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<f 
 peculiar privilege of her friendship in later years, cannot 
 but be eager to express our sense of the force aij!d 
 nobility of her character. 
 
 Her character ! There was the secret of the bewildei 
 fascination of her early singing. Those of us who ki 
 and watched, and loved her long after the marvellous .\j6icj 
 had grown worn, could yet perfectly understand why tl 
 charm she once exercised had been so unique. As we ffift 
 the impressive vigour, the brilliancy, the high purity of 
 the full-formed character, we could not be surprised at 
 anything men told us of her wonderful effect upon them, 
 when all this inward force, which still delighted us, had / 
 been felt at work within the heart of the clear, liquid, 
 bird-like voice of a young girl. 
 
 For, indeed, her character had all the notes of greatnessJ/ 
 
 First, it had the gift of originality. How can I explain,! 
 or justify & term which is used just to express what is inde-fV 
 scribable? Those who knew her will perfectly understand -8 
 me wl^n I say that everything she did, everything she y 
 said, ^f'ery gesture, every motion, bore her own individual I 
 stan^p upon it. As she came into the room, as she went 
 ouJ^as she spoke, you felt in presence of an original nature, 
 
 ade in a fresh mould, distinct, marked, unmistakable, 
 r cannot recall a single conventional look or act of hers
 
 1 6 Personal Studies 
 
 not one in which she was not herself alone. Her greeting, 
 her way of coming forward with her hands outspread to 
 welcome you, the pose of her head, the touch of dramatic 
 action in all she did how vivid is the impression left ! 
 Her image stands out, imprinted in clear outlines ; it 
 never mixes itself up with other memories. And she had 
 the unaccountableness of an original genius : you never 
 knew beforehand how she would take a thing, what she 
 would say, how she would like it. She awoke that 
 peculiar interest which belongs to those, whose whole 
 being is a surprise to you something which baffles your 
 normal expectations : you cannot sum it up in your cal- 
 culations ; you have to wait on it, and learn from it what 
 iits ways and motions will be. So with her. I never felt 
 
 )re sure that I was in the company of a genius than 
 when with her. Every phrase of hers " told " ; her foreign 
 English broke out into all sorts of strange and abrupt and 
 suggestive forms, which must have been a surprise to our 
 native mother-tongue, but which gave it unexpected force. 
 
 And, then, her character bore the type of a great Artist. 
 She was an Artist, through and through. This is what 
 you felt in her conception and treatment of music. She 
 had the artistic Ideality, the sense of an absolute and 
 ideal perfection of workmanship which was worth all 
 effort and all toil, and by which alone the life's work was 
 to be tried. She had the artist's sense of the all-suffi- 
 ciency and the sanctity of the ideal ; the artist's scorn for 
 all that compromised it, for all work that was not carried 
 to its highest attainable projection, for all weak shifts, 
 and unskilled presumptions. And, in all this, she had the 
 backing of her husband, for whose character she had an 
 enthusiastic admiration himself a musician of the most
 
 Jenny Lind 17 
 
 pure and delicate taste, fastidious of all that falls a 
 hair's-breadth below the highest standard attainable. 
 
 This Ideality was felt thoughout her whole treatment 
 of Life. It made her judgment of all untrained efforts, 
 that bore the stamp of the amateur upon them, to be 
 severe, and alarming. She could shut her lips fast in a 
 damning silence, after anything which failed to win her 
 approval, in a way that made you feel that all was over, 
 and that acquittal had become hopeless. She was not a 
 person to whose criticism an aspiring amateur would like 
 to offer his earlier efforts ; though, when she saw genuine 
 merit, she would delightedly give most generous help. 
 But the material must be good that you brought her ; and 
 the standard was very high. I think this is what her 
 pupils would say at the Royal College of Music, to whom 
 she gave such splendid work in the last years of her life. 
 They loved her ; and her training was magnificent in its 
 serious and radical thoroughness ; but she required much 
 of them. She kept them as close to their scales as Mr. 
 Ruskin kept his Drawing Class to the curves of a snail- 
 shell. She believed as thoroughly as the Duke of 
 Wellington that everything lay in the firm mastery of 
 the primary elements of your task. Yet, with this intense 
 belief in real " grind " she had the teacher's great gift of 
 looking to the individuality of the pupil. I remember 
 well her telling me, in her emphatic way, how her first 
 object was to discover the exact range peculiar to each 
 individual voice that came before her and, then, to make 
 its training turn on the compass it covered ; so that each 
 voice was an individual existence, with its own excel- 
 lences to be considered. How she made me laugh that 
 evening, imitating the strange way in which her girls 
 
 o
 
 1 8 Personal Studies 
 
 persisted in opening their mouths, when they sang ; and, 
 then, posing herself so naturally, just as she sat, and 
 saying, " Here I am ! I am ready ! Now I can sing." 
 
 This Ideality in Art brought her its familiar difficulties 
 and griefs in practical life. She had that artistic temper 
 which never seems quite at home in our work-a-day world. 
 What is it all at with its infirmities/its compromises, its 
 minglings of good and evil, its rough-and-ready method, 
 its thwarting imperfections ? The practical world con- 
 forms so little to any artistic ideal; it is satisfied with 
 such incomplete and untrained work. She could not 
 easily adapt herself to the common necessities and duties 
 of human existence ; they fretted her : they did not pass 
 into her ideal : they stuck out, with stiff angles, and bony 
 corners, and raw edges : she did not like them, nor could 
 she bear with them lightly and gaily : she could not bend 
 her inward moods to correspond to outward incidents. 
 She stood in an attitude of repulsion, of rebellion, towards 
 common, necessary, homely circumstances. She found it 
 very difficult to give these small affairs and details of life 
 their proper proportion and importance. And here, we 
 English, whom personally she loved dearly, yet tried her 
 sorely. We perplexed and distressed her by our British dis- 
 regard for first principles, by our Philistine content with 
 casual, haphazard, hand-to-mouth ways of doing things. 
 Our common life was so curiously satisfied with the 
 absence from it of any unity, or coherence, or symmetry. 
 
 This all emphasized her instinctive aloofness from the 
 world. Like all those who find their vent in Art, she 
 seemed always as if her soul was a homeless stranger here 
 amid the thick of earthly affairs, never quite comprehend- 
 i ng why the imperfect should exist, never quite able to
 
 Jenny Lind 19 
 
 come down from the lighted above and form her eyes to 
 the twilight of the prison and the cave. 
 
 And this gave a tone of sadness to her thought and 
 mind, of which her face, plain and grave, with its deep 
 grey eyes, and solemn furrows, and strangely pathetic 
 mouth, bore the traces. " When I am alone," she wrote, 
 " you have no idea how different I am, so happy, yet so 
 melancholy that tears are rolling down my cheeks unceas- 
 ingly." She had a profound admiration for Carlyle ; and 
 to her, as to him, it appeared as if the world were stained 
 with a corruption beyond measure, beyond endurance. 
 She felt all the power of his " railing accusation " felt it, 
 as he did, with the bewilderment and the indignation of 
 a spectator, not inside the work, not within the heart of 
 the workers, and so understanding how their errors and 
 their wrongs come often out of distorted love and ignorant 
 good- will but standing outside, gazing at a scene which 
 was, on the surface, a wild chaos of malice and horror and 
 sin. I saw her at Malvern, but two months before her 
 death, when her face was already white ^and waxen, with 
 the hue of death upon it, sitting in the verandah of that 
 lovely home, which she loved and where she died, high up 
 on the Worcestershire hills, looking out over the rolling 
 woodlands of the Severn valley, as they lay, soft and ten- 
 der, in the delicate splendour of an- English autumn, 
 looking out, and asking, with passionate energy, the old, 
 old questions, that have vexed and harried every religious 
 soul questions which the Cross of CHRIST enables us, not 
 so much to answer as to face. " Why is evil so strong ? 
 Why does wickedness increase ? Why is there pain, and 
 misery, and earthquake, and famine, and war ? Why does 
 the good which one sets oneself to do, fail ? Why do the
 
 20 Personal Studies 
 
 best efforts win no fruit ? " The old desperate enquiries ! 
 They stirred her to the very depths. The faith, which 
 she firmly grasped for her own salvation, did not seem to 
 spread out as an illuminative interpretation of the world 
 around her. These primary problems, which the Cross 
 presupposes and responds to, still importunately beset 
 her; and her vein of reflection was darkened by their 
 shadow. Such outcry against wrong is itself prophetic of 
 the GOD to whom it witnesses, and for whose honour it is 
 so jealous ; and now for her we can trust that, in the 
 great merciful silence, all questions have been hushed for 
 ever into divine repose. 
 
 This spiritual aloofness had in her, as, again, in Carlyle, 
 its natural effect in a special purity of tone. I can hardly 
 imagine the man who would, in her presence, venture on 
 a doubtful allusion, or a hazardous innuendo. Never 
 shall I forget the vivid vigour of her description to me of 
 her final parting with a friend, who had made some such 
 reference. The whole world conveyed under these phrases 
 was to her a thing of contempt and abhorrence, which she 
 dismissed with a touch of austere defiance. Certainly, I 
 can hardly imagine her being thought a genial or popular 
 companion in the green-room of an Opera House ; but ah ! 
 how one longed to have once heard, ringing through a 
 theatre, the young girl-voice which had been penetrated, 
 through and through, by this simple and haughty 
 innocence ! 
 
 It was the same with all things small, mean, or false. 
 Here, again, she hardly allowed, perhaps, for human 
 frailty, nor even for the misunderstandings and confusions 
 that are so inevitable. Little blunders were apt to get 
 magnified, friendships found themselves abruptly broken,
 
 Jenny Lind 21 
 
 sometimes. She had a very high standard for her friends ; 
 and woe to them if she suspected them of any lapse ! It 
 was a difficult matter to recover her esteem. 
 
 All this idealism culminated in her intense conviction 
 that her art was a gift of GOD, to be dedicated to His 
 service. This belief was continually on her lips. " I have 
 always put GOD first, " she said, during her last days. It 
 was this which you could feel in her pose, as she stood 
 high-strung and prophetic, to deliver a great theme, such 
 as " I know that my Redeemer liveth." It was this which 
 was the key to her superb generosity to the sick and the 
 suffering; she was fulfilling her consecrated office towards 
 them. It was this which sent her voice thrilling along 
 the wards of the Brompton Hospital, where she loved to 
 sing to those for whom she had herself built a whole 
 wing. It was this which kindled all her enthusiasm for 
 Mile. Janotha, in whom she found a kindred mind, 
 Janotha who had said to her (she told me), " What is 
 this ' world ' of which people speak ? I do not know 
 what ' the world ' is. I play for Jesus Christ." 
 
 Serious, and even sad, as was the deeper current of her 
 life, I hope it will not be supposed that she was oppressive 
 or stiff. She was full of warm affection. "There is 
 nothing like Love," she wrote in a letter : and again, " It 
 is the richest blessing, next to the Redemption, to love, 
 and to love purely, without any selfish desire. I feel quite 
 a pain in my heart to think I shall not see you for long." 
 Her letters are full of such tendernesses. And she 
 would in all happy hours of intimacy throw out her 
 whole heart in brimming gaiety. She was, when in spirits, 
 all alive with play and fun ; she had a delicious, merry 
 laugh ; and she could bubble with delight. At such times
 
 22 Personal Studies 
 
 as her Christmas-tree parties, for her children and friends, 
 her merriment would be irrepressible. I still see her 
 thumping out the " Swedish Dance " at the piano for us ; 
 smiling with joy at the emphatic rhythm of stamping feet ; 
 and then springing up to dance herself with all the brisk, 
 bright playfulness of a child ; and I am reminded of her 
 making, on such an evening, the tallest man in the room, 
 now a Judge, dance round with the tiniest little girl ; and 
 how, in a pause, she came up suddenly to a friend, saying, 
 " Now I will dance with you ! " and flew round in a valse 
 herself. Her figure, though angular, was'singularly full of 
 grace and motion, and she danced beautifully. And how 
 tenderly, on that evening, she marked a little deaf-and- 
 dumb boy, and led him up, first of all the children, to the 
 tree, to choose his present, and danced with him herself, 
 and devoted herself to making the evening a happy one 
 for him. 
 
 And one occasion remains ever in my memory, when 
 she played the part of a maid in some children's theatricals 
 at her own house at Wimbledon. I understood, then, the 
 charm there must have been in her acting in old days. It 
 was a little part, but how she made it tell ! She had to 
 show the sympathy of the domestic household with the 
 little lovers, who were coming together in the front scene. 
 And how she danced, and brimmed over with joy, 
 behind them ; and filled the room with her merry-hearted 
 encouragement of the pair, who, it must be confessed, 
 were a little timid and shy of each other. Or again, in 
 latter days, it was delightful to find her in the country 
 under the Surrey hills, with her daughter's children, to 
 whom she was devoted ; wrapped in some strange- 
 coloured shawl, with a large yellow straw-hat flapping
 
 Jenny Lind 23 
 
 about her face, greeting one with both hands, stepping 
 forward with feet that almost danced, and with all sorts 
 of dramatic fun in her eyes and in her motions. Dear 
 Madame ! It was at such happy times that she left a 
 vivid vision imprinted on the heart, such as no years can 
 efface, nor earth ever replace. 
 
 Vivid ! It is impossible not to use the word again and 
 again. She was vivid in phrase and in gesture ; that is 
 what made her so surprising and delightful. " What was 
 Mr. Grote like ? " I asked her once, as she was telling me 
 much of her intimacy in his house. " Oh ! Mr. Grote, he 
 was like a nice old bust in the corner ; you could go and 
 dust him ! " Here are her directions to a young lady 
 how, in singing, to pass from one note to another over an 
 interval. "First, the brain!" with a finger laid on the 
 forehead to express profound consideration of the note it 
 is proposed to pass to. " Second, the Portmanteau ! " 
 with a gesture of the hands to express lifting the voice 
 off the note it is on, picking it up, and carrying it right 
 across with a sweep to a spot just above the note to be 
 hit. " Then, the Pounce ! " I am reminded, by one who 
 was present, of a scene when some Americans were an- 
 nounced, seeking an interview. ' ' What is it you want ? " she 
 asked, standing very erect. " Oh, Madame Goldschmidt, 
 we hoped to have the pleasure of seeing you, and making 
 your acquaintance." " Well, here is my front ! " Then 
 (with a whisk round), " There is my back. Now " (with a 
 deep curtsey) " you can go home, and say that you have 
 seen me ! " After her visitors had crept out abashed, she 
 was very penitent for having been at all rude. But she 
 could not endure any impertinent curiosity ; and it was 
 always a perilous experiment to introduce a stranger to
 
 24 Personal Studies 
 
 her, lest she should suspect some motive in the introduction, 
 when her coldness would be freezing. She hardly ever 
 spoke a word about herself, her past life, her old interests 
 and glories, even among those most intimate with her. 
 And it will be felt how much this meant, when all of us 
 were ready eagerly to catch up the slightest hint that 
 might lead to her telling us something of the marvellous 
 days behind her. Often I wondered to myself that I had 
 never pressed her to speak on that most thrilling of all 
 subjects, a great dramatic experience. But she was utterly 
 unegotistical in such things ; her loftiness of temper kept 
 her reticent and reserved ; and restrained us, too, from 
 enquiries that might be impertinent. Looking back, I 
 can only recall one tiny fragment of a story about herself, 
 that she ever told me ; it dropped out in a brief whisper, 
 one night : how, when she was three or four years old, she 
 could pick up the tunes from a band and make them out 
 for herself on the piano. She used to do this when she 
 thought herself alone. But, one day, the grandmother 
 was in the next room, and hearing the piano, called out 
 the older sister's name, who was about seven. Little 
 Jenny, in alarm of being caught, crept down and hid 
 under the piano. The grandmother called again, and at 
 last came in to see why there was no answer, and searched 
 about, and finally dragged out the little creature, quaking, 
 from her hiding-place. " Was that you playing ? " " Yes ! " 
 said poor Jenny with tears, as if confessing a sin. " And 
 the grandmother said nothing, but she looked, and looked 
 at me ; and when the mother came in, she said, ' That 
 child will do something for you some day. ' ' As Madame 
 told me the story, I could feel how that silent look of the 
 grandmother had impressed her child-memory.
 
 Jenny Lind 25 
 
 This reticence was surely a remarkable evidence of self- 
 control in one who had to undergo that trial which to all 
 but the highest natures must be a severe strain on the 
 moral tone the trial of having passed the most triumphant 
 achievements of her life before she was out of girlhood, 
 and of having to watch her own fame and memory fade 
 away before her eyes, out of the minds of new generations 
 that knew her not. To a character less lofty than hers, 
 the temptation to keep that fading past in perpetual view 
 would have been inevitable and incessant. 
 
 But, indeed, she had the most genuine spirit of un- 
 
 worldliness. " Oh, Mrs. S , how I pity you ! " was 
 
 her frank greeting to her hostess at a great garden-party. 
 " Why, dear Madame Goldschmidt ? I have got husband, 
 children, everything that the world can give me." " Yes, 
 I am sorry for you, you have so much wealth ! " 
 
 " I am far more proud (though proud is not the word !) " 
 she wrote, " at having had a talent for rudder and oars, 
 than a made name and position." 
 
 About three years before her death she began to show 
 ominous symptoms of some internal wrong. She had 
 worked very hard in forming the School of Song in the 
 new Royal College of Music, into which she had thrown 
 her keenest energies ; and she evidently was unable to bear 
 the strain. Slowly the evil disclosed itself to be very grave 
 indeed. She had to retire from her work, and spent two 
 winters in the south of France. It was only in her later 
 years that she had learned the splendours of Sou them- suns, 
 and she had given them her enthusiastic love, and had fled 
 from our sunless London grizzle to enjoy their delicious 
 light again and again during the last fifteen years. Now, 
 in her sickness, she turned again to the coast of Cannes,
 
 26 Personal Studies 
 
 where she had been so happy. Her letters of farewell 
 were deeply shadowed by her sense that the end was not 
 to be far off. " I feel very strongly the beginning of the 
 end," she wrote, " and think it a blessing to look forward 
 to eternal rest. What is the whole miserable earthly life 
 worth in comparison to one single glance at the Sinless, 
 Holy SAVIOUR ? " And in a quaintly-sad letter, written 
 before going abroad for this last winter, she says : " I feel 
 almost inclined to say, ' Welcome, Death, my ugly friend ! ' ' 
 
 The disease was one of miserable discomfort, even when 
 it was not burdened with pain. Her children all came 
 out to her, at Cannes, conscious that they could not hope 
 to see her much longer here. Her devoted husband was 
 ever near her in most faithful loyalty and love. She 
 almost ceased to be able to see any one but him. In the 
 summer she succeeded in creeping home to her beloved 
 cottage on the Malvern Hills, where, after some months 
 of most pitiful and severe sickness, she died. 
 
 Twice I had the privilege of seeing her there. The 
 first time, it was just after a touching interview with 
 two dear friends. She was half-lying on a couch in 
 the verandah, and, seeing me, she beckoned me to her, 
 and spoke in the sad strong strain to which I have 
 already referred. I touched on the exquisite loveliness of 
 her little home. " Yes," she said, " but I am never to see 
 a spring here. The three first springs I was at work at 
 the College ; and now ! " She told me a plaintive story of 
 her last talk with Dean Stanley, to whom she had been 
 bound by a long affectionate intimacy. She spoke of her 
 last sight of Lady Augusta Stanley after her death ; and 
 then she told me, with all her own vivid, emphatic 
 brilliancy of gesture and look, of a scene which had
 
 Jenny Lind 27 
 
 evidently left on her an indelible impression of wonder 
 and glory. She had gone to look on the face of her friend, 
 Mrs. Nassau Senior, after death. The son of her friend 
 had shown her the stairs, and pointed out the door of the 
 room where the body lay, and put the candle in her hand, 
 and left her. She pushed open the door and entered alone ; 
 and there, before her, lay the face, fine and clear-cut, 
 encompassed about with a mass of white flowers. On it 
 was peace, and a smile, with the lips parted ; but that was 
 not all. I must tell the rest in her own words. " It was 
 not her own look that was in her face. It was the look 
 of another, the face of another, that had passed into hers. 
 It was the shadow of CHRIST that had come upon her. 
 She had seen CHRIST. And I put down my candle, and I 
 said, ' Let me see this thing. Let me stop here always. 
 Let me sit and look. Where are my children ? Let them 
 come and see. Here is a woman who has seen CHRIST.' " 
 I can never forget the dramatic intensity of her manner 
 as she told me all this, and how she at last had to drag 
 herself away, as from a vision, and to stumble down the 
 stairs again. 
 
 The second and last time I saw her there, she was a 
 little better, and looked less ashen in colour, and talked 
 brightly. She spoke of her dear Swedish people, for whom 
 she always had an enthusiastic admiration spoke of their 
 gifts, their great literature, their quick appreciation of 
 artistic form and grace, their capacity for both good and 
 evil. And then she touched on Carlyle; she and her 
 husband had been reading the letters that passed between 
 him and Goethe. And this led to his Autobiography and 
 Life. She was indignant at its treatment by the world, 
 who gossiped over it as if it only disclosed a domestic
 
 28 Personal Studies 
 
 wrangle. It was this, she said, which had decided her to 
 resist the importunities of friends, begging her to leave 
 some record of herself. If Carlyle could be so miserably 
 misunderstood, what hope had she of being better treated ? 
 No, " let the waves of oblivion pass over my poor little 
 life ! " She would have talked on, but I was forced to 
 leave ; and my last remembrance is of her kindly waving 
 her hand in good-bye, as she sat in her great chair, very 
 white but still impressive and vigorous, with the sweet 
 English hills and woods about her, steeped in delicious 
 sunlight. 
 
 Shortly after, she became worse, and never left her bed 
 again. She was almost too weak to speak ; but her 
 daughter, who hardly ever left her during all this pitiful 
 time, wrote to me that one morning as they drew the 
 blinds to let her beloved sun stream in upon her, she sang 
 three or four bars of Schumann's " An den Sonnenschein." 
 She longed to die, and hoped eagerly that it might be on 
 her birthday, October 6th ; but her great vitality dragged 
 on the long struggle, and not until November 2nd, All 
 Hallows Day, did her soul pass away, with a few soft sighs. 
 She was buried amid the sweetest music, sung by the 
 choirs in Malvern Abbey Church, and with wreaths and 
 flowers which not only loaded the hearse but filled a 
 separate car. So they laid her body to rest under the 
 Malvern Hills ; and " over her grave " (says one) " it seems 
 as if the very birds would sing more sweetly than else- 
 where." For the music in her was ever an inspiration, 
 which lifted her, as the lark is carried heavenward by its 
 song the lark, her own chosen symbol, carved over her 
 house-door ; the lark, the winged thing that " singing ever 
 soars," and "soaring ever sings." "What a gift is Art,"
 
 Jenny Lind 29 
 
 she herself writes; "music above all when we under- 
 stand, not to make it an idol, but to place it at the foot 
 of the Cross, laying all our longings, sufferings, joys and 
 expectations in a light of a dying and risen SAVIOUR ! He 
 alone and surely nothing else is the goal of all our 
 intense longing, whether we know it or not." 
 
 Dear lady, great-hearted and high-souled ! She is 
 gone ; and earth's ways seem strangely darkened to those 
 who feel sadly sure that never, here, will they see or know 
 anything like her again. For, indeed, she was of the 
 great race of those who startle our common days by their 
 free, fresh, beautiful originality. She was of those Pilgrim- 
 souls who move about this dim earth, possessed of a vision 
 which the world seems rather to baffle than fulfil. Happy, 
 most happy, as she was, in a tender wedded love, she yet 
 listened to the " sad music of Humanity " with a troubled 
 disquiet ; and for her it is far better to have passed into 
 that land which brings the sweet boon of sleep to those 
 that, dying in ' the LOUD, rest from their labours : and 
 which, beyond the sleep again, is loud with music the 
 voice of harpers harping on their harps, the voice of those 
 who sing the new song, which none can know but those 
 who are redeemed from among men.
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE* 
 
 "ALL I believed is true." This line from Robert 
 Browning comes back and back on the memory, as I pass 
 through the pages of this admirable book. " All I 
 believed is true." We petty men, who trotted in and out 
 of the great man's shadow, during the last twenty-five 
 years of his life, believed so much in what we felt to be 
 true under the pressure of that amazing presence. It 
 was irresistible. Its abounding vitality made everyone 
 else within its range seern so thin and cheap. Its high 
 passion was fed out of sources beyond the plumb-line of 
 habitual experience. Its freedom and spontaneity of out- 
 put was like nothing else in the whole wide world. And, 
 then, a most touching candour and simplicity placed all 
 these unmeasured resources at the service of any one who 
 was ready to draw upon them, however limited his powers 
 might be for drawing upon these deep wells. The 
 youngest and humblest were accepted as if they had 
 really some intrinsic value, and were completely worthy 
 to receive all the best he had to give. This fine and 
 unfailing courtesy almost bewildered us. It seemed so 
 remote from the rougher assumptions which govern the 
 hurry-scurry of modern social competition. How had the 
 
 * The Life of Gladstone. By John Morley. London : Macmillan. 
 1903. 
 
 30
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 31 
 
 vehemence of a personality which would, naturally, have 
 swept everyone out of its way with the force of an 
 impetuous torrent, brought itself down to this delicate 
 habit of deference, and learned to treat anybody and 
 everybody with such infinite regard ? 
 
 And then, again, we felt we could not but feel the 
 large, unhampered guilelessness which, in spite of obvious 
 subtleties of intellectual dialectic in talk and discussion, 
 still made itself known as the most radical and elemental 
 characteristic of the man. He was transparent as a babe : 
 even when he was most acute in framing puzzling dis- 
 tinctions, or hurrying us over the thinnest possible ice. 
 You saw the man flinging himself into his case, with the 
 keen abandonment of a child without reserves. You 
 might hear endless stories of the versatilities and elastici- 
 ties and shifts by which he had thrown his opponents in 
 the public arena of debate ; but nothing could ever shake 
 your conviction that guilelessness was the main note of 
 his character. Deep down in the life there was the 
 untouched heart of a little child. And the everlasting 
 wonder was always how he ever could have passed through 
 his incomparable experience of a world which he fought 
 so hardly and from which he had so often endured such 
 virulent attack and such unsparing hate, and yet had re- 
 tained the undying charity " which hopeth all things and 
 believeth all things " ; and still looked out upon man with 
 the dauntless faith which is convinced that everybody 
 must be on its side, if only they understood. 
 
 No suspicions could cloud this faith : no disappoint- 
 ments undermine it. And it was all the more remarkable 
 because of his profound realization of sin and the alarming 
 thoroughness of his recognition of the awful conflict
 
 32 Personal Studies 
 
 between good and evil. He, nevertheless, hoped in every- 
 body, to the very last, with an optimism that is only 
 possible for those who are kept by GOD in strange 
 innocence of heart. He could be very severe in judging 
 this or that action ; but he was really incapable of 
 personalities, or jealousies, or meannesses, or envyings, or 
 malice, or distrust. 
 
 If you wanted to select a type of character which was 
 the exact antithesis of Mr. Gladstone, you would think of 
 one which is known as "a man of the world." No 
 eighty-four years of varied discipline, under every con- 
 ceivable condition which " the world " could present, could 
 justify him for the title. He was unable to become a 
 creature " of the world." This is what drew you to him 
 with such unqualified and unstinted trust. There was 
 nothing to suggest wariness or to limit your glad sur- 
 render. Everything in him was, in a sense, on the 
 surface, to be seen and known, just because it all 
 emerged so freely from the deepest deeps, without check 
 or hindrance. There was nothing in him that made him 
 afraid to reveal all he felt or thought, under the impulse 
 of the moment. The entire man came to the front 
 through the words that flew to his lips : through the 
 dramatic expression of face and gesture. Yes ! he was 
 guileless, so we said, whatever the perplexities through 
 which he had to steer a perilous way. The world had 
 never even touched him. 
 
 And behind all this, and in it, and through it, we 
 knew that there was but one motive that dominated and 
 inspired. This motive was undisguised. At a touch it was 
 in evidence. It looked out from the deep-ringed eyes : it 
 spoke in the modulation of his bell-like voice ; it was as
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 33 
 
 an atmosphere in which he moved. " He was," says one 
 who had known the greatest and best of the Priests of 
 his day, "he was the most profoundly religious man I 
 ever knew." Religion was to him the moral breath that 
 he breathed. He had not to evoke it ; or pull himself 
 together to meet it ; or to call upon himself for any 
 special effort. It was there with the ease and complete- 
 ness that belong to those who are as little children in the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 All this we believed. It was the immediate and un- 
 deniable effect of his presence and companionship. As 
 we walked and talked with him we were sure of it. And 
 the certainty of it evoked in us that enthusiastic loyalty 
 which made his name to us the watchword of hope and 
 honour and victory. And now this book comes to con- 
 firm us in every jot and tittle of our creed. It reads to 
 us as a triumphant vindication of what we had persist- 
 ently held. It is not that it reveals novel aspects, or that 
 it brings forward new data for judgment, or that it has 
 the excitement of carrying us into unanticipated ground. 
 In a sense, we knew it all before. The man presented 
 to us is the man whom we remember. There is nothing 
 startling, or unaccountable. There is no introduction of 
 materials which challenge a reconsidered estimate. There 
 are no exciting discoveries. Rather, we remain as we 
 were ; our memory, our imagination, retain their familiar 
 portraiture. Only, we have the supreme delight of 
 ratifying our convictions at every point. We see our own 
 limited and partial experience carried into the inmost 
 recesses of the life, and outspread far back into the long 
 years which had lain out of our ken. We understand 
 how it was that it all grew and came about.
 
 34 Personal Studies 
 
 We follow back, for instance, the story of that self- 
 conquest which so astonished us, by which a character of 
 such abounding impetuosity made itself one of the most 
 companionable and courteous in the world. How easy to 
 picture Mr. Gladstone as another Burke, aflame with the 
 rage of righteousness, yet so vehement and uncontrolled 
 that he was an impossible colleague in a Cabinet ! As 
 Mr. Gladstone lets drop the burning phrase, " Read Burke : 
 he is almost divine," we are aware of the close kinship of 
 spirit. The moral fire, the ideal passion, the tumultuous 
 expression, are all his. Yet the undeviating witness tells 
 of the perfection of behaviour by which Mr. Gladstone 
 illuminated the art of mutual counsel. He was the 
 highest master in the delicate craft of bringing your mind 
 into the common stock. His patience, his toleration, his 
 persuasiveness, in a crisis, were simply inexhaustible. 
 And his temper, in the hours of bitter trouble and 
 agitated decision, was flawless. 
 
 And all this was due, as the book reveals, to a definite 
 and deliberate discipline. He held from his very boyhood 
 to the belief that " manners maketh man." He saw, in 
 courtesy, the articulate expression of the Christian Creed 
 which, for him, covered the entire area of conduct : and 
 he made it a religious duty to fufil its obligations. 
 
 " The whole system of legitimate courtesy, politeness, and 
 refinement is surely nothing less than one of the genuine 
 though minor and often unacknowledged results of the Gospel 
 scheme. All the great moral qualities or graces, which in 
 their large sphere determine the formation and habits of the 
 Christian soul as before GOD, do also on a smaller scale apply to 
 the very same principles in the common intercourse of life, 
 and pervade its innumerable and separately inappreciable
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 35 
 
 particulars; and the result of this application is that good 
 breeding which distinguishes Christian civilization." 
 
 Mr. Morley cannot resist the stinging question, as to 
 how far the Christian Bishops (say) at the Robber 
 Council at Ephesus can be said to have strictly exhibited 
 their superiority in manners over Plato : or over Cicero : 
 or over an Arab of Cordova. But, for all that, he is 
 ready enough to acknowledge that " nobody of his time 
 was a finer example of high good manners and genuine 
 courtesy than Mr. Gladstone." Nor would he suggest a 
 doubt but that, in Mr. Gladstone, this high habit of 
 deference and self-control was won by him out of the 
 seriousness with which he took up all the significance of 
 his cardinal Creed. It was won, already, in his eager 
 youth. And it is this which accounts for the famous 
 misjudgment of James Stephen, that Gladstone had every 
 gift that might bring him to the front, but lacked the 
 combativeness that was essential for landing him there. 
 Lack of combativeness ! When we, in the latter days, 
 who had seen Mr. Gladstone warring his way, in lonely 
 force, against innumerable hosts, turned to Dean Church 
 for some explanation of the extraordinary miscalculation, 
 he retorted that Mr. Gladstone's extreme deference to 
 older men, in his youth, made it quite intelligible. 
 
 Indeed, it is always surprising to recall that his 
 manifestation of volcanic energy, sweeping through the 
 country like a storm, came only with what might in other 
 men be called old age. His full powers as a platform 
 orator only revealed themselves when he was already a 
 past master in Parliamentary debate, and had risen to 
 the highest place in the arena. He had gained the
 
 36 Personal Studies 
 
 discipline of control long years before he let himself loose 
 in ways that might violently strain it. So it remained 
 that, to the very last, however vehement his passion, he 
 was the very apostle of constitutional formalism : he was 
 the most rigid stickler for rule, and order, and precedent, 
 and consideration. He had the belief that outward 
 details of behaviour, in the conduct of public affairs, were 
 vital and sacred. In this combination lay his special 
 significance as, at once, the tempestuous herald of new 
 forces coming into perilous play, and, also, the splendid 
 Parliamentary Politician, to whom the traditions of Con- 
 stitutionalism were dear as his life-blood. He covered 
 the whole ground that lies between the prophet and the 
 " old Parliamentary hand " : and this gave him his singu- 
 lar opportuneness at a moment when such immense social 
 changes had to be made without a breach in the per- 
 manent structure of national existence. The moment 
 exactly required and favoured such a temperament. But, 
 ' nevertheless, it was no mere accident that such a tem- 
 perament was his. On the contrary, he won it by 
 assiduous attention to his character under the guiding 
 inspiration of a religious belief. 
 
 This assiduity never flagged, from his days as a boy at 
 Eton, to the last dark hour which shut him fast within 
 the prison-house of pain on his death-bed. 
 
 Have I laboured this point too far ? I think not. We 
 all can recognize the exuberant energy, the splendid 
 endowments, the forceful impetuosity, the inexhaustible 
 fecundity, which made him the paramount social influence 
 of his time. All this leaps to the eyes. But what the 
 book reveals is this most masterful secret of his inner life, 
 by which he set his bridle on leviathan, and brought
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 37 
 
 down the tireless powers within him under the yoke of a 
 sleepless and tenacious will. This is the combination 
 which made him what he was. As Mr. Morley pronounces, 
 after recording the precise and rigid scheme for the 
 regulation of time and money given to his son : " In this 
 instance, the councillor was the living pattern of his own 
 maxims." " And the peculiarity of all this half-mechanic 
 ordering of a wise and virtuous individual life, was that it 
 went with a genius and a power that ' moulded a mighty 
 state's decrees,' and sought ' the widest process of the 
 suns.' " 
 
 As to this deepest secret of all, Mr. Morley succeeds in 
 even deepening the emphasis with which it had always 
 asserted itself through every detail of his habit and speech. 
 " All his activities were, in his own mind, one. That is 
 the fundamental fact of Mr. Gladstone's history. And 
 this unity of inspiration was simply and solely religion. 
 His political life was only part of his religious life." We 
 knew it. And here it is re-told, rehearsed, re-evidenced. 
 How thorough, how deep, how entire this religious 
 consecration was, from first to last, we are shown, above 
 all in the passage written to Mrs. Gladstone in which he 
 goes to the very bottom of all that the discipline of the 
 Saints has intended by the religious life. 
 
 " There is a beautiful little sentence in the works of Charles 
 Lamb concerning one who had been afflicted : ' he gave his 
 heart to the Purifier, and his will to the Sovereign Will of 
 the Universe.' But there is a speech in the third canto of the 
 Paradiso of Dante, spoken by a certain Piccarda, which is a 
 rare gem. I will only quote this one line : ' In la sua volontade 
 & nostra pace.' The words are few and simple, and yet they 
 appear to me to have an inexpressible majesty of truth about
 
 38 Personal Studies 
 
 them, to be almost as if they were spoken from the very mouth 
 of GOD. It so happened that (unless my memory much deceives 
 me) I first read that speech on a morning early in the year 
 1836, which was one of trial. I was profoundly impressed and 
 powerfully sustained, almost absorbed, by these words. They 
 cannot be too deeply graven upon the heart. In short, what 
 we all want is that they should not come to us as an admoni- 
 tion from without, but as an instinct from within. They 
 should not be adopted by effort or upon a process of proof, but 
 they should be simply the translation into speech of the 
 habitual tone to which all tempers, affections, emotions, are 
 set. In the Christian mood, which ought never to be inter- 
 mitted, the sense of this conviction should recur spontaneously ; 
 it should be the foundation of all mental thoughts and acts, 
 and the measure to which the whole experience of life, inward 
 and outward, is referred. The final state which we are to 
 contemplate with hope, and to seek by discipline, is that in 
 which our will shall be one with the will of GOD ; not merely 
 shall submit to it, not merely shall follow after it, but shall 
 live and move with it, even as the pulse of the blood in the 
 extremities acts with the central movement of the heart. And 
 this is to be obtained through a double process ; the first, that 
 of checking, repressing, quelling the inclination of the will to 
 act with reference to self as a centre ; this is to mortify it. 
 The second, to cherish, exercise, and expand its new and 
 heavenly power of acting according to the will of GOD, first, 
 perhaps, by painful effort in great feebleness and with many 
 inconsistencies, but with continually augmenting regularity 
 and force, until obedience becomes a necessity of second nature." 
 
 There is the whole matter. You cannot go beyond it. 
 He set himself that final standard ; and with this life- 
 long thoroughness of self-subdual went a naive and 
 genuine piety, quite startling to our modern self-con- 
 sciousness by its absolute simplicity of trust.
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 39 
 
 " On most occasions of very sharp pressure or trial, some 
 word of Scripture has come home to me as if borne on angels' 
 wings. Many could I recollect. The Psalms are the great 
 storehouse. Perhaps I should put some down now, for the 
 continuance of memory is not to be trusted. 1. In the winter 
 of 1837, Psalm 128. This came in a most singular manner, 
 but it would be a long story to tell. 2. In the Oxford contest 
 of 1847 (which was very harrowing), the verse ' LORD GOD, 
 Thou strength of my health, Thou hast covered my head in the 
 day of battle.' 3. In the Gorham contest, after the judgment : 
 ' And though all this be come upon us, yet do we not forget 
 Thee ; nor behave ourselves frowardly in Thy covenant. Our 
 heart is not turned back ; neither our steps gone out of Thy 
 way. No, not when Thou hast smitten us into the place of 
 dragons : and covered us with the shadow of death.' 4. On 
 Monday, April 17, 1853 [his first Budget speech], it was : ' 
 turn Thee then unto me, and have mercy upon me : give Thy 
 strength unto Thy servant, and help the son of Thine hand- 
 maid.' Last Sunday [Crimean War Budget] it was out of 
 the Psalms for the day : ' Thou shalt prepare a table before 
 me against them that trouble me : Thou hast anointed my 
 head with oil and my cup shall be full.' " 
 
 What more can be said ? Only we might just notice 
 how this spiritual absorption overlapped in time the full 
 length of his active career. It had preceded all political 
 interest, as we know from a letter to his father on taking 
 Orders. He entered politics, at first, with the supreme 
 object of serving the interests of the Church. And, 
 always, he nursed that predestinating intention to escape 
 out of politics, in order that he might get ready to die. 
 Within the turmoil, his soul could never satisfy his craving 
 for the deeper peace. 
 
 Not that he did not value the moral temper fostered
 
 40 Personal Studies 
 
 by political experience. There is a striking passage, 
 quoted in vol. i, p. 199, written long after, in 1894, look- 
 ing back on his career : 
 
 " That political life considered as a profession has great 
 dangers for the inner and true life of the human being, is too 
 obvious. It has, however, some redeeming qualities. In the 
 first place, I have never known, and can hardly conceive, a 
 finer school of temper than the House of Commons. A lapse 
 in this respect is on the instant an offence, a jar, a wound, to 
 every member of the assembly ; and it brings its own punish- 
 ment on the instant, like the sins of the Jews under the old 
 dispensation. Again, I think the imperious nature of the 
 subjects, their weight and force, demanding the entire strength 
 of a man and all his faculties, leave him no residue, at least 
 for the time, to apply to self-regard ; no more than there is 
 for a swimmer swimming for his life. He must, too, in 
 retrospect feel himself to be so very small in comparison with 
 the themes and the interests of which he has to treat. It is a 
 further advantage if his occupation be not mere debate, but 
 debate ending in work. For in this way, whether the work 
 be legislative or administrative, it is continually tested by 
 results, and he is enabled to strip away his extravagant 
 anticipations, his fallacious conceptions, to perceive his 
 mistakes, and to reduce his estimates to reality. No politician 
 has any excuse for being vain." 
 
 So it justified itself to his exacting conscience : and yet 
 and yet he never, of his own free will, made himself 
 responsible for any one entering it. And the passionate 
 desire for escape was fulfilled, in the last perfect years of 
 retreat, at Hawarden, when, in splendid spontaneity of 
 still unshadowed power, he opened his soul to the full and 
 true spiritual springs, and in the home that he loved so
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 41 
 
 fondly, found, in the eventide of a tempestuous life, the 
 light of perfect peace. 
 
 " All I once believed is true." So I keep murmuring 
 to myself over page after page of this record. Here is the 
 book which triumphantly confirms our faith. The limita- 
 tions of which we were aware are as obvious as ever. Two 
 whole worlds of intense human interest did not practically 
 exist for Mr. Gladstone. (1) He could not get an entry 
 into the domain of metaphysics. His intellect would not 
 bite. He had nothing to say about it ; it refused to 
 receive him into its secret. (2) This was a big curtail- 
 ment : and there was yet another and more strange one. 
 Science, which was in the act of disclosing its amazing 
 marvels, remained for him, from end to end of his career, 
 a closed book. Here, again, the doors would not open. 
 He never arrived. 
 
 (3) So again, close within his personal horizon, there 
 began to move and stir about him the new moral and 
 economic tendencies which are summed up under the 
 name of socialism. These were to be the formative forces 
 of the younger generation. Yet it remained for him an 
 uncongenial and alien world. It clashed with his own 
 primal political assumptions. It seemed to menace the 
 ideal of personal liberty, which he had spent his life in 
 apprehending with ever larger range and gladness. He 
 never got inside the novel atmosphere. Only he did learn 
 to see that a new birth was in travail. He spoke of his 
 own work of emancipation as closing. He foresaw a work 
 of construction, which it would not be his to share. I can 
 recall the peculiar solemnity, as of a warrior whose day 
 was passing, with which he bade me farewell once at 
 Broughton Station, near to Hawarden, and spoke what
 
 42 Personal Studies 
 
 seemed to him last words (so I thought at the time) of 
 hope and encouragement for those who were to pass 
 forward into a life from out of which he would be gone. 
 What more remains to be said ? As a Statesman, he 
 can let this book stand as his record. It lets us inside the 
 motives, and exhibits the moving forces. It brings out 
 the bulk of positive Legislation achieved. It meets, with 
 unanswerable energy, the charge of mere opportunism. 
 Certainly, Mr. Gladstone could disregard the trend of 
 popular opinion. Again and again he set himself to defy 
 it. I shall never forget the dignity of temper with which 
 he bore the storm of obloquy and hate, during dismal days 
 in Harley Street, when the whole world had swung against 
 him. He had, it is true, through his habit of intense 
 concentration, a power of omitting from his attention, with 
 singular thoroughness, issues which were not ripe for 
 practical handling. And then, when once he had fastened 
 on those in view of action, they loomed out in immense 
 proportions which contrasted comically with their previous 
 obscurity. And then would follow the anxious and 
 ingenious attempts to reconcile the contrasted situations. 
 His own account of his relationship to the guidance of 
 outward events is singularly interesting. 
 
 "I am by no means sure, upon a calm review, that 
 Providence has endowed me with anything that can be called 
 a striking gift. But if there be such a thing entrusted to me 
 it has been shown at certain political junctures, in what may 
 be termed appreciations of the general situation and its result. 
 To make good the idea, this must not be considered as the 
 simple acceptance of public opinion, founded upon the discern- 
 ment that it has risen to a certain height needful for a given 
 work, like a tide. It is an insight into the facts of particular
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 43- 
 
 eras, and their relation one to another, which generates in the 
 mind a conviction that the materials exist for forming a public 
 opinion and for directing it to a particular end. There are 
 four occasions of my life with respect to which I think these 
 considerations may be applicable. They are these : 1. The 
 renewal of the Income-tax in 1853 ; 2. The proposal of 
 religious equality for Ireland, 1868 " 
 
 " It is easy," comments Mr. Morley, " to label this with 
 the ill-favoured name of opportunist . Yet if an opportunist 
 be denned as a statesman who declines to attempt to do a 
 thing until he believes that it can really be done, what is 
 this but to call him a man of common sense ? " 
 
 As for the impossible and unhappy mission of Gordon, 
 we read here how the four most sane, and sober, and 
 common-sensical men in the three kingdoms determined 
 on it on one short afternoon : when the Prime Minister 
 was at Ha warden. When men of this order, Lord Granville, 
 Lord Hartington, Lord Northbrook, plunge into romance 
 and adventure, they plunge with a vengeance. All through 
 the critical decisions, Mr. Gladstone was in retreat under 
 necessities of ill-health. It remains a theme for tears. 
 As to Majuba, Mr. Morley's defence of the refusal to avenge 
 Colley's dreadful blunder when once negotiations had 
 begun, is most convincingly put : but the previous failure 
 to attend to the Transvaal appeals in the months before 
 remains the real disaster. It was this which enabled the 
 "galling" attack to be made, that we had yielded after 
 three defeats what we had refused to moral and pacific 
 appeals. Here was the gall which made the name of 
 Majuba work like poison in the blood of two nations for 
 thirty years not the surrender to just demands, after the 
 defeat, but the blindness to them before we had fought.
 
 44 Personal ^Studies 
 
 As for the growth and disclosure of the Home Rule 
 policy, the record is, surely, as intelligible as it is 
 honourable. 
 
 His whole political career is summed up in the gradual 
 realization by him of the full significance of Liberty. The 
 very absoluteness of his ideal of Church and State at the 
 start drove him to the discovery of the facts which he had 
 omitted. He had tried to impose a perfect scheme upon 
 the facts : and the facts at once, there and then, showed 
 themselves in revolt. The theory had only to be stated 
 in sufficient strength for its impracticability to be obvious. 
 The facts simply would not admit of it. What are those 
 facts ? The facts of human nature in its free development. 
 If Mr. Gladstone had retained his rigid Evangelicalism, 
 he might have contented himself with denouncing 
 the facts as the work of the Devil. But he had read 
 Bishop Butler. He had found the Fathers. He had 
 absorbed the rich Creed of the Incarnation, in all its 
 fulness, in its largeness of historical preparation, in its 
 superb honour for flesh and blood. He was bound to 
 respect man in his self-manifestation. Therefore, his new 
 effort lay in reconciling his own intense belief in the 
 Catholic Church according to the form in which it had 
 come down to him in England, with his ever-growing sense 
 of the sanctity of life, as it revealed itself in freedom. 
 The Disestablishment of the Irish Church followed in- 
 evitably from the very premises with which his book on 
 Church and State had started, when once the facts were 
 faced in their reality. It was simply impossible to identify 
 the actual existent Church of Ireland with that dream of 
 absolute coherence between Civil and Spiritual Power. 
 So his eyes opened. He spent all the rest of his life in
 
 William Ewart Gladstone 45 
 
 reconciling the paradox that Truth 'is absolute, and yet 
 that it can only become so in an atmosphere of perfect 
 liberty. Authority can only justify itself to free men. 
 We are all still engaged in learning how far this principle 
 is going to carry us. 
 
 So much for his Statesmanship. 
 
 This book holds close to the Statesman and his career. 
 It frankly recognizes how much more lay behind the 
 Statesman : yet it never lets us lose the sense of the busy, 
 urgent political pre-occupation of interest. We are 
 always watching Governments rise, and rule, and break. 
 To emphasize this aspect, he has almost omitted the home 
 life ; and has excluded all domestic letters and details. 
 Even Mrs. Gladstone is hardly allowed to appear in person 
 on the scene. No one can know better than Mr. Morley 
 the immense significance to Mr. Gladstone himself of all 
 that is thus omitted. In the home, it was difficult to believe 
 that the home was not the real central organ of his in- 
 terest, and that politics were not either an interruption 
 or an accident. The man in him found itself fully satiated 
 and expanded in the atmosphere of home. And then, at 
 every turn, in every memory, his very being includes the 
 thought of her. She was so vivid and distinct an element 
 in the very structure of the life that he lived, that a book 
 which declines to undertake the task of reproducing this, 
 can only have done so of set purpose. It was, perhaps, 
 necessary, if the work was to be kept within compass. 
 But the loss must be recognized, and discounted. 
 
 There is a most charming passage where Mr. Morley 
 is recalling the talks at Biarritz during the very last years, 
 in which he tells of the old man's passionate delight in the 
 buoyant breakers thundering home on the reefs. He felt
 
 46 Personal Studies 
 
 as if he could hardly bear to live without the sound of the 
 sea in his ears. He had, indeed, that within him which 
 beat in response to that tumult of waters, to that titanic 
 pulse of the Atlantic. But he had in him a note of some- 
 thing deeper still. Not in tumultuous buoyancy, not in 
 passionate upheaval, lay the secret of his primal powers. 
 Rather you felt in him, behind and beyond this energy of 
 elemental vitality, the spirit of the serious athlete, in 
 possession of his soul, disciplined in austerity, secure of a 
 peace that passeth understanding, held fast, in hidden 
 calm, by the vision of a quiet land in which there is no 
 more sea.
 
 MR. GLADSTONE'S RELIGION 
 
 THE Church of England, strange as it may sound, does 
 actually attempt " to see life steadily and see it whole." 
 It has persistently refused to be caught by the cheap 
 simplicity of a logic which ignores half of human nature. 
 It will not purchase emphasis at the cost of ignoring 
 obvious facts. If life is many-sided, as it certainly is, then 
 a religion which is one-sided stands convicted of inadequacy. 
 The solution of a complicated problem cannot but be 
 complicated itself. It must hold in balance or in combin- 
 ation antithetical tendencies, for of such is humanity 
 composed. 
 
 All this the Church of England characteristically 
 embodies. Herein lies its power to endure or survive. 
 
 Nevertheless, the effort at equity in each crisis compels 
 her to wear, to outsiders, the air of coldness and com- 
 promise. And while securing the adhesion of the sober 
 and the cool, she is terribly apt to lose men of rare and 
 special force, the men of passion, of enthusiasm, of impulse, 
 of genius. These fret under her limitations ; they cannot 
 find scope for their energies within her equitable reserves. 
 
 And it is because she so often misses, for this reason, 
 the highest types, that the devotion which she won from 
 the great Statesman whom she proudly laid to rest in 
 her own Minster in May 1898, is peculiarly noticeable. It 
 
 47
 
 48 Personal Studies 
 
 gives a fresh insight, not merely into the amount of 
 deserving labour which the Church contributes to the 
 national good, but into the magic of that spiritual sway 
 which, in spite of her drab and sober exterior, she can 
 exercise, when once she is understood, over souls touched 
 by a high nobility. For here was a man possessed by 
 spiritual passion ; a man who " followed the gleam " ; a 
 man who brought all things on earth to a spiritual test ; a 
 man wholly defiant of the temper of worldliness, and 
 compromise, and materialism. Here was a man of force- 
 ful energy ; of consuming zeal ; of vigorous initiative ; 
 of irresistible impulse ; of fiery indignation ; with the 
 ardour of a Crusader where wrong could be undone and 
 justice made to prevail ; with a heart that flung itself out 
 to meet the trumpet call, liberty, and an imagination that 
 caught fire from the vision of righteousness. Here was a 
 man of genius ; of impetus ; of splendour ; whose career was 
 charged with dramatic intensity ; and yet a man whose 
 central, paramount, and absorbing motive lay in his 
 religion, with which all his other gifts fused themselves. 
 He demanded a religion adequate to his unique and 
 tremendous needs. 
 
 And it was this man who, from first to last, was an 
 English Churchman. And a Churchman not in the faint 
 traditional mode by which the wealthier classes in England 
 find themselves attached to a Church which is the normal 
 note of their social position ; not even in that more 
 positive manner by which excellent men of station gradu- 
 ally take the lead in Church affairs, or head its beneficence, 
 and learn to like so much of the Creed and Liturgy as 
 their most trusted Priest happens to have made familiar 
 to them ; but a Churchman from the top of his head to
 
 Mr. Gladstone's Religion 49 
 
 the sole of his feet; a Churchman in every fibre of his 
 frame ; a Churchman not only in name, but in the root- 
 temper of his being. He knew why he was a Church- 
 man ; and knew it with all the force of his reason and 
 imagination ; and had spent, on the knowledge of it, the 
 deepest resources of his nature ; and had never tired in 
 the knowing of it ; and delighted, above all other interests 
 in the world, in the expression of that reasoned faith of 
 his by all conceivable skill in argument, out of the match- 
 less stores of his accumulated learning, with the rolling 
 flow of his unconquerable eloquence. 
 
 Everything in him responded to the attitude assumed 
 by the Church of England as interpreted by her high 
 Caroline Theology. The complications involved in her 
 historical development, in her mediating position, found in 
 him their enthusiastic defender. He was ever keen to 
 justify her Catholic Authority, her Corporate Continuity, 
 her Apostolic Sacramental Ministry, her Primitive Creed, 
 in spite of the confusions incident to her breach with the 
 Papacy, and to her implication with the wickedness and 
 tyranny of the Tudor Crown. 
 
 His pen was ever active in her defence, from his earliest 
 pamphlets on behalf of the positions for which the 
 Tractarians fought in the Forties down to his last retort 
 to the Papal Encyclical on the Validity of Anglican Orders. 
 For fifty years he was her strong champion at every crisis 
 in her fate. Though he had come down from Oxford 
 before the influence of the Movement that made itself felt, 
 Dr. Pusey's Life has revealed how incessant and unflagging 
 and intimate were his relations with the chiefs as soon as 
 storms began. And his deep affection for Manning all 
 through that tumultuous period brought him inside every
 
 50 Personal Studies 
 
 turn of the Theological debate. He had felt it all to his 
 very finger-tips. 
 
 And how strong and how intense his convictions became 
 is verified by his unshaken loyalty under the most terrible 
 strain that could have possibly fallen upon him. His two 
 most intimate friends, on whom he most entirely relied, 
 deserted him Manning, the godfather of his eldest boy, 
 and Hope Scott, whom not only he loved dearly but whose 
 intellect (so he once told me himself) was the only one 
 which he felt to dominate his own. 
 
 A Roman Catholic writer, since Mr. Gladstone's death, 
 has tried, with a curious childishness, to show, from 
 expressions of anxiety and trouble at the time, that he 
 was near to following his friends. Of course, the depth of 
 the trouble felt is a measure of the steadiness of his 
 retained convictions. If the combined influence of those 
 two friends could not shake him, he must have been a 
 rock indeed. And any one, who knew him in later years, 
 must have felt with what peculiar force he embodied those 
 Anglican convictions which derive the strength of their 
 antagonism to Papalism out of the very intensity with 
 which they pronounce themselves Catholic. He never 
 trembled for the Church except when she herself appeared 
 to be falsifying her own claims to Catholicity, as in 
 her passive toleration of the Divorce Bill ; or in her 
 timid compromises with the world over the things of 
 faith. 
 
 His religious exercises, temper, method, habits of ritual 
 and worship were as un-Roman as it is possible to 
 imagine. They were instinct with the Anglican tradition 
 throughout. 
 
 One tendency, indeed, to which the Church of England has
 
 Mr. Gladstone's Religion 51 
 
 been lamentably prone, he detested from the bottom of 
 his heart Erastianism in all its forms. 
 
 In all his passage from Toryism to Radicalism he was 
 never for one moment a Whig in his conception of the 
 Church. That is exactly the temper towards Religion 
 which he abhorred. And, in this way, his earliest ideal, 
 expressed in the famous work on Church and State when 
 he was " the rising hope of the stern unbending Tories," 
 endured with him throughout his later drawings to 
 Disestablishment, and in the famous resolution to dis- 
 establish and disendow the Church in Ireland. Could 
 there be a more ludicrous and libellous caricature on that 
 ideal than the Irish Church ? His zeal to depose it 
 sprang out of the same temper which had portrayed what 
 a Church might be if it were indeed the spiritual soul of 
 a State. Every argument in favour of the union of 
 Church and State, which he used in the book, exploded in 
 laughter when it was applied to the concrete facts in 
 Ireland. The situation there was an outrage on his ideal ; 
 and his very reverence for the Church made it intolerable 
 to him to see her occupy a position so ignominious and 
 false. 
 
 Again, it was through his recoil from the fatal de- 
 moralization by which the protest which he looked for from 
 the Church of England against the godless Eastern policy 
 of the Government, at the supreme hour of Bulgaria, was 
 stifled and cowed, that he was so profoundly impressed in 
 his last twenty years with the perils of the Establishment. 
 
 He never could forget that when the great moral issue 
 was set before the Nation, it was the voluntary Noncon- 
 formist bodies which rallied to the call ; it was the Church 
 of his heart which failed to respond. He could only
 
 52 Personal Studies 
 
 ascribe this to the weight of the world, which encumbered 
 the Church through its implication with the authorities 
 of the State. He judged that her moral will had lost 
 spontaneity, had grown timid and callous through a 
 situation which impregnated her with the poison of a 
 worldly Erastianism. And his deep desire to find all his 
 highest inspirations sanctioned through his Church was 
 the measure of his disappointment and distress at her 
 failure. He never recovered that experience ; and it left 
 upon him the abiding conviction that Disestablishment 
 would give the Church a purer freedom to show itself in 
 her spiritual truth and force. It was true that he shrank 
 more and more, as years grew heavy upon him, from 
 undertaking a task of which he foresaw the magnitude. 
 " No man has yet taken the measure of the fibres of the 
 national life through which he would have to cut before 
 he could carry out the Disestablishment of the Church of 
 England." So he would say, in his deepest tones of 
 thunderous impressiveness. And he was probably anxious 
 not to have on his hands the Welsh Bill. But when he 
 was urged to break through his reticence on that matter, 
 at the time when it was being thrown forward in the un- 
 authorized Programme of Birmingham, under the plea 
 that it was cowardly of him not to declare himself against a 
 measure which he was not prepared to support then he 
 explained that his studied reticence came from the opposite 
 motive, in that he could not possibly speak his mind with- 
 out saying words which would hasten rather than delay 
 the proposal in question. If he spoke out his heart- 
 conviction, his words would make for Disestablishment 
 and not against it. He was silent then, because he did 
 not desire that issue to be brought to the fore-front. He
 
 Mr. Gladstone's Religion 53 
 
 had a greater and far more important task set before him. 
 And this disinclination to have the doing of it increased, 
 I think, as life went on ; while any manner of setting 
 about it which ignored the full corporate and continuous 
 identity of the Church as a Spiritual Body, would have 
 had his unrelenting opposition ; and to preserve the 
 ancient fabrics for their Catholic use he would have fought 
 with his dying breath. 
 
 His devotion to the Church had its roots in theology, 
 in history, in religious instincts, in the practical necessities 
 of conduct. But he had no metaphysical interests what- 
 ever. He was in no sense a speculative philosopher. That 
 whole world was alien to him. Hence he felt no intel- 
 lectual repugnance to the lack of a systematic complete- 
 ness and logical perfection in Anglicanism. He brought 
 to bear on it the large human considerations and mental 
 standards of the Statesman, of the man of action; he 
 looked to it for moral training, for spiritual schooling, as 
 a home of the living heart of man in which, amid trial 
 and entanglement, he could find his God. 
 
 Therefore it was that he turned with such ardour to 
 Bishop Butler, himself no metaphysician but the deepest 
 and truest and wisest of those teachers who have attempted 
 to give rational and spiritual value to the actual sum of 
 facts as we find them. His profound seriousness, his 
 intensity of moral passion, his solemn piety, spoke to Mr. 
 Gladstone's very soul of souls. Beneath that sober 
 reasoning, sober only because it was so resolute in its 
 loyalty to the realities of human experience, he detected 
 the central fire the fire of love and adoration for a GOD 
 Incarnate to Whom his entire being was dedicated. And 
 in the same way, beneath all that appears confused and
 
 54 Personal Studies 
 
 inarticulate in the Church of England, Mr. Gladstone 
 found his way to her deep secret the secret that has held 
 sway over the souls of men such as Andrewes, and Herbert, 
 and Hooker, and Butler, and Keble and Church. He 
 found in her that which tallied with GOD'S voice as it spoke 
 to him out of the abyss of nature, out of the tumult of 
 history, out of the depths of experience, reason, imagina- 
 tion, knowledge, emotion. 
 
 Nature, history, experience, reason, emotion these 
 all wear an outward aspect of bewildering contradiction, 
 which it is easy to exaggerate into a denial of positive 
 Truth ; yet all of them, if treated with a loyal confidence, 
 yield an undeniable witness to the authority of a rational 
 and imperative Will of GOD. Taught by them, we are 
 not surprised to find that Revelation makes its manifesta- 
 tion of GOD felt through a kindred medium and after a 
 like fashion and method. Its voice is none the less 
 authoritative, because it needs effort to arrive at it. Such 
 a Revelation gains grandeur from its continuity with the 
 entire sum of things. The counter-conception of an 
 Infallible Chair, clearly pronouncing on every problem so 
 as to save us from all the strain and stress of arriving at 
 it, isolates GOD'S method in Revelation from those which 
 He employs in every other department of life. This is 
 what Butler so deeply apprehended. He felt sure that 
 Revelation could never be strengthened by being isolated 
 from Nature. What GOD is in Nature, that He is in 
 Revelation. The soul as it moves from level to level of 
 existence must still find the same GOD facing it, acting 
 after the same principles, fashions, methods. 
 
 This is the soul's education, as it passes up from step 
 to step. The definition of authority is more complicated,
 
 Mr. Gladstone's Religion 55 
 
 no doubt, but the evidence is none the less convincing ; 
 for the consistency of the two spheres of Nature and 
 Revelation with one another gives coherence and solidity 
 to each in turn. 
 
 The Church of England, with its mixed appeal to 
 authority and to individual judgment, corresponds, in its 
 very perplexities, to natural experience. 
 
 So Butler believed and taught : and the Faith of the 
 great human- minded Bishop, deep rooted in the facts of 
 life, passed down, as a mighty heritage, to the greatest 
 of his disciples. Strong in that Faith, Mr. Gladstone 
 committed his whole being, body, soul, and spirit, to the 
 Catholic Creed and the Catholic Worship, as these reached 
 him through their English characterization. 
 
 Once committed, he, with characteristic fervour of 
 conviction, knew no other mistress than that Church, and 
 needed no other ; but gave to her the unflagging service 
 of a heart aflame with the love of GOD.
 
 GLADSTONE AND RUSKIN 
 
 WE felt at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Mr. 
 Gladstone, that we were burying the last of those 
 prophets who came down to us from an earlier and 
 greater generation than our own. But let us not for- 
 get that there is still one left, though buried in silence 
 up by Coniston Lake; and the long silence is all the 
 more pathetic as we recall the exquisite speech which 
 was the characteristic of John Ruskin. There he waits 
 for the end that is so long in coming ; and for us he is 
 already passed away. Perhaps it may be well for me to 
 recall the first occasion on which Mr. Gladstone and John 
 Ruskin met. It was curiously far on in both lives, but 
 somewhere about the year 1881. Mr. Ruskin had written 
 an article in the Nineteenth Century which had profoundly 
 stirred Mr. Gladstone, and it was suggested that it would 
 be a happy opportunity for Mr. Ruskin to be invited to 
 Ha warden. He accepted, and I found myself at Broughton 
 Station arriving with him by the same train. As we 
 drove up I discovered he had the darkest view possible of 
 his host, imbibed from " the Master," Carlyle, to whose 
 imagination he figured apparently as the symbol of all 
 with which he was at war. Ruskin was therefore ex- 
 tremely timid and suspicious, and had secured, in view of 
 a possible retreat, a telegram which might at any moment 
 
 56
 
 Gladstone and Ruskin 57 
 
 summon him home: this telegram loomed largely the 
 first day, and we were constantly under its menace. But 
 as hour by hour he got happier, the references to its 
 possible arrival came more and more rarely, and finally it 
 became purely mythical. 
 
 The amusement of the meeting of the two lay in the 
 absolute contrast between them at every point on which 
 conversation could conceivably turn. The brimming 
 optimism of Mr. Gladstone, hoping all things, believing 
 everybody, came clashing up at every turn with the 
 inveterate pessimism of Mr. Ruskin, who saw nothing 
 on every side but a world rushing headlong down into 
 the pit. 
 
 They might talk on the safest of topics and still the 
 contrast was inevitable. We heard Gladstone get on 
 Homer and the Iliad, and a sense that there, at least, all 
 would be well came over us ; what was our despair when 
 we realized that in the poetic record of some pre-historic 
 exchange Mr. Gladstone was showing how thoroughly 
 Homer had entered into those principles of barter which 
 modern economic science would justify. As he paused in 
 an eloquent exposition for a response from his listener, 
 Mr. Ruskin said in a tone of bitter regret, " And to think 
 that the devil of Political Economy was alive even then." 
 
 At another time, Walter Scott was uppermost. Here 
 indeed we thought was common ground ; but Mr. Glad- 
 stone unfortunately dropped the remark that " Sir Walter 
 had made Scotland," and on Mr. Ruskin's enquiry as to 
 the meaning of the phrase, imagine our anxiety when 
 Mr. Gladstone began telling us of the amazing contrast 
 between the means of communication in Scotland before 
 Sir Walter wrote compared with the present day. He
 
 58 Personal Studies 
 
 poured out stores of most interesting characteristic 
 memories of his own of days when one coach a week ran 
 between this town and that, and of the strange isolation 
 of the human life hidden away in the Highlands, and 
 with this he triumphantly compared the number of 
 coaches and char-a-bancs, etc., that were conveying 
 masses of happy trippers up and down the Trossachs. 
 Mr. Ruskin's face had been deepening in horror, and at 
 last he could bear it no longer : " But, my dear Sir," he 
 broke out, " that is not making Scotland ; that is un- 
 making it ! " 
 
 These ruptures of interest were bound to occur. The 
 one trusted the democratic movement, however chaotic 
 and vulgar might be some of its manifestations ; the 
 other had learnt from his master, and faithfully repeated 
 his lesson, that the only hope for the great mass of man- 
 kind lay in obedience to the strong will of the strong man 
 who would know so much better for them than they 
 would themselves what it was their true life needed. 
 
 But the beautiful thing of it all was, that in spite of 
 every collision, they learnt to like and love each other 
 better and better. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone retained throughout the tone of courteous 
 and deferential reverence as for a man whom he pro- 
 foundly honoured. And Mr. Ruskin threw off every 
 touch of suspicion with which he had arrived, and showed 
 with all the frankness and charm of a child his new sense 
 of the greatness and nobility of the character of his host. 
 He made himself absolutely at home, showed himself 
 obviously happy, talked in his most delicious freedom, 
 and finally, on departing, as he stood at the hall steps, 
 begged publicly to recant all that he had ever said or
 
 Gladstone and Ruskin 59 
 
 thought against Mr. Gladstone, and pledged himself to 
 withdraw from print some unhappy phrase which he had 
 used about him and which it now stung him with shame 
 to remember. It was a complete victory, and all the 
 more noticeable just because the two talked a different 
 language and moved in different worlds. I drove away 
 with Mr. Ruskin again to the station after three days' 
 visit, and he poured out freely to me the joy of his 
 discovery, but was a little nervous as to how he was going 
 to explain it to "the Master" when he got back to 
 Chelsea. I met him again at breakfast in Downing 
 Street, when he was in radiant force, and I shall never 
 forget Mr. Gladstone's look of puzzled earnestness as Mr. 
 Ruskin expounded at length a scheme he had for enforc- 
 ing our social responsibility for crime. We all of us were 
 guilty of the crimes done in our neighbourhood. Why had 
 we not sustained a higher moral tone which would make 
 men ashamed to commit crime when we are near ? Why 
 had we allowed the conditions which lead to crime ? We 
 ought to feel every crime as our own. How good then 
 would it be if London were cut up into districts, and 
 when a murder was committed in any one district the 
 inhabitants should draw lots to decide who should be 
 hung for it. Would not that quicken the public con- 
 science ? How excellent the moral effect would be if the 
 man on whom the lot fell were of peculiarly high 
 character ! Mr. Ruskin felt sure there would be no more 
 murders in that district for some time. He conceived that 
 even the murderer himself would be profoundly moved 
 as he silently witnessed the execution of this innocent 
 and excellent gentleman, and would make a resolution as 
 he walked away that he would abstain from such deeds in
 
 60 Personal Studies 
 
 future. What was Mr. Gladstone to say to this ? Was 
 he to confute it, or show the difficulties of its practical 
 working ? Or again, there was a newspaper which Mr. 
 Ruskin had devised in which the news, all of it, was to be 
 absolutely true. The difficulty was that it would have long 
 ceased to be news before it could be certified to be true ; 
 everything in the paper would be months after the event, 
 and everybody would probably have long forgotten what 
 it was talking about. But still, when it did come three 
 months late, there would be the comfort of knowing that 
 it was at least true. And instead of police news there 
 would be sketches of all the people best worth knowing in 
 the neighbourhood, with notes of their moral character- 
 istics. Ruskin had more than any man the platonic 
 charm which mingles humour and seriousness so that the 
 two are inseparable. And this was the form of humour 
 that was least congenial to Mr. Gladstone. Not at all, as 
 is so often said, that he did not enjoy humour ; few people 
 enjoyed more heartily a good piece of fun, or laughed 
 with a larger freedom. But when Mr. Gladstone was 
 serious he was serious ; while Mr. Ruskin, like Plato, had 
 ever a quiver of irony and wit stirring within everything 
 that was most serious, so that it was impossible to separate 
 the two. This caused the bewilderment. 
 
 So the two prophets met and were knit together by an 
 affectionate reverence for one another which never failed. 
 Each was to go his own way and do his separate work, 
 and it was impossible that they should co-operate to- 
 gether. But for all that, they learnt to know that they 
 were fighting on the same side in the great warfare 
 between good and ill ; that they had the same cause at 
 heart ; that they both trusted in the supremacy of
 
 Gladstone and Ruskin 61 
 
 conscience over all material things, and in the reality of 
 righteousness, and in the hatefulness of lust and cruelty 
 and wrong. Their spirits drew together though their 
 ways lay so far apart ; and this because, for both, life 
 had its deep root in piety and had its one and only 
 consummation in GOD.
 
 JOHN RUSKIN, SOCIAL REFORMER* 
 
 THIS book of Mr. Hobson's is well-timed, and excel- 
 lently done. Everybody who cares for the work and the 
 worth of our last living prophet should read it. Mr. 
 Hobson has set himself the perilous task of shattering the 
 superstition "that a man like Ruskin, who writes well, 
 cannot think clearly or deeply." He is bent on showing 
 how " the very qualities which have pleased his readers 
 most, the superb freedom of passionate utterance, the 
 immense variety of swift and telling illustration, the gifts 
 of rhetorical exaggeration which he employs, have served 
 to conceal from sober-minded thinkers the close and 
 accurate texture of his deeper thought." 
 
 There is always one supreme name in history, under 
 whose shelter this claim for combining rhetorical splendour 
 with logical vigour can be made. It is the highest name 
 in all literature. Plato, of set purpose, deliberately en- 
 veloped his philosophy within a veil of passion and beauty. 
 He justified this out of practical necessities which require 
 the adhesion of a man's moral character and temper, if he 
 is to understand the logical movement of an argument. 
 And he found its ultimate justification in the fact that 
 the purest act of thought, in laying hold of the Absolute, 
 
 * John Ruskin, Social Reformer. By J. A. Hobson. London : 
 Nisbet. 1898. 
 
 62
 
 John Ruskin, Social Reformer 63 
 
 was no cold process of reasoning, but a motion of intelli- 
 gent love. So his dialectical system remains enclosed 
 within the glamour of his exquisite literary work. And, 
 to this day, the British Philistines, headed by their chief 
 banker, Mr. George Grote, believe, in consequence, that 
 Plato had no philosophical system, and only threw out 
 brilliant and amusing suggestions, without regard to 
 consistency or coherence. As if Plato were not fifty 
 times more coherent and precise in his terminology than 
 our own Locke ; or as if he, who was the great master of 
 dialectical argumentation, would not have riddled through 
 and through the inconsistencies of Jeremy Bentham or 
 Herbert Spencer ! Of course, not every one who is splendid 
 as a rhetorician is for that reason an acute logician, on the 
 ground that Plato was both. Ruskin has to prove that his 
 own case falls under the protective cover of the immortal 
 Hellene. And this is what Mr. Hobson has undertaken to 
 do ; and has done it thoroughly. 
 
 With Ruskin, as with Plato, the particular situation 
 and moment in which they find themselves create the call 
 for the rhetoric. They are both in violent protest 
 against a prevailing logic : and, while sure, by prophetic 
 intuition, that the real logic lies on their own side, they 
 cannot as yet get it out in accurate expression which 
 shall equal, in obviousness, the apparent precision and 
 lucidity of the sham logic against which they are fighting. 
 And this drives them wild. The world is so easily taken 
 in by logical lucidity. Its obvious clearness seems to 
 prove itself. No effort is needed. It is all plain as a 
 pike-staff (if anybody has ever seen a pike-staff; I am 
 not sure whether I have). In reality, such lucidity is 
 probably a condemnation of the logic ; for no logic that
 
 64 Personal Studies 
 
 goes to the heart of things is likely to look very lucid, 
 and will never appear plain to the plain man. Things 
 are very difficult ; and their secret will never be secured 
 without effort and struggle. Philosophy is bound to be a 
 very tough job. So the men who feel this, and who 
 know that in matter of lucidity the true logic will always 
 be worsted by the sham, fling themselves in fury against 
 the imposture which is so charmingly simple and wears 
 an air of such triumphant outward consistency. They 
 have to wreck its absurd reputation by gibes, and jeers, 
 and jokes, in order to break it up, and to force men to take 
 a little more trouble to think things out. So Plato 
 tumbled the Sophists up and down the stage. So Ruskin 
 shot all " his winged arrows of fire " at the complacent 
 Sophists, who held the field with such intolerable assur- 
 ance in his day. But this was not because he felt that, 
 having no case, he must abuse the plaintiff. On the 
 contrary, it was because he was so certain of the strength 
 of his logical case, that he must, at all costs, force dullards 
 to attend to it. 
 
 Mr. Hobson, moreover, allows that, even for Ruskin's 
 lovers and friends, there is, in the Master, a certain strain 
 of perversity and of waywardness in what he calls " the 
 intentional disorder of his reasoning " in places. 
 
 Let the book be read to see how thoroughly the task 
 has been fulfilled. For the moment, I would only venture 
 to note two special points raised. (1) Does the term 
 Usury cover all the forms of modern interest ? This 
 question is becoming more and more vitally pressing for 
 every one of us ; and Mr. Hobson tackles it gallantly in 
 his criticism of Ruskin's assertion that it does. That 
 criticism must be studied at length, to do it justice. It
 
 John Ruskin, Social Reformer 65 
 
 turns on the problem, Is money fertile ? No ! says 
 Ruskin ; therefore if you get back the exact sum you 
 lent, you have got all your due. You have no right to 
 accept an increase on it. But is not this to take too 
 mechanical a view of money ? is the rejoinder. Are you 
 not yourself protesting against this mere mechanical 
 view ? Money is what it represents. And that which it 
 represents is fertile ; does increase. If your loan served 
 to contribute to that increase, then, you may be entitled to 
 have some share in the increase that has come about through 
 your aid. What that share ought to be, if you have done 
 nothing but lend the money, is another matter and must 
 be determined by rules of justice : and by these rules, 
 you, who have done so little of the work, may deserve 
 very little return. But your act, whatever its moral 
 worth, has been fertile : and you are not positively unjust 
 in sharing in that fertility. This system of combining 
 capital for a profitable purpose may have very evil results 
 of its own, in that, for instance, it enables an enormous 
 mass of people to live easily and luxuriously in idleness; 
 but our present question is whether this gross evil is due 
 to anything that can be called Usury. Usury begins, I 
 suppose, at the point where the personal difficulties of the 
 borrower enter into the determination of the interest 
 asked. In a great mass of modern commerce, the borrower 
 is in no difficulties whatever : he simply wishes to put his 
 present position to profit, by securing the aid of some 
 additional capital. He is at perfect liberty to choose 
 whether he will borrow or not, and at what interest. 
 
 But over a terribly wide area of industry, it is quite 
 otherwise. It is stress of competition that compels 
 borrowing ; and this compulsion is merciless, and drives
 
 66 Personal Studies 
 
 hard ; and the man works encumbered by a load of debt 
 which fetters his every effort, and kills his spirit. This is 
 the region in which to look for Usury. Mr. Hobson's 
 analysis forbids us to rest the attack on Usury on the 
 ground chosen by Ruskin i. e. the sterility of money. 
 
 (2) The second point I will touch on is this In at- 
 tempting to place Ruskin as a Social Reformer, Mr. 
 Hobson singles out some characteristics which draw him 
 closer to the Christian Socialist than to the Socialist of 
 the School and the Street. These are (1) his emphasis 
 laid on the motive of Charity rather than of justice, and 
 (2) his enthusiasm for authority and subordination. I 
 quite understand Mr. Hobson assuming these two notes 
 to be typical of much Christian Reform. But I entirely 
 decline to accept them as necessary or essential to it. 
 The movement that sprang from Maurice and Kingsley 
 appealed to Righteousness and to Brotherhood, not to 
 Pity and Authority. And the spirit that has come from 
 them to us of to-day is passionate with the instinct both 
 of Freedom and of Justice. We have learned our lesson 
 that salvation comes from within ; that men must work 
 out their own deliverance, and their own life ; that no one, 
 however pitiful or charitable, can do this for them ; that 
 pity and charity approve themselves best by their willing- 
 ness to admit others on to their own level of liberty, so 
 that all may be equally free to put out the force that is 
 in them, and to find the opportunities in which that force 
 may be used. We have breathed deep breaths of frater- 
 nity ; and we desire, now, to see social redemption attained 
 through the exercise of a common Brotherhood in the 
 equalities of free Service.
 
 THE MISSION OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT* 
 
 " IT was at Rome that we began the Lyra Apostolica. 
 The motto shows the feeling of both Froude and myself at 
 the time. We borrowed from M. Btmsen a ' Homer/ and 
 Froude chose the words in which Achilles, on returning to 
 the battle, says, ' You shall know the difference now that 
 I am back again.' " 
 
 So wrote Dr. Newman in the Apologia, and the 
 words give exactly the note of the temper with which the 
 book still tingles from cover to cover. It sprang out of a 
 critical hour in which the forces of an historical movement 
 first found speech. It was an hour of high passion, that 
 had been gathering for some onset dimly foreseen, and 
 had now, at last, won free vent, and had flung itself out in 
 articulate defiance. After long and restless uneasiness, 
 the die was cast ; the venture was to be run. The world 
 was to be made aware that things were not going to run 
 smooth with it; that its victory was not so sure as it 
 seemed ; that there was an adversary in the field who had 
 counted the cost, and was not afraid to challenge it to 
 arms. Too long had the battle been slack and half-hearted, 
 until men had almost forgotten that there was any battle 
 to be fought. It had been as a battle fought in a dream, 
 
 * Introduction to Lyra Apostolica (Methuen). 
 67
 
 68 Personal Studies 
 
 purposeless and unreal. Friend and foe had mingled in 
 shadowy confusion. No one was in earnest. The war-cries 
 sounded thin and absurd. The heart had gone out of 
 them. There were no chiefs to rally the hosts on whom 
 the panic of a nerveless impotence had fallen. 
 
 So it had been. 
 
 But now all is to be changed. Trumpets are to blow. 
 Banners are to wave. Chiefs are charging. The battle 
 goes forward. It is to be grim work again. Keen the 
 call and swift the onset. Once again men must do, and 
 dare, and die. 
 
 So felt Hurrell Froude and Newman on the day on 
 which they borrowed Bunsen's " Homer." And every 
 poem that Newman sent home for the British Magazine 
 bore the mark of a man who had flung himself into a 
 Cause, and was ready for all the unknown sacrifices which 
 such a Cause might demand of him. " I began to think 
 that I had a mission." " We have a work to do in 
 England." " I speak, throughout these compositions, of 
 the vision which haunted me." So he writes of himself, 
 looking back on the tempestuous time. And when he was 
 struck down by fever, alone in Sicily, he kept murmuring : 
 " I shall not die ! I shall not die ! " And, again, he burst 
 into sobs, weak from illness, and cried : " I have a work to 
 do in England ! " " Now it was that I repeated the words 
 which had ever been dear to me from my school days, 
 ' Exoriare aliquis.' " He was " aching to get home " to the 
 call which he felt to be somehow waiting for him. On the 
 first Sunday after his arrival, the voice of Keble preaching 
 the famous Assize sermon in the University pulpit at 
 Oxford rang out the call to arms for which his soul was 
 athirst.
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 69 
 
 The book, therefore, has throughout a touch of defiance, 
 a breath of war. 
 
 The ark of GOD is in the field, 
 
 Like clouds around, the alien armies sweep. 
 Each by his spear, beneath his shield, 
 
 In cold and dew the anointed warriors sleep. 
 Oh ! dream no more of quiet life. 
 
 There is even felt, breaking through its solemnities, 
 something that Newman himself recognized as fierce. He 
 speaks in the Lyra of "learning to hate, before daring 
 to love." 
 
 And this is typical of the strain of his mood. He was 
 preparing " for the spoiling of goods and martyrdom," and 
 was inclined to desire this as " a blessed termination " for 
 the Bishops of the Church. 
 
 He was resolved to shatter the dream of those who 
 would fain 
 
 Give any boon for peace ! 
 Why should our fair-eyed Mother e'er engage 
 In the world's course and on a troubled stage, 
 From which her very call is a release ] 
 
 No ! in thy garden stand, 
 
 And tend with pious hand 
 
 The flowers thou findest there, 
 
 Which are thy proper care, 
 O man of GOD ! in meekness and in love, 
 And waiting for the blissful realms above. 
 
 Alas ! for thou must learn, 
 Thou guileless one ! rough is the holy hand ! 
 Runs not the Word of Truth through every land, 
 A sword to sever, and a fire to burn ?
 
 jo Personal Studies 
 
 If blessed Paul had stayed 
 In cot or learned shade, 
 With the priest's white attire, 
 And the saints' tuneful choir, 
 
 Men had not gnashed their teeth, nor risen to slay ; 
 
 But thou hadst been a heathen in thy day. 
 
 We are in a different atmosphere from that of the 
 Christian Year ; though there, too, the tone and teaching 
 are often severe ; but in the Lyra there is added to the 
 severity the sense of alarm, anxiety, revolt, even scorn. This 
 contrast is felt in the actual structure of the verse, which 
 has a sharper edge, a swifter pace, than in the earlier book. 
 The more intense and compacter language of the Lyra 
 signalizes the pressure and the stress of a crisis. 
 
 With the defiance goes also a strong note of confidence. 
 The men who write, however dark their outlook seems to 
 be, speak as those who see their way, and have made their 
 choice, and have found their speech, and have no doubt at 
 all about the issue. There was a certain rapture of reck- 
 lessness about them at the time, such as belongs to young 
 souls who have let themselves go under the inspiration of 
 a high adventure. They have burnt their boats. There 
 is no going back. Forward all hearts are set. The 
 opportunity is come. It is now or never. 
 
 Hurrell Froude was the embodiment to them of this 
 spirit of confidence, with its tinge of audacity. He had 
 the glow and the fascination of a man consecrated to a 
 cause. He wrote very little of the book, but his touch is 
 on it everywhere. And in a poem like " The Watchman," 
 with its splendid swing and its radiant courage, we can see 
 how the subtler brain of Newman was swept by the fire 
 and force of the man who was to him like an inspiration
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 71 
 
 Faint not, and fret not, for threatened woe, 
 
 Watchman on Truth's grey height ! 
 Few though the faithful, and fierce though the foe, 
 
 Weakness is aye Heaven's might. 
 
 Infidel Ammon and niggard Tyre, 
 
 Ill-attuned pair, unite ; 
 Some work for love, and some work for hire, 
 
 But weakness shall be Heaven's might ! 
 
 Quail not, and quake not, thou Warder bold, 
 
 Be there no friend in sight ; 
 Turn thee to question the days of old, 
 
 When weakness was aye Heaven's might. 
 
 Time's years are many, Eternity one, 
 
 And one is the Infinite ; 
 The chosen are few, few the deeds well done, 
 
 For scantness is still Heaven's might. 
 
 And with Fronde, too, is to be associated much of the 
 stress laid on personal discipline which so deeply marks 
 the poems, and which was so congenial to both Newman 
 and Keble. The knight who would gird on his sword for 
 this fray must have the spirit in him tempered by fire, 
 and the body chastened by patient training. 
 
 Wash thee and watch thine armour, as of old 
 The Champions vowed of Truth and Purity, 
 
 Ere the bright mantle might their limbs enfold, 
 Or spear of theirs in knightly combat vie. 
 
 Chivalry is ascetic. The confidence of the young warrior 
 is no loud boastfulness of the flesh. It springs out of
 
 72 Personal Studies 
 
 austere self-subdual, out of watching, and fasting, and 
 scourging. No undisciplined zeal can be tolerated in 
 the cause that they have in hand : no loose and reckless 
 courage will carry it through. One of the most striking 
 and vivid poems flings its rebuke against the untempered 
 spirit which says with Jehu, " Come and see my zeal for 
 the LORD." 
 
 Thou to wax fierce 
 
 In the cause of the LORD, 
 To threat and to pierce 
 
 With the heavenly sword ; 
 Anger and Zeal, 
 
 And the Joy of the brave, 
 Who bade thee to feel, 
 Sin's slave. 
 
 The Altar's pure flame 
 
 Consumes as it soars; 
 Faith meetly may blame, 
 
 For it serves and adores. 
 Thou warnest and smitest ! 
 
 Yet CHRIST must atone 
 For a soul that thou slightest 
 Thine own. 
 
 And poem after poem of Newman's turns on the self- 
 repression which is the essential note of every true soldier 
 of GOD. Not only do the lower desires need to be brought 
 severely under rule, but the purest and highest instincts 
 fall under the punishing rod and the purging fire. 
 
 The Gospel Creed, a sword of strife, 
 
 Meek hands alone may rear : 
 And ever zeal begins its life 
 
 In silent thought and fear.
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 73 
 
 Or again : 
 
 Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control 
 
 That o'er thee swell and throng ; 
 They will condense within thy soul, 
 
 And change to purpose strong. 
 
 But he, who lets his feelings run 
 
 In soft luxurious flow, 
 Shrinks when hard service must be done, 
 
 And faints at every woe. 
 
 The exquisite poem named " Chastisement," which is 
 charged with so much that is characteristically personal, 
 is so familiar that it hardly needs to be quoted : but, 
 perhaps, it may be allowed us to remind ourselves of the 
 lines on " Discipline," which bear witness to their continued 
 and unresting expectation of an ever-deepening self- 
 distrust. 
 
 When I look back upon my former race, 
 Seasons I see, at which the Inward Ray 
 More brightly burned, or guided some new way ; 
 
 Truth, in its wealthier scene and nobler space, 
 
 Given for my eye to range, and feet to trace. 
 And next I mark, 'twas trial did convey, 
 Or grief, or pain, or strange eventful day, 
 
 To my tormented soul such larger grace. 
 
 So now whene'er, in journeying on, I feel 
 The shadow of the Providential Hand, 
 Deep breathless stirrings shoot across my breast, 
 Searching to know what He will now reveal, 
 What sin uncloak, what stricter rule command, 
 And girding me to work His full behest.
 
 74 Personal Studies 
 
 All the heart of the men comes out in this cry for 
 control, for austerity. It expressed their revolt against 
 the glib and shallow tolerance of the popular religion, and 
 the loose and boneless sentimentality of the prevailing 
 Evangelicalism. They were determined to show that 
 religion was a school of character, keen, serious, and real, 
 which claimed not merely the feeling or the reason, but 
 rather the entire manhood, so that every element and 
 capacity were to be brought into subjection under the 
 law of CHRIST, and to be governed in subordination to 
 the supreme purpose of the redemptive Will. No labour 
 could be too minute or too precise, which was needful to 
 bend the complete body of energies under the yoke of this 
 dedicated service. Hurrell Froude's Diary, edited by 
 Newman and Keble, startled the easy-going world of the 
 Thirties by its exhibition of the thoroughness and the 
 rigour and the precision with which this self-discipline 
 had been carried out. Such a temper of mind was, of 
 course, capable of becoming morbid, strained, unnatural. 
 And, in the hands of smaller men, it would rapidly show 
 traces of this. But here, in the Lyra, it is still fresh 
 and clean; and the men themselves, who are under its 
 austere fascination, are so abounding in vitality, and so 
 rich in personal distinction, and so abhorrent of anything 
 pedantic or conventional, that the record of it cannot but 
 brace us into wholesome alarm. Again and again, these 
 arrow-flights of verse will be found to pierce through joint 
 and marrow with the same terrible precision with which 
 so many sentences in the Parochial Sermons smite and 
 sting. The armour of our self-complacency shivers under 
 the swift shafts. We are convicted of self-will there where 
 we most trusted our spiritual sincerity.
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 75 
 
 Even holiest deeds 
 
 Shroud not the soul from GOD nor soothe its needs. 
 Deny thee thine own fears and wait the end. 
 Stern lesson ! Let me con it day by day, 
 And learn to kneel before the Omniscient Ray, 
 Nor shrink while Truth's avenging shafts descend. 
 
 The stress laid on " works " by this stern life of dis- 
 cipline did not for a moment, in these days of fresh- 
 hearted faith, beguile them into any Pharisaic arrest of 
 spiritual movement. It bred in them no comfortable self- 
 content. Rather, its increasing strain only served to bring 
 out its impotence to achieve, and the need of tireless 
 advance, under the pressure of the schooling Will of GOD. 
 
 " LORD, I have fasted, I have prayed, 
 And sackcloth has my girdle been ; 
 
 To purge my soul I have essayed 
 With hunger blank and vigil keen ; 
 
 GOD of Mercy ! why am I 
 
 Still haunted by the self I fly T' 
 
 Sackcloth is a girdle good, 
 
 bind it round thee still : 
 Fasting, it is Angels' food, 
 
 And JESUS loved the night-air chill ; 
 Yet think not prayer and fast were given 
 To make one step 'twixt earth arid Heaven. 
 
 And who were the foes against whom this chivalry had 
 set its array ? And what was the cause for which they 
 had consecrated their high service ? 
 
 Newman has given the foe a name; and has, under 
 attack, defended and explained his choice of the name. 
 
 He called them " the Liberals " ; and any one who desires
 
 j6 Personal Studies 
 
 to enter into the spirit of the Lyra must read, in the 
 special note appended to the Apologia, the significance 
 which the word bore to the writers. 
 
 We must remember what the Liberalism of the Thirties 
 was, if we would understand the indignation with which 
 these men set themselves to repudiate it. It was the 
 Liberalism of rational enlightenment. It believed that 
 the evils and sorrows of humanity would fade away before 
 the instructed intelligence. It was hard, confident, aggres- 
 sive. It had the easy air of superiority which belongs to 
 those who have never faced the deep underlying issues of 
 life. It omitted these from its calculation. Everything, 
 for it, was on the surface ; was plain ; was uncomplicated. 
 The cool reason, the average common-sense, the ordinary 
 experience of the man in the street, were its sufficing 
 standards. It abhorred mystery. It had no touch of 
 reverence, awe, mysticism. It was frankly utilitarian. It 
 was at the mercy of a bland and shallow optimism. Not 
 that it was not doing an immense deal of practical 
 good. It was opening doors of freedom. It was breaking 
 down barriers. It was spreading knowledge. It was 
 extending the range of social happiness. It was widening 
 the old horizons of philanthropic effort. It was relieving 
 men from the burdens and terrors of ignorant bigotry. It 
 was insisting that institutions should do the work for 
 which they were intended. It was bent on applying 
 the test of real use for the public welfare to all 
 the resources of Civilization, which were locked up, too 
 often, by the selfishness of prejudice, and the idleness 
 of indifference. 
 
 But, in spite of all this beneficial activity, Liberalism 
 was felt, by those ardent young men at Oxford, to be their
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 77 
 
 enemy. And it was this, because it left out that which 
 to them was the one fact of supreme importance the 
 soul. 
 
 Liberalism, as it was understood in the days of Lord 
 Brougham, and of Benthamism, knew nothing of the soul's 
 enthralling drama its tragic heights and depths, its 
 absorbing wonder, its momentous agonies, its infinite 
 pathos, its tempestuous struggle, its mysterious sin, its 
 passion, its penitence, and its tears. All this Liberalism 
 passed over, as of no account. It was for it a veiled world, 
 into which it possessed no way of entry. It came not into 
 its secret, and, moreover, it was content to be excluded. 
 It was inclined to sweep it all aside, as the rubbish of 
 superstition. It was unaware of its own blindness. It 
 was confident in its own adequacy to set human life 
 straight, without regard to this disturbing matter. 
 
 It was this shallow self-sufficiency which stung the 
 strong soul of Carlyle into fierce revolt. In him, the 
 elements which rational enlightenment fancied it had 
 disposed of, re-asserted their volcanic intensity. Through 
 his voice, humanity defied the comfortable bribes of 
 utilitarianism, and revealed itself once again as the pas- 
 sionate Pilgrim of Time, for ever seeking an unknown and 
 eternal Goal. And this recoil of Carlyle, prophetic in its 
 force, yet empty of any Gospel-message, had its parallel 
 at Oxford in a shape which he himself could not recognize, 
 and, because he could not recognize, savagely abused. The 
 recoil began with John Keble. It was he, as Newman 
 says, who first initiated the movement counter to what 
 was known' as " the march of mind." The " march of 
 mind" had been mainly represented in Oxford by the 
 famous College of which all the writers of the Lyra
 
 78 Personal Studies 
 
 became Fellows. Oriel had been the centre of intellectual 
 reform, under Copleston and Whately. Its Common- 
 Room constituted that "Aristocracy of Talent," against 
 which Hurrell Froude plied his jokes and scoffs. " Poor 
 Keble," he ironically said, "he was asked to join the 
 aristocracy of talent; but he soon found his level." 
 Every fibre of Keble's soul revolted against any temper 
 that would smoothe over the dark realities of sin, or 
 would cheapen the tremendous issues of human character 
 and human choice, or would rob earth of its imagin- 
 ative mystery, or would trifle with the awful significance 
 of word or deed in the light of Doom. Truth was, 
 for him, no thin logical consistency, but a Vision of 
 Eternal Reality, which smote in upon the conscience of 
 man with the solemnity of a moral challenge. Liberalism 
 embodied, according to Newman's analysis, the spirit of 
 rationalism, and the claim of the human reason to sit in 
 judgment upon dogmatic revelation. And, against this, 
 Keble recalled to men the teaching of Bishop Butler on 
 the moral nature of the evidence by which spiritual con- 
 victions were reached. To the mere reason, this evidence 
 could not get beyond suggestive probabilities ; but these 
 probabilities were used, by the living spirit of man, as an 
 indication of the personal Will of GOD, which could be 
 read by the soul that was in tune with that Will. So 
 probabilities became certitudes. " I will guide thee with 
 mine Eye," was Keble's favourite example of the mode in 
 which Divine truth touched the soul. By deep glimpses, 
 by rare flashes, by a momentary glance, the Eye of GOD 
 could make us aware of Truths far beyond the under- 
 standing of reason. Such Truths possessed authority, 
 which we could not dissect or critically examine. They
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 79 
 
 were revelations of the mind of Him with Whom we had 
 to deal. So Authority was the keynote of Keble's think- 
 ing, in antithesis to the Reason of Liberal enlightenment. 
 And Authority was shown, as Mr. Balfour has again shown 
 us in our own day, to rest on profound instincts of human 
 nature, which had their roots far down out of sight, and 
 defied rational analysis. Emotion, Imagination, Associa- 
 tion, Tradition, Conscience, all pla} 7 ed their part in the 
 creation of that temper which found its joyful freedom in 
 surrendering to Authority. 
 
 Keble's close and penetrating studies of the Imagination 
 as it discloses itself in great poetry had made him intensely 
 appreciative of the high powers at work upon man's life, 
 which the mere logical understanding was hopelessly in- 
 capable of handling. His own poetry, which found its 
 inspiration so much in the intangible wonder of childhood, 
 and in " the light that never was on sea or land," abhorred 
 the matter-of-fact hardness which reduced everything 
 to the level of things that could be tabulated and 
 explained. 
 
 And Keble was dominant, let us remember, over those 
 with whom we are concerned. Every record of the stirring 
 time which has lately appeared has served to remind us 
 of this dominance. He was the oldest of them. He had 
 an incomparable reputation. His beauty and strength of 
 character won their enthusiastic affection. And his 
 courage and tenacity were masterful. There is a curious 
 superstition that he was merely gentle and quiet and 
 meek. As a fact, his meekness (which was almost a 
 passion) was the veil of a singular force of character, which 
 showed itself in impulsive boldness and in the inflexibility 
 of a soldier sworn to hold the fort. In all emergencies
 
 80 Personal Studies 
 
 his judgment went instinctively toward the course that 
 was most daring, and most dangerous. It was natural to 
 him to take the line that would cost most, and that would 
 demand the severest strain. He had the warrior's stern- 
 ness, and the martyr's fire. There was a good deal of 
 fight in what was known as " the Bisley school," led by 
 Keble and his brother Thomas. They were not at all 
 afraid to pit themselves, with some fierceness, against the 
 prevailing fashion of thought. Let us hear how John 
 Keble can set the war-horn to his lips, and bid it speak 
 with no uncertain sound. 
 
 Israel yet hath thousands sealed 
 Who to Baal never kneeled. 
 Seize the banner, spread its fold ! 
 Seize it with no faltering hold ! 
 Spread its foldings high and fair, 
 Let all see the Cross is there ! 
 
 Or again, in his noble memorial to Hooker : 
 
 Voice of the wise of old ! 
 Go breathe thy thrilling whispers now 
 In cells where learned eyes late vigils hold, 
 
 And teach proud Science where to veil her brow. 
 
 Voice of the meekest man ! 
 Now while the Church for combat arms, 
 Calmly do thou confirm her awful ban, 
 
 Thy words to her be conquering, soothing charms. 
 
 Voice of the fearless Saint ! 
 Ring like a trump, where gentle hearts 
 Beat high for Truth, but, doubting, cower and faint : 
 Tell them the hour is come, and they must take 
 their parts.
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 81 
 
 And Newman at this time was feeling the full influence 
 of John Keble. In his fever in South Italy he tells us how 
 he saw that he was himself but as a cold mirror through 
 which the ideas and convictions of Keble passed. Their 
 colour, their heat was not his own. This self-analysis was, 
 no doubt, morbid and exaggerated : he was sickening fast 
 unto the malaria. But the thought, nevertheless, would 
 have been impossible, unless the facts were such that they 
 allowed themselves to be put in that way. It is under 
 Keble's inspiration that he flings his rebuke against 
 " Liberalism " the Liberalism that is as Jehu who 
 destroyed Baal and yet kept the golden calves. 
 
 Ye cannot halve the Gospel of GOD'S grace 
 Men of presumptuous mind ! I know you well ! 
 
 And as we read the series of poems by Bowden, Newman's 
 dear and intimate friend, on the Religion of the Majority 
 (cxlii.), National Property (cxliii.), National Degradation 
 (cxliv.), and Prospects of the Church (cxlv.) : or again, the 
 long poem of Isaac Williams called Expostulation (cxiii.), 
 in which the claim for freedom appears as the voice of 
 Antichrist, we are aware of the same atmosphere and 
 the same mood. If we desire to learn whence these are 
 formed, we have but to read the sequence of poems by 
 Keble which fill the last quarter of the volume. The 
 warmth of his indignation gives fire to his verse. The 
 lines are compact, firm, decisive. The passion is concen- 
 trated, and charged with flame. 
 
 "Let us depart"; those English souls are seared 
 Who for one grasp of perishable gold 
 Would brave the curse by holy men of old 
 
 Laid on the robbers of the shrines they reared 
 
 G
 
 8 2 Personal Studies 
 
 Let us depart, and leave the apostate land 
 To meet the rising whirlwind as she may, 
 Without her guardian Angels and her GOD. (cxiv.) 
 
 And, again, in the poem on Elijah and the Messengers 
 of Ahaziah (cliv.) : 
 
 Oh ! tell me not of royal hosts : 
 One hermit, strong in fast and prayer, 
 Shall gird his sackcloth on, and scare 
 
 Whate'er the vain earth hoasts : 
 And thunder-stricken chiefs return 
 To tell their LORD how dire the Church's lightnings burn. 
 
 These were the fiery words which roused the slumbering 
 Church at the moment when the Whig Reformers, the 
 types in statesmanship of all that was secular and super- 
 ficial and unreverential in "the march of mind," were 
 undertaking to set the Bishops' houses in order for them, 
 and to carry out utilitarian improvements in the Church's 
 system according to the mind of Erastianism and by the 
 power of Parliament. It was the summary abolition of 
 Irish Bishoprics by the authority of the State which gave 
 the signal for the war which Keble proclaimed in the 
 Assize Sermon, and which fills the Lyra with the clash 
 of arms. 
 
 Liberalism, then, understood in this sense, was the foe. 
 And the Cause for which the trumpets blew was, above 
 all things, the Cause of the Church. 
 
 Everything combined to emphasize, at that critical hour, 
 the significance of the historic and national Church of 
 England. Not only was it the immediate object of attack, 
 and of spoliation, but its own adherents had lost belief in 
 its reality and in its gifts. The very memory of its claims 
 seemed to be perishing. Men crept about, trembling for
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 83 
 
 her safety, not daring to hope, weak-kneed, apologetic, 
 ashamed. They were prepared to bargain away her rights, 
 to let her sink to a humbler level, to see her pinched and 
 starved, if only she be allowed to survive in beggarly 
 meanness. It was a day for compromising, for coming to 
 terms with the loud and arrogant world, which dismissed 
 so contemptuously her obsolete dogmas and out-of-date 
 assumptions. So Churchmen whispered one to another. 
 The air was tainted with the cowardice of a great surrender. 
 The defence was undermined, just when the peril was 
 direst. To realize the general despair about the Church 
 that was shaking men's souls in 1832, it is good to glance 
 through the pages of a book like the Greville Memoirs, in 
 which a man of the world records his profound sense of 
 the imminent ruin that threatens Church and State ; or to 
 read the petitions and declarations of the early Irvingite 
 movement, in which spiritual men sent out their cry of 
 desperate dismay, to show why they could only hope for 
 some new outpouring of the Spirit into a new Apostolate 
 and a new Catholic Body. 
 
 It is this situation which accounts for the heat that 
 burns through the Lyra. These men have set them- 
 selves to revive the conception of a Catholic Church in 
 those who profess to believe in her. 
 
 They have got to shatter their fears ; to break in pieces 
 their timid apologetics ; to scout their compromises ; to 
 denounce their retreats ; to shake them out of their 
 lethargy ; to rally them from their panic ; to drive them 
 into irrevocable decisions ; to deprive them of the oppor- 
 tunity of surrender. Such a work can only be done by 
 vehemence, by force, by strong utterance and fiery onsets. 
 The language used must be sharp and clear. Dilemmas
 
 84 Personal Studies 
 
 must be pressed home. Alternatives must be excluded. 
 We are in the temper of Elijah's challenge. " How long 
 halt ye between two opinions ? If the LORD be GOD, 
 follow Him ; but if Baal, then follow him." The timidity 
 of the faithless must be scorned into recovery by the 
 rehearsal of the full splendours of the Church which they 
 would betray. Far from conceding this and yielding that, 
 every claim of hers must be asserted in its paramount 
 validity, every honourable endowment of hers must be 
 boldly proclaimed, all her terror must be vigorously upheld. 
 She must come forth in her comeliness, in her majesty, in 
 her strength, beautiful as an army with banners, rejoicing 
 as the sun to run her course. Not by minimizing her 
 Creed, but by magnifying her name, is the peril to be 
 repelled, and the day to be saved. The note, which rings 
 out again and again, is struck by Keble with emphatic 
 distinctness in the stanzas on " The One Way." 
 
 One only Way to Life; 
 One Faith, delivered once for all ; 
 One holy Band, endowed with Heaven's high call; 
 
 One earnest, endless Strife ; 
 This is the Church th' Eternal framed of old. 
 
 Smooth open ways, good store ; 
 A Creed for every clime and age, 
 By Mammon's touch new moulded o'er and o'er ; 
 
 No cross, no war to wage ; 
 This is the Church our earth-dimmed eyes behold. 
 
 But ways must have an end, 
 Creeds undergo the trial flame, 
 Nor with th' impure the Saints forever blend, 
 
 Heaven's glory with our shame : 
 Think on that hour, and choose 'twixt soft and bold.
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 85 
 
 Newman, who has denounced the attack of Liberalism 
 so vigorously, finds the weak and worldly defence of the 
 traditional Conservatism as repulsive and as dangerous. 
 " My soul is among lions " is the text that he quotes over the 
 poem named Conservatism (cxxi.), " and I lie even among 
 the children of men that are set on fire, whose teeth are 
 spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword." The 
 degradation of the alliance lacerated him. 
 
 How long, LORD of grace, 
 
 Must languish Thy true race, 
 In a forced friendship linked with Belial here ; 
 
 With Mammon's brand of care, 
 
 And Baal pleading fair, 
 And the dog-breed who at Thy Temple jeer ? 
 
 How long, LORD, how long 
 
 Shall Caesar do us wrong, 
 Laid but as steps to throne his mortal power] 
 
 While e'en our Angels stand 
 
 With helpless voice and hand, 
 Scorned by proud Haman, in his triumph-hour. 
 
 Newman was, at this time, in the full tide of brimming 
 confidence in the Church which he was so passionately 
 bent on serving. Here, again, he was under the sway of 
 Keble, whose belief in the Catholicity of the Church of 
 England was deep and traditional, based on the teaching 
 of the great Caroline Divines, and Anglican in every 
 nerve and fibre. And, with Keble, were Hurrell Froude, 
 radiantly sure of his position ; and Bowden, over whose 
 grave Newman wept bitter tears, thinking of the secret 
 misery in his soul which his friend had never suspected 
 or shared ; and Isaac Williams, whose Anglican instincts
 
 86 Personal Studies 
 
 drew away from Newman as soon as the first symptoms of 
 restlessness began to show themselves. Robert Wilber- 
 force, last of the band, had that in him which would 
 afterwards lead him the same road as Newman : but he 
 wrote very little in the book, and was still young and 
 unformed. 
 
 So it is that the Lyra springs out of the heart of a 
 faith in the true mission and the authority of the Church, 
 which knew no question, and felt no hesitation. It is the 
 song-book of English Catholicity, in its most militant and 
 defiant mood, sure of its message, confident in its claim. 
 It is the logical expression of a Church charged with 
 national memories, rooted in the soil, in possession of its 
 own immemorial inheritance, imbedded in the traditions 
 of our English countryside. We can hear the very voice 
 of Keble speak to us in Newman's well-known poem, the 
 first in the book : 
 
 Where'er I roam in this fair English land, 
 The vision of a temple meets my eyes : 
 Modest without; within, all glorious rise 
 Its love-enclustered columns, and expand 
 Their slender arms. Like olive plants they stand, 
 Each answering each in home's soft sympathies, 
 Sisters and brothers. At the altar sighs 
 Parental fondness, and with anxious hand 
 Tenders its offering of young vows and prayers. 
 The same and not the same, go where I will, 
 The vision beams ! ten thousand shrines, all one. 
 Dear fertile soil ! what foreign culture bears 
 Such fruit 1 ? And I through distant climes may run 
 My weary round, yet miss thy likeness still. 
 
 There is no touch of Roman inclinations from end to
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 87 
 
 end of the book : no straining and fretting at Anglican 
 limitation. The Vincentian Rule of Faith is sufficient 
 to condemn novelties and aberration, whether Romish, 
 Swiss, or Lutheran (cf. xcix.). Oddly enough, there does 
 not happen to be a single poem on the Blessed Virgin. 
 This must have been accidental ; but the accident itself 
 shows how remote the book is from even the instinct that 
 leads to any over-pressure in the direction. 
 
 The typical reserve of the English Church is exquisitely 
 caught in the poems on the Departed ; and especially in 
 the famous lines 
 
 They are at rest : 
 
 We may not stir the heaven of their repose 
 By rude invoking voice, or prayer addrest 
 
 In waywardness to those, 
 Who in the mountain grots of Eden lie, 
 And hear the fourfold river as it murmurs by. 
 
 We know from the Apologia how very slight was 
 Newman's contact with the Roman Church abroad : and 
 how he first learnt to soften the severity of his traditional 
 condemnation of her under the influence of Hurrell 
 Froude. The change is to be felt in the transition 
 from the two sonnets on Rome (clxxii.), and the Cruel 
 Church (clxxiii.), to the next ode, called "The Good 
 Samaritan." 
 
 that thy creed were sound ! 
 
 For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church of Rome, 
 
 By thy unwearied watch and varied round 
 Of service, in thy SAVIOUR'S holy home. 
 
 I cannot walk the city's sultry streets, 
 
 But the wide porch invites to still retreats, 
 Where passion's thirst is calmed, and care's unthankful gloom.
 
 88 Personal Studies 
 
 There, on a foreign shore, 
 The home-sick solitary finds a friend : 
 
 Thoughts, prisoned long for lack of speech, outpour 
 Their tears ; and doubts in resignation end. 
 
 I almost fainted from the long delay, 
 
 That tangles me within this languid bay, 
 When comes a foe, my wounds with oil and wine to tend. 
 
 It was the Catholic Church established in England, 
 rudely threatened from without, unbe friended from within, 
 which the writers set themselves, without reserve, to 
 rescue from contempt. And poetry was their natural 
 method, because they ardently desired to show that she 
 was not the commonplace, smug, prosaic affair which 
 contemptuous Whigs imagined that they could handle 
 as they chose. Nay ! she could appeal to the imagination, 
 and to the conscience, and to the heart. She had in her 
 the secret of romance, the charm of antiquity, the weight 
 of historic authority, the pathos of a troubled and a stormy 
 past, the beauty of a venerable martyr, the honour, the 
 majesty, the radiance of the Church of CHRIST against 
 which no gates of Hell should e'er prevail. Here, in it, 
 the dream of the soul found full expression. Here was a 
 kingdom, real and strong and living, which could hold its 
 own against the pressure of all the rising kingdoms of the 
 world. 
 
 So they said : so they sang : this volume of verse is the 
 record of their great and fiery passion. And there are 
 three notes which they especially emphasize in this Church 
 of their desire, and which they pit against the invading 
 worldliness, whether of its foes or its friends. 
 
 First, Authority, Liberalism was, to them, rationalism ; 
 and rationalism meant the adequacy, the supremacy of the
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 89 
 
 present mind, in its momentary modern shape, to judge 
 all things in heaven and earth. Against this they set, as 
 we have said, the Butlerian argument from probability, 
 which appealed to the multiform nature of the evidence 
 on which spiritual convictions rest, and to the moral 
 character of the judgment which has to draw the con- 
 clusions. And, in estimating these probabilities, and in 
 drawing the right conclusions, the weight of ancient learn- 
 ing and the moral authority of saints count for more than 
 the casual and undisciplined opinions of to-day. The 
 Church of England appeals to this high standard of truth. 
 She invites the aid of the great doctors and theologians in 
 delivering her creed aright. All the splendid names of the 
 past are hers. She speaks the language of Clement, and 
 Cyprian, and Athanasius, and Basil, and Augustine. The 
 sonnets in honour of these teachers are characteristic of 
 the scholars who have become the Church's champions, 
 and of the movement which dates itself from a University. 
 And the fervour of their " new learning " is felt in New- 
 man's wistful words when, at Messina, he can hardly allow 
 himself to be stirred by classic memories : 
 
 Though wedded to the LORD, still yearns my heart 
 Upon these scenes of ancient heathen fame. 
 
 And in his vigorous poem over the Greek Fathers 
 (xci.) : 
 
 Let others sing thy heathen praise, 
 Fallen Greece ! the thought of holier days 
 
 In my sad heart abides ; 
 For sons of thine in Truth's first hour 
 Were tongues and weapons of his power, 
 Born of the Spirit's fiery shower, 
 Our fathers and our guides.
 
 90 Personal Studies 
 
 It is in this poem that he gives to Athanasius the 
 epithet that has clung to him, "Royal-hearted Athanase." 
 
 To this rich armoury of argument, in the Fathers of the 
 Undivided Church, they turned for help against the thin 
 reasonings of a superficial enlightenment ; and few pictures 
 are more beautiful than that in which Keble images the 
 scholar among his books as a soldier of the later times, 
 taking down his father's weapons to feel their edge and try 
 their metal. It occurs in the address of the Churchman 
 to his Lamp (Ixiv.). 
 
 Come, twinkle in my lonely room, 
 Companion true in hours of gloom; 
 Come, light me on a little space, 
 The heavenly vision to retrace, 
 By Saints and Angels loved so well, 
 My Mother's glories ere she fell. 
 
 Yet by His grace, whose breathing gives 
 
 Life to the faintest spark that lives, 
 
 I trim thee, precious Lamp, once more, 
 
 Our fathers' armoury to explore, 
 
 And sort and number wistfully 
 
 A few bright weapons, bathed on high. 
 
 Secondly, they looked to the Church for Discipline over 
 against an age that revolted from all restraint. This 
 revolt had, indeed, its justification in throwing off the 
 fetters of prejudice and tyranny. But in refusing restraint 
 from without, it naturally was apt to ignore the compulsion 
 set by conscience and by the law of true liberty upon 
 individual passion. Carlyle was sounding his loud protest 
 against the liberty of the fool to make a fool of himself. 
 He was demanding, in his " purple " manner, the strong
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 91 
 
 hand of the true Ruler of men. Our poets were recalling 
 men to the same verity. All life of the soul is won through 
 restraint, through repression, through austere law. Only, 
 instead of the strong Ruler, they offered the discipline of 
 the Church. The Church was the true school of character. 
 In her lay the authority to interpret and apply the moral 
 law of the soul's freedom. With her was the seat of judg- 
 ment, the rod of correction, the privilege of acquittal. She 
 held the keys. She banned or pardoned. She had her 
 careful and experienced system, by which the soul slowly 
 won self-mastery. She had balm for wounds; warnings 
 in peril ; alternation of severity and comfort. 
 
 Here was the deeper conception of freedom than that 
 of mere freedom from restraint. In the Church, the life 
 of the soul found the liberty of a spiritual growth accord- 
 ing to the law of a free divine Society. 
 
 Thirdly, they turned to the Church as the home and 
 refuge of Mystery. Human life was losing all its mystery 
 under the hard and dry light of a practical utilitarianism. 
 The earth was stiffening into a blind piece of mechanism 
 under the handling of necessitarian Science. 
 
 In defiance of this naked materialism, the Tractarians 
 brought forward the rival conception of Sacramentalism. 
 For them the visible and the tangible were but the symbols 
 of a transcendent life, the vesture of the spirit, through 
 which its motions made themselves felt. They rejected 
 absolutely the notion of a material earth, isolated and 
 complete, working by cast-iron laws, in the mechanical 
 deadness of unintelligent force. On the contrary, it was 
 alive with a life not its own, which alone gave it meaning ; 
 and this life was personal, intelligent, sympathetic, com- 
 municable to man. In and through Nature, spirit spoke
 
 92 Personal Studies 
 
 with spirit, man came in touch with GOD. The Church 
 gave him the true cue by which to interpret the external 
 world, through its sacramental use of material vehicles by 
 which to realize spiritual power. Sacraments were no 
 accidental ecclesiastical form. They were in harmony with 
 the being of things. The world was sacramental. That 
 which was a truism inside the Church, Wordsworth had 
 long ago verified in his own experience. Nature was the 
 symbolic utterance of the unseen GOD. And, just as to 
 him, listening to the cuckoo as it recalled the days of 
 
 happy boyhood, 
 
 the earth he paced, 
 
 again appeared to him as 
 
 an unsubstantial fairy place, 
 
 so, to Newman, possessed by the sacramental idea, the 
 earth appeared no solid mass, but a moving vision, within 
 which angels passed and repassed, in pliable intercourse, 
 in quivering transitions. Their hands were about him ; he 
 could all but see their faces ; the breath of their presence 
 made him ever grave. He has told us in the Apologia 
 of his mood at this time. He had never read Bishop 
 Berkeley ; but he had arrived at the Bishop's idealism, out 
 of which all the substantiality of what we mean by 
 " matter " had vanished away. It was in this mind that 
 he wrote the beautiful sonnet 
 
 Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend, 
 His footprints, and his vesture-skirts of light, 
 Who, as I talk with men, conforms aright 
 Their sympathetic words, or deeds that blend 
 With my hid thought ; or stoops him to attend
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 93 
 
 My doubtful-pleading grief ; or blunts the might 
 Of ill I see not ; or in dreams of night 
 Figures the scope in which what is will end? 
 Were I CHRIST'S own, then fitly might I call 
 That vision real ; for to the thoughtful mind 
 That walks with Him, He half unveils His face : 
 Bat when on common men such shadows fall, 
 These dare not make their own the gifts they find, 
 Yet, not all hopeless, eye His boundless grace. 
 
 He is quite fantastic in his speculation over the Angels 
 who inhabit Nations ; and more especially over the par- 
 ticular Angel who makes " John Bull " to be what he is. 
 He gave exquisite and characteristic expression of this 
 belief in the sermon on the Angels, for Michaelmas Day 
 1831 ; and the same strain of thought is familiar enough 
 to all in the last lines of " Lead, kindly light " : 
 
 And with the morn those angel faces smile 
 Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile. 
 
 The Oxford Movement was an effort to recover the sense 
 of mystery in life ; and now that we have all, gnostic and 
 agnostic alike, recognized the impossibility of cutting life 
 down to the four-square limitations which seemed all- 
 sufficing in the days of Brougham and Macaulay ; now 
 that the thunder of Carlyle and the glamour of Ruskin 
 have passed into the common imagination ; now that the 
 poets have once more shed the gleam of consecration upon 
 land and sea; we can enter into the struggle of sacra- 
 mentalism in its stubborn repudiation of the prevailing 
 mechanism, and can easily forgive the heroes of the 
 resistance, if, in the storm of the conflict, they now and 
 again fell into fantastic exaggeration.
 
 94 Personal Studies 
 
 Authority, Discipline, Mystery these are the three 
 ruling motives in their uplifting of the ideal Catholic 
 Church. The book lies there, a perfect record of the 
 temper with which a united band of friends set out on a 
 high venture in an hour of peril and distress. They were 
 held together by all the glowing confidence which belongs 
 to a chivalrous company, who have sworn themselves to a 
 cause which they will serve unto death. The hour was 
 one of strange intensity. The men were nobly endowed. 
 They had imaginative and intellectual gifts of a rare order ; 
 and these had been trained under the fine discipline which 
 Oxford scholarship still retained. Above all, they spoke 
 out of the heart of a moral awakening, which lent exultation 
 to characters aflame with the ardour of righteousness ; 
 and which touched to its finest power the insight and 
 the conscience of the greatest master of spiritual truth 
 that this century has seen. Two of them were in reality 
 poets, Keble and Isaac Williams ; while Newman carried 
 to its highest point the capacity of a man of genius 
 to express himself in verse. A book that is born out of 
 such travail has a singular fascination. It is instinct with 
 a passion that endows it from end to end with the power 
 to smite home. It is thrown off at one blow, as it were. 
 Through all its varied music there is the tenacious 
 coherence that belongs to a single motive, and a dominant 
 purpose, and a common inspiration. The colour, the 
 emotion, of the hour hold throughout. The utterance is 
 keen and incisive, yet delicately refined. The occasion is 
 noble and historic ; yet its high themes, reaching from earth 
 to heaven, permit of and absorb an infinite richness of 
 human feeling and personal interest. Thus everything 
 conspires to make it notable.
 
 The Mission of the Oxford Movement 95 
 
 True, the fierceness of the battle -strain tends to 
 limit its significance to the special crisis out of which it 
 was born. We feel that their warfare often is not 
 ours. We wonder at their heat : we recoil from their 
 strained language. The terror of the day is passed ; and 
 the long war between the Church and the world has taken 
 other shapes for us. But it was through the stress of their 
 conflict that the poetry rose so high ; and their nobility of 
 spirit, as it reveals itself through their verse, may well 
 shame the languor and the cowardice with which we bear 
 our part in the age-long strife. Nor only this. For the 
 most perfect poem in the book tells how, even in the heat 
 of strife, these men attained a haven of hope and tender- 
 ness and peace such as we, in our genial tolerance, but 
 rarely touch. In the stanzas to the Winter Thrush, Keble 
 reaches his highest level. The poem is charged with the 
 very spirit of Wordsworth. It lifts us above the tumults 
 and the fears of the hour, and takes us out into the large 
 horizon and sweet breath of kindly Nature. We are re- 
 buked for our doubts and our despair. The last word, 
 and the best, is given to love. 
 
 Sweet bird ! up earliest in the morn, 
 
 Up earliest in the year, 
 Far in the quiet mist are borne 
 
 Thy matins soft and clear. 
 
 That sunny morning glimpse is gone, 
 That morning note is still ; 
 
 The dun dark day comes lowering on, 
 The spoilers roam at will;
 
 96 Personal Studies 
 
 Yet calmly rise, and boldly strive; 
 
 The sweet bird's early song, 
 Ere evening fall, shall oft revive, 
 
 And cheer thee all day long. 
 
 Are we not sworn to serve our King? 
 
 He sworn with us to be ? 
 The birds that chant before the spring 
 
 Are truer far than we.
 
 EDWARD WHITE BENSON* 
 
 No one can doubt that this is a fine record of a noble 
 life. And the character of the man portrayed justifies 
 the fact that the portrait should be drawn by his son. 
 For nothing is more noticeable than the paramount 
 interest, throughout the record, of the personal equation. 
 
 Of course the more positive and objective elements are 
 important enough. We are taken up into great affairs ; 
 we move through momentous crises. All his life long he 
 was doing work of a large and influential type. The 
 period through which he passed was crowded with public 
 incidents and with profound intellectual changes. Into 
 the thick of them he was thrust. He had to think, 
 speak, act, in a way that determined the course of events. 
 But, after all, it remains that the man himself is more 
 vitally interesting than anything that he ever said or did. 
 The book reveals him ; arid in that lies its strength and 
 its charm. The incidents are but the material through 
 which the personality emerges. From cover to cover this 
 dramatic display of individual character holds all the 
 attention. The son's sure and skilful hand is excellently 
 employed in achieving such a result. 
 
 And the man, so revealed, has something about him 
 which enthralls. That is not too strong a word. He 
 
 * The Life of Edward Wltite Benson. By A. C. Benson. 
 London : Macmillan. 1899. 
 
 97 H
 
 9& Personal Studies 
 
 enthralls by his intense and vivid vitality, alert, dramatic, 
 energetic. Wherever he is you feel the vibration of his 
 presence. He is always electrical, sensitive, radiating, 
 forceful. Sparks crackle and dance, as he is touched. 
 In his earlier days this characteristic is excessive, nor was 
 it ever without its alarm. And here, perhaps, the affection 
 of a son whose reverence can afford to be candid has 
 almost over-emphasized the terrors. Mr. Arthur Benson 
 knows so well the beauty and the tenderness of his father's 
 heart that he seems now and again to parade the frank- 
 ness with which he can note defects of temper. He is too 
 anxious to show that he is not afraid to be honest. He 
 gives instances of vehemence or of harshness which no 
 doubt take their proper proportion in his own intimate 
 perspective, but which, when taken out of the perspective 
 and thrown into prominent relief in the cold nakedness of 
 print, leave on those who have no personal intimacy to 
 mellow down the bluntness of the record a more unpleasant 
 impression than they are really intended to convey. One 
 or two of the stories told sound simply rude or cruel. 
 
 However, a hasty masterfulness there certainly was ; 
 and he could terrify ; and he did not allow for certain 
 weaknesses ; and he had the power of anger. But his life 
 is the story of a gradual victory over this vehemence. The 
 change that passes into him after he has left Wellington 
 is distinctly felt in the book. He himself became pro-, 
 foundly aware of the perils that beset anger, however 
 righteous. He had trusted it as a weapon of GOD, and 
 had found it break in his hand. What man is fit to wield 
 GOD'S wrath ? Anger, he would earnestly plead, is not 
 part of the Christian's true armoury. The work that it 
 may do for GOD can always be done better, even if at the
 
 Edward White Benson 99 
 
 cost of more time, without it. I can vividly remember 
 the personal intensity with which he urged this plea in 
 Retreat, as out of the living experience of one who could 
 speak of what he had tried and known. Still, to the last 
 the restraint of equal debate tried him sorely : and his 
 sense of the strain that it imposed on him withheld him, it 
 would appear, from much open converse with men who 
 differed from him, and seriously hampered him in the 
 House of Lords. 
 
 What it cost him to conquer this masterfulness of 
 temper comes out in a touching note to his wife, July 14, 
 1878: 
 
 " So this is my birthday. Nine and forty years, like the 
 knights and squires of Branksome, but not of name or of fame. 
 Only of work, such as it is according to my very poor notions 
 of working, and service according to my very poor notions of 
 service. ... I think the most grave and altogether best 
 lesson which I have learned in nine and forty years is the 
 incalculable and infinite superiority of gentleness to every 
 other force, and the imperious necessity of humility as a 
 foundation to every other virtue. Without this it appears to 
 me the best characters and noblest have to be taken to pieces 
 and built up again with the new concrete underlaid- and with- 
 out gentleness things may be done, but oh, at what needless 
 cost of tears and blood too " (ii. 736). 
 
 This transformation, this enrichment, of character is the 
 key to the life. The force, the nobility of type, the swift 
 passion, the glow these are all there from the start. 
 But they have something yet to gain, all through the 
 Wellington time. The gifts overwhelm rather than win. 
 His exquisite power of translation, and his passionate 
 delight in the delicacies of language, thrilling as they
 
 ioo Personal Studies 
 
 were in their effect upon those whom he so loved to 
 teach, must have swept them like a storm, under which 
 they bent and shook. What his power as a great school- 
 master was, is given by Dr. Verrall on p. 215 of the first 
 volume, in a memoir of singular beauty and insight, every 
 word of which is worth reading. Dr. Verrall has not 
 spared himself or his own boyish infirmities in the brave 
 desire to exhibit perfectly the full moral force of his 
 headmaster, brought to bear upon him with such compel- 
 ling strength, yet with such subtle attention to the 
 involution of a boy's intellectual growth. It is a splendid 
 picture. " His grave is now as the grave of our father. 
 We learned from him the power and the weakness of 
 language, the beauty and the courage of life." So the 
 reminiscence closes : and the tribute is absolutely sincere. 
 Yet, as Mr. Arthur Benson notices, it needed a sensitive 
 and gifted boy to receive this vehement inspiration. To 
 such 
 
 " He was the vivid, idealizing master and leader, magnifying 
 both opportunities and defects, seeing boundless possibilities 
 in the simplest words and acts, both for good and evil, and 
 with a vitality which rippled, to the extremest verge, the 
 society in which he moved" (i. 227). 
 
 But the power could not temper itself to " shorn lambs" ; 
 it was unmeasured in its demands ; and this lack of measure- 
 might justify a recoil, a refusal, a repudiation, in those 
 whom it failed to spur or to enkindle, by the very 
 extravagance of its hopes. 
 
 " Those who looked on life more coldly and impartially, 
 thought that in his view there was a want of balance and 
 proportion ; those whose nature was small and poor saw in the
 
 Edward White Benson 101 
 
 richness and luxuriance of his nature, insincerity and 
 exaggeration ; those whose characters lacked force and purpose 
 were frightened rather than inspired by the vividness and 
 alacrity he required " (ibid.). 
 
 Nor was this effect confined to the unworthy : 
 
 " It was always somewhat difficult, even to those who admired 
 and loved him best, to move without affectation in the high 
 atmosphere both of thought and emotion in which my father 
 naturally moved. I can recollect being paralyzed as a child 
 by having my meagre conversational stock criticized, and by 
 being required to produce from my lessons or my reading 
 something of more permanent interest. I still think this is a 
 mistaken view of the parental relation, but for the mental 
 stimulus it gave me I am grateful yet. Later, when travelling 
 enfamille with my father, worn with heat and dust and rail- 
 way-trains and the dura navis, his own fatigue would take the 
 form of indignant exclamations that we did not gaze with 
 more avidity on what we could see of Paris through the door 
 windows of a crowded omnibus. 
 
 " Yet of this high pressure of thought and emotion he was 
 certainly not conscious. He thought that all were made of 
 same fire and dew as himself. It was always a certain strain 
 to be long alone with him, to converse with him, however 
 much interested in the subject one might be. What was 
 natural to him tended to be affectation in another, and his 
 forceful temperament demanded companionship without allow- 
 ing intuitively for strain " (ibid.). 
 
 That is as admirably as it is frankly said. Nor would 
 the criticism have been unjustified even to the day of the 
 Archbishop's death. Only there is felt to be, after 
 Wellington, a power at work within him which mellows 
 and sweetens and spiritualizes this tendency to overbear. 
 
 The very face bears witness to the change. Framed as
 
 IO2 Personal Studies 
 
 it was always on such superb lines, it gains immeasurably 
 in beauty as the years pass over it. The best witness in 
 the world to such a change notes its reality and its depth 
 in a most delightful bit of memory recorded on p. 587 of 
 vol. i. 
 
 " My mother writes : 'There was nothing in its way more 
 remarkable than the development of the beauty of his face as 
 time went by. As a young man it certainly gave good 
 promise, but eagerness and vivacity were the chief things that 
 his face then expressed. A photograph of him taken at thirty 
 bears scarcely a trace of resemblance to the last one taken by 
 Elliott and Fry. It is impossible even for those who knew him 
 well to trace the course of the development. With most faces 
 there is a great change, but though in many cases new lines 
 of power, or thought, or softening can be seen, it is seldom 
 that the absolute beauty develops so markedly. He had 
 always very rich curves in the mouth. In fact it was scarcely 
 like an English mouth at all, but more Italian in its beauty. 
 The nose was always fine, but the sharp delicate receding cut of 
 the nostril seemed to get sharper and finer as time went on. 
 The brow developed extraordinarily, large bumps grew over the 
 arch of the eye, specially during the last fourteen or fifteen 
 years of his life. He took to growing his hair longer of later 
 years, which increased his likeness, often noticed, to John 
 Wesley. When he first came to London the artist world was 
 much excited about him, and more than one wanted to paint him. 
 At the first Academy soiree at which he was present, one who 
 was there told me that groups as he passed would eagerly turn 
 round to look at him. I used to be afraid that when his hair 
 grew whiter it would not furnish a strong enough background 
 to the marked features, and I think Herkomer felt this. 
 When we asked him seven or eight years ago to paint the 
 portrait which according to immemorial custom each Arch- 
 bishop had to leave at Lambeth, he urged speed. " I can
 
 Edward White Benson 103 
 
 wait," he said, " but the subject cannot." Yet this proved not 
 to be so. It is seldom, I think, that the growing development 
 of a face strikes the members of the family yet of late years 
 we have often talked to each other of the changes which seemed 
 to us all very rapid. 
 
 " ' One cold day at Milan, on our way home from Florence, we 
 were standing just outside S. Ambrogio he was wearing a 
 large black cloak, and flung it round his shoulder in an Italian 
 manner, and was looking up at the fagade of the church. A 
 woman who was passing caught sight of him, stood still to 
 look, and exclaimed, " Che bel prete ! " 
 
 " 'I shall never forget one night in the summer of 1894. I 
 had been ill, and was still somewhat of an invalid and was un- 
 able to go away with him to pay a visit to which we were both 
 looking forward. This depressed him a good deal, and we had 
 various other anxieties just at that time. He used always to 
 work late, and this night he came into my room about twelve 
 o'clock, leaving his door open. My room was dark, and as he 
 stood talking to me the light from the other room streamed 
 out on him. He was deeply depressed : " I feel as if it were 
 all closing in," he said. I tried to take the points one by one 
 and show that they were not so very bad after all. He stood 
 silent for a few minutes, and I could not think of the anxieties 
 or of anything but the extraordinary beauty of the picture. 
 He was in a purple cassock, and the light caught the colour. 
 There was a warm tint on his face from the inner room, and 
 his white hair shone and sparkled like frost. His features 
 were grave almost to gloom and the splendid lines of his profile 
 were thrown into relief by the strong light and deep shade.' " 
 
 And what is the moment at which the transformation 
 begins ? 
 
 Certainly, the chancellorship at Lincoln. It is at 
 Lincoln that the spirit in him takes a deeper tone. He 
 passes out of the narrow academic limitations into
 
 104 Personal Studies 
 
 touch with the life of the Church as a body. Not, 
 indeed, that he had not been a Churchman before this. 
 On the contrary, his innermost devotional ardours had been, 
 from his very boyhood, set Churchwards. They were 
 pronouncedly ecclesiastical. Few things are more in- 
 teresting in the Life than the record of the affectionate 
 intimacy of himself and Lightfoot, knit by the bond of the 
 Canonical Hours. The letter to J. B. Lightfoot, on the 
 formation of a small society for holy living, headed with its 
 Non nobis Domine, admits us into the innermost secret of 
 a young life inflamed with the ardours of catholic devotion. 
 The sacrificial effort of the confederated lives is to rest on 
 nothing which they are not as Christians already pledged 
 to do. " At Baptism, you and I, before the Blessed 
 Trinity, before all Angels, and the whole Church in 
 heaven and earth, made three solemn vows." It is these 
 vows which they will set themselves to keep. 
 
 " "We promised to renounce . . . the vain pomp and glory 
 of the world. Have we even attempted this 1 Again . . . 
 the Kingdom of. God was for the Poor. . . . Let us league 
 with all our souls and hearts, and powers of mind and body, 
 that it may be no more GOD'S witness against us, ' My people 
 perish for lack of knowledge. 1 Let us determine while our 
 hearts are still warm, and unchilled by the lessons of the world, 
 to teach the Poor. . . , 
 
 " We may begin this work now. Let our prayers rise up 
 a continual incense before GOD, for the extension of His 
 Kingdom, and the revival of the Church in our day ; many 
 outward ordinances want amending, a whole order of ministers 
 in the Church has become extinct. Fasting and other 
 spiritual helps are cast aside" (i. 51, 52). 
 
 So the passionate outburst pours on, in the blessed
 
 Edward White Benson 105 
 
 hopefulness and thoroughness of a youth that has con- 
 secrated itself to GOD ; and every syllable tingles with the 
 spirit of the Church, down to the closing cries of entreaty 
 Ora pro me. In Christo salus. ORA. ORA. ORA PRO ME 
 MISERO. So again to his friend from boyhood, J. F. 
 Wickenden, in September 1849, he is on fire with his first 
 discovery of % the Prayer for the Dead in the Alexandrine 
 Liturgy of St. Basil : 
 
 " Remember, Lord, all those who are already at rest ; 
 Grant rest to their souls in the bosom of our Holy Fathers, 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; gather them together in a green 
 pasture, and lead them forth beside the waters of comfort in a 
 paradise far from all grief, sorrow, and mourning, in the glorious 
 light of Thy Saints" (i. 81). 
 
 And, after several other quotations, he writes : 
 
 " Maybe I am rather rash in sending you these now, while 
 I am hot about them ; however, I have not used them yet, nor 
 do I intend doing so until I have thought a good deal more 
 coolly about them than at present. However, I want to hear 
 your opinion about them ; that they are beautiful is beyond 
 doubt, though there are some expressions which we should both, 
 I fancy, agree to alter " (i. 82). 
 
 This instinctive delight in the ancient catholic mould 
 of prayer determined his devotional life from first to last, 
 even when he was most vehemently severing himself from 
 that Tractarianism which was filled with the same 
 spiritual delight as he in our rich heritage of liturgical 
 devotion. It shows itself with singular humour in the 
 sharp criticism of the Presbyterian Service to which he 
 had been taken in Scotland. 
 
 All this was in him, then, from the days of these earliest
 
 106 Personal Studies 
 
 ardours, when his boyhood kindled into worship. But it 
 remained for Lincoln to set currents free which had been 
 hitherto hardset. His soul opened, the harshness relaxed, 
 the character was enriched, and a certain warmth and 
 graciousness are felt, where before there was terror. 
 
 Two influences seemed to have specially conspired to 
 work the change. First, the old Bishop of Lincoln showed 
 to him the wonderful treasures of tenderness, of generosity, 
 of spiritual sincerity, of high sacrifice, of intrepid single- 
 heartedness, which could be consistent with the intense 
 ecclesiastical conservatism of a man who could be the very 
 heart of the antagonism to Dr. Temple's appointment to the 
 bishopric of Exeter. Benson had himself put out in the 
 Times the noblest and most passionate appeal that was 
 made on behalf of the great chief whom at Rugby he had 
 adored. Yet his whole heart loved this Christopher of 
 Lincoln loved him for his splendid capacities of spiritual 
 heroism, for his personal sanctity, for his intensity of 
 purpose, for his utter surrender to GOD. A Churchman in 
 every fibre of his being, he was also the very soul of 
 chivalrous honour and of undaunted faith, with the touch 
 of a prophet upon him, giving dignity to what might have 
 been otherwise pedantic and bookish in a mind so remote 
 from the culture and temper of the age in which he lived. 
 Generations of old dead ecclesiastics lived again in him. 
 He was a living example of what their greatness had been, 
 even if he illustrated also, with equal vividness, their pro- 
 verbial limitations. It was a splendid type of consecrated 
 scholarship : and then round about it was the family with 
 that unmistakable force which is characteristic of the 
 Wordsworths a force of their own, totally unworldly, 
 unaffected by circumstance, with a childlike incapacity
 
 Edward White Benson 107 
 
 for fear, untrammelled by the shadow of self-consciousness, 
 with the large freedom that belongs to natural things. 
 Into the full pressure of this force Benson passed. He 
 revelled in the keen intellectual vigour of a family so 
 devotedly and affectionately domestic. This combination 
 was exactly what he delighted in. The influence of 
 Riseholme passed into his life : and the letters to 
 Elizabeth Wordsworth are a delightful record of the 
 passage. 
 
 Secondly, Lincoln brought him into touch, not only 
 with the Apostolic man at the top of the hill, but with the 
 working man at the bottom. In that great Bible class of 
 his he set free his human and pastoral impulses, unfettered 
 by scholastic formalities. He met men face to face : he 
 spoke from soul to soul. It was a novel experience to 
 him to find himself handling life in the rough, moving in 
 an atmosphere where independent and crude common- 
 sense worked out its modern problems without any 
 regard to the traditions of culture. He felt the force of 
 the appeal made by the simplicities of elemental manhood. 
 His shrewdness set itself joyfully to cope with theirs. He 
 let himself go with an abandonment that won their hearts. 
 He never got nearer to the flesh and blood of average men 
 than he did in those few years at Lincoln. And this told 
 on him. It opened fresh doors. It taught him his 
 powers. It softened and enheartened him. The famous 
 class of great ladies, for which he did so much in later 
 days at Lambeth, could never have been what it was if it 
 had not been for the earlier class of artisans at Lincoln. 
 
 The spiritual transformation that was begun at Lincoln 
 was completed at Truro, sanctified as that time was by 
 his lifelong sorrow over the loss of his eldest boy, Martin.
 
 io8 Personal Studies 
 
 And here I have my one serious complaint to make against 
 the author of the book. I cannot for a moment allow 
 that enough is made of the five years in the Cornish 
 bishopric. It appears merely as a bright and happy inter- 
 lude before the main work of his life came to him. And, 
 in a sense, it can wear this character. It was so quick : 
 it swung along with such a rush : it was followed by years of 
 strenuous and vaster labour, in searching the light of the 
 supreme throne. The enormous range of industry that is 
 inevitable to the archbishopric involved the larger space 
 that had to be allowed for its record. Yet, when all 
 has been said, it remains that the spiritual value and 
 significance of the Cornish period were unique. Never 
 again, in the after-years, weighted by measureless re- 
 sponsibilities, was he able to give full fling to the joyous 
 outbreak of all the strength and beauty that he had it in 
 him to give to the Kingdom of GOD. Down there, on that 
 hidden headland, he could allow his exuberant energy of 
 work free play, unhindered by the anxieties which 
 encumber a great position under incessant criticism. 
 His buoyant idealism was kindled by the poetic contrast 
 between the thing that he found to hand and the thing 
 that he meant to do. All his creative faculty of organization 
 was evoked, with its equal delight in the depth of the 
 foundations to be laid, and in the perfection of the smallest 
 detail to be foreseen. His warmth of feeling responded 
 to the imaginative emotion of the Cornish. Strange 
 memories, archaic visions, hovered mistily over uplands 
 and hollows ; the Past, in its fascinating shadowiness, in 
 its weird oddities, met him at every turn of the road 
 in the quaint form of suggestive aloofness which most 
 appealed to his swift curiosity. Everything that he
 
 Edward White Benson 109 
 
 undertook went through with enthusiasm. He had all 
 the joy of multitudinous beginnings ; and he left before 
 the drag had begun of seeing to the continuance of what 
 had been begun, among a people who are quicker to wel- 
 come than they are stable to sustain. 
 
 Above all, Cornwall gave him the rare opportunity of 
 fulfilling the dream which had been his from boyhood. 
 He had been possessed by the ideal of corporate life in a 
 cathedral chapter with a peculiar intensity : and lo ! he 
 was set not only to build the first new cathedral that had 
 been built since the Reformation in England, but also to 
 scheme and complete the first cathedral chapter that had 
 to be organized afresh on the traditional lines, in view of 
 the immediate needs in their modern shape which it was 
 the primal office of a cathedral to meet. Has it ever 
 before been given a man so exactly to face the very task 
 which his entire being aspired to undertake ? It is, 
 perhaps, a challenge from which most of us would flinch. 
 Who would not shrink to whom it was suddenly said, 
 " Here is a clear field. Go forward, and prove the worth 
 of your life's dream, without let or hindrance " ? But 
 Benson's splendid buoyancy rose to the challenge. Into 
 the cathedral, and all that it embodied and involved, he 
 flung his whole heart and soul. The extracts given in the 
 book from addresses and sermons are alive with the passion 
 of the hour. They give some impression of what his 
 quivering personality meant to an outlying people, quick 
 to catch fire, sensitive to the rarity with which a man of 
 this calibre threw in his whole lot with them. The whole 
 time was one prolonged rapture of welcome and of joy. 
 Round him gathered a band of young men to whom he 
 was an inspiration. We hear of one or two of them in the
 
 i io Personal Studies 
 
 book who were specially dear. But there were others, in 
 many directions, and of many types. 
 
 And, then, who can find words to tell of the depth of 
 affection which she woke in Cornish hearts, whom I have 
 forborne from mentioning, because it is so impossible to 
 mention her without saying so far more than she would 
 tolerate or forgive ? Let it only be understood that those 
 gifts of his wife, which are to those who know them 
 incomparable in their charm, never verified their power 
 more richly than in Cornwall. 
 
 And, then, there was the abundant call made upon his 
 priestliness, upon his spirituality, upon his beautiful spirit 
 of adoration, upon his pastoral love. The impulsive 
 religiousness of the people touched him. drew deeply 
 upon his resources. And there were the ordinations, 
 with all their fertile intimacies of spirit. And there was 
 the intense spiritual passion of his chaplain and successor, 
 to stir and to free him. Everything combined to make 
 those five years the sealing years of his character and life. 
 They were to him like fairy years, aglow with wonder. 
 Did he ever expand so liberally, or grow so rapidly and 
 vividly, as in the interval ? The photographs before and 
 after Truro bear the marks of the great change. Lambeth 
 proved him to be, in some ways, a greater man than, 
 perhaps, the conditions of Truro allowed for ; but was he 
 ever again so entirely himself at his very best ? And was 
 it not then that he became all that he proved himself to 
 be at Lambeth ? The Life is written to show us the man, 
 not to record history. And it is in view of the man's 
 own revelation of himself and of his powers that Truro is 
 no interlude, but of supreme importance. 
 
 Just at the close of the time he came to take a Retreat
 
 Edward White Benson 1 1 i 
 
 for Oxford Tutors in Keble College, and it is impossible 
 for any who were there ever to forget the magical effect 
 of his presence and of his teaching. We knew ourselves 
 to be in the hands of a prince in the spiritual domain. 
 Never had we heard the language of St. Paul and of St. 
 James made to feel so like a " living creature." The salient 
 words and phrases opened out unanticipated secrets. 
 Every syllable became pregnant with some new inspiration. 
 And then it was that he told us something of the story 
 of his own self-mastery, and how he had learned the 
 supremacy of love over power in CHRIST JESUS. Never 
 again did I hear him teach, with such sure force and 
 fascination, the deep things of GOD. That Retreat, we 
 always believe, had its say in determining the offer of the 
 Primacy. For we were enkindled ; and when, just at the 
 crisis of decision, we heard that, after all, the profound 
 respect felt for Bishop Harold Browne was rendering it 
 impossible to pass him over, we wrote eager letters to the 
 late Dean of St. Paul's, praying for this chief to be given 
 us, who would place himself in the forefront of all the new 
 spiritual movements expressed in Missions and Retreats, 
 and would be the living captain of the younger men. 
 The appeals reached the Prime Minister's ear at the 
 moment when the fateful determination was being taken, 
 and it may not be vain of us to think that they may just 
 have made the difference in the final decision. However 
 that may be, I am certain that the buoyant radiancy of his 
 spirit was then at its height. And the height had been 
 attained at Truro. Afterwards, masterful as he proved 
 himself in many directions, one never quite missed the 
 tone of fatigue in the voice and of anxiety in the spirit, 
 which told of the awful pressure of great affairs.
 
 1 1 2 Personal Studies 
 
 The story of the Primacy is told at length in the book, 
 and we can see there well enough the special directions 
 in which his stress was laid the pulling together of the 
 forces of the Church ; the emphasis on the missionary 
 responsibilities of the Church as a body ; the keen desire 
 to secure reform in abuses of patronage, and in slackness 
 of discipline ; the insistence, not withou t wrath, on the 
 attention due from the Bishops to their civil duties in the 
 House of Lords ; the skilful energy put out towards the 
 Church in the East, expressed through the Assyrian 
 Mission, and so carefully considered in the matter of the 
 Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem ; the mingled subtlety and 
 strength with which he worked out the ecclesiastical 
 connection between Canterbury and the colonial bishoprics. 
 Perhaps the book might have brought out more promi- 
 nently his direct reversal of the policy which had hitherto 
 determined the relations between the Metropolitan and 
 his Provincials. Archbishop Tait had ruled by diplomatic 
 management and by a strong hand. The Bishops were 
 excluded, as far as possible, from consultation. Matters of 
 policy were determined beforehand by the chiefs, and then 
 were submitted for assent. The new Archbishop set him- 
 self at once to secure regular and systematic co-operation 
 between the entire body of his Bishops. He drew them 
 together for special days of Conference and Prayer ; he 
 aimed at concerted action ; he had a statesman's eye for 
 large policies, and deep were his complaints at the 
 tendency of the Bishops to absorb their energies in diocesan 
 business. The famous outbreak against the influence of 
 Samuel Wilberforce has, of course, an ironical exaggeration 
 in it. He does not really mean that we shall " execrate 
 his memory." It is stupid not to recognize the intentional
 
 Edward White Benson 113 
 
 excess in the phrase ; but he uses the irony of excess in 
 order to express the intensity of his feeling against a 
 diocesanism which, out of the very heat of its local energy, 
 is liable to become as dangerous a vice as the parochialism 
 of an energetic parish priest. 
 
 And then, of course, full and lengthy justice is done to 
 the heroic moment of the Lincoln Judgment " the most 
 courageous act that has come out of Lambeth since the 
 days of Laud." Nerve, knowledge, skill, it most certainly 
 showed. The severest strain on his personal courage lay 
 in the decision to undertake the Trial. The success of the 
 Judgment has blotted out the terrible uncertainties that 
 beset this decision. It was a venture almost wholly in 
 the dark ; no one could foretell the result. Could a 
 distracted Church, heated with passion, endure the strain 
 of so critical an experiment ? No one could exactly define 
 the authority of the court, still less could they determine 
 its relation to the secular courts. The Archbishop could 
 only hope to be obeyed, if he judged the case freely, with- 
 out subservience to Privy Council decisions ; yet he could 
 only hope to see his Judgment legalized if the Privy 
 Council could be found to be in accord with it. The 
 pressure against the venture came from many whom he 
 was most accustomed to trust. The indignity done to 
 Bishop King by such a trial was enough to kindle a fire 
 of indignation, and the mean and unreal character of the 
 artificial attack justified its dismissal as contemptible. 
 The Archbishop hardly seems to have allowed enough for 
 this, nor for the misery to those who loved him of seeing 
 a man like Bishop King submitted to so cruel a process 
 by such unworthy means. And he is unfair to the 
 suspicions entertained by the High Churchmen against
 
 1 14 Personal Studies 
 
 the court suspicions which were natural enough to those 
 who knew and remembered how easily the judgments of 
 secular courts could be palmed off upon them as of spiritual 
 authority, because they were transmitted through spiritual 
 organs. This is a peril from which we have not yet 
 escaped ; and it was always a pressing danger in the days 
 of Archbishop Tait. They knew that nothing could be 
 more cruelly deceptive than to have a Father in GOD 
 claiming spiritual obedience for a decision in which they 
 recognize, in spite of all disguises, the familiar voice of the 
 Privy Council. How could they tell, then, of the subtlety 
 which would enable the Archbishop to deliver a Judg- 
 ment of his own, in spite of the decisions which had been 
 given ; or again, of the meekness which would induce the 
 Privy Council to bow under an ecclesiastic's over-ruling ? 
 The Archbishop clung to his strong point " if he declined 
 jurisdiction, he might be compelled by a mandamus from 
 the Queen's Bench to exercise it ; if he exercised dis- 
 cretionary power to veto the case, he was assuming that he 
 possessed jurisdiction, and this might on appeal be denied.'' 
 There is a capital sketch of ugly possibilities drawn up by 
 him on p. 329, vol. ii. : 
 
 " It would be an ugly chapter of Church History if it should 
 run thus in the heading : Abp. declines to admit his own 
 jurisdiction Privy Council decides that Abp.'s jurisdiction is 
 undoubted Abp. in exercise of his jurisdiction declines to 
 hear the case Privy Council again applied to, to compel Abp. 
 to hear case Privy Council decides that Abp. should hear the 
 case Abp. hears accordingly and decides in two particulars 
 against plaintiffs Privy Council applied to, to reverse judg- 
 ment of Abp. Privy Council reverses it.
 
 Edward White Benson 1 1 5 
 
 Postscript by the Archbishop : 
 
 Of course nothing can stop this they would apply." 
 
 And again, on p. 337 there is an exceedingly clever list 
 of reasons given him for dismissing the case : 
 
 " I am to dismiss the case because the complaints are un- 
 worthy of consideration. 
 
 I am to dismiss the case in order to use my ' discretion.' 
 
 I am to dismiss it because otherwise my Suffragans will be 
 embarrassed by many complaints. 
 
 I am to dismiss it to save my reputation as a strong 
 Archbishop. 
 
 To dismiss it because the complainants went straight to 
 my Court instead of going first to persuade the Bp. of Lincoln. 
 
 To dismiss it because I shall be thought to be influenced 
 by lawyers. 
 
 To dismiss it because the lawyers all think I ought to hear 
 it. 
 
 To dismiss it because it is an indignity to the Bp. of 
 Lincoln to hear it. 
 
 To dismiss it because he himself will not plead if accused 
 by such persons. 
 
 To dismiss it because the Bp. of Oxford refused to hear 
 the case against Mr. Carter and his discretion was upheld. 
 
 To dismiss it because all the High Church party will rally 
 round me if I do." 
 
 Probably now every one would agree that he decided 
 rightly ; but, nevertheless, it is only in view of his 
 extraordinary skilfulness in the Judgment that followed, 
 that this agreement has been reached. It is the Judg- 
 ment that has justfied the tremendous venture. We are 
 at this moment learning how the reverse result can damage 
 the authority which has not the like skill to make good 
 its risky claim.
 
 116 Personal Studies 
 
 The famous Judgment revealed to an astonished public 
 the superiority of the ecclesiastical expert who knows 
 what he is handling, over the lawyer who deals with it 
 from outside. It beat the lawyers on their own ground. It 
 was obviously a finer and truer estimate of the case than 
 any which they could form ; it was based on far more 
 delicate and complete knowledge ; it brought instincts into 
 play which were vital in determining the probabilities, and 
 of which your lawyer, as such, is incapable ; it judged 
 matters in their right historical perspective, and lawyers 
 have no historical perspective. Yet the Book of Common 
 Prayer is above all things an historical, not a legal 
 document; it is a sealed book to any but to those who can 
 estimate the process and the pressure through which it 
 took its precarious form. Above all it asks to be con- 
 sidered in the light of that vast liturgical background to 
 which it appeals, and to understand which is a science of 
 itself. The Archbishop was in all this wholly beyond the 
 criticism of the excellent gentlemen who brought to bear 
 upon the delicate mystery of Christian Worship the 
 temper and experiences of a law-court. He walked round 
 them ; they had to let him alone. 
 
 Still it has to be confessed that this victory was 
 achieved at the cost of some questionable subtleties. 
 The Judgment, in deference to the lawyers, accepts 
 practically the same rigid view of the Act of Uniformity 
 which has of late caused such serious trouble, and which 
 is, surely, rendered obsolete, morally and historically, by 
 the total abandonment of all the conditions to which it 
 was intended to apply, and of the principle which it 
 existed to assert. The Act of Uniformity is the antithesis, 
 the alternative, of toleration-; but we have all adopted
 
 Edward White Benson 117 
 
 toleration. It is in order to obviate the rigidity of this Act 
 that the Archbishop has to press a theory of Ceremonies 
 and Ceremonial use which is uncomfortably artificial, 
 allowing the Chalice to be mixed, the Altar candles to be 
 lighted, before the Office begins, so that thus there is no 
 Ceremony introduced. 
 
 However, it saved the day ; it saved the position ; it 
 broke up prosecutions ; it gave a valid ground on which 
 men could agree and could act ; it shattered the reputation 
 of the Privy Council, and the strange belief that the 
 Church was not after all the best interpreter of what its 
 own worship meant. Its value, its authority, to strong 
 churchmen lay in this that however intricate some of the 
 conclusions, nevertheless the continuity of the Liturgical 
 ritual before and after the Reformation was treated as 
 absolute. The whole discussion was grounded upon this 
 basis ; and this was the real matter at issue. Details were 
 of little importance so long as the Eucharistic Action itself 
 retained its inherent identity. 
 
 And it was unfortunate that the Archbishop should, in 
 his Judgment, have suffered himself to minimize the 
 dispute, and to declare that the points in question in no 
 sense touched the validity of the Sacrament. For how- 
 ever true in theory this might be, it was not true in fact. 
 In fact, he was deciding, to a Church breathless with 
 anxiety, the continuity of its life. This was the issue 
 challenged under the minutiae of ritual. Did the use 
 and custom of the historical Church have any bearing on 
 the Rite, as it stood in the Prayer Book ? Was there a 
 past behind it ? Did the Prayer Book record the 
 purification of a Form, the structure of which was already 
 determined by paramount and unchangeable conditions,
 
 ii8 Personal Studies 
 
 or did it offer a new and isolated and complete ceremony, 
 originated in the sixteenth century, and to be judged 
 without regard to its spiritual pedigree ? 
 
 That was an issue serious enough. It ran down to the 
 very vitals of the Church. And the Lincoln Judgment 
 was absolutely decisive on this vital issue. 
 
 But, able and impressive as his Primacy proved itself in 
 many directions, it is still the man himself who holds our 
 chief interest. And all the more because, throughout 
 the Primacy, we are given the accompaniment of the diary 
 on which the son has so largely and rightly drawn. It is 
 as nearly perfect as a diary can be. It abounds with the 
 very best that the man has it in him to put out. It 
 is admirably free, spontaneous, fertile, and varied. It is 
 charged with good matter and with brilliant phrasing. It 
 has singularly few lapses of temper or of judgment, and 
 no bitterness, though, now and again, it is angry. Above all, 
 it lets us know, without any loss of dignity, his inner 
 heart, in its fears and depressions, in its cries and 
 humilities, in its cravings and prayers, as before GOD. It 
 has beauty and pathos and passion, with much of the 
 artist's emotion, and of the scholar's aspiration. It 
 presents a portrait of the soul, such as one would desire 
 the worst enemy of prelacy to ponder and weigh. I know 
 nothing which I should be so glad to lay in the hands of 
 any one who doubted what sort of man, and what sort of 
 Christian, an Archbishop could be. 
 
 The personality is the dominant element in the book : 
 and to say that, is to suggest the limitations of its vali>e. 
 
 The character that emerges is so curiously individual 
 that it fails to be representative. There is nothing typical
 
 Edward White Benson 119 
 
 about it. It speaks for itself, and for hardly anybody else. 
 It is built up out of a complication of experiences and 
 interests which gave it personal peculiarity. It touched 
 life on many sides, but the points of its contact are so 
 individually unique that they do not explain themselves 
 to others. Qualities met in him which did not account 
 for their bond. He stood for a special and strange com- 
 bination of capacities, generally found apart. This adds 
 to the interest of his life, but it also detaches him some- 
 what from his kind. He is accidental, as it were. He is 
 not the embodiment of what other men mean, or fail, to be. 
 No men ranged themselves behind him, finding in him 
 their natural exponent. Rather, men were a little 
 puzzled. They could not trace the unity, the coherence, 
 that makes a character intelligible. They could never tell 
 how far he went with them, or where he would stop. He 
 often appeared to fly off at a tangent from the main 
 direction. His attitude was incalculable. He was apt to 
 look strained and elaborate to the spectator who could 
 not understand how he had arrived at this or that position. 
 His treatment of life wore an air of eclecticism ; it was too 
 privately personal ; it held together contradictory elements ; 
 it did not divulge the principle of its consistency. For, 
 indeed, the consistency lay only in the exceptional 
 idiosyncrasies of his character. No general principles 
 would interpret it. This made him somewhat bewildering 
 as a leader. In order to know what significance to give 
 to his public utterances, you had to know him as Dr. 
 Lightfoot, or Dr. Westcott, or Dr. Davidson knew him 
 Otherwise he would often seem to be giving familial- 
 phrases an artificial meaning. He would use theological ex- 
 pressions, which were public property, in an esoteric sense.
 
 i2o Personal Studies 
 
 This tendency was aggravated by his well-known love of 
 Thucydidean complexities of speech. He delighted in 
 packed epigrams, in forced allusions, in enigmatic anti- 
 theses. These were often individually brilliant ; but there 
 was no intelligible process visible by which they arrived, or 
 hung together. They gave an appearance of incoherency. 
 The reader, or the hearer, found himself leaping from one 
 to the other as if he were crossing a stream on stepping- 
 stones. As soon as he had got his breath on one, he had 
 to jump to another, and generally at some strange angle. 
 Progress, under these conditions, is intricate and uncon- 
 vincing. You may possibly get across with effort, but 
 you cannot recall the stages, and you doubt whether you 
 could do it again This style left always an impression of 
 over-elaboration, of a series of detached fragments of 
 suggestive thought oddly brought together, rather than 
 of a persuasive process of reasoning that had been willingly 
 followed. It is most interesting to see, from the book, 
 how instinctive this habit of intricate elaboration was ; for 
 it is at its height in the expressions of himself which are 
 most private and most spontaneous : e. g. in the intimate 
 notes of affection or chaff written by him to one who was 
 his spiritual son, A. J. Mason. Here, where the absolute 
 spontaneity is obvious, the allusive intricacy overlays the 
 very humour, until it requires a commentary to elucidate it. 
 
 And then, with this curious natural tendency to 
 complication and to elaboration, there belonged to his 
 temperament the artistic delight in a situation as such, 
 which made him take instinctively the dramatic attitude 
 which it evoked. Dr. Verrall's invaluable Reminiscence 
 has caught this phase of the character with admirable 
 courage and precision :
 
 Edward White Benson i 2 1 
 
 " As a Headmaster and always, to my eyes, he was, first of 
 all and above all, an unsurpassable actor of noble parts ; and 
 this he was by virtue of two qualities first, the extraordinary 
 range of his social and personal interests, and secondly, his 
 high estimate of spectacular function as an index and monitor of 
 such interests, a visible picture of society, directly corrective 
 through physical sensation to narrowness, lowness, and 
 selfishness" (i. 216). 
 
 After describing the minute and punctilious arrange- 
 ments for the Headmaster's entry into chapel, Dr. Verrall 
 proceeds : 
 
 " So stately and beautiful was the thing to which they led, 
 so ornamental to our common life, so full of a social and 
 religious poetry, which, without knowing it, we felt. . . . 
 
 " In judging from what internal disposition this outward 
 effect proceeded, we necessarily quit the limits of that which 
 can be tested or proved. For myself lam convinced and the 
 Archbishop showed himself to me in every kind of unguarded 
 intimacy during many years that his grandeur in social 
 function was simply the expression of his strangely, and in 
 very truth incredibly vivid interest in persons and their social 
 relations to one another. He acted well the greatness of large 
 human connexions, because he intensely felt it " (i. 216, 217). 
 
 That is perfectly intelligible, if you had personal know- 
 ledge of him, which would explain how much was due to 
 the glamorous influence of his imaginative appreciation of 
 the situation. But, of course, to the outsider, there could 
 be no tangible coherence in these successive dramatizations. 
 They were bound to look to him unreal, and a bit fantastic. 
 Yet they were due to sheer natural instinct in the man 
 himself, though often they did mean that he was more 
 mastered by circumstance than he quite knew himself,
 
 122 Personal Studies 
 
 and that he was tempted to let his imagination drape up 
 unworthy conditions, until they assumed an unreal validity 
 in his own eyes. 
 
 Perhaps this appears most in his intense conservatism. 
 It is wonderful how fertilely his dramatic power could 
 work, in endowing with worth almost any public institu- 
 tion. True, he is acutely conscious of the spiritual 
 callousness of the House of Lords, and of the hollowness 
 of its support of the Church. He uses very strong- 
 language about this. The temper of the House is 
 abhorrent to him, it paralyzes his nerves. Yet nothing 
 shakes his belief in it. To touch it is to threaten the 
 Church. All ancient institutions have one foe, whom 
 they must unite to oppose, if they would hope to survive. 
 Nothing can be funnier than his indignation at the effort 
 to get rid of Addington, and to break up the territorial 
 authority of the bishops. He sees in people like Lord 
 Midleton and Mr. John Talbot, who favour some such 
 policy, nothing but dangerous Girondists, recklessly 
 flinging themselves into the van of the Revolution, which 
 will then devour its own children. Do they not see that, 
 by playing fast and loose with Episcopal properties, they 
 are only teaching others how to deal with the estates 
 which they now call theirs ? Since then, Addington has 
 been sold ; yet Peperharrow is still intact, nor has Lord 
 Midleton's head rolled into the basket of the guillotine 
 on Tower Hill. 
 
 This idealizing faculty found characteristic expression in 
 verse, with which he took infinite and delighted pains. 
 Generally the outcome is overloaded, though there is great 
 richness of mystic symbolism, after the Elizabethan manner. 
 He loved the quip and fantasy of George Herbert : and so
 
 Edward White Benson 123 
 
 has buried his art. But there is a beautiful sample of verse 
 written in a game, on the motto " Whoever said so ? " And 
 one poem is simple enough to go straight to the heart, with 
 its exquisite tenderness that on " the Martin " (i. 646). 
 
 There are some touches, chiefly in the diary, of de- 
 lightful humour such as the comment on the pressure 
 put on him to attend this or that function by hinting 
 that, if not, Cardinal Manning will be invited : it is like 
 calling " Pussy, Pussy ! " in order to make a dog eat its 
 dinner. Or again, that other famous criticism on your 
 Roman friends, that they talk so pleasantly and humanly 
 until they suddenly drop a remark so strangely remote 
 that you feel inclined to stop and say, " Are you ill ? " 
 
 He was vehemently anti-Roman : and this antipathy, 
 perhaps, grew under the influence of Bishop Wordsworth 
 of Lincoln. It made it hopeless for him to respond to the 
 efforts of Lord Halifax over the matter of our Orders, even 
 if he had not been upset by the method in which he was 
 approached. He had an acute perception of the possibility 
 of being decoyed into a false position, and he felt how the 
 resistance of Cardinal Vaughan would prevail in the long 
 run over the simplicity of the Pope, who was only able to 
 show himself benignly favourable through his astounding 
 ignorance of the English situation. It is doleful to read 
 of an opportunity missed, and one's heart bleeds for the 
 disappointment of Lord Halifax, whose nobleness of nature 
 and fervency of belief had put out all their force into a 
 splendid venture for unity ; but it is difficult now to say 
 whether greater forwardness on the part of the Archbishop 
 could have baffled the sinister influences that finally swept 
 over the hopes raised by Portal and Duchesne. 
 
 There is one moSt remarkable blank in his interests.
 
 124 Personal Studies 
 
 Living as he did through a period crowded with storms of 
 revolutionary thought, he never appears to be even touched 
 by them. There is no mental conflict whatever. There 
 is no sign of his having ever been inside the philosophical 
 atmosphere, or of his having experienced at all the 
 problems of dialectical doubt. He never shows himself at 
 home with them. He never has anything to say about 
 them. All the currents of the intellectual movement 
 were brought nigh to him through Henry Sidgwick, his 
 brother-in-law and intimate friend. But nothing happens. 
 He is unpenetrated, untouched. His fine scholarship 
 delights in the products of modern criticism, but meta- 
 physical language hardly exists for him. His faith never 
 quivers. It is amazing that any one of his great capacity 
 and keenness should have passed through the furnace of 
 the mid-century without even the smell of the fire being 
 upon him. 
 
 Naturally, the reminiscence of him given in the book by 
 the late Professor Sidgwick, whose death is a national loss, 
 is full of moral insight, excellently conveyed. 
 
 The conditions under which the Life has been produced 
 have made it impossible to tell the extraordinary happiness 
 of his home the inimitable charm of a wife who united the 
 keen Sidgwick brain with inexhaustible warmth of heart ; 
 the poet son ; the intellectual vigour of the whole family. 
 
 But one thing there is which the Life has lifted high 
 the intense spirit of worship which was the core of his 
 entire manhood. From first to last this never flags or 
 fails. Prayer is the inspiration of boyhood, of youth, as of 
 old age. And not only prayer, but out of his heart there 
 break those special cries of humiliation which are known 
 only to those who move close to the ranks of Saints. That
 
 Edward White Benson 125 
 
 utter abasement of soul, which is the secret of the true 
 spiritual life from which the world is helplessly excluded^ 
 was his familiar experience. There is no mistaking its 
 genuine language. It is poured out in the hidden silences 
 recorded in the diary language as of a soul prostrate in 
 the dust at the misery of its own insufficiency. Whenever 
 he is alone, unsolaced by the need of action, the 
 melancholy of a profound self-distrust possesses him. Here 
 is none of the complacency of success, the smooth satis- 
 faction of the ecclesiastical dignitary. It is not too often 
 that we catch on the lips of an Anglican prelate the ascetic 
 speech of the Saints of GOD, so startling in its intensity, 
 so alarming by its sincerity. On October 10, 1884, he 
 writes in his diary : 
 
 "How can one help perplexing oneself in such a place as 
 this I I find in myself no fitness for it. I could not resist, I 
 had no right to resist. If calls exist, called I was ; against 
 my will. An unfit man, not unfit in his humility subjective, 
 but clearly seeing himself by GOD'S help as he is yet called. 
 Follows from that, that there is something unknown in GOD'S 
 counsels for the Church and for His poor servant, whom He 
 will not let fall to the ground for simply nothing, for His own 
 love to the least something He means to have done by one 
 unfit for the great place. Well then, he will be fit for the 
 thing He wants to have done. Then make him fit and let, O 
 GOD, whatever it be, be good for Thy Church. It is in Thy 
 Hand " (ii. 33). 
 
 On April 24, 1885, again : 
 
 " ' Non est creatura tarn parva et vilis quae Dei bonitatem 
 non repraesentet.' 
 
 "Yesterday I saw a girl of twelve or thirteen turn out of a 
 door and walk on before me dirty, torn her face was as if it
 
 126 Personal Studies 
 
 had been pressed flat, and recovered itself a little. Her knee 
 was weak so that she seemed to throw out her left foot as far as 
 it would go, and pull it in again by way of walking lilting 
 out with half her body each step, to gain the requisite ponder- 
 ance. She has to live a life out under these limitations and 
 there was not in her look any apparent effect of an ideal, or of 
 a reliance, yet there is in her remaining organization, and I 
 doubt not in her spirit, quite enough to show, quite enough 
 to take in and give out the 'Goodness of GOD.' It wants 
 redemption deliverance and clearance. And I doubt not that 
 there is abundant parvitas et vilitas in me, who am unfettered 
 bodily, and have, or think I have, an ideal, to make a still less 
 fettered being wonder how in the world my limitations can 
 possibly be got over. It can be only by Xv'o-is and Avrpwcris ; 
 O to see and to be free " (ii. 54). 
 
 On July 21, 1895, he writes : 
 
 "My last evening at Lambeth, at least this year. Six 
 months gone indeed like a shadow, and rather a dark one; 
 gone yet abiding. A life with so much to do that none can 
 be done well, and so complicated with fy-aditions of what is 
 essential that much is not worth doing and character and 
 6 ecrto avOpanros, Avhat becomes of him ? and what is to become 
 of him ? Miserere is the only word which can be written over 
 this half year (and nearly all others) Yes, Omnium annorum 
 meorum, Domine, omnium dierum, miserere, miserere" (ii. 
 649). 
 
 The voice of the soul, as it first spoke through the 
 Psalms, is speaking again from the throne of Augustine. 
 He was curiously sensitive to the splendour of a great 
 historical position, but no glamour of the world has hushed 
 the true spiritual cry. The masterful vehemence of 
 temper may be not wholly conquered, but the deeper 
 experience is steadily making way, and sweetening and
 
 Edward White Benson 127 
 
 enriching the life that fell asleep so swiftly, in the House 
 of GOD, on October 12, 1896. 
 
 In his own words, twenty years before, he sums up the 
 change which had already then begun its work : 
 
 " The masterful feeling is quite gone, and one quite forgets 
 how one used to think it was the work of one's own hands, 
 and feels that for all that may have been good one was only 
 the merest instrument moved by a power which in the 
 greatest things which really were within, one often rejected. 
 All the unhappy feeling about the reminiscences is only due to 
 want of Love. Oh, how little one knew the value of that. 
 How little all those years one thought about Grace and graces. 
 Strength and Finish seem to have been one's compassless 
 aims. . . . But I can try that the coming years, if they are 
 given, shall have the work cf Love and Grace in them " (ii. 736).
 
 BROOKE FOSS WESTCOTT* 
 
 " WE see not our tokens, there is not one prophet 
 more : no, not one is there among us that understandeth 
 any more." Sad wails out of old days of national be- 
 reavement drifted through the soul as we stood on Friday, 
 August 2, 1901, in the splendid shrine at Bishop Auckland, 
 and laid the body of the Bishop of Durham by the side of 
 Cosin and Lightfoot. The exquisite grey of the un- 
 polished Purbeck arches rose out of the rich splendour 
 of Cosin's woodwork; and round the walls glowed the 
 heraldries of the long succession of Prince-Bishops, and 
 the windows into which Lightfoot had poured the light of 
 his love and his knowledge. The noble fabric, with its 
 storied memories, made us recall the more vividly the 
 slight figure of the man whom we were burying as he 
 used to crouch, in a tiny huddled heap, under the weight 
 of his self-abasement. 
 
 How well I could remember, in days when we used to 
 meet with Quakers and Nonconformist chiefs to pray for 
 Peace, the swift collapse almost on to the floor, with hands 
 clasped tight over the hidden face, with which he had 
 responded to the congratulations of some minister on his 
 promotion to this Bishopric. Yet this personal humilia- 
 tion had its root in his intense consciousness of the 
 
 * Bishop of Durham. 
 128
 
 Brooke Foss Westcott 1 29 
 
 dignity of the historic Princedom to which he had been 
 called. He felt its honour and splendour in every fibre 
 of his frame ; and never did he tingle more vividly with 
 its glory than when he stood in this Chapel, where his 
 body was now to be laid with the wife whom he himself 
 had buried but two months before, and with the friend of 
 his life, over whom he had himself said the words of 
 committal eleven years ago. 
 
 The Chapel was crowded from end to end with men. 
 There were no women but those of the family and house- 
 hold. This gave massive force to the simple hymns, 
 so that even " Peace, perfect Peace " lost its possible 
 weakness, and sounded worthy and strong. Miners were 
 there, with their sturdy northern faces ; and grey-headed, 
 square-shouldered employers; and a sailor or two; and 
 one girl in academic cap and gown. The sun shone ; the 
 voices rose in full thanksgiving. Never, surely, was it 
 more fitly sung, that " Now the labourer's task is done." 
 The whole life had been consecrated to work to work as 
 an untiring act of worship. Joy and Praise dominated 
 the service ; and we knew that we had his mind with us, 
 as we closed with a triumphant Doxology. His children 
 were glad to welcome us with free and happy talk of him. 
 All was well ; only for us, as we crept home, the melancholy 
 refrain rang on, " There is not one prophet more ; no, not 
 one is there among us that understandeth any more." 
 
 My first sight of him had been in Peterborough 
 Cathedral, all but thirty years ago. I had gone with a 
 friend, to read with him for Deacon's orders. He was 
 giving lectures on St. John in a side Chapel ; and all 
 through the first lecture, we could hardly believe our eyes. 
 This tiny form, with the thin small voice, delivering
 
 130 Personal Studies 
 
 itself, with passionate intensity, of the deepest teaching 
 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 those undignified and newfangled efforts 
 was this, really, Dr. Westcott ? We had to reassure 
 ourselves of the fact, as we emerged, by repeated as- 
 severations that it certainly must be. 
 
 Then, the first interview revealed where the secret of 
 his power lay. We had never before seen such an 
 identification of study with prayer. He read and worked 
 in the very mind with which he prayed ; and his prayer 
 was of singular intensity. It might be only the elements 
 of textual criticism with which he was dealing ; but, still, 
 it was all steeped in the atmosphere of awe, and devotion, 
 and mystery, and consecration. He taught us as one who 
 ministered at an Altar; and the details of the Sacred 
 Text were, to him, as the Ritual of some Sacramental 
 action. His touching belief in our powers of scholarship 
 used, sometimes, to shatter our self-control; and I well 
 remember the shouts of laughter which we just succeeded 
 in mastering until we found ourselves outside in the 
 moonlit Close, when he confessed his disappointment at 
 our not recalling the use of a certain verb in the Clement- 
 ine Homilies we who, at that moment, had but the 
 dimmest conception what the Clementine Homilies might 
 be. Sometimes he would crush us to the dust by his 
 humility ; as when, after we had gaily turned off, at a 
 moment's notice, our interpretation of some crucial passage 
 in St. John, he would confess, in an awe-struck whisper, 
 that he had, himself, never yet dared to put down on 
 paper his own conclusion of the matter.
 
 Brooke Foss Westcott i 3 1 
 
 His mind and his method became part of the life of 
 those whom he taught, according to their power of 
 assimilating them. It was impossible to forget or to drop 
 them. And only under personal contact with him did 
 one learn the full value of those particular phrases which 
 are so characteristic of his teaching, and yet which, in 
 cold print, do not always account for their weighty re- 
 currence. His whole soul used to issue through them, as 
 he spoke ; and one ceased to be surprised that he carried 
 them everywhere, and applied them to everything. In 
 print they are apt to give a touch of sameness to all that 
 he writes. Wherever you open his books, he is sure to 
 be saying what he always said. Something of St. John's 
 manner finds itself in him. The emphasis and the depth 
 of the utterance express themselves through the infinite 
 variety of repetition. It is for ever the one truth, uttered 
 in delicately varied sameness ; and the whole truth of life 
 comes to the front at every point of the surface. Nothing 
 can be said, without involving all that ever can be said. 
 In reading, this gives the effect that it does not matter 
 where you begin or where you leave off. In listening, it 
 involved a sameness of tone and level, without relief. 
 From first to last the tone would be pitched at full 
 strain ; and it was difficult, afterwards, to remember the 
 special points which distinguished one address from 
 another. 
 
 But, then, as one listened, this hardly mattered ; for 
 the real and vital impression made came from the in- 
 tensity of the spiritual passion, which forced its way out 
 through that strangely knotted brow, and lit up those 
 wonderful grey eyes, and shook that thin high voice into 
 some ringing clang as of a trumpet. There was a famous
 
 132 Personal Studies 
 
 address, at the founding of the Christian Social Union, 
 delivered to us in Sion College, which none who were 
 present can ever forget. Yet none of us can ever recall, 
 in the least, what was said. No one knows. Only we 
 knew that we were lifted, kindled, transformed. We 
 pledged ourselves ; we committed ourselves ; we were 
 ready to die for the Cause ; but if you asked us why, and 
 for what, we could not tell you. There he was ; there he 
 spoke ; the prophetic fire was breaking from him ; the 
 martyr- spirit glowed through him. We, too, were caught 
 up. But words had become only symbols. There was 
 nothing verbal to report or to repeat. We could re- 
 member nothing, except the spirit which was in the 
 words ; and that was enough. 
 
 Everybody knows the famous answer that he is re- 
 ported to have made to the grateful pupil who exclaimed, 
 " Thank you ! thank you, Dr. Westcott ! You have made 
 that perfectly clear to me " " Oh ! I hope not ! I hope 
 not ! " The story exactly expresses the double character 
 of his teaching. It concentrated itself, first, on the 
 minute accuracy of words. So far, nothing could be less 
 like " a fog." Every jot and tittle of the text had an 
 exact meaning and significance. The attempt to arrive 
 at precision, here, was almost exaggerated. The study 
 proceeded on the assumption that every syllable had a 
 distinct and definite sense ; it seemed at times, to the 
 puzzled learner, that he was straining for more than a 
 verbal rather for a literal inspiration. So much truth 
 turned on the shade of precise value to be given to the 
 turn of a phrase in a disputed reading of the text. 
 
 But, then, this very exactitude was found to be but the 
 determination of the precise route taken by a spiritual
 
 Brooke Foss Westcott 133 
 
 process which was itself alive ; and, as alive, was infinite 
 in its significant suggestiveness. The point taken was, first, 
 definitely localized with the precision of the expert, and 
 the fastidious delicacy of the scholar ; but the point, once 
 fixed, was found to be but the pivot of radiating force 
 which broke out from it on every side, and " passed in 
 music out of sight." Then it was that all the difficulty 
 began of saying what one had arrived at ; what was the 
 conclusion to be drawn ; how and where one stood. Then 
 it was that critics spoke of being left in a fog. The point 
 which one had reached with such careful pains appeared 
 to withdraw itself from under one, and to transmute 
 itself, and to pass into something else. The deep mystic 
 unity of things, in which all life co-exists, had supervened, 
 and separate points became identified with that sole central 
 point round which the universe revolves. Somehow, that 
 would be the impression. Mysticism has always worked 
 through the like precision. It loves to begin with ex- 
 actitude of mathematical numbers and geometric measures ; 
 and, from these, to find the platform from which to make 
 its leap into infinitude. 
 
 Westcott found expression for the true mystical temper 
 through the medium of the scholar's delight in the 
 accuracy of words. He has given us his own account of 
 this combination in his sketch of the true theological 
 scholar.* But his temper as a scholar and critic is dealt 
 with elsewhere by one pre-eminently fitted to give a 
 j udgment. 
 
 For us of the Christian Social Union, his inspiration and 
 his authority were absolutely invaluable. And we can, at 
 least, flatter ourselves that we brought him some faint return 
 
 * See pp. 81 and 82 of Lessons from Work, 1901.
 
 134 Personal Studies 
 
 for his untold helpfulness, in that our existence led him to 
 look at Oxford with a more favourable eye. For it must be 
 confessed that his original distrust of the sister University 
 was beyond the normal degree of suspicion with which we 
 naturally regard one another. And the characteristic 
 infirmities of Oxford had seemed to him to culminate in 
 what was only too disastrously marked out as " the Oxford 
 Movement." But it was a surprise to him to find emerg- 
 ing out of this notorious misdirection of our spiritual 
 energies a social effort that appealed to the very principles 
 which he had been among the first to formulate. After 
 all, that fair City with its dreaming spires need not be 
 inevitably wrong. So it appeared. And he signalized 
 his new-born confidence in her by coming to a Christian 
 Social Union meeting in Christ Church Hall, and deliver- 
 ing a singularly rapt address on International Peace, which 
 none who heard will ever forget. I think that we may 
 claim to have given him the happiness of finding about 
 him, in his later years, a society, drawn from a younger 
 generation, wholly devoted to the social cause as he under- 
 stood and proclaimed it. He had the joy of knowing that 
 the great principle of human solidarity, which he had so 
 strenuously asserted, had become the accepted watchword 
 of all who were keen in social reform. 
 
 It was through the conception of solidarity that he had 
 interpreted the secret of the Fall, the Incarnation, the 
 Atonement ; and it was with the force of a disciplined 
 intellectual consistency, that he carried forward the formula 
 which had stood him in such good theological stead, over 
 the whole body of Economic and Political Society. 
 
 It was the ideal of corporate solidarity, which expressed 
 itself in his enthusiastic recognition of Co-operation in all
 
 Brooke Foss Westcott 135 
 
 its forms. He had the full ardour of the earlier belief in 
 all that Co-operation might effect, which was so character- 
 istic of Maurice and Kingsley ; and still is nobly embodied 
 in John Ludlow. He clung to its more prophetical form : 
 and reasserted it quite recently, as Mr. Holyoake records, 
 at a Co-operative Congress, in face of the Commercialism 
 which has tinged its purity. I think that he trusted to 
 its voluntary extension far more than to any State 
 Legislation for our ultimate economic redemption. The 
 high value that he set on the individual made him shy of 
 any compulsion that menaced it. 
 
 Perhaps this showed itself most forcibly in his ideal 
 of Education in which he made it the supreme function 
 of corporate authority to cherish and fertilize the vigour 
 of individual judgment. This was a favourite topic with 
 him, which he had elaborately formulated. He was never 
 finer than when idealizing the relationship of the true 
 teacher to the pupil, as in a magnificent address at the 
 Christian Social Union Annual Meeting at Bristol. 
 
 Solidarity became to him the key-word, again, in the 
 matter of International Peace. He felt strongly that 
 Christianity, with its prophetic conception of the variety 
 of Nations building up the body of the one complete 
 Humanity in the Flesh of the Christ, had laid the true" 
 grounds for universal Peace. It had carried the ideal of 
 Nationality forward into the fulness of a complex Inter- 
 nationalism, in which all Nations suffered by the wounding 
 of any one Nation, and for which the weakest and 
 smallest Nationality had its proper contribution to make.* 
 
 Once again in his last effort made on behalf of the 
 Christian Social Union in a sermon at Tufnell Park in 
 * See pp. 333 and 335 of Lessons from Work.
 
 136 Personal Studies 
 
 1900, he found in this corporate solidarity, or fellowship 
 of free peoples, the ideal towards which our British 
 Empire, in spite of all that marred and disfigured its 
 advance, was still heroically working.* 
 
 Yet, once again, it was the sense of personal service 
 due to the corporate fellowship which made him so 
 intensely urgent on the subject of expenditure. He had 
 a real passion for simplicity of life. He had astonished 
 the Harrow Boys, as ' : Bystander " has reminded us, by 
 appealing to the example of St. Francis. He had startled 
 respectable Cathedral Precincts by a wonderful ideal of 
 Monastic Families, gathered into a Conventional Order, 
 wives, children, and all. At Lambeth, he had hid himself 
 away from the Archiepiscopal pomp, with a mutton-chop 
 in the Lollard's Tower. He would retreat, to the very 
 last, from Archidiaconal hot-joints to a cold corner of a 
 railway station waiting-room surely the most forlorn 
 spot on this human earth of ours ! and sit there for an 
 hour or two, huddled in a shawl, engrossed in meditation. 
 Reasoned and measured simplicity was to him the ex- 
 pression of individual responsibility for public service. 
 He thought out every detail of the possibilities involved 
 in a vast and noble home like Bishop Auckland ; and his 
 misery at its splendour yielded as he discovered how 
 great were the opportunities it gave him of making its 
 glories a public possession. It was typical of the change 
 that has come over our dream that the famous Park, 
 which once held its hounds and its deer, was used by him 
 as a resting-home for exhausted pit ponies, against whose 
 hard usage in the pit he continually pleaded. He still 
 crept into his carriage as if it were a hearse ; but the 
 * Pages 370 and 381 of Lessons from Work.
 
 Brooke Foss Westcott 137 
 
 burden of his state sat much lighter on him as he realized 
 how practicable it was to use it as a trust. He valued private 
 property as the material for verifying a corporate service. 
 There was one department of human life which was 
 strange and unfamiliar to him, and in which he moved 
 with rare and doubtful steps. It was the world of sin. 
 He told us little about it. It was alien to him. Why 
 pry into it, or analyze it, or explore it ? He loathed it ; 
 and passed it by, wherever it was possible. He preferred 
 to uplift the ideal, and leave it to work its own victory. 
 If the sun were but up, would not the night, by that very 
 fact, have departed ? Somehow, that dark world is more 
 tenacious and persistent than he quite allowed for. When 
 his Archdeacons presented to him the carefully collected 
 case of an Incumbent who had broken every Command- 
 ment, he dismissed it on the ground (so it was reported) 
 that his category of humanity refused to admit the 
 existence of such a sinner. As the terrible facts of his 
 northern towns forced themselves upon his notice, he 
 became more vividly aware of the awful volume of evil. 
 But still, however deeply this disturbed him, it did not 
 provoke him to examine more closely the conditions of sin. 
 It remained a perturbing misery rather than an intelligible 
 experience. His purity of soul recoiled from its mystery, 
 and still sought for refuge in asserting the Ideal. This 
 accounts for a certain white intensity of optimism, which 
 characterizes his writings, and which keeps them slightly 
 aloof from things as they are. We wonder, as we read, 
 whether he has quite taken the full measure of the facts. 
 We sometimes feel as if the atmosphere were too fine to 
 live in, and as if the springs of human motive were left 
 untouched. There is no scathing light suddenly let in, to
 
 138 Personal Studies 
 
 lay bare the secrets of the soul, such as flashes from the 
 pages of Newman's sermons. We are not brought up to 
 judgment at the awful bar. This work was not for him. 
 Rather it was his to persuade us that all things were 
 possible with GOD; that evil was an alien thing, and 
 might be done away ; that human nature had the impulse 
 in it of eternity ; that the entire body of humanity was 
 moving towards its redemption in CHRIST JESUS. 
 
 He gave us hope, in an age which needed, above all 
 things, to be saved from hopelessness. " We can keep 
 hope fresh," so he cried to us of the Christian Social 
 Union. 
 
 " Hope, the paramount duty which Heaven lays, 
 For its own honour, on man's suffering heart." 
 
 This is the debt that we owe to him to cling to the high 
 hopes with which he was inspired even though we " see 
 not our token, and there is no prophet more ; no, not one 
 among us who understandeth any more."
 
 HENRY PARRY LIDDON * 
 
 NOT for a moment will I pretend that I write these 
 memorial words on Henry Parry Liddon in the spirit of 
 an impartial critic. On the contrary, I venture to write 
 them only in order that those thousands who admired and 
 honoured him in his public career, may know a little 
 more of what it was which those who had the privilege 
 of his intimacy, and who dearly loved him, felt to be the 
 peculiar value and significance of his personality. 
 
 Writing of him under the very shadow of his loss, 
 that significance and that value impress themselves with 
 special acuteness ; and the memory is quickened by an 
 affection which can with difficulty learn to believe that 
 a presence so vital and so exhilarating will never be found 
 at our side again, with the look and the speech that had, 
 for so long, been our delight. 
 
 What is it that we should say of him, if we are 
 asked why we attributed to him such peculiar value ? 
 
 I need not touch on all those obvious gifts of his, 
 which were revealed through his preaching and his 
 writing, and which are public property. He had literary 
 and theological learning ; he had style ; he had rhetorical 
 skill and passion. All this I can assume to be acknow- 
 ledged ; but what was it in him which gave force and 
 colour to all this ? 
 
 * Contemporary Review, October 1890. 
 139
 
 140 Personal Studies 
 
 Well, he had that which we call "distinction." You 
 might agree with him, or not agree ; you might criticize 
 and discuss his gifts ; but, anyhow, he had the quality of 
 speciality. In any roomful of men, his presence was felt 
 with a distinct and rare impression. If he let himself 
 speak, his voice, manner, style, articulation, arrested you ; 
 you wanted to listen to him, whoever else was speaking ; 
 his phrases, his expressions, caught your ear. Here was 
 somebody notable ; so you knew. He stood out from his 
 fellows ; there was a flavour in his company which was 
 unique. 
 
 And this impression is one which belonged to character ; 
 it was not the result of any particular and separate gift, 
 but it made itself known through them all. Whatever 
 he did or said was unlike another's ; was characteristic of 
 himself. And this was what gave him, to those who had 
 the joy of his friendship, such intense and unfailing interest. 
 In days such as ours, when the average standard of culture, 
 and cleverness, and character is so high, it requires a most 
 remarkable force of inward energy for any one to show 
 himself clearly and distinctly above the average. It is 
 this which makes the present generation of educated men 
 appear so strangely dull and commonplace. Such crowds 
 of men can come up to a very decent level ; so very, very 
 few can pass it. The result is that they all look exactly 
 alike ; they all talk with about the same ability ; they all 
 conform to a very respectable standard of knowledge and 
 reading and wits ; we feel that they have all been through 
 a common mill. It is a very good mill. We do not deny 
 that ; only, good as are Huntley and Palmer's Reading 
 Mills, it must be confessed that the biscuits are very much 
 alike. This feeling of the common average weighs upon
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 141 
 
 us, and depresses. It makes us humbly conscious that 
 nobody need be missed that there is certain to be only 
 too many who are ready to take his place, and who will 
 do as well as he. 
 
 And, therefore, it is with quite a peculiar and exces- 
 sive delight that we recognize one who, like Liddon, so 
 obviously stands apart from, and above, the average. He 
 had kept his contours free; he had never let himself be 
 ground down to the ordinary mould. He had got the 
 tono and quality that could never be mistaken for 
 another's. He was, in a word, intensely interesting. To 
 watch him, to catch his glance, his gestures, his motions, 
 his intonation, was a perpetual joy in itself. Everything 
 that came from him, in word or deed, was exactly typical 
 of him. It was so sure to be like him, that it gave you the 
 shock of a delicious surprise, every time it happened 
 the surprise, not of a novelty, but of recognizing so intense 
 an identity under a novel form. You seized on it with 
 the laughing glee of a scientific enthusiast pouncing on 
 a new specimen, in some unexpected spot, of a favourite 
 or familiar organism. You mentally treasured up the 
 saying, or the act, whatever it was ; you went about 
 repeating or reacting it ; you laughed quietly to yourself 
 alone as you recalled it. This gave to his companionship 
 an inexhaustible charm ; it was impossible even to be 
 with him beyond a few minutes without adding to your 
 stores of refreshing memories of this kind. Up something 
 was pure to come ; and it bubbled up so instinctively ; 
 and it threw itself into such varied and unexpected forms ; 
 and if once a vein was started, it developed so freely and 
 so richly ; and the happy words flowed along with such 
 amazing rapidity of selection ; and he became so confident
 
 142 Personal Studies 
 
 and insistent and abundant, as he felt the reflex of your 
 enjoyment in it ; and his eye so kindled with merriment 
 and keenness and animation, and his face so twinkled 
 with expressive motions and brimming fancies, that, 
 when at last you managed to drag yourself out of his 
 affectionate grasp, as he followed you out of his room to 
 the top of the stairs, and still held both your hands in 
 his, and still had some last irrepressible epithet or in- 
 imitable phrase to add to the many already showered 
 upon you, you disappeared glowing with the sense that 
 certainly there was no talk like Liddon's no one quite 
 so special and so vitalizing. 
 
 Of course, for this to happen he required to know you, 
 to know exactly where he stood toward you ; no one was 
 more sensitive to the social atmosphere about him. He 
 could never expand like this except when he was sure of 
 his surroundings. Until he had made himself aware of 
 his company, he would repress every signal or suggestion 
 of it all. People might interview him or meet him 
 and never suspect the fund of imaginative and ironical 
 humour that he was holding in restraint. But once give 
 him confidence in you, and, so long as he was in decent 
 health, these funds never failed you. The humour was 
 instructive and overflowing. Not even dark hours of 
 anxiety would be enough to subdue it. Even at times 
 when he was writing letters full of the blackest forebodings, 
 and when he was penetrated with pessimistic distresses, 
 still, in the evening, when you caught him free to talk, 
 the delicious springs of fun and brilliancy would bubble 
 and brim with the same inevitable felicity. Mr. Frederick 
 Harrison, in his touching little picture of him, harps on 
 his sweet and gentle melancholy. This conveys a very
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 143 
 
 partial impression. I should say that, gentle as was his 
 manner, with its soft tenderness of courtesy, and its 
 priestly touch of anxiety, still there was no one on earth 
 whose eye was so sure to greet one with a beaming look of 
 alertness, or who was so quick in response to any fun. Nor, 
 again, should I say that his habitual gentleness could at 
 all conceal the fire that glowed beneath it, and which 
 would kindle into ready flame at any provocation that 
 was aware how to rouse it. There were subjects on 
 which he would speak with a vehement excitement that 
 grew hotter as it found words; and he had this mark 
 of the natural orator, that the language would win 
 epigrammatic force and precision, according to the measure 
 of heat that burned behind it ; and again the brilliancy 
 of the epigrams that flowed from his lips would feed and 
 renew the heat. At such times it was evident how 
 explosive were the forces of that sensitive physique 
 which he had to manage and control under the restraint 
 of a delicate and disciplined courtesy. 
 
 Such a personality, so fresh, so vivid, so abundant, so 
 elastic, so vivacious, was bound to be ever interesting and 
 ever charming. Nor was this freshness, this elasticity of 
 character, the least diminished by the fact that, intellect- 
 ually, his lines were singularly formal and motionless. On 
 the contrary, is it not often true that humour and imagin- 
 ation play with the fullest freedom round and about an 
 intellectual pivot which is absolutely fixed ? The very 
 fixity of the conviction sets these forces loose, unhindered 
 by any interior anxiety. They are relieved from the 
 labour of working out and determining the position to be 
 taken up, and their entire energy is free to skirmish 
 outside to attack, to defend, to repudiate, to " chaff," to
 
 144 Personal Studies 
 
 detect weak points in an opponent's armour, to summon 
 up all available resources in succour of the position adopted. 
 Definite and unhesitating convictions are an immense 
 gain to the advocate and logician; they form the finest 
 background for humour, for irony, for imagination. The 
 man whose convictions are themselves in the act of 
 growing is bound to offer magnificent opportunities to 
 a quick and acute logic, and to a brilliant sense of the 
 ridiculous. Such opportunities were never missed by 
 Liddon. He had all his weapons ready. His appreciation 
 of the absurd was like an instinct, and the moment that 
 the absurb had been sighted, his imagination was up 
 and after it, like a greyhound slipped from the leash. 
 
 Here was his power in talk, and in writing. His in- 
 tellect, as such, would never stir. You could anticipate, 
 exactly, the position from which he would start. It never 
 varied. He had won clear hold on the dogmatic expres- 
 sions by which the Church of the Councils secured the 
 Catholic belief in the Incarnation; and there he stood 
 with unalterable tenacity. Abstract ideas did not appeal 
 to him ; for philosophy he had no liking, though naturally 
 he could not fail in handling it to show himself a man of 
 cultivated ability. But it did not affect him at all : he 
 never felt drawn to get inside it. He did not work in 
 that region. His mental tone was intensely practical ; 
 it was Latin, it was French, in sympathy and type. For 
 Teutonic speculation he had a most amusing repugnance. 
 Its misty magniloquence, its grotesque bulk, its immense 
 clumsiness, its laborious pedantry, which its best friends 
 admit, brought out everything in him that was alert, 
 rapid, compact, practical, effective, humorous. There 
 was nothing against which his entire armoury came into
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 145 
 
 more vivid play. His brilliant readiness, his penetrating 
 irony, his quick sense of proportion, his admirable and 
 scholarly restraint, his delicate grace, his fastidious felicity 
 of utterance. There was no attraction on the speculative 
 side to make him hesitate in these excursions of his ; he 
 saw no reason to expect any gain from these philosophers, 
 while, on the other hand, he was acutely alive to the 
 peril of such intellectual adventures. 
 
 So he stood, absolutely rooted, in the region of thought. 
 Nothing occurred to colour or expand his intellectual 
 fabric. To novel ideas to the ideas that are still in growth, 
 especially he offered no welcome, so far as his own inner 
 habit of mind was concerned. Of course, he was quick 
 enough to perceive them, to estimate them, to handle 
 them, to place them. He was on the alert to deal with 
 them ; he was acutely sensitive to the exact points at 
 which they touched his position. But he never enjoyed 
 them for their own sake. Reason to him was a tool, 
 a weapon, a talent committed in charge; but hardly a 
 life. And perhaps, in saying all this, we can relieve Mr. 
 Frederick Harrison of his wonder how any one, with a 
 mind so inelastic, could have had such immense influence. 
 As with the humourist, so with the orator and the 
 preacher, a fixed intellectual base is incomparable gain. 
 The preachers who produce the deepest effects are those 
 who, having fast hold of the elemental religious principles 
 which their hearers already hold, but hold hesitatingly, or 
 hold as in a dream, or hold without knowing what they 
 hold, draw these out from the darkness in which they lie 
 buried, and force them into activity, and vividly manifest 
 the reality of their application to heart and conduct. That 
 is what moves men so profoundly ; they come to church
 
 146 Personal Studies 
 
 professing a creed, they hope that they believe it ; but it 
 slumbers, inoperative and inert, without practical force 
 without any direct or effectual significance. The preacher 
 reads out the secret ; he takes up this assumed creed ; 
 he gives it actual meaning ; he spreads it out over the 
 surface of life ; he brings it to bear on the real facts of 
 daily conduct with incision and with fire. 
 
 Now, in all this Liddon was supreme. Inelastic in his 
 intellectual frame work, he was eminently elastic in every 
 other field of life in sympathy, in imagination, in affection, 
 in sensibility, in logical acuteness, in mental alertness, in 
 modes of expression, in times of feeling. Here was all 
 motion, rapidity, change. No one could appreciate a 
 situation with finer or more delicate intuition ; no one 
 could exhibit a more subtle variety of temperament, a 
 more spontaneous identification of himself with the shifting 
 needs of the moment. -Here he would become " all things 
 to all men " ; he could understand everything in a flash, 
 the meaning would be caught up and expressed with pre- 
 eminent happiness of insight. Thus he had the double 
 gift of the preacher. He impressed, he overawed, he 
 mastered, by the sense of unshaken solidity which his 
 mental characteristics assumed to him. Men felt the 
 force of a position which was as a rock amid the surging 
 seas. Here was the fixity, the security, the eternal 
 reassurance most needed by those who wondered sadly 
 whether the sands under their feet were shifting or 
 no. And yet at the service of this unmoving creed was 
 a brain, a heart, alive with infinite motion, abounding in 
 rich variety, fertile, resourceful, quickening, expansive, vital. 
 
 And if we add to this a strong will, possessed of 
 unswerving courage, and utterly fearless of the world, we
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 147 
 
 shall see that there was in him all the elements that 
 constitute a great director of souls. For such a function 
 he had just the right combinations of gifts, rigid and 
 decisive spiritual principles, applied to the details of life 
 with all the pliability of a sympathetic imagination and of 
 illuminative affection. The moment he entered the sphere 
 of personal relations, his intense honour for each soul in 
 its separateness, his exquisite courtesy, his unfailing 
 tenderness, his eager unselfishness, his perfect simplicity, 
 all served to temper and connect the rigidities of his 
 intellectual formulae. It must remain to us a matter 
 of poignant regret, that he persisted in a strange and 
 invincible refusal to undertake Retreats, for which he had 
 shown in early days at Cuddesdon quite a peculiar 
 aptitude, and for which he seemed obviously endowed 
 with every qualification that could be desired.* He was 
 a priest to the core of cores a priest by nature as well as 
 by grace. Already, as a boy, he moved about as a priest 
 among the rest, we are told. Instinctively he bent all to 
 edification ; instinctively he wore the names of others on 
 his breast. I can scarcely imagine any one who would 
 surpass him in conducting a Clerical Retreat. He had all 
 the strength and the gentleness, which, in union with his 
 strong spiritual insight, would have ranked him, so far 
 as we can judge, among the masters of the spiritual life. 
 Yet, in spite of reiterated entreaties, he abstained from all 
 such opportunities ; he resolutely declared himself unfitted. 
 He confined himself to private ministrations, to interviews, 
 to letter writing, holding himself, indeed, entirely at the 
 mercy of correspondents, and keeping his door open to all 
 who came there for counsel and good cheer. 
 
 * Of. R. Randall, " Retreat Addresses," Preface, p. xi.
 
 148 Personal Studies 
 
 I have attempted to show how unique was the position 
 of him whom we have lost. And such as this he had 
 been for twenty-five years. There was no one at all 
 to challenge his particular position. That position was 
 historically noticeable, in that, apart from his own per- 
 sonal eminence as a preacher and theologican, he served 
 to bind the later Ritualistic movement to the old 
 Tractarian centre. What we call " Ritualism " only means 
 the effort to diffuse over the parish life of town and country 
 that which the Tractarians had revived and secured in the 
 university. This diffusion carried the movement far afield ; 
 it had to make adventurous experiments, often in young 
 hands, under rough and irregular conditions. It might 
 have got quite out of hand. And then, of course, the 
 children of those who had stoned Tractarianism were now 
 ready to glorify their old foe, at the expense of their 
 new and swarming enemy. They spoke of the academic 
 dignity, of the illustrious learning, of the lofty intellectual 
 calibre, of the great leaders of Tractarianism. This was 
 safe enough now that most of those, who had not long ago 
 gone over to Rome, were beginning to grow old and to 
 die. They scornfully contrasted with those great names the 
 unknown crowd of clergy, fervent but ignorant, who were 
 spreading the new movement in the lanes and slums. They 
 were rash ; they were reckless ; they were silly. The 
 movement once so dignified was vulgarized. So men 
 complained ; and it was everything that, at such a moment, 
 there should be a personality like Liddon's in absolute 
 touch with the new men, in fullest sympathy with all that 
 they were attempting, and yet himself lodged tight and fast 
 in honourable places of the old university a professor, a 
 theologian, a unique figure in its pulpit ; and, moreover,
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 149 
 
 one to whom the outside public was compelled to listen 
 with respect ; who had a reputation which told on the 
 imagination of the world at large. Thus in binding the 
 earlier and later stages of the Church movement together, 
 Liddon, who was at once in the intimate and affectionate 
 confidence of the great academic chief who still worked 
 and prayed in the corner of the great quadrangle at 
 Christ Church, and the greatest power in the pulpit at 
 St. Mary's and yet had also been the fellow-curate of 
 Maconochie at Wantage, and had, as Vice-Principal of 
 Cuddesdon, inspired the very men who were doing the 
 Catholic work in street and field, was, for the last 
 twenty-five years, of incalculable importance to the 
 Church. 
 
 And it was in bridging these significant years by the 
 force of a most noticeable personality that he told, too, 
 upon us, the younger brood at Oxford, to whom he gave 
 himself in such simple and delightful familiarity. He 
 introduced into our midst the intensity, the fibre, the 
 moral toughness of the old Tractarians. He had their 
 rigorous unworldliness, their unflinching courage, their 
 disciplined self-repression, their definite and masterful direc- 
 tion, their spiritual beauty, their unearthly force. We, on the 
 other hand, had come under many influences which were 
 wholly foreign to all under which the older movement 
 grew. The currents of thought that fed the education of 
 the day had been changed. The English utilitarianism had 
 yielded to the sway of speculative floods, which had been 
 set moving in German universities. These influences had 
 gone very deep in us ; they had passed into our innermost 
 habits of reasoning; they had dyed our mental moods. 
 Their pressure had fallen upon us just at an age when we
 
 i 50 Personal Studies 
 
 were most receptive ; we could not but be moulded and 
 penetrated by them. The result was inevitable. Much to 
 which Liddon had closed the doors instinctively, was already 
 inside us by the very conditions of our growth. We had 
 offered ourselves to it at an age when every door and 
 window in us was as wide open as it could bear to be. We 
 had therefore absorbed, according to our abilities, that 
 which he held at arm's length with suspicion and repug- 
 nance. This could not but tell in matters of Christian 
 apology. We had imbibed another logical temper than 
 his ; we could not approach a problem by his method, nor 
 deal with it according to his measures. One of his genera- 
 tion, and, above all, one still living of the generation older 
 than his, whom it is needless to name, had, in all such 
 matters, drawn much nearer to us than he. He resolutely 
 kept himself aloof from the influences that had entered 
 the modern life and had changed its intellectual temper. 
 
 This could not but be a sorrow ; but yet it remained 
 that, by different routes, we arrived at the same goal. Our 
 conclusion was his conclusion. For still, it was " JESUS 
 CHRIST, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever." Still, 
 it was the doctrine of the Incarnation, as witnessed by 
 Church and Scripture, which was the sum and substance 
 of all our apology. All his positive vital convictions were 
 ours also. And here he brought to bear upon us the 
 authoritative conviction which we, in our littleness, most 
 needed. For we were shaken and confused by the new 
 powers that had taken hold of the intellectual life. We 
 were staggering about ; we were often lifted off our feet ; 
 we were weaklings caught in a strong stream. And i^ 
 was everything to have before us one who gave us a 
 standard of what spiritual conviction should mean ;. who
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 151 
 
 never cringed, or shrank, or compromised, or slid ; one who 
 looked unswervingly on the eternal things ; one who was 
 evidence to us of what the Sacraments of the Incarnation 
 could work in those who were yielded to them in body, soul, 
 and spirit ; one who had committed his all to the dominion 
 and service of CHRIST, " casting down before it all reason- 
 ings and every high thing that exalteth itself against 
 the knowledge of GOD, and bringing into captivity every 
 thought to the obedience of CHRIST." There he was ; 
 there was no mistaking him. He would die gladly for his 
 Creed ; we felt it, we knew it, and it shamed us and 
 braced us just when shame and bracing were most needful. 
 
 Ah ! and then, on the common ground of his and our 
 positive convictions, he gave us everything that was 
 exhilarating and attractive in personal intimacy. He drew 
 us with the cords of a man. He communed with us freely, 
 with that most joyful and blessed communion of mind and 
 heart which is impossible except for those who walk 
 together in the same house of GOD as friends. Only 
 to those who came within the warmth and security of 
 a common faith could he set free all the glowing fervours 
 and the most radiant fascinations of his personal character. 
 But to them everything was opened with the most 
 winning freedom and in the richest abundance. To the very 
 last it was the same ; the bond held fast, however annoying 
 and erratic we became. Never did I find him more buoyantly 
 at ease, more burning with confidential mirth and playful 
 affection, than when I met him at Oxford on the Sunday 
 before his final illness. 
 
 He was the most beautiful of friends. It is the loss of 
 this that has taken so much sunlight from our days, and 
 has made our daily life feel so beggared and so thin. Often
 
 152 Personal Studies 
 
 and often in the years to come we shall turn, by happy 
 habit, to feel it at hand, only to remember with a fresh 
 touch of sadness that GOD has taken from us that 
 presence that was so beautiful, so dear. 
 
 " All our days we shall go softlier, sadlier," as those who 
 are aware that a glory has gone from their life ; yet as 
 those who, from the very bottom of their hearts, give 
 thanks to the LORD and SAVIOUR who has him in good 
 keeping, that it was once their honour and their joy to 
 know and to love Henry Parry Liddon.
 
 THE LIFE OF HENRY PARRY LIDDON * 
 
 THE life is told through the letters. Mr. Johnston has 
 kept himself strikingly in reserve, and has been content 
 to give the letters their connection and place : to select 
 them, to explain the circumstances out of which they arose. 
 He has done this with singular discretion and right insight. 
 He leaves them to give their own report of their author. 
 
 Now, letters are always delightful reading : and these 
 letters are keen, effective, and real. They carry one back 
 into the very heart of many stormy hours, in the troubled 
 years of conflict and controversy. But the fallacy of a Life 
 based on letters lies in its tendency to hide out of sight all 
 that the letters happen to omit. There are matters of 
 the deepest possible interest in any life, to which the man 
 himself will be the last person to refer. Nor, of course, 
 Avill he convey to us by his own hand the impression that 
 he produced on others; or the characteristics that made 
 him dear ; or the man that he was when he had not got 
 his pen at work. 
 
 But Liddon was, above all things, a personality to be 
 felt, he left his mark on men and things as he moved ; he 
 
 * Life and Letters of Henry Parry Liddon. Edited by J. O. 
 Johnston. Longmans, Green and Co. 1904. 
 
 153
 
 i 54 Personal Studies 
 
 inspired vivid impressions, and kindled passions and 
 woke affections, and stirred the drama of human life 
 into intensity of emotion and action. You cannot tell 
 the story of what he was, unless this electric effect of his 
 presence upon men is given, in all its tingling vitality. It 
 was this that made him the man that we loved to hear 
 and follow : it was this that gave him his supreme power 
 as a preacher. Yet this book, keeping close to the letters, 
 fails to convey this impression ; and it happens that one 
 or two very distinctive moments in his career receive no 
 particular attention in the letters ; and, thus, the dramatic 
 effect of his appearance on the scene of public affairs 
 disappears. For instance, the famous lectures in St. 
 James's, Piccadilly, in 1870, get but a passing notice : yet 
 they were an epoch in London life, and in their effect on 
 Liddon's reputation. Was anything ever seen like the 
 sensation that they produced ? Those smart crowds packed 
 tight, Sunday after Sunday, to listen for an hour and forty 
 minutes to a sermon that spoke straight home to their 
 elemental souls. It was amazing ! London never again 
 shook with so vehement an emotion. " Society," in its 
 vague aggravating ignorance, believed itself to have 
 discovered Liddon. How indignant we used to get with 
 the rapturous " Duchesses " who asked whether we had ever 
 heard of this wonderful new preacher ? Why, for years 
 before we had stood ranked thick on each others' toes, in 
 huddled St. Mary's, to catch every word of the ringing 
 voice ! Those belated Duchesses, indeed ! Yet it was 
 something that, however late in the day, they should all 
 feel it necessary for their reputation to be there at St. 
 James's. 
 
 Then, the unhappy impaled Bulgarian plays but a
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 155 
 
 fleeting part in the book, hardly to be discerned. Yet 
 that was a moment, never to be forgotten, when Liddon 
 challenged the united hostility of England's Officialdom. 
 And how vivid was his insistence in after years in making 
 you look through the splendid glasses which had shown 
 him the gruesome sight close at hand : and, then, in 
 contrasting their immediate evidence with that of the 
 British Consul who, at a distance of 800 miles, off and 
 on, from the spot, suggested that it might possibly have 
 been a bag of beans on a post, and on the strength of 
 this incredible suggestion, has got himself believed by all 
 intelligent Englishmen to this day. 
 
 Or, again, those sermons in the Lent Courses of Bishop 
 Wilberforce, at St. Mary's, Oxford ! Can we ever forget 
 them ? Could we tear the memory out of our hearts ? 
 Can Liddon's life be written without a picture of the 
 moving sight ? The swarms of undergraduates, herded 
 in galleries, in deep rows, or crowded into every nook and 
 corner on the floor ; the lights ; the unwonted fact that 
 we were all there in church ; the odd weird length of 
 Burgon giving out the hymn in a shrill piping voice ; 
 the young voices released, in their joy, to sing some old 
 friend like " SAVIOUR, when in dust to Thee " ; the mighty 
 hush of expectation ; and then the thrill of that vibrant 
 voice, alive with all the passion of the hour, vehement, 
 searching, appealing, pleading, ringing ever higher as the 
 great argument lifted him ; the swift turns of the 
 beautiful face, as he flung out over us some burning 
 ironic phrase, or quivering challenge : the beads on the 
 brow that told of the force expended : the grace, the move- 
 ment, the fire, the sincerity of it all. It was wonderful 
 to us. We lived on the memory of it till next Lent came
 
 156 Personal Studies 
 
 round, and then there we all were again : the same scene 
 enacted itself, the same voice pleaded with us for our souls. 
 So, from year to year, in our weak, boyish hearts the 
 flickering flame of faith was saved from perishing under 
 the gusty tumult of the perilous times. 
 
 There is another characteristic of Liddon which escapes 
 notice in the book his splendid speaking. Very rarely, 
 indeed, could he be induced to make a speech. He 
 hardly ever would go on a platform. He avoided all 
 conceivable oratorical opportunities. But, when he did 
 speak, you felt that he was as excellently gifted for 
 it as for preaching. He had the un-English power 
 of becoming more terse and epigrammatic the more he 
 was moved. Two or three delicious occasions I well 
 remember. Once, at the Cuddesdon Festival, when King 
 had just been appointed Professor, and Dr. W. Jelf had 
 written a pamphlet, charging Bright and King with 
 patronizing all the Ritual excesses of St. Barnabas, and 
 inquiring how far they meant to go, with the motto 
 " Quousque tandem ? " Liddon at the Lunch pictured 
 King riding into Oxford on his cob to take up his duties, 
 and finding himself stopped by an old gentleman with 
 not much to do, on Magdalen Bridge, who is saying: 
 " Quousque tandem, Mr. Professor of Pastoral Theology ? " 
 Then he gave King's imagined answer in a series of 
 retorts which flew like pistol-shots round the tent, each 
 beginning " I am not going to stop until . . . . " I 
 only recall one now : " I am not going to stop until I 
 have convinced the young men of Oxford that the Church 
 of England is something more than the shell of an estab- 
 lishment ! " The effect of the stinging epigrams, as they 
 followed on each other's heels, delivered with flashing eye
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 157 
 
 and the tense utterance of passionate conviction, was 
 absolutely electrical. 
 
 Then, there was the famous speech at the Union 
 Jubilee Dinner in the Cornmarket, Oxford, which had 
 the disastrous effect of reducing Matthew Arnold to 
 speechlessness. We had toiled on through an enormous 
 array of speeches : Lord Salisbury, Lord Selborne, Lord 
 Coleridge, and more : Archbishop Manning had given us a 
 mournful funeral oration on the dead : we had got wearied 
 and despairing : it was drawing on to midnight : every 
 speaker apologized for its being so late, and then rambled 
 on through the long speech that he could not bring him- 
 self to shorten. Yet still we hung on in hope to hear 
 Liddon propose Literature, coupled with the name of 
 Matthew Arnold. It would be worth dying in our chairs 
 to hear this. " Tom " was getting himself together for his 
 midnight effort, before it was reached. Liddon rose. In 
 a moment we had risen out of a corpse-like listlessness 
 into acute attention. He shot out each perfect sentence ; 
 he delicately chaffed : he stole to the very edge of danger- 
 ous ground, and then, as we trembled lest he should go 
 too far, he sheered off through some felicitous phrase ; he 
 praised, yet retained sincerity : he let us feel the gulf 
 that yawned between him and his subject, yet never 
 forced the matter. It was exquisite in banter, real in 
 emotion, flawless in expression. When he sat down, we 
 found ourselves shouting in an enthusiasm of which we 
 had thought ourselves incapable at that exhausted hour. 
 And Matt ? Well, he took the measure of the situation. 
 It was obviously impossible at that late hour to produce 
 an effect that could stand against Liddon's. He gave it 
 up. " Everybody else who has spoken has said it was
 
 158 Personal Studies 
 
 time to go to bed : and I am one who believes it." So he 
 rose, said, and sat down, leaving his speech where it was 
 in his pocket : and out we streamed into the street. 
 
 The book tells us something of Liddon's travel : but it 
 hardly gives the idea of his insatiable and amusing 
 voracity in sights. He was the ideal tourist the tourist 
 " sub specie eternitatis," as Mr. Haldane would say. He 
 loved sight-seeing as such : and nothing came amiss. He 
 liked to see every church in every town, however ugly it 
 might be. His friend, Vere Bayne, who so often took him 
 round French towns, would turn him into a church, and 
 then buy a bag of cherries to eat until Liddon came out. 
 If when he had finished the cherries no Liddon had emerged 
 he knew that the worst had happened : Liddon was in the 
 sacristry, and out of this nothing but physical force could 
 remove him. Bayne had to dig him out like a lost ferret. 
 Dodgson had a legend that Liddon, on his Russian tour, 
 had started gaily in one sacristy to work through seventy- 
 three copes and vestments. On a tour he was at his 
 gayest. He had the wonder of a child, combined with the 
 associations of a man of high cultivation. He was never 
 tired of showing us the photographs of his last great trip 
 to Egypt and Palestine, when he would dramatize, in his 
 own inimitable way, the incidents, e.g. of his interview 
 with the Patriarch of Jerusalem, when, burning with 
 many thoughts, he was countered, first, by an inquiry 
 from the Patriarch as to the Queen's communicating in 
 the kirk: and then, when this point had been skilfully 
 skirmished round, two photographs were produced from a 
 drawer, one of Archbishop Tait, I think, in full-blown 
 magpie, and another of a Scotch bishop, gorgeous in cope, 
 mitre and staff; and the Patriarch observed that they
 
 Henry Parry Liddon i 59 
 
 appeared to be differently dressed. Liddon carefully ex- 
 amined them, and said that it certainly was so. " How is 
 this ? " asked the astonished Patriarch. Liddon observed 
 that we had two traditions as to how a bishop should be 
 dressed, and these were examples. The Patriarch looked 
 at him as if he hoped that he was speaking the truth, and 
 said : " Is not that very awkward, to possess two tradi- 
 tions ? " " Yes ! It certainly was." " Would it not be 
 well to settle on one, as soon as possible ? " " It would 
 be most advisable." And at last, to his intense relief, the 
 photographs were laid aside : but he felt his reputation 
 had been shaken. 
 
 Then there was the Papal Nuncio, who made such 
 friends on the voyage from Beyrout to Constantinople, 
 and became very confidential, and told him that his 
 instructions from the Holy Father were that he should 
 make every possible advance to the Patriarch of Constan- 
 tinople, and so he did, and got some way, only to find 
 himself beaten by some impassable wall. " Indeed," said 
 Liddon, " and to what do you attribute the wall ? " 
 " Well," said the Nuncio, " one must seek for causes very 
 far back in history : and he could not but think that the 
 Greek still had a sense of soreness at having been con- 
 quered by the Romans in ancient days." " No doubt," 
 said Liddon, " these causes lie deep : but need one go back 
 quite as far as that ? Might not more recent facts have 
 something to do with it such as the sacking of Constan- 
 tinople by the Western Crusaders ? " The Nuncio gave a 
 disturbed start, and cried : " Ah ! Cela ! Cfetait une 
 betise ! " After that, the Nuncio was not so confidential. 
 Liddon never firmly denied the famous story of the bak- 
 sheesh, which was so large that it enabled his dragoman
 
 1 60 Personal Studies 
 
 at once to add a new wife to his establishment. He, at any 
 rate, entered into the domestic perplexities of the captain 
 of his dahabeah, whose wife at Assouan complained bitterly 
 that the other wife at Cairo had all the fun, and pleaded 
 that each should have a spell in the gay city, turn and 
 turn about. Liddon entirely sympathized with this claim 
 for equal justice, and gave his judgment in favour of the 
 lady at Assouan. 
 
 His gracious winning courtesy cannot be expressed 
 through the medium of letters. Nothing was more 
 characteristic of him. His quick and affectionate " Thank 
 you ! Thank you ! " rescued him out of many emergencies. 
 He tumbled on his stairs one day, and on scrambling up, 
 saw an immense coal-carrier, who looked down on him in 
 amazement, and did nothing at all : but Liddon caught, 
 as he thought, some faint touch of sympathy in his eye, 
 and gave him his hearty thanks : " Thank you ! Thank 
 you ! " " Ah ! Dr. Liddon ! " cried the Liberal agent who 
 met him coming out of the polling-booth where he had 
 just voted Conservative, as he did on one historic occasion : 
 " Glad to see you ; one of us, I presume ? " " Thank, you ! 
 Thank you ! " said Liddon, as he affectionately clasped his 
 hand, and the secrecy of the Ballot was saved. His cour- 
 tesy to the poor was always beautiful. It was sorely tried 
 on one occasion, when walking with Paget, I think, in the 
 Hinksey meadow, they found a stout lady prostrated in a 
 ditch. On being tenderly raised and lifted to her feet, she 
 pronounced the cause to be " sun-stroke," and proposed to 
 go home. Liddon was all pity, and offered his arm, and 
 they started. But on nearing Osney, it appeared that the 
 lady was widely known. Boys ran round, saluting her as 
 " the Duchess." Cries of " Hullo, Duchess " arose. Porters
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 161 
 
 looked over the railway bridge, and called : " I say, 
 Duchess ! Who have you got hold of now ? " The lady 
 moved along, in triumph, on the arm of the bending clergy- 
 man, wreathed in smiles : and still Liddon never faltered 
 until they reached her door in St. Thomas's, escorted by an 
 admiring crowd. Never had the good lady had such a day. 
 He was the terror and the plague of the Charity Organiza- 
 tion Society. Several old men who sold pencils in the 
 streets were popularly believed to be sustained in existence 
 by his constant purchases. I remember how he flamed up, 
 at a little Sunday dinner with Bayne and Kitchin, at the 
 mention of the poor law : and his fiery indignation grew 
 out of some event in his old curacy at Wantage, when he 
 had given some pictures to relieve the hideous workhouse 
 walls, only to find them removed by unbending Guardians. 
 Mr. Sampson has recorded, in a most beautiful paper 
 contributed to the Life,, something of what he was as a 
 colleague and a companion to those of us who had the 
 happy privilege of being with him at Christ Church. 
 There was nobody in the least like him. Every mood, 
 every word, were unique, with the distinction which 
 belongs to a marked and original personality. There at 
 Christ Church we saw him at his freest : and then it was 
 that his incomparable humour bubbled over the brim with 
 irresponsible spontaneity. Only, for this to happen, he 
 had to be quite sure of his atmosphere. " Liddon shut up 
 like an oyster," so somebody records of a meeting with 
 Archbishop Tait. That is just what he would do instinct- 
 ively if the merriment was not congenial. Even to those 
 with whom he was familiar, he would hardly reveal his 
 humour unless he was sure of himself. I remember that 
 Lord Acton, after walks and talks of great intimacy with
 
 1 62 Personal Studies 
 
 him, was quite surprised when I spoke of it. Yet, at 
 home, in some congenial circle, it was simply inevitable 
 and inexhaustible. It penetrated every theme : it rollicked 
 and frollicked. It used to positively disgrace the mild 
 austerities of a fish tea on Fridays, at which he used to 
 delight in joining us. The result would be a babel of 
 happy and uproarious laughter on all matters little or 
 great. And all of it was only the natural release of the 
 man in him. Out it flowed, and every word was spiced 
 with some delight. Of course, there is no possibility of 
 recalling fun like this. And, oddly enough, there is very 
 little of it in his letters : so that the book does nothing 
 for us here. He had a fatal habit of answering every letter 
 by return of post. This is magnificent as a matter of 
 discipline, but it is not letter-writing. It reduces it to a 
 duty. It kills the free spirit of spontaneous outbreaks. 
 This I think is why the letters do not really convey 
 any idea of the brilliant versatility, of the delicious play 
 of his mind. 
 
 He was charming at a walk. Every country sight he 
 saw pleased him. " There is the corncrake," he would say, 
 stopping to listen to its monotonous croak. " Do you sup- 
 pose that by that effort he won the heart of Mrs. Corn- 
 crake ? Do you not admire, dear friend, the moral earnest- 
 ness of the bird ? It goes on saying the only truth that 
 it knows, however unpalatable that truth may be." He 
 collected all sorts of treasures, flowers, tinted leaves or 
 grasses, to be carried in his hat : and there was an Oxford 
 rumour of the disastrous results that followed his meeting 
 with Mrs. Liddell on the return journey, to whom he bowed 
 with his accustomed politeness, to find himself crowned 
 with his spoils.
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 163 
 
 This delicious companionship of his never failed us, even 
 when we had gone in for doing all the things which he 
 thought hopeless and compromising. He despaired of the 
 new Oxford : he could not adapt himself to its illogical 
 rumble-tumble. And illogical it all was, with no con- 
 sistent interpretation of itself, and with its ancient con- 
 structive spirit gone out of it. He would not take part in 
 our little efforts to make use of the opportunities left us. 
 " What is the advantage," he would ask, " in combing the 
 hair of a corpse ? " It was at this time that he delivered 
 his epigram about the University Commission under Lord 
 Selborne's chairmanship. I remember hearing it from a 
 cousin who met me in London, who said : " What is this 
 that Liddon has been telling us at Hatfield ? He declares 
 that Lord Selborne is stripping the University of even the 
 fragments of religion which the older Commission of 1852 
 had left it. In fact, he says that what the locust had left, the 
 Palmer-worm had eaten." Those who recall the relentless 
 pertinacity of Lord Selborne will appreciate the full force 
 of the analogy. I was Proctor when he preached the 
 sermon which bade all Churchmen wipe the dust off their 
 feet, and abandon Oxford for Zanzibar, where they might 
 give themselves to the service of the Catholic Creed. He 
 was so charged with repressed emotion that the perspir- 
 ation was pouring from him before he began, while he sat 
 waiting in Adam de Brome's Chapel for the procession to 
 pass in. 
 
 His logic that he applied to life was, as we all know, 
 keen and incisive to excess : but no one succumbed more 
 quickly to a personal touch. He was entirely human ; and 
 in face of human creatures in flesh and blood, his swift 
 spiritual sympathies came at once into play to modify his
 
 164 Personal Studies 
 
 rigidities. Conceive how different his judgment would 
 have been on Wilberforce, if he had been merely the 
 typical bishop, and not the man whom he knew, trusted, 
 and loved ! This is why Dean Church wanted him to be 
 a bishop himself ; in order that he may bring his abstract 
 verdicts into contrast with realities. For many years, he 
 had framed an abstraction of Dr. Westcott, who had 
 become a type to him of what he suspected and distrusted 
 in the Cambridge mind. At this image of his creation he 
 shot his arrows, until one day he went up to give evidence 
 before the Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts, and the 
 Archbishop handled him hardly : " Yes ! he doth ravish 
 the poor, dear friend, when he getteth him into his net," 
 so he said of it : but Dr. Westcott helped him, gave him his 
 leads, came with him to the door, and spoke sympathetic- 
 ally. At once his whole language towards Dr. Westcott 
 took a new colour. He never forgot it. A real bond was 
 made. He would indulge in his old chaff, but in quite a 
 new temper. 
 
 On few subjects was he more vehement in denunciation 
 than on that of " Women at the Universities." It was 
 one of his surest draws. But there came a day when he 
 stayed at Trinity Lodge, with the Master, and was entirely 
 charmed by the lady classic. She was all that he liked 
 in women ; and when the Master quoted Greek at dinner, 
 only by a slight quiver of the upper lip did she betray 
 that she could construe it. Everything was delightful. 
 And so, ever after, when the vehement storm was rising, 
 we had but to say softly : " But, Liddon, there is Mrs. 
 Butler," and he would collapse with a deprecatory wave 
 of the hand into a gentle protest : " You are evil, dear 
 person ! "
 
 Henry Parry Liddon 165 
 
 His immense success as a preacher never touched him. 
 Surely, never was there any one so utterly and entirely 
 free from the infirmities to which popular preachers are 
 proverbially liable. I could never make out whether he 
 was ever aware of the striking beauty of his face. He 
 lived quite clear of the atmosphere in which the tempta- 
 tions of popularity play their part, and find their oppor- 
 tunity. We might be told by the " Intellectuals " that 
 he was a rhetorician. We knew what they intended. 
 Intellectually he had the gifts of a splendid advocate. 
 When you were on his side, you wished for no better 
 advocacy than his. If you were not on his side, you 
 would feel only that you were his victim silenced, en- 
 tranced, but not in the least convinced. But beyond all 
 this, we owned ourselves spellbound by the passionate 
 sincerity of a man wholly committed to his belief, who 
 had but one aim possessing him the aim of dedicating 
 every gift in his being to winning each soul before him 
 into that allegiance to CHRIST, his Master, which was to 
 him the sole and supreme interpretation of life, at once 
 his awful joy, and his tremendous responsibility.
 
 LORD SALISBURY 
 
 WE are losing all that gave a background to public 
 life. There is nothing behind what we all can touch and 
 see and measure. No big personalities stand back, above 
 and beyond the commonplace foreground. That is what 
 is making us feel cheap and thin. And that is why the 
 withdrawal of Lord Salisbury is so marked a loss. He is 
 almost the last of those whose presence had in it the 
 touch of an older day. Except for him who still bears 
 heavily the burden of Canterbury, we are, now, all of one 
 lot. That is dismal. 
 
 And Lord Salisbury had such strong personal interest. 
 He was so far more interesting as a man than as a States- 
 man. Few of us could say what his Statesmanship came 
 to. As to Home Affairs, he gave no line : his effect was 
 purely negative. They had no attraction whatever for 
 him, as far as we could see. He never took them seriously. 
 They went on without him. Even as Prime Minister, he 
 appeared to contribute nothing, except criticism and cold 
 water. 
 
 We knew that his heart was wholly in Foreign Affairs : 
 and Foreign affairs are hidden in a mysterious silence. 
 No one could say what our Foreign Minister was making 
 for, and what policy he was likely to be pressing. He 
 knew a great deal about it. So we all believed. He 
 
 166
 
 Lord Salisbury 167 
 
 probably kept us out of a lot of mischief. He was bent on 
 saving us from risk and venture. He was steering the 
 ship out of danger with canny shrewdness. He was 
 known to all the Chancelleries of Europe. That was a 
 phrase that we trusted. In a big hour of crisis, when 
 Foreign Affairs would suddenly become alive to us, he 
 was, generally, cool, wary, and disappointing. If it was 
 an occasion for keeping cool, when others were going off 
 their heads, he was just the man to save us. If it was a 
 moment that demanded an heroic venture, when nations 
 are asked to rise to the height of a great passion for 
 justice, for generosity, he was the last chief to lead us. 
 He would have none of it. Some of us can never forget 
 such hours of distressful collapse : whether in the earlier 
 or the later day of Turkish infamies and England's lost 
 opportunities. Not for these hours was he born. But, 
 in quiet years, he moved along safe and rational paths. 
 He was against all bullying swagger and aggression. We 
 could trust him to be making the best of a situation. 
 
 Oddly enough, the Colonial Empire, which has played 
 so large a part under his period of power, and which is 
 the main fact now before us, had no particular significance 
 for him, and never moved his imagination. He had the 
 older mind about it. It was "provincial." It bored him. 
 There were probably few men in England to whom South 
 Africa appealed so little as to the man whose Government 
 was to see the fate of Empire risked there, at the cost of 
 the most perilous war ever waged by England. Did he 
 ever regard the war there, and all its tangled issues, as 
 anything else than an intolerable nuisance ? 
 
 His mind worked on lines, and within horizons, that 
 have passed out of our sight. Yet what a mind it was !
 
 1 68 Personal Studies 
 
 It did not matter that it was so remote and aloof from 
 our governing motives. It had such a vivid intensity of 
 its own. It was so utterly indifferent to us to its 
 environment to the world to the effect it produced. 
 There was a lordly recklessness in it, which entranced our 
 attention. It obeyed itself, with so little regard to us 
 and to our opinions, that we could not but be fascinated. 
 Such independence is so rare a feat ; and it was preserved 
 without conscious effort, which is rarer still. He never 
 wanted to prove how independent he could be. He never 
 posed. He was always and utterly himself. And his 
 splendid utterance of whatever he had to say betrayed 
 no artful forcing. It dropped out, in perfect form, without 
 condescending to take any colour from the surroundings or 
 the audience. 
 
 Could anything be odder than Lord Salisbury's mode 
 of producing an oratorical effect ? Was that heavy look 
 of apparently hopeless stupidity put on? Who could 
 believe what was coming ? The eyes were closed. The 
 mouth heavily opened. There were no gestures. He 
 hardly seemed aware of anybody being there. He did 
 not pay the House of Lords the compliment of recognizing 
 its presence. He was like a man talking to himself, 
 thinking aloud ; unconscious of place, or time, or people. 
 Yet, out of this curious and closed bulk, came somehow a 
 clear loud voice which made every word tell ; and the 
 words were chosen with brilliant effectiveness : and down 
 on the devoted heads of each quivering opponent came 
 the sharp, masterful raps, with swift and singular precision. 
 I can never forget the hitting force of the sharp retorts 
 that came ringing down on the Liberal Chiefs, one after 
 another, on the last night of the great Home Rule Debate
 
 Lord Salisbury 169 
 
 in the Lords. How we shouted ! It was like hearing an 
 anvil struck with a hammer, the masterful success of 
 each blow made one breathless. Yet he hardly looked 
 to see what he was doing, and betrayed no sense of being 
 aware of it. The retorts were rather too cruel : too 
 merciless. And the speech, for all its wonderful power, 
 gave the whole English case away. As it went grinding 
 out its relentless argument, without a touch of sympathy 
 in its intense insular limitations, I felt as if I were 
 listening to all that had made Ireland passionately 
 repudiate the temper and mind of England. I knew now 
 why she hated us so desperately. 
 
 And, indeed, that raises the general question why Lord 
 Salisbury, with his magnificent gifts ; with his masterful 
 character ; with his untainted and unworldly independence 
 of mind; with his total freedom from everything mean, from 
 intrigue, from personal ambitions ; with his high and noble 
 purity of intention ; with his deep inward sense of duty 
 and responsibility ; with his profound personal devotion to 
 GOD and to JESUS CHRIST why did he not do more ? 
 Why did he not rise into the ranks of the few great 
 master-spirits who have moulded their generation ? Why 
 did he stop short of the highest ? It can only have 
 been through lack of inspiration through that lack 
 of faith which moves mountains through a certain 
 cynical pessimism which withheld him from confidence 
 in what he had to do. The irony of the position lay in 
 this, that possessed of supreme power, the head of the 
 Government, with enormous majorities in both Houses 
 to support him, he disbelieved profoundly in the capacity 
 of Governments to govern. He poured all his brilliant 
 ridicule on the belief that you could do anything to make
 
 170 Personal Studies 
 
 the world better by Acts of Parliament. He despised 
 and derided all political action. It seemed to him foolish, 
 if not insane, to suppose that human affairs could be 
 improved by organization. Governments were but 
 negative necessities. They were doomed to sterility. 
 The result was that he had no real motive with which 
 to wield the immense power in his hands : and no positive 
 aim for which to venture his splendid capacities. 
 
 Unkindled himself, he could only quench the sparks 
 in others. The things that have been done, while he 
 ruled, have been done without him. He has brought a 
 wonderful personality into the field : and, yet, has left 
 upon us the disappointing sense that so much more might 
 have been made of it. He remained, to the last, aloof 
 from the very world in which he was the chief figure, 
 unable to guide its motions, because he had no interpre- 
 tation of its mind.
 
 CECIL RHODES 
 
 How is it that the man who made the Will made the 
 Raid ? This strong dreamer of dreams ; this man of 
 lonely and enduring convictions; with his far-reaching 
 and chivalrous generosity; with his love of home, of 
 Oxford, of hills and trees and birds and wide outlooks; 
 with his ardour for justice, liberty, and peace; with his 
 soul brooding over the high solitudes in which his body 
 should be laid what on earth had he to do " in that 
 galley " ? How reconcile this good citizenship, this spirit 
 of large brotherhood, with the intrigues, and treacheries, 
 and betrayals of that disastrous disgrace ? So, I suppose, 
 every man was asking himself on the morning on which 
 he read the record of Rhodes's deepest mind, into which 
 the man had put so much of himself. 
 
 A few days later, the Political Testament, interpreted 
 by Mr. Stead, gave the answer. And a most curious and 
 interesting answer it is. In it the two elements, that 
 appeared so irreconcilable, show themselves plainly side 
 by side. The very names of those historical personalities 
 with whom Mr. Stead is not afraid to rank his friend, are 
 suggestive of the contradictions to which the human 
 conscience lays itself open. As their names catch our eye 
 in the pages of the Review of Reviews, we seem to find our 
 cue. Oliver Cromwell ; Ignatius Loyola ; Mahomet ; 
 
 171
 
 172 Personal Studies 
 
 these are all notes, at once, of splendour and of terror. 
 They mark the line of moral peril that besets a special 
 type of greatness. They are the men of lonely brooding 
 dreams, of intense spiritual convictions, who have also 
 been endowed with the masterful instinct which demands 
 the translation of their convictions and dreams into terms 
 of practical and immediate efficiency. They have got to 
 set their ideals actively working ; they are bent, with all 
 the sincerity of an imperious will, on making them felt as 
 a political and public force in the arena of affairs. And 
 they are, themselves, in their dominant vitality, essential 
 to the realization of their ideas. And it is in this double 
 character of dreamers bent on achieving a practical result 
 of Prophets who had to become Politicians that they 
 have all become proverbial for those sinister freaks of 
 which conscience is capable. The very vastness of their 
 Ideals is the measure of their temptation to hurry up the 
 pace, and to ignore the value of small things, and to be 
 blind to the motives of wilfulness and arbitrariness and 
 recklessness and impatience, which may disturb the per- 
 sonal judgment set on high and imperious endeavours. 
 No, Mr. Stead ! These names are not wholly lucky, to 
 evoke as champions. Fascinating, of course they are ; 
 but also discomfortable and unhappy. 
 
 And, then, in these three men, their convictions at 
 least grounded themselves on a passionate Creed in the 
 One Almighty GOD. This intensified, no doubt, their 
 moral peril ; but it ensured an amazing spiritual elevation. 
 But Cecil Rhodes went to his work at that unfortunate 
 moment when, amid the shakings of the ancient Faiths, 
 men were caught with the fancy that Scientific Darwinism 
 could give to life a sure and clear interpretation. Since
 
 Cecil Rhodes 173 
 
 then, things have all got back into perspective. We 
 know how little, as well as how much, Science is going to 
 do for us in the moral world. Everybody recognizes now 
 that Evolution yields no Categorical Imperative. Long 
 ago, Huxley, the Prophet of the earlier Movement, had 
 announced with his typical courage and thoroughness, the 
 failure of the Cosmic Process to supply us with moral 
 data. He has told us that man's moral task is summed 
 up, not in the formula of the survival of the fittest, but in 
 the effort to fit as many as possible to survive. 
 
 Morality begins at the point where man ceases to 
 submit to the natural struggle, and sets to work to 
 determine what it is which shall be fitted to endure. He 
 himself secures the survival of what he considers best, by 
 endowing it with the qualifying fitness. And in estimat- 
 ing what he pronounces to be best, he wins his standard, 
 not out of the blind growth from out of which he has 
 emerged in the past, but out of the height above him in 
 which he becomes aware of an Eternal Friend and LORD, 
 and out of the end which he, by the intimations of the 
 prophetic spirit, gallantly foresees, and imposes upon the 
 facts. 
 
 All this is ground now recovered. But it was hardly 
 known to Cecil Rhodes in the days of his broodings in 
 Kimberley Diamond Holes. He had gained at Oxford a 
 sense of the strength that lies in character as distinct 
 from mere brains. He felt the power of the place in 
 breeding a fair breed of men. The spirit of Oxford had 
 taught him the poverty of Commercialism, He never 
 forgot how much it took to make a man how deep 
 rooted he must be how rich the associations in which 
 his life should be imbedded. It was not only the witchery
 
 174 Personal Studies 
 
 of the beautiful spot which enthralled his imagination. 
 By his superb legacy to Oriel, and to his Scholarships, he 
 has given his witness to the solid worth of the character 
 bred amid these fairy buildings with their moonlit lawns. 
 For his Imperial purposes, there were no men like them ; 
 there was no nursery to be compared with it. And, 
 besides this, Oxford had whispered in his ear one great 
 living sentence out of the wisdom of Him Who is the. 
 Master of all who know. Aristotle gave him the w r ord, 
 which brought meaning into his days. Within " these 
 three days at the seaside " to which he compared life, he 
 was to find an aim that would justify him in existing. If 
 only he could have gone deeper into his Aristotle, and 
 learned more from him what that aim might be ! 
 
 But here it was that the disaster overtook him. For 
 determining that aim and its character, he could find no 
 clue but such as came to him from the popular crudities 
 of a misunderstood Darwinism, now obsolete. 
 
 And, for motive, Oxford had left him only the sense 
 that it was about an even toss-up whether GOD existed. 
 Heads or tails ! Which ? Did he know how closely he 
 was obeying his Butler in deciding that, even though the 
 odds were only equal, it was worth while to assume that 
 GOD did exist ? Perhaps those who most adore their 
 Butler are those who most regret this particular fashion 
 of his reasoning. However, Cecil Rhodes arrived at the 
 conclusion, without Bishop Butler's help, on the rough 
 and ready reasoning that one hears from the honest 
 sportsman, arguing in the smoking-room of a country- 
 house. And not only this. He acted steadily on it ; and 
 by it arrived at the immediate practical result that his 
 duty to GOD, on those odds, lay in colouring the map of
 
 Cecil Rhodes 175 
 
 the world red. This is the exact point where the Creed 
 passes into practice ; and it is easy enough to see the 
 fatalities to which such a crude Darwinism might lead, if 
 adopted as an index to action. 
 
 And another peril discloses itself. The reference of his 
 life to GOD, even at these vague odds, served to raise the 
 scale at which he took its measure to those gigantic 
 proportions which overwhelm our little human conscience, 
 unless at the same time that we raise ourselves to the 
 level of Eternal Issues, we can fall under the immediate 
 control of a living personal moral Character, Whom we 
 face day by day, to Whom we answer, and with Whom 
 the little things of to-day are as infinitely precious as 
 the enormous ends towards which He draws the entire 
 Creation. 
 
 We men cannot afford to identify ourselves with 
 Eternity unless the Eternal heightens the value of the 
 Present, and the sanctity of every tiny individuality with 
 which it holds communion. That is what is so wonderful 
 in the Jewish Prophets. As they laid hold of the Divine 
 Purpose in History, they also fastened on the other pole 
 of the antithesis the everlasting value of the personal 
 soul. But Cecil Rhodes had nothing in his hold on GOD 
 by which to balance the awful immensity of the scientific 
 outlook, and of the ageless cosmic process. These, by 
 themselves, can only serve to dwarf the present into 
 insignificance, and to fling the mob of temporary creatures 
 into contempt. The man who surrenders himself to their 
 sway is almost sure to be dazed, unless he can also raise 
 his conscience to the divine intensity of sensitiveness, 
 which makes GOD heed every sparrow that falls to the 
 ground, and be careful to number every hair on our heads,
 
 176 Personal Studies 
 
 and induces Him, the High and Holy, who inhabiteth 
 Eternity, to love the soul of the poor, and to dwell with 
 him, above all, who is of an humble and a contrite spirit. 
 Who can be surprised if an unbalanced theory of Natural 
 Evolution had its instinctive effect on Mr. Rhodes ? Who 
 can wonder if, in face of that enormous movement, the 
 minor details of the village pump here at home seemed 
 to him of but poor account ? What wonder if it should 
 have seemed a small matter to overleap the obligations of 
 the moment, in view of the immense issues to be for- 
 warded; or that individuals might come in for scant 
 consideration, in face of the mighty progression of affairs ? 
 
 " You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs," 
 Rhodes used to say. True enough, but a dangerous fact 
 to be too conscious of. " Hello ! Why are you home ? I 
 thought you were in South Africa," said a friend (so the 
 story runs) to one of the great man's brothers. " Yes ! 
 So I was ! but Cecil was going to make an omelette, and 
 I did not want to be one of his eggs." Poor Frank Rhodes 
 went out to discover the peril of making omelettes. 
 
 Probably at each of his unhappy decisions, at the 
 outbreak of the Matabele War, and at the misery of the 
 Raid, the tragedy lay in this that the one man whom 
 Rhodes really loved was his evil star, and over-persuaded 
 him. It was Dr. Jameson who rushed the Matabele War, 
 and who " upset the apple-cart." That fatal act wrecked 
 Cecil Rhodes' own persistent policy. Up till then he had 
 nobly striven to weld together English and Dutch in a 
 common interest. But, in dread of seeing the reform of 
 the Transvaal Republic take a shape which would carry 
 it out beyond the hopes of an African Federation under 
 the British Flag, he sacrificed the Cape Dutch, who had
 
 Cecil Rhodes 177 
 
 trusted him as their champion against the hated Kruger- 
 ism. It was an aberration of judgment, as well as a 
 betrayal a betrayal of the Dutch Cabinet, of which he 
 was Prime Minister a betrayal of the Governor from 
 whom he accepted the responsibilities of office a betrayal 
 of the Sovereign whose Privy Councillor he had become. 
 It was an act which degraded the level of politics at 
 home, and inflicted a stain upon our public reputation 
 which we have had to pay for with our blood. Nothing 
 can justify us in condoning a wrong which the unhappy 
 War still forbids us ever to forget. The people of England 
 forgave too lightly, but it was partly because they felt 
 that Cecil Rhodes had paid the penalty by the ruin of his 
 position at the Cape ; and still more, because he " owned 
 up " himself, and was believed to have taken the bitter 
 lesson to heart. 
 
 His death, at the supreme hour of decision for the South 
 African Tragedy, touched men by its pathetic signifi- 
 cance, as they wonder what effect it may have upon the 
 long-desired peace. The passionate resentment of the 
 Dutch, who made him responsible for the war, will die 
 out. They showed it by their sympathy as his funeral 
 moved through the length of South Africa. His words, 
 reported by Mr. Stead, show how strong would have been 
 his action in the re-settlement on behalf of the Dutch. 
 
 His will carries us beyond the range of the war, 
 and makes for unity between the nations; and reveals 
 his longing for justice, peace, and liberty. True, his 
 Political Testament lets us see how much he thought 
 could be done in achieving high results by the power of 
 gold. He despised, indeed, all the mere flummery of 
 
 wealth, and the " Park-lane " business ; he hated the 
 
 N
 
 178 Personal Studies 
 
 " loafer " of a luxurious society with a godly hatred, and 
 he abominated the mere Stock Exchange gambling. But, 
 he was, as Mr. Stead calls him, the first " Money king." 
 He believed that the great aims, which statesmen have 
 pursued through politics, might be worked through by 
 money. He really believed in a Jesuitical Society of the 
 Rich for this purpose. It is a ghastly proposal. If it 
 ever were conceivable it would be a tyranny which not 
 even the genius of a Pascal could shatter. As it is, this 
 Secret Society will vanish with its first dreamer ; and will 
 not even require for its undoing the soft impact of Lady 
 Wimborne's donkey. There are, mercifully for the human 
 race, so few, so very few, millionaires who are prepared to 
 devote their wealth to the realization of dreams. 
 
 The distinction of Cecil Rhodes is that he proved the 
 possibility of there being one such man. He never let 
 his dreams go as wealth came. He held on to them in 
 spite of the moral atmosphere of Kimberley Diamond- 
 fields, and of gold-mines on the Rand. The wealth, as it 
 arrived, was still dedicated to the old ideals. His mistake 
 was to over-estimate the capability of wealth as an in- 
 strument for the realization of Ideals. But his will is 
 the evidence how thorough was his conviction. And no 
 wealth hid from him the worth of human character, nor 
 closed his eyes to the beauty of simple natural things. 
 Still he saw the need of endowing the Federated Colonies, 
 not with money, but with the deep associations that come 
 from heroic graves in solitary places ; and he himself had 
 retained the soul which desired for its last rest, not the 
 crowded, fevered mart, but the solitude of the wide out- 
 look in the heart of the hills.
 
 TOLSTOY AND THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 
 
 THE characteristic of our time is that we are an age 
 without prophets; and that is all the more noticeable 
 because there are so much ability and talent, and gifts of 
 all kinds about, that they are almost a drug in the 
 market. There are any number of clever people, but 
 never one who seems to rise above the level of able men, 
 or to give utterances of the type which we can class 
 as prophetic. In England, for example, we have, Mr. 
 Traill once assured us, seventy-six real poets; and yet, 
 here again, we miss the particular man whom we should 
 care to crown. Therefore it is that we have turned 
 with such unique interest to listen to the one man, 
 now living, who seems to speak with something of the 
 prophetic spirit. Here is the solitary man who has 
 power to speak out of an independent soul ; who owes 
 but very little to mere talent and mere gift, very little 
 to the men about him, but is cast in the heroic out- 
 lines which we miss in others. We find this high note 
 in the extraordinary directness of his speech, which, with- 
 out any particular grace or style, nevertheless has the 
 power of hitting nails upon the head with that incom- 
 parable precision which belongs only to those who wield the 
 highest powers and capacities with which the human race 
 
 179
 
 180 Personal Studies 
 
 is endowed. His words seize on our souls as no other 
 man's words do, and no one can escape their force, or 
 forget or ignore them ; and we feel this all the more when 
 we recognize that this power of Tolstoy is wielded even 
 through translations. With the photographic force of a 
 savage, he combines all the refinement of a man of 
 culture. And then, besides this extraordinary power of 
 prophetic speech, we turn to him as one of the few men 
 in this age who have conformed their actions to their 
 words, and as one who has given us in the actual frame- 
 work of life the message he also delivers in words. He 
 has given himself to the poor, and has loved poverty as 
 CHRIST loved it ; he has hated wealth as St. Francis hated 
 it ; and has felt the all-sufficiency of JESUS CHRIST ; and 
 has taken as his sole guide the simplicity of the Sermon 
 on the Mount. He therefore stands quite alone as the 
 only man at the present moment to whose voice all Europe 
 is listening. 
 
 Yet, here comes the tragedy ; and the tragedy lies in 
 the old familiar woe that we thought we had escaped 
 a single Bible text isolated and so applied as to shatter 
 into wreckage the whole of the rest of the teaching of 
 JESUS CHRIST. This tragedy is the more disastrous 
 because everything conspires to relieve us of such a peril. 
 The principles and methods of historical criticism have 
 become critical and not dogmatic, and the test of success 
 lies in the coherence and consistency which criticism can 
 give to the matter in hand. It discloses the interior logic 
 of the process of development. It conquers by obeying ; 
 it works by connection, by evolution, not by severance. 
 Holding to this method, the critics take Christianity in 
 its historical form and attempt to find its underlying
 
 Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount 1 8 1 
 
 principles. They refuse to look or to search for a 
 Christianity that never has existed. 
 
 But here, with Tolstoy, we are carried back to the anti- 
 Silurian methods, which criticism was thought to have 
 abolished. His text, the particular dynamite with which 
 he blows the whole ship out of the water, is " Resist not 
 evil." By the aid of this text, he sweeps off the field not 
 only all the commentators, not only the whole of ecclesi- 
 astical theology, catholic and protestant, not only the 
 entire story of Christendom since the time of Constantine 
 this we could bear, for we all did it in our day, 
 especially about the time that we were taking our degrees, 
 but also the whole idea of a Church at all, e.g. "every 
 Church, as a Church, has always been, and always must 
 be, an institution not only foreign to, but absolutely 
 hostile to, the doctrine of CHRIST." More than this, the 
 creeds of Christendom must go, in all their positive shapes 
 Nicene or Apostolic. Tolstoy's words are, " Either the 
 Sermon on the Mount or the Credo ; no man can believe 
 in both." Again, " If a man seriously believes the 
 Sermon on the Mount, the Nicene Creed must inevitably 
 lose all meaning for him." Nor is this enough : the 
 whole mass of St. Paul's Epistles, and, beyond this, the 
 Acts and the Gospels must go. The fatal perversion 
 which he deplores had already occurred in the upper 
 chamber of Jerusalem, and was completed and sealed at 
 Pentecost. 
 
 Now, all this is noticed, not to excite odium against 
 Tolstoy's interpretation, but in appeal to the purely 
 critical considerations which determine exegesis. Our 
 test of right and wrong interpretations lies in our capacity 
 to relate a part to the whole. Here is a text embodied
 
 1 82 Personal Studies 
 
 in the very heart of the Christian message, " Resist not 
 evil " ; repeated with emphasis in the very core and 
 substance of the Church's message. The men who re- 
 corded it are the very same who framed both Church and 
 Scripture. They are our sole sources of information as to 
 what JESUS taught on earth. They reported this text, 
 and according to their belief it hangs together with the 
 rest of their report. True exegesis is bound to account 
 for the fact that in the mind of those who reported it, it 
 seemed to cohere with the rest. As soon as our inter- 
 pretation of the text places it in hopeless collision with 
 passage after passage ; and involves us in supposing that 
 the very authorities who gave us the text w r ere wrong at 
 almost every point and at variance with themselves, and 
 had themselves offered us with enthusiasm the bomb 
 which blew them to pieces ; then we may be positive by 
 the surest of all proofs that our interpretation of that text 
 is wrong. 
 
 Let us take Tolstoy's interpretation of "Resist not 
 evil." According to him, this is absolutely inconsistent 
 with all forms of public justice or authority by which evil 
 is punished. All the institutions of the State are there- 
 fore "opposed to the conscience of the Christian." 
 " Christianity destroyed the principles upon which govern- 
 ment was based." Or again, "Christianity, faithfully 
 interpreted, saps the very foundations of civil law." " It 
 was for this CHRIST was crucified." " The profession of 
 true Christianity not only forbids recognition of the State, 
 but strikes it at its very foundation." 
 
 Now this interpretation makes JESUS CHRIST incon- 
 sistent with himself. First, in conduct and speech. 
 Compare his absolute acceptance, during his life, of the
 
 Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount 183 
 
 social systems about him, whether Jewish or Roman. He 
 never protested against public authorities. He expressly 
 sanctioned their right to exercise it. He acknowledged 
 Csesar's right to tribute, and Pilate's right to judge Him. 
 Not one word or one act in His whole recorded life 
 disputes the existence or sanction of Social Law. The 
 occasions on which He comes into collision with the 
 demands of Jewish or Roman law, derive all their signifi- 
 cance from their contrast with His habitual conformity to 
 the life of a Jewish citizen, under a Roman sovereignly. 
 In fact, our difficulty lies not in our LORD'S revolt against 
 public authority, but in His acquiescence. 
 
 Secondly, He stood absolutely on the Old Testament 
 conception, common to prophet and psalmist. Now, that 
 meant, GOD revealed in history ; States rising and falling 
 by His bidding ; the Jewish nationality in its temporal 
 manifestation an exhibition of His will, etc. No one can 
 question our LORD'S attitude to these conceptions. 
 
 Thirdly, this very section of the Sermon on the Mount 
 in which the text occurs, is heralded by the strongest, 
 reiterated assertion of the consistency of its root principles 
 with the old Mosaic law. He " came not to destroy, but 
 to fulfil " that law. But the Mosaic law was the direct 
 assertion of public justice, public authority, government, 
 civil law, tribunals, sanctity of the State. Our LORD, 
 therefore, did not destroy, but fulfilled the authority of 
 civil government. His own teaching was a consistent 
 expansion of the divine sanction given to Civil Institu- 
 tions. True, He took it up into a new plane and threw 
 off limitations ; but He agreed with it in principle, and 
 therefore He could not have meant that the " Christian 
 conscience created by the Sermon on the Mount destroyed
 
 184 Personal Studies 
 
 the principles on which government was based." Any 
 interpretation which fails to exhibit the consistency 
 between our LORD'S teaching and the public assertion of 
 justice by the Mosaic law, is ruled out of court by this 
 covering text. 
 
 And this text especially covers, it may be noted, the 
 passage under review, for our LORD is giving six instances 
 here of what He meant by saying that " He fulfils and 
 does not destroy the earlier dispensation." Even "love 
 your enemies " must therefore be in some sense the fulfil- 
 ment of the old law, " Eye for eye and tooth for tooth." 
 
 Then, fourthly, our LORD at the close of the section 
 gives as His principle, that man must resemble GOD. 
 But there is one thing we certainly know of GOD, reiter- 
 ated over and over again by JESUS CHRIST, that GOD 
 will be our Judge. There will be a final judgment, a 
 tribunal at which GOD will "resist evil," cast it out and 
 destroy it. Our LORD is Himself to be this Judge. In 
 some way, therefore, " resist not evil," " forgive your 
 enemies," must be consistent with GOD'S resisting evil 
 and judging His enemies. But then if these two qualities 
 can be united in GOD, they can also be united in man, 
 who is to be like GOD. But how ? That is the com- 
 mentator's business to show. If he fails to show it, he 
 condemns himself. 
 
 Fifthly, the parables and proverbs of our LORD, which 
 are peculiarly characteristic of Him, take continually for 
 their type matters of Civil Law, e.g. judgment, kingdom, 
 throne, officers, etc. Now our LORD'S parables are not 
 mere allegories and metaphors. They rest on real 
 analogies. They exhibit an identical principle at different 
 levels of activity. He shows us a principle at work on
 
 Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount 185 
 
 the visible and material plane, where we can apprehend 
 it ; and then assures us that we can see there the order 
 and manner of the invisible and spiritual world. But if 
 it were true that Christianity " saps the foundations of 
 civil society," then there would be no analogy to be found 
 between a civil society and a spiritual kingdom. Our 
 LORD does not change the principle by carrying it up to 
 a higher plane ; and the resemblance which He finds on 
 the higher plane gives sanction to the same principle on 
 the lower. There is that in civil law, in state organiza- 
 tion, in public justice, which our LORD approves and 
 confirms ; or else He could not have utilized them, as 
 examples of what would be met with in the Kingdom 
 of Heaven. "Resist not evil," then, and "Forgive your 
 enemies," whatever they mean, must in our LORD'S mind be 
 consistent with the authoritative assertion of justice, both 
 by GOD Himself and in Human Society, and must allow for 
 the tremendous assertion of public, external, authoritative, 
 punitive justice, which appears in all His positive dis- 
 closures of a Judgment to come. 
 
 Let us consider how this may be. We have two voices 
 in Scripture. "Resist not evil," so says one. Yet 
 " Resist the evil one," so says the other. " Turn the left 
 cheek to him that smiteth." Yet " fight the good fight," 
 " wrestle against principalities," " take unto you the whole 
 armour of GOD," " the sword of the Spirit/' etc. Now, 
 how is all this duality to be reconciled ? 
 
 Let us distinguish (1) What is the evil that must be 
 resisted ? It is the evil that is lodged ivilhin the life, 
 lowering and damaging and soiling and degrading it. 
 That evil is to be fought to the very death. The primal 
 obligation of the Spirit (and this not selfishly, but as a
 
 1 86 Personal Studies 
 
 sacred charge) is to preserve itself clean and sound. This 
 is obviously true in individual cases, and it is just as true 
 in the case of a society. Any society must exclude, 
 expunge, the evil that touches its own life. So it is that 
 the Divine Society, the Kingdom of Heaven, must in the 
 final resort, resist, expel, destroy, the evil that would lodge 
 inside and corrupt its truth. 
 
 (2) What, then, is the evil that is not to be resisted ? 
 All evil, I should say, that does not touch the life 
 principle ; evil that may be forgiven, tolerated, submitted 
 to, without moral loss. 
 
 Now, keeping in view this distinction, we must note 
 the vital contrast which holds between any form of human 
 society and the Kingdom of CHRIST. CHRIST had lifted 
 His Kingdom free from all civil, national, and material 
 limitations. Its life springs from spiritual sources beyond 
 earth, and is secured against all external or bodily 
 accident. Here is a momentous change ; for the Jewish 
 theocracy had identified the Kingdom of GOD with a 
 natural State. But CHRIST has cancelled any such 
 identification ; His Kingdom, His Church, are not of this 
 world. They stand on a higher plane. They are hid 
 with Him in GOD. Hence now in CHRIST there is a 
 division between the life of the State and the life of the 
 Church ; and, if so, then there must be, also, a difference 
 in the character and range of their resistance to evil. 
 This difference is not in principle, but in range. The 
 State is bound to resist evil that touches its health, its 
 life, its growth ; and this it is which determines its 
 assertion of public justice. Evil that does not damage its 
 life, it, too, has to endure and forgive. But the Christian's 
 life is now independent of much that would worsen and
 
 Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount 187 
 
 hurt the civil State ; and therefore he can afford to ' 
 submit to evil which the State could not tolerate. Evils 
 which would kill the State, such as spoiling of goods, 
 bodily violence, etc., do not reach his life, and therefore 
 can be forgiven by him. Let him " forgive them unto 
 seventy times seven ! " There is no limit to the forgive- 
 ness and resignation required of him. Yet the State, 
 in combating these very same evils, does so on exactly the 
 same principle as that by which the Christian would 
 resist evil if that evil made him a liar or unclean or false. 
 
 This is the truth of which Tolstoy makes such exag- 
 gerated use. The Christian can afford to endure and to 
 forgive what as a citizen he must fight. Yet he fights as 
 a citizen in obedience to the same law which makes him 
 fight against sin, the flesh, and the devil, in his Christian 
 character. The fight changes its outward form according 
 to the plane on which it is fought ; while, again, the 
 State is called upon to exercise a Christian forgiveness 
 wherever the evil is outside its own life. 
 
 But Tolstoy can allow no moral justification for the 
 State at all, because, for him, the State is based solely on 
 violence. Violence ! On and on that word echoes, not 
 only through his book, The Kingdom of God is within 
 you, but also in his beautiful book, Work while ye have 
 the Light. Of course, if the State originates in violence, 
 the Christian can have no interest in the State. That 
 goes without saying ; and Tolstoy has no other conception 
 of the State before his mind. Yet that is exactly the 
 conception that we should dispute with every breath in 
 our body. Never for one moment does Tolstoy ever 
 mention or discuss the State as the true product from 
 within, the proper development of corporate life, the
 
 1 88 Personal Studies 
 
 realization of social morality, the outcome of inner spiritual 
 necessities, the organization by which the social spirit of 
 nationality liberates itself. Never for one moment does 
 he conceive an authority that springs from a representa- 
 tive and responsible people governing itself through an 
 organized body of ministerial institutions. The State, that 
 is, as we understand it, does not exist for him. He 
 speaks just as if the speech of Pericles had never been 
 made ; as if Plato's Republic had never been written ; 
 as if the ideal universality of Roman law and the liberty 
 of Roman citizenship were wiped out of mention and 
 memory altogether. There is no conception of the ideas 
 that govern a book like Augustine's City of God, or St. 
 Gregory's De Cura Pastorali. And it is impossible for 
 those of us who once heard it, not to recall that voice 
 which used to speak to us always of the spiritual value of 
 political institutions, of the realization of our moral man- 
 hood by its expansion into national organizations. That 
 was Thomas Hill Green's persistent message ; that is the 
 creative idea which alone justifies the State. This is the 
 ideal which has worked behind and beyond all superficial 
 violence and conquest and greed; and it is the object of 
 political growth to set this ideal free from the debasing 
 alloys of violence and of force which have encumbered and 
 obscured it. This is the State; and it is to this con- 
 ception of the State, thus completely ignored by Tolstoy, 
 that the full sweep of Christian thought is unhesitatingly 
 pledged. It is pledged, first, on the authority of the 
 Jewish theocracy, which was the root and ground of the 
 Christian's position ; and, secondly, through the splendid 
 honour given, in spite of persecution and in spite of 
 Pontius Pilate, to the Roman imperial authority. This
 
 Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount 1 89 
 
 temper is stamped on every corner of the Gospels, the Acts, 
 and the Epistles of St. Paul. And it was sustained, in 
 the face of cruel experiences, by the whole body of early 
 Christian Apologists. To the Fathers of the first four 
 centuries the Imperial Government retained the divine 
 sanction which had been signalized by the strong verdict 
 of St. Paul. " The Powers that be are ordained of GOD." 
 "The Ruler beareth not the sword in vain." "He is 
 the minister of GOD for good." 
 
 This is the Scriptural tongue ; this is the normal 
 delation of the Bible to State. To account for its harmony 
 with the Sermon on the Mount we must go back to the 
 deep paradox of Christianity which is not " of this world," 
 and yet has in it the force of this world's worth. CHRIST 
 died as a criminal in order to reign from the tree. He 
 was judged by Pilate, so that he might become the Law- 
 Giver and the Judge. The asceticism of the LORD was 
 always paradoxical. It was for love of the body, not for 
 hate of it, that He crucified the flesh. It was not " GOD 
 so hated the world," but "Goo so loved the world," 
 that He sent His Son to His death. He died to the 
 world that He might take His great power over it and 
 reign. 
 
 This is the paradox of which the proverbs and parables 
 deliberately isolate one limb. They set this out un- 
 qualified, leaving the other half to be given in a counter- 
 parable, which may flatly contradict the first. Compare 
 "set on a hill " with " seed hidden under ground." Both 
 expressed rival characteristics of the kingdom. It is to 
 be visible it is to be invisible. Which is true ? Both. 
 Each parable has only one aspect in view. The two 
 together constitute the fulness of truth. All proverbs
 
 190 Personal Studies 
 
 are of this type, e. g. one advises you to have two strings 
 to your bow, another warns you against attempting to 
 sit on two stools. One assures you that in the multitude 
 of counsellors is safety, another begs you to trust your 
 own heart's judgment against any number of wise advisers. 
 Two are better than one, yet many cooks will spoil the 
 broth. The entirety of life verifies the truth of opposite 
 dicta. Each statement is an abstraction, which interprets 
 a limited body of facts. To interpret all life by any one 
 of such formulae is to falsify its concrete integrity. 
 
 Now, all the epigrams in the Sermon on the Mount 
 are proverbial in type, and are to be interpreted in the 
 method proper to proverbs. The reconciliation is ob- 
 tained, not by balancing opposite statements, but by 
 unlimited acceptance of each over all the ground that it 
 covers. " Forgive " (for instance) " until seventy times 
 seven." There is no limit to this. We may never say > 
 " I have forgiven enough ; I have reached my limit ; I 
 have done as much as can be asked of me." If there is 
 an opportunity of forgiving we must forgive. But there 
 is a limit to the opportunities in which forgiveness 
 embodies the possible action of the good-will, or in which 
 forgiveness will cover the facts. There are occasions on 
 which the contact of the good-will with the facts refuses 
 to express itself in terms of forgiveness. So with GOD, 
 His forgiveness never fails, but circumstances might forbid 
 its taking effect. He does not cease to forgive when He 
 judges, but the same will that judges is the will that 
 forgives. 
 
 Tolstoy has ridden off on the proverb, and has ignored 
 the paradox of which the proverb is but a limb. But life 
 is always paradoxical. It is the reconciliation in action of
 
 Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount 191 
 
 antithetical principles. And Christianity was the first 
 religion that laid hold of paradox as the key of life. 
 Christianity has never been false to this duality ; and its 
 terrible failures have been due to the courage with which 
 it plunged into the thick of life, believing itself to be the 
 regenerative source of the very World to which it had 
 died, and of the Society which killed its Master. It is no 
 sterile Essene sect. To hold itself aloof, in its own 
 purity, would have been to betray its Mission. Its task 
 is to redeem humanity; to save society; to purify the 
 flesh ; to renew the State. It has to do this from within, 
 by lodging itself deep behind all the wrongs, and so 
 uprooting them. Its courage in undertaking such a task 
 by such a method exposes it to the evil of being stifled 
 under the weight of encumbering wrongs. Once let its 
 inner nerve slacken, its inner vitality flag, and the 
 pressure of the lump would hold down the leaven. 
 
 Yet, perilous though it is, the risk has to be run. It is 
 at least right in its measure of the work that it was given 
 to do. 
 
 We of the Christian Social Union are pledged to this 
 faith that CHRIST is the life of the world; and Tolstoy 
 therefore slices the very fibres of our creed. True, that 
 in CHRIST we have a refuge beyond the confines of 
 earthly citizenship ; and to win that refuge we could 
 afford to be stripped of all earthly possessions ; to retain 
 that refuge we might submit to be scourged without 
 resistance. But we look out from that spiritual haven on 
 a world, which, though it crucified the CHRIST, we love 
 for the sake of the CHRIST whom it slew. It is no 
 strange world therefore for us. Nor indeed do we merely 
 gaze at it from afar ; for we are its citizens, charged with
 
 192 Personal Studies 
 
 its burdens, pledged to fight its battles, to strengthen 
 its stakes, to sustain its justice, and enlarge its welfare. 
 Tolstoy asserts that Christians have no interest in, and 
 no obligation to, any State institution. The Christian 
 Social Union exists to assert that Christianity holds in it 
 the inspiration and the vitality by which alone social life 
 can be carried to its highest perfection ; and that we can 
 become better citizens only by becomng better Christians.
 
 SIR JAMES PAGET * 
 
 THERE has been no life written of late comparable, in 
 moral force and inspiration, to the memoir of Sir James 
 Paget. And the life tells upon the reader with such 
 singular directness, because, in its main matter, it comes 
 straight from the lips of the man himself. Never, surely, 
 did Autobiography win a finer triumph ! The memoir of 
 himself, which Sir James handed over to his son, is flaw- 
 less in temper and tone. It is not afraid to be as personal 
 as we should desire it to be. It speaks, with absolute 
 frankness, of the man, of his character, of his endowments, 
 of his successes ; it never over-colours, and never depre- 
 ciates these. There is no tinge of false modesty, no 
 disturbing self-consciousness whatever. He speaks of his 
 own powers exactly as he would speak of any one else's, 
 interested in their characteristics, their development, their 
 range, noting their efficiency and their limitations ; and 
 all this with the delightful accuracy that comes through 
 knowing them from inside. Nothing could be better, in 
 judgment, in taste, in wisdom, and in reality, than his 
 analysis of his own exquisite facility of speech. 
 
 And, then, his style is faultless, in that it attains the 
 perfection of all style, absolute sincerity. It says exactly 
 what it means to say, in the fewest and most direct words 
 
 * Memoirs and Letters of Sir James Paget. Edited by Stephen 
 Paget, London : Longmans. 1901. 
 
 193 O
 
 194 Personal Studies 
 
 possible. It carries conviction with it. It has stripped 
 itself of all mannerisms ; and it simply succeeds in con- 
 veying the exact truth intended. The life is a record of 
 how a man of rare and noble gifts, with nothing to back 
 him, or to open to him his opportunities, by sheer direct- 
 ness of purpose, came straight through all that poverty 
 and privation could do to beat him down, and steadily 
 and finally achieved the highest and most fitting work in 
 the world that it could have been given him to do. He 
 put out all his splendid powers ; and he put them out in 
 exactly the direction for which they were suited ; and 
 with the utmost possible efficiency of result. He fought 
 through the long and weary hardships of his early days 
 without taking the slightest warp from the struggle. It 
 left no trace, except in the strengthening and ennobling 
 of his spirit. With perfect good humour, with a certain 
 radiance of spirit, which could be felt glittering in those 
 amazing eyes of his, he moved straight forward towards 
 the goal on which he set out. He seized, with a sure 
 mastery of grip, on the exact conditions necessary for the 
 best work that it lay in his hands to do ; and so he did it, 
 did it all did it richly and splendidly did it, with the 
 full measure did it, until the end. 
 
 In a lecture of most singular brilliancy and beauty, 
 given by the son who has edited the memoir, to the 
 Medical School at Liverpool, he tells how his first draft of 
 the facts of his father's life had to be flung over because, 
 in recording the simple hardness of the facts through 
 which he had passed, it had dropped out that intense and 
 vivid sense of happiness which was the real note of his 
 father's innermost character. And this happiness is not 
 like that famous happiness of which Dr. Mozley complained
 
 Sir James Paget 195 
 
 in Dr. Arnold's life " the happiness of a dog that is always 
 wagging its tail." That is the happiness that wearies in the 
 telling. But James Paget's happiness springs from unsullied 
 lucidity of soul. He has no meannesses, no egotisms, no 
 moods, to becloud him. He thoroughly enjoys the putting 
 out of vital energy. He lives his life out ; he has simple 
 and healthy delights ; he has keen domestic affections, 
 and a home absolutely after his heart, enriched by the 
 personal gifts that he most enjoyed. He was in intimate 
 touch with the highest minds of his day, in Science, and 
 in Literature, and in Art. He carried through it all 
 undimmed and unhindered, a beautiful nobility of temper, 
 which made itself felt in his fearlessness under responsi- 
 bility, and in the fine delicacy which transfigured his 
 forceful directness. As you touched this, you became 
 aware of the spiritual secret into which it ran back. 
 Nothing but a profound faith could inspire that gracious 
 humility in the wielding of high powers, which was, in 
 him, so instinctive and so unassumed. It was this 
 spiritual faith which, finally, gave such strange beauty to 
 the last years in which he was compelled to resign that 
 mastery over his own life which was so dear to him, and 
 to surrender to the utmost ignominies that physical 
 weakness can bring with it. Still, with speech almost 
 gone, he was himself; he was content; he made the most 
 of the narrow opportunity; he gave it character, and 
 dignity, and grace. He loved ; and was loved. His life, 
 as his son records, was still " ascendant " still rising in 
 worth. At last, the end came: "so slowly that it was 
 hard to see the change." He died on the 30th Dec., 1899. 
 The Funeral Service was at Westminster Abbey, where he 
 had himself carried the pall for Tennyson and Browning.
 
 196 Personal Studies 
 
 I shall never forget the look of the multitude of grey 
 heads in the choir that day. It seemed as if all that was 
 aged and honourable in England had come to do him 
 honour, who had made age so honourable. 
 
 " If I may choose," says his son Stephen in that fascinating 
 lecture on his father already alluded to, " out of all the 
 virtues that were daily in him, one that is above the rest, let 
 it be the singleness and the directness of his purposes. lie 
 never posed, or acted, or spoke in oracles, or hinted at 
 secrets, or did or admired things mean or tortuous or eccen- 
 tric ; he never made light of what is good, and he never 
 peeped through his fingers at what is evil. When he wanted 
 a thing he worked for it ; when he obtained honour he was 
 glad of it ; when pleasure came his way be mostly took it ; 
 and when he said a thing he always meant it. All the high 
 offices that he held, and all the admiration that met him at 
 every turn in his profession and in society, and all the 
 immeasurable influence tbat he exercised among the men and 
 women of his day, did not once make him false to himself, or 
 disobedient to the heavenly vision ; nothing ever darkened 
 the clear, pure, old-fashioned, homely simplicity of his nature." 
 
 Beautiful ! And yet and yet why is it that, in every 
 syllable of that noble record, I become aware of the rap 
 of a direct attack, challenging, at every turn, the ideals 
 that we hold dear ? It takes this form. 
 
 Here is one whose very nobility fortifies him in accepting 
 facts as they are He meets them full-breast ; he masters 
 them ; he takes them by storm. The demand that the 
 facts themselves of life as it is should be changed to meet 
 his case strikes him as a note of weakness, of flimsiness. 
 It is the sign of a bad workman, if he lays the blame on 
 the tools. Facts were harsh for Paget. It was not that
 
 Sir James Paget 197 
 
 he escaped their harsh incidence. But his simple-hearted 
 courage and good-humour took all this with an equal 
 spirit. The harshness was the challenge that put a man 
 to proof. Let there be no puling and whining no 
 peevishness of complaint ! Let a man go straight on ; and 
 the facts will yield him his open way through them ! 
 
 This is the dominant heart with which Paget read life ; 
 and it withheld him from all general fuss over Public 
 Reform. Of course, within his own professional lines, he 
 got things bettered. But he would have every one keep 
 himself to his own business, doing that with all his soul, 
 but not dissipating his energies in directions outside his 
 particular range, and concerning himself with the larger 
 issues with which he had no intimate knowledge. Every 
 cobbler to his own last ! That is the one rule by which 
 the affairs of the world at large will come straight. 
 
 So he believed. So he acted. This gave him a certain 
 optimism about life as it stood. As his son boldly notes, 
 " He loved London for its own sake, like a true lover, 
 without any desire to see it improved ; for he was pro- 
 foundly indifferent to all politics, whether Parliamentary 
 or Municipal what we should now call 'a bad citizen,' 
 but one of the best of all good Londoners." 
 
 The difference could not be better put than in those 
 last words, between his ideal, and all that which we, of the 
 Christian Social Union, exist to assert. We are drawn 
 together by the passionate desire to see London a different 
 place to change the face of the facts. Things as they are 
 profoundly disquiet and revolt us. We cannot be content 
 to go forward, each at our own task. We find ourselves 
 intimately concerned with other people's fortunes. We 
 cannot keep our fingers off things that lie outside
 
 198 Personal Studies 
 
 our private beat and our personal experience. We are 
 engaged in public fussing, and fuming, and complaining. 
 
 What is our defence ? Do we fall under the rebuke 
 of this manful record ? Are we convicted by these pierc- 
 ing grey eyes of Sir James Paget, which used to hold the 
 light in them, as they held you in their grip ? That is a 
 challenge that we had better consider how we can meet. 
 It is a challenge that no one of us can lightly afford to 
 pass by. 
 
 What is it that we should say ? We should say, I 
 think, that we would be content to bid every cobbler stick 
 to his last, if every cobbler had a last to stick to. As it 
 is, the lasts are without cobblers ; and the cobblers without 
 lasts. We should say, again, that we would gladly limit 
 our energies to doing our own business, if our own 
 business could be isolated from its effects on others. But 
 our misery is that every effort made by us on our own 
 lines involves hundreds of others ; and that we find 
 ourselves responsible, at every turn, whether we will or 
 no, for the lives that others are living, and for the deaths 
 that they are dying. We cannot ignore Parliamentary or 
 Municipal Politics, when we are ourselves taking full 
 advantage of the resources put into our hands by Parlia- 
 ment and Municipality, by which we grow fat through 
 the sweated labour of the weak. Our conscience has 
 become awake to responsibilities which, once recognized, 
 can never again be forgotten with impunity. 
 
 This brave and healthy belief of Sir James in a man's 
 power to make his way through the facts as they are, is, 
 after all, however humane and tender-hearted and pitiful 
 he himself was, a gospel for the strong ; and it is the 
 weak of whom we have especially learned to think the
 
 Sir James Paget 199 
 
 maimed, and halt, and blind, who are not, indeed, damaged 
 enough to fall under the protection of Public Charities 
 and yet are thrown out of the race, and have no adequate 
 chance in the open market, and droop, and drop, and fail, 
 and break, and die. The gospel of the strong lias shown 
 its seamy side to us. 
 
 No doubt, in Sir James' own noble profession, pre- 
 eminence is a proof of high character: it can only be 
 attained by moral distinction. But, in Commercial In- 
 dustry, pre eminence does not in the least involve this 
 as essential. The principle of the " career open to talent " 
 may bring to the top the very worst characteristics which 
 a State would desire to see in its leading citizens. 
 
 No, we cannot conceivably shut off from out of our 
 lives the criticism that experience itself has passed on 
 facts as they are. That criticism has been heard in tones 
 that will not admit of dismissal. It is too late to ask us 
 to be as if we had not heard them. Sir James belonged 
 to the earlier day, when the best men believed that it 
 was a man's own fault if he could not make something of 
 life ; and when, therefore, each had, for his main duty, to 
 do his own bit with all his might. Now, the world's 
 great trouble has cast its shadow on us all. We are all 
 driven to take our share in its burden and in its undoing. 
 To decline this, now that it has once been felt and faced, 
 would be the work of the " bad citizen." We shall be all 
 the more solemnly aware of this, if we take to our souls 
 the challenge of this noble life, and recognize how high 
 and true and pure a spirit was given to an ideal which 
 can be ours no longer. However changed the venue, he 
 has given us the standard of moral simplicity in which 
 alone our task can be discharged.
 
 FREDERICK TEMPLE * 
 
 THE rugged figure is gone out of the throng among 
 which he towered. All the old stories have been re-told : 
 and they are all alike in tone and type ; and most of them 
 are really true ; and all convey the same effect of a 
 brusque roughness which made one like the man for it, 
 and love to have a laugh over it. Everything about the 
 record was so wholesome and human and good, and told 
 on the right side, and made us feel the better for it. 
 
 He passed in a noble and dignified death : he knew 
 exactly when he had come to his close : and braced him- 
 self for his last speech, and took his Sacrament at the 
 very last moment at which he was master of himself, and 
 could lift himself to say his farewell to everybody who 
 had been knit by that act into the one Body to the 
 Archbishop of York, to his wife and his sons, and to each 
 of his household. His burial was singularly impressive in 
 its tone of solemn triumph, in its sunlight and colour, and 
 music, in its sure and certain hope. 
 
 The notices in the Press witnessed strikingly to the 
 profound impression produced by his personality on the 
 public imagination. Yet it is noticeable that this wide 
 public impression was very late in coming. It belongs 
 almost entirely to his few years as Archbishop. It was 
 
 * Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 200
 
 Frederick Temple 201 
 
 always a matter to me of surprise and indignation, how 
 little the Press had discovered him during his London 
 reign. He was in his full strength then, and in the 
 earlier years was continually making great utterances of 
 far finer power than anything which has come from him 
 of late when age had seriously told upon him. Yet no 
 public notice was ever taken of them at all. The Press 
 had got the word to pass them over as unimportant. They 
 never hit the public ear. He used at that time to come 
 to St. Paul's on the evening of the first Sunday in the 
 year and deliver a big sermon, full of thought, in that 
 strenuous passionate way of his, which, through its sheer 
 force, used to break its way into the hearer's heart of 
 hearts. No man living could have given such an utter- 
 ance. No personality at all, except that of Mr. Gladstone, 
 was built on the same plane, and bulked so large, and bore 
 down with such vehemence. We felt as if we were all 
 petty atoms, swept up into the power of this dominant 
 will, as the sentences ground themselves out in a fairer 
 form than the immense effort of the speaker led one to 
 expect ; and his bodily frame shook under the masterful 
 impulse ; and the machinery of utterance creaked and 
 groaned aloud ; and now and again the man's whole soul 
 broke through the furrowed face : and, perhaps, the big 
 tears which were so near to him would ooze slowly out of 
 the eyes and roll unheeded down. No sermons ever 
 quite moved me like these at their best ; and I used to 
 open my paper in the morning, convinced that the sordid 
 world would be ringing with the sound, only to find, if any 
 notice at all, a line to say that the Bishop preached as 
 usual in the evening at the Cathedral. Once or twice I 
 fired off private letters to editors, asking them whether
 
 2O2 Personal Studies 
 
 they knew the kind of man whom we had among us, but 
 it never had the slightest effect. 
 
 Curiously enough, as soon as he went to Canterbury, 
 when the day of his mighty sermons was over and gone, 
 the Press became imaginatively aware of him. It followed 
 him about : and noted : and reported : and told all the 
 stories. And finally, he rode off into triumphant public 
 affection in the inimitable caricatures of F. C. Gould. 
 That artist had absolutely got possession of him. Nose 
 and mouth, whiskers and legs, hat and back, and all were 
 perfect. And he had exactly caught the lovableness 
 that lay about the rough manner. People got fonder and 
 fonder of the man as they laughed over him. His 
 personal force told amazingly, through the jokes made at 
 his expense. 
 
 He made another conquest during his Archbishopric, 
 where he had failed as Bishop of London. He won the 
 attention of the big Laity : and of that strange lay- 
 menagerie the House of Lords. When he came to 
 London, I thought that at any rate here was a Bishop 
 who would especially tell on the laymen, and, I fancied, 
 also on the working-rnen at large. Here was a man whose 
 intense simplicity and robust humanity would be sure to 
 create a deep general impression in a city in which a 
 broad and direct impact can still count for something. 
 But not a bit of it. The West End laymen were puzzled 
 by never being asked to dinner with him. The familiar 
 organs of human intimacy and admiration were, therefore, 
 inoperative. And the Lords could not understand a man 
 who cried as he spoke against our poor friend, the 
 Deceased Wife's Sister. Peers don't weep as they speak. 
 It is not "good form." The working-man, somehow, failed
 
 Frederick Temple 203 
 
 to get hold of him, and never had any distinct impression 
 or imagination about him. So this curious result came 
 about that he became more and more the Clergy's 
 Bishop. The Clergy discovered his full worth : and they 
 became devoted to him. He worked like six horses : he 
 let everybody else work : he believed in his men 
 believed in them, indeed, to an extent which astonished 
 and bewildered them. He was never tired of asserting 
 that they were the best and bravest and most intelligent 
 Clergy that any Church had ever been blessed with. They 
 gazed on each other " with a wild surmise," and wondered 
 whether about half of it could possibly be true. But still 
 he said it, who never said what he did not mean. He 
 certainly meant it and meaut it so seriously, that now 
 and again it gave them moments of exultation and illusion : 
 they all but believed it themselves. However, the facts 
 were quick enough to undeceive them. So not much 
 harm was done. 
 
 He did not share his counsels with them ; but he 
 backed them gallantly ; he stuck to his diocese ; he put 
 all his wcnderful force into all that he had to do. He left 
 everybody alone : and pegged away himself. At the end, 
 his popularity with his Clergy was unbounded. 
 
 Oddly enough, he had failed just where nobody would 
 dream of him failing. He was too soft a ruler. He hardly 
 ruled at all. " Hinc ilia? lacrymae." It was splendid of him 
 to have resolutely refused to apply a Law which was itself 
 " in the dock." But he was bound to keep the reins in 
 his hand : he was bound to make it clear that some things 
 were over the border. No institution can work for long 
 on a bottom of complete chaos. A Church must have 
 some sort of mind about the character of its worship. A
 
 204 Personal Studies 
 
 slight exercise of fatherly supervision would probably, in 
 the earlier days, have done all that was wanted to prevent 
 things getting quite out of hand. He had trusted his 
 men to keep within equitable limits. They would have 
 responded if he had exercised the pressure of this spiritual 
 trust to check this or that excessive growth. 
 
 But he left it alone until custom had made reaction 
 difficult and dangerous. A bad situation came about. 
 He felt betrayed by those whom he had trusted to " behave 
 as gentlemen," as he once said. He had held back the 
 Law, believing that they would not take advantage of 
 this: and they had. They, on the other hand, had 
 understood themselves to be tolerated so lung, that they 
 had accepted the toleration as sanction, and were outraged 
 at being condemned for what he must have been aware 
 of for years. 
 
 He fell back at last on the Law as he understood it : 
 and this proved to be the narrowest possible interpretation 
 of a Law that was practically obsolete ; and then the fat 
 was in the fire. All that can be said is that the narrowness 
 of this interpretation is the measure of the generosity 
 with which he had tolerated things which, according to 
 his private judgment, had been so hopelessly wide of 
 legality. 
 
 Another odd infirmity was his habit of endless delay in 
 making appointments. This forcible, decisive man was 
 for ever postponing decisions. He could not be induced 
 to fill up Prebendal stalls, preachers' nominations, etc., 
 etc., and drove the verger's mind into distraction. As for 
 the Colonies, they gradually gave up in despair. Poor 
 Tucker of the S.P.G. used to roll sleepless in bed o' nights, 
 thinking of some bishopric that had lain vacant for
 
 Frederick Temple 205 
 
 months : and when for the twentieth time he pressed for 
 a name, he was only told that " Aaron's rod had not yet 
 budded." His appointments when they came were singu- 
 larly disappointing. It seemed as if the prolonged delay 
 only served to land him at the last on the flattest of the 
 candidates. It was strange how little his strong character 
 picked out strong characters. 
 
 For strong he was, in an heroic mould, with a heart 
 of human tenderness. He stood out as belonging to a 
 great generation, with a plain nobility of temper which 
 the breath of the world never touched or tainted. He 
 was riot very able to criticize himself. He knew that he 
 had done always, with a good conscience, what he thought 
 to be his duty : but he did not seem to ask whether what 
 he so saw to be right was the best that could have been 
 seen. He feared no responsibilities; but, having faced 
 and fulfilled them, he never appeared to go back on them, 
 and reflect, and reconsider again. They fell behind at 
 once, as choscs jugfas ; and he passed on to the next 
 business in hand. This habit gave him extraordinary force 
 in work ; but it has its inevitable limitations. It does not 
 assist a man to gain new perspectives, or to admit fresh 
 lights. This was seriously felt in his latter years, as old 
 age began to block the avenues through which intelligence 
 from without could reach him. 
 
 He had a bluff geniality ; but he never needed, or asked 
 for, intimacy. He went on his own way, in dogged in- 
 dividuality : and was followed with an affectionate 
 admiration by all who watched the splendid determination 
 and thoroughness with which he spent himself for GOD 
 and his fellow-men. He had the real passion of religion ; 
 and his whole being could flame through and through
 
 206 Personal Studies 
 
 with spiritual emotion. Then it was that "the granite 
 rock burned " ; and the face was transfigured. He had a 
 devouring hunger for righteousness, and a most tender 
 love for little children. He intensified our sense of what 
 human nature might yet become, if all its strength were 
 once committed to the simplicity of Faith ; and we are all 
 the smaller because he is withdrawn. 
 
 It was a great thing to have had seated in the Primate's 
 Throne the man who was unmistakably the strongest in 
 the Church. We have now had three Archbishops in 
 succession who have been all men of singular mark, 
 masterful, independent, and high-charactered. This is a 
 striking break into the Anglican tradition, which is apt to 
 carry the safe and unpronounced men to the chief places. 
 And, of the three chiefs, he was by no means the least, 
 whose massive frame has now been laid to its last rest in 
 the Garth at Canterbury. 
 
 No symbol of sadness discoloured the honour of his 
 burial. He had lived with something of the grandeur that 
 attaches to the elemental powers of man ; and had never, 
 from first to last, lost the simple beauty of a child's belief 
 in GOD, our Father, and the LORD JESUS CHRIST.
 
 MANDELL CREIGHTON* 
 
 MRS. CUEIGHTON has triumphantly achieved the task 
 that she set herself. She had to deal with a character of 
 infinite versatility, of intellectual subtlety, of electrical 
 alertness, of swift changes, full of bewildering paradox, 
 and flashing brilliancies, and ironic play, and reckless 
 humour, and perilous epigram. And yet she proposed 
 to convince a doubtful world, puzzled by his superficial 
 varieties of disguise, that the chief note in his character 
 was to be found in a deep and steady consistency of 
 purpose ; that his dominant interest was serious and 
 ethical ; and that his ideal of life lay in simplicity of 
 moral aim. 
 
 And she has done it. No one can read through this 
 book, with its remarkable series of intimate letters, 
 without being struck with the unity of interest that is 
 characteristic of Mahdell Creighton from his early boy- 
 hood to his last hours at Fulham. " Those who had 
 known him long," she writes at the close of the Life, "all 
 agree in saying that the Bishop was one who changed 
 singularly little. The Merton Undergraduate was in all 
 essentials the same man as the Bishop of London." The 
 fundamental character was unchanged ; and that found- 
 
 * Bishop of London. Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton. By 
 his wife. London : Longmans, Green and Co. 
 
 207
 
 208 Personal Studies 
 
 ation was given him by the North Country, and " was 
 very grave and sedate." That is Dr. Bigg's judgment. 
 And that is exactly the surprise that awaits us as we 
 read. Who was there who at first meeting with Mandell 
 Creighton suspected himself to be talking with a grave 
 and sedate Northerner ? Yet it is true. Always his 
 mind is playing round the same themes : always he is 
 handling life on the same method : always he gives his 
 admiration to the same types: always he is employed 
 in tracking the same motives : always he is pronounc- 
 ing identical conclusions. His rapid brain spins ever 
 round the same centres. He gains immensely, as he 
 goes, in skilfulness of application : in reality : in sure- 
 ness of insight. But the ideas that he applies do not 
 vary. 
 
 This comes out most obviously and vividly in his 
 treatment of Education. He loves the problems of 
 Education : they were eminently congenial to him : he 
 is always speaking on them : and speaking excellently. 
 He preached on them : he lectured : he gave addresses. 
 And he was always quick and alive and brilliant. But, 
 for all that, he is absolutely uniform in the thing that 
 he has to say. He is for ever reasserting one position. 
 
 So in history. Here lay his primary life-work : and 
 here he made himself a European reputation. And how 
 fixed and persistent he remains, from first to last, in 
 his deliberate estimate of the objective to be pursued by 
 the historian, of the limitations that he is to respect ; of 
 the mind with which he sets about his task ; and of the 
 morals that he is entitled to draw ! And the noticeable 
 thing is that this consistent judgment of his, which 
 accompanies him steadily through life, is, whether in
 
 Mandell Creighton 209 
 
 Education or in History, entirely devoid of subtlety or 
 paradox. It is the judgment of average sanity : it appeals 
 to plain common -sense; it avoids all semblance of excess: 
 it strips itself of anything that might attract through 
 literary brilliancy, or artistic craft, or picturesque vivacity. 
 He makes for sober Northern grey, in his historical 
 writing : he labours to reduce the tragic or melodramatic 
 elements; he disappoints us sadly over the number of 
 poisonings that he permits us to imagine as possible in 
 the Rome of the Borgias ; and Caesar himself becomes 
 quite a respectable person, with occasional lapses from 
 the stricter paths of suburban virtue. He works hard to 
 bring historical people under a general common standard, 
 with lower high lights, and less dismal shadows, than you 
 might expect ; according to his own famous verdict that 
 " the good are not so good as they think themselves : and 
 the bad are not so bad as the good think them to be." It 
 is not "white-washing" that he attempts: but, rather, 
 the close application of a very steady and sober common- 
 sense to the actions of both good and bad alike, in the 
 light of which we see and understand that there is a good 
 deal of human nature in everybody, whether villain or 
 saint. He has a horror of priggishness, and of pharisaic 
 moralizing. He wants us simply to understand that 
 people in history were men and women of our own flesh 
 and blood : and that we shall see this clearly enough if 
 we will but take the proper pains to understand them. 
 
 All this makes history a bit cold and flat. It is a 
 system which seems to omit the deeper and stormier 
 under-tow of the tides that sway and sweep men towards 
 some irresistible destiny : as well as the large winds of 
 prophecy, that lift, and shake, and inspire, and drive, and
 
 2io Personal Studies 
 
 exalt. But the point is that he who seemed superficially 
 to be the very last man to adopt such sober methods, 
 nevertheless, deliberately and consistently stuck to them 
 throughout. His ideal was framed out of sanity and 
 simplicity. This is what emerges so emphatically from 
 his record. And still more remarkable is it, when we 
 find that the supreme dominant interest, under the 
 pressure of which he so consistently worked, was ethical. 
 It was not the intellect, not the imagination, nor the 
 desire for literary expression, or for artistic production 
 of any kind, that really held him fascinated, but the 
 conscience. This is the secret of the inner man, which 
 his close friend, Reginald Copleston, Bishop of Calcutta, 
 detected in their earliest years of Undergraduate friend- 
 ship. It emerges at once, in the book ; and in its most 
 startling form is in the great letter to the monitors at 
 Durham School. Was there ever such a letter written 
 at such an age ? It has in it the earnest wisdom of the 
 man who has thought everything out. He claims quite 
 easily the right to speak, as if it would be expected of 
 him to do so. He is intimately concerned with the first 
 principles of School Discipline, and the monitorial 
 authority : and he follows these out, with strange acute- 
 ness, with felicitous insight, down into the lightest details 
 of behaviour and expediency. It is an amazing letter : 
 and exhibits the sincerity and force of his inherent bent 
 towards the philosophy of moral conduct, even when a 
 boy. This remains his habitual temper as an Under- 
 graduate. He is "the philosopher": "Mentor": these 
 are his nicknames. And they were used by his dearest 
 friends, to express what they liked in him, as most 
 characteristic. They are anxious to protest against
 
 Mandell Creighton 211 
 
 suggesting any flavour of " the prig," by these names. 
 This he could never be. He especially loathed the type. 
 But, naturally, by instinct, he occupied himself intensely 
 with human character. He found in it an inexhaustible 
 field for curiosity and interest. He watched everybody : 
 noted their motives and ways : and always so cared for 
 them personally, that he wanted to be inside their lives, 
 to advise, to kindle, to warn, to help. He was keen to 
 influence freshmen : he took everybody under his wing : 
 he had a word to say, he analyzed, and thought, on their 
 behalf. And he did it in a way that they liked. 
 
 Mrs. Creighton well recalls the habitual greeting of any 
 old friend as he tucked his arm in his, and led him off 
 for a talk. " How have you been getting on ? Come 
 and tell me about yourself." That personal subject could 
 never flag. In quite early days he delighted to influence : 
 but, in all his main life, he had a distinct fear of using 
 the influence which would naturally flow from his intense 
 interest in others. His passion for personal freedom gave 
 him halt. He would talk and advise with endless delight 
 and with keen skill : but he was resolute in his refusal to 
 ease others' responsibilities. He threw them back on 
 themselves : and was for ever preaching the necessity 
 that lay on each to " find himself." The most touching 
 evidence of his absorbing interest in conduct and character 
 is given by the wonderful letters poured out year after 
 year to his orphaned nieces and nephews. They are the 
 very best letters in the book. He wrote to these growing 
 children about everything that he was doing : and he 
 moralized to them : and he philosophized : and he entered 
 with zest into their development, and their problems. 
 And, always, the matter of it all is character, and the
 
 2 1 2 Personal Studies 
 
 conduct of life : and, always, he gave them of his very 
 best and most intimate thinking. 
 
 These letters, written in the storm and stress of his 
 appalling London work, are a witness to his intense and 
 affectionate loyalty to home relationships, and of the 
 largess and generosity of his intellectual expenditure. 
 These letters, with others of the same type, in the second 
 volume, exhibit the finest quality of Creighton's mind. 
 They are fascinating to read : brilliant in keenness of 
 insight and touch : free flowing : spontaneous : inevitable. 
 They have a quality of distinction : a nervous grip on 
 reality : a rapidity and intensity of suggestion : a pro- 
 verbial force, which make them without parallel in modern 
 letter-writing. We begin to wonder whether anybody 
 since the Son of Sirach passed away has left such a store 
 of shrewd sayings that sum up human experience with 
 such deft skilfulness and in such happy phrases. And, 
 always, at the bottom, it is sanity, it is sincerity, it is 
 wisdom, that gives the note to the utterance. 
 
 " Art is the veil of beauty over Law." " Action cannot 
 be carried out in terms of omnipotence : but criticism is 
 expressed in terms of omniscience." "If things were as 
 simple as our critics make them out, we should have 
 done what they advise long ago." " Happiness is growth 
 into the purpose of the world." " Life is the sum of our 
 relationships." " Life is an opportunity for loving." Excel- 
 lent stuff, in perfect form ! These sayings came out of 
 his innermost experience. And, then, there are all the 
 delicious epigrams, from the famous " It is the duty of 
 the newspapers to tell us what to do : it is our duty not 
 to do it " ; " No people do so much harm as those who 
 go about doing good " ; to the immortal utterance " In
 
 Mandell Creighton 213 
 
 dealing with ourselves, after we have let ' the ape and 
 the tiger die ' there still remains the donkey, a tougher 
 and more enduring animal." Every syllable of the thing 
 goes clear home. Here we feel him, as that which he 
 essentially was throughout the student of character, 
 the ethical expert. In this study he was insatiable : on 
 it he was inexhaustible. And he grows more and more 
 in mastery over its matter. His latest letters are his 
 best : and prove that the interest which came so vividly 
 to light in that Monitorial Rescript was with him in 
 unflagging force as he lay sickening to his death on the 
 sofa at Ful ham. 
 
 That is the revelation made by the book : and I cannot 
 but think that Mrs. Creighton, with so strong a case in 
 her hands, could easily have afforded a little fuller ad- 
 mission of the vagaries and bewilderments that served 
 so often to disguise the seriousness of his life's purpose. 
 I should have thought that the period of intellectual 
 turmoil at Oxford was more anxious and pronounced than 
 would be gathered from the book. Is the sway of the 
 aesthetic movement adequately accentuated ; and the 
 dominant influence of Walter Pater, not as we all learned 
 to know him in later days, but still in the temper of 
 the historic Preface to the volume of Essays on the 
 Renaissance ? Copleston and Wilson may have known 
 well what Creighton was even then, in his interior Creed : 
 but he must have passed through a troubled time, before 
 he found himself in the assured security of his faith at 
 Embleton. We are shown the result : but we might 
 have gained help by seeing more of the process by which 
 it was reached. The conclusion itself is said, in its 
 briefest form, in a letter to C. D., vol. ii. p. 403. " Life
 
 214 Personal Studies 
 
 can only be explained by a life : and I see in JESUS that 
 life of which all other life is but a partial reflex." " All 
 purely intellectual positions break down. They go so 
 far and no further. The simplest soul is full of amazing 
 problems. Try to explain yourself as you can, there is 
 a vast residuum which you cannot turn into shape. How 
 is all this to be dealt with ? I answer, only by conscious 
 communion with a Person Who is Life and Truth." 
 These sentences gather up, obviously, a whole world of 
 experiences and arguments ; the key of his position lies 
 in them. We dimly feel this : but we are not given 
 the steps and stages by which to realize what is meant. 
 Through his intense personal experience that relationships 
 with others alone constitute and interpret what we are, 
 and what we have to do, he passed on to his conviction 
 that all these relationships remain partial and fragmentary 
 and unresolved, unless they can be gathered up into, and 
 interpreted by, a supreme and unifying relationship 
 that of the soul with a Personal GOD. This is the 
 relationship revealed to us in the Person of the LOUD 
 JESUS CHRIST ; of that Kevelation "Scripture is the record, 
 and the Church the witness." " Dogma is simply the 
 maintenance of the historic CHRIST against imperfect 
 definitions." So it all came to him. But we should have 
 felt it all the more if we had shared the growth. 
 
 Again, the evidence and record of his kindliness and 
 patience, during his London episcopate, towards his 
 Clergy, is so direct and pronounced that we might well 
 have been shown a little more of the self-conquest by 
 which he was enabled to keep under his natural intolerance 
 of the stupid and the commonplace. It was all the more 
 noticeable in London because he could not have done it,
 
 Mandell Creighton 215 
 
 say, in Embleton days. And, yet again, his impressive 
 surrender to the entire supremacy of goodness, so deep 
 a conviction in his later days, would be given its full 
 weight and force if we were made first to realize how 
 unexpected such a conclusion was from one who had 
 every temptation possible to man to over-value intel- 
 lectualism, and who, in so much of his normal habit, 
 would seem to be rating the brain so far above the heart. 
 As he flashed along his way, how little would his hearers 
 have supposed that he was a man who had written round 
 the walls of the Intellectual Palace, " Mene, Mene, Tekel, 
 Upharsin." Yet this is what he had done, in absolute 
 sincerity. We ought to feel that the power of the 
 conviction lies in its surprise. 
 
 But enough of criticism on a book so effective and so 
 fascinating. Everyone must read it : and no one who 
 begins will lay it down before reaching the simple and 
 touching story of the death. 
 
 It is inevitable that, in closing the Kecord, and lying 
 back to estimate the impression left, we should find 
 bulking large his treatment of the famous Crisis. It was 
 a cruel position in which he found himself from the first 
 moment of his arrival in London. The ritual situation 
 was chaotic. He was under the necessity of establish- 
 ing some order, if he was to be in any sense a ruler. He 
 could not tolerate anarchy. Everybody was aware of 
 the urgency of the case. The first symptom, the difficulty 
 at St. Ethelburga's, disclosed at once the critical moment 
 that had been reached. Everything might have been 
 saved, if the Church had been allowed to work out her 
 own salvation quietly. The main body of Priests were 
 as keen for some regulation as the Bishop himself: and
 
 216 Personal Studies 
 
 he would have been singularly skilful in its orderly and 
 sensitive assertion. But the opportunity was ruined 
 hopelessly by the Bulls of Bashan. Kensit began running 
 amuck. Protestant mobs set to work to howl. Sir 
 William Harcourt joined in the bellow. The House of 
 Commons roared again. All was over. Backs stiffened. 
 Outraged consciences recoiled against malice and injustice. 
 The air grew heated : accusations hurtled : blood rose : 
 confusion reigned supreme. Everybody screamed at 
 once : and all of them screamed at the Bishop. The 
 situation is immortalized in Creighton's letter to Sir 
 William Harcourt. This is a masterpiece. That gay 
 Goliath had pranced out before the hosts, rolling the 
 great Erastian phrases round his tongue, offering to feed 
 with the flesh of Bishops all the Puritan kites and crows. 
 And lo ! here is a Bishop who lightly plays with him : 
 turns his case inside out : exposes the shallow futility of 
 his cheap logic : holds him up to mockery as a belated 
 Inquisitor, as obsolete as the Medievalism which he 
 derides. Sir William discovers himself to be simply dis- 
 missed. Persecution was always futile : it is now out of 
 date. No one will have it. Men only take a pleasure 
 in taunting the Bishops for not doing what they will not 
 do and dare not do themselves. About this Creighton 
 was perfectly clear. He had always been an apostle of 
 freedom and of tolerance. Nothing would induce him 
 to begin turning on the Police. Only his illness can 
 have prevented him from seeing at once how to put a 
 stop, as he afterwards did, on that absurd Colonel in the 
 Writing Room of the Athenoeum, who from that post of 
 vantage had proposed to purge the Church. 
 
 Creighton had resolved that the thing must be done
 
 Mandell Creighton 217 
 
 by persuasion. There are no other weapons that can 
 lawfully be worn in spiritual and intellectual matters ; 
 more especially when the people to be handled were 
 devoted Priests long accustomed to episcopal acquiescence 
 in all that they were doing. So he bent himself to the 
 work with all his powers. It was a work that called out 
 his special gifts in their most brilliant form. He brought 
 to bear all his store of historical learning : he exhibited 
 infinite fertility of resource: he was alert, skilful, per- 
 suasive. One rash joke on herrings, it is true, lost him 
 St. Peter's, London Docks. But he kept his temper 
 admirably : and was inexhaustible in argument, and plea, 
 and appeal. But he made the mistake of deserting his 
 own peculiar formula, " the appreciation of a principle 
 knocks the bottom out of complaints." So he expressed 
 his favourite method of entering inside the mind of the 
 man to be won and, by the evolution of his own principle, 
 correcting his excesses and conquering his recalcitrancy. 
 Instead of this, Creighton tried to break down the 
 exaggerations of one Ideal by emphasizing the Counter- 
 ideal. Over against the claims of Catholicity he set the 
 claim of Nationality. He put all his force into exhibiting 
 the strength and the wealth of the English Church as an 
 Historical Embodiment of racial character. He appealed 
 to the wonderful combination in it of Authority with 
 Freedom: of Catholic Creed with national colour. He 
 passionately pleaded, on behalf of the Church's responsi- 
 bility, for the Christianizing of the Nation. 
 
 Now, this might be true enough : but it left the par- 
 ticular issues at stake untouched. For, first, the question 
 was whether this delicate and difficult equipoise, which 
 balanced Authority and Freedom to such perfection, was
 
 2i 8 Personal Studies 
 
 likely to have been seized and fixed for ever in the rough 
 scrimmage of 1552, by the set of men behind Northumber- 
 land : or under the strain of perilous compromises by which 
 the Church contrived to survive under Elizabeth. Had the 
 exact point been once for all hit with amazing precision, 
 so that every rubric, every detail, of the Art of Uniformity 
 could claim for itself the high sanction of this English 
 Ideal ? And then, again, the problem was whether the 
 English racial type had not need of some enlargement, of 
 some balance, of some correction, of some transfiguration ? 
 What terrible losses it had suffered in the hubbub of the 
 Reformation ! How much it lacked of imagination : of 
 beauty : of width : of richness ! Everybody confessed 
 it. The Englishman had narrowed the Catholic Creed 
 into his own insular limitations : he had made it drab, 
 thin, cold, stupid. Did not the Bishop hold the poor 
 Englishman up to public scorn ? Was he not always 
 warning him of his insularity : his insolence : his ignor- 
 ance : his ugliness ? And was this Englishman to impose 
 his ugliness and his ignorance upon the fulness of Faith 
 in the Incarnation ? Did he not need to be educated, 
 tempered, enriched ? Who would say that he had not 
 thrown away much that was most precious, or that he did 
 not need to have his spiritual vision enlarged and his 
 imagination quickened by a Creed that had, for its 
 essential verity, the solidarity of the human race, the 
 repudiation of the finality of Nationalities ? 
 
 This was what the Catholic Party thought themselves 
 to be fighting for : and it was no answer, no solution, 
 to parade yet once again the virtues which the English- 
 man did possess, and the value to him of his insular form 
 of worship. Creighton would have won his men better
 
 Mandell Creighton 219 
 
 if he had frankly accepted their criticism of the English 
 position a criticism which he could enforce with a 
 capacity and an irony far beyond their powers ; and then 
 had exhibited the historical necessities, which, neverthe- 
 less, must condition the corrective action which that 
 criticism cried out for. They would have given him 
 more confidence if they had felt how cordially he shared 
 their view. By acceptance of this principle he might 
 have knocked the bottom out of their complaints. 
 
 He worked as few men in our generation have worked. 
 The harrowing anxiety of the Church crisis gave him no 
 rest, and no chance of recovery. He passed swiftly from us, 
 as he had come swiftly among us. He had flung out, for 
 those brief years, the full force of his splendid gifts, with 
 an unstinted and irresistible generosity. We knew his 
 faults : but we learned more and more to delight in his 
 quickening touch, in his illuminating utterance, in his 
 radiant scorn of conventional thought, in his rapid insight, 
 in his fertile sympathy. He was the most interesting 
 personality alive in London. And now, through this 
 record of his life, we know the nobility of his aims, the 
 simplicity of his innermost manhood, and the depth of 
 his passion for the supremacy of goodness.
 
 WILLIAM STUBBS* 
 
 WE have not half realized what a great man is gone 
 from us. He did his best, himself, to prevent us remem- 
 bering it. We all heard of his dry quips and odd cranks. 
 We laughed at the book with the big big B, which was 
 his constant companion by night and by day, and which 
 the awe-stricken children, at last, discovered to be, not 
 the Bible, but Bradshaw. We heard perhaps of his 
 earnest assurance to the lady at Lambeth garden-party, 
 who asked if he had seen the great guest of the hour, the 
 Princess of Wales. "No! But my Suffragan has." It 
 was nice to think of that clergyman in Cheshire who was 
 never in his parish, and to whom the Bishop said, as he 
 encountered him for the twentieth time at some railway 
 
 junction, " Well, Mr. , you are, certainly, the most 
 
 Stationary clergyman in my Diocese : " or to recall him 
 taking up one hand after another of Lord Grimthorpe, 
 who had cried to him in pride over a Parliamentary enact- 
 ment which he had introduced into a Bill of Lord 
 Halifax's " What do you think of my Clause ? " and 
 saying, "I can't see them." 
 
 Or, perhaps, it amuses us to picture Mr. Swinburne 
 shut up for months with him in a country parsonage, to 
 which the poet had retired in order to discover where 
 
 * Bishop of Oxford. 
 220
 
 William Stubbs 221 
 
 Ramoth-Gilead actually was. For, according to the Oxford 
 myth, it was ignorance of that important fact which had 
 ploughed him in divinity. There Mr. Swinburne declined 
 to go to church, not in consequence of any dogmatic 
 difficulties, but solely owing to the prayer for the Queen 
 which he could not induce his tutor to omit from the 
 service. But things have changed with him since then ; 
 and he sings us now our Imperialism with the best. 
 Very shrewd and very interesting were the Bishop's 
 comments on that curious episode. 
 
 All this is very good ; and, indeed, his cynical humour 
 was as characteristic as it was excellent. But, then, it 
 was characteristic because of the man behind it. It was 
 characteristic because behind it was a man of intense 
 emotional passion, who dare not let himself go, and who, 
 through many circumstances in his life, had little field for 
 any such emotional expression. Now and again it would 
 become visible ; the whole man would quiver with the 
 heat of impulses which he could with difficulty control. 
 Sometimes he would allow a sermon to become a vent for 
 his own personal emotion ; and, when he did, he preached 
 Avith singular unction and with profound impressiveness. 
 This often gave startling interest to those utterances in 
 which he broke through his habitual reserve, as in the 
 great Charge in which he told of his own personal relation 
 to the Tractarian Movement. 
 
 Immersed as he was, through the greater part of his 
 life, in the dusty details of Charters and Rolls, of 
 Inventories and Leases, he retained all his impetuous 
 passions in full freshness. He could be very angry, 
 almost with the vehemence of a child. ,He felt intensely 
 the burning questions of the day ; and had intimate
 
 222 Personal Studies 
 
 concern with its immediate Politics. Like all other true 
 historians, he hated, with a heat which not even his 
 innate Toryism could obscure, any policy of England, 
 whether at the earlier date of the Crimean, or at later 
 crises, which went to prolong the blight upon the East of 
 Turkish tyranny. 
 
 He read history with a large insight into human 
 motives and heroic causes. Here is his judgment on the 
 Crusades, no dry-as-dust verdict, but with the heart of a 
 true man in it. 
 
 " They were the first great effort of mediaeval life to go 
 beyond the pursuit of selfish and isolated ambitions ; they 
 were the trial-feat of the young world, essaying to use, to the 
 glory of GOD and the benefit of man, the arms of its new 
 knighthood. 
 
 " That the good they did was largely leavened with evil 
 may be said of every war that has ever been waged ; that bad 
 men rose by them while good men fell is, and must be, true 
 wherever and whenever the race is to the swift and the battle 
 to the strong. But that in the end they were a benefit to the 
 world no one who reads can doubt ; and that in their course 
 they brought out a love for all that is heroic in human nature, 
 the love of freedom, the honour of prowess, sympathy with 
 sorrow, perseverance to the last, and patient endurance with- 
 out hope, the chronicles of the age abundantly prove." 
 
 He was a Tory of the Tories ; partly out of a pessimistic 
 despair at the ignorance, the shallowness, the vanity, the 
 folly of all us average men ; partly out of his vivid real- 
 ization of the power of that amazing constitution, the 
 growth and life of which he had been the first to unravel 
 and interpret. He had followed its movement; and, in 
 that, he had shown himself the true lover of liberty. But,
 
 William Stubbs 223 
 
 once grown, it had so much behind it that it could not 
 risk being tampered with. He was a Constitutionalist to 
 the backbone, and abhorred absolutism. I shall never 
 forget the measured force of his judgment on Henry VIII. 
 It was like listening to a judge pronouncing the final doom. 
 
 As an historian, his favourite foes were the lawyers. 
 At them he was never tired of poking fun. He delighted 
 in chaffing their determination to fix precisely things 
 that were fluid ; and to invent where they could not 
 explain. He himself was keenly sensitive to the fact that 
 life moves, and refuses to be bounded by fixed outlines, and 
 to be cut and dried and squared. A great-hearted man, 
 with a soul as large as his brain, he could, nevertheless, 
 be wilful : and impulsive : and what the late Dean of St. 
 Paul's would call " naughty " naughty in trying to shock, 
 and in perversely concealing his best feelings. But he 
 was a man of noble temper, and of splendid force ; with 
 something pathetic hanging about him, as over a man 
 who had never quite got the world to understand him, or 
 had ever found full expression for that emotional self 
 which was so deep in him. This pathos drew to him the 
 affection of those who were near enough to know what lay 
 behind the incomparable master in History. 
 
 Let us hear him speaking in his own words on matters 
 of present concern. 
 
 He is speaking on the " popular " view of historic 
 knowledge : 
 
 "that aspect of it in which it becomes merely a tool or a 
 stock of tools capable of employment for ulterior purposes : 
 and the methods of teaching it by which with the least trouble 
 the learner can acquire practically useful information. I call 
 this the popular or utilitarian aspect, because it belongs to
 
 224 Personal Studies 
 
 the catchpenny theory of human life, according to which the 
 value of a thing is just as much as it will bring ; the theory 
 that despises science and research, that regards politics as a 
 game between Blue and Orange, that places the interest of 
 Great Britain at the crown and apex of national ambitions, 
 and regards education in general not as the training of the 
 human mind for GOD'S service, a development of powers to 
 His glory and the welfare of our fellow-men, but as a means 
 for the acquisition of a certain sum in the Funds ; the theory 
 that regards human souls as factory hands, and ascribes to 
 Parliament the power of making a false statement true." 
 
 Now take a great historical verdict. It is his summing 
 up on Henry VIII. 
 
 "I do not believe that he was abnormally profligate: in 
 this region of morality he was not better perhaps than 
 Charles V., but he was much better than Francis I. and Philip 
 II. and Henry IV. But he was cruelly, royally vindictive ; 
 there was in him an ever-increasing, ever encroaching self- 
 will, ever grasping and grasping more and more of power : a 
 self-will guided by a high intellect, and that sort of sincerity 
 which arises from a thorough belief in himself. I am not 
 prepared to deny that deep, cunning, unscrupulous men, like 
 Cromwell, traded on their knowledge of his character ; but 
 not one of those who tried to work their own ends through 
 Henry escaped the doom to which false friends and open foes 
 alike found their way. 
 
 " Well, you say, you would not wish to see him worse 
 cursed. I do not condemn him. GOD forbid, in Whose hand 
 are the hearts of kings. I do not believe him to have been 
 a monster of lust and blood, as so many of the Roman 
 Catholic writers regard him. I cannot accept at all the 
 picture which Mr. Froude has drawn. I think that even 
 Lord Herbert's estimate of him is deficient in the perception 
 of his surpassing self-wilf ulness. I do not attempt to portray
 
 William Stubbs 225 
 
 him after my own idea; but I seem to see in him a grand 
 gross figure, very far removed from ordinary human sym- 
 pathies, self-engrossed, self-confident, self-willed ; unscrupulous 
 in act, violent and crafty, but justifying to himself, by his 
 belief in himself, both unscrupulousness, violence, and craft. 
 A man who regarded himself as the highest justice, and who 
 looked on mercy as a mere human weakness. And with all 
 this, as needs must have been, a very unhappy man, wretched 
 in his family, wretched in his friends, wretched in his 
 servants, most wretched in his loneliness ; that awful loneli- 
 ness in which a king lives, and which the worst as well as the 
 best of despots realizes. Have I drawn the outline of a 
 monster 1 Well, perhaps ; but not the popular notion of this 
 particular portent. A strong, high-spirited, ruthless, disap- 
 pointed, solitary creature ; a thing to hate, or to pity, or to 
 smile at, or to shudder at, or to wonder at, but not to judge."
 
 RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH* 
 
 HE had been through the fire. That is what we of the 
 younger generation felt as soon as we came closely under 
 the spell of Dean Church. 
 
 Gentleness, delicacy, refinement, holiness these, no 
 doubt, were his in special measure; and the perfected 
 judgment of the older culture, with its firmness, its 
 sanity, its exquisite truth : and the charm of a most 
 beautiful nature : and the quick sympathy of a sensitive 
 heart : and the touch of a man who lived very near to 
 GOD. All this would have marked him out, and would 
 have won for him an admiration and a love such as are 
 given to very few. 
 
 But over and above this, there was a peculiar ring, as it 
 were, in the metal of the man which told of the flame. 
 Some great experience there had been, by which every- 
 thing in him had gained an intensity, a solemnity, a con- 
 centrated force, which would at times startle us. A flash 
 would come into the eye, a tone in the voice, which would 
 make us feel very small and rather afraid. This spare, 
 slight man, quiet and gentle, had he then been in the 
 wars ? Was it a soldier who spoke in him, who had known 
 what it was to hear the call of a trumpet in face of a foe ? 
 We crouched, and ceased to talk so glibly, and wondered 
 
 * Dean of St. Paul's. 
 226
 
 Richard William Church 227 
 
 what it all had meant long ago, in the days when he had 
 won this warrior-look. 
 
 We knew well when those days had been. They were 
 the years that followed the crash of Newman's secession. 
 Remembering, as we still could, that incomparable wonder 
 and fascination of Newman's personality, which are now 
 so fast becoming a fading tradition : remembering what 
 Newman had been to Oxford and Oxford to him ; and 
 then recalling those tender words that record in the 
 Apologia his last farewell to this his younger friend, 
 whom he called by the endearing name " Carissime " : and 
 recalling also that for fourteen years after the leave-taking 
 in Oxford, not one word passed between them, in speech 
 or writing : recalling, moreover, the endless partings of 
 friends, the sundering of ties, the ignominies and the 
 alarms and the disasters which filled those troubled years 
 for those who were faithful to the old Cause : we could 
 not wonder why it was that we said to ourselvers, " He 
 has been through the fire." 
 
 Richard Church was just thirty at this supreme crisis 
 of his life. Born at Lisbon, he was taken to Florence 
 in 1818, where, during the next eight years, he gained 
 as a boy the memory which was to issue, in after-days, in 
 his lifelong study of Dante, who left upon him, as upon 
 all who study him closely, that impress of noble austerity 
 which belongs to those who live in the Vision of the Last 
 Things. 
 
 Two opposite influences told upon Church through his 
 blood. From both his grandparents on his father's side 
 he inherited the spiritual depth of the Quakers. His 
 father's brother, on the other hand, was the famous 
 General Richard Church, whose life was crowded with
 
 228 Personal Studies 
 
 heroic adventures, fighting the French, from very boy- 
 hood, up and down the coasts of the Mediterranean, 
 repressing Calabrian and Sicilian brigands, freeing Greece 
 as the general of the revolutionary force which drove the 
 Turk out of the ancient homes of Hellenic Liberty. The 
 high courage, the love of freedom, the hate of cruelty and 
 wrong which revealed themselves in the Dean during 
 the great Eastern Crisis of 1876, after the Bulgarian 
 massacres, were true to the spirit and the tradition which 
 came down to him from this hero of the old Greek War. 
 
 However, his own life was peaceful enough in its actual 
 circumstances. His mother returned, a widow, to England 
 in 1828, and sent him to school at Redlands, near Bristol, 
 from which he passed to a quiet college, Wadham, at 
 Oxford ; and then came the Fellowship at Oriel, which 
 meant so much, for it was this which brought him into 
 affectionate intimacy with Newman. 
 
 He was Newman's candidate for the Fellowship, we are 
 told, though he did not need this favour, for " no one could 
 resist his moral beauty." 
 
 He had come up to Oxford under Evangelical influence ; 
 no record is left of his mental change. But he had 
 become an adherent of the Catholic Revival with head 
 and heart and soul. Taken at once with Newman's 
 closest intimacy, he shared it more especially with another 
 young Fellow of Oriel, slightly his senior, who became 
 his lifelong friend, Frederick Rogers, afterwards Lord 
 Blachford, one of the very ablest men, according to Mr. 
 Gladstone's judgment, whom he has ever known in the 
 Civil Service of England. 
 
 From 1838 to 1845 he lived in the full heat of the 
 Tractarian Movement, with everything in him quickened
 
 Richard William Church 229 
 
 to its highest life ; in brimming loyalty to the chief whom 
 he trusted and loved, in the joy and audacity of youth 
 when it knows itself committed to glorious strife. Some- 
 thing of this rollicking ardour shows itself in a sparkling 
 letter on Tract 90 to Rogers in March, 1841. (Church's 
 Life, p. 40.) 
 
 But all this suffers sharp arrest. The shadow fell upon 
 the Master : his utterance grew perplexed ; at last he 
 withdrew in silence to Littlemore. There, in his sad 
 retreat, he heard how his young ally, Richard Church, 
 had averted a fierce attack on him, by bravely exercising 
 a Proctor's veto, by which all proceedings were stayed in 
 the theatre at Oxford, crammed to the doors with a 
 stormy crowd. 
 
 Slowly the end came. 
 
 "Accept this apology, my dear Church, and forgive 
 me." So the letter from Littlemore ran, on April 3rd. 
 " As I say so, tears come into my eyes." " Heart and 
 mind are tired out, as the limbs might be from a load on 
 the back." 
 
 On October 8th the fatal news came to him. " I am 
 this night expecting Father Dominic." " This will not go 
 until all is over." " With my best love to dear Charles 
 Marriott, who is over your head. ... I left Oxford for 
 good on February 23rd, 1846. Various friends came to 
 see the last of me Mr. Copeland, Mr. Church . . . Dr. 
 Pusey." (Apologia, pp. 235-237, Ed. 1873.) 
 
 So it was over. 
 
 Nothing remains to tell what that dark time covered 
 for young Church. In his story of the Oxford Move- 
 ment, in which, with characteristic reticence, he never 
 names his own name, or allows one hint to appear of the
 
 230 Personal Studies 
 
 part he played, he throws into the words of Frederick 
 Rogers and James Mozley the record of his own experi- 
 ences and convictions. He makes it evident that Mozley, 
 above all, expressed the mind with which he faced the 
 shock, and the direction into which it drove his thoughts. 
 The loss of the master broke up the more superficial 
 theories about GOD'S methods of Revelation through the 
 Church, with which he had been satisfied ; and threw 
 him back on the deeper and more durable foundations 
 which are given through the study of the actual historical 
 facts. 
 
 From these foundations, new gained, he never swerved 
 through all the restless years. He was determined to 
 find GOD'S witness to himself in the realities of human 
 life; not in fancies, however beautiful, of what we should 
 wish those realities to have been. 
 
 It was the work of his life to exhibit what this witness 
 had been : in the actual story of civilization, in the actual 
 story of the Church. The first of this work may best be 
 seen in his books, The Gifts of Civilization, Human Life, 
 and its Conditions, and in his incomparable sermons: (1) 
 on Bishop Andrewes; and (2) at the Consecration of 
 Bishop Moberly : * the first of which is the finest defence 
 of the English Church, and the second of the Episcopate, 
 which can be found in the language. 
 
 But these were the issue of long and anxious thinking. 
 For the moment the Movement was ended as an Oxford 
 enterprise ; it betook itself to London and the country. 
 Those who, like Richard Church, remained in the 
 University remained as symbols of defeat, the broken 
 wreck of a cause that seemed lost, clouded under a storm 
 * In Pascal and other Sermons.
 
 Richard William Church 231 
 
 of suspicion and condemnation. His work as a tutor had 
 been resigned. He lost his mother at this time, which 
 increased his sorrow and his loneliness. He hardly ever 
 spoke of these years, even to his family. The only 
 activity which engaged him lay in the founding of the 
 Guardian, for which he wrote busily, in company with the 
 friend to whom he drew so closely in this hour of strain 
 Frederick Rogers. 
 
 But his main refuge lay in travel more especially to 
 Greece, where he was captured by brigands and tied to a 
 tree, and where he saw his famous uncle in his house at 
 Athens. Sir George Bowen, then a young diplomat at 
 Constantinople, remembers well the scene which he saw 
 on a visit to Athens, where, every Sunday, the old heroes 
 of the War of Liberation met at the General's; fierce 
 fighters, with tremendous moustaches, and pistols, and 
 swords, looking like glorified pirates of an Adelphi melo- 
 drama ; and in their midst the thin, quiet, delicate figure 
 of the Oxford don. 
 
 He read largely all this time, and especially deepened 
 his knowledge of Dante. He wrote the essays which were 
 afterwards collected into a volume, and two of which were 
 expanded later on into the two delightful books on Dante 
 and St. Anselm. 
 
 In 1852 he left Oxford for the little living of Watley, 
 and made his most happy marriage with Miss Bennett, a 
 niece of Dr. Moberly, of Winchester. 
 
 The first great period of his life closed. For eighteen 
 years he had loved Oxford ; in it he had passed through 
 the experiences which moulded his whole being, and 
 determined its bent. Two periods, each of eighteen 
 years, followed, in which he put to proof for himself, and
 
 232 Personal Studies 
 
 verified more and before men's eyes, the profound signifi- 
 cance and force and beauty of those convictions with which 
 he left the morning-home of his soul. 
 
 From 1852 to 1870 he was at Watley a tiny village 
 with a tiny church, hidden away in the green hollows of a 
 Somersetshire upland hardly ever moving out to touch 
 the big life outside, either of Church -or State. 
 
 Buried, do I hear you say ? Hardly ! With a mind 
 keen as the edge of a sword, alert as a flame, he read, 
 thought, wrote : delighting in the magic and stir of home, 
 as his four children, one boy and three girls, grew up about 
 him ; in affectionate intimacy with his poor, preaching to 
 them those wonderful "village sermons," so plain, so 
 piercing, so solemn, in a tongue understood by the 
 simplest ; kept in touch with the new revelations of 
 science by correspondence with Asa Gray, the great 
 American botanist, as fervent a Christian as he was 
 enthusiastic for Darwin ; feeding the Guardian constantly 
 with articles and reviews; at rare intervals holding 
 Oxford, as of old, by the perfection of his University 
 sermons. A life that he loved with all his heart ! 
 Nothing but the chivalrous and relentless importunity of 
 Mr. Gladstone would ever have dragged him from it. 
 For it was Mr. Gladstone who, detecting behind the shy 
 refinement of the scholar the force and judgment of the 
 statesman, insisted on his coming to the Deanery of St. 
 Paul's. He came, with protests, with fears, with 
 repugnance; but at- last he came. In December, 1871, 
 he celebrated, and preached, for the first time. "The 
 Deanery used to be a place of literary leisure. But times 
 are changed." So he wrote. " What is required now is 
 that St. Paul's should waken up from its long slumber,
 
 Richard William Church 233 
 
 and justify its existence as the great central church of 
 London." 
 
 It was just ready for the wakening. Gregory was there, 
 burning with financial and administrative reforms. 
 Liddon had already crowded the dome, Liddon with his 
 whole-hearted chivalry, his charm, his delicious humour, 
 his ardour, his intensities, his warmth of personal 
 affection. Lightfoot had just come, whom the Dean 
 quickly learned to love for his justice, his generosity, and 
 the child-like simplicity which hallowed his great gifts. 
 With Barff brought up soon to the revived Choir School, 
 and Stainer to the organ, the worship of the Cathedral 
 was secure of the tone and temper which the Dean 
 desired. 
 
 So the revival began at once, and never flagged. It 
 cost him personal worries and anxieties, at the memory 
 of which he would sensitively shudder in after years, but 
 it was singularly happy in its conditions and its advance 
 was inevitable. 
 
 In his latter days the Dean earnestly charged his 
 friends never to allow a monument of any kind whatever 
 to be raised for him in the Cathedral : it was enough, and 
 more than enough (he said) that he should have been 
 permitted to be there, at the moment when its life was 
 given to it so wonderfully. 
 
 But it was not only as Head of the Chapter, in the 
 work of reviving the slumbering church, that he showed 
 himself to be peculiarly fitted for his post at the heart 
 of London. More and more, as the years went on, men 
 learned to look to the Deanery for the counsellor in 
 moments of public or private anxiety: for the statesman 
 whose judgment would be level with each emergency.
 
 234 Personal Studies 
 
 Two hours of crisis I would specially recall. In 1874 the 
 policy embodied in the Public Worship Bill found in him 
 its most uncompromising opponent. No "Ritualist" 
 himself, he was indignant at the injustice meted out to 
 the Ritualists. He seriously threatened to resign, if any 
 more priests were driven to prison. It was the news of 
 this intention which, as much as anything else, served to 
 open the eyes of Archbishop Tait to the weight of resist- 
 ance which he had provoked. 
 
 Again, at the time of the Bulgarian agitation, men were 
 startled at the fire and force of his opposition to the 
 policy of Lord Beaconsfield. Every fibre in his frame 
 quivered with righteous passion against the cynical 
 indifference to cruelty and wrong which dominated London 
 " Society." He saw a moral judgment at work, sifting the 
 people. Freedom, righteousness, the honour of England, 
 the belief in the Divine government of the world, all were 
 at stake in the momentous issue. He found himself beset 
 on all sides by a political and social temper which was 
 worldly, godless, immoral, and he flamed with prophetic 
 wrath. The wrath of one so sensitive, so delicate, so 
 appreciative, so balanced, so wise, was like nothing else 
 that I have ever known. Its heat was so utterly devoid 
 of mere personal interest ; it was the heat of moral 
 judgment, of sheer holiness the heat of the Apocalypse. 
 
 So he lived for his last eighteen years : a watchman in 
 a high tower, yet close at hand for any perplexed soul in 
 need of advice. All sorts came : a curate in straits with 
 his vicar ; a priest in face of his bishop and three aggrieved 
 parishioners : Mr. Gladstone in search of a man to fill a 
 vacant See. 
 
 He wrote on Bacon, on Spenser, on the Oxford Move-
 
 Richard William Church 235 
 
 merit, Essays, Sermons. He suffered from bodily in- 
 firmities towards the end, which kept him much confined 
 to the house. He had the great sorrow of losing his only 
 son. He was deeply saddened by England's failure in 
 Egypt, and by the loss of Gordon. He was distressed 
 over Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule proposals. His outlook 
 was a little clouded ; but still his sympathies were ready 
 for the hopes of the younger men. He was to the last 
 receptive, intellectually, of all that was moving and 
 happening. More especially in the agitation over Biblical 
 Criticism he showed all his beautiful courage and wisdom, 
 by which he did much to prevent a serious split between 
 old and young. 
 
 Always he remained far aloof from every suspicion ; 
 incapable of anything petty or self-interested, or weak : 
 " the finest flower of the Christian character," as the 
 testimony of one outside the Faith bore witness. Un- 
 touched by the world's breath pure, reserved, austere 
 he yet won the praise of the world ; he never made a foe, 
 yet was deeply loved. To all he was a man apart, unique, 
 against whom no one could say a word. To all who knew 
 him he was the supreme witness of what the Christian life 
 could be so strong in its delicacy, so delicate in its 
 strength ; so gentle yet so heroic ; so disciplined yet so 
 passionate. 
 
 On Dec. 9th, 1890, he died, and was buried, according 
 to his own express and characteristic desire, in the little 
 churchyard at Watley, amid the fields, and among the 
 poor. There the master lies; and there is no one like 
 him left.
 
 AT last, the world at large may know the man of high 
 distinction and massive learning who never, in life, could 
 make himself known to it. The profound impression that 
 he produced .on all the master minds of his day could riot 
 but be felt (it is true) beyond the charmed circle : for he 
 knew everybody of mark, at home and abroad : he moved 
 about freely : he touched human life at every point : he 
 was at home in half-a-dozen European capitals : and spoke 
 four languages with equal facility. So the outside public 
 was bound to become aware of him : the report went 
 abroad : the name of Lord Acton was widely familiar. 
 Yet, if you asked the common or garden man who and 
 what Lord Acton was, he could tell you nothing: he could 
 point to nothing that accounted for the fame. He could 
 only say that he believed him to be possessed of colossal 
 learning ; and generally supposed that he was buried some- 
 where in the British Museum. 
 
 Yet could anything be less like Lord Acton than this 
 supposed Museumitc ? Was ever any one less buried than 
 he ? As Mr. Herbert Paul puts it, in that most admirable 
 Preface which he has written for these Letters a Preface 
 
 * Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone. Edited, with an 
 Introductory Memoir, by Herbert Paul. London : Allen. 1904. 
 
 236
 
 Lord Acton 237 
 
 so excellent in lucidity, discrimination, thoroughness, and 
 sympathy, that it leaves nothing more to be said 
 
 Lord Acton was dimly known to the general public as a 
 prodigy of learning. He left no great work behind him, and 
 is often quoted as an example of natural gifts buried under 
 an accumulation of excessive or ill-digested knowledge. The 
 image of a Dryasdust, of a bookworm, of a walking Dictionary 
 was excited by his name among those to whom he was a name, 
 and nothing more. To those who had the privilege of his ac- 
 quaintance he appeared almost the precise opposite of a picture 
 too unlike the truth to be even a caricature. For Lord Acton 
 was a thorough man of the world. An insatiable reader, he 
 was anything but a recluse. No man had a keener zest for 
 the society of his intellectual equals. No one took a stronger 
 interest in the events of the day, and the gossip of the hour. 
 
 The force and originality of Lord Acton's conversation are 
 reflected, and may be inferred, from his epistolary style. In 
 absolutely uncongenial company he would maintain the silence 
 of the tomb. But when there was any community of taste or 
 subject, he shone equally as a talker and as a listener. It was 
 not that he tried to shine. He did nob aim at epigram, and 
 his humour was as spontaneous as it was delightful. He loved 
 to stimulate conversation in others, and no man had more 
 sympathy with a good thing which he had not said himself. 
 
 His intimate friends agreed that he was the raciest and 
 most stimulating of companions, with an instinctive perception 
 for the true significance of a hint, so that they never had to 
 tell him a thing twice, or to explain it once. 
 
 This alertness, this lightness of touch, were all the more 
 delightful because they were belied by his personal appear- 
 ance. That monumental head, a visible symbol of the 
 vast knowledge that lay within it : that cold white cliff of 
 a forehead : that thick and burly figure, portentously firm
 
 238 Personal Studies 
 
 in its solid setting : were alarming enough to the light- 
 hearted and the trifling, until you suddenly discovered 
 that this great and solemn person was gaily toying with 
 your ignorant remarks, and gently chaffing you. You felt 
 like the House of Lords did on one famous afternoon, when 
 an anxious Peer was droning on to his dreary fellows, 
 strewn about the benches in that lifeless indifference so 
 characteristic of our High Assembly under the strain of 
 the twenty minutes which they daily devote to the Cause 
 of the Country, on an outburst of criminal violence in 
 Ireland : only to find that Lord Acton, in his strange 
 character as Lord-in- Waiting, was, in serious and impres- 
 sive tones, explaining that the outbreak, when reduced to 
 its elemental simplicity, turned out to consist of a boy 
 with a squib. The House woke to the fact that somebody 
 was poking fun at it, and doing it very well. 
 
 Yet this versatility, this alert capacity for affairs, this 
 ready speech, never won their way to the public ear. And 
 he produced no books. The one book on which his whole 
 life was to be spent, The History of Liberty, never got 
 itself written. His famous Library at Aldenham was 
 dedicated to this hope : the books in it were chosen, mainly, 
 for working purposes : and their work was to serve this 
 supreme end. It is impossible to conceive any one more 
 excellently fitted to produce the record of Liberty than he 
 to whom it was a passion. The striking passage quoted in 
 the Preface, in which Mr. Bryce describes the sudden 
 transfiguration of Lord Acton, reveals the intensity with 
 which the hope had possessed him and the spirit in which 
 it might have achieved its task. 
 
 Late one night, in his library at Cannes, while Mr. Bryce
 
 Lord Acton 239 
 
 was staying with him, it found vent in speech. " He spoke 
 for six or seven minutes only ; but he spoke like a man in- 
 spired ; seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in 
 air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human 
 progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow 
 into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. 
 The eloquence was splendid : yet greater than the eloquence 
 was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events 
 and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, 
 now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and 
 remodelled institutions, and had given to the human spirit its 
 ceaselessly changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole 
 landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of 
 sunlight. T have never heard from any other lips any 
 discourse like this, nor from his did I ever hear the like 
 again." 
 
 Yet the keen insight of his friend Dollinger had given 
 the prophetic verdict, which the years were to verify. " If 
 he does not write his book before he is forty, he will never 
 write it at all." The fastidiousness of the scholar, the 
 immense range of the student's curiosity, the unceasing 
 capacity for accumulating material, the deep humility of 
 the man who knew so far too much to be anxious to thrust 
 forward his own personality all told more and more 
 against actual realization. So, having not been written 
 before he was forty, it was never written at all. The 
 Madonna of the Future faded into nothing. Other 
 writings, that were produced, were buried in Reviews ; the 
 public could not know of them : nor often understand what 
 it read. I can never forget the paralyzing unintelligibility 
 of a Review of his on Creighton's Popes. It was, simply, a 
 series of confidences which expert might pass to expert. 
 One seemed to hear two people whispering secrets some-
 
 240 Personal Studies 
 
 where over one's head. It was just possible that they might 
 understand what each other meant. One hoped that they 
 did. No doubt, Creighton was taking it in. That was the 
 best result that a poor bewildered outsider could hope for. 
 
 One powerful stroke, I do recall, that went home a 
 sketch of George Eliot, after her death, in the Contem- 
 porary, I fancy. It was the best thing written on her : 
 and it said, in bearing testimony to her moral force, that 
 only those who knew George Henry Lewes before their 
 intimacy could appreciate all she had made of him. Still, 
 this was but a passing word. Once and once only, he 
 spoke so that all men heard. It came late in his life : in 
 his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of History at Cambridge. 
 It was a supreme utterance, clear, decisive, effectual. In 
 spite of the notes with which, as Mr. Paul complain?, it 
 was terribly overloaded, it told on the conscience and 
 imagination of all who read. It claimed that we had 
 emerged out of the austere discipline through which 
 Ranke had rightly taught us the secret of impartiality, 
 and could now afford to recognize, in the process of history, 
 the unfailing and inexorable verdict of the moral judg- 
 ment. It marked an epoch. But never again did the 
 average man get hold of what Lord Acton had to say to 
 him. So he passed into the silence which he had, through 
 life, done so little to break. 
 
 And, now, comes the strange alternation. The man 
 whose inner thought had been so veiled, had, nevertheless, 
 one channel down which he had through many years 
 released his storied mind. In Mary Gladstone, he found 
 a keen sympathy, a mf intelligence, a sensitive vitality, 
 which drew him into a most intimate and delightful 
 friendship with her. She could catch all his hints and
 
 Lord Acton 241 
 
 allusions : she could respond to his interests : she revelled 
 in his infinite play of wit and wisdom. To her, he could 
 unload himself with security and freedom. In answer to 
 her quick insight, he would open out in all the endless 
 spontaneity that comes of being understood. She plied 
 him with eager pleas, and swarming enquiries : and none 
 of these could ever find him at a loss, or come amiss. He 
 would have his fun : he would gossip : but, also, he gave 
 her of his very best. She was at the heart of affairs 
 those affairs which embodied the very life of man for him 
 to whom Politics were, as he said himself, a Religion. 
 Above all, she was in closest and most affectionate touch 
 with her father, his chief, on whom his whole political 
 faith centred : of whom he was not afraid to write, as 
 his deliberate anticipation of the after-judgment of the 
 generation to follow, the historical verdict: 
 
 The generation you consult will be more democratic and 
 better instructed than our own ; for the progress of democracy, 
 though not constant, is certain, and the progress of know- 
 ledge is both constant and certain. It will be more severe 
 in literary judgments, and more generous in political. With 
 this prospect before me I ought to have answered, that here- 
 after, when our descendants shall stand before the slab that 
 is not yet laid among the monuments of famous Englishmen, 
 they will say that Chatham knew how to inspire a nation with 
 his energy, but was poorly furnished with knowledge and 
 ideas ; that the capacity of Fox was never proved in office, 
 though he was the first of debaters ; that Pitt, the strongest 
 of ministers, was among the weakest of legislators ; that no 
 foreign secretary has equalled Canning, but that he showed 
 no other administrative ability ; that Peel, who excelled as an 
 administrator, a debater, and a tactician, fell everywhere short 
 
 R
 
 242 Personal Studies 
 
 of genius ; and that the highest merits of the five without 
 their drawbacks were uniteJ in your father. Possibly they 
 may remember that his only rival in depth, and wealth, and 
 force of mind was neither admitted to the Cabinet nor buried 
 in the Abbey. 
 
 Therefore he could think it worth while to pour out for 
 her all his deepest teaching on the significance of human 
 life, and on the purpose of history. For all was directed 
 to him, or turned round him, or would be reported to him, 
 or belonged to him and his. 
 
 So it all came out in these wonderful letters : and here 
 they are : and we may read them. They let us enter right 
 inside what he thought, in the very crisis of great events, 
 under the pressure of those public anxieties which built 
 up the political history of a great Prime Minister. The 
 affairs are weighty : the moments are historical : we live 
 on a big stage, at a high level, in the thick of work, amid 
 the solemnities of life. The interests covered are, there- 
 fore, deep and universal. Yet we are admitted to see 
 how these great affairs were being handled inside the 
 privacy of those most profoundly concerned in them. We 
 hear the confidences that passed : the things that were 
 whispered: the positions that were discussed. We can 
 feel the ebb and flow of emotions which accompanied the 
 movement of history within the domestic secrecies. We 
 can learn exactly how this philosophic student of life felt, 
 and spoke, and judged, under the crucial intensity of 
 actual facts, in the intimacy of an affectionate friendship, 
 in ways that really told upon the events themselves. For, 
 in and through those letters, he was himself one of the 
 influences which determined Mr. Gladstone's will and
 
 Lord Acton 243 
 
 mind. We can watch it all going on at moments of stress, 
 like the Irish Land Bill, the Irish Coercion Bill, the 
 murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish, the victorious 
 Campaign of Mid-Lothian, the Resignation after the 
 defeat. We can hear him talking (as it were) with Mr. 
 Gladstone, while " Vaticanism " is absorbing him : or 
 Biblical Criticism : or Huxley : or " Robert Elsmere," or 
 " John Inglesant." We can listen to his innermost criti- 
 cisms on the great man, put so admirably on page 26 and 
 page 46. We can recognize precisely what it was that 
 Lord Acton would have had him change, in his methods of 
 managing men. All is of high and public concern, except 
 the pleasant chaff and gossip : yet all is intimate and 
 confidential. The man, whom it was so difficult to know, 
 is openly revealed in his most secret moods arid motives. 
 He could afford to have lived and died unexpressed, if he 
 was leaving these letters behind him. 
 
 And the man, so known, stands out in lines that are 
 singularly firm and emphatic. For one of his startling 
 characteristics is the strength of his judgments. In life 
 he may have seemed to be reserved, to avoid strong 
 language to recognize many sides, to be fastidiously unable 
 to bring things to a head. But all this did not mean that 
 he was undecided : or could not deliver judgment : or had 
 any doubt or hesitation in his convictions. Down the 
 thunder-bolts fell. The sweeping language astonishes us. 
 We are quite frightened. " That is the reason of my deep 
 aversion for him." Who is it of whom he is speaking ? 
 Cardinal Newman. " Froude will write his life, a fit 
 historian for so unscrupulous a hero." That is Carlyle. 
 " If a man accepts the Primacy of Rome with confidence, 
 admiration, unconditional obedience, he must have made
 
 244 Personal Studies 
 
 terms with murder." This is not some Mr. Walsh who is 
 speaking, but a good Roman, who holds every article of 
 the Roman Creed. 
 
 Perhaps the most typical instance of this moral auster- 
 ity is to be found in bis indignant protest against Mr. 
 Gladstone's panegyric in the House of Commons, in 
 proposing to honour Lord Beaconsfield with a national 
 monument. It must be explained that Lord Acton would 
 have approved of a speech conveying the homage of the 
 House in which Disraeli had borne so distinguished a post. 
 But the monument implied public service of exceptional 
 merit : and this he could not allow : nor would he pass 
 the plea that the Prime Minister was bound to express 
 the national desire. 
 
 The defect of the argument is that it will neither wear nor 
 wash. It cannot be employed in public. Nobody can say 
 I who overthrew Lord Beaconsfield's ministry, reversed his 
 policy, persuaded the nation to distrust him, and brought his 
 career to a dishonoured end I who, altogether disagreeing 
 with a certain friend of mine, thought his doctrines false, but 
 the man more false than his doctrine ; who believe that he 
 demoralized public opinion, bargained with diseased appetites, 
 stimulated passions, prejudices, and selfish desires, that they 
 might maintain his influence ; that he weakened the Crown 
 by approving its unconstitutional leanings, aud the Constitu- 
 tion by offering any price for democratic popularity, who, 
 privately, deem him the worst and most immoral minister 
 since Castlereagh, and have branded him with a stigma such 
 as no other public man has deserved in my time, neverthe- 
 less proceed, in my public capacity, to lock my true sentiments 
 in my breast, and declare him worthy of a reward that was 
 not paid to Fox or to Canning ; worthy not only of the tribute 
 due to talents, efficiency, and courage, but of enduring grati-
 
 Lord Acton 245 
 
 tude and honour ; and I do it because I am not the leader of 
 the nation, but the appointed minister of its will ; because it 
 is my office to be the mouthpiece of opinions I disapprove, to 
 obey an impulse I condemn, to execute the popular wishes 
 when they contradict my own. 
 
 He does not recognize that Mr. Gladstone, by the very 
 fact of having been Lord Beaconsfield's life-long opponent, 
 was barred from undertaking to be his judge. 
 
 Now, to understand this vehemence of moral conviction 
 and expression, we must remember that, to Lord Acton as 
 a Historian and a Politician, looking back and out upon 
 the field of human affairs, public wrong-doing was the 
 cardinal form of sin. " Politics," he writes, " come nearer 
 religion with me, a party is more like a church, error more 
 like heresy, prejudice more like sin, than I find it to be 
 with better men." As he noted the vast and terrible 
 Drama of History, with its tragic defeats, its meaningless 
 cruelties, its needless pains, he saw flung out against the 
 fires of judgment the scared faces of statesmen who by 
 weakness of will, or infirmity of purpose, or insincerity of 
 aim, or mental cowardice, or mere lack of principle, had 
 wrought such blind woe on man, and had fought against 
 liberty and light. Leaders who had lowered the public 
 standards or who had corrupted public honour, were to 
 him as gross sinners as the adulterer and the thief. 
 No private virtue could atone for a perversity of conscience. 
 All the pieties and the charities of St. Carlo Borromeo 
 could not make Lord Acton forget that he had sanctioned 
 the assassination of heretics. By that he stood arraigned 
 for ever at the judgment bar of conscience, without excuse 
 or palliative. " But must we not make some allowance,"
 
 246 Personal Studies 
 
 said some one to him, " for the morality of his age ? " "I 
 make no such allowance," was the emphatic reply. 
 
 And this was the man, with this high and austere code, 
 to whose searching scrutiny, close at hand, lor year after 
 year, every minute motive that governed Mr. Gladstone's 
 action, under stress of political strife, in the agony of 
 convulsive decisions, stood naked and exposed. It was a 
 tremendous test ; and these letters are the record of its 
 triumphant vindication. Let them be read in that light. 
 Lord Acton's estimate of the character of the man with 
 whom he is so intimately influential can be seen in the 
 type of argument which he felt would tell, in support of 
 any counsel that he was given. Take as an instance the 
 reason given why Liddon should be offered the See of 
 London. After a most interesting discussion of Liddon's 
 character and capacity, in which he recognizes clearly 
 some limitations, he brushes aside all the pros and cons 
 by this one prevailing consideration : " Assuredly Liddon 
 is the greatest power in the conflict with sin and in 
 turning the souls of men to God, that the nation now 
 possesses. There must be a very strong reason which can 
 justify a Minister in refusing such a bishop to such a See." 
 The conflict with sin ! The turning of souls to God ! 
 These are the only and supreme qualification for a 
 Bishopric, which a Prime Minister need consider. Few, 
 very few, Prime Ministers have had that strong and simple 
 counsel given them by those whom they consult in those 
 emergencies. 
 
 It is the play and the counter-play of two such high 
 natures on one another, through the living medium of one 
 so near and dear to both, that constitutes the fascination 
 of this book. It is, in this way, absolutely unique. More
 
 Lord Acton 247 
 
 than ever are we content to leave asleep in peace, waiting 
 for the dread Judgment Day, the great Statesman who, 
 through this book, stands out revealed and judged under 
 such exceptional conditions. 
 
 And, surely, there is one lady in England who, in the 
 darkest hours that life, with its damage and defeats, can 
 ever bring her, will yet lift up her head and give thanks, 
 as she recalls the letters that life has brought her from 
 two masters so entirely diverse in genius, yet both her 
 friends John Ruskin and Lord Acton.
 
 EDWARD BURNE-JONES * 
 
 WHAT a power there is in friendship ! Why don't we 
 all draw more largely on its sacred stores ? And, above 
 all, the friendships of our growing years, when inspirations 
 are kindling, and convictions are on the make, and hopes 
 and aims are taking possession, hold in them the secret of 
 all that life can do with us. No such opportunity can 
 recur : such boons are only given once in a lifetime. 
 Here is a book which is one long and glorious psean, sung 
 in honour of .such friendships. There is nothing in Burne- 
 Jones' work and life that is not rooted in the blessed 
 comradeship that came together, with such miraculous 
 felicity, at Oxford in the Forties. Morris, Dixon, Cormell- 
 Price, Falkner, Fulford, and Burne-Jones fell together, 
 as Freshmen do : and so it all began : never to cease. 
 Day and night they met, and talked, and laughed, and 
 romped, and shouted, and debated, with all the delicious 
 ardour that makes Oxford the shrine of all such intimate 
 companionships. Round them it spreads its magic : its 
 age lends itself to their youth, and clothes it with the 
 glamour of romance. 
 
 This it does for us all: but into this knot of laughing 
 friends there had entered, also, the spirit of a Cause. 
 
 Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. By G. B.-J. London : 
 Macmillan. 1904. 
 
 248
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 249 
 
 They were caught into the service of Art. They passed 
 across into this new service out of an earlier stage of 
 religious devotion, which left its mark upon them all, long 
 after it had lost its hold upon some of them. And it was 
 from this earlier influence that they learned the fascina- 
 tions of brotherhood. For the spirit of brotherhood was 
 in the air, through the influence of the Catholic Revival. 
 Everywhere men were feeling after the joy of Mediaeval 
 Fraternities. It was for Burne-Jones quite a solemn 
 affair. " Remember," he cries, " I have set my heart on 
 founding a Brotherhood. Learn Sir Galahad by heart. 
 He is to be the patron of our Order. I have enlisted one 
 (Morris) in the project up here, heart and soul: you shall 
 have a copy of the Canons some day, signed, General of 
 the Order of Sir Galahad." Curiously enough, Burne- 
 Jones' favourite fun of writing in the language of Mediaeval 
 Charters to his friends, recurs, at just the same period, in 
 the records of the Oxford Reading Party in North Wales, 
 with Bishop Stubbs : where again the Party assumed all 
 the titles of an Abbey : and we hear, in the antique tongue, 
 how the Coquinarius (H. P. Liddon) rescued Stubbs from 
 a watery grave. " September 30th. Mie Lorddes dydde 
 bathe with Mr. C., and mie Lordde Abbot was well nigh 
 drowned, but Mr. Coquiner dydde hymme pulle oute." 
 
 So, again, those other Birmingham boys, Westcott and 
 Lightfoot, were binding themselves, about this same time, 
 by common rules, in a Prayer Guild. The Tractarians 
 had made historical this passion of a close fraternity, 
 bound together by the inspiration of a great cause. 
 That is why the opening of the Oxford Movement holds 
 in it such undying charm. We can never tire of those 
 wonderful personalities, who drew together, by mysterious
 
 250 Personal Studies 
 
 attraction, into such radiant intimacy of purpose. Keble, 
 Pusey, Newman, Hurrell Froude, Church, Marriott, 
 Mozley, Rogers these names are household words. 
 Time after time the story has been told, of how they 
 nut, and loved, and laughed, and talked, and worked, and 
 parted ; and yet it is never stale. For it has in it the 
 splendour of a world-wide movement, actualized in the 
 play and the fascination of personal characters, whose 
 every quality is heightened and intensified by their inclu- 
 sion within the common peril of a daring and noble 
 venture. And something of this timeless fascination 
 belongs to the later Art Movement, which is identified 
 with the Pre-Raphaelites, and which had now come to take 
 possession of this brilliant knot of Oxford friends, who 
 were meeting daily at Exeter and Pembroke Colleges. 
 
 Such friends they were ! And, above all, at the heart 
 of the companionship was that peculiar and rare friendship 
 of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, which was to 
 iast unbroken till death, and which was to tell, with such 
 thrilling effect, upon the imaginative development of 
 England. Rare, indeed, is it for two men, of creative 
 artistic power, to come together as boys : to grow together 
 as men : to live together, through life, working together 
 for the same ends, co-operating in the same production, 
 completing each other, in the full communion of delightful 
 and incessant intercourse, in perfect trust, and joy, and 
 love, from end to end of their careers. Has there ever 
 been an intimacy so fortunate, so fertile, so happy, and 
 so exquisitely fulfilled ? The very story of it, embalmed 
 in this book, is enough to revive our flagging belief in all 
 that man might be and do, if only now and again things 
 did but fall out right.
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 251 
 
 All that is buoyant and beautiful in Morris comes out 
 in the record. " Topsy," with his wealth of hair and his 
 square figure, never fails us, and comic sketches of him 
 and Ned keep both of them in their vivid contrast ever 
 before our eyes. There was always fun to be got out of 
 the simple-hearted creature : there was no trick or prac- 
 tical joke that would not take him in. Just like a child 
 he would tumble into any trap, break out into uproarious 
 protest and explode with gusts of laughter. His primitive 
 simplicity of character is at the heart of his glorious force. 
 A great scholar noted long ago that he showed himself in 
 his poetry more primitive than Homer ; there was more 
 primeval impulse in it and less reflection : and to live in 
 daily familiarity with a man who goes behind Homer was 
 to Ned Jones an unfailing joy and inspiration. He felt 
 absolutely certain of Morris's greatness from the first days 
 at Oxford. " Watch carefully all that Morris writes," he 
 says in 1855 ; "you will find of the very purest and most 
 beautiful minds on earth breathing through all he touches. 
 Sometimes I even regret that he is my friend lest I seem 
 partial in praising him so. But if he were a stranger I 
 know I should detect him in a heap of others' writings, 
 and watch for something v v ery great from him as I do now." 
 
 Lady Burne-Jones remembers Morris at that day: 
 " very handsome, of an unusual type ; statues of mediaeval 
 kings often remind one of him. His eyes always seem to 
 me to take in rather than to give out ; his hair waved 
 and curled triumphantly." 
 
 And now to this knot of friends, chattering, bear-fighting 
 and dreaming at Oxford, came the crown and consumma- 
 tion of all. In 1855 they saw at Mrs. Combe's house, 
 Clarendon Press, Oxford, the water-colour by Rossetti of
 
 252 Personal Studies 
 
 Dante drawing the head of Beatrice, to their wonder and 
 delight ; and they had read a copy of the Germ, Avith 
 " The Blessed Damozel " in it, and at once they gave them- 
 selves to the new power. Who can now tell what that 
 power was ? For beyond all his gifts of superb imagina- 
 tion, of which we possess the record in his pictures and 
 poems, there was an intellectual capacity and a personal 
 dominance which swept people off their feet. Wherever 
 he came he seemed to be first, and his presence possessed 
 the scene. His words opened doors into new regions : 
 his splendid generosity of temperament lapped men round 
 with a sort of royal benignity ; they felt that they could 
 do anything he told them to do. And all this without 
 any pose or effect or assumption. He used the most 
 direct speech without any mannerisms, largely slang ; but 
 the grandeur of the man was such that Burne-Jones, as he 
 walked down the Strand with him, kept always wondering 
 why the people did not all rush round to lift Gabriel 
 shoulder high and carry him with shouts to some throne. 
 
 We hear nothing in this book of that dominance of will 
 which was felt as an oppression or a disturbance by Madox 
 Brown and William Morris. They were uncomfortable 
 and not wholly themselves when he was too near. They 
 needed freedom from the pressure of his presence. But 
 to Burne-Jones there was none of this : here was the very 
 atmosphere he loved to breathe : here was the master 
 whom it was a joy to follow. Everything in him seemed 
 to live and grow under this genial cherishing hand. He 
 simply loved and adored him, and to the end felt that 
 Rossetti had been to him the master-light of all his seeing. 
 
 For him, therefore, the tragedy of the close went deeper 
 than for all others. It is good to read the record of the
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 253 
 
 first bright days, when the glow and the glory and the fun 
 were all at their height, before we feel the shadow fall. 
 It is in 1857, when the famous paintings on the Union 
 roof at Oxford were at work. Rossetti, Burne-Jones and 
 Morris are living at 87, High Street, and Mr. Prinsep has 
 gone down to join the work. Prinsep had told Rossetti 
 that he was not fit for it because he could not draw. 
 " Nonsense," said Rossetti confidently, "there is a man I 
 know who has never painted anything his name is Morris 
 he has undertaken one of the panels, and he will do 
 something very good you may depend. So you had better 
 come." On this strange ground for confidence he went 
 down, and on his first arrival at Oxford there is a legend 
 that he said to his cabman, " Drive me to the Union," and 
 found himself quickly at the doors of the Workhouse. 
 
 Prinsep's account of dining with Rossetti that first 
 evening is very vivid : 
 
 " I was, of course, proud to accept the invitation," he says, 
 " so at the hour mentioned I was punctually at the house. 
 There I found Rossetti in a plum-coloured frock-coat, and a 
 short square man with spectacles and a vast mop of dark hair. 
 I was cordially received. ' Top,' cried Rossetti, ' let me 
 introduce Yal Prinsep.' 
 
 " ' Glad, I'm sure,' answered the man in spectacles, nodding 
 his head, and then he resumed his reading of a large quarto. 
 This was William Morris. Soon after, the door opened, and 
 before it was half opened in glided Burne-Jones. ' Ned,' said 
 Rossetti, who had been absently humming to himself, ' I think 
 you know Prinsep.' The shy figure darted forward, the shy 
 face lit up, and I was received with the kindly effusion which 
 was natural to him. 
 
 " When dinner was over, Rossetti, humming to himself as
 
 254 Personal Studies 
 
 was his wont, rose from the table and proceeded to curl him- 
 self up on the sofa. ' Top,' he said, ' read us one of your 
 grinds.' ' No, Gabriel,' answered Morris, ' you have heard 
 them all.' ' Never mind,' said Rossetti, ' here's Prinsep who 
 has never heard them, and besides, they are devilish good.' 
 ' Very well, old chap,' growled Morris, and having got his 
 book he began to read in a sing-song chant some of the poems 
 afterwards published in his first volume. All the time he 
 was jiggling about nervously with his watch-chain. I was 
 then a very young man, and my experience of life was therefore 
 limited, but the effect produced on my mind was so strong 
 that to this day, forty years after, I can still recall the scene : 
 Rossetti on the sofa with large melancholy eyes fixed on 
 Morris, the poet at the table reading and ever fidgeting with 
 his watch-chain, and Burne-Jones working at a pen-and-ink 
 drawing. 
 
 'Gold on her head, and gold on her feet, 
 And gold where the hems of her kirtle meet, 
 And a golden girdle round my sweet ; 
 Ah ! quelle est belle La Marguerite,' 
 
 still seems to haunt me, and this other stanza : 
 
 ' Swerve to the left, son Roger, he said, 
 
 When you catch his eyes through the helmet slit ; 
 Swerve to the left, then out at his head, 
 And the LOUD GOD give you joy of it ! ' 
 
 I confess I returned to the Mitre with my brain in a whirl." 
 
 Now let us see the same men in 1880 a charming 
 account, written by Burne-Jones to his friend Norton in 
 America. 
 
 " Towards evening Morris came for it was Georgie's birth- 
 day and you would have found just as if no time had gone
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 255 
 
 by, only the best talk with him is while he is hungry, for meat 
 makes him sad. So it is wise to delay dinner, and get out of 
 him all you can in walks round the garden. He is unchanged 
 little grey tips to his curly wig no more ; not quite so 
 stout ; not one hair less on his head, buttons more off than 
 formerly ; never any necktie more eager if anything than ever, 
 but about just the same things ; a rock of defence to us all, 
 and a castle on the top of it, and a banner on the top of that 
 before meat but the banner lowered after that. Then the 
 family how unchanged all these years, and what happy 
 fortune for me ; and why 1 and how long will it be ? Alas, I 
 say we are not changed, but how do I know? Come and see. 
 
 "One night lately I spent the evening with Rossetti. There 
 is change enough for us all if it had been distributed amongst 
 us, amongst any seven of us. He has given it all up, and will try 
 no more, nor care much more how it all goes. It's nine years 
 since he came to the Grange now he goes nowhere and will 
 see scarcely any one. Four or five times a year I go to spend 
 a ghostly evening with him, and come back heavy-hearted 
 always, sometimes worse than that it's all past hope or 
 remedy, I think, and his best work has been done and I don't 
 know how it has all come about. 
 
 " And my rooms are so full of work too full and I have 
 begun so much that if I live to be as old as the oldest in- 
 habitant of Fulham I shall never complete it. And are you 
 sorry they have dragged me out of my quiet? But they 
 haven't and never shall. I read nothing that is said, I shall 
 never be moved out of my plan of life, I shall alter nothing 
 neither my way of life or thought nor go out more, nor 
 waste my time in any of their devices ; so don't be sorry, my 
 dear. In a year or two they will tire and want a new thing. 
 I am out of the story as they mean it, and you needn't be 
 afraid. But, me, I want you to see it. When you come (for 
 you will come), I will take you to see every place where my 
 tilings are. I have worked so hard I feel as if I had lived a
 
 256 Personal Studies 
 
 hundred years and when I am well it is still a fresh fountain 
 every day. The old things are dearer and better to think of. 
 Nothing else has happened I am just what you left me, only 
 minding more for the same things and one or two new things 
 no more change than that. 
 
 " I was very ill for a bit last year and I'm not ever very 
 well. I don't know what could do me more good than seeing 
 you ; we might run somewhere together, and renew our youth 
 say you'll some day come, dear, dear old fellow." 
 
 When the end came to Gabriel it served to clear away 
 the mists in which illness had wrapped him for years past, 
 and he shone out again upon his friends as in the first 
 days. So Lady Burne- Jones tells us, and adds : 
 
 " Nothing written about Rossetti ever satisfied Edward, and 
 some things so much dissatisfied him that as years went on he 
 began to feel that he could not keep silence, but must one day 
 write a monograph himself. ' Yes,' he said, ' if no one else will 
 do it, I will display Gabriel after a time.' A few notes were 
 made for this purpose; on the leaf of a pocket-book is the 
 following memorandum : 
 
 " ' Gabriel. His talk, its sanity and measure of it his tone 
 of voice his hands his charm his dislike of all big-wig and 
 pompous things his craze for funny animals generally his 
 love for animals his religion his wife.' 
 
 " Writing in 1892 of their early friendship, he says : 
 
 " ' It is nice to be remembering it all, and is good for me now, 
 only the most of it is so indescribable. His talk and his look 
 and his kindness, what words can say them? But bit by bit 
 little forgotten touches will come back, I daresay, and some 
 sort of image of him be made out and if it is a perfect image 
 and all overlaid with gold, it will be truer really than one that 
 should make him halt or begrimed or sully him in the least.' 
 
 " Would that the book had been written."
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 257 
 
 Perhaps he would have accepted the beautiful verdict of 
 Mr. Arthur Benson in his volume on Rossetti : 
 
 " And here, I think, lies the deepest tragedy of Rossetti's 
 life. A man of infinite self-will, of intense though limited 
 outlook, sets out upon a certain pilgrimage, with a radiant 
 goal in view, resolutely disregarding all that does not at once 
 accommodate itself to his aims or faiths ; and then the vision 
 changes, and he is confronted in the saddest and sternest way 
 with the darkest problems that try and torture the moral 
 nature. The very gloom of the tragedy lends a deeper august- 
 ness to the great figure that slowly moves to meet it. But we 
 may dare to hope that a soul which, though knit with a tem- 
 perament open in a singular degree to all the nearer seductions 
 of beauty, kept its gaze resolutely on the ultimate hope, the 
 further issue, the central vision, and which looked so earnestly 
 through the symbol to the force symbolized, must attain in 
 some freer region to the knowledge of the secret, that 
 murmured like a phantom music in divine, mysterious tones 
 round the clouded earthly tabernacle." (Benson's Rossetti, 
 p. 2.) 
 
 The fortunate friendship of Morris and Burne-Jones has 
 been crowned by the good fortune of their biographies. 
 Each has found a hand that could give a fascinating record. 
 Morris's Life, an almost perfect book, was written, as the 
 world well knows, by one of the few living masters of 
 English prose, and with knowledge such as few could 
 possess of all that went to the making of the hero. 
 
 And now comes another most delightful book, written 
 from the inside, with exquisite judgment and taste, with 
 skilful use of charming materials, and with a rare felicity 
 of style. There is only one complaint that I have to make 
 against the book : it tells much of the intimate friendships 
 
 that played so large a part in Burne-Jones's life, but it 
 
 s
 
 258 Personal Studies 
 
 does not tell the inner process of change in the man him- 
 self through which he arrived at what he was. The strong 
 religious influence fades dimly away without any positive 
 explanation. We only learn the disappointment that over- 
 came him at Oxford, when he found himself caught in the 
 drag of that dreadful time when the Heads of Houses, 
 having swept Oxford clear and clean of the great Tract- 
 arians, had set themselves to stamp their stout heels on the 
 cowering undergraduates who were left in their clutches. 
 Doctor Pusey held the fort grimly in his Christ Church 
 tower; and the poor undergraduates crept still in fear 
 and trembling to the one home of the Cause still left, where 
 faithful Charles Marriott celebrated his early Communion 
 in St. Mary's. But Tutors and Deans had sworn to get 
 rid of the thing in Oxford, and the recovery was to come 
 at last back to its first home from the slums of great cities, 
 where the Cause was to win its triumphs. John Oakley, 
 who is mentioned with affection in this book, would often 
 tell the dismal tale of those dark days, and we can well 
 understand how desolate it would have seemed to the 
 Birmingham boy, fired with enthusiasm by the vision of 
 the unworldly Oratorian in his native city. Still, we 
 should like to know more of the inner change. We are 
 told that he went to Charles Marriott and found some 
 comfort, " but the whole-hearted and enthusiastic and 
 unenquiring days were gone," and after that we are only 
 told that all was over because " he had looked behind the 
 veil." Perhaps we can hardly ask of Lady Burne- Jones to 
 tell how it was that the hope of a Celibate Brotherhood 
 ceased. Anyhow, he passed across into the world where 
 Art reigns ; but here again, though we are told of aims 
 and ideas for which they will go out to die as Crusaders
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 259 
 
 died, we are told nothing of what those ideas and principles 
 are. We know them, no doubt, from all that has been 
 written about Morris and Rossetti. We can guess very 
 well where we are : but we should still like to have known 
 what it was that Edward Burne-Jones thought he was 
 going to do and say when he first set out on the great 
 venture. 
 
 Reading this Life we feel how remote from what these 
 men really were was their first effect on us. Could any- 
 thing be further from expressing the robust vitality of 
 Morris than the refrain that first made his name sweet to 
 our ears as he claimed for himself in sad delicate lines, full 
 of autumn sorrow, that he was but " the idle singer of an 
 empty day " ? All the time he was a Viking, plunged into 
 the thick of roaring London, and feeling its life in every 
 fibre of his strong brain. And soon we were to hear of 
 him as a burly socialist, shouting at street corners, and 
 making songs that set people's blood on fire. Then there 
 stole in on us faint far-away faces in delicate tints, the 
 ghosts of old Romaunt tales, the sadder ghosts yet of dying 
 Hellenism. These were the visions, moody with some 
 dumb pain, which we learnt were the work of Edward 
 Burne-Jones. 
 
 Yet just listen to this man in his fury, when a gushing 
 lady has written to him flattering herself that he lives 
 hidden in some world of beauty, untouched by the sordid 
 present, somewhere with Tennyson's gods, who " lie beside 
 their nectar while the bolts are hurled." 
 
 " Dr Evans chanced to come in while Edward was reading 
 this, and finding him evidently disturbed, asked what was the 
 matter.
 
 260 Personal Studies 
 
 " ' There ! ' said Edward, trying to hide the seriousness of his 
 mood under the cloak of a flat Cockney dialect. ' Read that ! ' 
 and as Sebastian finished it, ' There ! ' he exclaimed again. 
 ' What has a poor old 'ard-workin' feller like me done, as he's 
 to be called a Tennyson's gods and the LORD knows what by 
 the likes of she 1 I arst you as a man ? You don't think I'm 
 a Tennyson's gods nor nothin' o' the sort, do you ? It ain't 
 fair, it ain't ! A man as has always worked 'ard for a livin' 
 and liked to see things decent and comfortable about him, and 
 is a-growin' old very old, my dear, very old. Tell me I'm 
 not a gibbering idiot tell me I haven't wasted my whole life 
 in running after things that no man will ever be the better 
 for!' 
 
 " ' In spite of the way in which he spoke of himself,' says 
 Dr. Evans, ' he was very much in earnest, and I did all I could 
 think of at the moment to soothe him.' " 
 
 He cared as passionately as Morris himself for the actual 
 life that is ; and his hatred of the horrors of great cities 
 was quite as intense. He was in spirit much more of a 
 rebel than Morris, whose ideal, as Mr. Mackail notes, was 
 really domestic and bourgeois, and who was furious with 
 the social order that failed to give people this. Burne- 
 Jones despised and detested all that was comfortable. 
 Everything that was English repelled him; "a fine 
 successful people," he says, " in their way," but for that 
 very reason people that oppressed him. Even the lovely 
 country of Surrey would not win him. 
 
 "You could see sixty miles away over a soft land, too soft. 
 I wanted some desolate bits and a woeful tale or two, and to be 
 told, ' At such a point was such a battle, and by that tower 
 was such a combat, and in that tower such a tragedy ' so long 
 ago that I couldn't be very sorry. Nobody knew anything of 
 anywhere, and everybody smiled fat smiles at the big green
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 261 
 
 carpet. It seemed churlish not to admire it. It was bonny, 
 but I like other lands better, and now and then I want to see 
 Hell iu a landscape. All that is like a silly Heaven." 
 
 He was a Celt in blood and bone, and lived in protest 
 against all that made for success in this world, and loved 
 everybody who failed. 
 
 The difference with Morris over the socialism lay in his 
 firm conviction, that Morris was throwing away his real 
 work and life, and trying to do something else. An artist 
 was for Burne-Jones a dedicated man, with a responsibility 
 to discharge as real as any others. That responsibility 
 asked for his whole being, and he would serve his genera- 
 tion best by giving himself up to that and nothing else. 
 Again and again he had to assert this principle for himself, 
 resisting all attempts to make him speak, etc. He had a 
 passion for work as such, and believed that there was 
 absolutely no end to it. " What do we want to be wrenched 
 from our work for ? I should like to stop in this room for 
 439'years and never be taken out of it." At another time 
 he made a bigger demand. " I should like to go on work- 
 ing in this studio for 17,000 years but why seventeen ? 
 Why not 70,000?" 
 
 He had absolute belief in his mission, and an heroic 
 disregard of outside opinion. The delicate-fibred man 
 shows extraordinary courage in clinging to the inner light, 
 both in early days before he was understood, and in the 
 great days when popularity swam round him ; and yet 
 again in the later years when he began to find himself left 
 alone and the art tendencies of the day turning into 
 directions which he disliked and distrusted. 
 
 Nor was it only the popular verdict which he dis- 
 regarded ; for not even John Ruskin, to whose affectionate
 
 262 Personal Studies 
 
 influence the book bears constant and gracious witness, 
 could prohibit him from seeking Beauty where the master 
 denied its sincerity in Mantegna, Signorelli and the 
 great Michael Angelo, for instance and from risking 
 a precious friendship in loyalty to his own independent 
 judgment. 
 
 Possessed with this solemnity of purpose, and believing 
 that Morris had a vocation as absolute, he was distressed 
 and angry at anything that carried Morris off his proper 
 lines, as he thought. It seemed to him like an act of 
 disloyalty to the task set. However, through it all, the 
 glory of the friendship abode strong as ever. Only on 
 those happy Sunday mornings when Morris came as 
 always, it was a trouble to think that there was anything 
 between them about which they kept silent. 
 
 And yet, I suppose, there will be many to ask how it 
 was that this subtle and far-away grace, with its soft tone 
 of sorrow and its plaintive passiveness, which the art of 
 Burne-Jones was ever so strenuously pursuing, was really 
 to be his message to the age as it stood. In what sense 
 was it work done for suffering and toiling populations, 
 such as he pitied and loved ? And how was it the best 
 thing that he could do for them, and far more worth 
 while than if he went out to preach reform in Victoria 
 Park ? Well, first it was his own task to give back, if 
 possible, beauty to a world that had lost belief in it. As 
 he looked round the hideous Victorian England, with 
 its mean streets and its gross carnal ism, he felt that there 
 was no such crying need as this. " Whatever you may 
 say," he writes, "men are restless till they get beauty." 
 And the beauty that he had to give to meet man's needs 
 must perforce take that shape which haunted his own
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 263 
 
 spirit as a passion, and this meant the beauty that was 
 caught out of the stories of the later medievalism, at 
 that strange mystical hour when the divinities of Hellas 
 were peeping pathetically out under Christian masks, or 
 through the network of the Christian legend. 
 
 "'There are,' he said, 'only two sides of Christianity for 
 which I am fitted by the Spirit that designs in me the carol 
 part and the mystical part. I could not do without mediaeval 
 Christianity. The central idea of it and all it has gathered 
 to itself made the Europe that I exist in. The enthusiasm 
 and devotion, the learning and the art, the humanity and 
 romance, the self-denial and splendid achievement that the 
 human race can never be deprived of, except by a cataclysm 
 that would all but destroy man himself all belong to it.'" 
 
 So he painted the little Greek love, half asleep, in the 
 Chant d' Amour, blowing the organ, unseen, for the girl 
 who, in a meadow below Gothic tourelles, is singing what 
 might be a hymn, but which has got another charm for 
 the- Knight who broods at her feet over the song. The 
 book that had wholly possessed him was the Morte 
 d' Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory, to which he and Morris 
 had given their souls from the first ; and the typical mood 
 that he had loved to express was that pathetic trance in 
 which you listen to old tales of love and war long ago, 
 or dream as tender music pauses into silence. It is a 
 mood, therefore, which is a little languid, a little sad, a 
 little wistful and forlorn ; and the face, therefore, that he 
 drew through life was one that held this mood within it. 
 
 Such was the ideal for him, and this alone would he 
 express in response to the craving for beauty, however 
 strange the type might seem for a world bubbling with 
 heated activities.
 
 264 Personal Studies 
 
 Lady Burne-Jones makes a most happy quotation from 
 Rio's Poetry of Christian Art ; in which his justification 
 of Perugino covers admirably the monotony of Burne- 
 Jones's typical face. 
 
 " Rio, speaking of a reproach brought by the Florentine 
 school against Perugino for repeating the same motives, says : 
 ' They were incapable of understanding that the progress of 
 an artist who seeks his inspiration beyond the sphere of 
 sensible objects does not merely consist in the variety of 
 picturesque grouping of the subject, nor in the depth and 
 fusion of the colours, nor even the delicacy and purity of the 
 design, but rather in the development and progressive per- 
 fection of certain types, which, concealed at first within the 
 most secret recesses of his imagination, and afterwards 
 regarded as a long and religious exercise for his pencil, had 
 at length become intimately combined with all that was 
 poetical and exalted in his nature.' Perugino's answer to the 
 reproach of the Florentines, as quoted by Rio, is also curiously 
 like what Edward might have said : ' At all events I am at 
 liberty to copy myself.'" 
 
 Then again Burne-Jones gave himself cordially to 
 Morris's belief that beauty was meant for common things, 
 and ought to be the heritage and possession of common 
 people. He poured out, with infinite fertility, exquisite 
 designs for the famous " firm," and so bore his share in 
 spreading the joy of art over all the pots and pans of 
 daily life, and into the corners of small houses and 
 churches. 
 
 And then, lastly, was he not right in his belief that in 
 giving himself to romance he had given himself to 
 the real heart of living human nature ? Romance is 
 always of the people. It belongs to the multitude, it
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 265 
 
 tells of the strange forces that are working for the future ; 
 it is full of inarticulate cries, and of the passions that 
 break with convention. It is always alive and always 
 revolutionary ; it has in it the watchword of liberty. After 
 all it is Classicalism in art that really exists for the few, 
 for the elect, and holds itself apart from the common herd. 
 It is Classicalism that needs a special taste, and draws 
 its skirts about it out of the dust and dirt of the street. 
 Romance knows that for ever King Cophetua will find 
 himself, for all his splendour, at the feet of a beggar- 
 maid. It follows poverty "over the hills and far away," 
 and is stifled in the silken chambers of the rich. It is 
 therefore for the people and to the people that Burne- 
 Jones was painting, even though his romance took far- 
 away forms that belong to old days long dead, and spent 
 itself on Cupid and Psyche, and Pygmalion and Galatea, 
 and the Praises of Venus. 
 
 Romance is eternal, and at all ages is one and the 
 same. And, therefore, his heart could be hot within him 
 for that vast town which was his own, and for all the 
 crowded joys and sorrows of its streets, even as he spent 
 year after year laying delicate tint to tint, to embody the 
 subtle fancies of an imagination that was fed out of the 
 old-world dreams. 
 
 Still for him the judgment lay here, and now, in what 
 could be done to better things as they are. 
 
 Hear him as he pours out his soul to the friend of his 
 later years, Sebastian Evans. 
 
 " There is only one religion. ' Make the most of your 
 best ' is common sense and morals. ' Make the most of your 
 best for the sake of others ' is the Catholic Faith, which
 
 266 Personal Studies 
 
 except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved. Athan- 
 asius did not know the real strength of his position : all these 
 things are automatic. You are a true believer you enter 
 the Kingdom of Heaven. You are a heretic you are damned. 
 It has nothing to do with happiness or unhappiness. People 
 who are damned, as far as I can make out, are generally 
 happier than we poor devils who humbly enter the Kingdom 
 of Heaven. Day of Judgment 1 It is a synonym for the 
 present moment it is eternally going on. It is not so much 
 as a moment it is just the line that has no breadth between 
 past and future. There is not cannot be, if you think it 
 out any other Day of Judgment. It is not in ' the nature 
 of things.' The Dies irae dies ilia is everlastingly dissolving the 
 ages into ashes everywhere. It is Nature herself, natura, not 
 past or future, but the eternal being born, the sum of things 
 as they are, not as they have been or will be. What I am 
 driving at is this : We are a living part, however small, of 
 things as they are. If we believe that things as they are can 
 be made better than they are, and in that faith set to work 
 to help the betterment to the best of our ability, however 
 limited, we are, and cannot help being, children of the 
 Kingdom. If we disbelieve in the possibility of betterment, 
 or don't try to help it forward, we are aud cannot help being 
 damned. It is the ' things as they are ' that is the touchstone 
 the trial the Day of Judgment. ' How do things as they 
 are strike you 1 ' The question is as bald as an egg, but it 
 is the egg out of which blessedness or unblessedncss is everlast- 
 ingly being hatched for every living soul. Of course you can 
 translate it into any religious language you please Christian, 
 Buddhist, Mahometan, or what not. ' Have you faith ? ' I 
 suppose means the same thing. Faith, not amount of 
 achievement which, at best, must be infinitesimally small 
 that is the great thing. Have you faith, my dear 1 Do 
 you ever think of this poor old woman, our Mother, trudging 
 on and on towards nothing and nowhere, and swear by all
 
 Edward Burne-Jones 267 
 
 your gods that she shall yet go gloriously some day, with 
 sunshine and flowers and chanting of her children that love 
 her and she loves 1 I can never think of collective humanity 
 as brethren and sisters ; they seem to me ' Mother ' more 
 nearly Mother than Mother Nature herself. To me, this 
 weary, toiling, groaning world of men and women is none 
 other than Our Lady of the Sorrows. It lies on you and me 
 and all the faithful to make her Our Lady of the Glories. 
 Will she ever be so? Will she? Will she? She shall be, 
 if your toil and mine, and the toil of a thousand ages of them 
 that come after us, can make her so ! " 
 
 And listen lastly to his own belief of what he was doing 
 by his life and work in art. 
 
 " Afterwards he said : ' That was au awful thought of 
 Ruskin's, that artists paint GOD for the world. There's a 
 lump of greasy pigment at the end of Michael Angelo's hog- 
 bristle brush, and by the time it has been laid on the stucco, 
 there is something there that all men with eyes recognize as 
 divine. Think of what it means. It is the power of bringing 
 GOD into the world making GOD manifest. It is giving 
 back her Child that was crucified to Our Lady of the 
 Sorrows.' "
 
 WILLIAM BRIGHT, D.D.* 
 
 ALL over England there will be those whose hearts will 
 give a sudden leap at the news that Dr. Bright has passed 
 away from the place that knew him so well, and where he 
 had so long been familiar. He was part and parcel of 
 Oxford life. His memory was one with the memories of 
 the grey walls and towers of that sweet city to which our 
 hearts cling so tenderly. 
 
 Always in and out of its courts, he could be caught 
 sight of, vanishing round corners with strange motions all 
 his own ; or his delighted laugh could be heard startling 
 the dumb stones as he greeted some young undergraduate 
 with ringing welcome. His soul was always young, and 
 loved the young ; and he had singular gifts for engaging 
 and amusing them. His intense dramatic skill in telling 
 a story (and his stories were infinite) ; his almost biblical 
 knowledge of all the pages of Dickens ; his shouts of glee, 
 his outpours of play and fancy and allusion all this 
 made his dinner-parties for undergraduates historical 
 events. 
 
 His love for youth spread down to children; he knew 
 their wants and joys with a brotherly instinct. " Shall we 
 have a rag ? " was his famous invitation to some boys 
 whom he was taking out for a trip by train, in whom 
 
 * Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. 
 
 268
 
 William Bright, D.D. 269 
 
 he detected an inarticulate craving for something to en- 
 liven the proceedings. At the scene that followed that 
 invitation, imagination boggles. He was impulsive and 
 spontaneous, and amazingly fertile, in all that belonged to 
 conversation. The stores on which he drew were immense, 
 and his imaginative and humorous powers were very high 
 indeed. 
 
 It was this which made his lecturing so impressive. I well 
 remember the effect of coming to his lectures, after having 
 listened to the best tutors and professors who then were 
 lecturing for the School of Literae Humaniores. He stood 
 out as a brilliant artist in his own historical field. He capti- 
 vated by his intense realization of the inner significance of 
 a scene or a person ; his whole being was thrown into the 
 work of making this realization felt ; his minute know- 
 ledge of detail was most skilfully handled to heighten or 
 deepen the momentous effects, and his vivid personal 
 interest in the subject gave it extraordinary animation. 
 All his best gifts were in richest use when he lectured. 
 The names and allusions which sometimes overlay, by 
 their multitude, the broad effect of his books were swept 
 along into the main current by the energy of his dramatic 
 force as he spoke. He was, really, a first-rate speaker 
 and preacher. The quaintness of the gestures interspersed, 
 the odd noises interjected, disturbed and bewildered the 
 young, so that they often missed the power of speech or 
 of appeal that lay behind. Undergraduates are easily 
 upset. But for those who could survive the mere surface- 
 difficulties, there was a gift felt at work which was rarely 
 equalled. There was a free and noble use of the best 
 Theology, in its most living form, which made his sermons 
 profoundly attractive and impressive ; or in open speaking
 
 270 Personal Studies 
 
 there was often, combined with a real eloquence, a dignity 
 with which he would wrap his gown about him as if it 
 were a Roman toga, and a high passion in his voice 
 which, at happy moments, would give telling effect to an 
 oratory that was always fed out of catholic convictions in 
 their largeness and splendour. 
 
 Of his productive erudition in the field of Ecclesiastical 
 History it is needless to speak. His work is all on our 
 shelves. It is always full of matter and excellent reading 
 more especially did he excel in illustrating theological 
 positions by embodying them in personal lives of the 
 champions. By this he has carried along generation 
 after generation of those who, being clergy, feel that they 
 ought to know so much more than they do. 
 
 But, besides this continuous work of rescuing us from 
 abysmal ignorance, he has shown himself a finished master 
 in two departments where the fewest possible ever succeed. 
 He could write a prayer, and he could write a hymn. 
 Only two or three in a generation ever attain to this ; 
 but he, at his best, was nearly perfect, and he was not 
 infrequently at his best. 
 
 His book of Private Devotions has prayers as compact, 
 and dignified, and personal as collects. What more can 
 be said ? 
 
 As long as our Church lives we shall sing, at most 
 sacred hours, "Once, only once," and "And now, O Father," 
 and so his breath will be ever with us and his memory 
 never willingly let die. It is worth living for, to have left 
 behind one such hymn which will be sung by unnumbered 
 generations. 
 
 Death is not the hour in which to speak of his un- 
 flagging controversies on behalf of the Anglican position
 
 William Bright, D.D. 271 
 
 in which he believed with such whole-hearted fervour, 
 and to the justification of which he brought all his 
 intellectual resources with unstinted keenness and de- 
 votion. We owe him debts that cannot be repaid. 
 
 But, now, we want chiefly to recall the man whom we 
 loved. 
 
 He had a weary physical trouble to bear all his life. 
 Dyspepsia gave him bad hours. But his innate cheer- 
 fulness rose buoyant and triumphant ; and it lasted him 
 to the end. Long after he had been broken by the stroke 
 that led to his death, he retained his vivid interest and 
 warm affection, and talked with his old delightful freedom 
 and brightness. He lived alone, but he was at home in 
 the hearts of many, both young and old. He had that 
 outflow of sympathy for people far younger than himself 
 which kept him in touch with movements of thought not 
 wholly his own. He was open, expansive, alert ; he never 
 shut himself up into the prison-walls of age. Therefore 
 he belonged to us all ; and therefore it is that we miss 
 him sorely, now that he is taken to the rest which his 
 long years of unwearied industry for the Catholic Church, 
 and for the honour of the dear LORD whom he loved and 
 adored, have so bravely earned.
 
 ROBERT CAMPBELL MOBERLY * 
 
 In the sunlight, under the grey shelter of the Cathedral which he 
 served, in the secret and delicate spot amid the garden lawns, which 
 has become the home of such tender and intimate memories of late, 
 we laid to rest the body which had for fifty-eight years so graciously 
 housed the delicate and tender soul of Robert Moberly. There in the 
 quiet corner lie Philip Pusey, and Edith Liddell, and her father, the 
 great Dean, and Helen Paget. He had known them all, and now we 
 had but to carry him down his own lawn, shining as only Oxford 
 grass can sliine ; nor did the birds cease for one moment, while we 
 sang our hymns. It was fitting that a life marked by such reserved, 
 sacred beauty should have had so beautiful a burial. 
 
 R. I. P. 
 
 HE has died, just as he was arriving at the fulness of 
 his power. He had matured late ; and that maturity had 
 still to prove all that it could achieve. He had won his 
 hearing ; and that very fact served to give him even new 
 confidence in the message that he had to deliver, and to 
 disclose, with increasing richness, the singular gifts which 
 this confidence was calling into play. He had more to 
 say ; and he would have said it to a wider circle, and with 
 a yet more decisive energy of expression. He had shown 
 on two occasions lately how he could speak, not only to 
 those for whom spiritual interests were already a direct 
 concern, but to that larger world outside, which is repre- 
 sented by the secular Press and the House of Commons. 
 
 * Canon of Christ Church. 
 272
 
 Robert Campbell Moberly 273 
 
 One was the sermon at the Bishop of Worcester's 
 consecration, and the other the pamphlet on Unde- 
 nominationalism. He was also gaining authority fast in 
 Convocation. This consciousness of growing powers and 
 of freer expression showed itself, during the last severe 
 illness, in a strong desire to have a short space of life still 
 allowed him, in which to do one more bit of productive 
 work. He had indeed dreaded the broken life of an invalid. 
 He did not desire that. He was aware of an incurable 
 disease, which forbade a long life. But he thought that, 
 possibly, if he could recover the present stress, he might 
 be given a short spell of effective activity. And he felt 
 that he would be glad to use it. He was not mistaken in 
 the physical possibility, but his strength could not hold 
 out under the immediate strain, and he was given his 
 new work to do elsewhere. It has been natural therefore 
 to feel that there was something cut short, exactly at the 
 moment when it was most sorely in request. He was one 
 of the very few men of our day who had the prophetic 
 gift ; he could see, and think, and pronounce ; and every 
 day we were learning to trust ourselves more entirely to 
 what he saw and declared. Yet his oldest and his dearest 
 friends go behind this natural regret. They are offering 
 deep thanksgiving for the arrival which it had been already 
 his to make. For they remember the time when they feared 
 that it might be denied him. Not that they had not 
 always believed in the force and beauty of his gifts. But 
 they had once feared that these would only be known to 
 the few. There was much to hinder their general re- 
 cognition. His own fastidious delicacy, his habit of reserve, 
 his intense humility ; a certain aloofness from the world, 
 which gave him a peculiar charm, but which made him
 
 274 Personal Studies 
 
 move through ordinary men as something apart ; and 
 above all, a certain elaboration of manner and speech 
 which veiled his real directness and positiveness of 
 purpose, and which could not but keep him remote and 
 unintelligible where there was not familiarity enough to 
 afford the right interpretation. 
 
 Then, again, he was some time before he found his true 
 vocation, or discovered his speculative faculty ; and it 
 was only as this self-discovering was made that he grew 
 convinced that he had something to say to which 
 men would listen. He had taken his degree as a scholar, 
 not as a thinker. Somehow, at that particular period, 
 New College allowed its men of Scholarship to enter for 
 the Final Schools, without passing them through the 
 philosophical mill to any effect. He was not alone, at the 
 time, in slipping into a second class through this ; and to 
 the very end he regretted his ignorance of the technical 
 methods of language employed by speculative thought. 
 As a Scholarship Tutor at Christ Church he found nothing 
 that really opened the door for him. And he did not 
 know yet what he could, or would, do with himself. And 
 his shy modesty prevented him supposing that he was of 
 any special value ; while he had a certain indolence which 
 greatly limited his reading. To the last he read strangely 
 little. He therefore made no push. We loved him. But 
 he was content to listen, and play with the intricacies of 
 words, and lie by. It was not at all clear what he would 
 finally be about. 
 
 The first moment of discovery came through a journey 
 to Ceylon with Bishop Copleston, now Metropolitan of 
 India, on his going out to his see in Colombo. Moberly 
 threw over his Oxford tutorship, and took a six months'
 
 Robert Campbell Moberly 275 
 
 trip through India. He came back with a most wonder- 
 ful diary ; and for the first time he was determined that 
 we should listen to him. He was possessed by what he 
 had seen. He made us sit down to hear him ; and out 
 it all came, with a vivid conviction and a masterful grip 
 Avhich fairly astonished us. We became aware of the 
 tenacity of insight, of the personal insistence, of the 
 singular intensity, which we afterwards grew to appreciate 
 so fully. 
 
 To understand the effect of this personal insistence, 
 one must understand that it came from a man who 
 would do anything in the world rather than assert him- 
 self, or desire public attention, or intrude; yet here 
 he was with something about which he was absolutely 
 convinced that it was worth our while to hear. He had 
 seen it ; he had fastened on it. He could not be shaken 
 off; and, in spite of his apologetic deferentialness, and 
 gentleness, and modesty, and softness of delicate speech, 
 we found ourselves under the compulsion, under the 
 mastery, of one who had, and held, us. He made us see 
 with his eyes. His convictions were his own ; and he 
 had the power to make them become ours. So we felt 
 it then : so we felt it more and more unto the end. 
 
 Never was there any one so independent, so self- 
 confident, so tenacious, so immovable, as this gentlest 
 and humblest of all gentle and humble men. 
 
 I have never known any other character to compare 
 with him in this but that of the late Sir Bartle Frere, 
 the famous Governor of Bombay and of the Cape. There 
 too one found oneself faced by the same combination of 
 attributes. At first all you were aware of was a delicate 
 humility ; a sweet courtesy that put you to shame ; a
 
 276 Personal Studies 
 
 smile that appeared to grant you everything you could 
 conceivably ask before you began ; a tenderness that was 
 gentle and gracious as a woman's ; and then behind and 
 through this there emerged a will like iron, that you 
 could never hope to turn ; a courage that knew absolutely 
 no limits ; a self-reliance that nothing could break ; 
 convictions that stood like steel. 
 
 With him, as with Moberly, there was an audacity of 
 judgment, which never seemed to be aware of the fear 
 of standing alone. The world might be against them, 
 and they still only smiled, and waited until it should 
 come to a better mind. And all this without the faintest 
 suspicion of egoism or of self-assertion. The personal 
 humility was as obvious as ever ; indeed it was the total 
 absence of self-reference which was at the root of their 
 independence and their courage. 
 
 Gradually this discovery of his right to speak moved 
 on from point to point with Moberly. At Great Budworth, 
 his living in Cheshire, Bishop Stubbs found him out, and 
 made him speak to the Clergy, and they found that they 
 had to listen. Two papers, one on the marriage law, and 
 one on tithe, marked this out. 
 
 Then came the first moment at which he ventured on 
 a high speculative theme. It was a paper on the know- 
 ledge of GOD, given at the Church Congress, Rhyl. It 
 was an epoch to him and to his friends. We had never 
 known what he could do in that region before. And now 
 we saw what his later books showed so remarkably, that 
 he was one of the best thinkers alive. 
 
 He had genuine insight into those problems with 
 which philosophy is concerned, and the obvious absence 
 of technical training made his insight all the more im-
 
 Robert Campbell Moberly 277 
 
 pressive. He was not tangled in the meshes of historical 
 speculation, and he seemed to .gain a certain simplicity 
 of aim and directness of expression from this very freedom. 
 
 This is what came to the front in the little book Reason 
 and Religion, in which he attempted to come to the 
 rescue of reason against attacks made on its authority by 
 Mr. Balfour, Mr. Kidd, and more indirectly by his very 
 close and intimate friend, Mr. George Romanes. 
 
 All his best qualities went to the making of his great 
 book Atonement and Personality. In that, he spoke his 
 full message, and won the attention of all those whom he 
 could hope to reach. After writing it he was at peace. 
 He could afford to die. He knew that he had not lived 
 in vain. He had a conviction, which was prophetic in 
 its assurance, that he had been shown how to utter what 
 was true. The book revealed to all that there was at 
 least one man among us who was qualified to move on 
 the highest levels of theological thought, and who could 
 mark an epoch in our apprehension of the mystery of the 
 Atonement. 
 
 I can never forget how, at the Round Table gathered 
 by Professor Sand ay to consider the subject of Priesthood 
 and Sacrifice, the representatives of English Nonconformity 
 and of Scotch Presbyterianism gave him their bowed 
 attention, and only asked, when the moment of discussion 
 at our conference arrived, that he should continue to 
 develop the ideal of the Holy Penitent which his limits 
 of time had curtailed. I saw, then, how deeply his work 
 had passed into the religious mind of England. 
 
 The book has shown, once and for ever, how immense 
 is the range of issues that must be covered in taking 
 account of the Atonement. It has detected that the core
 
 278 Personal Studies 
 
 of the matter lies in a true conception of the fellowship 
 involved in Personality. No theory will ever justify 
 the Atonement that starts from an isolated, infinite 
 individuality. The deep effect of the book comes from the 
 boldness with which high spiritual passion is brought into 
 the service of the argument in a way that intensifies its 
 intellectual force. The reason is made to assimilate those 
 emotional elements without which penitence and conver- 
 sion are unintelligible terms. Passion and logic are fused 
 into a single demonstration. 
 
 It is a book that will surely stand and endure. No one 
 can read it without feeling that life has to move on a new 
 level. It is one of the five books of our generation. 
 
 I have spoken of the conference at Professor Sanday's. 
 It is impossible to speak of Moberly's later life without 
 saying what the new friendship had meant to him. For 
 eight years the two had drawn into the closest possible 
 intimacy, and it is hard to exaggerate the influence that 
 this delightful friendship had in confirming Moberly in 
 his true vocation. He had always possessed inner con- 
 fidence; but his extreme diffidence prevented him from 
 claiming his right to say his say. He doubted its being 
 worth while. He doubted men's willingness to listen. It 
 was Mr. Sanday who, by his affectionate admiration for 
 every word and act of his friend, induced him more and 
 more to believe in the worth of what he had to do, and 
 gave him the needful assurance that others would be only 
 too glad to listen and to learn from him. 
 
 This latter-day friendship formed one of the deepest 
 joys that came to him in the years when sickness had 
 already stricken him. 
 
 His older friends, as they gathered year after year
 
 Robert Campbell Moberly 279 
 
 together again, at Longworth, to renew their ingrained 
 intimacies, felt, year by year also, the growing dimension 
 of his thought and character. To him these gatherings 
 were a special delight, and he made himself their conscience 
 and their inspiration. To those who had ever loved him it 
 was a peculiar gladness to note this increasing self-con- 
 fidence in him. His life was rooted in the ancient pieties 
 of discipline, reserve, submission, meekness, which belonged 
 to the deepest Tractarian tradition. He had grown up in 
 the atmosphere of Hursley, in the very spirit of John 
 Keble. He had been taught all the hidden force that 
 belongs to the character of which it can be said, " He 
 shall not strive nor cry ; neither shall his voice be heard 
 in the streets." An old-world delicacy hung about him. 
 His personal beauty came from a mother of the most 
 exquisite refinement, and of a shrinking fastidiousness, to 
 which publicity was intolerable. From his brilliant father 
 he had inherited a scholarly precision in speech, which in 
 him had become intensified into a sort of minute esoteric 
 utterance, which was bound to be " caviare to the general." 
 So much conspired to keep him secreted in a sheltered 
 aloofness, where only the very few would find the pearl of 
 great price. Yet it was given to him, before he died, to 
 win a wider and wider hearing ; to push forward, with a 
 singular audacity, into spiritual regions, where he was 
 recognized as a rare and trusted leader ; to prove himself 
 a master whom those who had ever loved him as a friend 
 were now glad to follow and obey ; and still all the honour 
 brought him to retain the untainted and delicate meek- 
 ness of a CHRIST-like soul.
 
 ROBERT DOLLING * 
 
 WE cannot better discover the power of personality or the 
 impotence of words than by trying to convey to others, 
 through report, the vivid impress of a strong soul that has 
 passed out of our sight. Yet this is what we are driven 
 to attempt, and this little book gallantly sets itself to the 
 impossible task. 
 
 Those who knew and loved Father Dolling cannot 
 let the felt pressure of his presence pass away without 
 an effort to express to others that which to them meant 
 so much, and all who have shared the joy of this experi- 
 ence will be glad to have it set down at once, while the 
 memory is keen and the affection undissipated, that they 
 may say over to themselves the tale that they cannot 
 bear to forget. 
 
 A fuller and more detailed memoir by his intimate 
 friend and colleague, C. E. Osborne will appear later. 
 In the meantime, here is put down the immediate 
 impression of the man as we remember him at the 
 moment that he is taken from us. 
 
 The man ! For with Father Dolling it was the man 
 who was one with the evangelist and the priest. It was 
 his absolute self, in its characteristic identity, and not 
 
 1 Preface to Father Dolling, by Joseph Clayton. London : 
 Gardner, Barton. 1902. 
 
 280
 
 Robert Dolling 281 
 
 merely some incidental gift or outlying sentiment, which 
 was made the instrument for the Divine use. He told for 
 GOD through being what he was, and the personal equation 
 was inseparable from his work. He had his methods and 
 his principles, and he thought them out, and he could put 
 them into words. But, still, to explain the results, you 
 must say, and could only say, " It was Dolling." He would 
 have made anything tell. He had the gift to let his 
 innermost personality come through and speak. 
 
 That is what the Winchester boys became aware of, 
 in spite of all that held them aloof from the type of man, 
 so strange to them, and from his ways of working, so un- 
 intelligible to most, and so repellent to many. Suddenly, 
 as he spoke to them, they would catch sight of his soul 
 ablaze : the light kindled, the passion and the pity, the 
 hope and the love of the Gospel broke out through face 
 and lips. They knew now, and some for the first time, 
 what religion meant. They gave themselves away to it. 
 The real thing was there, whatever the odd ritual in which 
 it disguised itself, and they meant to stand by it, whatever 
 freaks it indulged in. That prolonged hold on the confi- 
 dence of Winchester, whether of masters or boys, was the 
 highest tribute that could be paid to the simple force of 
 Dolling's personal religiousness, just because it was won 
 over those who are, perhaps, of all living beings, the most 
 remote from the special form of spiritual work which 
 Dolling embodied. 
 
 Our British public-school boy we know him. Our 
 British public-school master him, too, we know. And 
 we know, moreover, the curious type of worship peculiar 
 to public schools, with its quaint pre-historic conditions, 
 unlike anything else on the face of the earth, and its terror
 
 282 Personal Studies 
 
 of anything that commits it, or of any one who should let 
 himself go. Winchester is typical of all that is most 
 rooted in our public-school tradition. Yet it never failed 
 Dolling. It trusted, believed, backed him from first to last. 
 The men who came out of the school stood by him, worked 
 for him still, however remote they were from his stand- 
 point or practice. It was enough that it was Dolling. 
 They were convinced that he had hold of the secret, and 
 could do what he was set to do win souls for CHRIST out 
 of the slums. And they were convinced of this because 
 they themselves had known something of his power over 
 their own souls. Of course, there was also the discovery 
 made that he could enter into their school-life with a boy's 
 own inwardness of apprehension. He made himself their 
 mate ; he sat in their rooms and talked ; he brought into 
 play that burly bonhomie of his, the robust joyousness of 
 the "jolly Friar," the love of buoyant and natural life, which 
 was so deep in him. And, then, he had a very shrewd, 
 practical judgment : he understood men and things, and 
 boys and masters ; and he got inside the business in hand 
 with a sound and thorough common-sense which they had 
 not expected in a parson. He could steer them in a " row " 
 round a difficult corner. He could mediate between op- 
 posing forces. He saw matters on their level, and yet could 
 introduce something of authority into his opinion. He was 
 very human, very large-hearted, very tolerant of all natural 
 feelings. He would come to the business in hand without 
 any narrow parti pris, and above all, without a touch of pose 
 or priggery. The school-boy found himself interested ; and 
 what did it matter, then, how much Dolling was given to 
 rum goings-on in his church ? He was all right : he was 
 a " decent chap." Could praise go higher ? And just what
 
 Robert Dolling 283 
 
 told on the public school, or the Magdalen men, as he drew 
 them toward their school or College Mission, told with 
 equal force within the Mission itself. He knew perfectly 
 well how identical is the Gospel which really goes home 
 upon the soul at every level of social life. There is but 
 one message it speaks, and practically in the same words, 
 to educated and uneducated, to bond and free. So 
 Dolling's power over his people came through the personal 
 impression of his evangelical convictions. He kept the 
 whole fabric of his worship alive through this quickening 
 spirit of "conversion." This book will tell of his free 
 speech and open prayer. He allowed no mistake to be 
 possible about where the root of the matter lay. 
 
 Religion* after all, must be religion; it must mean a 
 spiritual life, a converted will, a humble and a contrite 
 heart, a love of GOD and of man. He let nothing overlay 
 these or compensate for the lack of these. He had, 
 indeed, a certain body of Ritual Practice, more or less 
 elaborate, and very definite in its intention. And he 
 appreciated beautiful ministration. But the secret of his 
 work lay behind or underneath this. He insisted, indeed, 
 strongly on the Sacrament of Penance and Absolution; 
 but, then, this was to him an essential element and agent in 
 the process of conversion. He pressed the central domin- 
 ance over all worship of Eucharistic adoration ; but, then, 
 the Sacramant of the Altar was to him the Spirit and the 
 Life. He could not conceive a division between the 
 inward and the outward manifestation of GOD'S Pardoning 
 Grace. Evangelical and Catholic Truth found here for 
 him their perfect fusion, in the hunger of the forgiven 
 soul for the Body and the Blood present in the Bread and 
 the Wine.
 
 284 Personal Studies 
 
 All this he needed to have emphatic and pronounced, 
 without disguise or modification, if his vivid missionary 
 attack was to be possessed of its obvious completion. His 
 inward message could not bear to be deprived of its outward 
 expression, and he was angry at any cautious check 
 put upon him, yet not so much with the Ritualist's eccle- 
 siastical anxiety, as with the Missioner's indignation at 
 being thwarted in his Gospel. 
 
 But if his strong personal character told upon public 
 schools and upon his missions as an attractive and com- 
 pelling power, it had one special field in which it put out 
 all its peculiar force. He could sway and hold the outcast 
 and the broken in a way and with a freedom that were all 
 his own. Here, in this region, the personal equation is 
 bound to be at its highest. The waifs and strays of social 
 life can only be reached through flesh and blood, through 
 a masterful individuality, through a living present affection, 
 through the touch of an intense personality. So only can 
 the incredible become credible, and the impossible be 
 made a fact. 
 
 The book will tell fully of the adventures, and risks, 
 and losses, and glories that belong to work done with 
 such unstinted generosity, and such open-hearted con- 
 fidence. Dolling was determined to keep the road back 
 home open to those who but loved too fondly the ease 
 of the " open road." House and table, room and com- 
 panionship, were to be theirs when they chose. Let 
 them walk in and find it. 
 
 Nothing but his steady and shrewd wit, his firm will, 
 his human common-sense, could have made it all possible. 
 But with him the risks could be run. Those who were 
 everybody's despair could have their chance given them
 
 Robert Dolling 285 
 
 here. It was exactly what we most need in these terrible 
 cities, that sweat and break men, body and soul. Here 
 was the moral hospital, the spiritual home of convales- 
 cence. Here was the House of Rest, with large open-air 
 treatment, and strong meat for those who could take it. 
 It was the rarest of all gifts that Dolling revealed. He 
 had that passionate sympathy with Bohemianism and 
 Prodigalism which let him inside the hearts of the men 
 to be won ; but he combined with it the firm, wholesome 
 judgment that never lost hold of the sanities or the sound- 
 ness of moral well-being. He had glimpses into the 
 secret of the soul, which disclosed the amazing heart of 
 goodness and of sacrifice and of pity that can be found 
 behind all the sinful disguises of Publican and Harlot. 
 Somewhere in them there is that hidden, which, if only it 
 can be unearthed or quickened by the violence of the Divine 
 Compassion, can put to shame all the righteousness of the 
 ninety-and-nine. And even in its sin it can often disclose 
 touches of the self-sacrificing passion which finds its full 
 expression in the Cross of CHRIST. This he believed ; this 
 he had the gift to verify. It is in this that he taught us 
 most and gave us his best, and is now most sorely missed. 
 
 With such a force of individual character, who could be 
 surprised if he had his rubs and tumbles ? With his 
 temperament, with his spontaneity, with his confidence, 
 with his masterfulness, he was bound to bump up against 
 the ordinary humdrum fashions of men. 
 
 No one who ever saw his stout square head, his bull- 
 neck, his burly presence, could doubt that he would give 
 things a jolt or two that would make them jump. 
 
 A man cannot have such gifts for nothing. He must 
 pay the price. Some of it may be his own fault ; some of
 
 286 Personal Studies 
 
 it a great deal of it will be the fault of a puzzled world, 
 of a startled Church, of bewildered Officialism, of conven- 
 tionalized Parochialism. We can leave others to do the 
 sum and work out the total of respective guilt. 
 
 But no one can expect to possess any abnormal gifts, 
 and yet to find their exercise perfectly smooth in a world 
 that of necessity bases its calculations on the normal. 
 
 No one can have the supreme boon of originality and 
 yet find himself instantly understood and appreciated by 
 those to whom he must, on this very hypothesis, be a 
 surprise and a shock. Originality has got to establish its 
 right to exist ; the abnormal has got to make good its 
 function and use. And this will never be done without 
 some suffering in a life of which sacrifice is the vital law. 
 
 Let no one who has the glory of the gift complain of 
 the price that he pays for its possession. 
 
 We have, surely, lost something in our day of the old 
 Tractarian patience, which never dreamed of a success to 
 be achieved straight off, but took the suspicion and distrust 
 that it aroused as the natural portion of all who are 
 charged with a special mission. They simply bided their 
 time, and it arrived. 
 
 Looking back at Boiling's career, I cannot lift a loud 
 wail. He had two moments of trouble, one at leaving the 
 
 O 
 
 London, and one at leaving the Winchester diocese. 
 But he had unparalleled confidence reposed in him by his 
 supporters, and enthusiastic support almost from the very 
 first. Never did any one more rapidly win the devotion of 
 those who believed in him. He was given a golden 
 opportunity even while he was a Deacon. He got 
 Magdalen College at his back, and Bishop Walsham How. 
 And then, after an abrupt flinging over of the work in
 
 Robert Dolling 287 
 
 London, in consequence of a blunder of his Bishop, which 
 he took to heart with, perhaps, over-hasty indignation, he 
 found himself in possession of that wonderful confidence of 
 Winchester School, which never failed him for those long, 
 good years under Bishop Thorold. 
 
 He had come to the end of what he thought it was given 
 him to do in Landport when the collision with the 
 Diocesan so unfortunately clouded the close. Then came 
 two years of real anxiety lest his Church should fail to 
 trust and use him again, during which interval his 
 American friends, by their splendid and gallant generosity 
 to him, did their utmost to bribe him away from his home 
 allegiance. After an attempt or two to place him made 
 by the Bishop of Rochester, Chandler, the present Bishop 
 of Bloemfontein, had the honour of wiping out our dis- 
 credit by offering him the work of St. Saviour's, Poplar, 
 in which he died. 
 
 He , found it hard to fight again against the apathy of 
 that London which had won his first love, and he had a 
 weary work of begging to do ; but he put his whole heart 
 out for the children, and found in them his solace and his 
 hope, while his old power of witchery won him immense 
 support from outside. 
 
 He was hard at it when he died. 
 
 It is ours to see to it that his memory shall live, to tell 
 what CHRIST'S Priesthood may do in this Church of ours 
 for CHRIST'S own poor. 
 
 He showed us how pitifully we cramp the worship of 
 Grace -and narrow the range of the Gospel within our 
 limited traditions and ecclesiastical timidities. He 
 shocked us out of our nervous proprieties, and taught 
 us to plunge and hazard and dare on behalf of those
 
 288 Personal Studies 
 
 of whom we despair, but for whom CHRIST sets us to 
 seek. 
 
 He proved to us how much could be done if only we 
 committed ourselves heart and soul to that which we 
 profess, and let the strong message that is on our lips 
 have clear and free way. 
 
 He showed us what the Book of Common Prayer could 
 do, and what it could not do. 
 
 He stormed against our frigid conventionalities, and 
 shook our Anglican self-esteem. 
 
 We recognized through him how often 'we had taken 
 pride in what was in reality our insular limitations. 
 
 He stretched and strained our tethers, not in a spirit 
 of disloyalty, but in the fretted impatience of a -workman 
 who found himself hampered by formalities and qualifica- 
 tions in the very task that he had been commissioned by 
 his Church to fulfil for his LoBD. 
 
 He demanded first place for the poor ; he bent his 
 ministerial charge to their primal needs ; he strongly 
 claimed for them their right to social and civic amelioration. 
 
 This book will, it is hoped, recall enough to show how 
 real and full was his Gospel. 
 
 The Catholic movement will yet continue to move, if 
 only it is embodied in those who, like Robert Dolling, root 
 their Priesthood in Evangelical conviction, and carry it 
 out in its demands over the full range of social human life 
 
 THE END 
 
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