8CRTRAN9 ACRES OF 240 LONC- '' LON< Oi Personal Studies Personal Studies By Henry Scott Holland Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral London Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., Ltd. 3, Paternoster Buildings '95 Preface As the years fall away, and the earth empties itself of the voices and presences which made it famous to us, the desire grows strong to make an attempt to convey the memories of those who gave significance to our life down to another generation, to whom they are fast becoming mere names. This may serve me as an excuse, I trust, for venturing to collect and reprint papers and reviews which, in themselves, might be considered fugitive. I have left them practically as they were originally written, because so alone would they tell to others what we thought and what we felt, as, one after another, those who had been our leaders and our prophets passed into the silence. Nearly all were written for the Commonwealth ; a note at the bottom of the page will explain the origin of those that appeared elsewhere. I gratefully acknowledge the permission readily granted by the Editors of the Guardian, of the Contemporary Review, and of the Journal of Theological Studies; by vi Preface Mr. John Murray; by Mr. Methuen for the Preface to Lyra Apostolica in the Library of Devotion series; by the Rev. H. Kelly, S.S.M. ; and by Messrs. Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., Ltd., for the republication of some of the " personal studies." H. S. HOLLAND. Contents PAGE IN MEMORIAM: QUEEN VICTORIA 1 JENNY LIND 14 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE . . . .30 MR. GLADSTONE'S RELIGION .... 47 GLADSTONE AND RUSKIN 56 JOHN RUSKIN, SOCIAL REFORMER ... 62 THE MISSION OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT . . 67 EDWARD WHITE BENSON 97 BROOKE FOSS WESTCOTT 128 HENRY PARRY LIDDON 139 THE LIFE OF HENRY PARRY LIDDON . . .153 LORD SALISBURY 166 CECIL RHODES 171 TOLSTOY AND THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT . 179 SIR JAMES PAGET 193 FREDERICK TEMPLE 200 MANDELL CREIGHTON .207 WILLIAM STUBBS 220 RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH . 226 viii Contents PAGE LORD ACTON . 236 EDWARD BURNE-JONES 248 WILLIAM BRIGHT .268 ROBERT CAMPBELL MOBERLY .... 272 ROBERT DOLLING 280 PERSONAL STUDIES IN MEMORIAM: QUEEN VICTORIA* "Thou, LORD, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou shall endure ; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment ; and as a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they sh-ill be changed : but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail. The children of Thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall stand fast in Thy sight." Ps. cii. 25, 26. WHENEVER the foundations are shaken, when the great deeps break up, when the pillars of the earth tremble, then it is that the Psalms speak to us with their old incomparable power. As our ordinary succours fall away from us, these voices of the unknown dead seem to renew their strength. Out of far-away forgotten years, out of the heart of unremembered sorrows, these dead men utter their living cries, which no weary century can stale, and no change can antiquate. Time ceases to be of account, differences of race and climate and culture and tongue all drop away. Nothing stands between us and them ; they knew what we know : they have felt what we are feeling. We listen ; we recognize, to our strong consolation, that the basal elemental verities which hold human life together are alike at all ages, and for one and all. What is now has always been, and these men * Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral. B 2 Personal Studies have said it once and for ever. We can but fall back on their deliverances, which combine the strength of that which is old with the vitality of that which is for ever new. And so it was when the dread whisper first fell on us, " The Queen is dying " ; and, as the great bell of St. Paul's tolled out its iron message, "The Queen is dead," these words of the Psalm came rolling back upon my heart, telling the piteous story of man's mortality, speak- ing of the endless sorrow that unendingly repeats itself ; telling of the instability which makes of the whole round earth and all that is in it but an unsubstantial pageant, but a fleeting ghost ; and yet telling also of those eternal verities which can never pass away ; telling of that which abides when the rocks perish and the heavens are rolled up as a scroll ; telling of the one earthly thing that can never die the life of man enwrapped within the life of the everlasting GOD. "Thou, LORD, in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth . . . they shall perish, but Thou shalt endure ; they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall be changed ; but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail. The children of Thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall stand fast in Thy sight." Something of this ancient conviction we must make ours, as, at the very moment of facing the new and most anxious century, we find ourselves suddenly bereaved of that enduring stay which had for so long bonded our present with our past and underlay every habitual assumption on which our temporal life was based the Queen. Never could we remember the day when we did In Memoriam : Queen Victoria 3 not take her into confident account as the central factor in everything that concerned the nation. Whatever else happened, still she would be what she has always been ; still in her the varied fortunes of the State would find their unity of coherence ; still she would embody its persistent traditions and hereditary honour ; still we should be secure of possessing for the public welfare those beneficent activities that are concentrated in the Crown ; all its indeterminate constitutional authority and function and aims would have but one concrete meaning for us the Queen. We had grown up in this ; it had overlapped our childhood with its wonder, a wonder that was neverthe- less, for all its marvel, so homely, so gracious and so kind ; and manhood's reflection only deepened our sense of its unique and astonishing significance. The more we knew of the vital issues which lie at the heart of the national life, the higher the value we gave to the meaning of the Queen ; and each year of the reign that seemed to us unending has intensified its meaning. Never before had it signified so much as when, in the very last year of her life, she showed herself to her people in London so freely and so bravely in the black hours of the African disaster, or when, last spring, she went to Dublin in witness of the gallantry of her Irish Fusiliers, and out of her own free initiation gave the colour of loyalty to the wearing of the green. What is it that we would chiefly wish to recall of her before GOD ? How can we sum up the secret of that which made the Queen's record so unique ? We have all of us been reading everything that could possibly be said by a Press that possesses such unmistakable skill in brief and brilliant portrayal. And out of the mass of crowded 4 Personal Studies incidents we can, I think, detect one unbroken purpose which gives unity to the entire life. That which we note and follow throughout the shifting swarm of events, endowing all with significance and dignity, is the per- sistent fulfilment, under unparalleled difficulties, of a mere girl's vow. A girl's vow ! Never before has so great an achievement on the high levels of history been won by means so simple and yet so pure. If we but think for a moment to what abasement and contempt the Crown of England had sunk when she undertook its responsibilities ! We have to turn to some such records as Charles Greville's memoirs to realize the alarms and despairs of men. He lived at the very heart of public affairs. No one knew what was coming, but everyone feared the worst. Every Institution, even Churches, appeared to be tottering. No reverence shielded con- ventional traditions ; and the honour of government appeared to have succumbed to the abuses of some senile decay. Under men's feet were felt the unknown volcanic tremors of revolutionary passion ; the poor, starved, brutalized people were herded like savages ; in our new industrial towns machinery had wrecked domestic habits and virtues, and the countryside was flaming with fired ricks and homesteads. The hideous revelations of the early Factory Acts were telling their tale of appalling misery. High Society was strangely corrupt and licenti- ous, gross in violent excesses and gambling and drink and lust. And yet, remember, it was the great hour of our Imperial expansion which was opening ; and, by a terrible fatality, at the centre of the Empire, there where strength was vitally needed to secure coherence and unity of sentiment all over the vast outgrowth, the In Memoriam : Queen Victoria 5 Throne had exhibited a melancholy succession of madness and vice and folly. And it was at such a moment of dreadful menace, when men's hearts were failing them for fear, and for looking to those things which are coming upon the earth, that there stepped out into the open arena, to challenge England's fate and her own, a child of eighteen a girl, almost unknown, brought up in jealous seclusion, untried, inexperienced, singularly in- nocent of the world's affairs. Yet with the dignity that comes out of perfect simplicity, she stooped to her task. From that first hour in Kensington, when she was hurried from her bed to receive her awful charge at midnight, with the old men kneeling at the girl's bare feet, to her last conscious hour, she never for one moment flinched from the plain duty to which as a child she had pledged herself body, heart, and spirit. And in the long years that have intervened she made of the Throne, which was then tottering to its fall in ignominy and scorn, the most powerful of all living institutions, the soul of a great Empire. Back to it, as to the one stronghold which no blunders or crimes of rival governments at home have availed to shake, turn the hearts of our widespread colonies ; the Queen is the one word of magic which knits all these confeder- ated colonies of ours into one compact body under one inspiration. It is the one spell that works upon the dusky populations of that strange mystery which we call India ; and still for millions upon millions of black Africans the one power which draws them to faith in England is the name of the Great White Mother. And even the great Anglo-Saxon States over the Atlantic, which are ever taking a larger and larger place in the 6 Personal Studies world's story, have something that still makes them one with us and with the mother land in their profound attachment to the Queen. And the whole world, which finds little enough to like or love in England, still recog- nizes that behind and beyond all that they so. bitterly condemn is the moral power of one personality, in whose passion for righteousness and for peace they cannot but believe the Queen. That is the incomparable feat which she has achieved ; and its importance can only be dimly measured if we think of what it would have been if, at the hour when the governing power in England was passing, as it has passed, from the classes to the masses, when the significance of England was spread- ing to people far away on confines of the earth, the Crown had remained what it was when she received it ; if there had been nothing at the central hearth which should draw their allegiance or warm their heart. She did it ; she did it all ; she did it out of her own personal self by being what she was. No one could have taught her how it was to be done, and she trusted to her own instincts and intuitions, and to those alone. And what were these ? How was the feat done ? First she set herself as we have been told by all those who know, as we were reminded in strong words by the Archbishop she set herself to work at her task with the sincerity, the thoroughness, the patience which belong to a profession, the profession of being Queen. We are said, in our England, to be failing because we are all amateurs. An amateur was exactly what the Queen from the first refused to be. Monarchs ordinarily assume that they exist for their own pleasure only, and that this pleasure is interrupted by the bother of State obligations ; In Memoriam : Queen Victoria 7 but this young girl, though of very high spirits and endowed with great physical vigour, asking for release, understood at once that she existed solely for the duties and the labours of Queen, and that to this end she must, even as is asked of a priest at his ordination, draw all her studies that way, as one dedicate and consecrate to the paramount office by which she is to be judged. She never ceased to perfect the art of being Queen ; every- thing was brought within the range of the obligations imposed upon her; she worked at it from first to last, night and day, in the spirit with which men work at the profession to which they are bound to give their whole and their best self. Her triumph was first the triumph of hard, unflagging work undertaken in the spirit of sheer and supreme duty. And, as done for duty, it told home on the heart of a race to whom duty is still the highest word to which it freely responds. Work was her first secret; and her second was a yet more simple and unexpected device ; it was the device of being good, of relying oil the force of moral goodness. Here was the girl's originality; for licence is the com- monplace of thrones. The daring and original stroke lay in recognizing that goodness was not merely a tribute to decency, but a governing force. It was, of course, a great matter that the Court should be pure ; but that is only a small part of what she believed and achieved. For she saw that her office as Constitutional ruler re- quired moral character. As Queen, she was exercising a moral faculty. It needed the succours and the forces which spring out of goodness to enable her to do for her people what they would expect from their Sovereign. Goodness would give her insight, goodness would endow 8 Personal Studies her with authority, goodness would fortify her appeals, goodness would interpret her relations. Behind her every act there must be felt the weight which is derived from nothing but a good character on which all can confidently rely. There must be no possibility of sus- pecting her motives; she must have secured a moral reputation which will exclude all suggestions of worldliness or wilfulness, or self-seeking, or ambition. So only could her actions be judged at their full value. This is what she actually attained; and the result realized itself in governing power. She could do things that no one else could have done. She was understood and trusted when she did what others with less weight of character could not afford to do. Every action counted for far more than itself, because she did it. So she steadily advanced the enormous force and influence which she wielded, out of the conviction that she had established of her absolute sincerity. And surely there is no witness that this age of ours needs more sorely than this witness to the political force of sheer moral character upon public affairs. It was this belief in the public and the national value of moral ideals which gave Mr. Gladstone his hold on the heart of England. And now that under the tight pressure of complicated international problems there are ominous signs abroad of a lapse to the principles of Machiavellian politics, let us arouse once more our own moral courage by the remembrance of her who verified the actual efficacy, in the tough and rough affairs of the world, of an unmitigated belief in the supremacy of goodness. And, thirdly, she put into the service of the Throne the wonderful gift of her womanhood. She put herself into In Memoriam : Queen Victoria 9 the office ; she did not divide her life into two parts, and, after toiling through her duties as ruler, withdraw and escape to enjoy herself as a woman. Rather, she let it be felt that she was a woman in everything that she did as a Queen. She filled the formal functions of royalty with the soul of a living woman. Never was the touch of the woman absent from any movement, from any utterance, from any appeal, from any declaration which she had to make as Sovereign. What a vivid reality she gave to the title " Our Sovereign Lady the Queen ! " It was always the lady who made herself present to us. So it was that in the first Council in which she took her supreme place, she let the girl come into her natural tone, without arti- fice or pose. So it was that she could broaden out the domain over which her royalty extended by making it coterminous with those natural sympathies which, as wife, or mother, or widow, she sent far afield into every corner of the land ; into every English home where a mother mourned some dead soldier-boy ; into every desolated pit village where weeping women and children cried over the blackened bodies of their dead ; or far away into her great Colonies, or into plague-stricken India ; or down the long wards where lay her soldiers and sailors maimed under the scourge of war. Always she was to be felt where there were hearts broken or bodies bruised; and yet always it was the Queen, even when she was entirely acting under the instincts of the sympathetic woman. It was not the woman adopting the pose of a queen, but a queen who was revealing herself as a woman. The dignity was never allowed to be forgotten ; it was just because she had so absolutely identified her queenhood with herself that they were inseparable. And io Personal Studies so her womanhood was her sceptre, by which her people drew nigh to her and touched her and all were touched. Ah ! kings at their best, alas ! are terribly handicapped just through being men. The most powerful hold that she laid on our loyalty is denied them. In this dis- astrous South African war, when our soldiers, under General Leslie Rundle, were suffering untold privations, half starved, half clad, lying out at night on the open veldt, with only one blanket between two or three men, while the water froze to the bottom of the buckets ; doing long marches over a terrific country after an enemy who could always evade them ; an officer who was there told me that he never heard a complaint, and never saw them lose spirits ; and the main motive which kept them in good heart was that' it was all done for the Queen. It was a personal devotion for the woman ; they were sure that she cared for them, that she would be thinking of them. If they ever got home, sick or wounded, she would be at Netley at their bedside. That was enough. " The Queen, the woman, GOD bless her ! " So she fulfilled her task; and in the doing of it she brought the force of those settled and simple pieties, which, for an older generation than ours, seemed to belong to the natural equipment of man. And this natural piety was profoundly reinforced by the personal subjective spirituality so characteristic of Teutonic religion, with which the influence of the Consort, to whom she was devoted, penetrated her life. Such a sentiment did not easily attach itself to the dominant methods and forms of our own worship in the Church of England ; it found itself more congenially at home in the simpler rites north of the Tweed ; but it was always felt In Memoriam : Queen Victoria 1 1 to be her spontaneous motive, and it enabled her to touch her people to those depths which religion alone can reach. Thus it was that the girl's vow stood, though all around was rocked in times of vast upheaval. Every fashion of life and thought and habit and manners and policy and interest has shifted and changed since she came to the throne. Electricity and steam have altered the face of the earth and our very conceptions of time and space. Whole literatures have grown and vanished again ; philosophy and science have been transfigured since then by a transformation as great as that which greeted the Renaissance. Historical epochs in Europe have come, and men and dynasties have risen and perished; societies have been revolutionized; institutions ancient as the State have been challenged and have succumbed, or have been transmuted out of all recognition. Social and industrial cataclysms have convulsed the elemental found- ations on which humanity has organized its powers. New peoples have arisen, new ideals have shaken our souls, new truths have disclosed themselves. But still that vow of the girl to do her duty and to be good has availed throughout ; and still it has found itself sufficient for every emergency ; and still it has been upheld with un- flagging faith, with unshaken simplicity of heart. It has gathered up into itself the excellent assistance of a dis- .ciplined judgment and all the garnered memories of incomparable^experience ; but always it has retained its identity in type and mood. It is all the fruit of a girl's simple heart, of the pledge which she gave herself of her responsibility. And it received its triumphant vindication in face of a united world when, after we had watched, at the western facade of the Cathedral, all the martial pomp 12 Personal Studies of this wide Empire pass in splendour, there came at the close of all the dashing uniforms and glancing steel, that in which this display had its sole and sufficient interpret- ation. And when it came, it was found to be the one spot in the whole scene which could afford to be bare of all artifice and emblem. Here was one who needed no pomp ; brought no menace ; and symbolized no violence. It was a simple, gracious lady, kindly and tender-hearted, a true woman, at home among her people, the living pledge to them of sympathy and gentleness and honour and peace. She is dead. Never again shall we know the old emotion with which we have sung since we were children, " GOD save the Queen." She is dead, and we are left to our last office of committing her soul to the infinite pity of JESUS, even the peace of GOD which passeth all understanding. She is dead ; and with her dies an epoch. That mighty period which is commemorated by her name has rolled up as a scroll. That is why we tremble. The ground under us is withdrawn; the world that we have known dissolves ; the unknown awaits us. A new century lies ahead ominously silent. Therefore if we would survive and play our part as our fathers did before us, back on the strong and eternal realities we must set our souls. For work, strenuous and anxious work, is before us, work of which we cannot foresee the end. We stand at the dividing of the ways, in the hour of moral crisis, when the fate of England and the destiny of her Empire tremble in the balance of Divine judgment. Far along the wide frontiers lie the millions of dark natives to whom the Queen's name has been a shield against all that would exploit them for the white man's wealth, or deny them In Memoriam : Queen Victoria 13 their full liberty of growth. Here at home, at the heart of our power, lie around us the millions of weak, burdened English poor, to whom her name had ever been a pledge that at least they were remembered and cared for. Towards all these she has set us our responsibilities ; and these will make their demands more and more urgently felt in the years now upon us. I know not how we should dare to face them at this hour, when on every side there is an impoverishment of forces, a shrinkage of resource, a lowering of tone and energy and gift, if we have not faith in that which can never shrink ; faith in that GOD unto whom she whom we now lay to rest committed herself in the simplicity of her girlhood ; faith in the Everlasting Father who fainteth not, neither is weary. Therefore let us rehearse the great words to- gether before we part : " Thou, LORD, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou remainest. They all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall be changed : but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail. The children of Thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall stand fast in Thy sight." JENNY LIND* WHY is it that the name of Jenny Lind has become a uiousehold word in England, familiar to thousands who fcever heard her sing a note, or saw her face, but who, somehow, associate the sound of her name with everything tlat is most kindly, and pure, and tender, and good, so that they feel a sort of affection forgone who., though inknown to them, about whom they could only tell you lat she was a successful singer, has yet left a fragrance mt her memory, which makes her name sound sweet and dear, as the name of a friend ? It is surely quite a peculiar tradition which she has left behind her. You feel it not only in the universal and affectionate familiarity with her maiden name, which I j have ventured to put at the head of this article, but in ^ the illumination which kindles in a man's face as he tells t you of the great days when he heard her in her wonderful j, 1 triumphs. How he kindles, as he rouses himself to speak i i of it ! " Ah ! Jenny Lind ! Yes, there was never anything I like that ! " And he begins about the " Figlia, " and how & she came along the bridge in the " Somnambula " ;^nd you '// feel the tenderness in his voice, as of a positive Ibve for I her, whose voice seems still ringing through him vs he talks. Why is it ? There is some tone in the enthusiasm which is quite distinct from the way in which men speak * Hurrays Magazine, January 1888. \ Jenny Lind 15 of Grisi and of Alboni. There, you feel at once the enthu- siasm is for the voice ; here, there is, within the admiration of the voice, a touch of personal affection for one who was, to him, like nothing before or since in the whole world. ,. It is of this unparalleled personal fascination of which 1;> would speak in this paper. The records of her career, at the time of her death, told enough of her musical achievements. But those of us who have enjoyed th