a serious and incisive debater at the Union ; and he came in contact, too, with older and more experienced minds, as well as with eager and original spirits among his own contemporaries. All these influ- ences produced in him a remarkable expansion, widening his grasp and deepening his interests. It was all entirely free from any priggishness or over-earnestness ; not perhaps wholly free from a certain intellectual pride, and a contempt for vague and sloppy intelligences. Some latent am- bition woke and raised its head. There was no one for whom we more confidently predicted fame and success. It seemed to us then that he had only to select his line, and situations of emolument, as Mrs. Micawber said, would be brought forward. Not only was his mind quick, logical, alert, and ingenious, but he had an enormous reserve of mental and physical strength and health, which seemed boundless, to draw upon. He never seemed tired, or dispirited, or uncertain, or half-hearted. He would sit up most of the night and be perfectly fresh in the morning, while his bodily endurance was inexhaustible. When I went up to Cambridge in 1881, I found him at the very top of his reputation, and certainly the most marked man of the younger generation. He lived a very easy life, with apparently no fixed hours for work, and endlessly sociable. But at this 90 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE time I did not see as much of him as I had hoped. He had big, dark rooms in the Fellows' Building at King's, on the ground floor, in the staircase next the chapel. The furniture was extremely heterogeneous. The front room was panelled and painted a dark sage-green. The inner sitting-room was a high panelled cabinet de travail, coloured and grained, I suppose to resemble oak ; and here he was usually to be found. I remember one afternoon finding him at tea with an older man a small, elegant person with moustache and side- whiskers, who was delicately smoking a cigar, and whose appearance did not suggest any intellectual weight. I was introduced, but did not catch the stranger's name. He talked in the most enchant- ing manner, with a fine irony and a subtle humour. It was Jebb, I afterwards discovered, and he showed me much kindness then and later. But the most picturesque of my memories of Jem Stephen are in salient vignettes. I remember going to breakfast with him one morning and finding him still in bed. He rose at once, plunged into a cold bath, and, putting on a shirt and trousers without any attempt at drying himself, came out and presided at the meal while the suffused shirt slowly regained its texture. Again, I recollect going into Chapel one morning on the stroke of eight. The rule was that, if one did not go to Chapel, one had to sign one's name, before the clock struck eight, in a book which lay at the porter's lodge. I was walking with the Vice- Provost, Augustus Austen Leigh, a man of the most amiable decorum. As we passed the door J. K. STEPHEN 91 of Stephen's staircase, he burst forth, his hair in great elf-locks, clad in trousers and a short dress- ing-gown of a gaudy Oriental pattern, with a pair of carpet slippers on his feet, and ran intently and furiously, with a look of desperate concentration, across the grass, which was forbidden to be trodden by the profane foot, leaving one slipper at the edge of the lawn, and the other by the fountain. The Vice- Provost watched him with a melancholy air, but was suddenly seized with a convulsion of uncontrollable laughter, in which I joined, and we entered the Chapel in a hysterical state. Once or twice during the service I glanced at the Vice- Provost in his stall of state, and I saw with delight that at intervals he bowed himself over his book, in a desperate attempt to check his irrepressible mirth at the recollection of the apparition. It was at this period at the end of 1882 that Stephen acquired some fame as an actor by his appearance as Ajax in the play of Sophocles which was performed at the Cambridge theatre. My recollection of his performance is that it was ex- tremely impressive. He was wholly without any dramatic gift ; his elocution was hurried, his gestures stiff ; but the thing was so forcible, so intense, and vibrated with so intellectual a passion, that it held the audience from first to last as with a kind of tragic significance ; while at the rehearsals the contrast between his irresponsible humour, his social enjoyment, and the desperate energy with which he enacted his own part was a thing I can never forget. 92 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE In the matter of companionship, Jem Stephen lived, on terms of undisputed pre-eminence, with all or nearly all the foremost undergraduates of the day, all the vigorous and ardent intellects contemporary with him ; and he was on familiar terms, too, with most of the more brilliant senior men in residence ; but I think it may be fairly said that he preferred, for daily intercourse, the society of pleasant-mannered and mildly cultivated men, of his own standing or junior to himself, to the society of profound and ardent intellects. It is difficult to define precisely what his attitude was to the most brilliant minds among his con- temporaries and what their attitude was to him. In this respect he was something like Dr. Johnson, in the deference which he enjoyed. He was so clear in his own views, so cogent in statement, so humorous in argument, so incisive in combat, that I doubt whether the best minds of the genera- tion were, except perhaps in the meetings of the Apostles, ever laid very fairly alongside of his. I should say that he enjoyed an absolutely un- questioned supremacy so far as pure intellectual force went. But he did not thirst for the fray ; he preferred as a rule to take his ease among gentler temperaments. Probably his superior skill in dialectic rather concealed from him that his mind was more analytical than constructive, and his dislike of insecure idealism kept him unaware of the fact that he was lacking both in moral energy and in imaginative sympathy. He was serious enough, but he did not allow his serious- ness to overflow into his ordinary life and con- J. K. STEPHEN 93 versation. He liked talk better than discussion, and there was never the least touch of prophetical solemnity about him. Young men who are very earnest, or who luxuriate in the consciousness of intellectual gifts, are not as a rule easy company. People who are pressing towards the mark of their high calling have not much time for trifling by the way ; while those who find themselves possessed of mental power of untried sharpness and supple- ness, like a new rapier, are not averse from show- ing how dexterously they can use it. The fact is that the undergraduate period is a time when many boys who have been tamed and fettered by conventional public-school life come into their kingdom, and do not dislike manifesting their authority. The frank collision of ingenuous minds, engaged in rediscovering the truths of life and the significance of ideas which seem to have escaped the notice of philosophers and sages, is of great advantage to the particular disputants ; but it is apt to fret and bore older people, because of the violence and cocksureness with which they see society being remade. I do not think that Stephen went through much of this ; he had a kind of instinctive maturity, a balance of judgment, which as a rule is only arrived at by experience. Like a man of the world, he did not flood the whole of life with enthusiasm, or account all moments wasted which were not expended in the discussion of first principles. This was the interest of his mental processes that they were so sane, so well-proportioned. Yet I used to think that it imparted a certain aridity to his serious talk when 94 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE the veil was removed, because he seemed already to have arrived, while we were experiencing the luxurious emotion of not arriving ! Jem Stephen invented a form of entertainment for Sunday evenings, the object of which was that the gatherings should have a markedly domestic character. It was an informal club called the T.A.F. Twice a Fortnight which met in the members' rooms. The fare a cold supper ; and then every one did as he liked talked, read, played the piano, drew. Members of the Ford family best represented the quality of the T.A.F. Henry Ford was even then an accomplished black-and-white artist of lively humour. His caricatures were inimitable. Walter Ford had a beautiful tenor voice, and sang charmingly. They were interested, too, in books, but cared little about politics or the problems of life and being. In this circle Jem Stephen expanded with a delightful zest. He liked the easy, amiable, affectionate atmosphere ; he liked the sense of being able to amuse and interest ; he loved close and intimate relations. And this, I always felt, was the secret of Jem Stephen's temperament. He had a very emotional nature, combined with a horror of sentimental situations. He had a touch of that austerity about emotional expression which was so char- acteristic of his uncle, Leslie Stephen, and which concealed a deep vein of the purest tenderness. And I believe that Jem Stephen would have fallen an easy prey to any one who could have over- whelmed him with sentiment. In this I used to think that he resembled Swift. He was trenchant J. K. STEPHEN 95 and even devastating in discourse ; but he, like Swift, could have invented and enjoyed "the little language," and like Swift he expanded in an atmos- phere of delicate cares and caressing affection. I used to feel something vaguely paternal about him, and a sense that in the region of affection he seldom spoke out. I remember several strolls with him, on starlit nights, down to the bridge at the back of the College. He was fond of identifying the con- stellations ; and I can see him now in the glimmer- ing dusk, in a light suit, with his shirt open at the neck, his hands in his pockets, walking slowly, dragging his great limbs along, with his face turned up to the sky. There was an owl at that time which used to snore somewhere in a hollow tree in the thicket of yews on the river-bank ; and after vain attempts to awaken it, or to make it show itself, he addressed it in an absurd invocation, upon which it suddenly sailed softly out over the river, so that we could hear its beating wings, and flapped off into the dark to find some more secluded spot for its dreams. But I think I saw less of him at the end of his time, and talked less freely to him than formerly ; and the reason, I think, did credit to his loyalty and consideration. He was a strong Agnostic, while I at that time took up a rather definitely religious line, and had the intention of reading theology and taking Orders. I do not think he had any respect for the theological position, and despised ecclesiasticism with all his heart. But I have reason to think that he had no wish to 96 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE proselytise, or to disturb the minds of those who chose to follow a different line of thought ; and I believe that his abstention from any such argu- ment in my case came from a real loyalty of friendship. He knew that I lived among ecclesi- astical influences, and had no desire to upset con- victions even of a kind uncongenial to himself. I do not say this merely as a supposition. There were others of his circle who argued against re- ligious beliefs with me with considerable impatience and even contempt ; but Jem Stephen had a juster sense, and showed here as elsewhere a maturer wisdom and a riper consideration. When he took his degree in 1882 and left Cambridge, I succeeded him in his big rooms, and bought most of his furniture. He expended much pleasant rhetoric in persuading me to take a particular wooden writing-chair, which he pointed out was singularly adapted to the human frame. I did so, and it has been my writing-chair ever since. There is no doubt about its merits, and I cherish it as a memorial of him. His career at Cambridge was full of distinction. He took a very good first in History, he won the Member's Prize for an English Essay, and the Whewell Scholarship for International Law. He also carried off the Winchester Reading Prize. He was, too, President of the Union. And all this was done with little appearance of steady work. Then he went for a while as tutor to the Duke of Clarence, and his time at Sandring- ham proved extremely pleasant and delightful ; though I have sometimes wondered whether Jem J. K. STEPHEN 97 Stephen's dry art of statement and somewhat im- patient quality of mind fitted him to teach a prince of extraordinary amiability and sweetness, but whose intellectual tastes were of the simplest character. They were, however, firm friends ; and Jem Stephen realised to the full, as none who knew the Duke ever failed to find, the warm affec- tion and constant fidelity of his illustrious pupiL When he left Cambridge, he went to London to read for the Bar. But he often came down to King's, and appeared at many social gather- ings. He was the aptest and wittiest of extempore speakers, and there are many traditions extant of his epigrams. There was an occasion, at which I was not present, when an elderly man, at some discussion I suppose about the future life, spoke in a confident manner about the detailed pros- pects of the immortal spirit Jem Stephen replied with much incisiveness. He quoted Wordsworth's line, " Heaven lies about us in our infancy/' and added that this did not constitute a reason why we should lie about it when we were middle-aged. And there was another occasion when, in a tem- porary fit of irritation with his friend and former tutor Oscar Browning, he said that he had dis- covered the derivation of the word "microbe" Mucpix, little, and O.B. I remember, too, the genesis of. some of his poems one in particular. He was in my rooms one evening, and I asked him to write something. He required a subject I suggested die name of an undergraduate, a very shrewd and amusing Scotchman who lodged on the same staircase G 98 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE William Harvey. Stephen sat down with a pen and a bit of paper, and wrote off, with hardly an erasure, the sonnet printed in his poems : " What are the habits of this crimson flood We reek with ? Man had questioned many a year." He worked into the octet allusions to Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and completed it by an allusion to Harvey's sauce. I have the MS. still, but the poem has lost some of its pristine vigour by subsequent alteration. The sonnet to Provost Okes, and another to his friend Theodore Beck, were both written under similar circumstances. He turned aside a good deal to journalism at this time, and wrote for the St. James's Gazette and the Saturday Review. His powers were then at their very strongest and brightest ; and when he was elected in 1885 to a Fellowship it was felt that the College had acted with a fine disregard of academical caution, and with a per- ception of quality which a body of intellectual electors often fails to exhibit. By this time I had gone to Eton as a master ; but he occasionally appeared there. At this period, his friends felt that he had begun to show a seriousness and a strenuousness, both in writing and in talk, which differed from his old detached manner of incon- sequent persiflage. I remember well, after he had been present arguing a political question with great lucidity and some animus, a friend of his, when Stephen went away, said, "Well, I suppose it was bound to come but Jem Stephen seems J. K. STEPHEN 99 to be losing his sense of humour ! He has acquired a political faith. I suppose it is only right and natural, but it is not nearly so amusing." Then in 1886 came the accident which was the unhappy cause, without doubt, of the later disasters. It was at Felixstowe, where he was staying. There was an erection over a well, a pumping-mill, worked by a small windwheel. Jem Stephen clambered up the ladder to examine this, and either by accident, or in attempting to take hold of the revolving sails, received a blow on the head which half stunned him. Nothing was thought of it at that time, and he soon got over the accident ; but no doubt some subtle inflammation of brain-tissue resulted. He began to form sanguine and unbalanced plans, to be extravagant in money matters, and to display emotional tendencies of a rather vehement type. In 1888 he started, on very insufficient capital, a little paper called the Reflector. It was meant to be a concentration of sensible and well-informed journalism. He worked at this with immense energy and gusto, and secured a band of very distinguished contributors which included such names as Leslie Stephen, George Meredith, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Anstey, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Bernard Holland, Lady Ritchie, and Miss Mary Cholmondeley. Each number contained only one or two articles, and it was designed to supply a dependable and lively criticism of current thought and literature. But the whole tone was too intel- lectual, and the light was too dry. It never attained to a circulation of more than 250, and after seven- teen numbers the resources were exhausted. Stephen zoo THE LEAVES OF THE TREE felt the disappointment very keenly, and indeed the complete failure of such an enterprise constitutes rather a severe censure on the intellectual curiosity of the day. As it seemed unlikely at this time that he would do much at the Bar, and as it became more and more clear that his work would be literature, he accepted a legal appointment a Clerkship of Assize which gave him light circuit duties and a com- petence. But now his behaviour began to be marked by a curious eccentricity. It all seemed so deliberate, and his mental powers were so preternaturally acute and brilliant, that it was supposed and hoped that it was a passing phase. He became very restless in mind, taking up such pursuits as drawing and even music, for which he had no aptitude whatever. I remember his showing me a number of water-colour pictures of the most grotesque kind, which he assured me were portraits ; one in particular, of a female figure in a long brown coat sitting on the rail of a stile, in a kind of twilight, with a low moon in the distance, and a curious suggestiveness about it. But his conversation was still so forcible and brilliant, that it was all put down to nothing more than the vagaries of an original mind. Indeed, the most characteristic feature of all this time was the extraordinary lightness and bril- liance of his talk. But the difficulty when he was down at Eton was that, while he was so sociable and so entertaining, he did not seem to think that any one else could have anything to do. He had no fixed engagements himself, and yet he J. K. STEPHEN 101 was writing a great deal and was anxious to have his work criticised. He would read his poems aloud to any listener, willing or unwilling. Some- times he would spend long days on the river. He would take a lodging for a week together, but one could not be sure that he would ever turn up for a meal at the time appointed, while he would appear at one's house at any hour of the day, ask for luncheon or supper, eat whatever was put before him, and pour out a stream of amusing talk. He was always ready to discuss anything, always tolerant and reasonable and humorous ; and the only anxiety was that he seemed so entirely indifferent to the ordinary framework of life. But after that there came a time when it became clear that there was definite physical mischief. He resigned his legal appointment and his Fellow- ship, and alleged that his literary prospects were such that he had no need to think of money. There was an interval of apparently restored health in 1890. He went up to Cambridge, did some private teaching, and it seemed as though the cloud was clearing away ; but he was suddenly struck down by an acute attack of brain disturbance, after which he put himself under medical care. But nothing could be done to save him, and he died somewhat suddenly, early in 1892. It is difficult to know what to make of this tragic story, of these astonishing gifts so strangely squandered and devastated by what seems so for- tuitous an accident. If it is too much to say that men are gradually organising and constructing society on the broad lines of justice and order 102 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE and peace, yet there is obviously a tendency at work bringing harmony out of discord and social liberty out of individual selfishness. It had seemed that Jem Stephen would have contributed his part to this work. It need not be supposed that the aim of Providence is to gratify individuals by enhancing their sense of personal success. There are plenty of minds of a high order of efficiency and exactness ; but Stephen had a width of survey, an extraordinary lucidity of view, a marked sanity of judgment, enlivened by a great love of human beings and a most abundant sense of humour. As a rule, the hard thinker is apt to be deficient in sympathy and humour ; while the humorist and the man of sentiment are in danger of declining on a hazy and good-natured theory of human progress. But there was nothing in the least indefinite about Jem Stephen. As a statesman, as a lawyer, as a writer, he might have exercised a real and vital power upon the thought and life of the nation. In the broken music of his mind, the poems which are like the wrack thrown up by the sea, he did a very remarkable thing he produced a kind of humorous poetry which is, I believe, entirely sui generis. It follows no master, and it can hardly be imitated. The strength of it lies in a peculiar and almost prosaic directness, a great economy of art, a saying of simple things in a perfectly simple way, and yet all leading up to a climax of humour that is the more impressive because it is so unadorned. Most humorists have made their mark by a redundance of absurdity, but Jem Stephen's work is all severe and restrained J. K. STEPHEN 103 in conception ; it never luxuriates or plays the mountebank, but goes as austerely to its conclusion as though it were the most serious matter in the world. And then, too, he had the still more unusual gift of treating what might have been almost a prodigality of sentiment in the same dignified strain. The Old School List has to me a poignancy of pathos which makes it a poem that can hardly be read or recollected I will not say without tears, but without that sense of inner sorrow hardly tolerable to the feeling mind. It is fed from the very fans lacrimanun, the desperate grief of dying beauty and fading happiness. The passion of the past, as Tennyson calls it, is a pretty thing enough in sunny gardens, when all is well with us. But in this poem the unsatisfied heart can but watch its Paradise unfold before it, and recede irrevocably from the view. What was, I think, the most impressive thing about Jem Stephen was this that one felt oneself in contact, in even the slightest and most trivial con- versation, with a mind of the highest order and quality. It was not a poetical mind his poetry was only a casual by-product of thought ; he had nothing of the visionary about him, nothing of that rich suggestiveness, whatever it is, which is the essence of beauty that power of seeing swift connections between things apparently contrasted, of bridging gaps of thought, of interpreting one idea in the terms of another, of perceiving and expressing the colour, the curve, the motion, the charm of life. His mind was rather of the severe intellectual type, that saw things distinctly and in 104 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE due proportion, that grasped wide fields of thought, and cast a sharp, just light upon all. No one could detect a logical fallacy more easily, throw a derisive beam into nebulous confusions, or use logic more mercilessly and more ingeniously to substantiate a bias of his own. I have never met any one who seemed to sail so lightly and yet so surely ahead of the efforts of other minds. It was a kind of instinctive judicial faculty. In a discussion, he could dispose instantly of a pretentious position, while he could emphasise and disentangle a point which another pleader could not make effective. I do not think that he made knowledge or theory wholly attractive. His mind produced, so to speak, plans and elevations of knowledge rather than sketches and pictures of it. But his statement of a case had the charm of perfect order and distinct- ness, and impressed one with the dignity of ex- actitude and justice ; and it was all lighted up with a profound and caustic humour which de- molished without malice, and operated without wounding. His judgments were not genial, but they were essentially good-humoured. But with all this he was never either dreary or ponderous. He did not cast a sort of professional blight upon all luxuriance and emotion, nor did he subject the lighter processes of the mind to a kind of elephantine metaphysic. The central quality of his mind did not throw a baleful and doleful glare upon human ineffectiveness. He had not quite the Socratic quality of tender condescen- sion, or the irony that gratifies while it penetrates. But he had a charming lightness of touch, and, J. K. STEPHEN 105 as I have said, an almost tender delight in anything youthful and unaffected, vivacious and gentle. Many of his chosen friends were men of no great intellectual grasp, no ardent visions, but youths in whom the mounting sap and the opening bloom of manhood were just as simply beautiful as the spring foliage of the wayside spinney. With these Jem Stephen was at his best. He had a great simplicity of nature ; he had no precocious touch of worldliness, and still less had he any of the superiority of the youthful prig who discounts alike experience and inexperience in the light of his own infallibility. He took people as he found them, and judged them on their own merits and not by comparison with his own. Yet now, looking back, there seems, in spite of all his cheerfulness and lightness of spirit, to have been a shadow over him as of an aim unuttered and unattainable. He seemed to be always looking for something upon which he could not quite put his hand. Perhaps this might have disappeared in the light of ambition and success, even in the ordinary work of the world. But I feel that it was something different that he was seeking. There was a melancholy cadence about his voice, an abashed air about his glance. In his restlessness, his constant desire for some- thing to distract and soothe, there was a lack of the radiant gaiety and certainty of youth. He was neither satisfied nor contented. Not that he com- plained, or seemed to resent. It was not a back- ward-looking regret or disappointment, but more like a radical disillusionment, a haunting shadow of vanity. I had other friends in those days whose io6 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE eclipse has been tragic, others whose promise was cut short by death. Over one of these in particular there was a prescient air of doom which seemed to hold him back from buoyant hopes and plans. But with Jem Stephen it was not thus. There seemed to others to be a certainty about him, a promise of equable development and steady success. It was rather that there lurked in his mind a quiet consciousness of the failure of life to realise its own limitless dreams, which led him to seek relief rather than enjoyment. I think that the love of some wise and devoted woman would have given him much of what he stood most in need ; but his soul-malady lay deeper than that, and came from the almost terrible clearness with which he viewed both action and thought. There is nothing in the world which one would rather know than what the significance of life is and what it leads on to. There is, in some souls at all events, an abiding sense of permanence, and an intolerable desire to be assured of the continu- ance of life and individuality. It was this that made Dr. Johnson say, with uncontrollable emotion, that the idea of infinite torment was to him less horrible than the thought of annihilation ; in that dreadful uncertainty all lesser certainties are in- volved. Wealth, fame, friendship, beauty, love are all things that can be resigned ; but there is a sense of vital indignity, of incredible injustice, about the possibility that the one certainty the consciousness of self may be brought to an end. For men to be as gods, knowing good and evil, is but a torturing privilege, a harrowing mockery, if it is J. K. STEPHEN 107 a thing which is at the mercy of fortuitous acci- dents of matter. The contrast of the stately solidity, the lucid dignity of Stephen's mind, with the treacherous wreck, the lamentable collapse of those noble faculties, is so tragic, so pathetic on the one hand, and on the other so dastardly, so demoniacal, if this stage of life is all that is conceded to us, that the enigma is almost too torturing for thought. One cannot take refuge in an icy resignation ; one cannot merely seek to obliterate the shocking com- parison, to forget it like an idle tale. For some, at least, such tragedies of life become inevitably the seed of an infinite hope ; and if that hope be once conceived, there is no limit to its boundless glories, no horizon to the heavenly scene that it flashes upon the awestruck imagination, no delusion in the secret message that it whispers to the heart. BISHOP WILKINSON WHEN I first saw Wilkinson, I was an Eton boy of sixteen. My father had recently been made Bishop of Truro. He had had no previous acquaintance with Wilkinson, who was then at St. Peter's, Eaton Square, but acting upon urgent advice, he had written to him asking him to become his examining chaplain, and Wilkinson had consented. They had an interview shortly afterwards which both created and sealed a deep and emotional friendship, that lasted for life. My father wrote to my mother, after his first strange talk with Wilkinson, "I've been to see Wilkinson . . the half was not told me. We had a very long, very serious talk, full of fears and yet of joy fulness. I knew him in a former state of existence very intimately." My father was impulsive in friendship, and his power of incisively criticising his friends sometimes came inconveniently into play in later intercourse. But though he afterwards perceived that Wilkinson was a man whose energies ran swiftly, deeply, and clearly in a narrow channel, and though he missed in him the humorous and romantic perception which so enriched and broadened his own outlook on life, yet his affection grew more tender, and his 108 BISHOP WILKINSON 109 reverence for the glow and fineness of Wilkinson's spiritual instinct increased every year. At the very outset of their friendship, each of the two passed under the shadow of a heavy sorrow. In 1877 Wilkinson had lost his wife ; and my elder brother, a boy of remarkable promise, died at school at Winchester in 1878, a bereavement which caused my father passionate and inexpressible grief. All this evoked a peculiarly intimate and brotherly sym- pathy between them. Some days beforehand I became aware that Wilkinson's visit was expected with a sort of agitated delight, and I became extremely curious to see him. My father spoke of him in terms which he seldom used, and seemed to be looking forward to Wilkinson's arrival with a sort of youthful ardency. He came ; and going down to tea soon after his arrival I had my first joyful sight of him, and, boy though I was, fell instantly and almost jealously under the charm. He was then between forty and fifty. He was a man of moderate height, with an extreme grace of movement and carriage. His face was pale with a clear, parchment-like morbidezza of complexion. His black, smooth hair had an almost velvety gloss. He had a very expressive mouth, which fell in repose into a strangely wistful curve. His eyes were clear, but the drooped eyelids and updrawn brows gave him a weary and sorrowful look. It was not that he looked physically fatigued, but there was an appearance of resignation, of burdens tenderly borne, of melancholy wonder about him. The expression of his face was that of sadness and no THE LEAVES OF THE TREE patience. But he had the sweetest of smiles lavishly distributed. If he caught the eye of any one in the surrounding circle, he met it with a smile. His voice, too, in conversation, though not always in preaching, was extraordinarily winning and arresting. His pronunciation of words was very individual, with its slight clipping of syllables, and its unusual and attractive emphasis. But the tone was always melancholy. It had a pathetic cadence, which passed under emotion into a sort of eager hopefulness ; and there was a slight hesitation about his utterances which gave an intimate sense of modesty and conciliatoriness. There was nothing dogmatic, or assured, or radiant about him, and anything more unlike the fashion- able and influential clergyman could not be con- ceived. I had seen many dignified ecclesiastics, and was familiar enough with the self-reliant deference, confident of welcome and respect, which so often characterises the successful leader. But Wilkinson seemed to have no sense of security and position, and, if anything, to be diffident and self- effacing, anxious to win rather than certain to impress. His courtesy, if it had not been so absolutely natural and instinctive, would have been almost elaborate. One felt him to be every inch a fine gentleman, even a courtier. That very day, at tea, my sister, a girl of fifteen, went out to fetch something, and Wilkinson was on his feet in an instant to open the door for her. His dress had little that was markedly ecclesiastical about it. He wore, I remember, an ordinary frock-coat, which gave a look of great elegance to his slim figure, and BISHOP WILKINSON in out-of-doors a black Homburg hat, which was then unusual for a cleric. His talk was the most wonderful thing about him. I had been brought up in a very ecclesiastical household, where there was no lack of unaffectedly serious, and even religious, conversation. But Wilkinson talked about spiritual experience, about daily experience and discipline of character, about joys and sorrows, in a still more natural and intimate way. I do not know how the effect was produced, but he made religion and goodness, faith and holiness, the most beautiful and desirable things in the world. He spoke with no insistence or confidence, but as if these were the things which we all naturally cared about and thought about ; and he had a way of turning his appealing eyes, with their half-mournful smile, from face to face, as if to include all, and to extract confirmation of his own experience. I cannot claim to have been a very spiritually-minded boy, but though Wilkinson talked thus at every meal, at every session, out walking or riding, I can only say that my one desire was that every one else should be silent and let me listen to him. The thing was so beautiful and simple, so utterly without egotism or parade, that it wholly fascinated me. My father himself seemed transfigured by the contact, and showed a combined subtlety and simplicity of spiritual feeling which I had hardly expected him to express, because he had often seemed to me before to mis- trust emotional religious talk. But there was even more to come. I had to return to Eton a day or two after. What was my H2 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE ecstasy of delight when this mysteriously reverenced and adored man, after breakfast on my last morning, asked me to walk with him ; and pacing up and down the winding walks of the dense shrubbery and along the orchard path, spoke to me with an incredible perception and delicacy of the difficulties of school life and the need of keeping the love of God alive in the heart. I could not answer him, but I drank in his words. On our return to the house he took me to his bedroom ; we knelt together by the bed ; he prayed with me in quiet words, and then, drawing me to him, blessed me with tender affection. I was accustomed to go back to school in those days with an almost tearful reluctance at leaving the affection and amenity of home. But that day I went off in a strange glow, only anxious to put into practice those sweet and strong counsels, and conscious, as I had never been before, of the width and nearness of the enfolding heart of God. I loved Wilkinson with the sudden and ardent affection, given utterly and unreasoningly, of a growing boy ; and the thoughts of being what he would wish me to be, and of acting as he would have me act, were potent with me for many weeks. I was to remember his fatherly offer of help in darker and more troubled days ! The years passed on, and I did not see him again for a time ; but at Cambridge I passed through a severe religious crisis, when the familiar beliefs seemed all broken up, my life appeared worthless and careless, and I found myself thoroughly adrift. It seems strange now to recall what I did. BISHOP WILKINSON 113 I had been much moved by a sermon of Newman's, and I wrote him in my bewilderment a despondent letter, saying that I was not of his communion and did not seek to be ; but could he resolve my per- plexities ? I received a severe and peremptory letter, almost menacing in tone, telling me to rouse myself and live more strictly. It was not what I wanted at the moment ; and I wrote to Wilkinson, who replied at once in a most reassuring way, telling me to come and see him. I went on a dark, foggy morning to his house in Grosvenor Gardens. It was a strange experience. I sat in a gloomy room, which reminded me of the consulting-room of a physician. There was a veiled lady sitting there in obvious trouble of mind. I was admitted on the instant to a study with lights burning. Never was there such a relief ! I had expected to be examined, to be taken to task for my doubts and troubles ; but he swept them all aside and told me to think no more of them. He gave me a little very clear instruction, and handed me a small book of his own to read. I do not think that it was precisely suited to my need, for I wanted a more cogently intellectual treatment ; but he brought back, I cannot now imagine how, the sense of the loving Presence of God, again prayed and blessed me, and sent me away happy and hopeful. He looked older and wearier than before, and I had a feeling that I must somehow have wounded his tender heart. But his teaching was hardly emotional indeed, it was profoundly shrewd and sensible, for he told me to do anything but brood over my anxieties. " Do your work, play your games, don't H n 4 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE get into the way of vaguely turning over religious books, don't discuss your difficulties." He did not encourage me to come to him again or to write to him, and I felt that he had no sort of desire to establish a personal influence over me, but rather to let me fight my own battles on simple and straightforward lines. Now let me retrace my steps a little, and say briefly how he had arrived at the position which he held when I first knew him. George Howard Wilkinson was born in 1833, of well-to-do parents, and had been brought up to live the open-air life of a country house among dogs and horses. This gave him his easy touch with the world and his familiarity with the life of the English upper class, which requires an initiation to comprehend. The English upper class has many virtues and serious deficiencies. It is courageous and honourable, it values aplomb and unaffectedness ; but it is ill-educated and dull, suspicious of ideas, and complacently contemptuous of intellectual things. Wilkinson understood all its merits and defects instinctively, and partly owed to this his great influence in society, because he never undervalued the aristocratic qualities, while his spiritual fervour was never eccentric or extravagant, nor set courtesy and the social order at defiance. He went up to Oxford in 1851, where he won a scholarship at Oriel. This is a point worth noting, because his distinct intellectual ability was often lost sight of in his later life. The fact was that this side of his mind was gradually thrown into the BISHOP WILKINSON 115 shade by his intense preoccupation with religious experience. He was never, of course, technically a student, and his work, as well as his disposition, removed him from the influence of what is known as culture ; indeed, the intense importance of the discipline of character led him to under-estimate the mental side of life. The personal knowledge of God, the establishment, so to speak, of a kind of electrical contact between the human will and the Divine grace, appeared to him to be the one hope and object of life, and the possibility of this vital connection as the one lighted space in a world where so much is dark. Mental culture receded into the background, and became to him merely a means of exercising without fatiguing the over- strung mind. My feeling about him in later years was that he regarded intellectual and artistic pursuits as a man might tenderly regard the games of children, not contemptuously, or impatiently, but with a kind of gentle wonder that men, in a scene where eternal verities were at issue, could seriously engage in pursuits which must of their nature be temporary. If he had to deal with in- tellectual people, he manifested no sympathy with their interests, except in so far as those interests formed material for the exercising of spiritual gifts. He realised more the dangers of the life of thought and perception than its vitality and its aim. He never thought of writers and artists as idealists working on lines different from his own, but only as men who, it might be hoped, could be brought to employ their gifts in the expression and illustration of religious truth. But what saved n6 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE his work from any touch of sentimentalism was the fundamental brain-work which he put into it. His perception both of men and situations was shrewd and lucid ; his sermons, for all their simplicity, were models of form and of concentra- tion : there was nothing in the least diffuse or disorderly about them. Indeed, it is clear that he had a very artistic conception of a sermon, because it all sprang to life in his mind from end to end, like a living thing, before he worked it out. And then, too, his business capacity was great. He had a far-seeing grasp of contingencies and a wide view of detail : and it may fairly be said that his intel- lectual power was the thing that gave all his work its directness and its toughness. It was always said of him that he was " converted " by his own first sermon. The doctrine of conver- sion played so large a part in Wilkinson's life that it demands a few words, because it is so often mis- understood. Conversion, in its perverted sense, is often used to describe a sort of mental crisis in which, under the influence of hysterical excitement and rhetorical intoxication, the spirit is hypnotised into an experience so abnormal that it often has a permanent effect on character, and has in retrospect the appearance of a Divine interposition. That was not what Wilkinson meant by conversion. He believed, indeed, that it often came suddenly upon the soul, but that it was only a natural step in a chain of circumstance, like the parting of the avalanche from the snowfield. What he meant by it was a realisation of truth, of the personal relation with God, so vivid and indubitable that the soul BISHOP WILKINSON 117 could never be in any doubt again as to its redemp- tion and its ultimate destiny. But he believed that this might be a tranquil and a reasoned process, though in the case of sin-stained lives he was in- clined to feel that the break with the past must often be of the nature of an instantaneous revulsion, a sudden perception of the hideousness of sin, and a dawning of the light of God. " Conversion " was a word which carried great weight in Cornwall. I do not know what test exactly was applied, but the Celtic temperament was able to decide from the look, the utterance, the gestures of a preacher whether the change had taken place. It made a great difference to the effectiveness of my father's ministrations when it was realised, and freely stated, that he was a con- verted man. With Wilkinson there was never any period of despairing uncertainty ; but it seems that this placid faith did pass through a crisis, of which his first sermon was the crowning incident. He never had any doubt as to his vocation, but the necessity of summarising the grounds of his faith and stating them in public before a congregation for which he felt a spiritual responsibility, did awaken him to the recognition as a concrete force of what he had pre- viously known rather as an abstract truth. He did not realise or come into his pastoral strength and influence quite at once. It was partly that he did not find the exact sphere where his full powers could expand ; partly that the method of individual appeal which he used required time to form itself. One fancies from the record that, n8 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE though he was earnest and serious enough from the first, there was a touch of conventionality about him. He was a curate in London, and here he made his wonderfully happy marriage. He went as Vicar to Seaham Harbour, where he was perhaps a little dominated by the gallant and imperious old Lady Londonderry, who ruled the district like a miniature but not at all petty queen. At Auckland he was much hampered by the fact that the palace of the Bishop of Durham was in the parish. Bishop Baring, the occupant of the see, was a man of energy and earnestness, but a narrow Evangelical. He was able to see the spiritual force of his Vicar, but he was not wise enough, or tolerant enough, to trust him and his methods. He began with remon- strance when he saw that Wilkinson was advancing on lines of which he disapproved ; he ended by acting with an arbitrary and even tyrannical severitv. Wilkinson felt the strain acutely, but never were his fine feeling and his large-hearted faith more clearly shown than in the way in which he not only obeyed the mandates of his Bishop, but never allowed him- self to criticise, in word or even in thought, the Bishop's action. It was an intolerable situation, and it was an obvious relief when he found himself invited to London. For a short time he worked at a church in Windmill Street ; but when he was transferred to St. Peter's, Eaton Square, the great opportunity of his life opened before him. He found Church traditions that were conventional rather than Evangelical, a tone of opinion which united the faults alike of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He found religion reckoned as one of BISHOP WILKINSON 119 the respectable and reputable civic forces, together an intense suspicion of anything emotional or aesthetic. Wilkinson was somewhat coldly re- ceived, but his triumph was complete and swift. The sincerity, the simplicity, the intensity of his creed broke down all barriers : he was soon idol- ised by his congregation ; he had but to indicate his wishes and they were carried out. He could ask for a thousand pounds from the pulpit without hinting the purpose for which it would be required, and it would reach him within the week. The wonder was that this popularity never affected him in the smallest degree. It is clear from his re- corded words that no man was ever more intensely sensitive to the least breath of opposition or hos- tility ; he instinctively desired and valued the good opinion of the world. But he valued his con- science and his message more, and never modified the truths he had to tell ; while his very sensitive- ness kept him from ever presuming or dictating, and gave him an instinct for conciliation which was never blunted. He was never an orator, and used no arts of persuasion ; but the extreme simplicity and stern- ness of his message because he never condoned human weakness, though he equally never lost sight of it coupled with his intense winningness and sweetness of appeal, pierced through the conven- tional husk of many a case-hardened heart. But no doubt his great power was that of dealing, as a wise physician, with individual souls. He was so chivalrous, so absolutely reliable, so generous, so gentle, that soul after soul cast its burden of 120 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE sin at his feet and asked to be taught how to amend what was amiss, to regain, if not the innocence they had lost, at least the path of purity and peace. Wilkinson combined a horror of sin with an infinite compassion for frailty : he never suggested excuses but pointed to pardon. And what was the strongest fact of all, though he carried in his heart the stained secrets of hundreds of lives, he never used his power for personal ends, nor tried to establish a personal dominance. He had no desire to seem to stand between the soul and God, or to retain a confidential hold over a single heart. What he did desire to do was to teach the sinner to fight his battles and to recognise his divine sonship. And though he probably heard more confessions than any man in England, there never fell across him or his penitents the shadow of the confessional. In fact it may be plainly said that he used the confessional in order to enable penitents to do without it. He had a native sense of personal liberty and independence, and he abjured alike the diplomatic and the despotic attitude ; he wished souls to walk freely before God, and not to be bound to himself. It was inevitable that such a man should be required elsewhere. Indeed, the strain of his work in London was so great that his doctor, Sir Andrew Clark, said afterwards that he had advised him to accept the see of Truro in order to save his life. He was already bound to Cornwall by ties of loyalty and affection, and the fact that my father earnestly desired him to be his successor had great weight with him. His work began happily BISHOP WILKINSON 121 and hopefully, and he fell under the romantic charm of Cornwall, its green watered valleys, its iron coasts, and the impulsive and generous hearts of its folk. He threw himself, moreover, with touching loyalty, and yet with a fine initiative of his own, into inter- preting and completing his predecessor's schemes and designs. He evoked enthusiasms which my father had not reached, while his fine reverence for and confidence in my father's ideas communi- cated to them a new and impulsive energy of motion. But in the midst of all his eager faith and joyful energy, a tragic shadow began to creep over his life. The human heart naturally longs to believe that the sorrows and pains of life have their prospective as well as their retrospective aspect : that they make for future possibilities, and are not only the grim fruit of one's own and others' failures and sins. Wilkinson's fiery trial had an almost tragic appro- priateness. He had borne the devastating grief of his wife's death with marvellous sweetness. It had sent him, with a deeper intensity than ever, into his cure of souls ; and it had, moreover, evoked the mystical faculties of his nature. His friends know well, and his biography indicates, that after his wife's death he was sustained by visions and by voices audible to himself alone. But the emo- tional strain of this and of his work, the perpetual using of one particular faculty, and, no doubt, of one particular part of his brain, involved him in a shadow so deep, an anguish so intolerable, that one can hardly bare to recount it. For nearly 122 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE five years, while Bishop of Truro, he suffered the miseries and terrors of melancholia. His mind never lost its balance, but he suffered a daily martyrdom. He could get no rest ; the prospect of work and daily engagements became unbearable ; the smallest decisions became occasions of mental torture. He struggled on manfully, trying to relieve his wretchedness by travel, and took long holidays from work. Sometimes the cloud lifted a little, but invariably closed in again. His self-control and patience were wonderful. Probably only two persons his daughter and Canon Scott Holland, with whom he travelled knew at the time what he had to bear. He never lost his courtesy and consideration for others ; he was never betrayed into irritability or sharpness ; indeed, though it often seemed impossible that he could fulfil an engagement, when he was once launched he gener- ally spoke with the old force and lucidity. But, what was the worst trial of all, his joyful sense of the Divine Presence for long periods deserted him. He never doubted that the love and peace were there, but he was as a man imprisoned in a dungeon, hearing the breeze and the rustle of leaves against the bars. At last, after a series of gallant and faithful attempts to deal with the situa- tion, he gave up, resigned the see of Truro, and lived a good deal in London, doing some quiet pastoral work, but often in great despair. The misery culminated in the course of a visit he paid to South Africa in order to study and report on the problems of the African Church. On the voyage out he could attend to nothing and take BISHOP WILKINSON 123 interest in nothing, and he was believed by those who saw him to be an utterly broken man. Yet he had fifteen years of active work before him. On his arrival in Africa, the Bishop showed a wonderful grasp of the task he had come to discharge, and his utterances sowed the seed of a policy of union which has borne good fruit. Just before the end of his mission, the cloud rolled off suddenly in a single instant, while he was giving an address. He had probably recovered some months earlier, and needed only a shock to break the prepossession. He had later visitations of the same trouble, but none so severe or protracted. Soon after his return to England he was offered the Bishopric of St. Andrews, which gave him a perfectly practicable sphere of administrative spiritual work ; and it was no doubt to this that he owed much of his later immunity from the disease. It was impossible for him not to use himself up ; but his new sphere gave him fresh interests, much change of scene, and some relief from the strain of individual work. The disaster had no doubt been partly due to the intense absorption of his faculties, which had driven all other interests into the background. He had never had the relief of a hobby, but had focussed all his powers on one point. But in later life he took the greatest care to be occupied without undue fatigue, kept easier hours, and led a more sociable life. I remember seeing him at Truro when his suffer- ings were at their worst. I had a somewhat intricate matter to consult him about, and I heard afterwards that this particular appeal had caused 124 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE him great distress of mind. A decision had to be made by him, and what he decided was to be final. I certainly had no idea that there was anything amiss with him. He heard me with great patience ; he asked extremely pointed and concentrated ques- tions, and mastered the whole case with great rapidity. The only thing that surprised me was that, while, as a rule, his decisions were based upon intuitions, and were made without hesitation, on this occasion he deferred his judgment, and gave it me at a later date. But it would be impossible to exaggerate the depth of his suffering. His one great resource, both in dealing with himself and others, had been to realise and to depend upon the momentary and constant sense of the guidance of God. The whole of this relief was withdrawn from him. Sensitive and highly-strung as he had always been, yet he had always shown a peculiar power of patient endurance and a faculty for hopeful recuperation which had stood him in good stead. This, too, he lost ; and he lost, moreover, the power of the emo- tional acceptance of suffering, which had often for him turned a failure into a triumph. He had been accustomed, too, to depend upon swift and gracious intuition rather than upon reasonable and logical processes ; and now he found himself compelled to act solely on reason and habit, without any inner sense of higher guidance. A sterner discipline could not be conceived. It was strange that his troubles left so little physical mark upon him. In later life he was as upright as ever ; he became more sturdy in frame, BISHOP WILKINSON 125 and his very lineaments grew stronger and clearer. His speech was as deliberate, his movements even more stately, and his hair was as dark and full as it had ever been. Far from seeming a man who had descended into the very depths of spiritual darkness, and who had long sojourned on the brink of despair, he looked like one whose life had been continuously secure, who had, indeed, given rather than received, and who had so thrown himself into the sorrows of others that he had hardly endured sorrows of his own. He died in harness, in 1908, in his seventy-sixth year, breathing his last at a meeting in Edinburgh, a few moments after address- ing the gathering. It is characteristic that his very last words were of the practical effect of united intercession. It was undoubtedly true that, as life went on, the Bishop became, as his friend and biographer not unwillingly records, a much Higher Church- man. I cannot say that I believe this change was a very radical one, though it was undoubtedly a marked one. His early religious outlook had been that of the simplest Evangelicalism ; but he was both docile and affectionate, and when he came into touch with men like Canon Mason, Canon Scott Holland, and my father, who, he saw, cared as intensely as he did for the root of the matter, but whose habits of mind were more ecclesiastical and catholic, he adopted a different phraseology and a wider range of ideas. His interest in cathedral building and in ritual had something a little pathetic about them. He raised great sums of money for 126 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE Truro Cathedral, but he was not interested in the cathedral from the social, aesthetic, or hieratical point of view, but rather as a practical expression on the part of individual givers of their confidence and faith. In later life he certainly took a much higher sacramental view than he had done in his earlier years, because by habit and devotion he realised the intense mystical force of the Com- munion, and the nurture which it afforded to spiritual vitality. But he was always an in- dividualist ; he thought of souls as solitary way- farers, or as little groups of pilgrims, finding their anxious way to God not as a mighty army marching with trumpets blowing and banners flying. A good instance of this is his strange and almost ineffective attempt to arrive at some principles of reunion in Scotland in his later days. He threw himself warmly into the reunion move- ment, arranged conferences, appointed days of united prayer ; but when it came to taking practical steps he had nothing to give but a lyrical passion of devotion, and he sternly declined and forbade any interchange of pulpits, or any deviation from the principles of ecclesiastical organisation, saying that he did not believe that any such artificial fusion would foster the cause which he had at heart. His attitude caused great disappointment and discouragement. He would say pathetically that it was a terrible thought that devoted Christians of different denominations could not kneel side by side at the altar ; but though he would have welcomed any convert to his own principles, he could not offer any sort of compromise, or give BISHOP WILKINSON 127 up any portion of what he believed to be the faith once delivered to the saints. It was more than a shock to his Presbyterian allies when he announced in a formal document that the idea of episcopacy was logically involved in the teaching of the Gospel of Christ. It would have been better if he had not taken up the matter, because he had no contro- versial gift, nor the sort of statesmanship that can conciliate and accommodate opposing tendencies. He could direct and shepherd ; he could not negotiate or diplomatise. His Scotch episcopacy, indeed, is in some ways the least inspiring episode of his life. He was frail and outworn ; and the record leaves the impression of a great battered vessel caught in the shallows but for the fact that his pastoral instincts never for a moment deserted him, and the sweetness of his example, the deli- cacy of his human relations, his inspiring effect on individuals, made themselves felt as strongly in Scotland as they had done at all periods of his life. It seems to me that his strength lay in the fact that the core and centre of his faith was an ex- quisitely simple one an intuition, for which " cer- tainty " is but a halting word, of the Fatherhood of God and of His hourly care for men, made manifest in the Life and Love of Jesus Christ. His whole purpose was to realise this presence at every moment of his life, and to lead others to realise it. He had the strongest pastoral bent ; he did not wish to influence people or to proselytise or to have disciples ; he was simply like a man who had found some priceless treasure and wanted 128 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE to distribute it, or rather as one who had dis- covered a secret source of life and happiness and longed that all should drink. It was infinitely tragic and pathetic to him to see men and women looking everywhere for happiness, endeavouring to win it by pleasure and excitement, through ambition and vanity, while all the while it lay beside their path and within reach of their hand. And thus, though the confession of sin was often sad and painful enough, he had in it something of the angelic joy over the sinner who repents. The sad- ness lay not so much in the sin as in the hardness of heart which could not perceive it to be sin. One who lacked the pastoral instinct might feel a half- compassionate wonder that a man should spend so much of his time and energy in the microscopic investigation of diseased spirits. Of course, a man might have a scientific pleasure in such psycho- logical investigation and in observing the laws of spiritual infection. But Wilkinson had no touch of that about him. He worked rather in the spirit of a poet than in that of a physician ; it was the goal and not the details of the journey that he kept in view. Sin was to him rather the dark ante-chamber of glory, the slough through which the pilgrim must struggle, that he might become aware of his need and of his hope. I remember his saying once musingly of the sad case of a man of high ability, who drifted into evil habits of life, that it almost seemed as if there was some root of bitter- ness in many souls which must flower before the new life could begin. His power lay in his intense hopefulness, his fiery assurance, and most of all in BISHOP WILKINSON 129 the example of the overpowering strength of his conviction which his own life gave, in every word and every gesture. I do not think he was in the least interested in the ordinary environment of life. He had no curiosity about politics or history, about science or literature. Art, music, nature were but sources of refreshment which could soothe without distracting the spirit from its tremendous quest. He was far too courteous and sympathetic to exhibit any scorn for mundane interests, but neither could he pretend to take a hand in them himself. He listened to conversations on such subjects with polite tolerance, only happy if he could find in them an illustration of some moral point of conduct. One personal characteristic of Wilkinson stands out very strongly all through his life the exquisite sensitiveness and delicacy of his bodily frame. He was not a man who could rough it ; he was sin- gularly dependent upon rest, upon the refined appointments of life : his house, his dress, his appa- ratus were always those of a wealthy and almost aristocratic fine gentleman. I think he showed his greatness and his simplicity by not troubling about this, and accepting these as the conditions under which he could do his work best ; he did not plan for them or set any affected value upon them he was simply unconscious of them, while they some- how enhanced his mysterious grace, and showed how the arts of courtly living and the pomps and vanities of the world may be consecrated to the service of God. It is not possible to put aside the actual and I 130 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE practical results of Wilkinson's work, but it is quite possible to criticise his mystical mode of thought, and to say that it was merely subjective imagination and not actual experience. But so to the ordinary man is it with the raptures of the poet and the artist. One remembers Wordsworth's lines "On an Evening of Extraordinary Beauty." Well, the evening, with all its pomp of translucent green, its furrowed purple cloudflakes, was there just as much for every shepherd, housewife, and child in the Rydal valley that day ; that waning orange light struck just so upon every outer eye. But if one of those simple folk had said that he saw the sunset indeed, but did not feel the august emotion which it awoke in Wordsworth's mind, that is no disproof of the existence of that emotion ; it is but a varying interpretation of the same tangible facts by different minds and hearts. And just as the finer ear of musicians can detect the complex harmonic chord, thrilling above and below the single note which is all that the duller mind can perceive, even so it is with the emotions of religion. The eye of the lover can discern a desirable charm in the beloved face that is hidden from the indifferent. In questions of beauty and love it is safer to be on the side of the artist and the lover ; and in matters of religion it is better to be on the side of the saint. The mistake is when the saint or the artist or the lover predicates that the emotion is an objective one, which all can feel, or ought to feel. And when on the religious plane the saint begins to dogmatise and to say that thus and thus only can God be BISHOP WILKINSON 131 found, and to think that such secrets are hidden from men because of their grossness and the hard- ness of their hearts, then he becomes a false prophet. The error of religion has been that it undertakes to explain the world, when its work is to interpret it. Conduct does not spring from religious belief ; rather, both belief and conduct are the flower and the fruit of some hidden life. The strength of Wilkinson's life, its universal appeal, is not that it recommends one particular shade of denomi- national faith, but that he perceived and detected a loving intention behind and in life, and that even on the very threshold of despair he never faltered in his trust. But we mistake him wholly if we think of him as a man who made up a bundle of convictions, and felt it his duty to impress them on the world. It was rather that he realised so intently the peace and beauty of holiness that he could not be silent ; he could not help revealing what he felt so urgently to souls which seemed to be sadly and blindly missing the very thing they needed. In the ecclesiastical world, obscured by conventional tradition, darkened by policy and partisanship, a life such as his opens suddenly as a glade opens in the dusky twilight of a forest, and reveals the tranquil spaces of the evening and the soft light of a low-hung star. VI PROFESSOR NEWTON THE following study of Professor Newton is published very much in its original form, with a few alterations of detail ; but I think it well to prefix a short prefatory note to it, because I found that it aroused some difference of opinion. I received a certain number of letters about it from old friends of the Professor, who wrote of it with warm approval ; and further, many of those who knew him and loved him best recognised it as an accurate and even vivid portrait. But I also became aware, both directly and indirectly, that there were some of Newton's friends who disliked the literalness and hardness of the detail ; some thought it disrespectful, and others said that only one side of him was given, the personal and em- phatic side, and that not enough was said about his earlier and more vigorous days, and all the generous service he did both to science and to younger students of science. One has no business to wound the susceptibilities of friends, and I sincerely regret any pain or dissatisfaction that the paper may have caused. But I must confess that I do not believe in any but the most truthful biography ; I do not believe that idealised and improved portraits of personali- PROFESSOR NEWTON 133 ties do the least good, either to those who read them, or ultimately to the memory of those who are thus delineated. I am sure that Newton was a great enough man to pay him the compliment of writing with absolute fidelity and accuracy about him. His was an extremely trenchant and salient character, with many marked mannerisms. He never concealed his opinion either of persons or subjects. Courteous as he was, he never al- lowed his courtesy to cause him to deviate in the smallest degree from the frankest expression of his opinion and sentiments. He was not a man who suffered fools, either gladly or sorrowfully. He was an unflinching antagonist, and a sturdy controversialist. I cannot imagine that he himself would have objected in the smallest degree to the method of portraiture I have employed. Indeed I have heard him express the most outspoken contempt for biographies of a conventional and decorous order, and I do not think that anything would have displeased him more than to have had his own biography written on such lines. Of course it is a portrait of Newton in advanced age ; I did not know him in his younger days ; and I looked upon my sketch as purely supple- mentary to the larger biography which I knew to be in preparation. But I believe that nothing is more likely to preserve his memory than to put on record the exact impression he made on one who saw him often. One felt, in his company, that one was in the presence of a man of extraordinary power, mental vigour, and force of character. He had his foibles, but the largeness of his nature 134 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE was in marked predominance, What, one may inquire, would have become of the memory of Dr. Johnson if Boswell had worked on the decorous method, suppressing all the occasions on which Johnson spoke hastily and tyrannically, omitting all the humorous oddities and personal traits, and exhibiting nothing but a genial philosopher ex- panding in rotund and elaborate sentences ? I think that it might have been better to have delayed the appearance of the paper a little, but I do not regret that I drew Newton as I saw him and knew him, nor do I believe that any one who had never met him would regard him, after reading my article, with anything but increased interest, respect, and admiration. I will then only briefly say that his earlier life was not only one of constant and immense in- dustry, but that he made it his business, to a conspicuous degree, to gather round him, to advise and encourage, all younger and less experienced students, and to give them all the help in his power. He earned and he deserved an extra- ordinary amount of admiration and affection for his generosity and his unwearying kindness. Generation after generation of students who had come into contact with Newton left Cambridge with heightened enthusiasm for exact and accurate work, and inspired to prolonged exertion by the energy and ardour of his vigorous mind. He set his mark upon the scientific world, and particularly upon his own branch of study ; and this was done, not merely by his own laborious industry, but by the wonderful mixture of zest and conscientiousness PROFESSOR NEWTON 135 which he both practised and evoked. At the same time, to have drawn him as a gentle and long- suffering enthusiast would have been to have grossly falsified facts. Half of Newton's power lay in his uncompromising and relentless energy of opinion. He did not believe in amiable tolerance. He enjoyed conflict, and did not pretend to be at peace with all mankind. He sharply contemned sloppiness and sentimentality ; and there were other qualities which he misunderstood and under- valued. He liked his own methods and his own ideas, and outside of what he approved he had little sympathy or tolerance. The secret of his power lay in the fact that he knew exactly what he wanted and desired, and in the resolute self- limitation with which he pursued it. Yet he was a man to respect, to admire, and to love. He had no meanness or pettiness about him, and a generous kindness of heart when once he had satisfied himself of the sincerity of an acquaintance or a colleague. And so I reprint the study with entire confidence. I do not conceal my own regard for Newton, nor do I hesitate to say that I liked him all the better for his mannerisms. He disagreed with me frankly on many points, and with a profound belief in the Tightness of his own conclusions. I did not accept those conclusions in every case ; but on the other hand there was no one who more eagerly acknowledged friendly overtures, or who more openly and promptly expressed his satisfaction in the efforts and successes of his friends. I re- member sending him a book of mine, which he 136 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE read at once and instantly acknowledged, as his manner was, in a pleasant note, in which he said that, though he did not take the same view that I did, he thought it a well-written and interesting book. Thus, though I never felt entirely at ease with him, because I knew that if I expressed my opinions frankly, he would have firmly combated them, yet I was always conscious both of his justice and of his goodwill. I hope very much that the picture will be com- pleted and amplified by a fuller life of him ; and meanwhile my portrait may stand as that of a man, who even in his age, when his peculiarities were more marked, sincerely desired truth, practised kindness, feared no opponent nor adversary, and lived a full and a gallant life to the very end, enjoying existence and making the most of it in his own vigorous way, and not either pretending or wishing to enjoy it in any one else's way. The first time I saw the Professor was in 1883, when I was acting in the " Birds " of Aristophanes, which was being performed at Cambridge. The chorus were dressed as birds ; they had the heads of birds superimposed upon their own, and their own faces looked out from the gullets of the birds. They wore tunics with painted wings in the place of sleeves, manipulated by sticks held in the hand, and fastened into the tips of the feathers, so that the wing could be suddenly unfurled. This, I believe, was Newton's suggestion. The whole thing was very picturesque and absurd. I do not know what realistic Don had the idea PROFESSOR NEWTON 137 of consulting a professed ornithologist as to the exact scientific appropriateness of the birds, but in an ardent moment it was resolved to ask Newton to inspect them. I suppose he had possibly fur- nished a list beforehand. We, the performers, were sitting about in full dress at one of the last rehearsals, when a strongly built man of about fifty, leaning heavily on a stick, with a brisk, alert face and bushy grey side-whiskers came into the room with one of the Committee. He seemed to me to bristle with decision and alert- ness. He wore an old-fashioned tall top-hat, very high in the crown, with a flat brim ; and a short, full-skirted tail-coat. He looked sharply from bird to bird and then said suddenly, "That Ibis is all wrong ; the head ought not to be scarlet it is preposterously absurd ; it must be darkened at once." l The Ibis was the headgear of a friend of mine, Willy Boyle, an extremely good-natured, able, rather indolent Eton man, with much musical ability. He took off the head. It was a pleasing object, made of a long-haired, rough, red plush, with a curved black beak and large, shining, roguish black eyes represented by means of a sort of glazed metal stud. Some paint was brought, and Professor Newton daubed over the bird-head with it, giving it a dusty, draggled air. The owner looked on ruefully. The Professor said sharply, " There ; that is better now, but it is still ridiculous 1 A scarlet Ibis in a Greek play ! Who ever heard of such nonsense ? " It 1 The scarlet Ibis is a denizen of South America. The only Ibis known to the ancients was the sacred Ibis, the head of which is black. 138 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE was not better at all, it was much worse, though perhaps it was ornithologically correct ; but it sacrificed a pretty point of colour. Boyle gave me the head and dress. The latter I fixed up in my rooms at King's with an in- scription, and left it there when I went down. It was used, I believe, as a model for the bird- dresses at a later performance, perhaps twenty years after, and I dare say has never been re- placed. The head I still have, with its elastic strap and tapes. The eye is still bright, but the beak is broken, and the complexion is daubed and stained with the Professor's paint. That was my only sight of the Professor at that date. He seemed to me then decided, brisk, peremptory, not wholly good-natured, not a man to oppose in any way. Alfred Newton was born in 1829, the son of William Newton, M.P. for Ipswich. His mother was an aunt of the late Lord Houghton, so that he belonged to what may for convenience be called the upper class, and inherited the traditions of birth, breeding, and descent He appreciated in a quiet way his social advantages, and never undervalued them in others ; but it was a part of his old-fashioned and magnanimous code that the more adventitious advantages a gentleman possessed, the less he must put them forward or allude to them in any way. I must not here attempt to estimate the extent or value of his scientific work ; but it may be said that he was one of the leading ornithologists PROFESSOR NEWTON 139 of his day, that the range of his investigation was very wide, though his name is connected with no great definite discovery of first-rate importance, and his accuracy prodigious. There have pro- bably been few ornithologists who have added so much to the detailed knowledge of the science, or done so much to reduce existing knowledge to order ; precise as he was, he yet made the whole subject live ; while both as a guide and inspirer of younger students, and as a stern and inflexible critic of the work of other investigators, his influence can hardly be over-estimated. In 1904 I was elected a Fellow of Magdalene, and a Cambridge friend wrote to congratulate me. He said in his letter that I should find Newton, who was a Fellow of Magdalene, very friendly and very interesting. " He is the only man I have ever known," he added, "who has all the characteristics of John Bull." My first encounter with the Professor, as we all called him at Magdalene, was at dinner at the Lodge. He was then over seventy-five years of age, and had resided at the College for more than fifty years. I recognised him at once. He was older, balder, whiter, and much lamer. He walked with two sticks and with great difficulty. He had been lame in one leg since infancy, and had latterly injured his sound leg by a fall out yachting. But his complexion was as clear and rosy as ever, and he looked like a man who en- joyed life heartily. I had written to him upon my election, and had received a courteous non- committal sort of reply. He greeted me drily 140 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE but kindly. His fine old-fashioned courtesy im- pressed me. " I was taught manners," he once said to a friend, " but people nowadays don't seem to know what they mean ! " He would not allow any one to help him, though he moved with great difficulty ; and the way in which he plumped into a chair and crossed his legs, in a peculiar fashion, showed that standing caused him great uneasiness. His profound bow was delightful, and the deft way in which he gathered his sticks in his left hand, in order to have his right hand free to shake, was very characteristic. The hand itself was firm, strong, and cool, and the pointed fingers had a well-bred look. His manner was quick and decided, and his talk trenchant enough. He spared no loose statement, and his courtesy was not of the kind that sank differences of opinion. He combated any view with which he disagreed, and it was eminently necessary to be wary in talk with him ; his manner to me was a mixture of friendliness and caution. On the following day he made his appearance at Chapel, occupying the next stall to myself. I was talking to the Master at the Library door, when he appeared at the postern which led from his house. He wore the familiar tall hat, a full surplice, and a hood flung on anyhow, torn in several places, the white silk lining having become a sort of coffee-colour from age and dust. He made his way very slowly to his place. When he was seated, he produced and put on an old and battered skullcap. His edition of the service, so to speak, was the quaintest I ever heard. He PROFESSOR NEWTON 141 had all sorts of curious omissions. For instance, he never said the last words of the Lord's Prayer, from " For thine is the kingdom " to the end, supposing it, no doubt, to be a later addition. In the first clauses of the Litany he never said the ascription, but began at the words " have mercy upon us" ; and the same was the case with all similar suffrages. In the Communion Service he joined almost fiercely in the Lord's Prayer at the beginning, which is generally and rightly left to the celebrant, and said the responses to the Commandments with a strong emphasis on the word "this law." Add to this an extreme rapidity of utterance, which hopelessly distanced all competitors, and a peremptory, downright tone, as though he were rating a dishonest footman rather than making a personal petition at the Throne of Grace. I never heard so strange a performance, and it was never varied in the smallest particular. I never quite gathered what his re- ligious opinions were. He was a zealous Con- formist, and I should suppose would have described himself as an old-fashioned Churchman. He attended the Sacrament at due intervals, and re- ceived the elements, reverently standing at the altar steps. Shortly after this date music was introduced into the service. There had not been a musical instrument in the Chapel since 1680, or any species of music, and the introduction of the harmonium was a sore blow to the Pro- fessor, who had hitherto successfully resisted all attempts to establish an organ in the Chapel. When hymns were introduced, it was an unfailing 142 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE amusement to see the Professor open a hymn- book, and survey the scene with ill-concealed disgust. He used to shut the book with a snap before the end, and sit ostentatiously down with an air of relief. He always said a loud Amen at the ends of the prayers ; but when the Master introduced a little prayer for the College, from the old Compline service, the Professor used to turn to the pages of his Prayer-book, look round with dramatic bewilderment, as though he thought the Chaplain was delirious, and hold his lips stiffly sealed at the conclusion, for fear he should forget himself and add the endorsement of an Amen to any petition of so singular a character. That first service over, I went out with the Master and the Professor. The latter lived in an odd, low, one-storeyed house adjacent to the College and stretching north from the Master's drive. It was called the "Old Lodge," and was in fact the back rooms of the original Master's Lodge, converted into a curious little dwelling, with large cellars underneath it. In front of it is a small, dark court, separated from the street by a high, ancient wall with gates. In this space the late Master used to keep cows, but at some recent time the cows had been given up, and the Professor, who had long occupied the house, built a bedroom on the site of the cowshed, and turned the byre into a tiny, ill-kept, smoke-dried garden. There was but one entrance from the street, front and back door alike, entered through a high postern across a flagged passage. At the back the Professor had added another bedroom for PROFESSOR NEWTON 143 himself. The shrubs grew thickly in front of the windows. A great box-hedge shut off the view into the Master's garden ; here, in the summer, bracken, originally planted by the Professor, grew high and luxuriant in the secluded angle between the Master's drive and the Professor's house. A flight of steps, much overgrown with moss, led down into the cellars, and there were one or two erections of iron rods supporting little platforms holding a dish for water, over which the Professor used to crumble bread for the birds that came to his call. A tiny gravel walk led into this strip of ground from the Master's drive, and by ascending a few steps you reached the Professor's study window, which opened to the ground, and which formed his usual egress to go into College and the ingress by which his friends in College were permitted to visit him. That first morning, the Master, with a good- natured desire to increase cordiality between myself and the Professor, unadvisedly suggested that I should go in with him to have a talk unadvisedly, I say, because the Professor was a man of strict routine, and always employed the morning hours in answering letters, of which he received a large number, and which he always answered, with a blunt pen in a somewhat illegible hand, by return of post ; accordingly I went in. The Professor said politely that he was proud to make my ac- quaintance, and added in a somewhat menacing tone that he was gratified to learn from my letter to him that I meant to reside in the College. He did not invite me to sit down, but a moment after i 4 4 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE held out his hand, saying, " I won't detain you we shall meet in Hall to-night." I felt myself dismissed, and hurried away. I confess that he inspired me with considerable awe. In Hall that evening I met him. He appeared in a black bow-tie, a very high-cut waistcoat, a roomy dining coat, a thin silk gown, and a tall hat, with his two sticks. The dinner consisted of a clear soup, fish, roast beef, a goose, plum- pudding, cheese. In those days the hour was seven, and the carving was done on the table. I learned afterwards that the meal was invariably the same, though pheasants and chickens were sub- stituted in due season for the goose. It was the Professor's idea of an appropriate English dinner. I gathered that if there was any alteration whatever in the menu he was profoundly vexed, and he had hit upon a plan by which it should be always the same. The menu was brought to one of the Fellows in residence, who occasionally made some alterations. But the Professor ordered that the menu should be brought to him last, when he struck out the alterations and substituted the original dishes. He did this even when he did not dine in Hall. Not only did he prefer a settled order himself, but he could not bear any deviation from it even when he was not present. It was not, with him, a question of courtesy, but of principle ; and his resistance to innovation would always have been conducted with due out- ward deference. This was an interesting trait in the Professor's character. If he approved of a thing, and ninety-nine other people approved of PROFESSOR NEWTON 145 something else, he would still have desired that his own preferences should be carried out, in spite of their wishes, and even if he were not personally affected by the change. He could not bear even to think of us as eating any other meal than that which he preferred. If he had known, for instance, that a leg of mutton had been substituted for roast beef at the Sunday dinner, even if he himself had been dining in his own house, he would have eaten a plate of roast beef in solitude, and thought in disgust and dudgeon that those in Hall were eating something different, even though it was their pre- ference to do so. He had no sense of the rights of others in the matter. I have heard him say a dozen times, when some change of detail was being discussed, and it was represented to him that every one else preferred it, " Then every one else are fools." It is the custom to have a guest-night on Sundays in Magdalene, and the Fellows are bound by an unwritten law to dine in Hall. The Professor always had a couple of guests. He ate an extra- ordinarily good meal, a full plateful of everything that appeared, washed down with abundance of claret. He strenuously preserved the old custom of " taking wine," and it was a pleasure to see him fill his glass, insist on his partner filling his, and then bow gravely over the uplifted goblet. He always sprinkled his plum-pudding with salt. I used to wonder how he kept his health, because the dinner he ate would have been a large one for a man living an active life ; but he took neither luncheon nor tea, and breakfasted late. He did K 146 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE suffer terribly from gouty eczema, and I have little doubt that had he duly regulated his diet, which was quite inappropriate to his age, his life might have been prolonged. We adjourned to the Combination-room after- wards, the Professor working his way very slowly up the steep stairs. We had dessert sitting at small tables in a semicircle round the fire. This ritual again was dear to the Professor's heart. I remember on a later occasion that the Master innocently suggested that for a change we should sit round the big oval table. The Professor was speechless with indignation, and sat sullenly through the proceed- ing, scarcely opening his mouth except to say that he would hardly have known the place. Nothing vexed him more than the least variation from the convivial routine. It is the duty of the junior Fellow to look after the comfort of the guests, and to see that the wine and dessert are duly circulated. The Sunday evening parties became larger at this time, as there were more Fellows in residence, and the only way to secure the comfort of the guests was to take the wine round and fill the glasses ; otherwise the bottles used to get stuck, and one was always jumping up to pass it on. The Professor disliked extremely being ministered to. "You're very good," he would say, if one filled his glass, adding testily, " Can't you let the things be passed round ? That is the custom here passed, not handed. Do put that decanter down, and let us help ourselves ! " A Fellow who was present ventured on one occasion meekly to suggest that if that wine was not handed round it did not PROFESSOR NEWTON 147 always circulate. " Do put it down ! " said the Professor ; " I hate to see people fussing about. It's not our custom here." But with the little tables duly spread, and a good dinner inside him, he was generally in high good-humour. He was always full of talk. He remembered everything, and remembered it exactly. I have heard him re-tell a story I once told him, and I think he preserved my exact phrases. I once gave him an anecdote about a common friend of ours, A . "An excellent story," said the Professor, " but not in the least characteristic of A ! Now, if it had been told of B , I should not have been surprised." I discovered afterwards that it really was an anecdote of B , and the Professor's delight, when I told him this, was great. He had travelled a good deal, he knew almost every one of a past generation that was worth knowing, he was full to the brim of picturesque personal details, and he seemed to be acquainted with almost every book one could mention of a certain date. He had the strongest prejudices. Some one quoted a saying of Charles Lamb's to him in my presence. "Very apposite and amusing ! " said the Professor ; "but I have a very poor opinion of Charles Lamb. He was a monkey, and a snivelling monkey." He disliked all argument ; he seldom spoke of politics ; and if ethical or religious matters were alluded to, he changed the conversation as quickly as possible. He liked to talk of definite facts and definite people, and his acquaintance with family histories and genealogies was very wide. He was a perfect mine of informa- tion about the history and traditions of the College. 148 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE He was always very jealous of outside interfer- ence. On one occasion he was dining in Hall with one other Fellow, when a considerable uproar arose at one of the undergraduates' tables. The Professor sent down a message requesting that order might be restored ; and the monition had its effect. A Trinity undergraduate, who had been dining with the noisy party, was much vexed at the occurrence, waited till the Hall was empty, and then came up to the high table in order to apolo- gise for his part in the disturbance. He had hardly uttered a word, when the Professor said in indig- nant tones, " How dare you come and speak to me in that gown ! A Trinity gown in Hall most improper ! I must ask you to be so good as to go away at once." When I began to reside in College, in 1905, I found that Newton appeared little in public. He was really very infirm, though his alertness and cheerfulness, and the remarkable healthiness of his face and demeanour, gave the opposite impres- sion. He had long given up lecturing, and paid a deputy, Mr. W. Bateson, of St. John's, the distin- guished biologist, to discharge this duty for him. I learnt a curious thing : that he was always very nervous when lecturing, and disliked it greatly, putting his lecture at one o'clock to discourage would-be attenders. Possibly this arose from a liability to stammer which he carefully concealed by avoiding words containing certain sounds in conversation and lecturing. He wrote out his discourses, and delivered them exactly as they were written. A friend of mine who was on PROFESSOR NEWTON 149 one occasion the solitary auditor of a lecture tells me that the Professor addressed him throughout in the phrase, "some of you may possibly object that there are obvious exceptions to this" not having sufficient confidence even to substitute the singular for the plural. It is said too that, at due intervals, at each rhetorical climax or natural division of the discourse, a little figure of a wineglass was interpolated in the text, as a sign that he would do well to take a sip of water, before facing the next section. It was a curious trait, for any man less shy or nervous in a party I never saw. One would have thought him wholly indifferent to and unconscious of an audience. But I have seen the same tendency come out once or twice. There was a sudden call on him one evening to say grace in Hall, and a more stuttering and stumbling performance I never heard. As to his discharging the ostensible duties of his post by deputy, he was justified, both by custom and statute, in considering that he was mainly paid for research work ; and in this respect his energy was prodigious and unflagging. He certainly did far more for his subject by his untiring industry than if he had contented himself with delivering the stipulated lectures and no more. Besides, he thought it his duty to encourage in every way the students of his subject. He invited them to his house, he answered any question referred to him with endless courtesy and patience, and held up a high ideal of strict investigation and laborious accumulation of facts. Neither did he amass money. He always lived like a poor man. The clothes he wore were 150 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE the oldest I have ever seen : there was a suit he wore in summer which was like sacking, and a funny little round hat, green with age, adorned his head out of doors. He used to drive down to the Museum every day in a cab, and sometimes went a little farther into the country. As far as appearance went, he had the faculty of always looking like a gentleman ; one would have sup- posed him to be a prosperous professional man, perhaps a lawyer. The routine of his day was absolutely fixed : he rose late and breakfasted about ten o'clock. I once had to see him on business, and went in, finding him at breakfast. I never saw such a meal for a sedentary man suffering from gout. He had a cold beefsteak pie, a captain's biscuit, and two cups of tea poured out, so that they might be of precisely the same strength. One of these he drank at the conclusion of the meal ; one was reserved, to be sipped, cold, over his evening work. After breakfast he wrote his letters ; and it may be added that he never destroyed a letter even an invitation to dinner ; his house was full of stored papers. Then he went down to the Museum. He could not bear to be called upon except at stated times. He dined by himself early, and did most of his work late at night. He was a slow worker, and verified everything ; and the act of getting up from his chair, finding the necessary book, looking out the passage, and putting the book back consumed much time. He went to bed about two or three in the morning. He imbued his pupils with the sense of the necessity of verifying references so much so that, though he left at his PROFESSOR NEWTON 151 death an immense mass of verified references, the pupil to whom the task of editing them fell said that he would not be true to the Professor's prin- ciples unless he verified them all again. He was always at home on Sunday evenings. In old days his pupils used to come in considerable numbers, and he set great store by this social function. I remember his once deploring to me rather patheti- cally the fact that of late so few people came to see him. But it was not a very exhilarating per- formance. The room was lighted with a- blaze of gas, to which of recent years he added electric light. His eyes must have been marvellously strong, for he used to read quite small print without glasses. A number of hard chairs were set out in a circle round the fire, which was always lighted, even on comparatively warm evenings. He himself sat in an easy-chair by the door, and the appearance of the room was as though it were arranged for some species of class-instruction. He used to sit smoking and making paper spills out of half-sheets. The conversation was general as a rule, and not always entertaining, though one became aware what a marvellous memory the Professor had, and how wide a knowledge he possessed both of books and people. His judgments on the latter were trenchant and a little superficial. He was fond of humorous stories, and I can recall very clearly his look when he was amused or telling some amusing story. His hand was upraised, his mouth elongated and drawn down at the corners into a very genial smile. I never saw him out of spirits. He was occasionally vexed, but never melancholy or tired or 152 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE suffering. I used to meet him also at the meetings of an old dining club called the Family, which met once a fortnight, at which he was always in the best of spirits, and ate and drank everything that was handed to him, but always plentifully watered his wine. His house was very characteristic. It was hideous beyond the nightmares of aesthetes. It was not even homely or comfortable. The hall was hung with a paper made to look like blocks of granite ; the rooms were papered in a faded buff colour ; the new bedroom was painted a strong purple. The furniture was either old and shabby, or new and pretentious. There were a few dusty pictures, mostly of birds, and I believe of consider- able artistic merit, hung rather high ; books every- where, crammed into deal shelves ; heaps of papers, pamphlets, packets of letters lumbering up the tables. The carpets worn, the curtains dim and drab. There was hardly an object on which the eye could rest with a sense of pleasure or even of comfort. In his bedroom was a huge four-post bedstead, many books, bottles of medicine, oint- ment in saucers ; nothing seemly or stately. The Professor was entirely unconscious of it all ; he dis- liked ornament, and had just the things he wanted. The large parlour, with its flaring gas, and piercing electric lights in milky globes, was one of the most uncomfortable rooms I ever saw. In College matters he was generally in opposition. I can hardly ever remember an occasion when he consented willingly to a change of any kind. I never could quite understand his attitude to the PROFESSOR NEWTON 153 College ; he was fond of it and proud of it in a way ; he desired that it should flourish and prosper, but only on the lines which he preferred. There is a rule at Magdalene that all resident Fellows are members of the governing body, and he never missed a meeting. He was always very genial and full of talk on these occasions, and indeed used to delay the progress of business. He was always very much opposed to anything being made a pre- cedent, and used to hamper any concession that was suggested with all sorts of precautionary conditions. I remember a few salient instances of his method. At one time it was suggested that the Hall panelling should be repainted. It was formerly a light buff colour, and the paint was so scorched and blistered by the sun that it had the appearance of being smeared with stale mustard. We adjourned to the Hall to see the effect of certain strips of colour hung upon the walls. The Professor pleaded eagerly and fiercely for the same colour to be restored. It was useless to point out that there was not a single member of the College who approved of the buff tint, and that visitors invariably com- mented upon its dinginess. "They are all fools," said the Professor. A sub-committee was eventu- ally appointed to act, with full powers, and the panelling was stained a rich brown, enormously improving the appearance of the place. The first time we dined there after the painting, the Master said cheerfully to the Professor, "Well, what do you think of it ? " The Professor looked round in disgust and said, " I don't like to say what I think : it is like what I may politely call Gehenna." 154 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE On another occasion it was proposed that ladies should be admitted, in restricted numbers, to the Chapel service. The discussion was amicable, and a system was suggested. To my surprise, the Pro- fessor took very little part, except to interject an occasional growl ; but when the motion was to be put to the vote, the old man grew suddenly pale, and in a voice strangled with passion made a most vindictive speech. He said that he disapproved of all the alterations in the Chapel service ; that it was no longer the least pleasure to him to attend. Everything done or suggested was utterly out of keeping with the ideal of a plain collegiate service. He disliked it all from the bottom of his heart ; and he wound up by saying that we might pass what votes we liked, but that if a lady was admitted to the Chapel service he should never set foot in the building again. We sat appalled at the tempest. One of the Fellows said that, though he approved of the motion, he thought that the Professor's feeling overbalanced the advantages. The Master con- curred, expressed his concern at the Professor's view of the alterations that had been made hitherto, and withdrew his motion. The old man sat grimly silent, and it evidently never entered his head to make, or to wish to make, the least con- cession ; he did not care what any one else thought or wished, and he would prevent any change if he could. The only thing I have ever heard him express a wish to see changed in the Chapel was a certain window which had been painted in the Professor's PROFESSOR NEWTON 155 undergraduate days by some members of the College, himself included I suppose about 1850 under the direction of an artistic Don. It was a very poor affair, the colours thin and staring, the figure- panels small, muzzy, and mean, the ornament clumsy and feeble. But it had an historical value, having been made in the early days of the Gothic revival, and the personal associations made it more interesting still. An embarrassing scene occurred when one of the Fellows asked leave that his daughter's marriage might be celebrated in Chapel. The Professor ex- ploded in wrath. He had never heard such a preposterous suggestion. A College Chapel was not intended for such things as weddings ; the young -lady could have no association with the place ; he regarded it as a most improper and entirely unaccountable proposal. On that occasion the rest of the governing body were rather indignant at the attitude of the Professor to what seemed a very reasonable request ; the matter was put to the vote, and the Chapel placed at the disposal of the Fellow in question. At the following College meeting the Fellow said that he withdrew his re- quest. His daughter had been so unfortunate as to break her leg while playing lawn-tennis, and was lying ill in the house where the accident had occurred. She was to be married quietly in the neighbouring village church as soon as she could get about. The Professor smiled, and said, with really incomparable humour, " Solvitur non ambu- lando." And it was characteristic of him, too, to take immense pains over the selection of a wedding 156 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE present for the bride herself, of whom he was per- sonally very fond, on the same occasion. One great scene took place when an organ was offered by one of the Fellows to the College Chapel. It was thought that the Professor would object so strongly that the proposal was deferred. Eventually, however, it was brought forward. The Master began by saying, " I have a proposal to make about the Chapel, which I fear you will not like, Professor." The Professor flared up and said, " No, indeed ; I never come here now without hearing something that I dislike very much." The offer was then stated, and every one welcomed it with cordiality and enthusiasm. The Professor waited till they had done, and then with a little bow to the donor, said, "Words entirely fail me to express my sense of the generosity and public spirit which prompts this offer. But I am bound to say that I object in toto to music in a College Chapel. It is entirely out of character, and I am therefore bound to oppose what I believe to be against the best interests of the place." The usual scene took place, the Professor voting in a minority of one. But when the organ was erected, he contrived to say something pleasant to the giver about its improving the appearance of the Chapel. For one thing must be recorded. I never saw a man who took a defeat better. He fought to the last moment, and when he was outvoted, he accepted the situation gracefully and good-humour- edly. I never heard him make any sort of criti- cism or recrimination afterwards : and, indeed, when a thing was once done and had become part PROFESSOR NEWTON 157 of the place, the Professor's Toryism invested it with a sort of sanctity, and he would have opposed its removal with the same zeal that he had opposed its erection. In November 1905 he had a bad fall while coming out of Hall. I never saw a man collapse so completely ; but this was evidently deliberate, as an attempt to save himself would have no doubt produced a worse strain. He was badly shaken, but I saw him later in the evening, and he did not appear to be much the worse. But he was never quite the same again. The last time he dined in Hall we were a very small party, and he was troubled by a violent cough. The death of a sister distressed him greatly, and he began to say that he had outlived all his friends. Then dropsical symptoms intervened. I believe that if he had made any effort to live he could have thrown his illness off there was nothing organically wrong but he determined to consider himself doomed. He used to reply to inquiries about his health with a grim shake of the head. He still came to Chapel and Hall, and looked much the same ; only I used to notice in Chapel how his hands trembled. The last time I ever saw him alive was in his own house. I went in one Sunday evening, and found him alone. He did what he seldom did with his colleagues ; shook hands, retaining my hand in his own for a minute. I think he regarded it as a farewell. A great crowd came in that evening ; he seemed a little oppressed, and presently left the room. When I went out I found him in the passage. " Must you be going ? " he said, and 158 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE added, " Yes, there is rather a crowd to-night too much of a good thing." He dropped his stick, and I picked it up. " You are very good," he said, with the familiar formula and so I saw him no more. He suffered a good deal at the last, and could only sleep in his chair ; lying in bed brought on palpitations. But he never complained ; he made all his arrangements for death, and faced it as a gallant old English admiral might. The evening before he died the Master was sent for. The Professor's articulation was very faint. The Master said a prayer. The Professor thanked him, and then wished him good-bye. Then, with long pauses, he said, " God bless all my friends God bless the College," adding, with a smile, " and may the study of Zoology continue to flourish in this University 1 " He was in bed for the last few days, and very weak ; but just before the end he said, " Lift me up I must die in my chair, like Brad- shaw." Bradshaw was one of his old friends, the University librarian, who died in his rooms in 1886, after returning from a dinner-party, and was found dead in the morning sitting in his chair. So on June 7, 1907, the end came. His funeral was a very striking sight from the number of old pupils and friends who followed him to the grave. The coffin was brought into the Chapel in the morning, and there was a short service for the College. In the afternoon it was wheeled through the Court, out of the gate, and up the street to St. Giles'. A long procession followed bare-headed, the Visitor, Lord Braybrooke, following the bier, with the Fellows behind him. The old man had PROFESSOR NEWTON 159 left the severest injunction that there was to be no music at the service, and it was consequently one of the most dismal ceremonies I have ever attended. Newton's was a very happy life, full of enjoyment, fame, work, honour, and friendship. I do not think he suffered much from his restrictions, or even from his physical disabilities. He had been more or less lame from infancy, and his face testi- fied to his contentment and happiness. It was hardly at all lined, and he had the complexion of a young man. He was a man of great courage, and without imagination. He did not anticipate evil, and lived joyfully in the day and for the day. One could see that he hated sentiment ; what he loved was the interest of life, social intercourse, con- viviality, stir, science, work. His courtesy was innate and instinctive ; one always felt him to be well-born and well-bred. He clung to the sacred affections and pieties of home ; while his mother was alive he wrote to her every day ; and critical though he was, no one ever heard him question or dissent from any action or decision of his parents. He loved to have his own way, and for a long time I believe he entirely dominated the College. He undoubtedly had mellowed much in later years, but I should think he had no pity to spare for weakness or sensibility. He valued success, and liked distinguished people, not in a deferential way, but out of genuine interest in a successful performer. He could show a superb hospitality on public occasions with a stately and majestic politeness. He had nothing mean or petty about him, and in controversy, however strongly he felt, he would 160 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE have scorned to use any subterfuges or to have outstepped his strong code of honour. He had a truly kind heart. I began by fearing him, I went on to admire him, and I ended by loving him. He was not at all a typical Don, though he had certain donnish characteristics ; but his touch with the world was wide and his outlook was liberal. Though restricted in aim, he was not a narrow- minded man ; and he was sometimes unexpectedly found among the ranks of the progressive party. He had no programme about doing good, because he instinctively realised that the best way to help the world is to do one's appointed work with all one's might and main. Of course there were qualities he did not possess, but he never pretended to possess them ; and he was a vigorous Briton a man cast in a big mould. The significance of Newton's life is twofold. It has no touch of weakness about it ; yet this very characteristic, which seems at first sight to be its strength, is in reality, if we appraise it justly, a limitation, and a serious limitation. It was not that he despised emotion at all. No one ever had a stronger sense of manly comradeship, a deeper passion for study, a greater consciousness of his responsibility to kindle the torches of those who came after him ; and he had, too, a proud patriotism, an almost fierce sense of honour, and a fanatical reverence for tradition. The weakness lay in his intense personal dominance, in the doctrinaire certainty of the exact proportions in which common- sense and emotion should be mingled the feeling that not only was his instinct a law to himself, but PROFESSOR NEWTON 161 that it ought also to be a pattern to others. What he lacked was imaginative sympathy. He did not recognise the rights of other people to their own visions and aspirations. His view, for instance, of art was that certain sorts of sculptures and pictures and music were approved by connoisseurs, and therefore might be temperately enjoyed and applauded. But he could tolerate no development in art, and any new tendency was humbug and moonshine. He would have indignantly denied that he was swayed by the verdict of the world ; he was quite capable, for instance, of declaring that any one could see at a glance that the writings of Browning were metaphysical twaddle ; but he had formed his taste before the year 1860, and all subsequent developments were decadent innova- tions. If it had been argued in his presence that the world changed from generation to generation, he would have replied with absolute conviction that change was not always progress, but might be degradation ; and thus he was really a pessimist in his despair of the future and in the eager way in which he welcomed all the signs of increasing deterioration which seemed to result from the introduction of principles, social or political, opposed to his own. But, in looking round upon the world, however much one may regret the miserable waste of time, the halting and uncertain progress of truth and justice, the ugly tyrannies and prejudices of humanity, one must face the fact that it is only through the resistance of such sturdy tempera- ments as Newton's that progress is solid and L 162 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE secure. One does not want life to be overwhelmed in a rush of fluid and hasty experiments. Toryism is not only the drag upon the wheel, it is the caution and the prudence that annihilate hasty and sentimental theories. Justice is not done by trampling on prejudices and flouting traditions, but by recognising the needs and the aims which they express. Little happy and solid work can be done under a sense of general insecurity, and in guarding against anarchy much genuine and fruitful eagerness must be sacrificed. The Pro- fessor represented, in a militant form, the stable element of society ; and though the structure of the world rises above and beyond the reluctances of the prudent, it is upon their doggedness that the soaring arch is based and made sure. VII FREDERIC MYERS FREDERIC MYERS was born in 1843. His father, who came of a stock of Yorkshire yeomen, was vicar of a church at Keswick. He belonged to the Broad Church school, and was a close friend of Stanley, Jowett, and Frederic Robertson. Myers' mother was a daughter of John Marshall, of Leeds, a Member of Parliament, a man of high character, great commercial ability, and conspicuously public- spirited ; one of her sisters married the first Lord Monteagle, and another Dr. Whewell, Master of Trinity. Myers was a sensitive and deeply affectionate child, thoughtful beyond his years, and extra- ordinarily impressionable. The exquisite surround- ings of his Cumberland home, the great, dark, sun-dappled mass of Skiddaw, the tree-embosomed lakes of Bassenthwaite and Derwentwater, the mysterious vista of green-shouldered, craggy-topped peaks, lost in the empurpled distance to the south, left ineffaceable impressions on his childish mind. But behind that passionate love of nature there lay from the very first a strange preoccupation with the secrets of life and death. The sight of a dead mole, crushed by a cart, gave him, he records, an intense emotion at the age of six. He 164 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE was told by his mother, in answer to his eager questions, that the little creature had no soul, and would not live again ; and the thought of the loss of conscious joy, of a death without resurrec- tion, filled him with anguish, at an age when most children look upon animals as a sort of pretty mechanical toy, have few imaginative sympathies, and simply observe, without drawing any con- clusions or comparisons. At an early age, too, the sense of the music of words came to him, borne on the echoing lines of Virgil. It is comforting to compare that joy- ful initiation into a lifelong mystery of delight with the bewildered entry into a dolorous and unintelligible apprenticeship that befalls so many boys. And it is characteristic, too, of the poetic temperament that feeds so poignantly upon re- trospect, to think that that day in the sunlit parsonage study sowed the seed which flowered in the majestic essay on Virgil written in Myers' prime. His father died in 1851, at the age of forty, and left his widow with the anxious care of three boys. Frederic Myers was deeply moved by his father's dying words and by the shock of his death ; but it is strange to read the fact which he records, that about the same time his mother, shrinking from dwelling upon the doctrine of hell, suggested to the boy that men who lived bad lives on earth were possibly annihilated at death. " I remember," says Myers, "where I stood at the moment, and how my brain reeled under the shock." The prospect of so appalling a possibility as that any FREDERIC MYERS 165 conscious soul should cease to be, sank deeply into his mind. It is difficult to analyse this feel- ing, but the incident carries within it the secret of Myers' life the urgent claim to continuous and conscious personality. It is strange to reflect that the instinct is not a universal one. To many minds the cessation of personal consciousness is simply an inconceivable thought ; but I have known men who have felt the precise opposite, and to whom the prospect of entire annihilation is not only not horrible, but positively attractive and tranquillising. Myers gives a touching extract from his mother's diary, which indicates the extraordinary sympathy and comfort which he, then a child of eight, seems to have given her in her bereavement. She said to him once that she could never be happy again, and the child replied, " You know God can do everything, and He might give us just once a vision of him as should make us happy all our lives after." Of course, a sensitive and clever child can, and often does, in the presence of overwhelm- ing grief, suggest words and thoughts of consolation of almost preternatural fineness and appositeness, purely by a precocity of intelligence ex ore in- fantium just as he can traffic with a coin whose battered heraldry he does not understand. But there does seem to be something more than that here a loyal affection, a facing of great issues, a vitality of spirit, which cannot be passed over. As a rule the reminiscences of childhood are tedious things, and keep the secret of their golden glow only for the possessor ; but in the case of 166 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE Myers there seems to have been an almost feminine tenderness, a ripening of sympathy, a preoccupa- tion with the needs and sorrows of others, very different from the placid and heedless self- absorption of ordinary boyhood. It was the same when he went to school. The letters that passed between himself and his schoolmaster testify to an unusual equality of friendship and an un- common tenacity of affection. He was for a time at Cheltenham, and went at seventeen to Trinity College, Cambridge. In the little glowing autobiographical fragment published after his death he traces the history of his mind in those early years. He speaks of his increasing passion for the Greek and Latin poets, and his inward recital of them. He read the Phcedo of Plato at sixteen, and experienced, he says, a sort of conversion to Hellenism. He found in Plato, Virgil, and Marcus Aurelius, the three great religious teachers of antiquity ; and though at a later period a contrary influence swept across his life and carried him into a very different region of thought, these great minds remained the support of his faith and the foundation of his creed. Sappho and Pindar furnished in turn their several intoxication of delight. He recognised in later days that they had brought evil as well as good : they had served to detach him from low interests and to foster imaginative impulse ; but this had afforded no medicine for pride. It would seem from his veiled words that he had found in the Greek spirit a reflection of his own, and that he had yielded himself to every joyful and emotional FREDERIC MYERS 167 impulse nee prohibui cor meum, he might have said with the preacher. He describes in words that touch the very limits of restraint his wanderings in Greece at the age of twenty-one, the passionate delight aroused by the sight of the heathery pro- montories of Lesbos and the sunny bay of Mitylene. But writing at the end of life he could see in retro- spect that the mistake he had made was to fling himself so insatiably into the joy of the past "an unnatural passion . . . men must set their hearts on what lies before." He was elected to a Fellowship of Trinity in 1865, and a reaction passed over his mind. It was only natural, I think, that an emotional life which had been lived with so complete an abandonment, in so prodigal and reckless a fashion, should have its ebb and flow, and should be followed by a sense of satiety and weariness. But he now came under a strong and eager Christian influence. He met Mrs. Josephine Butler, who combined with an intense spiritual fervour the sympathy which can- not rest without a lavish sharing of its joy with others, and who possessed that ardent instinct for seeking the lost which made her influence a turning- point in many wayward lives. She led him to the faith, he wrote, " by an inner door ; not to its en- cumbering forms and dogmas, but to its heart of fire." The notable monuments of that period are the two poems of "John the Baptist" and "St. Paul." They were submitted in competition for the Sea- tonian Prize. The tradition runs that the quaint prelude which dealt with the conditions of the i68 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE prize laid it down that the poem should be written on the nature and attributes of God, until in the opinion of the Master of Clare the subject be deemed to be exhausted. It has been often quoted as an instance of the futility of academical competi- tions that neither of these poems, of which " St. Paul " at least has won a secure place in English literature, should have obtained the prize. It always seems to me more surprising that the less conspicu- ous of the two " St. John the Baptist " should not have been successful. "St. Paul," in form and metre and treatment, was a perfectly novel experi- ment ; and its luxuriance, its almost cloying sweet- ness, its entire lack of economy or severity, might well be regarded with suspicion by academical minds. It is curious to note in passing that 1 once had a correspondence with Myers on the subject of, the metre of the poem. The matter is too technical to discuss here, but it surprised me to find that he analysed its metrical scheme in a way which showed that his own musical instinct had entirely overcome his deliberate prosody. The beat of the curiously infectious stanza had made havoc of his plans. I venture to say that no technical metrist would ever dream of assigning to the poem the scheme of rhythm which Myers maintained underlay it. But the poem, with all its rush of feeling, its gorgeous wealth of word-music, remains. It may be shunned by a mature taste ; but it has played a notable part in the development of many men and women, and I will confess that for me at least though I feel that the conception has little in common with the scholastic framework which FREDERIC MYERS 169 cramped the literary genius of " St. Paul " the poem has a haunting spell which defies all sense of critical taste, like the honied scent of some sun- warmed field of summer flowers. Not the least testimony to its beauty are the letters in which Ruskin acknowledges the gift of the poem, and its moving effect upon his own much-tortured spirit. I must not here linger over the literary work of Myers, attractive and beautiful as much of it is, because it was not his main concern indeed, it was little more than the happy talk of the pilgrim by the way, concerning itself for an instant with the misty foldings of the hills, the gleam of wayside flowers, the appeal of some passing face. He had a wonderful power over words, and in his poems an extraordinary musical sense of rhyme and rhythm alike. There are lyrics of purest form and almost intoxicating sweetness ; but he had not the supreme austerity of the artist : he could not hold his hand or subdue his material to his use ; and thus there is a prodigal lavishness of ornament and image that gives a sense of luxury and excess and mars the perfection of much of his work. There is perhaps a dulce vitium, but it passes at times into rhetoric and out of control. Save for this he might have won supremacy as a poet ; but his profusion has a touch of the luscious, the over-ripe, about it, and lacks the final gift of simplicity won by discarding richness the purity of beauty unadorned. But a process of disillusionment set in. There followed a period of agnosticism and materialism, when Myers suffered severely, and bore his suffering with "a joyless doggedness," which obliterated 170 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE not only his own personal hopes, but his care of his brethren. Part of his pain, he says, was the thought that the very sensitiveness of his organisa- tion, acuter and more clear-sighted than that of his fellows, exposed him to suffering rather than ministered to his joy. It was on a starlight walk with Henry Sidgwick, in December 1869, that the first glimpse of the quest to which he was to give so much of his life, and which was to bring him so much ultimate happiness, dawned on him. " I asked him," wrote Myers, " almost with trem- bling, whether he thought that when Tradition, Intuition, Metaphysics had failed to solve the riddle of the universe, there was still a chance that from any actual observable phenomena ghosts, spirits, whatsoever there might be some valid knowledge might be drawn as to a World Unseen. Already, it seemed, he had thought that this was possible : steadily, though in no sanguine fashion, he indicated some last grounds of hope." The significance of this step was great. The force of the suggestion lay in this pregnant fact, that, whereas men had begun in every other region to apply the method of science to all baffling material problems, and had been led, through a painful enough process of discarding and unlearning their prejudices and preferences, to amass materials for sure conclusions, it was now clear that the only way to approach psychical problems was through the prosaic process of beating the covert carefully to see if the quarry lay hid in the brake. It was seen to be useless to begin by assumptions drawn from an immense mass of vague and floating tra- FREDERIC MYERS 171 dition. The only possibility was to study the problems at first hand, to be discouraged by no triviality of detail, no silliness of immature imagina- tion, from applying to the abnormal and even sordid phenomena of spiritualism the same searching and rigid investigation. Myers put literature and art aside, and gave himself to the new quest with an enthusiastic abandonment. I believe that his capacity for in- vestigation was to a certain extent hampered by his sanguine hopefulness. In dealing, for instance, with the performances of mediums, his intense desire to find evidence made him believe more guilelessly than he need have done in their good faith. "Our efforts," he wrote, "of the first few years were tiresome and distasteful enough ; yet what were they in comparison to the hardship which a naturalist will undergo to trace the breeding- ground of a songbird or to establish the relationship of a worm of the sea ? " He said in most deliberate words that his own history had been that of a soul struggling into the conviction of its own existence, and that he had postponed all else to the one question whether life and love survive the tomb. To give and to receive joy, companion- ship with nobler spirits these seemed to him the real aims of life ; and while doubt remained as to the permanence of the human soul, even these aims appeared to be futile and fruitless. But when the conviction of immortality dawned upon him, as it did, he said that it gave him a creed which encouraged him to live at his best, and inspired the very strongest hopes that can incite to exertion. 172 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE In 1880 Myers was married to Miss Eveleen Tennant, and found a joy in the new relationship which he had never before experienced. " Indeed," he wrote to his mother, "my own happiness has grown and deepened till one doubts whether it can be good for one to drink such deep and continuous draughts of it." He plunged into his great book on Human Personality, and found fresh happiness in the intensity of his convictions. " My researches," he wrote, "have at any rate made me very happy, and I want to make as many other people follow the same line of happiness as I can ; though we are all booked for such a good thing in the next world that it matters comparatively little how we fare in this." There is not much that is eventful to record of these later years ; but in the presence of this ecstasy of peace, this habitual exaltation of spirit, one finds oneself asking uneasily how it stood the test of some of the darker experiences of life. I will but cite two instances. When his son, who was then in my boarding-house at Eton, was seized by a dangerous illness which had once nearly proved fatal to Myers himself, and was for some days in a critical condition, I was amazed by his exhibiting a combination of feelings which I had never seen before. He was deeply and dis- tressingly anxious, though he seemed to think very little of himself or his anxieties, and showed the tenderest consideration for, and confidence in, every one else. And at the same time there seemed to be in the background an untroubled serenity about the issues of life and death, which made me FREDERIC MYERS 173 _4 * - - M r * ** " * "- ______ " - " . ; . 3BL 1QS( ADO uiui JUS SCD5C OH UDC ^HMHBOECMBHP OH UBC I . ~* _ ... . ._._ __--. _ * SuuXK vnB "^TT 2 UHKSDT 5fT utmOSOOOSUL DODCL DHK v* , ^_ , _ . _ . . . . . _ . , ... . . Mli ::-.!.: -r :,.n -.- -.,: v.t:r ".-:., -.: .- _-,- :: ..-. ir. i . : :T" ~_~.r :;"i'tc .: }...':..?. -."."_'. ".: ^: v :>i ;;; :: i_ t_.-_ - _ ir. ** *,. -~- - . .. - .'. -' .'- - r . 'T'r . ^_: . nt . 1 .1 ,1 _, * ancnaea uy 2 nezvcnij' ^ ^ ^^ Ji^^^^^^^^^^L^ AJU I.I i__r^'.".' first sigjbt off Myus TTJ boy; nc ^n*^ anmooaocd to .* ^..*J " .~ 2. . ^LT"-^~.i'^ .-.~ J *..?.'f ^ L ^* J*T. [ J ' I : -; :. :.- :: -f ,--:- .-. :. ::-.,,:. , : : "._ 7 L-^A., :: vr.i ^,- ; ~ : x - " ~|- - * - .- ^' - - " ocgcra ID icau bis fecbvc in at bw w 174 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE pression of some fiery and uplifted quality which made the whole room curiously attentive, though the proem was simple enough. There was no point at which the transition came, but we were soon aware that we were under the spell of a solemn and noble eloquence, which at first surprised and then attracted the audience, and then held us all absolutely spell-bound. The voice rose into a sort of rhythmic chant, and the narrative gradually merged itself into a great rhapsody of heroic emotion. The quotations, which came frequently, sounded like lyrical hymns, and the whole worked up to a splendid climax and ceased at the very height and summit of the strain. Yet the lecturer exhibited no sign of physical emotion, used no gesture, and the unimpassive face with the veiled eye added infinitely to the solemnity of the dis- course, which seemed hieratic and liturgical rather than oratorical. It left us all in a glow, and the proceedings closed with more irrepressible and prolonged applause than I have ever heard at an Eton Lecture. We had many and notable lectures at Eton. Mr. Ruskin, for instance, addressed the boys on three occasions during my time there. But with all Ruskin's prestige, his mysterious im- pressiveness, the winning charm of his piercing glance and pathetic smile, he never produced the effect which Myers produced ; and I have often agreed with contemporaries that the " Nelson " lecture was by far the most moving discourse I ever listened to as an Eton boy. This is curiously confirmed by a story lately told me by Archdeacon Cunningham, who, when FREDERIC MYERS 175 a Lecturer at Trinity, presided over the fortunes of a small undergraduate Essay Society which met in his rooms. He invited Myers to address the society one evening on the subject of Psychical Research. Myers came, took his stand on the hearthrug, and poured out for an hour, without a single note, an oration of the most moving eloquence and finished verbal precision, never hesitating for a word, and never failing to wind up the most elaborate and involved sentences. I have often wondered that Myers did not attain to more fame as a lecturer. He would have been, I believe, a preacher of almost unsurpassed eloquence if he had been in Orders. I do not think he would ever have been a political speaker, because his logic was rather at the mercy of his feeling. But for impassioned public discourse, of a set kind, he had talents, I am sure, of the very highest order. I do not know how much preparation such discourses entailed a good deal, I should imagine, because the form and the language were both so elaborate. I do not even know whether he enjoyed the delivery. His demeanour was so statuesque that it was impossible to augur what he felt ; the only thing that betrayed emotion was an occasional flash of the downcast eye, which gave a sense of intense repression. But the voice, high- pitched, clear, and with a peculiar thrill of emotion, was perfectly adapted to the process. It never drooped or flagged ; it never became either strident or uncontrolled. It might even have been monotonous but for the passion of feeling which animated it from end to end. I am not sure that 176 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE this emotional tide of eloquence did not produce an almost deleterious effect upon his prose writings. I have always thought that his study of Words- worth in the English Men of Letters is a very fine piece of criticism from the point of view of a panegyric ; but it is a panegyric, and though per- haps it is the highest function of criticism to dis- cern and express the distinctive quality of a writer's work and influence, the book preaches the Words- worthian faith rather than sets it in a just and balanced light. I heartily wish we had more of this kind of criticism, but it is prophetical rather than analytic. I do not think that Wordsworth has ever been treated in so devotional a spirit, and Myers interprets his august message and his consecrated life in a very true and noble way. As applied to Wordsworth, such an attitude leaves little to be desired, because Wordsworth's position is rather that of a priest of mysteries than a literary in- fluence ; but it would be impossible to apply the same method to any writer but a poet, and a poet with a conscious and deliberate message. And thus the essay on Virgil in the Classical Essays is for the same reason admirable ; but here again Myers sings rather than discusses his subject, and, like the poet himself, teaches the groves to resound with the beloved name. But I think that in his last great work, on Human Personality, the fault of the method is more appa- rent. I do not know any book of so breathless and sustained an emotion, which makes itself felt even in the more deliberately scientific passages. But here, in spite of the caution, the gravity, the studied FREDERIC MYERS 177 impartiality of the treatment, there emerges a sense of passionate conviction and almost frenzied hope, which detracts from the judicial effect, and leaves a reader overborne rather than convinced. It is artistic, in the sense that the writer adopts an atti- tude and a method, and never lapses from it ; but the natural instinct of the man penetrates the book, and makes it an impassioned discourse rather than a scientific treatise. I first came to know Myers personally in the summer of 1883, when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I recognised him at once as the heroic lecturer of my Eton days. He was remarkable for an extraordinarily reposeful dignity of manner and an almost demure courtesy. He had built himself a fine house on the outskirts of Cambridge, which he called " Leckhampton." The ground had been very skilfully laid out. The approach was by a private road, so that there was a sense of great seclusion about the place ; and the long strip of ground belonging to it, at one end of which the house stood, had been planted so as to give the sense of a spacious pleasaunce. Against the back- ground of this graceful and stately little mansion, richly and delicately appointed, Myers, with his beautiful and accomplished wife, stood out in admirable relief ; and I remember receiving a radiant impression, which has never left me, of a nobly endowed nature, to which all the refined re- sources of the world gracefully and unostentatiously ministered. The people one met there were not of the familiar academical kind, but men and women who brought a breath of the larger world with them, M 178 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE and with a halo of interest and fame about them. There was something of a refined princeliness about it all ; and I remember, too, thinking that it was not characteristically modern at all, but gave the feel- ing of a Renaissance picture. Myers did not seem to me so much the product of a time as of all times, belonging not to a date, but to a type a type that at all epochs takes by a natural good fortune all that is best and highest in the world, and uses it not with a luxurious ostentation, but with a refined and critical taste. The motto over the door since, I think, obliterated said " Aude, hospes, contemnere opes et te quoque dignum Finge Deo." That motto seemed to be the perfectly right and just summary of so lavish and fragrant a life. It was a life which did not shrink from using comfort and beauty, art and leisure. But it did not rest upon these things : it availed itself of them just so far as they ministered to the well-being of the spirit, but all the time there were secret windows opening upon far wider horizons. Myers appeared to me something utterly different from a wealthy and cultivated inspector of schools. I thought of him rather as something mediaeval and lordly a Venetian merchant-prince, perhaps, with an outlook upon art and letters, and with none of the limitations in life, nothing of the timidity of dealing with its fullness, that my own more puritanical bringing-up had imposed on me. I felt a sense of narrowness and circumscription about the artificial life t had been ignorantly leading a sense of beautiful avenues and vistas FREDERIC MYERS 179 leading into realms unknown. I fell back, of course, in an unadventurous spirit into the easy familiar ways, but it was a glimpse of something more liberal and exquisite than anything I had before experienced. In spite of the dignity in which Myers seemed to be involved, there was nothing in the least formidable about him. His courtesy and sympathy were great, and he welcomed any timid and fitful reaching out after fuller interests with a charming readiness to hear and to answer. But his serenity and self-possession gave me in those days a sense of awkwardness and clumsiness. I only saw him occasionally, so that it was in no sense an influence only a rare prospect of something delicate, finished, and beautifully ordered. He was a busy man, and apart from his official work he lived a life of reflection and aspiration. And then, too, he was always a seeker rather than a teacher. His writing was rather the taking shape of his own impassioned dreams than an attempt to share or lead or inspire. I knew him better at a later date, when his son came to be a boarder in my Eton house. As a parent he was not so much anxious as careful, desiring the best influences for his boy, but showing a fine confidence and trustfulness in one's own methods and intentions. I have a good many letters from him of that date, in his firm, rather official hand. But he seemed to hold himself aloof, and to be preoccupied in larger designs. I knew nothing then of his inner hopes and quests ; but though his whole life was nurtured on emotions i8o THE LEAVES OF THE TREE and ecstasies, there was never anything in the least emotional or effusive about his talk. He was essentially reserved ; and there is one thing that always struck me very forcibly about him, and that was the extreme serenity and tranquillity of his face and bearing. The perfect smoothness of his brow and cheek, the absence of all lines or dints of stress or experience, his leisurely carriage, gave a feeling of self-contained prosperity and stability. It still remains to me a thing to be wondered at that so little of the eagerness or rapture of life should have been visible, and no touch of dissatisfaction or unrest. He looked like one whose progress had been deliberate and outlook untroubled. There was no sense of struggle or urgent restraint, and yet there had been both in his life ; and still less was there any hint that he had known what it was to despair. Yet of all the poignant utterances of the darkest moods of man that darkness of the spirit when even the very impulse to rage against the imprisoning walls and the galling fetters dies away into apathy I feel that the two sonnets " Would God it were evening " and " Would God it were morning " are the most vivid and spectral I know. The truth is that Myers had attained, more than most men, not so much to a serenity of joy as a serenity of hope, and hardly troubled himself more about the sordid incidents of life than the traveller in sight of the lighted windows of his home troubles himself about the mire on his foot or the sleet upon his face. Of course a busy professional life, so intently FREDERIC MYERS 181 contemplative in its leisure spaces, and with so much literary work interspersed, must either deliberately forfeit some element of fullness, or must stand in little need of human solace. What Myers sacrificed was that kind of easy relationship with the world that gives to normal human beings a variety of natural pleasure. Courteous and amiable as he was in ordinary intercourse, it was yet true that he was intensely reserved. He had no desire to multiply friendships, no need to exchange the current coin of opinions and interests. His home circle and a small group of intimate friends sufficed him. Though he was a delightful host, and had many social gifts, he was very rarely to be seen at Cambridge gatherings, it was characteristic of him that, when I once sent him a book of my own, he acknowledged it at once with great warmth, but said that, though he had read it, he would express no opinion upon it. He added that he had once lost a friendship through expressing a perfectly candid opinion of a book, and that he had made a rule never to express an opinion again. It was natural enough, I felt, for a sensitive man like Myers to make such a rule : what was unnatural was that he should keep to it ; and he did not perceive that, though a direct criticism might in a single instance have caused offence, yet that to maintain and allege such a principle of action was to draw a far chillier veil between him and his friends, because it was an abnegation of natural relations. The truth was that he was really a dreamer, passing on his way intent on his own visions, and with a power of maintaining his 182 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE emotions at a high temperature, without conscious effort and without contact with other minds. But this diminished his power of affecting the world. His very repression of ambitions, social and literary, was a proof of the same thing. Most people are ambitious, not so much because they covet the prize in itself, as because it is natural to desire what others desire. But in this Myers was wonderfully self-sufficing, and absolutely independent of opinion. He did not hanker after applause, or he had overcome the hankering ; and he craved for evidences of personal immortality, not because he primarily longed to satisfy the aspirations of others, but because he could not rest until he had put his own life on a secure basis. He had all the fire of a poet ; but he had, too, the temper of a stoic, and found a medicine for his sensitive and restless disposition in cultivating, as far as he could, an undisturbed tranquillity. This is not to be dis- missed as a selfish attitude. A man may serve his generation by abjuring the easy give-and-take of life, and absorbing himself in an investigation the results of which may be fruitful in happiness for others. If Myers had been able to establish beyond reasonable doubt the conclusions which he was in search of, he would have been a benefactor to humanity. He did establish his belief to his own satisfaction, but through a complexity of investigation and emotion which was not simple enough to carry a general conviction. But after all a man must choose his own method and follow his own ideals. What is inspiriting about the life of Myers is that no one can doubt the FREDERIC MYERS 183 solemnity and nobility of his quest, or fail to admire the patient ardour with which it was pursued. But the two characteristics which seem to me to distin- guish the inner life of Myers, so far as I apprehend it, from most other lives lived on similar lines, are these. In the first place, the strongly sensuous temperament, such as his was, is generally one that exhausts sensation and vitality in the frank pursuit of satisfaction, and ends either in a morose dis- illusionment or a dreary scepticism, as the fire and savour of life are extinguished, and there seems nothing to take their place ; or else it is succeeded by a business-like materialism that is temperate by way of precaution, in order to husband and econo- mise its resources of pleasure. But in Myers this was not the case : rather, as life went on, the current ran more clear and swift than ever. I know no man who seems to have lived more con- sistently in a sort of rapture of thought, without wearied or discontented interludes, but in an im- passioned ecstasy of sweetness. In this he was a mystic, and his joyful serenity of mind is just what one finds in the lives of mystics. But as a rule, the mystic is born and not fashioned, and begins at the very outset of life to taste and enjoy the high pleasures of austerity. Very rarely does a man attain to the inner joys of contemplation who has begun by feeling the fascinations of the outer and material claims of beauty and delight. But the mysticism of Myers differs from other mysticism in the quality of its energy. The mystic, as a rule, gains his strength by recognising and augmenting the consciousness of some tremendous 1 84 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE personal force above and about him a force with which he can link himself and travel heavenwards, carried rather than self-impelled, as the fly that sits on the wayfarer's shoulder as he mounts the hill. But with Myers it was rather the sense of his own personality, his private hopes of immortality, the ideal of what he himself might become, that urged him on. It was a self-centred life, though not an egotistical one. The egotist is interested in what he is, in the smallest incidents of his actual life ; but Myers disregarded all this proudly and serenely, and was interested rather in what he might some day be. Neither did he lose sight of humanity ; but he thought of others rather as heirs of the same hopes which he himself cherished than as spirits whom he could affect and guide. Just as Newman, in that strange and courageous emptying out of his inmost spirit given in the Apologia, confessed that his ultimate thought was " Shall I be safe, if I die to-night ? " so Myers recognised that his first concern was his own pilgrimage, and could not merge his own personality in the hopes and fears of other pilgrims. This attitude of mind may easily become ignoble ; but it was saved from all that in the case of Myers by the supremely spiritual character of his visions, and by his real scorn of all the base and sordid elements of life. The significance of such a record needs but little emphasis. I can. only say that I have known no man who so searched the sources of human joy, and lived with such continuous exaltation in spiritual aspiration. I care little for the fact that he wandered far and wide. The fact remains FREDERIC MYERS 185 that the only unhappy periods of his life were those when he rested too securely on material and physical things, and when he sank despairingly into a period of stagnant negation. Of course it may be logically urged that such a conviction as that to which he came must be subjective ; and I must reluctantly confess that the particular evidence on which he based his beliefs does not carry the same conviction to myself. I believe that what came to Myers was an intuition of the truth, and that the definite apparatus of his belief was rather the consequence than the cause of his conviction. But, after all, it is the intuition that matters rather than the argument. It may be said that this is an unsatisfactory conclusion to draw ; but one sees the same serene conviction of God and of immortality arriving to men of different creeds and different religions, while at the same time one sees that many of these lofty souls tend to base their assurance on particular schemes of dogma when the dogmas are mutually exclusive. His mortal body sleeps in English soil ; but in the cemetery at Rome, close by Shelley's grave, is the tablet which records his death, and there is engraved the verse of Homer which he loved, and which so fitly sums up the scope and goal of his life VfjNAfMMS *]l> T tyvxfjV KO4 VWTTOV TO.lp6)V. So runs the stately verse "desiring his own soul's life and his comrades' home-coming." It was home, after all, that he longed for for him- 186 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE self and for all those whom he loved ; not the pleasant bypaths of life, nor the sunny slopes of the sleeping hills, but the very home and goal of all " The spiritual city with all her spires And gateways, in a glory like one pearl. No larger, though the goal of all the saints." VIII BISHOP LIGHTFOOT THOUGH Lightfoot was one of the most familiar figures of my early childhood, it never, strange to say, dawned upon me that he was a man of the least eminence, distinction, or even ability, till my early days at Eton, when he became, or I became aware that he was, a member of the Eton Governing Body. Up till that time he had been to me nothing but a sturdy, unimpressive, good- natured, and silent clergyman, who appeared at intervals in our family circle as unquestioned as the sun or moon. I had no idea where he lived or what he did, nor the faintest curiosity to inquire. I thought, I suppose, that he was a friend of my father's ; but when he came, the two never seemed to have anything particular to say to each other. The friendships of grown-up people are incompre- hensible to children, because they seem so unin- telligible and so dreary. The essence of a childish friendship is primarily that one should have some fun, and nothing resembling fun ever seemed to pass between my father and his oldest and dearest friend. I do not know what I should have thought if I had been told that, not so many years before, my father, with youthful irritation at the precision of "Joe's" packing arrangements, and the length 187 i88 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE of time that they consumed, had slipped upstairs in my grandmother's house, where they were both staying, and inserted the tongs, poker, and shovel into Lightfoot's portmanteau, that on his return to Cambridge he might find himself in a position at once painful and ridiculous, and be wholly unable to explain his violation of the rites of hospi- tality. But no such human reminiscence ever reached my ears. The only thing that brought him down to our level, except the presents he invariably bestowed on us, was the fact that he could be counted upon at intervals to become involved in excruciating paroxysms of laughter, in which his cries took on a shrill quality, quite at variance with his ordinary utterance, and the tears streamed down his cheeks. I can just remember in 1868 a long coach-drive in South Wales, to a watering- place where we were all going for a summer holiday, during which Lightfoot sat immersed in a small red book, refusing to look at the scenery, and every now and then bursting into helpless explosions of laughter. This lasted the whole drive. The book was Alice in Wonderland, which had just appeared. Again, I can remember his examining with an air of polite sympathy a series of very grotesque caricatures of my mother represented in various capacities by a girl-cousin of ours. He passed over a design for a stained-glass window, in which she figured as a saint, with an internal quiver. But when he came to a design for an equestrian statue in the Georgian style, the horse pawing the air, supported by a heavy post, and my mother represented with a look of infinite BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 189 disdain, holding an extended roll of parchment, the familiar sounds arose, while he ejaculated between the throes, "She has caught the features . . . and idealised them ! " But as a rule Lightfoot was noted for an imper- turbable silence. It has been said that he was painfully shy, and would have given much to be able to join in social conversation. That was not the impression he gave : he seemed quite content to be silent, and appeared to be preoccupied. There is a story that late in his life an American lady, to whom he was unknown, said to him on the platform of a Scotch station, pointing to a distinguished ecclesiastic, " I am told that the Bishop of Durham is in this train ; can you tell me if that tall, handsome man is he ? " " No, ma'am," said Lightfoot, " the Bishop of Durham is very short and plain." There was no doubt about the truth of the description. Lightfoot was ugly, not with a repellent or grotesque ugliness, but with an honest and straightforward plainness. He had a strong cast in his eye, so that one was never quite sure what he was regarding. The lower part of his face was very heavy, with a great under-hung jaw and thick lips. He looked, and was, a man of extraordinary determination. His body was sturdy and clumsy, and his rather small and dapper legs and feet seemed disproportioned to his weight. But this did not detract from the fact that at a function he bore himself with a fine deliberate dignity, and had a stately uplifted look which gave one a sense of immense force and weight. But in ordinary life he was, as the rustics say, "no company." igo THE LEAVES OF THE TREE He did not even, as some silent people do, establish a sort of intimacy by kindly and humorous glances. He seldom looked at any one, and appeared uncon- scious of the presence of others. He always ate a hearty meal, and his habit of breathing only through his mouth added somehow to the sense of his solidity. He rarely spoke to us as children, yet he somehow contrived to give us a sense of great kindliness and even interest. I remember once, as an Eton boy, stopping him, as he came with his rather precise, light walk down the aisle of St. Paul's, and not only receiving the warmest greeting, but being carried off to the Chapter House, where he lived, and being entertained at an abundant extemporised meal, with much silent goodwill. Lightfoot's friendship with my father began at school. He was born in 1828, the son of a Liver- pool accountant, and after his father's death, his mother, who was the sister of J. V. Barber, the artist, migrated to Birmingham, her native town. Both my grandfather and Mrs. Lightfoot lived some little way out of Birmingham, and the two boys had an arrangement by which, on going in to school, the one who first came to a particular corner waited as long as he could, and, if he went on alone, was under a pledge to put a stone into a certain hole in the wall, to show that he had passed. Lightfoot was a popular, humorous boy, extremely strong, but not athletic. The chief recreation which he and my father practised was to take immense pilgrimages on foot, on free days, to the surrounding towns and places of interest. Lightfoot went up to Trinity in 1847, an< ^ BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 191 with Westcott, who was three years his senior ; my father joined him a year later, and thus the triple friendship was formed. My father and Lightfoot can hardly have been very normal undergraduates. They had certain fixed engagements. One was always to breakfast together on Sundays off a cold pie, and read the Fathers. I have lying before me as I write two thin books, bound in black leather, containing the services of the Canonical hours, from Prime to Compline, written out by the two friends their handwriting was then strangely similar and care- fully rubricated with red initial letters. At least my father's copy has the initial letters. Lightfoot's copy has a few, but the task of mere ornamentation appears to have wearied him. They always met together the last thing, and said Compline. The interesting point is that this was not, as it might easily have been, an aesthetic fancy, but a matter of serious and unaffected devotion. Lightfoot took the highest honours, and was elected to a Fellow- ship at Trinity in 1852, the tradition being that my father beat him in the examination, but that, being his junior, his election was deferred till the following year. Lightfoot settled down to College work, was ordained, and became a tutor of the College in his twenty-ninth year. He had intended to annotate the great Orestean trilogy of ^Eschylus, but this was gradually and happily abandoned for a work which was intended to comprise all the Pauline Epistles. His relation with his pupils was interesting and characteristic. 192 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE Many of them never discovered that he was any- thing but a shy, silent, firm, and good-humoured man. But there was a strong romantic fibre in Lightfoot's composition ; he loved youth, and high spirits, and graceful demeanour, and the gaiety which he envied but could not emulate. He liked taking undergraduates on reading parties, and those who took courage to approach him confidently found themselves met with eager affec- tion and unfeigned delight. He became Hulsean Professor at the early age of thirty-three, and his lectures, contrary to custom, attracted large and enthusiastic audiences. It was a time of great theological disquiet and clerical animosity. The privileged monopoly of the Church of England was being actively assailed ; but Lightfoot's good sense and deliberate toleration helped to keep things quiet at Cambridge. He never had the least touch of the odium theologicum about him, and treated denominational leanings, and even latitudinarian speculation, as matters of personal preference, not as objects of Pharisaical persecution. Being transparently honest himself, he took the honesty of other people for granted. His career at Cambridge was one of quiet in- dustry, unaffected devotion, and steadily increasing distinction. His physical strength and his power of work were enormous. He found time to teach, to write, to take a large part in administrative business, and was regarded with extraordinary respect and affection on all sides. He refused the Bishopric of Lichfield in 1867, before he was forty. But he accepted a Canonry BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 193 of St. Paul's in 1871, where he became a great and effective preacher, while he added to his labours a membership of the Universities Com- mission in 1877, and was one of the Revisers of the New Testament. Indeed, it is certain that that revision, which has been so unfavourably criticised, bears the marks of Lightfoot's influence to a far larger degree than it bears the marks of any other individual mind, except perhaps of West- cott's. Lightfoot always adhered to his deliberate principles in the matter, and maintained that the objections made to the new text were almost entirely due to the unrecognised effect of mere familiarity with the old. I recollect well how, in January 1879, an urgent telegram arrived from Lightfoot to my father, who was then Bishop of Truro, and how he travelled down by night for a day of anxious conference. He had been offered the Bishopric of Durham by Lord Beaconsfield, and his face and demeanour testified to his extreme perplexity. None of his friends had the smallest doubt that it was his duty to accept, but he did not share their con- fidence. It meant for him giving up duties with which he was entirely familiar, and which no one doubted he was discharging with immense effectiveness. It meant his abandoning his life- work on the Pauline Epistles. He was, on the other hand, faced with the prospect of a task which was not wholly congenial. He knew that he had no social gifts : he had no power of saying deftly the pointed criticism or the appropriate compliment. He had lived entirely in academic circles, he knew N i 9 4 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE nothing of the world. But he made his choice. He was rewarded by finding that he had an extra- ordinary aptitude for detailed administrative work, and that his sturdy good sense, his unpretentious simplicity, and his unfailing good-humour, recom- mended him at once to the confidence and affec- tion of the laity, high and low, of his great diocese, from the county magnate who could recognise a straightforward Christian gentleman, to the pitman who knew an honest man when he saw him. The private background to his public life was a very delightful one. In the summer of 1879 I went up with my father to stay at Bishop Auckland. I was fairly staggered by the immense princely mansion of florid Gothic, with its pleasaunce, its stone screens, its ranges of bedrooms, its vast throne-room where the old levees of the Prince- Bishops used to take place, and its stately chapel, rich in woodwork. Lightfoot had established himself there with two young chaplains, both men of great social charm the present Bishop of Wakefield and the present Dean of Lichfield. He had, too, half-a-dozen theological students, young graduates, who lived a free and delightful life, half domestic, half collegiate. It was evident that he was enjoying himself to the full. He treated his young men with a charming, indulgent, fraternal affection, poking fun at them in his quiet way, and enjoy- ing the free but respectful banter which he en- couraged them to use. The young men read their books, were lectured by the chaplains, and worked in the neighbouring pit-villages. All the BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 195 meals were taken in common, and he would re- ceive no payment for their expenses. His large- handed generosity was indeed one of his most marked characteristics : money streamed from him, not only in small subscriptions, but in great princely gifts. Simple as he was, he liked the state of his great house. I remember driving once with him and my father through the disparked chase. At what seems to me now to have been an immense distance from the Castle, we passed a great solemn lodge-gate. "Yes, it is bewildering, but rather shocking," said Lightfoot, "to think that my personal domain extended as far as this 1 " Happy as his Cambridge time had been, I believe that the time of his episcopate was the happiest period of his life. His strength seemed equal to all demands, he organised the immense diocese with ease and success, he attracted devoted helpers to the North, he felt that he possessed the thorough confidence of his great flock, and he had the happy back- ground of his college of friendly students. Occasionally the sense of humour which lay at the back of his mind found a quiet vent. There is a delightful story of how a very loquacious and prolix gentleman came to stay with him at Auckland, and deluged the party with minute domestic details, referring to his own family circle. The Bishop followed his annals for a time, and then became lost in silent meditation. There suddenly alighted on a dish of oranges a large solitary bluebottle, which had often been noticed, apparently the only winter occupant, of its species, of the big dining- hall. The Bishop caught sight of it, and fixing 196 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE his eyeglass, cried out with delight, " Hullo, hullo I there's our fly ! Look at him ! " This effected a diversion, and the rest of the history had to be entrusted to subordinate ears. But apart from his own circle he did not succeed in manifesting any particular social ease. The last time but one that I saw him he came to stay at Addington. There were some visitors in the house, who were intensely curious to see him. I was with them in the drawing-room just before dinner, when the door was cautiously opened and a large head was inserted. The Bishop, having thus ascertained that it was the right place, screwed his eyeglass into his eye, advanced into the room in his precise manner, and took up his position on the hearthrug in absolute silence. I presented the eager visitors. He shook hands in silence, and stared at the chan- delier. I did what I could, but he was obdurate, and did not utter a word until the other guests appeared. In 1888 he had a sudden breakdown in health, the result of symptoms disregarded and the im- mense strain of his work. He went to Braemar for a holiday, where I saw him for the last time. I went to the hotel where he was staying, which had two projecting bow-windows, at each end of the front. The first-floor windows on each side were open. As we approached, I saw that Light- foot was standing at one, looking out on the drive, while at the other was visible the noble head, with its finely-cut features, its sanguine tinge, adorned by Olympian curls, of Sir Frederic Leighton. It was a strange contrast : both men were invalided, BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 197 and by the same complaint. I was much shocked at Lightfoot's appearance ; he looked aged, frail, and broken. He was thin and drawn the ghost of his former self. His eyes seemed to be larger, and had a fixed and suffering stare. I never saw a man with death so legibly written in his face ; and he had, too, a distressing apathy and languor about him, very different from his old sturdy cheer- fulness. It is a grievous pity that the great por- traits of him, by Sir W. B. Richmond, at Auckland and Trinity, faithfully record this last enfeebled stage. I have no thought of trying here to estimate the range and worth of Lightfoot's exegetical work. What I wish to bring out is the tone and character of his mind, and the spirit in which he laboured. The principle on which he worked at the Pauline Epistles seems simple and obvious enough when it is once forcibly stated. The surprising thing is that it had never been so clearly stated and pursued before. Previous commentators on St. Paul had worked from a standpoint of classical Greek ; they had been brought up and nourished, that is to say, on a language which had reached its full perfection four or five hundred years before St. Paul wrote. The result was that they thought of the Pauline or Hellenistic Greek as to a certain extent a debased and degraded language, which had seen its best days, and had no unimpeachable monuments of literary taste to recommend it. They recognised, of course, that it was in a sense an altered language with a different terminology, different usages, and with transmuted literary values and nuances. But 198 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE the perfection of the masterpieces of the golden age of Attic Greek had so sunk into their minds that they could not put themselves at the new angle. They thought of St. Paul, perhaps not quite con- sciously, as of a man whose intention it was to use Attic Greek, but in whose case the purity of the language at its best had been vitiated by an unfortu- nate deterioration of usage. The very terms he used, the nouns and adjectives denoting abstract qualities, appeared to them to retain their earlier significance and to connote the earlier ideas. Of course the surprising thing is that the language, in so long a lapse of time, had on the whole altered so little, and that very fact tended to augment the error. Lightfoot's position was that St. Paul was using a perfectly definable language, with an absolutely distinct and ascertainable terminology of its own, and that he was using it with all the skill of a literary artist, who knew quite well what he was about, and expressed with entire lucidity and force what he intended to say. Lightfoot's view, then, was that one must not read the writings of St. Paul through classical spectacles, but that one must endeavour, by comparison of his language with contemporary Hellenistic Greek, to ascertain what the words he was using did actually mean to him and to his contemporaries. Lightfoot had been brought up in the school of Prince Lee, and had imbibed from the first a method of precise verbal analysis. But he was not, like Westcott, misled by any strain of poetical fancy. A writer like St. Paul, who is anxious to prove his points in a BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 199 dialectical way, and to work out definite trains of thought, does not use words in a mystical and poetical sense, haunted with a consciousness of their history and tradition. He does not, as a poet might, desire to produce a vague atmosphere of remote associations, but to make an intricate and subtle matter as clear as possible to his readers. Westcott was almost hampered by the knowledge of what words and tenses might have meant, or had meant, at an earlier stage in the literary history of Greek. But Lightfoot, with the admirable common-sense and hardheadedness that character- ised him, saw that St. Paul was using contemporary Greek in such a way as to make his meaning absolutely intelligible to his followers. And the result was that Lightfoot was able to follow and to reproduce the exact thought in St. Paul's mind, in a way in which it had never been analysed before. Thus his paraphrases of the Pauline argument, though they have little literary grace, are perfectly invaluable to all who desire to see what was the line of argument which St. Paul was pursuing. In one respect it is possible that this method affected him unduly. Any one who has studied the Authorised Version of the Scriptures in connection with the Greek, will know that the Jacobean trans- lators used a considerable variety of English words to translate the same word in Greek, and seem to have been guided more by the metrical euphony of the translation than by strict linguistic inter- pretation. Lightfoot was very strongly in favour of the same word in English being invariably used 200 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE for the same word in Greek. The principle is on the whole sound ; but the correspondence can never be quite exact. Sometimes the original Greek word will have a more extended range of meaning than the corresponding English word, and vice versa, and sometimes it may happen that a word is used in one special aspect in a particular passage which may not correspond to its more general equivalent in English. The principle is no doubt right in the main, though it may be possible to defend a certain elasticity of exceptions. There was one special point in Lightfoot's theo- logical work which needs a word. He is often quoted as an instance of a writer of impeccable accuracy who admitted that Episcopacy was not part of the primitive order of the Church. It is an entire misunderstanding. Lightfoot believed and taught that Episcopacy was an Apostolic institution Monarchical Episcopacy, as it is called, apart from mere presidential functions. He referred the probable establishment of it to the closing years of St. John's life, and to his personal sanction. What he did teach was that it was subsequent to the establishment of the Priest- hood, and grew naturally out of it as a consistent development of Church authority. He more than once made a public contradiction of the mis- understanding, which, for all that, had and has a curious persistence. But, speaking generally, the whole of Lightfoot's exegetical work is marked by certain main character- istics detachment, neutrality, historical insight. He showed in the first place an admirable common- BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 201 sense, almost of the nature of genius. He never had the slightest touch of the advocate about his writings. He went to the Pauline Epistles with the desire of finding out what they actually meant, not to confirm what they were expected to mean, or what they had been understood to mean, and still less with any idea of making them express what he himself wished to believe. His tone was like a clear and fresh wind blowing through the mist of ecclesiastical prepossessions and tradi- tions, which it was deemed unsafe to disturb. He had no fear of insecurity or uncertainty. His work was to interpret a great writer with trans- parent honesty, not to accentuate the bias which had been imported into his words by writers whose creed was more definite than their scholarship. And from one ecclesiastical quality he was wholly and entirely free. He had no touch of the doctrinaire about him. He was really and truly tolerant. He was not in the least impatient or contemptuous of opinions contrary to his own, so long as they were founded upon sound and laborious investigation. What put him in a superior position was the pre-eminent patience and the candour of his own work. It may be possible to take up the position that St. Paul was mistaken, or that he had not sufficient data before him to form his conclusions ; but it is hardly possible to disagree with Lightfoot as to what the data were from which St. Paul worked, or what the actual conclusions were which he did, as a matter of fact, draw from them. It is not too much to say that Lightfoot got as near to the mind 202 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE of a writer of high and inspired genius as it is possible to get. Perhaps the only one of Lightfoot's writings in which there is any touch of controversial animus is the refutation which he published of a book which appeared in 1874, entitled Supernatural Religion, which professed to show that there was no miraculous element in Christianity, that miracles are indeed antecedently incredible, that the evidence obtainable from the Apostolic period is untrust- worthy, and that the four Gospels have no sufficient warrant for their reputed date and authorship. Lightfoot considered the criticisms in the book loose, pretentious, and full of errors, and he thought that "a cruel and unjustifiable attack" was made in the book on a very dear friend, to whom he was attached "by the most sacred personal and theological ties." The book had attracted a good deal of attention, because it was believed to be the work of a prominent and respected Bishop. But it is characteristic of Lightfoot's affectionate and generous nature that the one and only time that any note of personal severity appears in his writings was when it was induced by his chivalrous affection for a companion and friend. Of course it is useless to pretend that scientific observation and the application of the scientific method has not put religious controversy within the last fifty years on very different lines from those on which it had been hitherto conducted. Formerly, when the historical basis of Christianity was not substantially doubted, religious controversy mainly concerned itself with the interpretation BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 203 rather than with the origin of Christian documents. Now, when the history of testimony and evidence generally, and the investigation of its psychological basis, are better understood, the tendency is not so much to impugn the bona fides of the writers of early records, as to suggest that their observation and their opportunities of investigating evidence were at fault. The important thing is for the defenders of orthodox Christianity to approach the documentary evidence in a spirit of open- minded candour, to make it clear what earlier writers actually said and wrote, and to establish as far as possible their substantial accuracy. In the first heyday of scientific opposition to religious claims, the tendency was to deride and to dismiss the whole of the miraculous element as a mixture of credulity and pious invention. But now, when the border-line between the normal and the ab- normal seems less clearly ascertained, the con- troversy assumes a more scientific aspect. The opponents of religious belief are inclined now to say, not "We can accept no record of miraculous events as genuine," but rather, "Show us for certain that the miraculous events recorded are indisputably true, and we will regard them as manifestations of a natural force of an abnormal character, which are then the outcome of definite laws, which we will proceed to investigate." What is demanded is that supernatural forces should not be regarded as purely arbitrary and fortuitous, but that they should be looked upon as the symp- toms of a definite if unknown force, and as such be added to the phenomena which it is man's 204 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE business to investigate. The whole province of psychology which deals with imagination and opinion requires still to be scientifically surveyed. We are as yet only on the threshold of that region. The work which Lightfoot did was the putting of certain phenomena, certain products of the human mind, certain recorded experiences of a bygone age, in a perfectly clear and pure light. If theologians had always worked in that spirit, and not in the spirit of the partisan fighting to con- firm foregone conclusions, the strife would have lost much of its bitterness. But after all, the most remarkable fact in the career of Lightfoot is that, after accepting the See of Durham with real misgiving and something of considerable though Godly fear, he became so instantly and even blithely at home there. Partly it was the intense relief at finding himself able, without effort and reluctance, to do the work of the See easily and with dignity. Every one, it is said, ought to have a complete and entire change of habits and work at least once in a lifetime. This was Lightfoot's great change ; and there is probably a physical justification for it. From using the scholarly and erudite lobes of the brain, he passed to the work of organisation, to financial schemes, to public activities. He made acquaint- ance with new faces and with a totally different kind of persons from those who had peopled the academical seclusion in which he had lived. His romantic and paternal sympathy with youth made him take great delight in his Confirmation work. BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 205 He liked the pitmen, and their shrewd, critical wel- come. He liked the clergy of his diocese, and the sensible, kindly laymen of his County Palatine. If he did not talk easily to them, they on the other hand found it easy to talk to the great scholar, who turned out to be so simple and un- affected a man. He established a marvellous hold over them. When he produced a great scheme for Church extension, it was thought that he would receive but little support ; but when .30,000 had been subscribed in the room, on the occasion of the first meeting, a bewildered critic said, "The Diocese has gone mad." It proved a sustained and reasonable madness 1 My impression as a boy, when I saw him at Auckland, was that he was in high spirits, and enjoying himself with an effervescence of cheerfulness such as I had never seen him exhibit before ; instead of being, as I had seen him to be when the decision was pending, an anxious and careworn man, he seemed alert and lively, overflowing with good-humour and enjoyment. He was among his young men like a busy man taking a holiday. He was proud of his magnificent house, and had a simple and frank pleasure in the state of his great position. There was a pompous Bishop of Bristol in the eighteenth century who was fond of stating that he was a peer of the realm, with the addition of the unctuous formula, "God knows how un- worthy ! " Lightfoot did not labour under a sense of unworthiness. If those whose task it was to find the worthiest occupant of the See had decided that he could adequately fill it, and 206 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE if the friends who knew him well had confirmed their choice, he was content to do his best. There is no sort of doubt that those years of joyful strength and activity were the happiest years of his life. Some of his friends were surprised, and even pained, that he could transfer his interests so wholeheartedly from Cambridge to his Northern See ; they had half hoped that he would have hankered after the old collegiate days and the academical attitude, as the sailor at sea longs for the green fields of home. But he did not show the slightest disposition to regret his choice ; and his dear friend and successor, Bishop Westcott, summed up the situation by saying that he was delighted to find that Cambridge was forgotten by Lightfoot, and wisely forgotten ; and that he recognised in Lightfoot, in his new life, the same true comrade and wise friend, only all translated into a larger scale. When, after his great break- down in health, Lightfoot returned for too short a time to work, he made a statement on the subject, in a public speech, of almost sublime manliness. He then hoped that he had regained, or would regain, his old vigour ; but he said, boldly and frankly, that if his overwork had meant a sacrifice of life, he would not have regretted it for a moment : " I should not have wished to recall the past, even if my illness had been fatal. For what, after all, is the individual life in the history of the Church ? Men may come and men may go individual lives float down like straws on the surface of the waters till they are lost in the ocean of eternity ; but the broad, mighty, rolling BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 207 stream of the Church itself the cleansing, purify- ing, fertilising tide of the River of God flows on for ever and ever." That is really the secret of happiness to dare to subordinate life and personal happiness and individual performance to an institution or a cause, and to be able to lose sight of petty aims and selfish considerations in the joy of manly service. And then there is another point which must be emphasised that Lightfoot in his utterances about life always subordinated the sense of the duty of work to the sense of the pleasure of work. This is one of the simple secrets of life that is constantly overlooked in surveying the lives of others. We know, most of us, that we enjoy our own work Le travail, il n'y a que fa ! but we have seldom enough imagination to transfer the sense of our own enjoyment into the view we take of the work of others. We are too apt to think of work, if not on our own lines, with a sense of compassion and wonder that people can be so much absorbed in what seems dreary and uninteresting. This is particularly the case with erudition. We are apt to think of the laborious investigator as a man sustained by an incompre- hensible standard of duty. We should rather think of him as a man engaged in so beloved a pursuit, so congenial an exercise of mind, that his one danger is that of excessive indulgence in an activity that is both desirable and adorable. The spirit of enjoyment is visible in the whole of Lightfoot's work. To make a complicated position perfectly clear, to ransack every possibly 2o8 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE source of information, to leave something abso- lutely complete, is one of the very highest and most overmastering of intellectual pleasures. And this pleasure was in Lightfoot's case infinitely heightened by the extraordinary candour and fairness of his mind, so that he never approached a question with the desire to emphasise his own predispositions, but simply to present the facts as truthfully as possible. The impression, then, that the life of Lightfoot leaves upon the mind is of a man of immense mental power, wholly freed, by a large tranquillity of outlook and a remarkable balance of physical facul- ties, from any of those troublesome individualistic traits which are apt to haunt the path of the in- tellectual man. He was wholly free from morbidity, vanity, jealous suspicion, and caprice ; and, what is even more rare, he had no tendency to over-subtlety, no aloofness of view, no exaggerated respect for in- tellectual distinction. Men nurtured in academic influences are apt to be lacking in imaginative sympathy for those whose mental processes are simpler and more restricted, and are inclined to rate purely intellectual capacity, apart from character, too high among the motive forces of the world. Lightfoot never made any such mistakes. He valued men for their moral qualities more than for their mental performances. His own work was a moral rather than an artistic process, and depended more upon patience, clearheadedness, and industry than upon brilliance or suggestiveness. He had little of Westcott's poetry and speculative intent- BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 209 ness ; he had hardly any of my father's passionate love of ecclesiastical tradition and sacred associa- tions. He had little instinct for emphasising either the beauty of holiness or the holiness of beauty. Rightness of conduct, justice, purity, laboriousness, were the qualities he valued best and practised most. He was held by some to be unappreciative of the work of others, and sparing of his praise ; the fact was that he cared nothing for applause himself and detested compliments, and he did not realise that others could value what seemed to him to be un- meaning and uncomfortable civilities. But all this makes him perhaps the strongest witness that this generation has seen to the vital and literal truth of Christianity. The Christian faith is so bound up with the history, the passion- ate hopes, the great affections of men, that idealistic natures are apt to make light of the critical diffi- culties which surround its origin, in the light of its splendid successes, its emblazoned roll of heroes. Again, the surpassing beauty and sweetness of the Gospel story, and its profound appeal to the sensi- bilities of peace-loving hearts, are apt to cause a surrender of reason and logical exactness in the minds of those who are reduced to despair by the stupidities and brutalities of humanity, and the in- tolerable delays that beset the path of emotional progress. But Lightfoot brought to his consideration of the origins and records of Christianity a sturdy, lucid, and prosaic mind, absolutely fearless and candid, incapable of any sacrifice of truth and reasonable- ness. His faith was neither mystical nor symbolical ; O 210 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE it was plain, direct, and sensible. Through nebulous tradition, through the distortions of biassed partisans, through obscure and unverifiable testimony, he discerned and realised the actuality of the central figure of Christianity. His reason was never dragged at the chariot-wheels of adoration j he worshipped because he believed, and he believed because his reason was satisfied. It is impossible to suspect Lightfoot of any concession to opinion or sentiment. He was a man of profound and balanced intellect ; and he deduced with an almost mathematical exactness from the first recorded ripples of Christian thought the divine energy of the central spring. If a man with Lightfoot's quality of mind had been a determined opponent of Christianity, there would have been countless doubters who would have sheltered themselves under his asgis. Yet he would have been the last to desire that any living man should have pinned his faith upon the faith of another. He had no taste for leadership, no desire for personal domination ; he did not desire any credit for his services to truth, nor did he wish to be admired and applauded for presenting an interesting and attractive theory of religious orthodoxy. There was nothing which he preached so constantly or practised so firmly as the duty of tolerance, of adaptability, of respect for sincere if hostile opinion ; and thus he became a witness for Christian truth whom it is in the highest degree unphilosophical to overlook or disregard. Like James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, so Lightfoot might have said of the faith, with the Psalmist of old, " I bear up the pillars of BISHOP LIGHTFOOT 211 it." It is, of course, the last thing he would have either said or thought ! It was not that he under- valued his work or depreciated its importance. He simply had neither the time nor the taste for the garlands and the trumpets of life. He worked among the sheepfolds with the same integrity, diligence, and kindliness as he used when he came into his kingdom ; and he passed through life very much as Mr. Greatheart accompanied the pilgrims, loving the work he was sent to do, with an amused tenderness for the young and weak, a sturdy self- confidence that was neither rash nor egotistical, and a very practical dexterity in dealing with the giants who encumber, now as then, the road to the city of God. IX HENRY BRADSHAW HENRY BRADSHAW was born in 1831. He came of an interesting stock. His father was a Quaker, and he was descended from the great banking .family of the Hoares. His direct ancestor was a near blood-relative of the famous regicide ; " but my mother was a Stewart," he used humorously to add. He was educated at Eton, where he was known as a good-humoured, indolent boy, of high moral character, and with his own clearly-defined pursuits. At Cambridge he did not distinguish himself in the prescribed studies, but succeeded to a King's Fellowship, and went for a time to be a master in St. Columba's School, near Dublin. The work was uncongenial to him, and affected his health prejudicially. He came back to Cambridge, took a College office, and held a subordinate post in the Library. In the course of the next twenty years he made himself one of the most erudite of bibliographical authorities, and in 1867 accepted the Librarianship. This post he held with marked success for twenty years. He took few holidays, and most of his work was done in helping other scholars. He died suddenly in his rooms in 1886, at the early age of fifty-five. Such is the bare biographical outline of a life HENRY BRADSHAW 213 that would seem at first sight to be not only destitute of events, but of most of the possibilities of human interest ; to resemble, indeed, the career of a worm that burrows in a dusty folio, measuring its progress not even by pages traversed, but by pages pierced, and leaving no trace of its passage from volume to volume but a little sprinkling of outpoured excavation. Yet, as a matter of fact, it would be hard to find a life more widely and firmly knit with other lives. Not only was Henry Bradshaw one who by a real genius for friendship established direct relations with a constant and increasing succession of friends of all ages, but even his very pursuits, narrow and academical as they sound, formed both the scene and material for the same multiplication of intimacies. In fact, his studies were mainly attractive to him because of the links which they afforded him with the person- alities of the past, or for the sake of those in the present on whom he might lavish the most unspar- ing help. His life, indeed, suffused as it was with tranquil charm and romantic affection, casts a vivid light upon all those mysterious figures of the past whose effect upon their contemporaries seems wholly out of proportion to the slender materials with which they worked or the quality of their actual performance. It may safely be said that of all the Cambridge men of his time there was no one who was regarded with a more loving respect, or whose death made a more sharply-felt gap in so many generations. There was no one on whom his friends more depended for a certain unchangeable regard, an affection which was both ardent and 214 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE restrained, and a perfect loyalty which never shrank from absolute candour, yet never failed to make the fullest allowance for temperament. Bradshaw was not a faultless man : he was indolent, fastidious, even whimsical ; but he had a depth and a force of nature which is more than rare, a magnanimity which was wholly unaffected and instinctive. He was sensitive without jealousy, and though he loved details, he never lost sight of the great outlines and mainsprings of humanity. I fear that I am not in the least degree capable of appreciating and still less of criticising the value of his bibliographical and archaeological work. It is certain that he held a foremost position in the bibliographical world. Much of his erudition was buried in his notebook, in scattered jottings and phrases, and much of it is embodied in the com- pleted researches of other scholars. He was con- stitutionally incapable of finishing work on his own account, but he had not the least particle of jealousy or personal ambition in him. He was only too ready to give away the results of his investigation, and he did not care for recognition. In biblio- graphy he was a sort of Sherlock Holmes with an amazing instinct for seeing the drift of a problem, and of balancing and applying details in the right place. Everything that he observed in the course of his researches threw light on some other problem that was floating in his mind. This is hardly the place to amass instances of his amazing delicacy of observation and the incredible "coincidences" which assisted his efforts. He had the faculty of keeping an enormous number of small points in his HENRY BRADSHAW 215 memory, and of focussing them all upon the detail under consideration. He read the history of a book or manuscript at a glance, and eyes, ears, and nose alike contributed their share of informa- tion. He extracted out of the bindings of books fragments of manuscript glosses which extended philological knowledge ; he had a genius for dis- covering in libraries books that had been supposed to be missing for many decades, and were mas- querading in new bindings and under erroneous titles. He did this mostly by the not very recondite process of looking at the insides of books instead of the outsides, which seems to be the habit of librarians ; and his marvellous luck came to the assistance of his skill, his patience, and his know- ledge. I have never myself been able to rate the value of bibliographical exploration very highly from the point of view of its services to literature and history. It seems to me to be the exercise of a highly delicate and artistic gift, and the pleasure derivable from it to be on a par with the pleasure derivable from any other kind of fine connoisseur- ship. Bradshaw was, I think, a very subtle and a very fortunate connoisseur. He himself admitted that bibliographical work was dry and tedious ; but it amused him, and he confessed that it was his greatest pleasure ; while it was the human element in it which throughout attracted him. " My province," he once wrote, "is to give help on certain details which most people don't care about." And again he said : " The most interesting thing to me is not so much finding particular books, as tracing the history the individuality of great 2i6 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE libraries which have come down to the present time." But what is the most remarkable fact about a man who accomplished so large an amount of erudite work, in addition to much administrative and deliberative business, both in his College and in the University, is that what he did was almost entirely done without effort, and because he liked it. It was so all through his life : as a boy and as an undergraduate he could not do the prescribed work. At Eton, instead of preparing a lesson, he would spend the time in tracing a word in the dictionary through its derivations. At Cambridge, as an undergraduate, he would for days read nothing but novels. Later in life there were several great subjects which he had more or less constantly in hand the editing of Chaucer, the history of typography, early Irish literature, mediaeval litur- giology. Yet he completed nothing. He could not work under compulsion ; when he ought to have been doing one thing he took up another. He could not force himself to do anything. He was often approached by editors to write them special articles, and he sometimes undertook to provide them. But it generally proved almost impossible to get the work out of him. It was partly an extreme fastidiousness, and a dislike of coming to any conclusion unless he had ransacked all possible records ; but it was partly a constitutional indo- lence, and an inability to coerce himself to drudgery. He was well aware of this failing. He often con- fessed it, and never condoned it. He once de- plored his inability to write French, saying that HENRY BRADSHAW 217 he was one who had a supreme love for the litera- ture and language of France, but not enough energy to master the simplest elements of grammar. "It has been my curse all through life," he once wrote, " that I want the power or gift, or whatever you like to call it, of finishing what I work at, and all the minute research in the world is only rendered more hopeless by this one failing." But it was this consciousness of a stubborn weakness which made him so tolerant of others' faults. He knew exactly what moral effort could do and what it could not do. He said once frankly that he had never been able to work at anything which did not amuse him ; but this must not be held to apply to his adminis- trative work, which was always faithfully done. Indeed, it is curious to find that this indolence of temperament and incapability of finishing co- existed in him with an extraordinary instinct for method for seeing the way in which an institution ought to be organised, a set of complicated accounts kept, a statute or a set of regulations drafted. And it is the fact that he left his mark and an indelible one on both his University and his College in such matters, and that his influence as a counsellor and administrator was real and wide. The same fact comes out, strangely enough, in his relations with his friends and family. He used to give pain and cause misunderstanding by his inability to answer letters ; indeed, he sacrificed one of his tenderest and most emotional friendships to this habit, sending no reply to reiterated letters of the most affectionate entreaty and remonstrance. It seems impossible to analyse exactly his feeling 2i8 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE on the point. He suffered acutely, he confessed, under the idea of the unanswered inquiry, the slighted affection ; but this could not make him act. In one so tender, so faithful, so laborious, it is impossible to think of this as a mere per- versity ; it must have been almost a malady of will, some mechanical suspension of volition. No one ever accused him of any lack of love or failure of dutifulness ; and yet this strange fibre of impotence lies across his character, as a thing which he pathetically deplored but seemed unable to alter. Henry Bradshaw's name was familiar enough to me as a small boy. He was my youngest brother's godfather, and the donor, in that capacity, of an envied silver cup. Of the ten friends of my father who were sponsors to his children, he was the only one who was not a clergyman. I remember well his first appearance in our circle. He arrived at Lincoln, where my father was then a canon, on a sudden visit, I should think in 1874. He was then about forty-three years old. He arrived late one evening, when we children had all gone to bed. We were full of curiosity about him, and on coming down to breakfast we saw, observed, and instantly approved. There came into the room, solidly, quietly, and imperturbably, a short, stoutly-built, plump, clean- shaven man, in a serviceable suit of grey. His hair, cut very short, bristled over his big round cranium. I fancy that he had small side-whiskers. His head was set rather low on his shoulders and thrown slightly backwards by his upright carriage. HENRY BRADSHAW 219 Everything about him was solid and comfortable ; he filled his clothes sturdily, and his neat, short- fingered hand was a pleasant one to grasp. His small eyes were half closed, and a smile half tender, half humorous, seemed to ripple secretly over his face, without any movement of his small but expressive lips. We were presented to him, and he held our hands for a moment in his own, repeating our names in a way which gave us a pleasing sense of immediate and permanent relationship to him. My father's delight in his company was as obvious and patent as his respect for our guest. I understood from that moment that Bradshaw was a man of dignity and import- ance, and though the allusiveness of his talk was beyond our comprehension, dealing much with undergraduate reminiscences, yet it was plain that he was not a mere pomposity. His humour had something darting, subtle, charmingly malicious about it, and all the time his tenderness and his emotion were obvious and visible. I saw him again some years later, when I was an Eton boy. It was in the summer of 1878 that I was coming up from the playing-fields, and near the gateway into the cloisters, under Lupton's Tower, I saw my old friend standing with the present Vice- Provost of Eton, Mr. Cornish, then one of the masters. I saluted him, and was too shy to claim Bradshaw's acquaintance ; but Mr. Cornish called to me, and said to Bradshaw, " Here is a friend of yours, I think Benson." Bradshaw gave me a quick, radiant smile and held out his hand, saying, " Of course Martin 1 " This was 220 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE the name of my elder brother, who had died at Winchester earlier in the same year. I did not speak, and I suppose I looked confused. Brad- shaw himself at once recognised the mistake, and I could see that he was extremely distressed at what he had inadvertently done. He put his arm through mine, and presently took me off to the College Library with him, where he was at work, talking quietly and affectionately about my father and mother, and then showing me some interesting things in the Library, as if to obliterate the painful impression of his involuntary mistake. When I came to go up to King's as an under- graduate in 1 88 1, my father took me to see him in his rooms. They were on the first floor in the front court, just beyond the Hall, and had a private back staircase, which came down into the kitchen passage. He greeted me very warmly and kindly, holding my hand for a minute in his, and giving it a little flick with his finger as he did so, which came to be so characteristic a greeting. "Mind," he said to me as I went away, " I want you to be at home in these rooms, and to come to see me at any time : you will be always welcome, for your father's sake " and then he gave me a little smile, darting a quick and kindly glance at me, and added, " and for your own 1 " They were great big rooms, with two large parlours, looking north and south, and a bedroom. They were heterogeneously furnished, without any attempt at taste or indeed of comfort, with books and papers all about a strange mixture of order and disorder. Most of the pictures and ornaments had some association HENRY BRADSHAW 221 connected with them, which he could generally be induced to relate. On Sunday evenings he was usually at home, and held quiet vague receptions, people coming and going and joining the circle, where the talk was of the easiest. But better still were the times when one found him alone. I remember one summer day his meeting me in the court. It was ^very hot weather, and I was in flannels. " What are you doing ? " he said. " Are you supposed to be working ? Why not come and work in my rooms ? I shall not interrupt you." I took a book and ensconced myself on his sofa, while he sat writing at the table, every now and then glancing up with a smile, as if pleased to have me with him. Then he sent for some luncheon, and we lunched together. Then we decided it was too hot to go out, so we read and talked until tea- time, when he gave me tea, and we strolled after- wards to the Fellows' Garden and sat there in the dusk. I do not know how he created, as he did, the peculiar feeling of intimacy and affection. It was done by manner and look rather than by speech, and by establishing little absurd secrets, such as children might have, which he never forgot. For instance, he used to have hanging on his watchchain a charm in the shape of a tiny silver tankard. I once made some silly objection to the incongruity of this, and he seldom failed, in talking to me, to cover it with one hand, saying " I mustn't forget you think this degrading 1 " He had a way, too, of leading one on to tell him all about one's home doings and domestic incidents, so that it became natural to inform him of anything that 222 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE happened, and to consult him if there was any friction. I remember that my father once objected to my accepting some invitation to a circle of which he did not approve. I took the letter a long, anxious, and tender document to Bradshaw, and told him the story. He read the letter and said : " Of course, you think that your liberty is being interfered with. Don't you see, you goose, that it is worth anything to have a father who cares about you like that ? " I did see it, in a flash, and felt a goose indeed ! When I had a disappointment in my Tripos, and took a lower place than I had expected, he came in to see me. " I know I understand," he said. "Of course you are disappointed, and so am I. But depend upon it, these things mean something, and it is our business to find out what they mean. They don't happen merely to annoy us." I got into the way, with the easy egotism of youth, of referring all sorts of trivial matters to him squabbles, misunderstandings, worries, fears, as well as hopes, pleasures, new friendships, successes. It was very tempting, because he always seemed, and indeed was, so much interested in the details, and his comments were not professional or hortatory, but purely sympathetic. He was tolerant, I used to think, of everything but coarse- ness, meanness, and intellectual pride. He could not bear airs of superiority ; and I have seen him pour cold water in public on priggishness, with a liberal hand. He had a way, if I made any remark to him savouring of contemptuous judgment of another, of pushing up the tip of his nose with his HENRY BRADSHAW 223 finger to indicate the nasus adimcus. I would hasten to explain, covered with ingenuous con- fusion, that I was the most tolerant of human beings. "Oh, of course, of course. That's the misfortune of having a high standard. Poor So- and-so is not quite . . . quite correct ? He hasn't the advantage of being an Etonian, like you and me!" One of the most curious things about him was his habits, or rather his absence of habits. Some- times for days together he would be secluded in his rooms, only going to and from the Library, and eating a meal, generally of tea and bread-and- butter, at any hour of the day or night. Sometimes he would be up early, sometimes lie in bed half the morning. He took, in my time, very little exercise, but occasionally he would tricycle or go for long walks. He seemed to have no settled occupations and no fixed hours for work ; but he hardly ever took a holiday, and his series of note- books, in which he wrote down every kind of miscellaneous facts, grew steadily. He was always ready to undertake any amount of congenial investi- gation for other people, while he could seldom bring himself to attend to any work of his own. One most characteristic thing about him was, that if one ever consulted him on a point of antiquity or erudition, he had always just stumbled upon the answer in the course of some other investi- gation. These "coincidences," which were always happening, filled him with extreme delight. The reason was that he had an immense and varied stock of knowledge in his mind, and never forgot 224 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE anything, so that any question extracted illustrative facts. I once travelled up to London with him, and pointed out a big house on the outskirts of London, with a large garden, which was being demolished to make room for some suburban houses. " Yes," he said, " I used often to go and play there when I was a child." A few minutes later we passed an old church, the tower of which rose from a weltering mass of new streets. I called his attention to it. " Yes," he said, " I was chris- tened there. What a coincidence ! " He was a familiar figure on Sundays in King's Chapel. He sat in the Senior Fellows' stalls on the right of the choir, his big head poised on his shoulders, enveloped in a full surplice. He always wore the old Non-regent M.A. hood of black silk, with the white lining removed, which is now used by holders of the B.D. degree. He had a trick of taking off his hood in the court after Chapel, and carefully folding it up into a neat package. But the most familiar impression of him is as he walked in the morning in cap and gown with slow, leisurely steps to the Library, along the front of the Fellows' Building and round the west end of the Chapel, with his notebook clasped to his chest. He suffered from long fits of what he called " grumpiness." " It's no use I won't stop to talk ; I am grumpy to-day." I used to inquire what was the matter. "Oh, I don't know " (with a sigh). " People are so tiresome ; it's my own sinfulness, no doubt ! " But, as a rule, he was extraordinarily equable and cheerful, and kept his moods and his ailments to himself. He was very variable about correspondence. On one HENRY BRADSHAW 225 occasion, when he was travelling in France, he wrote to me two or three times a week. At another time nothing would extract an answer from him. He was unable at times to return any answer to an invitation, and it is a well-known anecdote, how a friend of his, who had invited him to dinner and could get no reply, sent him two postcards, addressed to himself, on one of which was "Yes," and on the other " No." Bradshaw posted them both. But he was forgiven everything, and allowed to do exactly as he pleased. If he did come, people were delighted to see him ; and if he did not, it was Bradshaw, and he was privileged. His personal influence was extraordinary. It was not gained by any arts, nor did he ever manifest the slightest wish to interfere or to exercise influ- ence. One just knew him to be a man of guileless life, laborious, high-principled, incapable of any sort of meanness or malice. To love is to under- stand everything, says the French proverb. It is not easy really to improve people by scolding them or lecturing them, but if one knows that a generous, unsuspicious, high-minded man has a real affection for one, it is impossible not to be restrained by the thought from acting in a way that he would dis- approve. Bradshaw's influence over the men he knew was stronger than the influence of any man at Cambridge. But his affection was sisterly if one can use the word rather than paternal. He was fond of little demonstrations of affection, would pat and stroke one's hand as he talked, and yet there was never the least shadow of sentimentality about it. I remember that a friend of mine told P 226 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE me that he had once kissed Bradshaw's hand when he said good-bye to him, on an occasion when Bradshaw had shown him even more than his usual kindness. " I am not the Pope," he said bluffly, but the offender felt he was pleased. He had a way of picking a flower, if one was with him, and sticking it into one's buttonhole, which had some- thing gently caressing about it. Indeed, his affection for his friends had something really romantic about it. There is a letter in his Life which says to an undergraduate friend that he is tempted to think about him continually, and to write him too often. And yet I have never heard any one suggest that there was anything weak or unmanly about his tenderness. It was preserved from that by his critical judgment, his excellent sense, his power of saying the most incisive things, and the irony which, however lambent, had got a very clear cutting edge, and which he was always ready to use if there was occasion. If any one traded on the affection of Bradshaw or counted on indulgence, he was sure to be instantly and kindly snubbed. It was more that there was an atmosphere of inti- macy and confidence in one's relations with him, which pervaded the time spent in his company as with fragrant summer air. He loved directness in everything. He spoke again and again of his admiration of the men who used their energy on doing the best work they could, rather than on decrying the work of others, which he believed to be a disabling fault of Cam- bridge. He hated intrigues and manoeuvres, and maintained that the best and most effectual form of HENRY BRADSHAW 227 diplomacy was to tell your opponents your reason for disagreeing with them. So, too, in his handling of life, he detested casuistry, and believed that if things went wrong, the truest and manliest solution was to be ready to believe it was your own fault rather than the guile of others. It may be thought that this arose from fearlessness and freedom from morbidity. Fearless he certainly was, but, on the other hand, he was almost morbidly sensitive. He could not bear hostility or even coldness. He once did an elaborate and voluntary piece of work with reference to the Bodleian. The then Librarian, Mr. Coxe, received the results with what Bradshaw thought was ungracious indifference. Bradshaw threw the papers he had prepared into the fire, and confessed that he never took any real pleasure in the Bodleian again. But it remains a very difficult matter to analyse the charm of a life which had so little that was calculated or dramatic about it. It is very hard to say what it is which makes a man what may be called a figure, a distinction which appears to fall so fortuitously on men of no brilliance or predominance, and to miss so completely and unquestionably men of far higher powers and attainments. Some men achieve that particular prestige by an unconsciously artistic handling of their materials, some by an innate picturesqueness, some by a kind of secret fragrance of spirit, a balanced consistency of life. There is a charm about the exhibition of simplicity in a great position, but there is a still more potent charm about the exhibition of greatness in a simple position. There 228 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE have been famous bibliographers who have had their reward, and there have been men of deeply emotional nature who have been faithfully loved by their friends ; but the remarkable thing about Bradshaw is to note the passionate desire on the part of his friends to acclaim his greatness on grounds which, in the case of an ordinary person- ality, would only justify a moderate degree of eminence in a small and limited sphere of technical knowledge. I do not at all wish to belittle the excellence of Bradshaw's work its range was con- siderable, its quality was supreme ; but no man can be heroic in bibliography, and we must look elsewhere for the secret of the ineffaceable impres- sion he made upon his friends. The secret lies in the quality of the man's soul. In the region of affection he had a natural kingship. To put one's own petty heart in touch with his was to feel oneself enveloped by something deep and pure and lasting. If the individualities of men do indeed survive, and if, in the world that lies beyond our limited perceptions, personal intercourse, however transformed and enlarged, is possible, then I feel for myself, and I do not doubt that other friends of Bradshaw feel it too, that one will be met and welcomed and received by that sweet and gentle spirit with the same tenacity and tranquillity of affection which he so often gave us in the old un- forgotten days. I do not exaggerate when I say that to be with him on one of those quiet evenings in the scented dusk of the College garden, with its screening foliage and its winding ways, with the flowers glimmering in the bordered turf, was HENRY BRADSHAW 229 like floating in a boat on a silent moving tide. The man was always there, behind his labours and anxieties, and infinitely greater than them. I am not attributing to him any close intellectual grasp of intricate problems, any vast mental horizon ; but what he had was an immense vitality of affection, a power of loving not selfishly or desirously, not for any comfort or luxury of emotion that he might gain, but only because his heart was deep and wide. He did not condone one's faults or weakly overlook them ; he merely took you as you were, and because you were just that and nothing else, and dear to him so. He did not appraise or justify, remember or forget. He simply loved his friends as the father in the parable loved his prodigal son, because he loved him, and for no better reason. X CHARLES KINGSLEY IN the little panelled Hall of my College here at Cambridge, with its beautiful gallery and double staircase, a pair of portraits, very strangely con- trasted, gaze at each other across the long tables. One is I/ely's famous portrait of Pepys, smiling, foppish, complacent, every curve of the good- natured, sensuous, bourgeois face full of rich satis- faction, lively zest, and efficient self-importance. He has had his troubles, no doubt, and his anxieties, that genial soul, but he has enjoyed them in their turn, partly to heighten his content, and partly as being of the very essence and stuff of full-flavoured, exciting, delicious life. Opposite to him hangs a very different portrait. He has lived, too, one can see, this strong, sturdy, sanguine man, with his flashing eye, great aquiline features, and compressed lips ; but he has been looking for something behind and above existence, the untravelled world behind the arch of time, with its horizons that fade and grow so strangely. He has enjoyed life and enjoyed it fiercely ; but something has held him back from joy, and fixed his gaze firmly on pain ; and what- ever else he has tested and renounced, he has never yet sounded the depths of hope and love. The portrait of Charles Kingsley 1 CHARLES KINGSLEY 231 Could there be two men so strangely alike in one respect, and yet so wholly and utterly different alike in an indomitable zest and appetite for the joys of living, in an insatiable curiosity, in an over- powering thirst for experience ; and yet so different in view, in aim, in aspiration ? Pepys so excited by the light upon the surface of life, so entirely satisfied with movement and pleasure, with money and esteem, with sound and scent and sight yet for all his intense humanity, so unheroic, so un- consecrated a life 1 Kingsley for ever straining his eyes for the light that shines through life, so anxious to help and heal and bind up, so full of splendid rage against everything mean and brutal and stupid, so compassionate and gene- rous lover and poet, pilgrim and warrior, all in one ! Nothing is further from my thought than to moralise and shake my head over Pepys : the wretch is irresistible ; his candour, his exuberance, his delightfulness, save him from anything like dis- approval. The cloudiest brow must relax into a smile over all his frank rogueries. But for all that, he represents the stationary elements of life at its fullest. The tribe of Pepys exploit the world, but do not advance things a jot. They roll and splash about in it, as a jolly boy splashes about in a river under a summer sun. But it is through Kingsley and his tribe that the world takes shape, and learns to be just and eager and forgiving. The two men are in wholly different regions. While Pepys revels in the sunlit valley, Kingsley is out prospecting on dark mountains, and catching the gleam of some 232 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE further sunrise gilding the towers and battlements of the city of God. Charles Kingsley came of a long line of country gentlemen and soldiers, and belonged to the pleasant county of Devonshire, where he was born in 1819, and which he loved all his life with a romantic love. His father was a clergyman, not wholly by choice, though in a sturdy British fashion he did his work remarkably well ; and there was a strong strain of artistic genius in the family ; two of Kingsley's brothers were well-known authors indeed, it is a tenable theory that Henry Kingsley was an even better novelist than Charles. He was a precocious and imaginative child, fond of books, but even more passionately devoted to the open air and natural history. His father be- came Rector of St. Luke's, Chelsea, in 1836, and Kingsley was sent to King's College, London. He hated the town life, and was dreadfully bored by the parochial atmosphere of his home. He entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, 1838, where but few traditions of him survive. He lived a life of tremendous energy, not wholly on conventional lines. He was popular for his animal spirits, his courtesy, and his humour ; he worked, rode, drove, fished, played cards with immense zest. His cure for stupidity and headache was to tramp across country in a roaring fen-wind, and it is recorded that he scaled the wall of the back court at two o'clock on a summer morning, to begin fishing at the neighbouring village of Shelford at three. He took a First Class in the Classical Tripos, but he was not looked upon with much favour by the CHARLES KINGSLEY 233 authorities, and was not elected to a Fellowship, as he had hoped. He never concealed the fact that his life had been distinctly a fast one at Cambridge. And he certainly went through a profound religious crisis, a battle between his instinct for goodness and purity and his strong animal passions. He thought of it all afterwards with manly regret and shame. But it is no less certain that his stormy experiences gave him a unique power of sympathy with the troubles of young men, and an extraordinary delicacy and frankness in dealing with them. He was saved from this downward career by meeting his future wife, Miss Grenfell, a woman of real genius, intensely ardent, devoted, and loving, with a vigorous mind and a religious spirit. The engagement met with opposition, and Kingsley in despair and bitterness flung himself again into all that might distract and excite him. But Miss Grenfell held to him, and he fought his way to the light. He describes somewhere the intense emotion with which, in later life, he visited a place in Canada to which in his unhappy days he had thought of emigrating. He burst into tears, he said, at the thought of how patient God had been with him, giving him an honourable life at home, full of love and noble opportunities, instead of the life he had then so wilfully designed. He was ordained in 1842 to the curacy of Evers- ley, a village in a wild heathy country on the out- skirts of the old Windsor Forest, with a somewhat lawless population of squatters and poachers. He lived a quiet life, working and writing. His friends 234 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE were some of the officers at Sandhurst, with whom he used to fish and ride to hounds on a wonderful succession of old screws. Then good fortune came to him. He married in 1844, and the living of Eversley falling vacant, it was bestowed on him. He settled down as a simple parish priest ; and though he can hardly be reckoned a typical clergyman at all events by modern standards it is as a parish priest that he will be for ever known. I have often wondered why that particular type of priest, far from multiply- ing in England, has rather tended to diminish. Kingsley's example seems so buoyant and so in- fectious that one would have thought that he might have founded a school of ardent, manly, and whole- some disciples, with that touch of secularity which England loves. Yet the modern type of clergyman is very different, though it is laborious, devoted, and enthusiastic in its way. But it is increasingly ecclesiastical, while the laity are increasingly un- ecclesiastical. This is no doubt inevitable, in these days of professional specialisation ; and Kingsley was rather a glorification of an old type than the founder of a new. The old parish priest was often strangely ignorant of and indifferent to ecclesiastical traditions ; but he was a neighbourly, sensible, and right-minded man, a country gentleman on a small scale rather than a member of a clerical caste. He was perfectly independent, and lived among his people like one of themselves. But Kingsley was a great deal more than that ; he knew, as a friend, every man, woman, and child in the parish. He doctored them, advised CHARLES KINGSLEY 235 them, nursed them, taught them, visited them, talked to them, scolded them, joked with them, and loved them. There was not a soul in the place, who was in trouble or difficulty, who did not know that, if he went to the Rector, he would have all the sympathy, interest, and practical help of a perfectly honest, courageous, and tender- hearted gentleman. There was simply nothing, however disagreeable, that he would not do for them, no sin so base or disgusting but he would try with all his might to clear them of. He met them with no condescension, no airs of superior wisdom, no claim to respect except what he could win as a man, and he treated them as his equals, except in the cases where he treated them as his superiors. He could talk to the men about their work, about the weather, about horses, about crops, about sport ; he could talk to the women about their ailments, their cares, their husbands, their children. He could play with the boys and girls, laugh with and at them, tell them stories, show them a hundred pretty things. The only things he could not stand were cruelty or unkindness, meanness or pretentiousness. In the presence of such qualities he exploded in vigorous words of indignation and grief. He made his flock the first object of his life, and never allowed anything whatever to interfere w T ith his care for them. He abominated dirt and waste and slovenliness and drink, as much as he hated laziness and impurity and selfishness ; but once let a man turn his back on his sin, and he lavished on him all the tender- ness of a brave and manly heart. 236 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE But he had many other activities, for his spirit did not burn like a solitary flame, but blazed like a fiery furnace. He went about preaching and lecturing ; he flung himself into the great Chartist movement ; he was one of the founders of the Working Men's College ; he was the friend of all who took up the cause of humanity, of Carlyle, of Cooper, of Maurice, of Tom Hughes. As his fame grew, he was consulted by men and women of every age and rank about their difficulties, and he answered them eagerly and wisely. He took pupils to add to his scanty income, and he wrote many fine books, of which some perhaps those in which he poured out his heart most are now unduly eclipsed ; though the Heroes, West- ward Ho, Hypatia, and The Waterbabies, still preserve their vitality and force. To myself the strange, formless, digressive, inconclusive, noble book, Yeast, is the most characteristic of all, because he here really bared his heart. But in spite of its vigour and its fine pictorial power, it has somehow become Early Victorian ; it has faults of taste ; it ranges over problems which have now passed into the background, and offers as its solution a curiously nebulous sort of mysticism. It was written, after all, in the days of the Charter, when Labour Members were still a dim and unrealisable dream. Half the aspirations of the book have become the plainest matters of fact, such as fair wages, decent housing, educa- tion. No one doubts the justice of such claims ; the whole combat has entered on a different stage, but the victory is or seems as far off as ever. No CHARLES KINGSLEY 237 longer can we hope, as Kingsley seemed to hope, that the problems of the world can be solved, if we only have a network of sewage farms ex- tending over the length and breadth of the country ! There drifts into the tale, after the passion and heat are over, a mysterious, gruff, wealthy person- age, who it must candidly be confessed is some- thing of a bore, and rather a pretentious bore, with a marvellous power of linking together bad arguments, and a battery of voluble phrases such as Carlyle himself might have envied. He tells the hero that he is going to take him away to have his education finished in some place where the social problem has been solved, and where men live by just and unselfish laws. The mind loses itself in vague speculation as to where the prophet means to go, though he seems to have no doubt himself. The last conversation takes place in the nave of St. Paul's, and consists of a rhetorical harangue from the prophet, inter- rupted by plain questions from the hero, to which I am bound to say he gets very unsatisfactory answers. But it is beautiful for all that : though it is a poet trying to talk like a logician, and arguing as ill as poets alone can argue, yet the pages are full of glowing, hopeful, suggestive thoughts, meat on which a man may stay his soul in the wilderness, and in the strength of which he may fare forward. It has all the beauty of youth and generosity and courage ; the beauty of a soul which through perplexity and dimness still hopes vigorously and vehemently in justice 238 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE and truth and love. It moves me yet to read it, and it was like a heavenly manna in the old days ; and though I make fun of the book, I confess I cannot bear to hear it abused. Then in the Heroes Kingsley retold some of the ancient mythological tales of Greece, in a sort of impassioned prose, which is more than half verse. He takes the ancient forms, charges them with a subtle modern beauty all haunted with old echoes ; and the book, more perhaps than any other, initiates a child into the spirit of Greek romance, the pure poetry of the older world. In his Prose Idylls, a book not so well known as it deserves to be, he did some of the best nature- drawing he ever attempted. His passion for streams and woods, and the deep ancient instinct of which we are half-ashamed, and which we do not or cannot resist, even though we cannot justify it on moral grounds the instinct known by the ugly name of sport are here depicted with ex- quisite poetry, and in cadences and phrases of haunted beauty. And then there is the enchanting Waterbabies, written as a gift to his youngest child. The first chapters are adorable in their sympathy with child- hood and nature alike ; and it does not detract from their charm that they are evidently the work of one who is somewhat weary of the journey, who would like to slip out of the heat and dust, and lie down like a tired child in the cool and crystal waterway that creeps, a thread of silver, over the moor, with all its ribbons of trailing CHARLES KINGSLEY 239 weed, its still pools and sunny waterbreaks. I know no book which so interprets the spirit and the essential mystery of moving water, alike the streamlet, the full-flushed, travel-stained river, and the pure, vast, cavernous sea, with its sapphire spaces and the fallen light of its depths. But at the end of the book Kingsley gave the rein to his whimsical sense of humour, and ran into long absurd catalogues, in the Rabelaisian manner, of diseases and symptoms. It is a sorry disappoint- ment at the close of the story, that the child who, like Shakespeare's drowned king, had suffered "a sea-change into something rich and strange," who had escaped from the foul chimneys into the clear rivulet, who had played with waterbabies in the silver sand, in the weed-hung caverns of Brandan's Isle, who had darted down the river in flood among the gleaming salmon, should go back to the world and become an engineer ! Not that one does not honour and esteem the work of the engineer among mortals ; but of this child of the stream and the sea one finds oneself saying ruefully in the words of Virgil, " Non haec pollicitus " " Not this the promise of his prime." But the book was written out of the clearest and most joyful part of Kingsley's mind, over- shadowed by no gloom tender, absurd, charm- ing, and irresistible. Some may say that for a hard world like this, where we have to push for a place and a livelihood, it is too peaceful, too romantic a book for a child to feed upon. But I think that nowadays we are sometimes too practical, a,nd forget to feed the soul. A child does better 240 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE to come smiling out of the golden gates of imagina- tion into the severe daylight of the world ; and he will go through life with more fire and hope in his heart, with a deeper belief in the uses of beauty, than if solely initiated into the principles of the lever and the parabola, instructed about imports of jute and exports of hardware, and all the other things which practical men must no doubt know. If one looks at a list of Kingsley's published works, one notices that his later books are almost all volumes of sermons, or collections of earlier addresses and articles. The fact was that the old creative dramatic power had burnt itself out. His poetical power left him first. He said of himself, in humble criticism, that he had not the necessary equipment for a poet, because he had not the power of seeing one thing in terms of another. By which he meant that the essentially poetical gift of metaphor and analogy was not native to him. The great poet sees a flower or a star, and expresses what he sees with delicate insight and perception. We read the poem with delight, and the flower spreads its petals before us, the star hangs, a point of glowing light in the low-hung gloom. All of a sudden one realises that the flower or the star, which seemed so prominent, so distinct, have become the least important thing in the poem ; it is the soul that he is speaking of after all the soul's joy, when it opens its bright heart upon the day, or the mysterious hope that beckons to it from the other side of the darkness. It is no longer what we see that concerns us, CHARLES KINGSLEY 241 but something vast that is hidden from us, but which is or may be a part of us. That power Kingsley did not possess. He saw with a marvellous clearness ; but he had a great share of the scientific spirit, and his mind dwelt with such intentness on the precise form, the outline, the effect, the detailed life of spore and cell, that he was content to remain there. In his beautiful poem of " Sappho," which he puts into the hands of his heroine in Yeast, we have a fine instance of this. Let me quote a few lines : " She lay among the myrtles on the cliff, Above her glared the noon ; beneath the sea ; Upon the white horizon Athos' peak Weltered in burning haze ; all airs were dead, The cicale slept among the tamarisk's hair, The birds sat dumb and drooping. Far below The lazy sea-weed glistened in the sun ; The lazy sea-fowl dried their steaming wings, The lazy swell crept whispering up the reef And sank again." What a picture of high summer and burning heat 1 But he can say no more, and when the maiden herself speaks, it is only to say that she has lost belief in her own utterance. It is the same with "Andromeda," which I always think contains some of the finest English hexameters in the language ; and with the beautiful elegiacs, " Wearily stretches the sand to the surge and the surge to the cloudland, Wearily onward I ride, watching the water alone." The poet sees the scene with such distinctness Q 242 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE that one sees it too. One stands with the dis- pirited man on the wide sands, watching the slow waves creep and curdle. But the flash is wanting which shows the further deeps, the remoter horizon. In his novels Kingsley could put out his strength more fully. Into these he poured his humour, his melancholy, his affection, and his joy. He had a shrewd perception of character, he had an immense historical sympathy ; he knew by instinct that nothing in the world which human beings have ever cared about and thought about and loved, can ever wholly lose its charm. He did not perhaps dive very deep, but he saw very wide. He understood men and women because he loved them, because he loved life, because he wanted to make life noble and beautiful. He had a great dramatic power. The one thing that prevented his being in the very first rank of novelists was that he was essentially a partisan. The novelist ought to have no preferences or prejudices. He ought to make his world, like a little god, and sit above it serenely. He must not storm and scold ; he must not write down some of his characters, and write up others. He must let each speak and act for himself, and he must see the point of view even of his villains and rogues, and appreciate the excuses that they make for themselves. But Kingsley could not do this. He hated a certain type of character with all his heart. It would be grossly unfair to call it the priestly character, because he was himself a priest to the inmost fibre of his being ; but he hated the false priest, the man who uses his sacred character and CHARLES KINGSLEY 243 his holy secrets for his own ends, to gain and maintain his influences, to wield power. This character appears, over and over again, in his books, and is attacked in Yeast in terms of obloquy so gross that it is painful even to recall them. Kingsley had a deep pity for frank weak- ness. The poor poet Vavasour, in Two Years Ago, is very tenderly handled. But he detested a mixture of timidity and cunning. There is no harm in presenting such a type in a detestable light ; but you must not strike and spurn your characters and spit in their faces ; and this Kingsley did with immense energy. Gradually, as I have said, the creative glow died away. The animal spirits failed. Life began to appear both too brief and too serious to be sported with ; and he passed gradually from the interpreter to the prophet. One can find it in one's heart to wish it had been otherwise. Perhaps if he could have imposed upon himself what Lord Acton used to say was the first condition of permanent work resolute limitation he might have done greater things in the field of fiction. But it was just what Kingsley could not do ; he was a man of impulse. He found that great, earnest, thirsting crowds would come to hear him speak, and he threw aside all other thoughts and spoke. "Woe unto me, if I preach not the Gospel," he once said with flaming eyes to one who pleaded for more books. After all, the sowers of seed must sow it after their own method. We hanker, as the circle of those who knew a great man grows smaller, for 244 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE some permanent memorial of his spirit. We are apt to forget that a man can enrich the blood of the world as well by the spoken as the written word ; and the effect of Kingsley's sermons is none the less there because we cannot see it. As literature, they can hardly be permanent. I do not know if they are still read. They seem to me to be rhe- torical, and the glow has somehow died out of them. They need the deeply lined face, the noble gesture, the burning eye, the thrilling voice, to send them home to the heart. Kingsley was a very familiar figure to me as a child. My father was headmaster of Wellington College from 1859 t 1873, and Eversley was only three or four miles away. Kingsley and my father were great friends, yet I do not recollect ever seeing Kingsley at Wellington, though he must have been there many times ; but he was a man who filled the day to the brim with work, and I do not think he ever had much leisure for what one might call social duties or social pleasures, according to the view that one takes of such festivities. But I do remember him very well indeed at Eversley ; and I will try to sketch him as he seemed to the eyes of a child, nearly forty years ago. One has no con- tinuous memory of childish days, I think ; certain bright pictures and radiant glimpses stand out in the mind and among the most radiant pictures that I have in my mental gallery are a few of Eversley. We used to walk over to luncheon and spend the afternoon there. The road from Welling- ton went up a long incline among woods, and came out on a high heathery plateau, with a great view to CHARLES KINGSLEY 245 the south over Hampshire. Then the road dipped down into the plain. Soon one came to a little village green, with a farmhouse, among its barns and outbuildings ; a solid ugly brick church tower was visible on the right. Then one passed a little lawn with a sunk fence and a rustic paling, and went in at an iron gate among shrubberies to an old rambling irregular brick house with big bow- windows, standing so low that it was sometimes flooded in stormy weather. It was a very pretty, peaceful place on a summer afternoon, with the shadows of the great trees on the turf, and the churchyard close by, where Kingsley now sleeps well. I can see him coming out to meet us, a strong, spare, active figure, with very marked features, a big nose, a great, mobile, compressed mouth, eyes deeply set, but with a flashing light in them that told you he was no ordinary man. His face was worn and deeply marked, showing that he had not found life an easy business. He used not to dress like a clergyman. I remember him in a rough dark-grey suit, with knickerbockers and a black tie. And then his voice was unfor- gettable ; he had a tremendous stammer, and what- ever he said was said with a prodigious energy. I remember his coming out, crying out a hearty greeting, taking my mother's hand, with a kind word for each of us children, saying that he had this and that new thing to show us. I remember going into his little dark study crowded with books and papers, smelling strongly of smoke ; how he took up an old hunting-knife that had been dug up in the New Forest and sent to him, and told us 246 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE a story about it ; how he filled our pockets with small treasures scarlet seeds that he had brought from the West Indies, brown polished nuts, an odd Indian ornament of red and yellow feathers tied on a string, which I have to this day. I remember a walk alone with him in a wood hard by, where we heard the report of a gun and afterwards found in a ride a dead jay, just shot by a keeper, and how he picked it up and smoothed its feathers, and looked at it for a moment with a look of pity, saying (t Poor beastie " a compassion which I ; as a child, thought very much thrown away on a piece of incredible treasure-trove a real dead bird, with nice claws and legs, with pink and blue feathers and a pretty spotted crest, and with the additional advantage, which all dead birds did not possess, of being warm and smelling sweet. He was going to throw it back into the wood, I think, and I was forming a desperate resolve to slip back and secure it, when he gave it to me, saying, "There, put that into your pocket perhaps your father will have it stuffed for you." And a few weeks after stuffed it was, sitting, with a bright, hard glass eye, on a branch, in a perfect bower of dried grasses and herbs looking like fried parsley, with a blue sky behind. I have it still, and its merry eye is still undimmed, its parsley brake as green as ever. I remember, too, one hot summer afternoon, how he and my father, with my mother and Mrs. Kingsley, sat out on the lawn and talked ; and we heard shouts of laughter from the group. I did not know then but I know now that some one had asked what was the pleasantest way of CHARLES KINGSLEY 247 spending a day, and how Kingsley had looked up, and said with his great stammer, "Why, to lie on your b-belly like a lizard in the sun, and to think about nothing." We children wandered restlessly about the lawn, and I broke off a great flake of bark from a decaying tree ; out of the cavity tumbled a huge white grub, the colour of sickly tallow, with horrible blue spots, and fell writhing on the grass. Mr. Kingsley had to be dragged from the group to tell us what it was. He was all alert with interest ; he picked it up. " Show me exactly where it fell from. I don't know what the ugly fellow is never saw anything like it ; and now we will pop him back into his nice hole, and I will remember the place, and see if I can find out what he turns into. Don't forget to ask me some day." I did ask him every time I saw him, till it became a joke between us. But he could never discover. " Oh, he slipped off some night when he was grown into a jolly old beetle, and probably has by this time a big family of his own." But one recollection above all remains with me. I walked over one summer morning with my mother to go to Eversley Church. We got there just in time, and slipped into the rectory pew, Mrs. Kingsley smiling a welcome from her big black eyes. I remember the vestry door under the tower creaking, and how he came marching up the church looking about him, in a big loose surplice and hood ; followed by the curate. He always looked to see if the men of his parish were at church, and if they were not they heard of it afterwards. " Now look here, Jim, the missus doesn't want you lying in 248 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE bed, or lounging about and smoking. She wants to get the children nice and to cook the dinner. So I expect you to come to church in the morn- ing and then in the evening you can stop at home and look after the house, and she can come to church with the children." And they came, partly because the advice was sensible, and partly, perhaps, to please the Rector ! The chancel at Eversley was screened from the church, I remember, by a quaint Georgian screen, gilt and painted. Mr. Kingsley went in, and remained hidden somewhere I could not see him ; the curate read the service, and then, before the Communion, joined Mr. Kingsley inside the screen. There was a pause, and then it gives me a thrill now to think of it there came a full, deep, resonant voice, without a trace of stammer, so that I could hardly believe it to be Mr. Kingsley, reading with an infinite solemnity, with pauses between the words, " Our Father, which art in heaven," not only as if he meant it, but as if it were everything to him, and he was laying his whole soul before God. A silence fell on the hot and crowded church. He came out of the screen for the sermon, and preached on "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness " ; and I can see him now, with his grave, fatherly, uplifted look and flashing eye, and the scorn with which he spoke of the pursuit of riches. But I must be forgiven if I say of what I was thinking, like a child, most of the time. Not many months before there had arrived in the church, while the morning service was going on, a pale, CHARLES KINGSLEY 249 breathless, and perspiring groom, who announced that the great house of Bramshill hard by was on fire ; whereupon all the congregation had streamed out, Kingsley with them. In the churchyard he had sternly sent all the women and the curate back into the church. " Go back and finish the service ; we don't want you up there fussing about ; all the men are to come with me " ; and thereupon he had run across the churchyard, and just as he was, surplice and hood and all, he had jumped over the hedge into the rectory garden, torn his things off, seized a little axe, and run up to Bramshill faster than any of his parishioners, where they managed to get the fire out. All the time that he was preaching, I may confess, I was hoping that Bramshill might catch fire again such blessed incidents did sometimes happen that I might see Mr. Kingsley jump the hedge in his surplice, and that I might be allowed to go up to the fire, while my mother would certainly be sent back. However, we had no exciting interruption ; but the strange thing is that, though it must be six-and-thirty years ago, I can yet remember the whole scene with absolute vividness, which proves, I think, its impressive quality. Only twice have I visited Eversley since those days, to stand beside his grave in a corner of the churchyard, under the great cedar of the rectory, where he always, and often how ardently, desired to lie. There is a little bare path worn across the turf by the feet of pilgrims who have visited the place, and I think his great loving heart must be glad that men and women should do this 250 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE for the love of him, his wisdom, and his tender care. And I may perhaps here add two or three of the stories that my father used to tell about him. Kingsley was, of course, one of the broadest and most liberal of Churchmen so much so that in his love for science, in days when science and religion were held to be in a deadly antagonism, he said and printed many things which made old-fashioned people say that he was hardly a Christian at all one of the basest slanders ever uttered about a true man of God and a loving servant of Jesus Christ. A lady, the mother of a boy at Wellington, was afraid, being a very rigid Protestant, that the services in Wellington Chapel, in their beautiful precision, were dangerously High Church. She sent a friend down to spy out the land, and after- wards upon his information w T rote to Lord Derby, then President of the Governors, to say that Dr. Benson was a dangerous Ritualist, that a friend of hers had attended service there, and had heard a sermon of the most distressing kind, the doctrine of which was very nearly Roman Catholic. Lord Derby wrote to my father, enclosing the letter, and asking how he should reply. My father wrote back to say that the service at Wellington was careful and reverent, but of no particular school, and that the preacher upon the occasion happened to be his friend and neighbour, Mr. Kingsley, who, of whatever views he might be suspected, could certainly not be suspected of sympathy with Romanism. Indeed the score was singularly complete, for it was CHARLES KINGSLEY 251 just at the time when Kingsley had been engaged in his famous controversy with Cardinal Newman, in which he had made a very vehement attack upon the Church of Rome's methods, and in which, it must be confessed, Kingsley had for once rather forgotten his manners. And perhaps it may be added that, while Newman triumphantly vindicated his personal character, we may be ultimately grateful to Kingsley's fierce and faulty dialectic for eliciting the splendid Apologia. Indeed, it was one of those great controversies in which both the disputants were probably right ! People who saw Kingsley at the service at Wellington Chapel he was often there when his boy was at the school more than once asked my father who it was that bowed his head so low at the sacred Name of Jesus in the prayers, and exhibited such emotion all through the service. My father used to tell how once he was walking with Kingsley round about Eversley, when Kingsley suddenly stopped and said "It is no use ; I know you detest tobacco, Benson, but I must have a smoke " ; and he had accordingly gone to a big furze-bush and put his arm in at a hole, and after some groping about produced a big church- warden pipe, which he filled and smoked with great satisfaction, afterwards putting it into a hollow tree, and telling my father, with a chuckle, that he had concealed pipes all over the parish, to meet the exigencies of a sudden desire to smoke. Again, my father remembered walking with Kingsley and coming to a little horse-pond, nearly 252 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE dry, in the mud of which were writhing a number of hateful-looking transparent worms. Kingsley bent down, absorbed, to watch them, and in a moment turned up his sleeves, and plunged his hands into the mud, saying solemnly, "In the name of N -nature, come out." And again, the great aeronaut Coxwell came once to lecture at Wellington, shortly after his terrible ascent in a balloon, when they had gone so high that his companion had become unconscious, and Coxwell's hands were so frozen with cold that he had only just in time been able to tear the valve open with his teeth. There was a large party invited to meet Coxwell at dinner, among them Kingsley. After dinner, Kingsley suddenly said, in a silence, " I have often thought that the first man that ever went up in a balloon must have been a d-dentist." Some one laughed, and said, "What an extra- ordinary idea ! " "I don't know," said Kingsley ; "a man who is always looking down people's throats, and pulling their teeth about, and breath- ing their breath, must be inspired with a tremendous desire to get away and above it all." Coxwell leaned forward, and said very good-humouredly, " Well, Mr. Kingsley, it is true that I am a dentist ; but it was not that that made me become an aero- naut." " My d-dear Mr. Coxwell," said Kingsley, flushing red, " I am sure I beg your pardon. I had no idea it was so. You must have thought me singularly ill-mannered to make a joke of it." And he could not recover his spirits for the rest of the evening, because he was the soul of courtesy, and CHARLES KINGSLEY 253 hated giving pain to any human being more, perhaps, than anything in the world. And I will add here a characteristic little story, never, I believe, published, told me by a friend of Kingsley's. Kingsley was lecturing at Chester on " Heroes," and had just concluded with fiery emotion a very noble address. The chairman, a well-meaning man, who had, no doubt, prepared a neat impromptu speech beforehand, lowered the emotional temperature by saying that the man who answered to the description of a hero was the man who, with the thermometer below freezing- point, put his feet down to the bottom of his bed. There was a laugh, and then a silence, in which Kingsley, with thunder in his face, was heard to whisper, as he imagined, to his neighbour, " Who is that f-f-fool ? " Life ran on swiftly enough at the little parsonage, but never either equably or peacefully. Kingsley's life was a series of breakdowns. When he was well and strong, he would write letters, visit his people, talk, smoke, from morning to night. He was extra- ordinarily restless in body as well as in mind. He could seldom sit quiet through a meal, and tobacco was to him an absolutely necessary sedative. Then at the end of a day which would have sent many men crawling to bed, he would sit up half the night writing at one of his novels. After a few months of this he would collapse and be ordered off. At first he used, after a breakdown, to plunge into active physical exercise, and be surprised that he did not get better ; but he soon discovered that it did not refresh the mind to overtire the body ; and 254 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE so he used to content himself with sitting out in the sun in some quiet moorland place, drawing the peace of Nature and God into the fevered brain and throbbing heart, till the old energy returned. He had moods of the deepest depression, and indeed all his life long looked forward to death, as he said, with an intense and reverent curiosity. At one time he made the mistake of accepting the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge. He was not at all equipped for it. He knew no history scientifically, but for all that his lectures were intensely inspiring, though attended more by young enthusiasts than by professed historical students. But he realised himself that it was a mistake, and soon resigned. What was felt by the more cynical academical persons on his retirement is best expressed by an epigram of the late Master of Trinity, Dr. Thompson, who attended the inaugural lecture of Kingsley's successor, Professor Seeley, whose genius the Master hopelessly underrated. The Master sat through the lecture with an air of supreme contempt, and, on going out, said to a friend, with an air of gentle compassion, " Dear, dear, who would have thought that we should so soon have been regretting poor Kingsley ! " It is true that Kingsley was very unpopular at one time in England. He was thought dangerously unorthodox, a Radical, a Socialist, an encourager of republican doctrines. But Kingsley was never really a Radical he had an intense sympathy for the down-trodden poor, but what he loved in them was not their discontented and repining spirit, but CHARLES KINGSLEY 255 the true men that they might become. He had a great idea of the due subordination of classes, and of the noble work of kings and priests. He once said to a friend at Chester : " When I was in America, I saw the prospectus of a newspaper, whose editor promised that he would always act up to his motto : ' When you see a head, hit it.' Good Heavens," added Kingsley, "what an idea this gives one of the constant tendency of democracy to keep all human qualities, powers, and talents at one dead level 1 " Still, he was mis- understood and almost persecuted. He preached a sermon once in a church in London, about which a complaint was made to the Bishop, and was forbidden to preach in London, though the pro- hibition was withdrawn on the publication of the discourse. But he lived it all down, and came to be regarded with universal admiration and love ; he was made a Canon of Chester, and later of Westminster, where he held enormous congregations spell-bound by his fiery eloquence. But the blade was wearing out the scabbard. His son came back from abroad, and was horrified to find that his father had suddenly become an old man, bent and with white hair, though he was only fifty-six, and at the end of the year 1874 he went joyfully back to Eversley from his residence in London for the last time. Early in the new year Mrs. Kingsley fell danger- ously ill, and her life was despaired of ; the fear struck Kingsley down, and he fell ill himself of a chill. One night he augured from something that was said at his bedside that her death was momently 256 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE expected, and insisted on going to say good-bye to her and what that sacred parting was can be imagined rather than told. But the exposure to the cold air brought on pneumonia, and he lay unconscious, in the sad and solemn occupation known as dying when the most commonplace person in the world who lies dozing and fevered in the darkened room is invested for all who move silently about the house with a strange majesty and awe. And so he passed into the presence of God, having lived in his small span of existence the life of ten men of ordinary mould. Mrs. Kingsley recovered, and survived him for many years. It is an almost impossible thing to try to analyse and summarise the life of Charles Kingsley. It is like analysing a flame, a thing that glows and leaps and vanishes before you can fix your gaze upon it. He did not found a school of thought or dazzle his age with great, fruitful ideas, but he belonged to the party of those who, like Carlyle, dared to look facts in the face and say what they thought of them ; and this was all the more im- pressive in Kingsley, because he spoke and acted candidly, unconventionally, and generously, from a position which had grown to be synonymous with caution and conventionality and acquiescence. He was a democrat in surplice and hood. He was not a revolutionary at all ; he believed with all his heart in labour and order, equal opportunities, and due subordination ; he did not wish to destroy the framework of society, but to animate it throughout with appropriate responsibility. CHARLES KINGSLEY 257 But he was far more than this ; he was a poet from head to heel, and all his work, verse or prose, sermon or scientific lecture, was done in the spirit of the poet. He was neither theologian, nor scien- tist, nor historian, but he loved Nature and humanity alike, the complexity of natural forces, the moral law, the great affections of men and women, their transfiguring emotions, their noble sacrifices. Life was to him a conspiracy of manifold interest, a huge enlivening mystery, holding out to him at a thousand points glimpses of a vast and magnifi- cent design, of which he burnt to be the interpreter. But he was not content with a splendid optimism of heart and voice, such as Browning practised ; he had a strong combative element, which could have made him an enthusiastic pirate if he had not been a parson. He had that note of high greatness the power of tormenting himself into a kind of frenzy at all patient and stupid acquies- cence in remediable evil. It is an unphilosophical position enough to hold that the world was created on ideal lines, and that mankind has perversely marred the design. Sir George Trevelyan, in one of his youthful ebullitions of irresponsible and delicious humour, writing of Calcutta, said, " God made the country and man made the town, and the municipal council made the drains the com- bined effect is overwhelming." But that was in a way very much Kingsley's view. He saw a world full of splendid chances, crammed with entertain- ment and work for all, and yet in a horrible mess. He wanted to put it all straight, beginning with the drains, and yet never forgetting the Redemption. R 258 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE And so he went on his way through life at a swing- ing stride, with a word and a smile and a hand-grasp for all, full of pity, and courage, and enthusiasm, and love, ready to explain everything and to main- tain anything, in a splendid and contagious hurry, making plenty of mistakes, full of weak arguments and glowing metaphors, and yet somehow uplifting and inspiring every one with whom he came into contact, giving away all he had got with both hands, greeting every one as a brother and a friend, his life flaring itself away in his joyful and meteoric passage. Like Sir Andrew Barton, in the fine old ballad; when he was pierced, he said " I'll but lie down and bleed awhile, And then I'll rise and fight again." Thus one feels about Kingsley, not that his conclusions are intellectually correct, but that they are emotionally inspiring that his restless roving eye, his bold unquiet heart, his uplifting talk, his joyful laughter, his pitying tears, all make him into a personality which even the coldest and dullest heart could not regard unmoved. And then, too, whatever he was not, he was a great teller of tales, which catch the heart of children and men alike by their sweetness, their energy, and their purity, and leave one gasping and thrilled, with a strong inclination, half to shed tears, and half to go and do likewise. Life was full for him of fire and music, with a vision ahead of a city of God, where man could live unstained and love untroubled. It was in a day of radiant summer that I last set foot in Eversley. The church has been restored CHARLES KINGSLEY 259 in Kingsley's honour with that singular and pathetic desire to do honour to a man by destroying and refurbishing everything on which his eyes have once lovingly rested. The little yew-trees of the churchyard have grown up into tall pillars ; the marble of the grave is weather-worn now ; the house where his fiery heart beat so high and sank so low is, but for an added touch of trimness, just what I recollect it to have been. The whole place was thronged with pilgrims groups of men and women and children, come to see the earthly scene where the books they loved had been written, where a man had clasped life so close and wor- shipped it so tenderly. As a rule, when one visits a shrine which one regards as sacred, one desires to be alone ; but I welcomed those pilgrims there, and was glad at their coming. It was natural, beautiful, and right. There was not a tree or a stone in the place that did not seem somehow penetrated with the man's great and tender spirit. I was thankful that I had seen him and loved him in the old days, and it was good to stand where his spirit had broken out, like a spring in a wilderness, to sink again into the central Fount of life and love. XI BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN CHRISTOPHER WORDSWORTH, Bishop of Lincoln, was born at Lambeth Palace in 1807, where his father, Christopher Wordsworth, afterwards Master of Trinity, was chaplain to Archbishop Manners- Button . Christopher Wordsworth, the father, was the brother of the poet ; and there were literary traditions on both sides of the Bishop's family : his mother was the sister of Charles Lloyd, the poet, the friend of Charles Lamb. The whole clan affords a remarkable instance of kindred ability and tastes. The Bishop's brother Charles was Bishop of St. Andrews, while his eldest son John is the present Bishop of Salisbury. The future Bishop of Lincoln went to Win- chester in 1820. He was a precocious child of extraordinary ability, a great lover of books. The Headmaster of Winchester during the greater part of his time there was Dr. Williams, a gentle, upright, diffident man so diffident that he used to read aloud the sermons of other preachers in Chapel, and who, in default of any precise statement of his own on the subject, " was known to wish his boys to do right." Wordsworth was a popular boy, strict as a prefect, much respected both for his scholarship BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 261 and his great proficiency in athletics : in cricket, fives, football, he was pre-eminent ; he was a famous runner, and a fine skater to the end of his life. It is amusing to remember that in the Winchester and Harrow match of 1825 he caught out Manning, the future Cardinal, for 0. He went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, his father being then Vice-Chancellor, and simply swept the board of prizes and scholarships, taking his degree as Senior Classic in 1830 and being elected at once to a Fellowship. At school and college he won no less than nine gold medals. His early journals are full ot books, athletics, theology, and politics, the range of his interests being as wide as his ability was great. He travelled a good deal after taking his degree, and was in close touch with his uncle's household at Rydal. His character seems to have been singularly modest and simple ; he had no touch of self-consciousness or jealousy : his intention of taking Orders was slowly formed. He had a curious adventure in Greece in 1833 ; he was robbed by brigands on Mount Parnes and stabbed in the left shoulder. A serious illness followed, just at the time that he was making up his mind to be ordained. The experience set a deep mark upon his life. Meanwhile he was prospering at Cambridge : he became a tutor at Trinity, and was elected Public Orator. But a few months later, in 1836, he was appointed Headmaster of Harrow at the age of twenty-nine. The school was at the time un- disciplined and disorderly, under the mild and 262 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE gracious rule of Dr. Longley, afterwards Arch- bishop of Canterbury, and the teaching left much to be desired. Wordsworth took the place in hand very vigorously and not very tactfully. It is strange that one whose chief characteristics in later life seemed a curious aloofness from ordinary interests and an overflowing benignity, at this time gave an impression of caustic shrewdness, a power of sharp repartee, and even of unsympathetic rigidity. He entirely disregarded popularity. He enforced discipline unsparingly, and sent away boys, of whose conduct he disapproved, with stern severity. The numbers fell rapidly ; partly the expulsions which he thought necessary gave the school a bad name, and partly he was suspected of unduly High Churchman ship. It was a time for the young Headmaster of hard experience and sharp trials ; but he met it all with unflinching courage and intense devotion to duty. Though he did not exactly set a personal mark upon the place, yet by his strictness and vigour he prepared the way for the future prosperity of the school. One curious incident is worth recording. Colenso, afterwards the heretical Bishop of Natal, was Wordsworth's assistant tutor at Harrow. He devised, tradition relates, a system for warming the Headmaster's house, which was installed, and was so successfully adapted to its object that the house was burnt to the ground on the following day 1 Wordsworth was not at ease at Harrow, though his marriage to a Miss Frere, of the famous Norfolk family, brought him great domestic happiness ; but his mind turned to study and theology : he was BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 263 disappointed in not obtaining the Regius Professor- ship of Divinity at Cambridge in 1843. It is amusing to recall a tradition in the Bishop's family, that in his daughters' dolls'-house, while the lower rooms of the house were occupied by puppets engaged in the ordinary avocations of life, in a small bare attic at the top there sat a small doll in a chair at a table, representing the master of the house. If it was inquired what his occupation might be, the answer was : " He is writing his Commentary." In 1844, Sir Robert Peel, whose love for Harrow was of a romantic kind, and who felt very deeply the fall in the reputation of the school, offered Wordsworth a Canonry at Westminster, which he accepted with delight, and plunged into more congenial duties. The Canonry had first been offered to his father, who had resigned his Master- ship of Trinity. Wordsworth had done a great, if a secret and unappreciated, work at Harrow, and there were many boys there who were grateful to him for his inspiring teaching and firm moral influence. His health was much undermined ; his excessive and dangerous industry, combined with constant anxiety and vexation, had brought him into a sensitive and trying state of nerves. But his natural cheerfulness, his ascetic habits of life and diet, and regular exercise in the open air soon restored his vigour. He took great delight in the secluded house at Westminster, with its panelled rooms and carved chimney-pieces. His study- door opened into a little garden, bright with flowers, where jessamines and lilies of the valley bloomed 264 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE under the ancient wall in spite of the London smoke, and where the air seemed full of the mellow sound of bells. But he was a great sufferer at this time from neuralgia and nervous depression, and only gradually did the strain of Harrow wear away. As his strength returned, he threw himself with great ardour into the controversies of the time, and became an ardent ecclesiastical pamphleteer as well as an organiser of Church activities in Westminster, then in a very neglected condition, supporting hospital work, establishing a sisterhood ; he always held very earnest views about the work of women in the Church, and in this he was a pioneer. In 1850 Wordsworth took a country parish in addition to his Canonry. There is rather a tendency nowadays to mistrust the multiplication of posts of emolument as well as the accumulation of duties. But cases such as that of Wordsworth's country living are instances often overlooked, where a little pluralism is a benefit to all concerned. The living was a poor one, and he kept two excellent curates to work the large parish. It brought into the place a man of kindness, wealth, and apostolical sincerity of life, with a wife of wonderful powers of quiet sympathy and active benevolence. When the expenses of the place had been met, no income from the living was left for Wordsworth. But it gave him rest and country air and parochial experience, and brought him into touch with the social realities of life a thing very important for a man whose main work was preaching and whose temptation was to lose himself in study. The BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 265 parish was in the vale of White Horse, and rejoiced in the rustic name of Stanford-in-the-Vale-cum- Goosey. Wordsworth was at work on his great Commentary on the Bible in these years, but he taught the village children diligently, and spent much of his time in house-to-house visiting, earning the sincere affection and respect of farmers and labourers alike. In 1863 Stanley was appointed to the Deanery of Westminster. His views on the inspiration of Scripture were well known ; and though these would hardly be considered advanced nowadays, when so much more latitude of speculation is practised and permitted, yet at the time they caused Wordsworth deep uneasiness. He pub- lished a pamphlet of remonstrance, a step which cost him anxious deliberation and many sleep- less nights ; but he received Stanley cordially and loyally, and they became great personal friends. He took an active part in Convocation in these years, and strenuously upheld the view of the traditional catholicity of the English Church. In 1868 Wordsworth was offered the vacant See of Lincoln. He was then over sixty, and his life of study and pastoral work was a very congenial one. He hesitated for a time, but eventually decided with many misgivings that it was his duty to accept. These misgivings were shared by others as well. It was supposed that he would be ignorant of business and addicted to study. But as a matter of fact his experience had amply qualified him for episcopal office, and he proved a very active and successful administrator. His gift of kindly 266 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE conversation and his knowledge of parochial detail endeared him rapidly to the clergy, while he developed a power of felicitous public speaking which made his appearances impressive. But another serious controversy was ahead of him. In 1869 Temple was appointed Bishop of Exeter. Wordsworth wrote to him and begged him to disclaim his agreement with the famous Essays and Reviews in which an article of Temple's held the foremost place. Temple declined to make any sort of recantation. Wordsworth con- tinued to protest up to the time of the consecration against Temple's appointment ; but he conducted the whole dispute in a way which made a deep impression upon Temple, contriving to separate a policy which he thought was demanded of him on public grounds from his eagerly expressed personal respect and even affection. My father had made acquaintance with Words- worth in the previous year, and a very warm friendship had sprung up between them. Temple, under whom my father had served at Rugby, was one of his dearest friends, and knowing the depth and intensity of Temple's Christian con- victions, he laboured hard to obviate a misunder- standing between two men to whom he was devoted. He was already Wordsworth's chaplain, and acted simultaneously in the same capacity for Temple for several months. Meantime, Wordsworth had settled down at Lincoln, and was hard at work carrying out a dozen schemes, and endeavouring to organise the administration of the great undivided See. BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 267 His' relations to the Nonconformists of the diocese were peculiar and characteristic. In this era of social tolerance, the attitude 01 ecclesiastics to Dissenters is generally a kind of distant and digni- fied courtesy, like that of two antagonists in an affair of honour, which abstains from raising points of difference and cherishes no real hope of concrete union. But Bishop Wordsworth ad- dressed a Pastoral to the Wesleyans in his diocese, representing the perils of schism and pressing upon them the blessings of unity, which in this case meant the blessings of meek submission. It aroused considerable indignation, which was not allayed when the Bishop objected to the title of " the Reverend " being placed on the tombstone of a Wesleyan minister in a churchyard. The matter was referred to the Courts, and the Privy Council ultimately sustained the legality of the designation. The Bishop made it clear by further pastoral letters what his position was that he admired the zeal and energy of the Wesleyans and desired a closer union. The Wesleyan Conference be- came convinced of the Bishop's honesty and sincerity, but naturally no action was taken. He did not conciliate them by his later action in the matter of the Burials Bill, when he resisted the right of burial in churchyards by other ministers and with other services than those of the Church of England. He was indeed of the stuff of which martyrs were made, and my father used to say that martyrdom was the thing which he believed the Bishop would have enjoyed more than any- thing else. 268 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE One of Wordsworth's numerous activities grew out of the great interest he took in the affairs of Continental churches and the sympathy which he felt for a movement like the Old Catholic movement, and for any designs which promoted the unity of the Church and resistance to Papal claims. But these schemes have led to little practical result, because the social organisations of ecclesiastical bodies form a solid barrier against any effective combinations. The Bishop's en- deavours did little more than cast a fragrance of mutual respect and traditional learning over movements in which practical hopefulness is not very much to the fore. It may be said that the sustenance of Churches by property held under trusts depending upon religious definitions is the real obstacle to unity, even more than niceties of doctrine. It seems impossible to indicate a scheme which could free religious bodies from the need for endowment ; yet, on the other hand, if no endowments were in question, the power of comprehension would be largely increased. The death of Mrs. Wordsworth in 1884, hi tender and faithful companion, was a shock from which the Bishop never rallied. There followed a time of intense melancholy and depression, in which the light that had continually blessed him was withdrawn. He was overcome by a sense of deep un worthiness, and subjected his past and his motives to the most scrupulous and even morbid analysis. "Was this ambition?" he was heard to say one day, half to himself, when re- capitulating the events of his past life. "Could BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 269 it all have been ambition ? " The end came quickly after a mournful struggle, and he died in March 1885. I stayed more than once as a child at Riseholme, which was the very unepiscopal "palace," as it was then called, of the Bishops of Lincoln for about fifty years, from 1840 onwards. The great palace in Lincoln, on the southern slope of the hill, looking out over the town, was a mere mass of ruins, as I remember it, with a stone Georgian house, where the Bishop's legal secretary lived ; the rest of it covered with ivy, tufted with grasses, and with an orchard growing between the broken walls of the Great Hall. The Bishops had had a palace at Buckden, near Huntingdon, in the days when the huge diocese was still undivided, and the stately brick towers of it are visible behind the church there. Riseholme itself is a modern stone house, stand- ing among pleasant woods, and half-encircled by a lake, in which on calm days the Cathedral tower, nearly three miles away, is mirrored. Hidden away among trees, close to the house, was a small village with a tiny church, in the churchyard of which Bishop Wordsworth lies buried. I have before me as I write an old photograph of Rise- holme, taken, I suppose, in 1870 from the far side of the lake. The house blinks pleasantly through its sun-blinds across the flower-beds, backed with trees. In the lake lies a boat, with two little boys in straw hats resting on the oars my brother and myself, who were staying there at the time. I re- member being dreadfully alarmed when I was told 270 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE by my mother that we were going to stay there, and bursting into tears ; the real reason being that I found it still difficult to dress myself without the aid of my nurse (though I did not confess this), and a vision passed before me of myself struggling with a refractory collar in a bed-room of a great house filled with unsympathetic elders, and unable to make a public appearance in consequence. How- ever, we went, and my mother proved a perfectly satisfactory valet. Riseholme was to my eyes a place of strange and romantic grandeur : the central hall, with its un- familiar scents ; the big library, where we mostly sat, with a black bronze Greek helmet perched aloft, in terrifying solitude, on the top of a book- case ; the great dining-room, with two colossal line- drawings of St. Hugh with his Swan, and St. Remigius, are as clear in my memory as though I had seen them yesterday. It was summer weather, and we boys spent most of our time on the lake, rowing and fishing, and looking out for the great mottled pike that used to lie basking among the weeds as we glided overhead. The Bishop, as I remember him, was not in the least a terrifying figure. He was compactly and lightly built, and he moved with singular grace and alertness. His complexion was dark, and his expressive eyes moved quickly under his big fore- head. He had a very beautiful and irradiating smile, which lit up his ascetic face, with the two deep wrinkles that went from his nose to his lips. In my mental pictures of him he is always smiling 1 His smile was rather a mystery to myself and my BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 271 brother, because it did not seem to be connected with any particularly humorous events or ideas. It was just expressive of an attitude to the world. My father took great delight in the Bishop's society, and treated him with filial veneration and respect. I can see the two walking up and down a long terrace beside the lake on a hot afternoon in deep converse ; I don't know that I questioned it or thought it odd at the time, but I remember that the Bishop when he said good-bye to my father used to kiss his cheek, even on the crowded platform of Lincoln station, and give him a solemn blessing with uplifted hand. Wordsworth had a certain sense of humour, of a simple and almost practical kind. He would quote Greek at a public meeting, and when it became clear that his clerical hearers did not understand him, he would translate it " for the benefit of the ladies." He was very fond of my mother, used to call her his youngest daughter, and created some confusion in early days at Lincoln by introducing her to guests at a garden-party as " Mrs. Benson, my youngest daughter." Again my mother re- members how on one occasion, as the Bishop came out of the Cathedral in state, the vergers and the crozier in front, the Chapter and Choir behind, he caught sight of her in the street, held out his hand, and when she took it, gently detained her and made her walk with him in the procession as far as the Old Palace, to the high amusement of the spectators. One of my clearest pictures of the Bishop is as he sat at luncheon in the dining-room, discoursing 272 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE with a far-off look to not very attentive hearers on some point of mediaeval theology or tradition. He seemed wholly unconscious of what he ate ; used to crumble bread over his food, or help himself to anything within reach of him in an absent way, until one of his daughters would sign to a servant to remove the curiously diversified plate, and give the Bishop a fresh start. He gave me the impres- sion, even as a boy, of a man wholly remote from normal things, and living in a world of learning and thought. Or I can see him in his stiff red velvet cope, the hood of which came nearly up to the top of his head, proceeding with an air of the most un- conscious dignity up the choir of Lincoln, followed by his chaplains. Or I can hear his fine voice in his own Chapel reading a long string of collects and extending the range of his intercession from diocese to kingdom, from England to Europe, and em- bracing at last the whole world, civilised and uncivilised. I did not perceive then, but I realise now, how extraordinarily unlike other people he was in his spiritual range and intensity, and in the absorbed life of reflection and erudition which he lived. We children were not in the least afraid of him, though we never discovered that he was within the reach of any species of human communication or interest. When my father told us what a great cricketer he had been, it seemed to me dimly that it must have been centuries ago, so apart from mortal life he appeared. He was very good to us always, blessed and kissed us patriarchally. I remember when I BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 273 was a little Eton boy, and sent home to my father a verse translation which I had done of a passage of Theocritus, my father showed it to the Bishop. The Bishop sent for me to Riseholme, talked to me in the library, and finally took down from a shelf his own copy of the Theocritus which he had edited, inscribed my name in it in his picturesque and illegible hand, and sent me out for a row on the lake. I never remember seeing him at our house ; he was not often in Lincoln or at the Cathedral service the diocese was large, and his work was heavy. He used to go by preference to the little church at Riseholme, where I recollect him preaching on a hot summer evening to a handful of rustics for something like an hour on the Maccabees. The discourse was wholly unintelligible to me, and I should imagine to most of his hearers ; there seemed no reason why it should ever end ; but it was beautiful, for all that, to see the indwelling glance, and the smile which played over his dark features. I suppose that all the poetry of his nature and of his clan went into the dream of primitive and mediaeval Christianity. It certainly did not, with a few exceptions, pass into his hymns, of which I shall have occasion to speak ; but it was there, glowing and burning in the untiring brain and the wiry frame, with a fine intensity of vision. A word, too, must be said about Mrs. Wordsworth, whose devotion and simplicity were perhaps the greatest blessings of the Bishop's life. I remember her as a small and delicately built old lady, of tranquil and beautiful aspect, but with a look of S 274 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE weariness about her at times a weariness which her entire sweetness and unselfishness never allowed her to indulge, and of which indeed she seemed unconscious. I recall her with pretty old-fashioned curls on each side of her face, in a gown of purple silk, stepping quietly and with a perfectly uncon- scious dignity about her duties. She was to us as children entirely dear and reassuring. She talked little with us, but it was a pleasure to be allowed to be with her ; and she had a kindly decision about her utterances which gave one all the comfort of authority taken for granted rather than asserted. She was mostly silent, as I re- member her, but with a benignity that made one feel she was happy if her circle was content. My recollection of her is as of a life extraordinarily pure and fragrant, entirely untouched by any worldly thought, and absolutely devoted to the quiet service of love. Her whole thought and care were given to the Bishop. She was, I remember, the only one of that curiously active-minded and enthusiastic circle, boiling over with ideas and pursuits and tastes, who seemed to have no intellectual interests what- ever. The daughters used sometimes laughingly to complain that their early education had been sacrificed, as in the case of Milton's daughters, to their father's Commentary, and that day after day they and their governess had done nothing but copy out manuscript at Mrs. Wordsworth's desire. The Bishop what he wished, what he needed, what he cared for filled her whole horizon. " Is the Bishop interested in the matter ? " said BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 275 another English Bishop to Mrs. Wordsworth at a public luncheon, referring to some contem- porary controversy. "The Bishop is interested in everything," said Mrs. Wordsworth, "though I have not heard him mention this particular subject." One other little story I may tell of her. It was known that the Bishop disliked the line "and only man is vile " in Heber's great mission hymn. My mother, sitting next the pair in church, saw the Bishop with a very undisguised smile, bending down to listen to Mrs. Wordsworth singing the hymn, and substituting for the obnoxious words a line which hardly satisfies the required antithesis " and all the pastures smile." One of the most remarkable points about Bishop Wordsworth's life is that, though he was eight years a Headmaster and sixteen a Bishop, and though both at Cambridge and Westminster he had an abundance of practical and administrative work to do, yet the amount of his literary output was gigantic. He wrote a book about Greece, he edited Theocritus, he wrote a life of his uncle the poet, he compiled a Latin Grammar which was for long a standard work, he published a lengthy and learned Commentary on the whole of the Bible, and a Church History in four volumes. Besides this he wrote a volume of Hymns for every festival of the Church, as \vell as several volumes of occasional lectures, sermons, and ad- dresses. This immense mass of work was made possible by his retentive memory, his power of complete absorption in his work, and his continuous 276 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE diligence. He rose early, and worked before break- fast, day after day, even when the rest of the day was to be taken up by official work. He rarely took a holiday, and even then, he never laid aside his writing. All his work is penetrated by a peculiar quality which it is difficult to define. He had imbibed the scholastic learning, and was familiar, by instinct as much as by practice, with the method of thought of the early Fathers of the Church. He had a strong historical bias, and, though living in the nineteenth century, his mind was stored with pre- cedents of primitive Christian times. He had, too, that curious love for the symbolical and allegorical which was characteristic of the mediaeval mind ; he saw mystical analogies high and low, and his reasoning processes were affected by his taste for spiritual correspondences. It was the expression, no doubt, of the strong vein of poetry in him which was his family inheritance. But the result is not wholly satisfactory. His Commentary, with which I was as a schoolboy very familiar, is somewhat vitiated for practical purposes by a fantastic vein of parabolic significance, and by a deliberate or, more properly, an unconscious quaintness of expression. If this quaintness had permeated his work it might have been more striking ; but it mingled not very smoothly with a rather ponderous style of English, a Ciceronian involution, which was the offshoot of the classical eighteenth-century manner, in which magniloquence of diction obscured and destroyed terseness of thought. There never was a vehicle so inflated, so in love with its own sonorous empti- BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 277 ness, as the early nineteenth-century prose ; it lost itself in balance and phrasing, it threw over emphasis and lucidity. Wordsworth did not escape from this influence, and the result is a rather dreary sententiousness, a love of apophthegm rather than of epigram, a multiplication of parallel phrases, with no particular antithesis underlying them. The same tendency came out in his talk. It was learned, accurate, lengthy I doubt if it was interesting ! He used to give the impression of having come out of his study absorbed in a train of thought and disposed to continue it in conversation. He seemed to be thinking aloud, and to take for granted a much closer acquaint- ance with erudite subjects among his hearers than was at all the case. It was not that he sought for illustrations of modern tendencies in the ancient world his mind naturally supplied them without conscious effort ; and thus, though there was always an impressive and even beauti- ful aroma of antiquity about his talk, it was clear that he was judging modern problems too much in the light of ancient tendencies, and that he did not realise the expansion of latter-day ideas. His line about the Burials Bill, for instance, was largely influenced by the line taken by St. Ambrose against the Emperor Valentinian when he was required to give up some churches of Milan for the use of the Arians ; he was sustained in his resistance by the thought of St. Hilary and St. Athanasius, and their resolute defiance of secular authority. It was noble in its way ; but the Bishop did not 278 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE realise that the forces of primitive Christianity were novel and rising forces, fighting for life and liberty against materialistic tendencies, and not a pathetic clinging to venerable and ancient traditions. The combat of the world transforms itself ; and it is strange to see that even Christianity, which was the most liberal and dynamic of all ideas and systems at work in the ancient world, can transmute itself, if development is thwarted by tradition, into one of the most conservative and static of drags upon the wheel of progress. But the value which Wordsworth's method of thought possessed lay in his realising, at whatever sacrifice of compromise, the essential unity of the old and the new. The danger of the backward- looking eye is that it interprets the problem of the present rather by the facts of the past than by the needs of the future ; but its advantages are that it does not lose sight of the solidarity of human life, even if it sets precedent above imagination ; and Wordsworth's whole life and utterances breathed a glowing and inspiring sense of gratitude and loyalty to the past, for its rich association and its unlifted simplicity. In the book where his poetical talent had most scope the Holy Year one finds exactly the same gratitude firmly displayed. In certain hymns, such as " Hark, the sound of holy voices," he rose into a true lyrical and devotional passion, which has endeared that fine apostrophe to all Anglicans ; but he kept too much in sight the principle of dogmatic instruction, and the suppression as far as possible of personal sentiment, with the result that the facile BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 279 stanzas achieve in places an almost incredible bathos. " What the Holy Prophets meant In the ancient Testament, Thou dost open to our view, Lord, for ever, in the New." Such lines as these (and they are not uncommon in the book) are in my belief the direct result of Wordsworth's classical training. If boys of acute mind are encouraged to give poetical form to slender and prosaic ideas in a language like Latin, where neat balance is easy, and where the poetical associations of language are not instinctively understood, the result must inevitably be a real baldness and thinness of expression which misses the whole idea of poetical utterance. It is curious to see in this book the two inherited tendencies at work which both ennobled and devastated the writings of the poet Wordsworth. There is the same resolute avoidance of diction, the belief that only through extreme simplicity of statement can poetry survive ; and with it the same total absence of the power of self-criticism which allowed so much thin and inferior work to stand. The notable family to which Bishop Wordsworth belonged is distinguished by that poetical quality which, by combination with strong mental and physical capacities, contrives to create a singularly independent atmosphere of thought, and a view of life which is highly eclectic and does not correspond very closely to the actual world. The faculty of dwelling and abiding in dreams and visions is the truest mark of the poetical temperament. At the 280 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE same time, this need not be accompanied by any lack of practical power ; only that power may be at times, from want of a vital and sympathetic understanding of normal natures, inappropriately and even perversely applied. The ecclesiastical world was the world of which Wordsworth's imagination laid hold. His mind created for itself a noble pageant of the past, a pomp of great, heroic, courageous figures, now withstanding the secular powers of the world, now exercising large and beneficent jurisdiction, now translating their hieratic visions into splendid ceremonies and great buildings, now in solitude and austerity upholding against oppression and malice the truth of some deep and subtle oracle of God. It was not purely a moral ideal that inspired these hopes and prospects. Wordsworth's conception of the world was not a philosophical one. It was a vision of a great secret of salvation and redemption slowly manifested in the midst of a world whose natural bias was towards materialistic and selfish aims. Wordsworth thought of the Church as a visible and incarnate counterpart of its triumphant Lord ; he did not regard the world as a great and comprehensive society, slowly feeling its way, through national divergences and glimmering ideals variously conceived, to the truth, but as something to be conquered and subdued into an awestruck submission to a detailed and unquestion- able revelation. This has, of course, the positive advantage of infusing the special tenets of the individual with a precise and triumphant kind of certainty, that states its case with a deliberate BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 281 conviction which has a strong compulsive effect on kindred minds and hearts. One need not be in exact sympathy with Wordsworth's position to be glad that an ideal should be so firmly presented, and confirmed by such glowing charity and stainless innocence of life. His life, indeed, in its passionate ardour, its unflinching courage, has a true heroic quality ; and it is, moreover, deeply inspiring to see the daily progress ot a spirit so richly endowed with intellect, so conspicuously successful from the start in all the institutions of civilised society. There is a sense of vigilance, of patient effort, of eager self-discipline about the life from first to last. One sees a somewhat stern boldness melting into a sustained courage, a censorious tendency losing its sharpness, and devoting itself to purifying its own example rather than vehemently testifying against the faults of others. Most admirable of all is the slow growth, not of a spirit of tolerance, but of a constant endeavour to cultivate a just respect, a sincere reverence for all moral greatness, however based. Inconclusive as some of the Bishop's arguments and illustrations were, one feels them to have been the result of a mental bias rather than of any lack of moral candour. Notable, too, is the vast and ceaseless energy of the man. Idleness and languor were inconceivable to him. Life was for him a thing to be used to the uttermost, not a thing to be trifled with. Like all serious men, his lack of the wider kind of humour contributed greatly to his enjoyment of life. To be much amused by life is to confess its faultiness and even its meanness ; and though the humorist is more 282 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE in line with facts, he has not the impelling power which belongs to those who see frailties and discordant selfishness with reluctance and even with shame. If Bishop Wordsworth was ignorant of the world, it was with a noble ignorance which refuses to believe anything but the best of humanity. But he was not one of those who agonise and torment themselves with despair at the sight of the array of brute forces. Wordsworth had something of the temper of those ancient heroes who hewed the Amorites hip and thigh, though his Christian forbearance would have led him rather to welcome the onset of the forces which he despised and hated than to have exercised a policy of extermina- tion. His was one of those chivalrous spirits to whom the prospect of falling in a good cause was almost dearer than the thought of quelling the Saracens. He was in fact a Crusader, even an Inquisitor turned inside out, to use a homely metaphor. He was averse from persecution, not at all averse from being persecuted. He would have desired peace on his own terms ; but he would have preferred to be exterminated than to have accepted peace as a compromise. This is, I think, the secret of this deeply interest- ing character, so vital and yet so remote from life, so deeply biassed and yet penetrated with such ardent aspirations. As a witty and tender-hearted Lincoln resident said, in reply to a question as to whether Wordsworth was popular in his Cathedral town, " He is as popular as a man can be, three- quarters of whom is in the third century and the rest in heaven." One cannot expect, or even BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN 283 honestly desire, that the expansion of Christian thought should be limited, as Wordsworth would have limited it, to such antique lines ; and yet his example may lead one to the belief that no development is sure and stable which does not carefully keep in view the conditions out of which the world is passing, which does not give its due and true value to the past and to the great factors of history and tradition, evoking order out of chaos and wide principles out of passionate preferences. XII MATTHEW ARNOLD IT is the hardest thing in the world to recover what one really thought or felt, or even knew, about great men or great books, when one was young. Subsequent knowledge and feeling have gone on trickling down, like stalactites from the roof of a cave, blending with and penetrating the original tiny core of experience. It is so impossible to shut off all the new light, which has since inter- vened, from the old picture ! cannot now dis- entangle what the essence of my genuine admiration for Matthew Arnold, in my schooldays, was. I did not know many of his poems. The " Forsaken Merman," which I learnt by heart as a child, seemed to me rather silly and trivial, I am ashamed to say. I certainly had not read any of his prose works. But he was the son of Dr. Arnold, who was one of my father's heroes, and whose life I had read. In any case, I was prepared to see a great man when he came down to Eton to give his lecture on evrpajreXla "happy flexibility." It was going to be an event, and an event it was. I can remember the dignified suavity with which he took his place, the dark head, with its rippling glossy hair, sinuously and graciously inclined, the big side-whiskers, the large expressive mouth, the MATTHEW ARNOLD 285 grave ecclesiastical smile. The opening sentence about the philosopher Epictetus, and his com- plaint of the quality of the water in the bath, arrested me by its urbanity, its elaborateness ; and by the sense that our instructor recognised himself to be, like the wise householder in the Gospel, bringing out of his treasury things new and old ! I did not know what culture was in those days. I liked the books which amused me ; I had no scheme of self-improvement, and not the smallest touch of ambition. But the whole discourse had the charm of a mysterious secret, of which our kindly and kingly lecturer had the dispensing. Something stirred and fluttered in my soul. This was not the hard and dull knowledge, like brick- bats, which fell from many of our teachers : it was not a taste of bitter and loathsome grammatical facts, which had no connection with each other or anything else ; dreadful rules which had to be learnt, in order to play the dreary game of education. There was something harmonious and seductive about what he was telliug us, a sense of living men and living ideas where language for a moment became, not the ashes of the human rubbish-heap, but coals glowing with the fire of the heart. I do not mean that I then and thus elaborated my thought ; but the discourse was a revelation of beautiful things within reach of one's hand living ideas, glowing images. I felt a sense of princely condescension and of active kindness about Mr. Arnold that he should be willing to instruct us. His utterance did not seem like persuasion, but a priestly sort 286 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE of ministering of undoubted grace. The effect soon faded away ; but it induced me, I remember, to read his poems, with an odd mixture of pleasure at the beauty of many of them, together with a sort of revulsion at the hard, plain, and knotty lines that lay among the richness, like the pointed kernel in the honeyed plum. One of my school- fellows was his nephew, and I secured an autograph, not indeed of the poet himself, but of his wife, which seemed to me a precious leaf from very near the rose. Then, at Cambridge, I fell wholly under the spell of Matthew Arnold's writings, prose and poetry alike. He seemed then the one faultless writer ; and there came a day when he delivered the Rede Lecture, in the early eighties, and received an LL.D. degree. I was asked as an under- graduate to the great garden-party at King's, where the Doctors all appeared robed in glory ; and while I was talking to the kindly Mrs. Westcott, wife of the Bishop, I suddenly descried two figures stand- ing together and surveying the scene Sir Henry Maine and Mr. Arnold. One little thing struck me. Most of the Doctors were wearing their scarlet gowns and their odd, flat, gold-corded velvet hats with an air of obvious and fearful joy. They had become, most of them, mere lay-figures, with a foolish, smiling figure-head at the top, instinct with complacent vanity. But Maine and Arnold alone appeared to wear their gowns like customary coats, each as one " That tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky." MATTHEW ARNOLD 287 There was no parade about it ; they shone because it was their fate to shine. I murmured a heartfelt wish to Mrs. Westcott, who, with motherly kind- ness, went straight up to Mr. Arnold, I trailing in her wake, aghast at my boldness, and said, " Mr. Arnold, here is a young man who wishes to be presented to you. You know his father the Bishop of Truro." The moment was come. The great man held out his hand, said a few pleasant words about my father, and then, when I was about to retire, nodded to Sir Henry Maine, and said to me, " Come and walk about with me a little, and point out to me some of the celebrities." He even put his hand within my arm, and I had a few minutes of awestruck rapture, parading before the guests in a kind of gorgeous intimacy with one of the first spirits of the age. I did my best to obey his instructions, and was at last dismissed with a delightful smile, and a wish that we should meet again. We did meet again. My father became Arch- bishop of Canterbury, and Mr. Arnold used to dine with us at Lambeth ; I have little doubt I bored him horribly, for I contrived more than once, when the ladies left the room, to slip into a chair beside him. But his graciousness was perfect. He treated me as he might have treated the most honoured of our guests, and gave me of his best. My father had a real affection for him, not un- mingled with terror. He considered him a danger- ously subversive writer, but I think also thought of him as not likely to do serious harm to the 288 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE cause of orthodoxy ; while he loved his poetry so much and respected his sense of things ancient and beautiful so deeply that his admiration was wholly sincere. One interesting and characteristic story about him he was fond of telling. He had sat next to him, on the iirst occasion of their meeting, at the house of Mr. Charles Arnold at Rugby. Matthew Arnold had uttered some humorous semi- cynical statement, to the effect that it was useless to try to enlighten the general public, or to give them a sense of due proportion. My father was somewhat nettled, and quoted a few .lines from the celebrated sermon of Dr. Arnold's on Christian Education. Matthew Arnold smiled affectionately at him, drooping his head sideways in his direction, while he patted his shoulder, and said, "Very graceful and appropriate, my dear Benson, but we must not take for Gospel everything that dear Dr. Arnold said." It was incidents and sayings such as these half- genial, half-ironical, and not really quite tactful that gave Matthew Arnold the reputation for conscious superiority which the reality so instantly belied. It was only necessary to be once in his presence to know, with a certainty that could never be shaken, that he was the kindest, most amiable, and most delightful of men. He was simple, humorous, sweet-tempered, and natural. Yet the tradition persistently lingers that there was some- thing supercilious and disdainful about him. Per- haps the tone of his writings, which have been described as " painfully kind," like a sage pleading graciously with a stubborn and stupid child, his MATTHEW ARNOLD 289 magnificent manner, his dramatic eyeglass, may have created this impression. He was thought to be affected and academic. Probably, too, this view of him was augmented by Mr. Mallock's delightful satire, the New Republic, where Mr. Luke, who stands for Arnold, is depicted as languid, affected, and patronising. Yet his letters alone, which are really almost too homely for publication, might have disposed of this strange perversion. Even his liberal use of irony that large, courteous, Socratic irony, which plays lambently over the type, and seldom scorches the individual never made him unpopular : and in private life he was simply irresistible. He was born in 1822 at Laleham, near Staines, in the great alluvial plain of the Thames. His father, Dr. Arnold, was then an unknown man, making an income by taking pupils. Two more diverse temperaments than those of father and son could hardly be selected. Dr. Arnold was earnest and strenuous, with the kind of passionate idealism that, while it inspires the enthusiastic with the same intense quality of emotion, is apt to take the heart out of more leisurely and easy-going natures. A man who could burst into tears at his own dinner- table on hearing a comparison made between St. Paul and St. John, to the detriment of the latter, and beg that the subject might never be mentioned again in his presence, could never have been an easy companion. Dr. Arnold was a hero of men : he had a Herculean task to perform, and he per- formed it with marvellous courage and industry. But such a spirit flies abroad like flame, and withers where it does not ignite. It is impossible not to T 290 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE feel that Dr. Arnold would have regarded his son's religious writings with shame and horror. And yet, strange to say, both father and son were attacking very much the same things and championing the same cause. Dr. Arnold hated tyranny, and had the true Protestant spirit. The son loved grace and light, and hated stupidity and conventional ineptitude. But the difficulty with such natures as Dr. Arnold's, with their intense capacity of translating theory into practical life, with their sharply-defined principles, their ardour of hope, is that they cannot concede to others more liberty than they are themselves deter- mined to possess. Dr. Arnold's liberalism was part of a very clear theory of government and practice. He did not wish others to be free on their own lines, but upon his own. He gave his boys liberty with a generous hand, but woe betide them if they extended that liberty ; they had then, in Dr. Arnold's mind, abused it. Neither had Dr. Arnold a sense of humour. The ironical attitude, the half-pathetic, half-amused contemplation of perversities and stupidities, which you can perceive, but cannot terminate, was abhorrent to him. It was a kind of cynical trifling with the urgent issues of life. There is evidence that father and son did not wholly harmonise in the school-days of the latter. But if Dr. Arnold had lived to be an old man, it is difficult to say what would have ensued. Matthew Arnold's filial piety was so strong, he was so " Decent not to fail In offices of tenderness," that he would have very possibly suppressed MATTHEW ARNOLD 291 opinions the avowal of which would have caused his father unmitigated pain. But Dr. Arnold died in 1842, when his son was an undergraduate at Balliol, and the collision never came in sight. Matthew Arnold's Oxford career was not an entire success. He only obtained a Second Class in the final Classical Schools. But this, as in the case of Newman and Clough, was more than atoned for by an Oriel Fellowship, which was still considered the highest intellectual honour that Oxford could bestow upon a young man of promise. He went for a time to Rugby as a master, and then became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who was one of those quiet imponderable personal forces in mid-Victorian politics to which history inevitably does scanty justice. Lord Lansdowne led the House of Lords, and was consulted on every matter of political importance. He was a strong Whig, at a time when Whig opinions were still on the side of progress. Whiggery now seems a disagreeable blend of privilege and democracy, combining a convenient belief in popular liberty with a still stronger belief in personal prestige. Matthew Arnold's politics, nominally Liberal, were to the end influenced by the bias communicated to them by the serene dignity of his old chief. Yet the period of indoctrination was short enough. A political secretaryship is a fleeting thing ; and within four years Matthew Arnold was appointed to an Inspectorship of Schools, a post which he held for thirty-two years. It is natural, I think, to over-estimate the services which Matthew Arnold rendered to the cause of 292 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE national education. He had, of course, a perception of the fact that if the democracy is to rule the State, the only hope is to educate the democracy up to its vote, and to give it an inkling of what political progress is. But his real concern lay with second- ary education, and, though he was a kindly and sympathetic inspector, it is clear that his ideal of education was built upon the old humanistic basis. He overrated the force of classical culture, and he did not perceive that what, under earlier conditions, had been a real tincture of mental habit, was becoming, under modern conditions, a merely sentimental veneer. The modern function of educa- tion, in its civic aspect, is to initiate the youth of the country into clear conceptions of the possible reconstruction of political stability under democratic conditions. Matthew Arnold had a theoretical sympathy with the possibilities of scientific educa- tion, but his real sympathies lay with the attainment of literary culture. Hence he suffered from the inevitable backwardness of mind which befalls all those who can only meet actual difficulties, arising out of changed conditions, with a vaguely emotional proffer of ancient complacencies. He was in favour of State supervision and publicity in education, but the result of his own and like-minded efforts was to establish a system of primary education which corresponds very little with the needs of the class educated ; while secondary education, which was, and is, in urgent need of simplification and co- ordination, has been left in the hands of monopolists and traditional exponents of outworn theories. The secondary schools of England are still as much MATTHEW ARNOLD 293 in need as ever of the qualities which Matthew Arnold endeavoured to enforce, while the effect of the type of primary education adopted has been to upset and subvert traditional class-feeling, with- out providing any social outlet for the type thus educated. It is useless to organise education without knowing very clearly what end is in sight. Matthew Arnold had little grasp of social eventu- alities. He knew clearly enough what attitude of mind he desired to produce, and still more clearly the middle-class attitude of mind that he abhorred ; but he did not grasp the fact that education must be closely adapted to the material available, and that to achieve results it is even more important to know what instincts you have to act upon than what result you would desire to attain. Matthew Arnold was made Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, and held the post for ten years. His discourses were elegant and stimulating, but made no great mark on the history of the period. His official life lasted until 1886; but he found time to play a considerable part in the social life of his day. He was a welcomed and honoured guest in all societies ; and in later life he made a lecturing tour in America, where his great ineffectiveness as a lecturer only emphasised the enthusiastic respect and admiration with which he was everywhere received. The last time I ever saw him was in 1887, at Windermere Station. He appeared to be in the very flower and vigour of a strong and dignified age ; but he died six months afterwards, from the effects of hurrying to catch a tramcar in the streets of Liverpool, at the age of sixty-five. This swift 294 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE and painless close to a life full of activity and social enjoyment was but the final blessing of a naturally felicitous temperament. As a literary critic, Matthew Arnold was fanciful and even whimsical. But this is a small matter in face of his urbanity, his exquisite taste, and his delicacy of perception. He may be said to have inaugurated, or at all events to have given prestige to, a new school of criticism. The old-fashioned sangrenu theory of criticism the criticism of Lord Macaulay and the Edinburgh Reviewers is slowly, it may thankfully be believed, dying a natural death. There were two modes of criticism extant in the earlier part of the century, and it is hard to say which is the more futile. The benevolent critic classified authors, and placed them in lists, like Tripos lists, in classes and brackets ; authors had to be compared and pitted one against another. If poetry was in question, another class-list was brought out, say of elegies : Lycidas came out first, Gray's Elegy second, and so on. The stricter method was to sit in judgment, and to pronounce what was right and what was wrong. The critic was a judge, and authors were arraigned before him. If an author was approved, he was acquitted with- out a stain on his character ; if he was disapproved of, he was taken to task as a nuisance to society, and received a harsh and ignominious sentence, with every sort of wounding ridicule that could be heaped upon him. It was an attempt, a con- scientious and complacent attempt, to establish standards ; but it overlooked the fact that criticism is ultimately based upon individual opinion, and MATTHEW ARNOLD 295 that opinion shifts its channels. The most that one can say is that, if a book approves itself to generation after generation, and satisfies both trained and un- trained opinion, it probably has some quality which corresponds to an instinctive sense of beauty in the human mind. But there is no scientific standard instantly applicable in the case of contemporary work. Dr. Johnson was a shrewd and perceptive judge of certain qualities in literature, but the fact that he thought the Pilgrim's Progress a stupid and barbarous book does not make Johnson a bad critic or the Pilgrim's Progress a bad book. All that the most acute critic can do is to discern qualities in a writer that are likely to prove congenial to cultivated minds and hearts. It is the same with natural objects. One cannot say that the Matterhorn is a beautiful mountain and Monte Rosa an ugly mountain. What one can do is to perceive that the Matterhorn has certain arresting qualities, which for some unknown reason are likely to continue to appeal to the human imagination. When one comes to individual books, it is no more possible to explain why one is beautiful than to explain why human beings like mutton and do not care for horseflesh. All writers, all books, all poems are unique ; and it seems gradually dawning upon men that the true function of criticism is only that of discerning and interpreting excellence, and that the only comparison worth making is the comparison between a writer's intention and his performance. Matthew Arnold had strong preferences of his own. He did not care for Shakespeare, Tennyson, Shelley, Keats, or Thackeray. On the other hand, 296 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE he had a taste for discovering, and for praising almost extravagantly, little literary figures of no great significance. Amiel, Joubert, the two Guerins, were figures on whom Matthew Arnold conferred a prominence which they did not wholly retain. He liked a subtle and suggestive kind of moralising ; he sympathised with a melancholy outlook on the world. But in so far as he saw and felt the charm of these writers, and made others feel it, he dis- charged the true critical function. After all, the victory rests with the man who sees and feels beauty, not with the man who is unaware of it. The Guerins, in their slender way, were as beautiful as the purple toadflax on the crannied wall. They were not beautiful, as the Matterhorn is beautiful ; they had a delicate quality of their own, and were perfect on a small scale. People who are touched and satisfied by the toadflax need not be scolded for not admiring the Matterhorn. It is more im- portant to realise quality than to reverence scale. The critic who appraises is only a sort of auctioneer. The true critic is one who takes a theme, whether it be Maurice de Guerin or Shakespeare ; sees its delicate outlines or its majestic curves, its sweetness or its majesty, its connection with life and death, its truth and its sincerity ; and on this theme, large or small, soft or loud, he must create something organic, that in itself is a criticism of life. There may, of course, be people who think it valuable and instructive, and even interesting, to have books marked and classified ; and, if there is a demand, there is no sort of reason why literary salesmen should not discourse in public on these MATTHEW ARNOLD 297 lines. But Matthew Arnold was not a critic in that sense, and he was a critic in the larger sense in that he had his eye on life and his finger on the pulse of humanity and thus set himself to criticise the strange fruit of human utterance, which is both a part of life itself, as well as its expression and reflection. He was a critic in his seriousness, his dis- interestedness, his desire to get at the meaning and essence of it all. He had a finely trained intelligence working on systematic lines. His great maxim in criticism was this : " I wish to decide nothing as of my own authority : the great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way, and to let humanity decide." There he struck a very true note. The critic is a pleader, not a judge, and still less the epitome of a jury. His business is to present the case truthfully and lucidly, but the ultimate decision lies elsewhere. Arnold struck a true note in his book, Culture and Anarchy, in which his point was to prove that lawlessness in art was the lack of proper deference to the authority of cultivated persons ; but even so, no deference to the individual critic can be demanded, because the individual cannot wholly discard his own preferences. Deference is due to a slowly accumulated body of cultivated opinion ; and even when one has said that, one is little better off than before, because the only admiration that is worth anything is genuine admiration, and the admiration which is the result of deference to opinion is a perfectly valueless thing. What defer- ence ought to make men do is to give literature a fair trial, and not to decide hastily ; and if one 298 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE disagrees with the verdict of the ages, to conclude that it is probably oneself that is deficient, and not that the ages had no right to their opinion. A critic who did not agree with Matthew Arnold's judgments spoke acrimoniously of Arnold's belief in the well-known preference of the Almighty for University men. The criticism was not wholly undeserved. Behind Arnold's deliberate and in- stinctive urbanity there lurked a well-bred con- tempt for the mob for all that was loud and violent and brutal and rude. But this was not the impotent rage manifested by weakness for good-humoured strength, as by Miss Squeers for John Brodie, which is too often the attitude of the literary man. Arnold regarded the uncultivated as the lost sheep of the House of Israel. What he really did openly despise and dislike was the gross, robust, and complacent self-satisfaction of the middle-class the Philistines, as he christened them who despised ideas because they thought they had secured what was better worth having a measure of material comfort. But the irony in which he indulged at their expense never made him unpopular, because he attacked, as a rule, the type, and not the individual ; and when he did attack the individual, he seasoned his con- tempt with a deferential consciousness of his ad- versary's strength, and with diplomatic compliments. Even his ridicule was of a kind which ministered agreeably to his victims' vanity to such an extent, indeed, that it rather confirmed them in a perversity which seemed so distinguished, than induced them to wish to alter their methods and opinions. MATTHEW ARNOLD 299 Arnold was thus not an appraiser of literary values, but a critic in the sense that he heightened and dignified the interest and the appreciation of art and literature ; and a critic, in the larger sense, of his age, in the fact that he saw clearly its strength and its weakness, and held up his flattering mirror to its smug and comfortable visage. Perhaps his best service of all was to show that a critic can be well-bred and urbane, and that he thus does far more for the cause that he has at heart, than when his native irritability throws out malignant sparks at its contact with life, or when he vindictively punches to bits some of the helpless and grotesque vermin of letters, in the spirit of the gardener who hewed the toad, like Agag, to pieces, saying that he would teach it to be a toad. It is difficult to estimate what the precise effect of Matthew Arnold's religious opinions upon con- temporary thought exactly was. He was in no sense a pioneer ; he rather focussed a great amount of floating opinion, and expressed with grace, force, and simplicity what a good many cultivated people were thinking. " I thrive on religious exegesis," he once said to a friend who inquired after his health. His religion was a literary Pantheism, with a strong tinge of Christian Idealism. He could not accept as proved the doctrine of a Personal Divinity. Unfortunately, with his relish for phrases, he invented a new and extremely un- attractive formula for a very simple idea. "The Eternal not-ourselves which makes for righteous- was in its way a formula as disagreeably 300 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE definite to agnostics as the technical statements of the Athanasian Creed, without the advantage either of the familiarity which leads simple people to over- look the precise significance of clauses which have become habitual, or of the venerable and emotional associations which gather round expressions that have been consecrated by religious solemnity. The ordinary man does not want to think of the Divine principle as a sort of electricity, of which the untamed manifestations are disastrous and the subdued uses beneficial, but all the workings of which are blind and mechanical. If the mysterious force behind the frame of things has anything so definite in view as right conduct, the human mind is more than justified in using a concrete sym- bolism, for the simple reason that it cannot think in abstractions. A human being, with its intense consciousness of what it means by the word " self," can hardly be trained to think of that self as being originated by any power which is not also personal. Indeed, the evolution of consciousness from uncon- sciousness is an unattainable thought. Our intense sense of our right to happiness inevitably leads us to interpret the events of life as being framed to develop that happiness, and our natural optimism triumphs over unhappiness, by imagining that the disasters of life must somehow be intended to minister to ultimate content. Thus, on the con- structive side, Matthew Arnold's theory must be held to have failed, because it provides no medicine for discontent and despair. If there is only a passionless force making for righteousness, if no alliance of the human will with that force is MATTHEW ARNOLD 301 possible, then, however true the theory may be, there is no reason for attempting passionately to embrace it. It can have no value for humanity till it is proved to be true ; and if it is proved to be true, it is a very discouraging business. But where Arnold undoubtedly did help his generation was by showing thoughtful minds that they need not necessarily abandon Christian principles and Christian hopes because they could not believe whole-heartedly in ecclesiastical title- deeds. The modern critical position with regard to the miraculous element of Scripture is not that it is necessarily untrue, but that it needs more proof than the records can possibly furnish. Matthew Arnold's view of Christ and the Gospel record was very much what his view would have been of St. Francis of Assisi. Any one who reads the Fioretti of St. Francis must feel perfectly sure that there is a real human being behind the record. But when the narrator says that St. Francis's head threw out flames as he prayed, and that, when an inquisitive Brother came nearer to observe the phenomenon closely, St. Francis turned round and blew him with a breath to the other end of the room, no one can be compelled to believe the statement, or to give up his belief in the actu- ality of St. Francis if he disbelieves it. The obvious bona fides, the naive simplicity of the Fio- retti, do not necessitate one's adherence to the belief that St. Francis reduced by a scolding the cannibal wolf of Gubbio to an affectionate kind of lap-dog. That did not seem impossible in an unscientific age. The real marvel would have been 302 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE if St. Francis's recorded life had been unattended with such reported occurrences. Of course, the difficulty is where to draw the line, but the diffi- culty is more theoretical than practical. Matthew Arnold's view was that in the Gospel we have the history of a character of supreme moral insight and transcendent spiritual force, and that the great and noble principles of life uttered by Jesus of Nazareth could never lose their indisputable power and truth. It was, no doubt, an intense relief to many thoughtful minds to find a man of high enthusiasm and stainless life saying frankly that no one need trouble his head about the legendary element of the Gospels, but also affirming that, on the other hand, the sayings of Christ afforded a final and ultimate standard of conduct and impulse. The mistake, he thought, was to try to deduce an ontological and dogmatic explanation of the world from sayings which combined the noblest kind of enthusiasm with the clearest perception both of moral beauty and truth. It is probable that Matthew Arnold, by expressing with matchless lucidity and courage what many sincere but bewildered people were thinking, did retain in sympathy with religious ideas a great many desirous souls who had felt themselves confronted by the choice between ecclesiastical dogma and scientific materialism. He induced many semi-thoughtful people to regard the Bible with increased reverence and respect as an inspiring manual of conduct, instead of abandoning it as an intolerable enigma. This is not, perhaps, a very living message now, because the type of persons to whom he gave consolation MATTHEW ARNOLD 303 have moved into a different region, and are more interested now in problems of social reconstruction. Religious dogma has become a matter which mainly agitates denominational coteries ; the words "heresy" and "schism" have lost their sinister consequences, and the tendency is rather to emphasise points of agreement than to ostracise points of dissidence. Indeed it is almost im- possible to reconstruct, even in imagination, the susceptibilities which broke out into flame over Essays and Reviews. And it may be said gener- ally that Matthew Arnold helped his generation in the direction of clearness of thought, of facing problems sincerely and without irritability, and away from the peculiarly ecclesiastical product which confuses muddle with mystery, and supposes that the blessing given by the Saviour to St. Thomas was a blessing on credulity, rather than a tender warning against materialistic self-sufficiency. The books which people write are interesting, I believe, in so far as they represent their tastes rather than their ambitions. The latter books have generally some pretentious emphasis, which is of rhetoric, not of nature, or some subtle suppres- sion of opinion which makes the fabric insecure. The weakness of such books is that they are written to impress the world ; and people who desire to impress the world generally judge it harshly or meanly, perhaps because they suspect that their triumph implies the world's gullibility. Few poets, God be praised, have ever written in that spirit, even though they may yield to complacency after- wards. Matthew Arnold's poems were certainly 304 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE not written from that point of view. He published both his first volumes, The Strayed Reveller (1849) and Empedocles on Etna (1852), under the single initial "A." Both books fell so flat that they were withdrawn from circulation after a few copies had been sold. If he had lived entirely for ambi- tion, that would have been a sharp lesson. I do not intend here to give a critical appreciation of the poems, except in so far as they illustrate char- acter. They made no appeal to popular ears. They are intensely cultured, and have a certain Miltonic stiffness and bareness, in many lines, which require for their apprehension that a reader's taste should have been curbed and enriched by classical training. He made some experiments, notably in a sort of rhythmical prose, with a pulse of metre beating throughout. That this style was not wholly successful is perhaps proved by the fact that it has had no imitators, except Mr. Mallock, who, in the New Republic, produced a similar poem which, if it had been a genuine work of the poet's, would have been faithfully, and rightly, accepted as a fine poem of the kind. Matthew Arnold wasted time, it may be whispered, in writing a poem, Balder Dead, where much emotion and high poetry is expended on a subject which never seems quite to burst into flame. He wrote a very noble narra- tive fragment, Sohrab and Rustum, which is a splendid specimen of the self-conscious and elabor- ate epic, and touches the springs of life. Perhaps his best work was done in iambic and stanzaic lyrics, mostly of a gnomic type, full of finely crystallised maxims ; while the romantic poem of MATTHEW ARNOLD 305 the Scholar-Gypsy and the monody Thyrsi's, on the death of Clough, have taken rank among the great poems of the century. But the poems, as a whole, illustrate a melancholy habit of mind. Occasionally there are hints of a mournful passion, not sensuous, but spiritual, which seems held in check by a certain timidity and coldness of nature which dares not let itself go. The impression they give is that of a mind ill at ease, with an intense love of beauty, a desire for heightened living and zest, struggling with a nature which is hardly robust enough to live as it longs to live. Here, one says, is a spirit that feels the weariness more than the joy of life, and that checks itself again and again on the threshold of experience, trying to school itself into tranquillity and philosophical peace. The hand that wrote " Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well," must have been that of a man who felt that through some deficiency of vital force he could not afford to gratify his desires, and that his only chance of peace was to accept what he knew to be only second-best namely, life on a lower plane, hus- banded and guarded so that its resources may not be squandered. It is a nature which dreads the fight and the struggle, the elements which to coarser and stronger spirits, who do not trouble themselves about the wounds which they inflict, add zest to the things for which they fight. But there is a nobler quality than that in the background. The nature behind the poems is pre-eminently just, high-minded, and affectionate, born out of due U 306 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE time into a world which is still very far even from its conscious possibilities. The poems reflect an intense love of the earth not the wild, untamed earth of peak and forest, but the earth as subdued and replenished by man. The morality they teach is high and austere. Life is a pilgrimage of which the end is uncertain. There are beautiful things by the way, which the pilgrim sees with hungry heart and tears unsealed ; and perhaps some kindly power hangs out signs of love and hope in wayside flowers and forest-aisles. But life, it would seem, must be a constant renunciation, with no hope of immediate reward. Not that men should wilfully abide in sadness there is work to be done, there are tasks to be performed. If one desires to get the strongest possible contrast to Matthew Arnold, one may consider the poems of his contemporary, William Morris. Both men had the same intense love of man's handiwork the tilled field, the home- stead, the garden, the winding lane. But Morris is full of the joy of life and work, while Arnold gazes mournfully on a life which it is impossible to enjoy and work which it is unmanly to avoid. Perhaps one gets nearest to Matthew Arnold's thought in the solemn reflectiveness of Empedocles on Etna, where the contrast is heightened by the boy's voice breaking in, like the song of the wayside bird. But to the soul-wearied, tortured philosopher, planning a grave flight from a world in which it seems impossible to live wisely and calmly, all that radiant and careless joy is but one of the pathetic fetters which pinion the soul, and which must sternly be broken through. MATTHEW ARNOLD 307 The poems all belong to a period of unrest. Life had in store for Matthew Arnold a fuller message. He was to live and thrive, without ever drifting into comfortable materialism. He was to enrich the world by his gentle irony, his temperate example, his unsuspicious candour, and by the sweet reason- ableness which he practised as well as preached. But the poetical impulse left him, not probably because he was busy, but because, as has befallen even the most otiose of poets, the nerves of percep- tion and lyrical expression get dulled by the mere act of living ; it becomes not worth while to express in dancing and tinkling measures such very tem- perate raptures ! And so he sank, not into silence indeed, but into the congenial task of pleading more prosaically and directly with an unreasonable world. When one comes to survey the life and character of Matthew Arnold, one is struck at once by the curious set of contrasts which it displays. His grand manner, his social brilliance, his love of appearances and high consideration, do not seem to correspond to the extreme homeliness of his letters, which are, perhaps, the tamest documents for all their goodness and kindness ever penned by a man of genius : they are so much concerned with the details of life, with the food he ate, the names of the people he met, his trivial adventures, that, taken by themselves, one might imagine them to be the work of a capable, kindly, and intelligent commercial traveller. There is no enthusiasm, no discontent, and an almost total absence of ideas about them. But at least his extreme and deep- 308 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE seated modesty comes out. He speaks in one passage of the fact that is borne in upon him every year that he lives that success as a writer is far more a matter of good fortune than genius, sur- rounded as every writer is by hosts of intelligent and capable people, all aiming at the same sort of success. That is a very wise and mellow maxim ; but it is the last thing that a casual stranger meeting Matthew Arnold, in all his princely condescension, would have credited him with feeling. Then, too, behind this easy and distinguished life, there looks out from the poems the eager, dissatisfied, unhappy spirit, only craving for peace, and unable by any device to compass it. Yet, looking at the facts, even his overwhelming sorrows three of his four sons died in boyhood seem to have been gently borne. It is difficult to bring all these strands together. There appears at first sight a duality of disposition, a nature that agonised in the deeps of thought, and a nature that could live easily and cheerfully in daily life. My own belief is that he was one of those rare spirits who had really disciplined his life into patience and acquiescence out of feverish discontent and limitless dreams. He had realised, as all poets do not realise, that, apart from visions and reveries, there is a very real and simple life of duty, and family ties, and intellectual enterprise, that must be courageously and genially dealt with. He had a very noble and simple nature, incapable of meanness, or suspicion, or resentment. He found, I believe, that the one certain way to misunderstand humanity is by intellectually despising it, and that the life of the mind, prospective as it must be, must MATTHEW ARNOLD 309 not be allowed to interfere with the present and urgent life of the heart. He was not, it seems, a sagacious political prophet. The refined Whiggery, which he picked up under Lord Lansdowne, obscured his view, while the constitution of his mind made him incapable of recognising or sym- pathising with the rough and vivid hopes of democ- racy. His political judgments are, indeed, quite singularly inept. Neither had he any constructive social power. His educational ideals are pedantic and bureaucratic ; but he had a real love of his fellow-men and a great tolerance for their weak- nesses. If they did not flock into his intellectual fold, he yet was a friend of liberty, and struck some shrewd blows at stupidity, complacency, commer- cial religion, and vulgarity. And when he was swiftly summoned from the life he loved so well, the world lost not a warrior or a prophet, but a man who had lived faithfully and guilelessly, a wise and tender critic who had held up a faithful mirror to the faults of his time, and had done much to inter- pret and enforce the beauty and significance of thought and emotion and uplifted life. In one of his poems he says that esteem and function are the only merits which death allows. And these he had indeed, when his body was laid to rest, of purest quality and in fullest measure. EPILOGUE I HOPE that before now it may be plain enough why I have chosen to call my little book The Leaves of the Tree / but because there are many who do not like an allegory without the explanation, I will here try to make all clear. The tree in the midst of the garden, as we see it in our curious, finite way, has, besides its own individuality, a number of apparent indi- vidualities dependent on it branches, sprays, and leaves. Each leaf has its own character, its own little system of life, its own similarity and diversity of form. Each has its time to unfold and to fall ; but it would be a very childish mind that could think of one leaf as really apart from other leaves, and apart from the tree. The sap that to-day flows through one leaf may to-morrow flow in another. Just so I hold it to be with men. They are all but manifestations of a central will, or a central force, if " will " is too personal a word. Their life is not only common but identical. The tree has a certain definite power and energy of life. Its vitality may be augmented or diminished by circumstances and environment, but it has strict limitations, and a beech-tree cannot throw out a spray of pine, or imitate the silvery droop of the willow. If we could think of a leaf as having imagination and EPILOGUE 311 will, we should believe that its imagination would best be used in wondering at its airy station, in welcoming the sunlight on its glossy back, in drinking in the cooling rain, in admiring the strange shapes and glancing hues of the dove that rested in its shade ; and that its will would be best employed in using its faculties and opportunities to the utter- most, and in repressing its envious fancies. We should think it a childish affair if the leaf were to spend its imagination in picturing the more joyful range of the bird, and its will in striving to flutter from the bough. Thus for ourselves our hope lies in realising that we are the manifesta- tion and offshoot of some force that we cannot direct or control ; in meeting as joyfully and serenely as we can the course of life ordained for us, not wasting our energies in trivial visions of what we may expect to be, but in facing the issues of life and death with a noble curiosity and a high- hearted patience, and with a resolute acceptance of experience as a thing of small moment when com- pared to the infinite prospect which lies before us. But, it may be urged, how is it possible to think of this individuality of ours, which seems so absolutely distinct from all that is not itself, as being merged and lost, and even divided and re- distributed in other identities ? Well, we have no difficulty in conceiving of it in the case of matter. The body of a bird has a distinct in- dividuality ; while the bird lives, it is conscious that its body is its own, in a sense in which outside things are not its own. But if men make a meal of it, it is incorporated with their bodies. How or 312 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE at what moment the incorporation takes place we do not know, but though the atoms of which the bird's body are composed all exist unchanged in the bodies of those who eat of it, yet there is a time when they are mastered and animated, and become the property and substance of the man. We are all of us constantly sharing and distributing other bodies as well as our own. I do not say that the analogy necessarily holds good of the soul ; but it may hold good of it, and it would seem to explain many things which are otherwise dark to us. It is to me impossible to conceive that there was a time when the force which manifests itself in human souls had no existence, and that it has but been called into being by material conditions. The soul-stuff, whatever it is, must all have been there from everlasting ; it can hardly have been added to or multiplied. It is indeed inconceivable to us that there can ever have been a time when matter was not, and it is equally impossible to conceive any process by which it can be annihi- lated. When a candle has burnt itself out, it is just as much there as ever, the particles of it are only rearranged. And though this analogy is no explanation of an impenetrable mystery, I have little doubt in my own mind that the solution lies in that direction, namely, that life is just as limited in amount as matter, that it can neither be in- creased or diminished, but only rearranged. And thus there is, it may be believed, a real homogeneity and unity in life, as in matter, which is an actual and not a metaphorical thing, though we may not fully understand the laws, so to speak, which EPILOGUE 313 regulate the grain or the fibre or the cleavage ; but of its substantial oneness we need have no doubt. Our duty, then, is not to believe that life ends in nothing, but to believe that it rather ends in everything. Not to say that the confusion of forces is so great that we must take refuge in an indolent agnosticism, but rather to recognise that the forces at work are so tremendous that we must expect a certain elasticity of tendencies. If one stands beside some rocky coast and watches great ocean-billows thundering in, with all their tracts of shifting ridges, their wrack of flying spray, their boom of plunging foam, one's first thought is that the whole thing is a manifestation of fortuitous and irresponsible fury. Yet one knows that the forces at work are all precisely ordered and decipherable, and that any one who had all the data could predict every smallest variation and transformation of the insurgent flood. The mis- take of the agnostic is to say that the forces are unknowable, the mistake of the dogmatist is to claim that they are known. At the present time there is little temptation to assert that the forces of life are unknowable. The men who are playing perhaps the noblest part in the development of thought are those who are working patiently in a corner at what may seem to be the uninspiring accumulation of facts. No less noble is the practical work of those who are endeavouring day by day in the circle in which they live to harmonise discordant elements and to diminish the social evils of vile environment and immature corruption. But the 314 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE temper which retards all clearness of vision and devastates sincere effort is the temper of the dogmatist who holds that only upon one stereo- typed theory can any real progress be made. That is the sin of which Christ had so supreme a horror the sin of maintaining that what seems to be a good and purifying influence must be an evil influence disguised, because it springs from principles that differ from the principles which one has received and holds. I have no doubt whatever in my own mind that all spiritual in- fluences religion, philanthropy, art, science are alike manifestations of one harmonising force, and that anything which helps men to disregard material motives and considerations, to live de- liberately, justly, lovingly, peacefully, which en- courages wholesome joy, which diminishes selfish- ness, coarseness, disorder, and cruelty, are all but varying forms of the great central force which is transforming the world. Of course we cannot fathom why it all goes so slowly, why our own dreams and hopes have the power of foreseeing but not of producing the change ; but I have no kind of doubt that none of the dis- cipline of ugliness and sorrow arid evil is thrown away or wasted, but that something is thus wrought out for the soul that can be in no other way achieved. The energy that seems to me to be most wasted is the energy that seeks to make other spirits follow one's own track among the dark mountains, because I am sure that every soul must follow its own path, and that every step that we take in deference to another's guidance, EPILOGUE 315 if it be in opposition to our own consciousness of truth, must somehow be painfully retraced. The pain which is felt by the highest spirits at the sight of so much helpless and bewildered wandering is not to be considered by the side of the injury done to those who are roughly shepherded in arbitrary tracks. It may be asked then, is no one to have any convictions at all ? Is it wrong to enter any social system or to embrace any traditional theory of life ? No, it is upon forceful conviction that our progress depends. But what is wrong is to find ourselves, as years go on, unable to see new light, to welcome new tendencies, to allow for expansion, to encourage generous impulses. Every one knows in literature the pathetic figure cut by genuine lovers of the elder poets, who try not only to force their standards on a new generation, but to deride the latter developments of poetry as tawdry and unsub- stantial trickeries of language. It is not wrong to love and cherish the old, but it is wrong to decry the new. We may justly say that we can extend our own sympathies no further, and that our own minds have done with expansion. But we should regret it rather than glory in it, and we should rejoice that others can see the things that we desired to see, even though we have not seen them. It is of the utmost importance that a man should hold something very sacred in life. It matters more that he should hold something sacred than it matters what it is that he holds sacred, for that is really what differentiates men from each other the power of cherishing an ideal. One man has 316 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE a high sense of personal honour and can permit no aspersions on his courage or his good faith ; another holds truth sacred, another integrity ; another purity of heart, another chivalrous com- passion. I often think of the great musician in Trilby who, when he was asked if he was not joking about Trilby's performances, said : " My friend, I never joke when I speak about music." And I remember once talking with a Frenchman about the Dreyfus case. He maintained that it was more important to punish Dreyfus than to establish his guilt. I confessed that I could not understand his point of view. He said very gravely that he could not understand the English attitude. He said : " You have in England an exaggerated idea of the value of truth. It is a very good thing in its way ; but we in France put honour higher still ! " But the melancholy thing is that the battle tends to be waged not between the idealists and the materialists, but between the idealists themselves. A religious man may account self-restraint a high and essential virtue, and look upon art as a sort of graceful accomplishment ; an artist may care noth- ing about self-discipline, and yet may have a strong artistic conscience, and a code of literary sincerity from which nothing can induce him to deviate ; he will think the man of religion to be merely an unenlightened precisian, while the religious man may think the artist a careless sensualist. The strange thing is that the two men will hardly recognise each other as idealists at all, when they are both in their way fighting against materialism. EPILOGUE 317 I am not here upholding one ideal against another, but only saying that the momentous thing is to have some kind of spiritual energy, some uplifting vision. And now that I have painted my portraits and hung them, I want before I leave them to go a little further back, to get behind the accidents of nature and feature, and to delve a little into personality ; to inquire what all these differences of standpoint and view and belief mean. The portraits which I have drawn are those of men of high gifts and aims, men of acute observation and experience, men who in every case were not content to rest in mere superficial things, to earn enough to support or to amuse themselves, but men who set themselves to have a theory of life, and who arrived at a conviction of a certain order prevailing in the world, and of the part which they were themselves bound to play. I wished at first I had been able to make my gallery more various and comprehensive. I should like to have included several other types of life. Here I have been limited by my own environment. But, even so, I have enough for my purpose ; because all I need to argue from is this salient fact, that most of my types are men who have accommodated themselves with deliberate energy to the frame- work of the world. They have been men for the most part who accepted, without any serious resistance, an unusual share of prosperity, respect, and influence. None of them made a clean sweep of the things which the most mundane value. No one of them considered that he was bound to act 3i8 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE with eccentricity, to embrace poverty, or to incur unpopularity. They all of them did what they believed to be right, and they would in all cases have claimed that they followed principle before convenience. Yet the result was that the world respected and honoured them for doing this, and bestowed on them its best rewards wealth, fame, station, and deference. I am sure that none of them were conscious of making any compromise in the matter, or were aware in anything that they wrote or said of doing it for the sake of mundane rewards. The only curious fact is, that those among the figures whom I have depicted whose task was to uphold the Christian ideal, the essence of which was unworldliness, simplicity, and sin- cerity, were the very ones to be most amply and publicly rewarded. More singular still, Bishop Westcott, who spoke most energetically in praise of Christian simplicity, and who practised a more deliberate personal austerity than the rest, was the one who left behind him the largest private fortune of all. Yet I am equally sure that no suspicion ever crossed his mind that in accumulating wealth he was doing anything in the least inconsistent with his ideal. On the other hand, Henry Sidg- wick, who was intellectually most opposed to the Christian system, was the one who, without living ascetically, was most consistent in his secret generosity, and who disregarded a distinct pleasure, to which he frankly confessed, in the accumulation of property. Again, in a different region, Professor Newton had as little of the sentimentalist about him as can well be conceived. He had an unflinching EPILOGUE 319 scientific conscience, and his duty as he conceived it lay in the accumulation and verification of fact. He was not particularly interested in the interpretation of those facts. He disliked and mistrusted ethical and religious speculation. Yet his life was ordered on strictly disciplined lines. He condemned as practically foolish all intemperate living, and he had not the least sympathy for any moral weakness. He bore a great deal of humiliating disability and painful limitation with cheerful insouciance. He accepted the conditions of life, and would have thought it ill - mannered and unmanly to have complained. Myers, on the other hand, was an amazing mixture of scientific pertinacity and in- tense feeling. He had an overpowering sense of beauty, and an unbounded craving for a con- sciousness of personal satisfaction and serenity of mind. He would have given all he possessed to be able to translate his hopes into certainties, yet he never consciously allowed his enthusiasm to bias him or to deflect his sense of evidential values. Henry Bradshaw, on the other hand, lived a life of placid connoisseurship, and yet made his influence securely felt by his loyalty and tenderness of friendship. Then again there is Bishop Wilkinson, who accepted his own mystical and subjective intuitions as certainties beyond the reach of criticism, and yet, as a physician of diseased souls, never lost sight of shrewd and practical considerations. Bishop Wordsworth lived in the past, embracing an old ideal of Church guidance and authority, untouched by the scientific spirit ; while he fed his 320 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE imagination upon the thought of ancient heroic figures of priests and prophets and saints. Yet in life he was active, tender-hearted, simple, with a fiery devotion to work and service. Bishop Lightfoot again exhibits a mind of the sturdiest order, whose unimaginativeness amounted almost to genius, who hardly touched the specu- lative side at all, and turned the light of his intellect to elucidating, in a truly scientific spirit, documentary Christian tradition, and preached the inspiration of kindly common-sense. Kingsley, on the other hand, lived a life of passionate idealism, exulting like a poet in the beauty and interest of the world, and yet torment- ing himself into wretchedness over the failures and miseries of life, and fighting like one of his own knights against sin and baseness. Then, in a different region, we have the stately and gracious figure of Matthew Arnold, labouring to uphold an intellectual and philosophical ideal of serenity and calm, pitying rather than despising the dreadful strength of stupidity and prejudice. The difficulty is how to harmonise the principles which sustained these various minds, principles which issued in most cases in the same sort of temperate, ordered, laborious lives. They would most of them have referred what are plainly the same effects to wholly different causes. Westcott would have traced his inspiration to the sense of mystery in life, and to the corporate solidarity of humanity, Wilkinson would have attributed it to the sense of an hourly contact with a Divine personality, Henry Sidgwick to the EPILOGUE 321 pursuit of absolute truth, Myers to a consciousness of passionate identity, while Newton would have declined to enter into the question at all, and, if forced to speak, would have probably said that he knew what was right and meant to do it. Evidently, then, there is no possibility of unques- tioningly accepting the labels which any one of these high-minded persons would attach to their own principles. We have to look through that, and we see that what lies behind all is the com- pulsion of a great intuition, not a reasoned thing, but an irresistible attraction to certain habits of life, and a no less irresistible repulsion to other habits. The part which reason has played has been in the selecting of dogmas, methods, principles, call them what you will, which are part of the common stock of human experience and human imagination, which seemed to these individuals to correspond more closely than other principles to their own needs and desires. Indeed I must go further and say that I think that my argument gains force from the very fact that my experience has been so limited. Three of the figures I have depicted Westcott, Lightfoot, and Wilkinson might easily be labelled by an outsider a philosopher, let us say, who believed exclusively in the pursuit of naked scientific truth as ecclesiastics of a painfully monotonous type, as men who had cramped their minds into a posi- tion inconsistent with all sense of intellectual freedom, until they had grown habituated to the disuse of their evidential faculty, who had taken, so to speak, the intellectual veil, and delibe- X 322 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE rately immersed themselves in a sort of cloistered virtue. Yet the three not only moved freely on their own orbits, and not only had no sense of curtailed or compromised liberty, but would have condemned as an arid and insolent dogmatism the assumption that they sacrificed one particle of absolute truth to the demands of a traditional theory. Sir Francis Galton traced with great care and patience the history of several sets of twin brothers, both of twins who were closely alike as children, physically, intellectually, and morally, and who had early been parted ; and also of twins, originally unlike, who had grown up together, and had been subjected to precisely similar surroundings and influ- ences. He came to the conclusion that the power of nature was overwhelmingly stronger than that of nurture, and that human beings on the whole adopted the thoughts and ideas which suited them, rather than were modified by them. The inference would seem to be that souls wear opinions and habits as a vesture ; and that the reason why most of us are so slow at observing the essential differences of character and temperament is that we are so easily misled and beguiled by what are really very super- ficial things. And indeed it is a most difficult and intricate thing to get behind the fence of intellect and reason, because so many people not only say, but believe that they think, merely what they have learned to say and think, or what they see other people saying and thinking. The light of the sua conceals the stars, not because it is really more powerful, but simply because it is nearer. EPILOGUE 323 To myself the only conclusion to be drawn from this is obvious it is that there is some central and collective force, some ultimate source of life and light, of which our lesser wills are but manifes- tations and emanations. The difficulty is how to reconcile this collective unity of will with indi- vidual differences. To one it is Truth, to another it is Love, to another it is Duty, to another it is a personal guide, to another it is Immortality. These varying aspects of the same force seem to be conditioned by individual predilection. What- ever it is, it presents itself in an overpowering i-ense of grace and right and beauty, to which each of us desires to be true, and with which each of us desires to be in perfect harmony. But the mysterious fact then emerges that the compelling and moving force seems to work on two wholly different lines the force that unites and the force that disjoins. Love comes to unite two human souls in indissoluble bonds of nearness and desire, and with it comes the shadow of jealousy, the terror of the thought that any other individuality can claim a share in that relationship. The patriot, in his zeal for the well-being of a nation, is forced to plan the downfall and control of another nation. A Church that claims to win its inspiration from the following of Christ in one manner feels bound to work for the extinction of a Church which worships Him after another manner. And these very hostilities seem to de- velop the highest qualities of the human spirit, courage, fervour, and self-sacrifice. The static force, which keeps things together, is at enmity 324 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE with the dynamic force which disintegrates them. Life disjoins and death consolidates. The spirit feels the impetus of one force, the body the pres- sure of another. And yet the only hope wouJcl seem to be to trace them both to the same origin. It may be urged, of course, that this is only a sort of fatalism. If the individual has no motive force of his own, if his improvement is only a sign of the growth of some vast hidden collective will, what incentive, it may be asked, is there to individual effort at all. " If I thought as you did," said a friend to me the other day to whom I had opened my mind on the subject, " I should just relapse into indolence, pursue the pleasure of the moment, and not trouble my head about anything." " No," I replied ; " the very assumption that you would do nothing proves that you postulate a freedom of will which you do not possess. You cannot and you will not relapse into indolence. What you now do is the result of certain forces at work, and you will continue to do exactly the same as you are now doing, as long as those forces continue to operate." But it may be said that such a theory would deprive one of all interest in the development of the world. It is not the case at all. The future is hidden from us, but the interest of seeing how things develop remains as intense as ever. It would be equally reasonable for a man to say that he could take no interest in life, if he was not sure that things would develop exactly on the lines he desired. He may be sure that things will not develop exactly as he wishes. His ambitions will be frus- trated, he will have to suffer and grieve, his designs EPILOGUE 325 will be interrupted by incidents over which he will have no control. Of course the divine quality in man is his imagination, his power of forecasting exactly how he would wish things to turn out, his power of being disappointed if they turn out dif- ferently. His power of being conscious of the collective will is his unique privilege. A man's life is thus the expression of himself, and his sense of will-power is a reflection on his mind of the central will. But no one will deny that his will is limited in certain directions. And the moment that this is granted freedom disappears. No one will pretend that the will to write great poetry means the power to do so, or that any amount of will would restore an amputated leg. The sense of freedom merely means that the data are not fully realised. The limits of volition are being daily narrowed and conditioned by the study of heredity and psycho- logy. Whether eventually any power of volition, independent of previous causation and environing circumstance, will be conceded must be at present uncertain. But at best, freedom can be only a comparative matter. If a prisoner complained of his lack of liberty, it would be idle to tell him that he could move about in his cell, open or shut his eyes, and that he was therefore essentially free. Liberty conditioned and limited is not liberty at all, if the possessor of it recognises and rebels against his limitations. It is not until this is apprehended that any real serenity can result. And even so imagination, work- ing through regret, must continue to exercise its torturing power. We all of us feel that if we could 326 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE but banish fear and regret, our lives would at once become perfectly tranquil and harmonious. The reason why the memories, even the painful memories of the past, have such a peaceful air about them is that the element of fear is gone. The sin was sinned, the evil done ; we see how it was chastised, how the bitter root flowered. But at least we have no longer the terror of waiting for it to burst into poisonous bloom. The strange thing about all this is that even the most devout persons will say and believe that de- terminism is contrary to the spirit of the Christian revelation. Yet Christ was in part, at least, a fatalist. Many of His sayings teem with the essence of fatalism. "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature ? " " Not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Father." " The very hairs of your head are all numbered." The very substance of Christ's teaching was the apprehension of an overmastering, urgent, moment- ous Providence, governing and directing the minutest facts of life ; and no amount of quotation can explain away these statements. It cannot even be said that the spirit is certainly free even to desire what it sees to be good. It is in the very incapacity to desire what reason and temperance would dictate that the force of sin lies. If it is urged that this disparagement of individual force and individual will-power diminishes hope and faith, I can only say that it seems to me to be otherwise. If one really believed that our wills were free, the enigma of the pressure of sin and evil would be insupportable, because wholly un- EPILOGUE 327 intelligible. Why should a state of things continue which we desire to change and could change, unless there were a ghastly dualism at work, a conflict of two opposed forces ? The very conception of the rise of evil within the all-powerful and all-bene- volent mind of God is an impossibility. No creature could choose evil unless it were there to choose. No will, however strong, could choose an impossibility. Will cannot create or annihilate, it can only select. But the hope of the determinist consists in his seeing, gladly and gratefully, that the vast world-will is slowly transforming life all along the line, and he rejoices as far as he may be enabled to be a link in the great chain of causes that leads the world to become what he is enabled to foresee. What one would like to disentangle if one could but that would be to lay hands on the very secret of life is what all the people I have depicted, and for the matter of that all other people in the world, are really aiming at and in search of. One tends to rule out for analytical purposes all the irresponsible people without any conscious aim at all, who just live, eat, work, laugh, marry, bear pain and loss with what spirit they can, and then close their eyes on the wonderful world. Then there are troops of people with a sense of respon- sibility, who probably think and would say that that sense is directly derived from some religious tradition they have inherited, though in most cases they are people who would never have found a system for themselves, but who would have ac- cepted with the same deeply rooted consciousness 328 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE of its special worth any system into which they had been born ; and then above these come all those with conscious vocations, artists, writers, thinkers, teachers, politicians, priests, all the people who make it their business to affect other lives, either from a real desire to make the crooked straight, or because they like to exercise power, or because they need applause ; and then I think highest of all come the few who have no such motive, and no anxious sense of responsibility ; but who from a genuine and instinctive affection are just content to love others and to serve them, not because there is anything that they wisk to gain, but because they must give whatever they have got. But I suppose that what lies behind it all is the desire for the heightened sense of living, the instinct to make the most of life, to taste its sweet or bitter savour. We do not act upon a design, we simply show forth, inevitably and unconsciously, what we are. The poet sings, the painter paints, the preacher preaches, the statesman contrives, and the lover loves, because they must. No one does any of these things by taking thought or by determining to do them. And what I seem to discern is that we are all really aiming at the same thing, though we call it by a hundred different names ; and to be vexed with other people's pur- suits, to deride them, to censure them, is simply a sign that we do not understand them, simply a loud and stupid proclamation of our own limi- tations. We are all bent on living, and the mistake we make is not to encourage other people to live in their way, but to try to make them live on our EPILOGUE 329 own lines. One may forgive short-sighted, simple, muddle-headed people for not understanding this ; but it is harder to forgive men and women who have imagination and sympathy for not perceiving it. What is worst of all is to find people who are really concerned in an intellectual way with the criticism of life so blind about it. I know artists who simply cannot tolerate the language of religion. It seems to them only a set of dull conventional terms for practices which seem to them boring and tiresome. And they cannot conceive how people can affirm so confidently a theory of life, and a precise explanation of its mysteries, which seems to them so contrary to facts, and so impossible to test. I know teachers of religion who are con- temptuous of or horrified by the artistic ideal, who look upon it as an egoistical waste of time, and cannot conceive how men can be content to be absorbed in beautiful dreams, and not want to put straight the preventible miseries of life how men can be so blind, as they say, to their higher interests. Of course the more definite one's own predilec- tions and enthusiasms are, the more perverse and absurd will the predilections and pursuits of others appear ; but if the artist and the religious teacher could but feel that the other was but following out a quite inevitable bent, and aiming at fulness of life on different lines, there would be less mis- understanding, less bickering, and more mutual confidence. The worst of all dogmatism is that it puts one out of harmony with other people ; and dogmatism 330 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE is the one habit of mind that one is at liberty to mistrust. Every man has a right to trust his own intuitions and to make his own laws ; no one has the right to impose those intuitions on others. Society has, of course, the right to make rules for its own convenience and welfare ; and the wise man will submit to these so far as conduct goes, though he has also the right to disbelieve them ; and we should all try to distinguish clearly between social morality and intrinsic morality. Social morality is the common-sense of ordinary people. The extraordinary man, the man ahead of the crowd, may humbly hope to quicken the moral temperature a little, and to make the social con- science more sensitive. But meanwhile, whatever we may announce as our programme, whatever our intellects may formu- late, we may be sure that we are all in reality aiming at one thing, and that is fulness of life. Sometimes that aim is intemperate, and knocks its head against natural laws with very painful results, or it is eccentric, and encounters some social tradition to its discomfiture. But we have no need to be ashamed of our propensities, unless they are animal or selfish, in which case they will meet with their natural reward. The one quality which can mend the confusion is love ; if we love others truly we shall not want to conform them to our own theories, but we shall desire them to follow out their own. We shall love them for themselves, and rejoice in the fact that they are different from ourselves. We shall not be dismayed at their using a different set of terms, because we shall know EPILOGUE 331 that we and they alike are aiming at the same thing the heightened consciousness of life, its worth and its fulness. We shall realise that the best we can do is simply to extend the horizon of our sympathies, to understand men and women of different types. Whenever we see a profound seriousness, a daily energy, a multiplication of in- terests, even on lines entirely different from our own, we shall realise that there life is burning with a steady glow, and we shall rejoice in the generous fire so that we shall end by seeing that life is not a thing which is intended to prove certain propositions, or to confirm certain theories, but a gift to be gratefully received and strenuously enjoyed a thing which has its laws indeed, like the flame and the wind, outside of which we cannot wander even if we would. The one thing we can- not afford to be is to be tame and spiritless and terrified ; because even if we have hitherto wasted or misused it, life is of its nature perennial ; it cannot be quenched or extinguished ; or even if it seems to droop and fade, it is but a phase and a guise ; it alters nothing of its imperishable quality or of its endless energy of motion. And thus we may attain to what is perhaps the highest and noblest of all human qualities the quality of faith. Faith is not the power of ignoring the facts we do not like, or even the faculty of hoping that things will somehow turn out according to our desires ; it is rather the power of seeing that a very wonderful and beautiful thing is being worked out in the world, in spite of infinite obstructions and delays, and of welcoming our own transforma- 332 THE LEAVES OF THE TREE tion to that which God intends us to be ; and this will sustain us through diffidence and fear, and even through that darkness and deadness of spirit, which is the hardest thing in the world to endure. It will make us eager to welcome all the love that is proffered us, and generous to encourage all beautiful aims and impulses in others, until at last we may be worthy to eat of the fruit of that other tree, which is hidden in the heart of the holy garden of God, the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations, and the fruit itself the fulness of joy. THE END Printed by BALLANTYNK, HANSON &* Co, Edinburgh &* London Works by Arthur C. Benson, C.V.O. I^arge post 8vo, 7s. 6c. net each. RUSKIN: A Study in Personality. TIMES. ". . . It is an attractive picture, and in the main a true picture. ... Mr. Benson's book has the merit of giving us a new point of vitw." THE SILENT ISLE. THIRD IMPRESSION. MORNING POST. " No more fascinating volume of essays has ever appeared in our language." AT LARGE. SECOND IMPRESSION IN THE PRESS. DAILY CHRONICLE. "This is, in its way, the most frankly personal of the 'Benson books' as yet published. It is all graceful, soothing, and pleasant the very book for tired minds in a nervr.-racking world." THE ALTAR FIRE. THIRD IMPRESSION. WORLD. " In conception and in execution this study of a high-scaled bnl inveterate egoist, converted to humility and altruism by the discipline of luffering, in an achievement of rare power, pathns. and beauty, and, so far, incomparably the finest thing that its author has given us." BESIDE STILL WATERS. THIRD IMPRESSION. DAILY CHRONICLE." ' Beside Still Waters ' gathers together the scattered threads which have been already introduced into several of Mr. Benson's more recent studies ; it consolidates his attitude in life, and gives full expression to bis mellow and contented philosophy." FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW. FIFTEENTH IMPRESSION (Fourth Edition). DAILY GRAPHIC. " One of the most delightful books of the yctt." THE UPTON LETTERS. FOURTEENTH IMPRESSION (Second Edition). With a Preface. DAILY CHRONICLE. "If any one supposes that the art of letter writing is dead, this volume will prove the contrary. . . . Altogether this is a curiously intimate and very pathetic revelation." PAUL THE MINSTREL, and other Stories. Reprinted from " The Hill of Trouble " and " The Isles of Sunset." With a New Preface. Large post 8vo. 6s. net. THE GATE OF DEATH : A Diary. THIRD IMPRESSION (Second Edition). With a New Preface. SPECTA TOR.' 1 A very striking book." New " 35. 6d. net" Edition. THE UPTON LETTERS. FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW. ** OTHER VOLUMES TO FOLLOW. London : SMITH. ELDER, ft CO., 15 WateiJoo Place, S.W. Recent Biography. A Memoir of ' The Great English Tribum.' With Portraits and Facsimiles of Letter*. Medium 8vo. I Os. 6J. net. John Bright : a Monograph. By R. Barry O'Brien, Author of ' The Life of Lord Russell of Killowen.* With a Preface Ly the Right Hon. Augustine Birrell, M.P. Morning Post.' Perhaps tiic most char- cteristic feature about tm book n its tone of refreshing ttiJ unexpected-candour ... it . highly laudatory auJ appreciative. Daily Chronicle. ' Mr. O'Brien has pot no under a debt o( gratitude for his story o( trie great Tribune's career.' Daily News. 'This most appieciativ and enjoyable monograph, Mr. O'Brien h: written a hook likely to appeal to all who a interested in current politics.' Freeman 'i Journal. ' The book is delight to read, an illuminative study of figure of peculiar simplicity and charm.' With Portraits. Large post 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. The Romance of a Great Singer: A Memoir of Mario. By Mrs. Godfrey Pearse and Frank Hird. O&jeroer. ' An account of the greatest singer of his day, with many anecdotes of himself and Grisio, whom he married in 1856.' Evening Standard. "The story of an uuusual and varied career ... a large number of the foremost personalities of the Euiope of half a century ago pass through tne pajes.' With Photogravure and Half-tone Illustrations. Medium 8vo. 15t.net. Sir Woodbine Parish, K.C.H., F.R.S., and Early Days in Argentina. Written by the Hon. Nina L. Kay Shuttleworth. Financial Times. ' The work gives aa interesting picture of die period ... a sound piece of work, and with :*? appendices forms a valuable contribution to biographical literature.' Obieroer.' Sir Woodbine Parish's most interesting experiences. The memoir gives an interesting account of the foundation and early history of the Argentine Republic. With * Frontispiece by H. W. Stagg end 10 Portrait!, gilt top. 6s. Crown 8vo. Fighting Admirals. By John Barnett. Author of * The Prince's Valet,' ' Geoffrey Cheriton,' ' Eve in Earnest,* &c. Stamford. ' Mr. Barnett writes with real eatimsiasm and considerable ability. There could be no better Christmai present for boy a stiggestio* commesded to the kind coa*id:ration of British UncU*.' Yorkshire Observer. "The author gives * some glorious half-hoars, and no one who reads his thrilling pages can fail to be roused to a high piti*> of British ra-tbntiatm. London : Smith. Elder & Co., 15 Waterloo Place, S.W. At all Bo9ksellers and Bookstalls, Smith, Elder & Co.'s New Is. Net Series. 1. Deeds that Won the Empire. Dr. W. H. Fitchett. 2. The Cruise of the " Cachalot " Round the World after Sperm Whales. Frank T. Buiien. 3. Fights for the Flag. Dr. w. H. Fitchett. 4. The Log of a Sea Waif. Frank T. Bulkn. 5. The Gamekeeper at Home. Richard 6. A Londoner's Log Book. Rt. Hon. G. W. E. Russell. 7. The Sowers. H. S. Merriman. 8. JeSS. H. Rider Haggard. 9. Vice Versa. F. Anstey. 10. Woodland, Moor, and Stream. j. A. Owen. 1 1 . The Tale of the Great Mutiny. Dr. W. H. Fitchett. 12. Sixty Years in the Wilderness. Sir Henry w. Lucy. 13. A Vision of India. Sidney Low. 14. The Defence of Plevna. Capt. F. W. von Herbert. With an Introduction by General Sir JOHN FRENCH, K.C.M.C., K.C.B., etc. 15. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. A. Conan Doyle. 1 6. Nelson and His Captains. Dr. w. H. Fitchett. I 7. With Edged Tools. Henry Seton Merriman. London : SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15 Waterloo Place, S.W. Thin Paper Edition of Stanley J. Wey man's Novels (Author's Complete Edition) In 20 Volumes Arranged Chronologically With an Introduction in the First Volume by Mr. Weyman In clear type and handy size To range with Henry Seton Merriman's Novels Fcap. 8vo, Gilt Top, each Volume 2/- net in Cloth 3/- net in Leather Vol . I . The House of theWolf . 2. The New Rector. 3. The Story of Francis Cludde. ,, 4. A Gentleman of France 5. The Man in Black. ,, 6. Under the Red Robe. 7. My Lady Rotha. ,, 8. Memoirs of a Minister of France. , o. The Red Cockade. Vol. 10. Shrewsbury. ,, ii. The Castle Inn. 12. Sophia. 13. Count Hannibal. 14. In Kings' Byways. 15. The Long Night. 16. The Abbess of Vlaye. 17. Starvecrow Farm. 18. Chippinge. 19. Laid op in Lavender. 20. The Wild Geese. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER & CO. AND LONGMANS GREEN * CO. DATE DUE GAYLORD PRINTED INU.C.A. 000514477 n> CL 3 O <* P CL 3 W r 1 O n o H 3* W O o a o c c H3 ^ o' CL C/3 CD SO CO o nr CO