-OLIVE-PERCIVi^L- 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 I 
 
 STRAY LEAVES
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 MEN AND LETTERS 
 
 Crown 8vo 
 
 Fourth Edition
 
 StRAT LEAVES 
 
 "By HERBERT PAUL, M.P. 
 
 LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMVI
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 Printed by Ballantynk, Hanson &> Co. 
 A( the Biillantyne Press
 
 ACS 
 
 IN MEMORIAM 
 D. G. 
 
 G319h5
 
 These Essays have appeared in the columns oj 
 " The Nineteenth Century and After^^ and 
 " The Independent Review" and it is a pleas- 
 ant duty to thank the respective editors for their 
 kindness in permitting this reproduction. 
 
 TU
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 George Eliot . 
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 The Novels of Peacock . 
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 horje subseciv^ 
 
 Charles Lamb . 
 
 The Author of " Ionica " 
 
 Winston Churchill's " Life 
 Randolph Churchill " 
 
 OF 
 
 Lord 
 
 Page 
 II 
 
 38 
 
 74 
 109 
 
 143 
 171 
 
 204 
 
 222 
 
 251 
 
 278 
 
 IX
 
 St RAT LEAVES 
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 BISHOP THIRLWALL once told a 
 friend whom he met at the Athen- 
 aeum that he had spent the whole day 
 in writing letters. He had written 
 thirty. "Three of them," he added, "were 
 important, and it was necessary that I should 
 write them. The rest might have been written 
 by my butler." That great intellect, which 
 had no superior, if indeed it had an equal, on 
 either the episcopal or the judicial bench, was 
 frittered away on an infinite deal of nothing, 
 and an interminable series of nobodies. Yet 
 Dr. Thirlwall had a comparatively small diocese, 
 containing a very large proportion of Dissenters. 
 It did not kill him. He lived to a green old 
 age, and died in an honoured retirement. Far 
 different was the fate of Dr. Creighton, who 
 broke down as a racehorse would break down 
 if he were put to draw a coal-truck. Sydney 
 Smith's favourite nightmare was to be preached 
 to death by wild curates. One might say 
 without flippancy that Bishop Creighton was 
 bored to death by fussy incumbents. For in 
 
 II
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 all seriousness there can be few things more 
 tragic than the spectacle of fine and rare 
 mental gifts, which might have been employed 
 in building a monument more durable than 
 brass, wasted upon trifles to which no sensible 
 and educated man would voluntarily give two 
 thoughts. Dr. Creighton was among the ablest 
 and most learned historians of the century. 
 The work which he did before he became a 
 bishop, I mean his " History of the Papacy 
 During the Reformation," will long outlast 
 the fruits of his episcopal labours, important 
 as they were. And yet it is hard to say that 
 such a man should not be a bishop. Dr. 
 Creighton had all his life a strong interest 
 and belief in the Church of England. He 
 regarded the Church not merely as a spiritual 
 body, but also as a national institution, insepar- 
 ably connected with the growth and devel- 
 opment of the English people. He believed 
 in bishops, and in their power to do good, 
 as well secular as religious. By universal con- 
 sent he ruled two dioceses with conspicuous 
 ability and success. A man must die some- 
 how, and he died nobly, a victim to duty. 
 His wonderful faculty of organisation, his 
 social influence, his tact and brilliancy in ad- 
 dressing audiences of every class, would never 
 
 12
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 have been discovered if he had remained a 
 Canon of Windsor and gone on writing books. 
 He might have become, like Dean Wellesley 
 and Dean Davidson, a bishop-maker. A book- 
 maker, even in the literary sense, he could 
 never have been. 
 
 A bishop's life ought to be anything rather 
 than trivial, and that was certainly the last thing 
 which Dr. Creighton would have desired his 
 own life to be. But he could not emancipate 
 himself from the thraldom of das Gemeine^ 
 the common, and he died, as he might him- 
 self have said, of blessing hassocks. I am not 
 an ecclesiastical reformer. I have no sugges- 
 tions to make on utilising suffragans. What 
 concerns me is the premature close of a great 
 career, and, as a corollary, the reason why 
 Dr. Creighton is not, under Providence, alive 
 now. It is simply because he would not or 
 could not confine himself to essentials, and 
 leave secondary things in the hands of secon- 
 dary persons. The only consolation is that 
 he died in the plenitude of his physical and 
 intellectual vigour, before any sign of weak- 
 ness, of decadence, or of approaching age could 
 be detected by the keenest observer. I suppose 
 every one who knew Dr. Creighton would agree 
 that his vitality was the most striking thing 
 
 3 
 
 0^
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 about him. His spare figure, his rapid walk, 
 his elastic step, were in perfect harmony with 
 the range of his interests, the quickness of his 
 apprehension, and the readiness of his replies. 
 As with many short-sighted men, his hearing was 
 particularly acute, and it was observed that he 
 never heard better than when he seemed to be 
 asleep. He was always ready to talk, and, like 
 most really good talkers, he was also a good 
 listener. He was incapable of missing the 
 point, and he could not be obscure. He was not 
 specially famous as a sayer of good things, and 
 no man's speech was' less formal. He liked 
 plunging into a conversation just as he found 
 it, and saying the first thing that came into 
 his head, which was not infrequently some 
 outrageous paradox. The correct thing to say 
 of Dr. Creighton is, I gather from what I have 
 read, that he was " too paradoxical." That is, 
 of course, a matter of taste. A paradox must 
 contain an element of truth, or it is simply 
 ridiculous. Its value consists in its being at 
 once true and contrary to received opinion. 
 " He that seeketh his life shall lose it, and 
 he that loseth his life for my sake shall find 
 it," is a paradox. But Christians regard it as 
 a truth. I do not say that Dr. Creighton*s 
 paradoxes were always serious. Sometimes 
 
 14 
 
 ;f-
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 they were, as when he said that all knowledge 
 was opposed to common sense. Most often 
 they were audacious fun : gravity agreed as 
 little with Dr. Creighton as with Sterne. The 
 peculiar carriage of the body, intended to hide 
 deficiencies of the mind, was abhorrent to him. 
 In church no one was more reverent, on public 
 occasions no one more episcopal, than he. 
 But he never assumed pontifical airs in private. 
 He had a good deal of the undergraduate 
 in him to the last. He talked illimitable 
 nonsense to children, and sometimes, it must 
 be admitted, to grown-up people, who thought 
 that the Bishop was wanting in respect for 
 their intelligence. He certainly did not under- 
 rate the number of fools in the world ; perhaps 
 he overrated it, for people are not always so 
 silly as they seem. But the Bishop's own 
 irrepressible gaiety and youth of heart were 
 accountable for most of his quips. Then he 
 wanted to stir his company up, to rouse their 
 combative instincts, to make them talk. He 
 could not bear dulness, and he was the life of 
 every society into which he came. He did 
 not spoil conversation by monopolising it, but 
 he kept it going, he never let it run dry. 
 There was hardly anything about which he 
 could not, and would not, converse. His 
 
 IS
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 memory, though more substantive than verbal, 
 was wonderfully comprehensive. He would 
 pass from classical scholarship to social gossip, 
 from mediaeval history to Italian inns, with 
 perfect ease, always avoiding shop by the way. 
 He prided himself on knowing Italy as well 
 as any Englishman, and he appeared to re- 
 member every picture in every church he had 
 seen. He never, I should think, knew what 
 it was to feel shy. He made a point of 
 getting into conversation, as the phrase is, with 
 all classes in all countries wherever he went, 
 being in the first place a good linguist, and in 
 the second place not much caring how he 
 spoke a language so long as he made himself 
 intelligible. And somehow every one wanted 
 to talk to him, his geniality was so irresistible. 
 As a rule, a man who seems always serious 
 is never serious, but merely trivial. I do not 
 think that Dr. Creighton had the slightest 
 touch of the profound and melancholy humour 
 which distinguished Swift and Carlyle, nor 
 even of the half-cynical, half-sentimental 
 humour which belonged to Thackeray. He 
 was the most cheerful of men, full of high 
 spirits, and enjoying every moment of his 
 life. But about things for which he really 
 cared, such as, to take only secular examples, 
 
 i6
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 history and local institutions, he was more 
 than serious, he was earnest and enthusiastic. 
 He would poke fun at them, but it was all 
 in the way of affection. Not long before his 
 death he became a member of the governing 
 body for the University of London. He was 
 already burdened, as the event showed, beyond 
 his strength. But he entered with the keenest 
 zest into these new duties, and was constantly 
 meditating schemes for making the university 
 serviceable to the people. Yet he would be 
 as likely as not to tell a casual acquaintance 
 that the worst thing to do with people was 
 to educate them, because it was ten to one 
 they remained ignorant, and only became con- 
 ceited. It cannot be denied that he gave 
 annoyance, and that not merely to stupid or 
 pompous people, by these fashions of speech. 
 They thought he was showing disrespect for 
 their mental powers, and perhaps they were 
 justified in thinking so. But it was not the 
 fact. The causes of the Bishop's inveterate 
 love for paradox were, I should suppose, 
 mainly two. In the first place, it was the 
 habit of Oxford common rooms in his day, 
 and few men changed less than he. In the 
 second place, it saved time and trouble. The 
 Bishop was a very busy man, who saw a great 
 
 17 B
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 many people, and he could not be always suit- 
 ing his conversation to his company. We all 
 know what Sir Robert Walpole did in similar 
 circumstances. The Bishop's was at least a 
 cleanlier shift. The most silent and sluggish 
 of mankind are roused to combative loquacity 
 when they hear their most settled convictions 
 boldly denied, and their pet platitudes turned 
 inside out, or upside down. Dr. Creighton 
 did not aim, like some great talkers, at 
 gathering round him a silent circle of admir- 
 ing listeners. He liked to make others talk, 
 and he almost always succeeded. 
 
 Dr. Creighton's taste was not perfect. No 
 man's is. He was, I think, while he extolled 
 character above intellect, a better judge of 
 intellect than of character. Free as any human 
 being has ever been from envy, hatred, malice, 
 and all uncharitableness, he was full, though 
 not so full as he seemed, of friendly con- 
 tempt. He sometimes failed to realise that 
 a man who did not understand chaff, and 
 would not play, the game with him, might 
 nevertheless have a sound and penetrating 
 judgment which made his simple words of 
 more value than many epigrams. I do not 
 mean to say that this was so in all cases. I 
 know what he has written about Sir George
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 Grey and Lord Lilford. But I do mean that 
 he habitually measured men (not women) 
 too freely by an intellectual standard. On 
 the other hand, he never imputed motives ; 
 he put the most favourable construction upon 
 conduct ; there was no bitterness in his satire. 
 He had no reverence for other people's idols, 
 and very few idols of his own. As Matthew 
 Arnold says of Socrates, adopting the language 
 of the Hebrew prophet. Dr. Creighton was 
 terribly at ease in Zion. No disrespectful 
 word about any moral or religious principle 
 ever, I am sure, fell from his lips. But he 
 would not enlarge the objects of his devo- 
 tion to suit susceptible feelings. He some- 
 times, for instance, made one consider that, 
 whatever Mr. Gladstone's political blunders 
 may have been, there were reasons why a 
 Christian bishop should speak of him with 
 respect. But Dr. Creighton was the opposite 
 of a hero-worshipper. He had an almost 
 passionate belief in liberty, and disliked, ex- 
 cept perhaps in Russia, the spectacle of men 
 blindly following a leader. Being a thorough 
 Englishman, he was, nevertheless, only too 
 delighted to have an opportunity of shocking 
 insular prejudice by pointing out the most 
 prominent defects of the British character. 
 
 19
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 But in nothing was he more English than in 
 his love of freedom. His own independence 
 of character was almost startling. In public 
 he looked the most episcopal man on the 
 bench. In private there was nothing of the 
 bishop about him except his clothes. But 
 in public, as in private, he was always Mandell 
 Creighton, more like himself, so to speak, 
 every year he lived, and not caring a halfpenny 
 stamp what any one thought of him. That 
 he liked people to think about him was 
 possible. He was intensely human. 
 
 Dr. Thompson, of Trinity, complained that 
 much of his life was occupied with " that 
 worst kind of trifling called business." Dr. 
 Creighton was, of course, overwhelmed with 
 it. Besides his episcopal functions, he was 
 an Ecclesiastical Commissioner and a trustee 
 of the British Museum. He never neglected 
 anything, except his own health and the 
 necessity of regular meals. He would sit, as 
 I have been told, at the Museum writing 
 letters incessantly, but not missing a single 
 point in the discussion, and taking part in 
 it from time to time. No other face that I 
 have seen had such an expression of concen- 
 trated energy. The Bishop seemed to have 
 in him twenty lives, and it may be said that 
 
 20
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 he died of compressing twenty into one. And 
 yet nobody could lay aside work more easily, 
 or enjoy a holiday more. Although he did 
 not get much exercise in London, he kept 
 up to the last the habit of taking long walks 
 in Italian valleys and in the North of Eng- 
 land, where he spent so many years of his 
 life. He must have walked many scores of 
 miles in the spacious garden at Fulham. 
 Those who went to see the Bishop there on 
 a Sunday afternoon always found him, if they 
 found him at all, leisurely, chatty, hospitable, 
 and apparently without a care in the world. 
 There was the family tea-table, and there 
 were the eternal cigarettes. The Bishop must 
 have paid a fortune in tobacco-duty. The 
 occasion was never improved. Anything, or 
 any person, that came up was treated with 
 perfect freedom, but at the same time with 
 kindliness, if sometimes with irony. I made 
 many attempts to discover what the Bishop's 
 political opinions were, but I never once suc- 
 ceeded. He professed for politics, I think, 
 more contempt than he really felt. For, after 
 all, politics are the making of history, and the 
 Bishop was nothing if not historical. In one 
 of his last public addresses, the lecture on 
 the Italian Renaissance at St. Paul's, he laid 
 
 21
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 down the principle that he who claims to 
 speak in the name of God should never, as 
 Savonarola did, attach himself to a party. 
 But it was not merely as Bishop of London 
 that Dr. Creighton shrank from parties, nor 
 was it only parties that he eschewed. What 
 he really disliked, one might say hated, was 
 the self-confidence without knowledge which 
 he saw, or thought he saw, in politicians. 
 
 Comparisons have been drawn, very little 
 to the purpose, between Mandell Creighton 
 and Samuel Wilberforce. Except for a love 
 of society, which after all is not very rare, 
 the two great Bishops had nothing in common. 
 Bishop Wilberforce's sincerity was, perhaps 
 wrongly, but at least widely, suspected. 
 Bishop Creighton was sincere to a fault. His 
 loathing for cant sometimes drove him into 
 the other extreme, and made him appear far 
 more cynical than he was. Dr. Wilberforce, 
 though a brilliant orator, a witty talker, and 
 full of showy accomplishments, was shallow, 
 inaccurate, and superficial. His criticism, or 
 what he meant for criticism, of Darwin ex- 
 posed him to the ridicule of all scientific men, 
 whether they were Darwinians or not. Dr. 
 Creighton had the most profound respect for 
 knowledge, and minute accuracy was character- 
 
 22
 
 Bishop Cr eight on 
 
 istic of all he wrote. Style, I think, he under- 
 valued. He seemed to regard it as concealing 
 or distorting the truth, and a more single- 
 minded worshipper of truth never lived. He 
 was quite capable of appreciating the best 
 style, and he used to say that Plato had 
 carried the art to the utmost limit of human 
 perfection. But in his *' History of the 
 Papacy," which I am quite incapable of judg- 
 ing, except from the outside, he sacrifices 
 everything to accuracy and to directness of 
 narrative. There are no purple passages in 
 the book. It is dry in the best sense, like 
 champagne. Dull it never is. There is 
 throughout it a sense of movement, the action 
 never flags, and the characters of the Popes 
 become as familiar to the reader as if they 
 were contemporaries of his own. The book 
 is wholly free from the taint of moral indig- 
 nation. Even the career of Alexander the 
 Sixth is described with scarcely an epithet, 
 and the worst of his crimes are disproved 
 by a few simple statistics. There are no 
 flings at the Scarlet Lady, from which Wilber- 
 force could not, for twenty pages, have re- 
 frained, Wilberforce's doctrinal orthodoxy 
 was unimpeachable. It endeared him to Mr. 
 Gladstone, and to others. About his devotion 
 23
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 to truth there were at least two opinions. 
 He was, however, undoubtedly a consummate 
 man of the world, despite his odd, awkward, 
 and singularly unsuccessful attempt to con- 
 vert Charles Greville ; and Dr. Creighton, 
 with all his cleverness, was hardly that, though 
 he was the most interesting and delightful 
 of companions, especially if you were alone 
 with him. He always knew what to say. 
 In the more difficult art of knowing what 
 not to say he was less proficient. He was 
 intentionally unkind to no one. But he 
 sometimes unconsciously gave pain to people 
 who thought that a bishop must mean every- 
 thing he said. 
 
 Samuel Wilberforce came into the world 
 with great advantages. His father was equally 
 and most justly respected in political, philan- 
 thropic, and evangelical circles. Mandell 
 Creighton had his own way to make from 
 the beginning. He owed nothing to any one. 
 His own intellect and his own character were 
 all that he had to work with from his birth 
 at Carlisle to his death at Fulham. This is 
 no attempt to sketch the course of his life. 
 I did not know him until he became Bishop 
 of Peterborough, and I did not see much 
 of him until he came to London. I did, 
 
 24
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 however, spend one Sunday with him at 
 Peterborough, when the only other male 
 guest, except the present Master of Emmanuel, 
 was the late Professor Sidgwick, perhaps the 
 most exact reproduction of a Greek philo- 
 sopher that our age has seen. A con- 
 versation on Purcell's "Life of Manning" 
 comes back to me in fragments as one of 
 the most amusing I ever heard. Mr. Sidg- 
 wick was the more brilliant talker of the two. 
 He had just that amount of hesitation in his 
 speech which enhanced the effect of his 
 pungent remarks ; and, though he was the 
 least pedantic of men, he never said anything 
 which could not have been taken down in 
 writing, and used in his favour afterwards. 
 The character of the Cardinal underwent a 
 searching and exhaustive analysis, a task which 
 Mr. Purcell's labours undoubtedly facilitate. 
 The Bishop had no love for the Church of 
 Rome, and Mr. Sidgwick had no prejudice 
 in favour of any Church. At last 1 found 
 myself the Cardinal's advocate, and I said, 
 rather feebly, that his asceticism must have 
 been sincere. Mr. Sidgwick's quite unexpected 
 reply may perhaps be quoted without impro- 
 priety. " He was a (pause) prudent man 
 with a (pause) bad digestion." The Bishop
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 and Mr. Sidgwick differed, I suppose (I do 
 not pretend to speak with knowledge), almost 
 as widely as men can differ upon fundamental 
 subjects. But Dr. Creighton did not care 
 two straws what a man's opinions were. He 
 liked a clever man, he loved a good man. 
 That was all he cared about, except that 
 within the restraints of Christian charity he 
 hated a bore. 
 
 One of the finest and most penetrating of 
 all Dr. Creighton's personal criticisms is to be 
 found in his account of Luther's attitude 
 towards the Peasants' War. Luther on that 
 occasion took the side of the powers that were. 
 "The man who had cast away the bonds of 
 ecclesiastical authority felt himself compelled 
 to assert the binding obligation of civil 
 authority with all the greater vehemence be- 
 cause he had been himself a rebel. No man 
 is so certain as he who draws a fine distinction 
 because it is practically necessary^'' Dr. Creighton 
 would probably have disclaimed a reference in 
 these words to any statesman living when he 
 wrote them. He would have considered that 
 to degrade the functions of history. But it is 
 impossible not to perceive that he was ex- 
 pressing his opinion of practical politics. 
 He disliked them, not, as the Marquess of 
 
 26
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 Halifax did, because they were a rough thing 
 compared with the fineness of speculative 
 thought, but because they were empirical, 
 because they did not rest upon knowledge. 
 He was incapable by nature of being a party 
 man, though, if he could have sat in the 
 House of Commons, he would have made 
 an excellent debater. The House of Lords 
 did not seem to suit him, and his clear ring- 
 ing voice was seldom heard in it. It is, no 
 doubt, a depressing audience. But Dr. Tait, 
 whose mental powers were certainly not greater 
 than Dr. Creighton's, held a leading position 
 there for twenty years. Dr. Creighton was 
 not an orator like Wilberforce, or his own 
 predecessor at Peterborough, Magee. Though 
 an interesting and stimulating, he was not in 
 the vulgar sense of the term a popular 
 preacher. He had not much admiration for 
 eloquence and not much love of popularity. 
 But on a platform, or at a public entertain- 
 ment, there were few better speakers in 
 England. Whether it were a cultivated audi- 
 ence, as at the dinners of the Royal Academy 
 and the Literary Fund, or the hall of a mid- 
 land town crowded with working men. Dr. 
 Creighton always interested and excited his 
 hearers. The Church Congress, not an easy 
 
 27
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 body to manage, never had a better chairman. 
 But the atmosphere of the Lords did not seem 
 to suit him. Certainly addressing *' sheeted 
 tombstones by torchlight " was not in his way. 
 An excellent article on Dr. Creighton in 
 the Qjuarterly Review attributes to him an 
 overmastering desire for influence. He was 
 ambitious in the noblest sense. He had the 
 *' daemonic " gift of Socrates. He enjoyed 
 the exercise of his remarkable faculty for the 
 guidance of men and the management of 
 affairs. He was also profoundly impressed 
 with the value of historic truth and the duty 
 of spreading it. But there never was a man 
 less anxious to make proselytes or converts. 
 He was far more interested in ascertaining 
 other people's opinions than in getting them 
 to adopt his own. Nor, indeed, had he always 
 a very strong opinion. He had, what is very 
 rare, a naturally impartial mind. He saw both 
 sides in their weakness and in their strength, 
 especially in their weakness. It amused him 
 to watch the wrangling of men who knew no 
 history, whether their disputes were political 
 or ecclesiastical. The first question (I don't 
 say the last) which he put to a dogma, or a 
 principle, was not whether it were true or 
 false it might be partly one, and partly the 
 
 28
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 other but how it came to be there. Turn 
 to the " History of the Papacy " for the 
 Bishop's views about confession, and you will be 
 disappointed in your object. But your search 
 will nevertheless be rewarded, for you will find 
 this precious sentence : '* Naturally, men pre- 
 ferred to confess to a wandering friar whom 
 they had never seen before and hoped never 
 to see again, rather than to their parish priest, 
 whose rebukes and admonitions might follow 
 them at times when the spirit of contrition 
 was not so strong within them." Gibbon 
 seldom wrote anything better than that, and 
 yet it is quite free from objection on religious 
 grounds. It is the mere statement of a fact, 
 and the humour is in the situation. For 
 history, even when told with Dr. Creighton's 
 strict and cold fidelity, may teach lessons for 
 itself. If confession is most popular when 
 it is most perfunctory, the popularity of the 
 practice can be no proof of its usefulness. 
 Dr. Creighton was classed by Evangelicals 
 as a High Churchman, and in some respects 
 he might be called so. He was jealous for 
 the dignity and independence of the Church, 
 so far as an established Church can be in- 
 dependent. But there was a vein of sturdy 
 English Protestantism in him which rebelled, 
 
 9
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 and always would have rebelled, against the 
 " Roman obedience." No man was more 
 thoroughly imbued with the sentiment of the 
 grand old text, " Where the spirit of the 
 Lord is, there is liberty." 
 
 Perhaps no Englishman of real learning in 
 our day, except Lord Acton, ever had his 
 knowledge more at his fingers' ends than 
 Dr. Creighton. If his memory was not quite 
 equal to Lord Acton's, it was at once capacious 
 and retentive, and his quickness could not 
 have been exceeded. He was an omnivorous 
 reader of Greek, Latin, English, French, Ger- 
 man, and Italian. He had been thoroughly 
 grounded in classical scholarship by Dr. 
 Holden at Durham. He had a singular 
 gift for extemporaneous translation, and he 
 sometimes wrote Latin verses which were quite 
 as good as the Pope's. Without German he 
 could not have written his history. His 
 Italian he refreshed every year in Italy. No 
 bishop on the bench was fonder of French 
 novels. It has been said that he did not 
 read much poetry, but that is a mistake. 
 On his last Easter holidays he read through 
 the whole of Milton's poems again in the new 
 pocket edition published by the Clarendon 
 Press. I remember his saying to me that he 
 
 30
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 found in them no proof of Milton having 
 been an Arian. His mind was not poetical, 
 nor, except in the sense of realising historic 
 development, imaginative. But he had the 
 scholar's love of literature for its own sake. 
 He had a very strong belief that the Gospels, 
 apart from their religious aspect, were models 
 of biographical writing, and he would refer 
 to the Acts of the Apostles as the perfection 
 of historical narrative. Of modern historians 
 he was no great admirer, though he was 
 trained in the school of Stubbs. Macaulay 
 sinned against his canon that history was fact, 
 and nothing but fact, which would be all very 
 well if facts spoke for themselves to people 
 in general. Unfortunately, to most of us 
 they are silent until they have been touched 
 by the hand of a master. When Dr. Creighton 
 abandoned history to be a bishop, he did not 
 give up his interest in the subject. He often 
 seemed to hanker after the comparatively quiet 
 days when he could live so much in the 
 past. Not that most men would have thought 
 them quiet. For at Embleton, where most 
 of his book was written, he worked a parish, 
 took pupils, and sat as chairman on the board 
 of guardians. 
 
 It will seem like one of his own paradoxes 
 31
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 to say that the excellence of the Bishop's 
 conversation makes the difficulty of showing 
 people who did not know him how he talked. 
 But it is so, and for this reason, among others. 
 He never harangued in private. To hold 
 forth was not in his way. He would start 
 a subject he was very good at that and 
 let any one who pleased take it up. Or he 
 would flash a rapid glance at you, and then 
 suddenly put a question. He once asked 
 me, after a long chat with an eminent con- 
 troversialist, whether I did not think that the 
 mistake David made in his haste was to say 
 " liars " instead of " fools." Chief Justice 
 Jervis's classification of mankind is not for 
 episcopal ears, so I could only reply that no 
 doubt we were all equally ignorant of history. 
 He was good enough to approve of this 
 gloss. At the same time, his interest in 
 human nature was equally keen and bene- 
 volent. He declared that the population of 
 Embleton would have furnished materials for 
 another Balzac. To Balzac he was devoted, 
 and he liked also an inferior artist, Gaboriau. 
 I believe that he would have rivalled Monsieur 
 Lecocq in the detection of an obscure crime, 
 and the skill with which he manoeuvred an 
 undesirable resident out of his parish would 
 
 32
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 have done credit to a great diplomatist. 
 There was a point in this story, too long 
 to tell, at which the individual in question 
 appeared to be triumphant. " He boasted," 
 said the Bishop, with his most Mephisto- 
 phelian smile, ** that he had done the parson." 
 It soon turned out, of course, that the parson 
 had done him. What the Bishop did not tell 
 was the long series of kind, sympathetic, and 
 unselfish acts by which he endeared himself 
 to the poor. His heart was as soft as his 
 head was hard. It was not fondness for 
 Ritualists, nor even regard for the peace of 
 the Church, but reluctance to deprive a good 
 man of his livelihood, which led him to 
 stop ecclesiastical prosecutions, " Live, and 
 let live," was his motto. He was a bad 
 hater. '* Oh, he*s a good fellow, but he doesn't 
 understand the question." With some such 
 words he would dispose of a clerical delin- 
 quent. Cruelty and presumptuous ignorance 
 did make him angry, but hardly anything 
 else did. In an age when Churchmen held 
 high offices of State he would have been 
 thoroughly at home. He would have liked 
 to be Lord Chancellor as well as a bishop, 
 at least in the days when it was possible for 
 a bishop to be anything else. But he realised 
 
 33 C
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 that those days were over. He had to decline 
 the proposal that he should write the " Life 
 of Queen Victoria " on the same scale as his 
 " Life of Queen Elizabeth." The Queen asked 
 him his reason. " If your Majesty wished me 
 to write your life," was the reply, " your 
 Majesty should not have made me a bishop." 
 Once a bishop, always a bishop, is, from one 
 point of view, a dreadful truth. There is 
 no discharge in that war, and no rest for a 
 bishop, except in the grave. Dr. Creighton 
 went so far as to say that no one who thought, 
 or had a mind, should be Bishop of London. 
 The secular qualities required were those of a 
 bank clerk. When he came to Peterborough 
 he found that the clergy had been living for 
 years in terror of their diocesan. Except with 
 a few favourites. Dr. Magee was almost as 
 remote and awful as Swift. Dr. Creighton 
 soon changed all that. He put the humblest 
 people at their ease with his good-humour, 
 his high spirits, and his total absence of re- 
 serve. If he often puzzled the clergy, he 
 never frightened them, and he played with 
 their children as he played with his own. 
 When he came to London he mixed freely 
 in various sorts of society, for none came 
 amiss to him, and he was just the same to 
 
 34
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 them all. He was the reverse of dazzled, 
 and used to complain that the average intel- 
 ligence of Londoners was so low. Though 
 it was very difficult to shock the Bishop, it 
 was very easy to bore him, and pomposity 
 of all kinds had that effect. Nor did he 
 like gush. He was fond of destroying illu- 
 sions, and proving that no popular hero's 
 character would bear examination. He did 
 not acquiesce in the glorification of the past. 
 "There is far more real religion now," he 
 said, " than there was in the so-called ages 
 of faith." What we wanted was greater re- 
 spect for knowledge. The Bishop had a good 
 deal of the Socratic irony, though he was 
 perhaps even more conscious of other people's 
 ignorance than of his own. 
 
 There was something singularly attractive 
 and also singularly Christian in the kindness 
 which underlay Dr. Creighton's superficial 
 irony and cynicism. His pecuniary gene- 
 rosity, perhaps the cheapest form of the 
 virtue, is known to have been great. His 
 hospitality was unbounded, and seemed to 
 be part of his nature. There was nothing 
 of the recluse in him. He really and 
 truly loved all sorts and conditions of men. 
 He also felt that most of them had rather 
 
 35
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 a dull time, and he was the more deter- 
 mined that they should not be dull when 
 they were with him. He and Mrs. Creighton 
 adopted the pleasant theory that Fulham was 
 a country-house, to which Londoners might 
 be asked from Saturday till Monday. To 
 his friends the Bishop was more than kind ; 
 he was sympathetic, warm-hearted, and affec- 
 tionate. And he was always the same. What- 
 ever worries he might have in his diocese he 
 did not inflict them, or the depression they 
 must have caused, upon his guests. He liked 
 to talk about something else, and what was 
 there that he could not talk about } An 
 observer of human life has left it upon record 
 that sense must be very good to be as good 
 as nonsense. That was probably the Bishop's 
 view. He certainly talked a lot of nonsense 
 to children, and he made schoolboys roar 
 with the wildness of his dog-Latin. Children 
 adored him, for he understood exactly how to 
 treat them. If he was too much inclined to 
 treat all women like children, it was not con- 
 tempt, but a sort of paternal and protective 
 tenderness. He might have said with the 
 poet, if he would have said anything so self- 
 conscious, that " He gave whate'er he had 
 to give to freedom and to youth." He did 
 
 36
 
 Bishop Creighton 
 
 not grow old, or even middle-aged, himself. 
 One always thought of him as a young man, 
 and put down his occasional freaks to the 
 exuberance of youth. '*Alas!" one thought, 
 " when he is old and grave, and Archbishop 
 of Canterbury, he will not do these things 
 any more." And now that he is gone, some 
 of the things for which strict censors blamed 
 him are not those which we miss the least. 
 If ever a man's death was premature, his was. 
 But it is vain to lament. 
 
 " His saltern accumulem donis, et fungar inani 
 Munere." 
 
 Slight as this rough sketch is, it would be 
 incomplete if I did not add one thing. The 
 Bishop had, perhaps, no great turn for dog- 
 matic theology. But he was the best practical 
 Christian I have ever known. 
 
 37
 
 George Eliot 
 
 THE first of living English critics 
 has been fitly chosen to inaugurate 
 the new series of Messrs. Mac- 
 millan's " English Men of Letters." 
 Mr. Leslie Stephen's " George Eliot " is a 
 grave, sober, and measured estimate of a great 
 Englishwoman. A clever and learned French- 
 man, who speaks English like a native, said 
 of the same publishers' " Twelve English 
 Statesmen " that they included Henry the 
 Second, who was a Frenchman ; William the 
 Third, who was a Dutchman ; and Elizabeth, 
 who was a woman. The masculine gender, 
 say the grammarians, includes the feminine, 
 and, by Lord Brougham's Act, the word 
 '* man " in an Act of Parliament includes 
 woman, unless such inclusion be repugnant to 
 the context, or where it would confer upon 
 her any sort of right. Some of the best 
 novelists are women ; and since the time of 
 Fielding, if not since the time of Defoe, it has 
 been impossible to say that a novelist as such 
 was not a person of letters. George Eliot's 
 adoption of a fictitious name may have had 
 something to do with her domestic circum- 
 
 38
 
 George Eliot 
 
 stances. It deceived many, though not 
 Dickens, who had no doubt of the author's 
 sex after reading "Scenes of Clerical Life.'* 
 The fact that most people did doubt, while 
 some were confident and wrong, seems to show 
 that Messrs. Macmillan are right ; that sex has 
 nothing to do with literature, and that, even 
 in the delineation of character, a woman may 
 take the man's point of view. Mr. Stephen, 
 by implication, denies this, and says that 
 George Eliot's men are not so real as her 
 women. ** Convincing " is, I believe, the 
 epithet which finds most favour in such cases 
 with the modern school. I must confess that, 
 to my mind, Adam Bede and Caleb Garth, 
 Arthur Donnithorne and Fred Vincy, Brooke 
 and Lydgate, Featherstone and Bulstrode, are 
 as convincing as Mrs. Poyser herself, and even 
 more convincing than Dinah Morris. It is 
 impossible for the most acute reader always 
 to determine an author's sex. Sometimes, of 
 course, there can be no doubt. Nobody ever 
 attributed ** Rob Roy " to a woman, or 
 '* Northanger Abbey " to a man. Fielding is 
 irredeemably masculine. So is Thackeray. 
 So is Dickens. But a woman might have 
 written ** Robinson Crusoe," or " Clarissa," 
 or " Far from the Madding Crowd." Miss 
 
 39
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Martineau was as masculine as Mrs. Gaskell 
 was feminine, and Miss Edgeworth was as well 
 acquainted with a fine gentleman as she was 
 with a fine lady. Miss Austen, with singular 
 self-control, abstains from an attempt to re- 
 produce the conversation of men among them- 
 selves. But very few writers in the world's 
 history have understood so well the limitations 
 of their own genius, even when they had any, 
 as Miss Austen felt rather than understood 
 the limits of hers. George Eliot had a man's 
 education, and the course of her life brought 
 her into contact with more men than women. 
 
 Mr. Stephen, in his sketch of her unevent- 
 ful life, has made the best use he could of 
 very unpromising materials. George Eliot's 
 own letters, published after her death by the 
 trustful piety of her husband, are even less 
 interesting than Jane Austen's. They are 
 ponderous, conventional, and dull. Why 
 any human being should have preserved 
 them, let alone printed them, it is difficult 
 to conceive. Yet Mr. Stephen has discovered 
 here and there a phrase worth record and 
 remembrance. Like George Sand, whom she 
 did not otherwise in any way resemble, she 
 sympathised with Louis Blanc and the Red 
 Republicans of 1848. In her disgust with 
 
 40
 
 George Eliot 
 
 the Philistinism of her own people she 
 wrote, *' I feel that society is training men 
 and women for hell." No one who has ever 
 read it can forget the description in '* The 
 Mill on the Floss " of the " Imitation " and 
 its effect on Maggie Tulliver's mind. Its 
 effect upon Marian Evans's was less intense. 
 " It makes one long to be a saint for a few 
 months," she says. Most of us would like 
 to be saints for a few months, to see whether 
 it agreed with our constitutions. There would 
 be crowds of Good Samaritans, said the witty 
 divine, if it were not for the oil and the 
 twopence. 
 
 With all her admiration for George Sand 
 and Rousseau, George Eliot never caught the 
 magical charm of their style. Her own, even 
 at its best, had a hard, metallic tone, and the 
 metal was not silver. She was not only a very 
 learned woman, conscious of her learning, and 
 a very able woman, conscious of her ability. 
 She had also very warm affections and a deep 
 feeling for the inexhaustible pathos of human 
 life. But her powers of expression seldom 
 found a simple and natural outlet, except 
 indeed (and it is a great exception) in the 
 mouths of her characters. It is difficult 
 to sympathise with Dorothea Brooke, Mrs. 
 
 41
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Casaubon, when we read that her " grand 
 woman's frame was shaken with sobs, as if 
 she had been a despairing child." George 
 Eliot had to move in the fetters of her own 
 stored and cultivated mind, which grew heavier 
 with years. Charles Dickens testified to 
 the exquisite truth and delicacy both of the 
 pathos and of the humour in " Scenes of 
 Clerical Life." When they appeared in 
 Blackwood they made, as they well deserved 
 to make, a profound impression upon 
 the educated public. Janet Dempster and 
 Milly Barton and Mr. Gilfil are as real as 
 genius could make them. "Janet's Repent- 
 ance " has the melodramatic element which 
 the other two stories are without. But they 
 are all three true bits of human nature, and 
 real efforts of the imagination. For George 
 Eliot knew no more about the clergy than 
 Trollope himself. The charming chapter of 
 that otherwise tiresome book, " Theophrastus 
 Such," called " Looking Back," which Mr. 
 Stephen strangely omits to mention, has great 
 biographical value. It tells how little Marian, 
 or Mary Ann, Evans used to drive about 
 Warwickshire with her father, whom she 
 transforms into a clergyman, though he was 
 really a land-agent. The country clergy of 
 
 42
 
 George Eliot 
 
 the Midlands in those days were for the most 
 part laymen in white ties, hunting three times 
 a week and preaching once. George Eliot 
 passed from evangelical faith to sceptical free- 
 thinking without taking the Establishment by 
 the way. But she had a true and sincere 
 sympathy with goodness of all kinds, with 
 sorrow, with suffering, and with childhood. 
 The famous, too famous, line of Terence 
 was as true of her as of Chremes in the 
 " Heautontimorumenos." '* Depend upon it," 
 she wrote to Blackwood, " depend upon it, you 
 would gain unspeakably if you would learn with 
 me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, 
 the tragedy and comedy, lying in the ex- 
 perience of a human soul that looks out 
 through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in 
 a voice of quite ordinary tones." To that 
 doctrine, if it deserves so formal a name, 
 George Eliot was always faithful, and no- 
 where has she expressed it with more eloquence 
 than in the closing sentences of " Middle- 
 march," her last great work of fiction : " That 
 things are not so ill with you and me as they 
 might have been is half owing to the number 
 who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in 
 unvisited tombs." Such are the final words 
 of what I cannot help regarding, though I 
 
 43
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 know it is an unfashionable opinion, as the 
 culminating effort of her genius. But there 
 is the other side of the picture. " We in- 
 significant people," she reminds us, " with our 
 daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of 
 many Dorotheas, some of which may present a 
 far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea 
 whose story we know." For George Eliot was 
 always didactic. She never made any pretence 
 of not having a moral. From " Scenes of 
 Clerical Life " to " Daniel Deronda " she 
 preached to the conventional masses of her 
 fellow-countrymen the gospel of self-sacrifice, 
 self-surrender, and self-restraint. Although, 
 or perhaps because, she broke away from 
 orthodox religion, and even to some extent 
 from orthodox morality, she held up a 
 standard of duty, and maintained the loftiest 
 ideals. She had not the smallest sympathy 
 with what is called sentimentalism, with easy- 
 going indulgence in the natural inclination of 
 amiable and luxurious people. " The evil 
 principle deprecated in that religion is the 
 orderly sequence by which the seed brings 
 forth a crop after its kind." Mr. Swinburne 
 classes George Eliot with the " realistic " 
 school because she allows Maggie TuUiver to 
 fall in love with Stephen Guest. I do not 
 
 44
 
 George Eliot 
 
 yieJd even to Mr. Swinburne in my loathing 
 for that ** counterjumping Adonis," though 
 I fall very far short of him in my power of 
 expressing it. But I always thought that the 
 modern realists boasted of having no morals, 
 whereas George Eliot, so say the flippant, 
 gives you " Moral, moral everywhere, and not 
 a drop to drink." I cannot admit that she is 
 ever dull, but she certainly is sometimes dry. 
 
 George Eliot's capacity for work was 
 astonishing. Not even Southey was more 
 methodical, and she did give herself time to 
 think, which he was accused of not doing. 
 " She finished * Janet's Repentance,' " as Mr. 
 Stephen tells us, *' on the 7th of October 
 1857, and began 'Adam Bede ' on the 22nd 
 of October. She completed the first volume 
 by the following March, and the second during 
 a following tour in Germany, and after return- 
 ing to England at the beginning of September 
 completed the third volume on the i6th of 
 November." Her later books are said with 
 some truth to show signs of effort and strain 
 on the writer's part. But nobody could say 
 that of '* Adam Bede." Mr. Stephen does not 
 care for the lady preacher, Dinah Morris ; and 
 Seth Bede, Adam's brother, he abhors. It is 
 one of the many charming features in this little 
 
 45
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 book that the author makes no attempt to 
 conceal his personal prejudices and predilec- 
 tions. For my part, I cannot help feeling pity 
 for Seth, and Adam, and Dinah, and Hetty, 
 and all the rest of them. They are involved 
 in a common misfortune. They are eclipsed 
 by Mrs. Poyser, whose sayings are still quoted 
 by a world too oblivious of Mrs. Poyser's 
 creator. " I have no stock of proverbs in my 
 memory," said George Eliot, " and there is not 
 one thing put into Mrs. Poyser's mouth that 
 is not fresh from my own mint." Mr. Stephen 
 regrets that Mrs. Poyser had no successors. 
 None equally good perhaps. But Mr. Macey, 
 and Dolly Winthrop, and Mrs. Cadwallader 
 are not to be despised. Some of Mrs. Poyser's 
 wit has passed into the language, like Falstaff's, 
 and is, in the hackneyed phrase, too hackneyed 
 for quotation. But Mr. Stephen has done well 
 to reproduce the less familiar contrast between 
 the old-fashioned rector Mr. Irwine and the 
 more theological Mr. Ryde, who followed him. 
 " Mr. Irwine was like a good meal o' victual, 
 you were the better for him without thinking 
 of it ; and Mr. Ryde was like a dose of physic, 
 he gripped you and worreted you, and after 
 all he left you much the same." There is 
 nothing so good as that in Swift's advice to 
 
 46
 
 George Eliot 
 
 a young clergyman, which, indeed, is rather 
 like a dose of physic than a meal. It is 
 certainly curious that George Eliot should 
 have been her own Mrs. Poyser. A critic 
 would almost certainly come to the conclusion 
 that she was faithfully copied from real life. 
 For George Eliot herself never approached 
 nearer wit than a grave and temperate irony. 
 Even that is in her books alone. In her letters 
 she is severely literal. She is perhaps the one 
 novelist, if not the one writer, who cannot be 
 humorous except by proxy. Just as Goethe, 
 having no religion of his own, could by the 
 sheer force of genius counterfeit religious 
 emotions in " Wilhelm Meister," so George 
 Eliot, on a lower level and a smaller scale, 
 could become for the moment *' one of the 
 untaught wits that help to stock a country with 
 proverbs." 
 
 With the true instinct of the true critic 
 Mr. Stephen points out in felicitous words 
 George Eliot's combination of reverence for 
 the past with hope for the future. " Her 
 affectionate recognition of the merits of the 
 old world," he says, " makes one feel how 
 much conservatism really underlay her accept- 
 ance, in the purely intellectual sphere, of 
 radical opinions." George P^liot's radicalism 
 
 47
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 was not altogether confined to the purely 
 intellectual sphere. She declared that she was 
 neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but a 
 " meliorist," and she was an advanced Liberal 
 in politics. But she had, as Mr. Stephen says, 
 a deep feeling of respect for the characters 
 of men like her father Tories of the old 
 school, devotees of law and order, upholders, 
 as the Duke of Wellington was, of government 
 as such. There is indeed a haunting beauty 
 and charm in the rural life of England seventy 
 years ago, despite the scandalous condition of 
 the criminal law and the poor law. Sometimes 
 the squire was a tyrant, sometimes the parson 
 was a toady. As a rule, they were honest 
 Christian gentlemen doing their duty as they 
 understood it, and holding themselves respon- 
 sible for the moral and material welfare of the 
 parish. 
 
 Most people will, I think, be disposed to 
 agree with Mr. Swinburne that the third part 
 of " The Mill on the Floss " is, as Dogberry 
 would say, most tolerable, and not to be en- 
 dured. The earlier parts are among George 
 Eliot's very best work, containing humour not 
 unworthy of Dickens, and sentiment as delicate, 
 if not as tenderly refined, as Mrs. Gaskell's own, 
 Tom is a brute, no doubt, and stupid as well 
 
 48
 
 George Eliot 
 
 as brutal. But Maggie's devotion to him 
 would have been less touching if he had been 
 more like Sir Charles Grandison, whom George 
 Eliot admired with her whole soul. The 
 aunts are inimitable, especially Aunt Pullet, 
 and Mr. Pullet is worthy of his wife. He 
 was oppressed, it will be remembered, by the 
 mysteries of etymology, and could not under- 
 stand why Lucy Deane was called " the bell 
 of St. Ogg's." Even a little knowledge is some- 
 times a useful thing. Mr. Stephen judiciously 
 quotes the incomparable scene in which Mrs. 
 Pullet discusses her new bonnet with her sister, 
 Mrs. Tulliver. " ' I may never wear it twice, 
 sister, who knows } ' ' Don't talk o' that, 
 sister,' answered Mrs, Tulliver, ' I hope you'll 
 have your health this summer.' ' Ah, but 
 there may come a death in the family, as there 
 did soon after I had my green satin bonnet. 
 Cousin Abbott may go, and we can't think o' 
 wearing crape less nor half a year for him.' " 
 It is impossible not to be reminded of Susannah 
 and the death of Bobby. " ' My young master 
 in London is dead,' said Obadiah. A green 
 satin nightgown of my mother's, which had 
 been twice scoured, was the first idea which 
 Obadiah's exclamation brought into Susannah's 
 head. Well may Mr. Locke write a chapter 
 
 49 D
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 upon the imperfections of words. ' Then,' 
 quoth Susannah, ' we must all go into mourn- 
 ing.' But note a second time the word 
 mourning, notwithstanding Susannah made use 
 of it herself, failed also in doing its office ; 
 it excited not one single idea tinged either 
 with grey or black all was green. The green 
 satin nightgown hung there still." Then the 
 whole of Mrs. Shandy's wardrobe passes in 
 procession through Susannah's brain. For how 
 can her mistress wear colours any more ? There 
 is a cynicism in Sterne from which George Eliot 
 was free. But his humour goes deeper than 
 hers. It goes to the roots of things. Locke 
 would have stared and gasped at the vagaries 
 of his too faithful disciple. 
 
 To Mr. Stephen it seems that Guest was 
 " another instance of her incapacity for por- 
 traying the opposite sex." As I have said 
 before, I do not believe in this alleged in- 
 capacity, and I wish I could think that there 
 were no Stephen Guests. Whether Maggie 
 would have fallen in love with him is another 
 question. He was the very last person she 
 ought to have fallen in love with, and that, 
 according to Sheridan, is an excellent reason. 
 Almost any man would say beforehand that 
 Anna Karenine could not really care for a 
 
 5
 
 George Eliot 
 
 mere animal like Wronsky. But Tolstoi 
 forces conviction upon the mind, and George 
 Eliot does not. The episode is strained and 
 unnatural, although she herself says that it is 
 an essential part of the book, and that, if she 
 is wrong, then she had better not have written 
 the book at all. "The affair gains upon us," 
 as Mr. Stephen truly says, " because it is not 
 a development of her previous aspirations, but 
 suddenly throws a fresh and unpleasant light 
 upon her character." To Anna, Wronsky 
 was at least the antithesis of a husband she 
 disliked and despised. Maggie succumbs to 
 a temptation which ought to have been no 
 temptation at all. George Sand, in whose 
 stories of French country life Mr. Stephen 
 finds the nearest parallel to "Silas Marner," 
 would never, with all her occasional wildness, 
 have committed such a mistake as that. Her 
 taste was better than her morality. George 
 Flliot's morality was better than her taste. A 
 comparison between the two authors could 
 only be a contrast. George Sand, as Mr. 
 Stephen puts it, " poured forth novels with 
 amazing spontaneity and felicity," while " each 
 of George Eliot's novels was the production 
 of a kind of spiritual agony." George Sand 
 seems to have been born with a style. George 
 
 5*
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Eliot acquired a command of language and a 
 large vocabulary, by the process of translating 
 Strauss and Feuerbach into English. But 
 lightness and ease she never attained. Per- 
 haps, if they are not innate, they are unattain- 
 able. It is impossible to deny that George 
 Eliot wrote good English. She was apt to 
 write it as a good classical scholar writes Latin 
 prose. 
 
 Nothing can be better, or more lifelike, 
 than Mr. Stephen's account of the formidable 
 receptions held by George Eliot in the sixties 
 at the Priory, Regent's Park. As he justly 
 observes of all such ceremonies, " the shy- 
 ness generated by the desire to prove that 
 your homage is genuine, and that you are so 
 brilliant a person that it is also worth having, 
 gives one of those painful sensations which 
 is not least among the minor miseries of life." 
 Perhaps it is not absolutely necessary to be 
 quite so self-conscious. But George Eliot 
 allowed herself to be enthroned as a sibyl 
 and approached by humble admirers in a 
 reverential attitude. It may have been very 
 good for them. It was certainly very bad for 
 her. She was weighed down with a sense of 
 responsibility for the message which she must 
 deliver to mankind. It became essential that 
 
 52
 
 George Eliot 
 
 she should write poetry, and she wrote " The 
 Spanish Gypsy." There are some noble lines 
 in '* The Spanish Gypsy," as, for instance : 
 
 " The saints were cowards who stood by to see 
 Christ crucified : they should have flung themselves 
 Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain 
 The grandest death, to die in vain." 
 
 That is a paradox of course. But I cannot 
 agree with Mr. Stephen in regarding it as 
 mere nonsense. The grandeur is the com- 
 plete sacrifice of self, and that is increased 
 by the absence of any return or reward. The 
 fatal objection to *' The Spanish Gypsy," and 
 to ail George Eliot's poems, is that, save for 
 a few lines here and there, they might as 
 well, or better, have been written in prose. 
 Verse was to her a laborious exercise. She 
 did not publish any till she was forty-four. 
 It may safely be said that good poetry is only 
 written by those to whom verse is the most 
 natural vehicle for their thoughts. '* I lisped 
 in numbers, for the numbers came," said Pope, 
 and Horace said much the same thing before 
 him. Forty-four is an age for ceasing to write 
 poetry, not for beginning. But George Eliot 
 is put by Mr. Stephen in good company. He 
 is a master of the art known as damning with 
 
 53
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 faint praise. " If," he writes, " ' The Excur- 
 sion ' is undeniably dull, it is still a work 
 which, in spite of all critical condemnations, 
 has profoundly impressed the spiritual develop- 
 ment of many eminent persons." 
 
 " Glory beyond all glory ever seen 
 By waking sense, or by the dreaming soul. 
 The appearance, instantaneously disclosed. 
 Was of a mighty city, boldly say 
 A wilderness of building, sinking far 
 And self-withdrawn into a boundless depth 
 Far sinking into splendour without end. 
 Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold. 
 With alabaster domes, and silver spires, 
 And blazing terrace upon terrace high 
 Uplifted ; here serene pavilions bright 
 In avenues disposed ; there towers begirt 
 With battlements that on their restless points 
 Bore stars illumination of all gems." 
 
 Undeniably dull, deserving critical condem- 
 nation, but conducive to the spiritual develop- 
 ment of eminent persons ^ Of course Mr. 
 Stephen did not mean that his words should 
 be applied to the passages of ideal splendour 
 in which " The Excursion " abounds. He 
 meant that the poem was dull as a whole, 
 and cast, as it is, in a form which has pre- 
 vented it from becoming as popular as " The 
 Lady of the Lake " or the " Idylls of the 
 King." No critic has written of Wordsworth 
 
 54
 
 George Eliot 
 
 with more appreciative enthusiasm than the 
 author of " Hours in a Library." It is not 
 from him that we expect a repetition of Jeffrey's 
 too famous verdict. If there were an ochlocracy 
 in literature, the multitude might not disagree 
 with Jeffrey. But from Mr. Stephen one looks 
 for better things. He, if any man, is qualified 
 to show that ** The Excursion " stands in the 
 front rank, the small but splendid rank, of 
 philosophical poems ; that it must be read as 
 a whole, and that only those who read it as 
 a whole can fully appreciate the magnificence 
 of the " purple passages " which even Jeffrey 
 could admire. 
 
 One of those true readers was George Eliot, 
 whose early books, especially "Silas Marner," 
 abound in Wordsworthian touches. " Silas 
 Marner," and "Adam Bede," and "Scenes of 
 Clerical Life," and " The Mill on the PMoss " 
 need no vindication. If they are not so much 
 read as " Guy Mannering," or " David Copper- 
 field," or " Vanity Fair," their permanent place 
 in English literature is fixed as securely as 
 theirs. Of " Romola " and " Middlcmarch " 
 as much cannot, I suppose, be said, while 
 " Felix Holt " and " Daniel Deronda " are 
 almost forgotten. To the merits, the un- 
 doubted merits, of Felix the fanatic, and 
 
 55
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Daniel the prig, Mr. Stephen does ample 
 justice. Upon *' Romola," the historical 
 novel, and " Middlemarch," the novel of 
 manners, he is, I cannot help thinking, unduly 
 severe. If " Romola " be compared with the 
 masterpieces of Sir Walter Scott in the same 
 line, with " Waverley," or "Old Mortality," 
 or '* The Fortunes of Nigel," it appears cold 
 and tame. As an historical novelist Scott has 
 neither equal nor second. Even the brilliancy 
 and the beauty of " Esmond," that strongest 
 of all literary imitations, are as moonlight unto 
 sunlight and as water unto wine. "Romola" 
 is full of faults. The learning is too obtrusive. 
 There is too much and too obvious an effort 
 at minute historical accuracy, which is the 
 mint and anise and cummin of every historical 
 romance. Romola herself, though a portrait 
 lovingly drawn, is hardly a creation of flesh 
 and blood. But, in spite of Mr, Stephen, I 
 respectfully maintain that the figure of Savona- 
 rola stands out in almost startling reality, and 
 that Tito Melema is absolutely true to life. 
 It may be that, as Mr. Stephen says, he is half 
 a woman. He is not the only man with that 
 moiety in his composition. He is, so far as 
 a foreigner can judge, intensely Italian, and 
 deserves a place in the " Purgatory " of Dante 
 
 56
 
 George Eliot 
 
 When we have reached the end of the book, 
 and can survey his career as a whole, we are 
 apt to pronounce him incredibly base. But 
 for each separate action of Tito's there is 
 always some plausible excuse, and he cannot 
 be convicted of any crime unexplainable by 
 weakness of character or by coldness of heart. 
 Bishop Creighton, in one of those penetrating 
 and fascinating lectures which no one else could 
 give, warned his hearers not to overestimate 
 the importance of Savonarola. An undue 
 regard for the value of history is not perhaps 
 the besetting sin of the present generation. 
 Dr. Creighton was endowed with a double 
 portion of the iconoclastic spirit, which in 
 him was half stimulated and half checked by 
 a passionate love of historic truth. The man 
 in the street is not likely to injure himself or 
 others by thinking too much about Savonarola. 
 George Eliot does not conceal the frailties of 
 the Florentine monk. He was ambitious ; he 
 meddled with matters too hard for him ; he 
 was a better Christian than Florentine. He 
 had not the wisdom of Erasmus, nor the force 
 of Luther; but when he said that he would 
 not "obey the devil" in the person of Alex- 
 ander the Sixth he did more for the honour of 
 Christendom than the worst of the Popes had 
 
 57
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 done for its discredit. " If we can put aside 
 the historical paraphernalia," Mr. Stephen 
 tells us, " forget the dates and the historical 
 Savonarola and Machiavelli, there remains a 
 singularly powerful representation of an inter- 
 esting spiritual history ; " in short, the story of 
 Romola herself. The private taste or caprice 
 of the individual reader may indulge itself in 
 the amusement of treating books after this 
 arbitrary fashion. But George EHot herself 
 always insisted that " Romola " must be taken 
 or left as it was, and this is surely a choice 
 she was entitled to make. " Romola " is 
 not a smooth tale, chiefly of love. It is a 
 serious attempt to depict Florentine life four 
 hundred years ago, and by its success or 
 failure in achieving that object it must stand 
 or fall. 
 
 Five-and-twenty years ago, when George 
 Eliot was still alive, Mr. Swinburne published 
 an exuberantly eloquent and passionately en- 
 thusiastic eulogy of Charlotte Bronte. Not 
 content with praising his idol, whom indeed 
 it would be difficult to overpraise, Mr. Swin- 
 burne bestowed some rather stern, though not 
 unfounded, censure upon the novelist whom 
 he chose to take as her rival. He had been 
 moved to this entertaining and thoroughly 
 
 58
 
 George Eliot 
 
 characteristic essay partly by Sir Wemyss 
 Reid's excellent monograph, and partly by a 
 rather stupid remark in The Spectator not 
 worth reproducing at this distance of time. 
 Dipping into the future, he predicted that 
 Charlotte Bronte would be read by a discern- 
 ing public with enjoyment and delight when 
 '* Daniel Deronda " had gone the way of all 
 waxwork, when Miss Broughton no longer 
 came up as a flower, and Mrs. Oliphant 
 had been cut down like the grass. Miss 
 Broughton still flourishes like the bay-tree, 
 and Mrs. Oliphant's death was mourned by 
 myriads of readers. But George Eliot is no 
 more to be judged by "Daniel Deronda" 
 than Charlotte Bronte is to be judged by 
 "The Professor." Charlotte Bronte was one 
 of those whom the gods love. She died 
 young, which, as Miss Austen says, is an ex- 
 cellent clearer of ill fame. One may agree 
 with Mr. Swinburne in thinking that she 
 had more natural genius than the author of 
 " Middlemarch," and yet think " Middle- 
 march " a very great book. Miss Bronte's 
 style at its best is scarcely to be surpassed in 
 the English prose of the nineteenth century. 
 There are passages, for instance, in " Villette " 
 to which the word " inspiration " may without 
 
 59
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 pedantry be applied. George Eliot's style, 
 though sometimes beautiful with a grave and 
 dignified beauty, never rises above a certain 
 level. She never really lets herself go. Most 
 people would probably agree with Mr, Stephen's 
 coldly judicious estimate of " Middlemarch." 
 He seems to have at the back of his mind a 
 conviction that books ought not to be written 
 at all, but that, as they are, one must try not 
 to exaggerate their importance, and yet to 
 say what one can for them. He can say for 
 " Middlemarch " that " it is clearly a work 
 of extraordinary power, full of subtle and 
 accurate observation ; and gives, if a melan- 
 choly, yet an undeniably truthful portraiture 
 of the impression made by the society of the 
 time upon one of the keenest observers, though 
 upon an observer looking upon the world from 
 a certain distance, and rather too much im- 
 pressed by the importance of philosophers and 
 theorists." This view is not quite consistent 
 with the opinion, also held by Mr. Stephen, 
 that the moral of " Middlemarch " is to do 
 your work well and not to bother about ideals. 
 But, consistent or inconsistent, if it be correct, 
 there seems to be no particular reason why 
 anybody should ever read " Middlemarch " 
 again. 
 
 60
 
 George Eliot 
 
 I must confess, though the confession may 
 invalidate my judgment, that I cannot look at 
 " Middlemarch " in the light of cold reason 
 at all. I remember too well the hungry, 
 boyish appetite with which I devoured the 
 green paper volumes in which it successively 
 appeared. Celia's dislike of hearing Mr, 
 Casaubon eat his soup, and her wonder 
 whether Locke had a mole on his forehead, 
 were, I think, to be quite candid, a welcome 
 relief after the faultless Dorothea's ideal aspira- 
 tions. But Dorothea's unhappy marriage, and 
 the misfortune of Lydgate coming too late, 
 and the irresponsible Ladislaw sprawling on 
 Rosamond's hearthrug, and Mr, Casaubon's 
 pathetic hunt after the key to all mythologies, 
 and Mr. Brooke's universal sciolism, which 
 never carried him too far, and Mr. Borthrop 
 Trumbull's pomposity, and Mrs. Cadwallader's 
 wit, were all delightful, as to me they are 
 delightful still. And what a wonderful 
 character is Caleb Garth ! Mr. Stephen calls 
 him a " pale duplicate " of Adam Bede. To 
 me he seems an entirely fresh creation, and 
 in many ways Adam's superior. He is the 
 type of the strong, silent, capable man, who 
 can act but not talk, the perfection of British 
 energy and modesty, resembling that far older 
 
 6i
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 class concerning whom the son of Sirach says 
 that they are not found where parables are 
 spoken, but they maintain the state of the 
 world, and all their desire is in the work of 
 their craft. In absolute contrast to him stands 
 Mr. Brooke, who can talk but not act ; " such 
 a leaky fool," as Lydgate says, always ready 
 to take up his parable at a moment's notice 
 on any conceivable subject, with the genial 
 preface, "I went into that at one time, you 
 know." " Wordsworth now, I knew Words- 
 worth." "Virgil?" But Mr. Brooke reflected 
 just in time that with the Laureate of Augustus 
 he could not claim acquaintance. He did not 
 shine at the election meeting " with a glass of 
 sherry hurrying like smoke through his ideas." 
 On a private occasion he was never wanting ; 
 with the small change of conversation he was 
 amply provided, and he had a subtly mysterious 
 instinct for not being a bore. Bulstrode, the 
 sanctimonious and fraudulent banker, is more 
 conventional. Yet, as we are reminded, he was 
 not one of those coarse hypocrites who con- 
 sciously affect beliefs and emotions for the 
 sake of gulling the world. He believed in 
 himself. He had his point of view. The 
 sixth commandment in Clough's " Latest 
 Decalogue " exactly describes the extent to 
 62
 
 George Eliot 
 
 which he would go in contravening the 
 moral law 
 
 " Thou shalt not kill, but need'st not strive 
 Officiously to keep alive." 
 
 His dull wife, who became heroic when 
 her husband was in the dust, is a beautiful 
 example of the way in which George Eliot 
 could ennoble the sordid and the common- 
 place. Old Featherstone the miser is not 
 a pleasant picture, but he is marvellously 
 vivid, with his almost pathetic inability to 
 go to sleep in church. His conclusion from 
 long attendance upon divine worship was the 
 very mundane one that God Almighty stuck 
 to the land, making folks rich with corn and 
 cattle. He was an ignorant and graceless old 
 sinner, but as real as Sir Peter Crawley, and 
 less disgusting. The courtship of Fred Vincy 
 and Mary Garth is delightful in its simplicity, 
 tempered by humour. Mr. Farebrother, 
 though not quite such an attractive clergy- 
 man as Mr. Gilfil or Mr. Irwine, is admirable 
 in his geniality, his independence, and his 
 thirst for knowledge. Dorothea and Mr. 
 Casaubon are comparative failures. They 
 are supposed to have nothing in common, 
 but they have the common element of 
 
 63
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 stupidity. "No man is the wiser for his 
 learning," said one of the most learned men 
 in a learned age. But even Mr. Casaubon's 
 learning is sham, and he could not have 
 imposed upon a really intellectual girl. As 
 for Dorothea, she might have been a good 
 listener to a clever husband, but her own 
 remarks are vapid in the extreme. " Middle- 
 march " contains an inordinately large number 
 of characters, and yet every one of them is 
 distinct, and most of them the reader feels 
 that he must have personally known. Mr. 
 Stephen desiderates " a closer contact with 
 the world of realities." Unhappy marriages 
 are real enough, and there are two in 
 " Middlemarch." He would also have " less 
 preoccupation with certain speculative doc- 
 trines." The chief speculators in " Middle- 
 march " are Mr. Casaubon and Mr. Brooke. 
 Both are held up to ridicule and contempt. 
 Lydgate's researches are purely biological, and 
 eminently suitable to his profession. If 
 " Middlemarch " be not read, the world, even 
 the world of realities, is the loser. 
 
 Like all sound judges of good literature, 
 George Eliot was a warm admirer of Henry 
 Fielding. She envied him the leisure, the 
 days of slow-ticking clocks, when he wrote his 
 
 64
 
 George Eliot 
 
 introductory chapters. But Fielding was no 
 dawdler. He died before he was fifty, leaving 
 behind him four novels of the highest order, 
 besides plays which are no longer read. George 
 Eliot lived to be sixty, and survived the fresh- 
 ness of her imagination, though not the vigour 
 of her intellect. Daniel Deronda's proper place 
 is, as Mr. Swinburne says, over the rag-shop 
 door. He is a pale reflexion of the brilliant 
 and fascinating man with whom Mr. Stephen 
 compares him. But to my mind there is all 
 the difference in the world between " Daniel 
 Deronda" and " Middlemarch." "Middle- 
 march " is George Eliot's climax, and those 
 who depreciate it are really depreciating the 
 author as well as the book. " Middlemarch " 
 is her " Vanity Fair," her " David Copperfield," 
 her " Heart of Mid lothian." If you do not like 
 the " Heart of Midlothian," you do not like 
 Scott. Jf you do not like " David Copperfield," 
 you do not like Dickens. If you do not like 
 " Vanity Fair," you do not like Thackeray. 
 If you do not like " Middlemarch," you do 
 not like George Eliot. " Adam Bede " may 
 be more amusing, "The Mill on the Floss" 
 may be more pathetic, "Silas Marner" may be 
 more poetical. But "Middlemarch" is George 
 Eliot herself, with her large, grave, earnest, 
 
 65 s
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 tolerant view of human nature and human life. 
 It is pervaded by the melancholy of a reverent, 
 regretful scepticism which surrenders with re- 
 luctance a store of cherished beliefs. It is 
 impressed with the value of a scientific educa- 
 tion and the futility of mere antiquarianism. 
 It brings out more than any ostensibly political 
 novel that I know the rooted and ingrained 
 conservatism of the English character. It ex- 
 poses, or endeavours to expose, the inadequacy 
 of political reforms, being in that respect a 
 completion of "Felix Holt." But these are 
 its superficial aspects, like Mr. Partridge'sj con- 
 tempt for Garrick, or the French proclivities 
 of Squire Western. The types which it is the 
 fashion nowadays to call * human documents ' 
 abound in " Middlemarch." The growth of 
 an intellectual passion in Lydgate from the 
 day when he discovered that the valves of his 
 heart were folding doors is not really disturbed 
 by his passing fancy for the woman he marries. 
 Yet no other English novelist has drawn with 
 more consummate skill the mastery which may 
 be achieved by the weak over the strong if 
 the strong be of Samson's sex and the weak of 
 Delilah's. " Drop heart's blood where life's 
 wheels grate dry," says Browning, in that won- 
 derful poem which compresses a novel of three 
 
 66
 
 George Eliot 
 
 volumes into a score of stanzas. Dorothea 
 Brooke does that, and perhaps deserves no 
 pity for doing it, inasmuch as Mr. Casaubon is 
 neither a Milton nor a Locke, nor even, as 
 some surmised, a Mark Pattison. But her 
 illusion and her disillusionment are portrayed 
 with the sure touch of a master without the 
 exaggeration which provokes incredulity. Mr. 
 Brooke is no doubt a caricature. Yet he only 
 says in plain English, and in a crude form, 
 what many people say in an indirect and round- 
 about manner. That human reason or is it 
 logic } will carry you too far, over the hedge 
 in fact, if you don't pull up, has formed the 
 staple of many speeches and of more conversa- 
 tion. I met Mr. Brooke myself once. It was 
 before " Middlemarch " appeared, at the time 
 of the match-tax, and he undertook to explain, 
 for the benefit of the ladies present, the mean- 
 ing of Mr. Lowe's celebrated motto, ex luce 
 lucellum. " Ex luce^ from light," he said ; 
 '' lucellum, a little light." We all felt what a 
 witty man Mr. Lowe was, and how valuable 
 was a classical education. Celia and Sir James 
 Chetham and Fred Vincy are as natural studies 
 in flesh and blood as the infinitely varied gallery 
 of English fiction contains. Of Bulstrode I 
 have already spoken. He and his relations 
 
 67
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 with Raffles are the one touch of melodrama 
 
 in the book, unless old Featherstone may 
 
 be considered melodramatic when he throws 
 
 his stick at Mary Garth. But the state of 
 
 Bulstrode's own mind, the arguments by which 
 
 he half convinces himself of his own innocence, 
 
 and quite persuades himself that other people 
 
 are worse, would be intolerable if the art were 
 
 a shade less perfect. " When immortal Bunyan 
 
 makes his picture of the persecuting passions 
 
 bringing in their verdict of Guilty, who pities 
 
 Faithful ^ That is a rare and blessed lot 
 
 which some greatest men have not attained, to 
 
 know ourselves guiltless before a condemning 
 
 crowd to be sure that what we are denounced 
 
 for is solely the good in us. The pitiable lot 
 
 is that of the man who could not call himself 
 
 a martyr even though he were to persuade 
 
 himself that the men who stoned him were but 
 
 ugly passions incarnate who knows that he is 
 
 stoned, not for professing the right, but for 
 
 not being the man he professed to be." If it is 
 
 superfluous to pity Faithful, it is difficult to 
 
 pity Bulstrode. But George Eliot succeeds, as 
 
 perhaps no one else could have succeeded, in 
 
 conveying by suggestion, not by assertion, that 
 
 the contrast between the banker's religion and 
 
 his frauds was not really greater than the gulf 
 
 68
 
 George Eliot 
 
 which separates the ordinary practices of society 
 from its professed and conventional creed. 
 
 Fielding had a richer, racier humour than 
 George Eliot. He had mixed more with all 
 sorts and conditions of men. He wrote an 
 incomparably better style. But since " Tom 
 Jones," " that faithful picture of life and 
 manners," there has been no English novel 
 painted, so to speak, on larger canvas with a 
 broader brush than " Middlemarch." George 
 Eliot might have said with Juvenal : 
 
 " Quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, 
 Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli." 
 
 To her all classes were alike. Middlemarch is 
 no more than a country town, and Lydgate 
 no more than a country doctor. It was the 
 human nature in people, not their social posi- 
 tion, for which she cared. Her displays of 
 learning were not always happy. Cicero was 
 not, as she supposed when she wrote "Romola," 
 in the habit of ending his sentences with the 
 words esse videtur. She could no more have 
 described the Homeric battle in which Molly 
 Seagrim suffers so severely than she could 
 have written " Hamlet." She lives not by her 
 learning but by her sympathy, not by her 
 science but by her imagination, not by her 
 
 69
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 positivism but by her humour. Her allusions 
 to Aristotle, her digressions on Bichat, have 
 done her more harm than good. They come 
 from George Henry Lewes, who wrote a 
 " History of Philosophy " to prove that there 
 was no such thing, and described the phy- 
 siology of common life in such an uncommon 
 way that it ceased to be recognisable by phy- 
 siologists. Mr. Stephen complains that the 
 law of " Felix Holt," for which Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison was responsible, is too good. But it 
 is not too good to be true, and a " base-fee " 
 is not a very recondite branch of jurisprudence. 
 We are all of us interested in law, for we 
 never know when we may suffer from it. 
 Clarissa Harlowe suffered from the want of 
 it, and none of Richardson's contemporaries 
 seemed to feel the strangeness of the com- 
 plete licence enjoyed by Lovelace a hundred 
 years after the Habeas Corpus Act. There is 
 always something uncivilised in pure romance. 
 " Clarissa " and " Middlemarch " are, I fear, 
 almost equally unfashionable now. To re- 
 suscitate " Clarissa," a work of sheer genius, 
 if ever there was one, seems to be beyond the 
 spells of even a literary magician like Mr. 
 Leslie Stephen. But I cannot help thinking 
 that his delightful book will send many readers 
 
 70
 
 George Eliot 
 
 back to the author of *' Middlemarch," and in 
 the long run to *' Middlemarch " itself. I 
 plead guilty to being an enthusiast, and enthu- 
 siasm often defeats its own object by exag- 
 geration, Mr. Stephen is a calm, judicious, 
 and impartial critic, whose praise is all the 
 more valuable for being economically bestowed. 
 It may be said, of course, that good wine needs 
 no bush, and that if George Eliot's own merits 
 do not revive her reputation nothing else can. 
 That is plausible, but it is not quite true. If 
 ever a novelist deserved immortality, it was 
 Jane Austen. Yet it is an undoubted fact 
 that Macaulay's posthumous testimony to her 
 inimitable excellence, published in his bio- 
 graphy, rai up the sale of her books at once. 
 That was enthusiasm, no doubt, but then it 
 was Macaalay's. Mr, Stephen attributes to 
 George Eliot " a singularly wide and reflective 
 intellect, a union of keen sensibility with a 
 thoroughly tolerant spirit, a desire to appre- 
 ciate all tie good hidden under the com- 
 monplace and narrow, a lively sympathy with 
 all the nohler aspirations, a vivid insight into 
 the perplecities and delusions which beset 
 even the strongest minds, a brilliant power of 
 wit, at once playful and pleasant, and, if we 
 must add, i rather melancholy view of life in 
 71
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 general, a melancholy which is not nursed for 
 purposes of display, but forced upon a fine 
 understanding by the view of a state of things 
 which, we must admit, does not altogether 
 lend itself to a cheerful optimism." No one 
 can say that this is unqualified praise. Every 
 one must admit that it is very high praise 
 indeed. Mr. Stephen knows well, for he has 
 quoted in his "Life of Fawcett " the noble 
 lines 
 
 " There is a soul of goodness in things evil, 
 Would men observingly distil it out." 
 
 George Eliot might have taken them for her 
 motto, and she might have shared them with 
 Count Tolstoi. There is much ir. " Resur- 
 rection" which recalls George Eliot. That 
 wonderful and beautiful book is bolder than a 
 woman, or at least an Englishwoman, could 
 well venture to be. It sets at nought all in- 
 stitutions and conventions. It is 3uilt upon 
 the roots of things and the religion of Christ. 
 But in its breadth and its humanity, in the 
 depth of its feeling, in the vividiess of its 
 satire, and in the width of its charity, it re- 
 sembles George Eliot at her best, the George 
 Eliot of " Middlemarch." After all, the 
 proper study of mankind is what Pope said it 
 
 72
 
 George Eliot 
 
 was. As Lady Mary Wortley put it, the only 
 two sorts of people are men and women. 
 Circumstances are no more than clothes, and 
 have even less efficacy of concealment. The 
 true artist, be he painter or writer, divinely 
 through all hindrance finds the man. Because 
 George Eliot did this, as Tolstoi does it, her 
 work is sure to be permanent, and the eclipse 
 of her popularity must pass away. 
 
 73
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 THE vote of the Oxford Congrega- 
 tion retaining Greek as a com- 
 pulsory subject for a pass degree 
 is not likely to be permanent. 
 The majority was not large, and it is seldom 
 that great universities adopt serious changes in 
 a hurry. But modern Oxford is full of the 
 intellectual restlessness which mental vigour 
 begets, and is more liable than it ever was 
 before to the pressure of the outer world. 
 Now the outer world are only too apt to 
 agree with the opinion of Bismarck, recorded 
 by Busch, that Russian is quite as difficult as 
 Greek, and much more useful. The question 
 might well be left to practical educationalists, 
 as instructors of youth are now called, if only 
 they were unanimous. But when we find the 
 Headmaster of Eton and the Headmaster of 
 Marlborough taking diametrically opposite 
 views, an ordinary citizen who has conju- 
 gated the verb " to teach " only in its passive 
 mood is emboldened to express his views. I 
 venture, therefore, to say that I do not believe 
 the study of Greek would suffer if it were 
 made voluntary. When Bishop Thirlwall was 
 
 74
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 told that at Cambridge, of which he was so 
 illustrious an ornament, the choice lay between 
 compulsory religion and no religion at all, he 
 replied : *' The distinction is too subtle for 
 my mental grasp." It is, no doubt, true that 
 Greek has been well and effectively taught to 
 unwilling pupils. But it may also be true 
 that the amount of Greek acquired by a pass- 
 man at Oxford, or a passman at Cambridge, 
 is not worth the time bestowed upon the 
 acquisition. On the other hand, the removal 
 of compulsion would not leave Greek to stand 
 upon its own merits and the disinterested 
 enthusiasm of heaven-born students. It would 
 still lead to posts of honour and emolument 
 even in this world. There would still be 
 classical scholarships and classical fellowships, 
 and similar incentives to those who had not 
 the sacred thirst of Browning's Grammarian. 
 Latin, like French, is a necessity. Greek, 
 like German, is a luxury. The late Lord 
 Coleridge used to say that if mankind were 
 sharply divided into an educated and an un- 
 educated class, he supposed he should be in 
 the educated one. He was an accomplished 
 scholar in the old-fashioned sense of the word. 
 Total ignorance of French, or of Latin, is 
 hardly compatible with education as now un- 
 
 75
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 derstood. They belong to the common know- 
 ledge of cultivated persons in all civilised 
 communities. Almost every word in the last 
 sentence is Latin in its origin. Of course, a 
 eulogy of the electric telegraph is as Greek, 
 good or bad, as a prophylactic against dys- 
 pepsia, a diatribe against anarchy, as the hypo- 
 thesis of amnesty,' as a political panacea, the 
 thesis that philosophic despotism is Utopian, 
 the hydrostatic paradox, the polygamous pro- 
 phet. But Latin words are a natural element 
 in even vernacular English, and Greek words, 
 though acclimatised, are intruders. Grote's 
 endeavour to appropriate them was unsuc- 
 cessful. As Macaulay said before the days 
 of Newnham and Girton, if a young lady 
 were to read that Alcibiades won the favour 
 of the Athenian people by the novelty of his 
 theories and the expensiveness of his liturgies, 
 she would get a very inaccurate idea of Greek 
 history. Nowadays she would, of course, 
 know that a theory in this connection was 
 an embassy, and a liturgy a public office. A 
 knowledge of Latin is essential for every 
 lawyer, for every doctor, for every man of 
 letters, of science, or of affairs. Latin has 
 been, since the days of the Roman Republic, 
 a sort of universal language. It never entirely 
 
 76
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 died out, even in the dark ages. Greek for 
 several centuries absolutely disappeared from 
 the world. Dante could not read Aristotle, 
 "the master of them that know," in the 
 original tongue. Petrarch knew nothing and 
 could know nothing of Theocritus. Erasmus 
 in the sixteenth century was denounced as a 
 heretic for editing the New Testament in the 
 language in which almost the whole of it 
 was composed. Omne ignotum pro h^retico. 
 Latin was always orthodox because it never 
 had to be rediscovered. 
 
 The Renaissance, a beautiful name for a 
 beautiful thing, not harsh and pedantic like 
 Renascence, was the revival or new birth of 
 learning which succeeded the obscurity of the 
 Middle Ages, when ignorant armies clashed by 
 night. Perhaps the best account ever given of 
 that wonderful movement which has never died 
 out, because it permanently reconnected the 
 ancient with the modern world, is Sir Richard 
 Jebb's chapter in the first volume of the *' Cam- 
 bridge Modern History." The ease, grace, 
 and purity of Sir Richard's style are not more 
 excellent, though they may be more attractive, 
 than the masterly condensation and artistic 
 proportion of the narrative. It is a fortunate 
 accident that this exhaustive essay should have 
 
 77
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 appeared just when the place of Greek in 
 education had come within the range of 
 practical debate. The Renaissance exhibited 
 Greek once for all as the fount and origin 
 of Western culture, the " force and potency," 
 to adopt Tyndall's words, of every form of 
 intellectual life. Latin, on the other hand, 
 occupied then, as it occupies now, a different 
 position. The elegant trifles in which such 
 scholars as Cardinal Bembo indulged, the 
 tortured Ciceronianism which Erasmus, most 
 Ciceronian of writers, afterwards turned into 
 ridicule, did not represent the real value of 
 Latin. Even the beautiful verses of Petrarch 
 in the fourteenth and of Politian in the 
 fifteenth century were froth on the surface 
 of modern Latinity. Latin was then an in- 
 strument of government, the language of 
 aflkirs, the recognised means of communica- 
 tion between the educated classes of Europe. 
 Of course it is not that now. But it is 
 embedded in history, the records of the past 
 can scarcely be understood without it ; it is 
 the foundation of French and Spanish, as well 
 as of Italian, and to write English prose 
 without the use of Latin words is a mis- 
 directed eflFort of ingenuity. Sir Richard Jebb 
 tells us that the classical Renaissance had two 
 
 78
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 aspects. ** In one," he says, " it is the re- 
 covery of a lost culture ; in another, of even 
 higher and wider significance, it is the renewed 
 diffusion of a liberal spirit which for centuries 
 had been dead or sleeping." Two aspects, not 
 two parts; for parts are separable, and aspects 
 are not. The culture lost and regained in- 
 cluded the spiritual freedom which had been 
 buried with it. If one may say so without 
 irreverence, where the spirit of the Greeks is, 
 there is liberty. " To be free, to understand, 
 to enjoy," were declared by an acute and 
 original philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, to 
 be the claims of modern thought. No words 
 could better express the attitude of Greek 
 mind and character in the palmy days of 
 Athens. The great men of the Renaissance 
 found something more, something higher, than 
 literary beauty in the Greek manuscripts which 
 they deciphered, collated, and edited. They 
 discovered the passionate enthusiasm for free- 
 dom, not for the mere absence of outward 
 restraint which may leave men inwardly slaves, 
 but for the conscious exercise of the mental 
 faculties upon the problems of life and mind. 
 Liberty has always by some persons been 
 abused. If it could not be abused, it would 
 not be liberty. The abuse was copied as well 
 
 79
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 as the use, and there is a side of the Renais- 
 sance almost wholly evil. The exemplaria 
 Graca are vitiis imitahilia. You may repro- 
 duce the faults, and only the faults, of the 
 Greek models. But do not blame the Greeks, 
 though they be not as blameless as the 
 Ethiopians. As well complain of writing 
 because it enables men to forge cheques, or 
 of arithmetic because without it they could 
 not cook accounts. 
 
 The Renaissance succeeded to the scholastic 
 philosophy, upon which minds of the highest 
 order had wasted their strength. By applying 
 Aristotelian logic to patristic theology they had 
 put the match to the magazine and blown the 
 entire structure into the air. Humanism went 
 back to nature and truth, to knowledge, to 
 culture, and to instinct. It took the course 
 which is taken in actual education at the 
 present day, by approaching Greek through 
 Latin, by going, like Alice, behind the looking- 
 glass. If we abstract from Latin poetry of the 
 first class that which is not Greek in its origin, 
 we shall be left with little except the Satires of 
 Juvenal. It is otherwise, no doubt, with Latin 
 prose. Yet Cicero's philosophical treatises are 
 avowed imitations of Plato, and his letters 
 teem with scraps of Greek at which Plato 
 
 80
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 would have stared in amazement. That was 
 the Greek of Cicero's own time, and Cicero 
 quoted it as we should quote French. But 
 he would have been proud, not ashamed, of 
 the fact that he adopted the Athenians as his 
 masters. That Greece conquered her Roman 
 conquerors is the tritest of Horatian common- 
 places, and one of the few really musical 
 hexameters Horace ever wrote describes the 
 long duel in which Greece was engaged with 
 barbarism.* The early and the late Renais- 
 sance are respectively typified by Petrarch and 
 Politian. Petrarch was born in 1304, and died 
 in 1^74. He was an orthodox member of the 
 Catholic Church, and one proof among many 
 that the Renaissance is not as such pagan. An 
 accomplished writer of Virgilian poetry, and 
 in a less degree of Ciceronian prose, he studied 
 hard, but unsuccessfully, to learn Greek. As 
 Sir Richard Jebb points out, Greek could not 
 then be acquired through Latin or Italian. A 
 Greek teacher was necessary, and the Greek 
 teachers of Constantinople had not in the time 
 of Petrarch come to Florence. When they 
 came they introduced Greek scholarship, which 
 was also fostered by the visits of Italian 
 students to Constantinople. Twenty years 
 
 ' " Grsecia baibarix lento collisa duello." 
 
 81 F
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 after Petrarch's death, Manuel Chrysoloras 
 arrived in , Florence and gave lectures on the 
 classical authors of Greece. Boccaccio knew 
 a little Greek, and would have thoroughly 
 appreciated Lucian, who endeavoured to re- 
 produce in the decline of literature the Attic 
 Greek of the past days. But Politian, whose 
 short life was more than covered by the latter 
 half of the fifteenth century, is the finest flower 
 of the Renaissance, He translated four books 
 of the " Iliad " into Latin when he was sixteen, 
 and when he was eighteen he brought out an 
 edition of Catullus, who is almost as Greek 
 as Homer. The rhetorical genius of his Latin 
 hexameters is highly praised by Sir Richard 
 Jebb, a consummate judge. Yet even Politian 
 was much better acquainted with Latin than 
 with Greek, and was inclined to indulge in the 
 paradox of putting Virgil above Homer. Not 
 till the age of Erasmus and the great Venetian 
 publisher Aldo, when the fifteenth century was 
 passing into the sixteenth, did Greek acquire 
 the position it has ever since maintained. The 
 Aldine editions of the Greek classics began in 
 1493, and were continued till 15 13, when they 
 reached their climax in the famous Plato, 
 dedicated to Pope Leo the Tenth. Sir Richard 
 Jebb mentions the curious and interesting cir- 
 
 82
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 cumstance that the Aldine type was cast from 
 the handwriting of a Cretan named Musurus, 
 as Person in the eighteenth century furnished 
 a model for the Cambridge type identical with 
 the printed Greek of the present day. 
 
 The Aldine editions were as cheap as they 
 were splendid, and from their appearance dates 
 the general diffusion of Greek literature among 
 the educated classes. The influence of Eras- 
 mus, first and greatest of Broad Churchmen, 
 was powerfully exerted on the side of Christian 
 humanism as opposed to monkish ignorance 
 and to the prohibition of free inquiry. The 
 modern scholar, with his luxurious apparatus 
 of commentaries and lexicons, can but dimly 
 imagine the poverty of the materials with 
 which his predecessors in the time of Erasmus, 
 or even in the time of Bentley, had to do their 
 work. The prejudice against Greek as dan- 
 gerous and unorthodox was finally dispelled 
 by the wit and the irony, the piety and the 
 learning of the " Epistolae Obscurorum Viro- 
 rum." The Renaissance in its largest and 
 fullest sense was represented by Rabelais, Cer- 
 vantes, and Shakespeare. The learning of 
 Rabelais was as colossal as his humour, in 
 which he is akin with Aristophanes. Cervantes 
 embodies the triumph of the modern spirit 
 
 83
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 over mediaevalism. Shakespeare, if one may 
 safely say anything of him except that he is 
 universal, expressed the full and complete 
 glory of intellectual freedom before the 
 Puritan reaction set in. 
 
 Latin is a practical language, and a little 
 of it sometimes goes a long way. No one 
 who remembers the story of the apparition 
 which Rab Tull, the Town Clerk of Fairport, 
 saw in the Antiquary's Green Room will be 
 disposed to undervalue even a smattering of 
 that tongue. " Aweel," said Grizel Oldbuck, 
 " Rab was a just-living man for a country 
 writer, and he was less fear'd than maybe 
 might just hae been expected ; and he asked 
 in the name o' goodness what the apparition 
 wanted and the spirit answered in an unknown 
 tongue. Then Rab said he tried him wi' Erse, 
 for he cam in his youth frae the braes of 
 Glenlivat but it wadna do. Aweel, in this 
 strait, he bethought him of the twa or three 
 words o' Latin that he used in making out 
 the town's deeds, and he had nae sooner tried 
 the spirit wi' that, than out cam sic a blatter 
 o' Latin about his lugs, that poor Rab Tull, 
 wha was nae great scholar, was clean over- 
 whelmed." But he heard the word which, 
 such was his erudition, he knew to be the 
 
 84
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 Latin for paper, and the ghost of Aldobrand 
 Oldenbuck guided him to the lost deed of 
 which he was in search. This is the modern 
 test of education. Will it be of use to you 
 in after life ? Let Latin then by all means 
 be compulsory, for other reasons, and for 
 that. After the age of academic honours 
 and emoluments Greek, like good sense, is 
 its own reward. No deed was ever discovered, 
 no fortune was ever made, by means of a 
 Platonic Dialogue. The pursuit of truth is 
 not lucrative. Indeed, it has a tendency to 
 draw men away from their proper business of 
 making money. The teaching of Socrates 
 was worth infinitely more than all the gold 
 then or now existing in the bowels of the 
 earth, and he died in poverty by the hand of 
 the public executioner. In the Athens of the 
 fifth century, which is what we mean by 
 Greece, there were doubtless men of great 
 practical wisdom. There was Pericles. There 
 was Thucydides. There was Aristophanes. 
 But intellectual versatility, not common sense, 
 was the strong point of the Athenians. The 
 Romans founded a vast empire, which has 
 long since crumbled into dust. The Greeks 
 produced a literature not very large in quan- 
 tity, but infinitely precious in quality, which 
 
 85
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 exercises at this moment a commanding in- 
 fluence over the thoughts and speculations of 
 mankind. " What is the glory of Csesar and 
 Alexander to that ? " It is the Latin writers 
 who primarily testify to the intellectual supre- 
 macy of Greece. That such a man as Virgil, 
 perhaps the most musical of all poets, should 
 have been content to imitate first Theocritus, 
 secondly Hesiod, and finally Homer, is a 
 phaenomenon without a parallel from the dawn 
 of letters to our own time. Frederic Myers 
 in his beautiful essay on the Mantuan poet, 
 the finest tribute to him that I know ex- 
 cept Tennyson's poem, shows how continuous 
 through the ages have been the charm and 
 power of Virgilian phrases and Virgilian melo- 
 dies over the human heart and soul. John 
 Henry Newman, imparting to the idea a 
 Christian turn, speaks of the pathetic half- 
 lines, giving utterance, like the voice of Nature 
 herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope 
 of better things, which is the inheritance of 
 her children in every clime. A greater than 
 Newman, one of the three or four supreme 
 poets vouchsafed by Providence to man, made 
 Virgil the object of profound and reverent 
 study. Yet Virgil, with all the matchless 
 charm of his exquisite and inimitable verse, 
 
 86
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 was no more an original poet than Cicero was 
 an original philosopher, or Terence was an 
 original playwright. Greece, to quote his own 
 mighty line, had breathed on him with the 
 winds of her lightning, and touched him with 
 the finger of flame.^ Terence, most graceful 
 and elegant comedian, is now supposed to have 
 simply translated Menander, unless, indeed, 
 as some say, he was a mere amanuensis of the 
 real translator, Scipio Africanus. Plautus, 
 who wrote the purest and raciest vernacular, as 
 became a slave born in the house,^ is believed 
 to have copied Diphilus and other Greeks 
 as faithfully as Moli^re in the *' Amphitryon " 
 copied him. We think of Horace as the type 
 of a Roman gentleman, and so he was. But his 
 metres, his subjects, even the perfect style, of 
 his Odes were Greek. That Catullus translated 
 a poem of Sappho and a poem of Callimachus 
 we know. How many other Greek poems 
 he translated we do not know, but in all 
 probability they were numerous. That sort 
 of literary imitation is common enough, and 
 in ordinary circumstances is hardly worth 
 pointing out. But the peculiarity in this case 
 is that the imitators and copyists were poets 
 
 ' " Fulminis aiHavit ventis, et contigit igni." 
 * Vtma. 
 
 87
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 of the highest, or almost the highest, order, 
 not mere versifiers, but men of genius. Yet 
 so complete was the ascendency of Greek 
 poetry over their minds, that they copied it 
 as a painter copies nature, and would have 
 been equally at a loss without it. Virgil 
 carried this form of devotion to quite a touch- 
 ing extreme. There is a line in one of his 
 Eclogues which makes perfect nonsense, be- 
 cause he misunderstood the corresponding 
 passage in Theocritus, and yet never doubted 
 that, as it was Theocritus, it must be right. 
 People who learn Latin cannot help learning 
 Greek too. Richard Porson, as is well known, 
 desired, and was content, to be remembered, 
 as one who had done something for the text 
 of Euripides. Yet Porson was much more 
 than a merely learned man. His natural 
 powers of mind were probably not inferior 
 to Gibbon's or to Burke's. His wit was cele- 
 brated in a witty age, and he was almost as 
 great a master of irony as Pascal. Every 
 reader of the " Letters to Archdeacon Travis," 
 most luckless of archdeacons, will admit that 
 there have been few such writers of English 
 as Porson. Painful and tragic circumstances 
 obstructed the full development of his literary 
 genius. He did not follow the example of 
 
 88
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 the Greeks in putting water with his wine. 
 But, though fully conscious of his intellectual 
 strength, he never considered that he wasted 
 it in collating the manuscripts of one Greek 
 author. The suggestion that " your Porsons 
 stain the purple they would fold," is prepos- 
 terous as applied to Porson himself, whose 
 reverence for the classics was as profound as 
 his knowledge of their meaning, and his appre- 
 ciation of their beauties. It cannot, of course, 
 be proved that Porson was no product of com- 
 pulsory Greek. He may have acquired his style 
 and his handwriting in Long Chamber. But 
 compulsion does not usually beget enthusiasm. 
 There can be few scholars like Porson, though 
 there can be many like Travis. It was com- 
 pulsion which turned out that consummate 
 philologist, the compiler of the Eton Greek 
 Grammar, with his oiruy: gaudet optativo^ justly 
 described as the most striking instance of self- 
 denial on record, inasmuch as that Greek pre- 
 position is almost always found in the company 
 of the future indicative. The quantity and 
 quality of the Greek required for a pass degree 
 are responsible for such precious compounds as 
 "sociology," and "automobile," for the notion 
 that '* Anglophobe " means one who hates 
 England, and " Turcophile " one who loves 
 
 89
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Turkey ; for the theory that a " Symposium " 
 is a number of articles on the same subject, and 
 for the belief, 'which seems to be widely pre- 
 valent, that Maranatha is a Greek adjective 
 qualifying the Greek substantive Anathema. 
 
 When Sir Henry Maine said that " except 
 the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves 
 in this world which is not Greek in its 
 origin," he is thought to have forgotten the 
 Christian religion. But he might have replied, 
 if the objection had been put to him, that at 
 least the earliest forms of Christianity are 
 Greek. He probably had in his mind Homer, 
 the father of poetry ; Herodotus, or, as I 
 should rather say, Thucydides, the father of 
 history ; Plato, the father of philosophy, and 
 Aristotle, the father of science. The influence 
 of Aristotle, as may be gathered from Dante, 
 was predominant when all knowledge of the 
 language in which he wrote had disappeared 
 from Western Europe. If the same cannot 
 be said of Plato, it is nevertheless true that 
 there would no more have been an Aristotle 
 without a Plato than a Plato without a 
 Socrates. By some odd and perverse mis- 
 chance there has been formed from Plato's 
 name the most unmeaning of English epithets, 
 a prime favourite with bad writers in search 
 
 90
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 of a word. But when Dr. Arnold said 
 that he could understand Coleridge better if 
 Coleridge would write Platonic Greek, he 
 expressed, half unconsciously, the permanent 
 power of an author who had been dead for 
 2300 years. He also illustrated the manner 
 in which it is worth while to know Greek. A 
 very slight knowledge of Latin is better than 
 none. But to acquire a mere smattering of 
 Greek is simply waste of time, and results in 
 nothing, or in absurd derivations, of which 
 *' pancake " from irav kqkov is scarcely a 
 caricature. There is not the slightest danger 
 of Greek dying out when it becomes a volun- 
 tary subject. Greek scholarship was never 
 more exact or more profound in the English 
 Universities than it is to-day, and certainly 
 pass examinations, which alone are compulsory, 
 have nothing to do with the matter. In the 
 eighteenth century, a curious and not unlearned 
 age, Greek was at rather a low ebb. Dr. 
 Johnson's Latin scholarship, if not elegant, 
 was sound, thorough, and robust. His Greek 
 would scarcely carry him in these days through 
 Smalls or the Little Go. Whatever Pope may 
 have translated Homer from, it was not from 
 the original. Voltaire loved the literature of 
 Rome, and especially the " Bucolics" of Virgil. 
 91
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 But to compare these with the "Idylls" of 
 Theocritus was beyond his capacity. Carteret's 
 acquaintance with Greek was considered por- 
 tentous, even stranger than his faculty of 
 talking German. Lady Mary Wortley was 
 conspicuous, not only among her sex, but in 
 her age, for her familiarity with the Greek 
 as well as the Roman classics. Gibbon taught 
 himself Greek, as he taught himself everything. 
 But he was a miracle, for which the ordinary 
 chain of sequences will not account. The 
 vastness of Bentley's erudition cannot be 
 denied, whatever may be thought of his 
 taste. Yet Bentley himself seemed even more 
 gigantic than he was when Boyle, and Atter- 
 bury, and Temple took an ostensibly serious 
 part in a classical dispute. The range of 
 Burke's reading, the amount of his acquire- 
 ments, went far beyond Peel's, and were 
 equal to Gladstone's. But his Greek scholar- 
 ship was childish compared with Gladstone's 
 or Peel's. Robert Lowe, who loved to 
 depreciate classical learning, knew more Greek 
 than all the unprofessional scholars of the 
 eighteenth century, except Fielding and Gray. 
 The poets have done more than the doctors 
 to stimulate and perpetuate interest in the 
 glory which was Greece, the grandeur which 
 
 92
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 was Rome. Some of the attempts which have 
 been made to convert ancient into modern 
 poetry are indeed fanciful enough. A brilliant 
 scholar and delightful essayist, Professor Sellar, 
 amused himself and fascinated his readers by 
 drawing an elaborate parallel between Catullus 
 and Burns. It would be hard to say which 
 was the greater genius of the two. For while 
 the humour of Burns is infinitely above the 
 coarse scurrility of the Roman poet, there is 
 nothing in the love-songs of the Ayrshire 
 peasant, exquisite as they are, to be set beside 
 the intensity of passion and of despair which 
 makes the verse of Catullus glow and scorch 
 with unquenchable fire. Burns owed nothing 
 to the classics nor to any one except the 
 author of the " Gentle Shepherd." So far 
 as originality is possible to man, he was 
 original, while Catullus would have considered 
 originality a sign or note of barbarism. He 
 believed, as all Romans, including Veronese, 
 of his time believed, in the verbal inspiration 
 of Hellenic poetry. It is improbable that 
 Burns had ever heard of Cynthia or of Sirmio. 
 But yet it is easy to understand how Sellar 
 came to think of them together. The resem- 
 blance between them, if resemblance there be, 
 lies less in their sentiment, which with all its 
 93
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 depth and fervour belongs also to other men 
 of other times, than in the peculiar pathos, 
 to be felt, not to be described, of such poems 
 as that whose opening words are Si qua 
 recordanti^ and that whose closing lines are 
 
 " Had we never loved so kindly, 
 Had we never loved so blindly, 
 Never met, or never parted. 
 We shouldna now be broken-hearted." 
 
 Tennyson found for Catullus an even more 
 illustrious similitude. With the instinct of 
 critical genius he discovered an amplification 
 of CatuUus's noblest couplet^ in one of 
 Shakespeare's most glorious sonnets 
 
 " Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, 
 For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, 
 And weep afresh love's long-since cancelled woe. 
 And moan the expense of many a vanished sight." 
 
 Of Catullus we may certainly say that 
 whatever he wrote, except mere expressions 
 of personal love or hatred, was Greek in its 
 origin. A great poet of the next generation 
 after Burns, the author of the " Ode to a 
 Grecian Urn," which Wordsworth thought im- 
 proper, was equally innocent of the languages 
 
 ^ '* Quo desiderio veteres revocamus amores, 
 Atque olim amissas flemus amicitias." 
 
 94
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 foolishly called dead. But Keats, as all the 
 world knows through his famous sonnet, fell 
 in with one of those rare translations which 
 preserve the spirit without neglecting the 
 letter. There is not in English a finer 
 rendering of Greek poetry than Chapman's 
 " Homer," and the full, proud sail of his 
 great verse carried Keats away. Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling, in the cleverest, because the most 
 imaginative, of all his stories, tells how a 
 modern English clerk addicted to scribbling 
 trash is suddenly visited by the spirit of 
 avd/xj/ijo-if, or reminiscence, and describes a 
 naval battle of the Peloponnesian war, in 
 which as a galley-slave he had been engaged. 
 The soul of our grandam may haply have 
 inhabited a bird, and many things, including 
 the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare, are 
 less likely than that Keats was once a Greek 
 poet whose works have perished. 
 
 The scholars of the Italian Renaissance have 
 been not unjustly accused of neglecting sub- 
 stance for style. No one, said Erasmus, would 
 have felt more contempt for that brood of 
 little Ciceronians than Cicero himself. The 
 leading men, such as Politian, are not touched 
 by this sarcasm, which may have suggested the 
 brilliant picture of a learned squabble drawn 
 
 95
 
 stray Leaves 
 
 by George Eliot in " Romola." Erasmus was 
 a true child of the Renaissance, though as a 
 Christian, a scholar, and a man of fastidious 
 literary taste, he saw all its defects. Perhaps 
 he was not sufficiently grateful to the men who, 
 with all their faults, relit the extinct torch of 
 Greek scholarship, handed down in uninter- 
 rupted succession, through Scaliger, Casaubon, 
 Bentley, Person, to our own day. " The 
 greatest intellect that ever spent itself in the 
 search for knowledge " is the judgment of 
 Casaubon's biographer, Mark Pattison, upon 
 a greater than Casaubon, the French or Italian 
 Bentley, Scaliger. Bentley was a big man full 
 of small foibles, and they may be seen set 
 forth at large in the fascinating pages of his 
 Life by Monk. His foibles are conspicuous 
 in his reckless emendations of Horace (though 
 some display real genius), his outrages upon 
 the text of Milton, and his twenty years' war 
 with the Fellows of Trinity. His full stature 
 appears in the immortal treatise on the "Epistles 
 of Phalaris," and may be seen at a glance by 
 every one who takes the slight trouble of read- 
 ing his short letter on Joshua Barnes's Homer. 
 If the lives of the victims of great men ever 
 find a chronicler, a place beside Chelsum, and 
 Davies, and Travis, and Goezman, and Robert 
 96
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 Montgomery must be given on account of 
 Bentley to Boyle and Barnes. Barnes was a 
 very good example of superficial scholarship. 
 He was by no means an ignorant man. He 
 knew enough to make blunders quite beyond 
 the reach of a dunce, and to destroy the 
 possibility of restoring a text by changes which 
 were not merely absurd in themselves, but 
 would, if adopted, have removed all chance of 
 finding the proper emendation. It is not for 
 a desultory amateur to affect contempt of 
 sciolism, unless sciolism occupies the profes- 
 sorial chair. But as Barnes was to Bentley, so 
 are the mechanical products of compulsory 
 Greek to Barnes. If they were asked in the 
 witness-box, as the Claimant was, what Greek 
 they had read at school, they would probably 
 not say *' Caesar." They would remember 
 that Caesar wrote a book for beginners in 
 Latin. But an aversion from the sight of the 
 Greek alphabet is the most definite result in 
 many cases of ramming Greek syntax into 
 unsympathetic minds. It is the same with 
 mathematics. Mathematicians, like musicians, 
 are born, not made, and are scarcely less to 
 be envied. Astronomy is their plaything, and 
 they have the instinct of exactitude. But the 
 attempt to hammer mathematics into un- 
 
 97 G
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 mathematical brains is useless torture, far 
 worse than waste of time. Arithmetic is, no 
 doubt, essential, and comes, more or less, 
 by nature. But geometry is a mystery to 
 thousands, and they can derive no benefit from 
 it, except a slight improvement of the memory 
 from learning Euclid by heart. There are 
 certain beggarly elements, as St. Paul calls 
 them, which must be common to all education 
 worthy of the name. When they have been 
 mastered, the sooner the literary and the scien- 
 tific portions of the human race are allowed to 
 separate, the better for both. If there is no 
 water to which a horse cannot be brought, there 
 is none which he can be made to drink. 
 
 That most learned and excellent scholar, the 
 Rector of Lincoln, defending his recent vote 
 in Congregation against compulsory Greek, 
 declared the knowledge of it acquired by 
 candidates for pass degrees to be absolutely 
 worthless. Of course there is the remedy of 
 raising the standard, and some would go so 
 far as to abolish pass degrees altogether. But, 
 on the whole, it seems more reasonable to 
 recognise that Greek is an accomplishment, 
 not an elementary subject, and that the noblest 
 of all languages is degraded by administration 
 in homoeopathic doses to recalcitrant school- 
 
 98
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 boys. From a merely philological point of 
 view such smattering is useless, and it is even 
 more alien to literature than to philology. 
 That classical authors should be handled with 
 reverence is, to put it no higher, a respectable 
 superstition. But, on the other hand, the 
 study of Greek is time thrown away unless it 
 results in a familiarity with the style and 
 idiom of the Greek writers from Homer to 
 Theocritus, at least equal to an educated 
 Englishman's acquaintance with French. Mr. 
 Gilbert Murray's "Euripides," the third volume 
 of Mr. George Allen's " Athenian Drama," is 
 a good example of the way in which a Greek 
 author may be treated by a real master of his 
 subject, who can appreciate for himself, and 
 present to others, the inward and spiritual 
 meaning of ancient tragedy and comedy. Mr. 
 Murray has adopted the unusual and rather 
 startling plan of combining " The Bacchanals " 
 and "The Hippolytus," two of the greatest 
 extant plays Euripides produced, with that 
 marvellous comedy "The Frogs," in which 
 Aristophanes made fun of Euripides and every- 
 thing Euripidean. "To some readers," he 
 says in his Preface, " there may appear to be 
 something irreverent in allowing two noble 
 tragedies to be so closely followed by a hostile 
 
 99
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 burlesque." But "The Frogs" is far more 
 than a burlesque. It is the work of a poet 
 as well as a satirist, of a man who, though 
 full of what the French call Pesprit Gaulois^ 
 was steeped in all the culture of a highly 
 cultivated age, and it contains more good 
 literary criticism than many accredited treatises 
 on the art. Mr. Murray calls it " preposter- 
 ously unfair." A burlesque can hardly be fair, 
 and when Aristophanes began to use his powers 
 of sarcasm, he was apt to let himself go. The 
 defence of Euripides is well worth undertaking, 
 and few men are so well qualified to undertake 
 it as Mr. Murray. But Aristophanes is not 
 responsible for the dull pedants, mostly German, 
 who have assumed that Euripides was a bad 
 poet because the greatest of all parodists made 
 game of his peculiarities. Aristophanes ap- 
 preciated Euripides, if Schlegel did not, and 
 Mr. Murray's brilliant translations will show 
 even the unclassical reader the absurdity of 
 the view that Euripides represents a dramatic 
 decadence. Aristophanes was a ferocious Con- 
 servative, and he has lampooned Socrates as 
 fiercely as Euripides, both being guilty of 
 innovation, in his eyes the worst of crimes. 
 But Aristophanes was not a man who would 
 have wasted his strength on bad philosophers 
 
 lOO
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 or bad poets. It was a battle of giants in 
 which he fought, and his audacious satire did 
 not spare ^schylus, whom, even on his own 
 principles, he was bound to revere. No 
 dramatist has raised more problems, or been 
 the subject of more controversy, than Euripides. 
 Dr. Verrall's paradoxical and almost super- 
 naturally clever pamphlet, " Euripides the 
 Rationalist," attributes to "sad Electra's poet " 
 a Machiavellian subtlety not suspected by Aris- 
 tophanes or Aristotle. The " Bacchanals " or 
 " Bacchae," translated by Mr. Murray, contains 
 an unequalled representation of religious en- 
 thusiasm passing into religious madness. Yet 
 it is equally possible to hold that Euripides 
 meant to exalt the Bacchic frenzy, that he 
 meant to decry it, or that his object was purely 
 dramatic. The abiding interest of Euripides 
 for critics of all nations and schools is a suffi- 
 cient answer to the theory that he fell away 
 from the standard of i^schylus and Sophocles. 
 Which of the three was the greatest is a 
 question that may be argued for ever. That 
 they all belonged to the highest order of 
 dramatic literature is a certain and incontestable 
 truth. They differed, as Cicero says, in quality, 
 not in degree, and it is strange that modern 
 critics should have selected for ignorant dis- 
 
 lOI
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 paragement the most modern of that mighty 
 trio. " Aristophanes' Apology " contains an 
 eloquent and passionate defence of the tragic 
 against the comic poet, put into the mouth of 
 an Athenian lady who has endured the moral 
 torture of sitting through a representation of 
 the " Lysistrata." Her reminiscences are ex- 
 pressed with vigour, though with the prolixity 
 of Browning's later style, which makes con- 
 secutive quotation impossible. 
 
 " Waves, said to wash pollution from the world, 
 Take that plague-memory, cure that pustule caught, 
 As, past escape, I sat and saw the piece 
 By one appalled at Phaidra's fate. 
 
 that bestiality 
 So beyond all brute-beast imagining, 
 That when, to point the moral at the close. 
 Poor Salabaccho, just to show how fair 
 Was ' Reconciliation,' stripped her charms, 
 That exhibition simply bade us breathe, 
 Seemed something healthy and commendable 
 After obscenity grotesqued so much 
 It slunk away revolted at itself." 
 
 Browning did not know Greek as Mr. 
 Murray knows it. He was not a professional 
 scholar nor a deeply learned man. But he 
 had a robust and manly grasp of Greek litera- 
 ture, the fruit of voluntary study, which was 
 always a labour of love. His estimate of
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 Aristophanes was out of proportion because 
 he put the accidental on a level with the 
 essential, the coarseness which is on the sur- 
 face with the poetry and humour which it 
 sometimes overlays. Most English critics, 
 with the great and signal exception of Cole- 
 ridge, have made a similar mistake about 
 Rabelais. The "Lysistrata" was certainly 
 not a play for women to go and see. "The 
 Adventures of Pantagruel " is perhaps not a 
 book for them to read. Yet the real objects 
 are in each case noble. With Aristophanes, 
 it was the establishment of peace and good- 
 will among men. With Rabelais it was the 
 emancipation of the human intellect from the 
 trammels of monkish tyranny. But if Brown- 
 ing's love of Euripides made him unjust to 
 the author of "The Frogs" and *'The Clouds," 
 it led him to a spirited vindication of his 
 favourite poet against criticism often captious 
 and sometimes absurd. His own poetry was 
 not exactly Greek in finish, or in restraint. 
 Yet the beautiful fragment which he called 
 " Artemis Prologises " is strictly classical both 
 in form and in substance. Dearly as Brown- 
 ing loved Euripides, he could not love him 
 more than Milton did. Euripides was to 
 Milton what Virgil was to Dante, and the 
 o3
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 admiration of Milton is conclusive for the 
 English-speaking race. Milton's Greek and 
 Latin verses are not distinguished for accuracy, 
 elegance, or ease. But they are quite in- 
 telligible, and it illustrates the scholarship of 
 the eighteenth century that to four Archilo- 
 chian iambics inscribed by Milton under a 
 bad portrait of himself, Warton appended the 
 note, " a satire on the engraver, but happily 
 concealed in an unknown tongue." The lines 
 are not a satire at all, but plain, downright 
 abuse of the unlucky artist, in remarkably bad 
 Greek. Milton's Greek is most perceptible in 
 his English; for instance, in that fine passage 
 which Macaulay quotes as after the manner of 
 Euripides 
 
 " But wherefore thou alone ? Wherefore with thee 
 Came not all hell broke loose ? " 
 
 It does not fall within Mr. Murray's pro- 
 vince, more's the pity, to trace the influence 
 of Euripides upon succeeding ages, from his 
 own to the fall of the Western Empire and 
 from the Renaissance to the present day. 
 " Our Euripides, the human," wrote a gifted 
 lady, who might have been a great poet if 
 she could have made or avoided rhymes. 
 " No one in modern times," says Dr. Verrall, 
 '* since Greek has been well understood, has 
 104
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 said that his dearest desire beyond the grave 
 would be to meet Euripides ; not this nor 
 anything like it," as, for example, that his 
 dearest desire was to meet Euripides beyond 
 the grave. But if no one has said this, Euri- 
 pides has found modern admirers as competent 
 and as diverse as Milton and Fox. The struc- 
 ture of his plays is faulty enough, unless we 
 adopt the ingenious hypothesis of Dr. Verrall, 
 and assume that ridicule of the supernatural 
 is his secret purpose. But they abound in 
 felicitous phrases, in lovely songs, in exquisite 
 descriptions of natural beauty, in maxims of 
 civic wisdom and political prudence. And 
 there is something more in them than that. 
 Among the causes of sudden and impressive 
 influence upon sceptical minds enumerated by 
 Bishop Blougram, coupled with 
 
 " A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death," 
 is 
 
 " A chorus-ending from Euripides." 
 
 Perhaps Browning was thinking of those won- 
 derful lines put into the mouth of the Muse 
 in the "Hippolytus" 
 
 " But if any far-off state there l>e, 
 Dearer than life to mortality ; 
 The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof; 
 And mist is under and mist above. 
 
 105
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 And so we are sick for life and cling 
 On earth to this nameless and shining thing. 
 For other life is a fountain sealed 
 And the deeps below are unrevealed, 
 And we drift on legends for ever." 
 
 The greatest of England's classical scholars, 
 Richard Bentley, was not a man who under- 
 valued his own countrymen, or even, that last 
 infirmity of noble mind, his own contem- 
 poraries. It was he who wrote, and it was 
 to Bishop Pearson he applied, the fine and 
 striking phrase, " The dust of his writings is 
 gold." When his favourite daughter, "Jug," 
 lamented that her father's powers should be 
 exclusively devoted to work which was not 
 original, he acknowledged the justice of the 
 complaint. " But," he added, with a simplicity 
 and a modesty he did not often show, " the 
 wit and genius of those old heathens beguiled 
 me : and as I despaired of raising myself up to 
 their standard on fair ground, I thought the 
 only chance I had of looking over their heads 
 was to get upon their shoulders." And upon 
 their shoulders he stands. If one may reverse 
 Porson's caustic judgment of Southey, Bent- 
 ley's works will cease to be read when Homer 
 and Virgil are forgotten. Monk, who was a 
 college tutor before he became a dean and a 
 io6
 
 The Study of Greek 
 
 bishop, tells us that pupils whom he referred 
 to the " Dissertation on Phalaris " for some 
 particular point of prosody or syntax, almost 
 always read the book through. The native 
 force of that powerful mind dealt with the 
 vast learning it had accumulated as Adam 
 Smith dealt with economic science, and Glad- 
 stone with financial policy. A little learning 
 makes a pedant. It was not a real scholar 
 who, preaching upon the subject of a new 
 organ, told his congregation that the Greeks 
 called the instrument to opyavov. George 
 Eliot used to cite Dean Milman, author, by 
 the way, of some of the most beautiful hymns 
 in the English language as a man to whom 
 intimate acquaintance with the classics had not 
 given a good style, and Dean Merivale, known 
 as * Gibbon in slippers," would be an even 
 better instance. But these examples are cited 
 because they are rare. They prove the 
 existence of the rule. There have been ac- 
 knowledged masters of English prose who 
 were wholly innocent of Greek. Shakespeare's 
 prose is inferior only to his verse ; the names 
 of Bunyan and of Goldsmith will at once 
 occur to every one. There is Cobbett, whom 
 a famous scholar compared with Cleon, and 
 the letters of Burns have a fiery eloquence 
 107
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 of their own. Johnson, Byron, and Scott 
 knew Greek chiefly, if not wholly, through 
 Latin. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens did 
 not know it at all. It is a commonplace that 
 original genius can dispense with extraneous 
 aid. If Fielding is to be reckoned above 
 Richardson as a novelist, it is because he had 
 a sense of humour, and not because his ac- 
 quaintance with the " Iliad " enabled him to 
 describe the battle in the churchyard. Field- 
 ing's English is so idiomatic, so stately, and 
 so pure, that it seems to come straight from 
 his own brain and soul ; yet he himself con- 
 fesses his debt to Lucian, who was not a real 
 classic, but a conscious and deliberate imitator 
 of a style which had not been written for 
 hundreds of years. Since the loss of Athenian 
 independence every institution then existing 
 in the Western world has passed away ; Greek 
 literature itself perished, and had to be re- 
 discovered. It fell under the ban of the 
 Church as something outlandish, heretical, 
 impious. Yet its influence upon the culture 
 of civilised communities is greater now than 
 it has ever been before, and [if the study ceases 
 to be compulsory, it will be because no com- 
 pulsion is needed, because Greek is a sixth 
 sense. 
 
 io8
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 yA MONG tales of whim and fantasy 
 /% Peacock's novels, if so they can 
 / % be called, have always held a high 
 place. Equally removed from the 
 problem and the proverb, they are still more 
 unlike those pure works of art, such as Shake- 
 speare's plays and Scott's romances, where the 
 author stands aside altogether, and the charac- 
 ters are apparently left to develop themselves. 
 Peacock follows his fancy whithersoever it leads 
 him, and never continueth in one stay. He 
 was as full of prejudices as an egg is full of 
 meat, and he made his stories the vehicle for 
 expressing them. The late Dean Merivale used 
 to say that England had reached the summit 
 of her greatness under a system of rotten 
 boroughs and Latin elegiacs. To the Reform 
 Bill and Greek Iambics he traced her gradual 
 decline. Peacock, though he was so loose a 
 scholar as to write Greek without the accents, 
 seems to have believed that, if man did not 
 live by bread alone, good wine and classical 
 quotations were sufficient to guide him through 
 this world of sin. He had not, like Merivale, 
 the art of writing Latin verse. His verse is 
 109
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 English, and excellent it is. He had not been 
 through the mill of the University, or the 
 public school. His scholarship was self-taught, 
 and few men have taught themselves so well. 
 But the Dean's doctrine was just the sort of 
 theme with which he loved to play, and it 
 would have enlivened his pages a good deal 
 more than the perfectibility of man. For it is 
 true of Peacock as of most eccentrics that they 
 are best when they are least serious, when they 
 do not go much below the surface of things. 
 Peacock was a humourist in the old sense of 
 the term. He was essentially a queer fellow. 
 Never, or hardly ever, did he deviate into the 
 commonplace. The one thing certain about 
 his conclusions is that they do not follow from 
 his premisses. His books are as provoking as 
 Lamb's " Essays " to well-regulated minds. 
 He violates all the conventions, and sets at 
 defiance all the rules. Few writers are so 
 absolutely devoid of that common sense which, 
 as Pennialinus says, is the saving of us all. No 
 wandering sheep was ever brought back by 
 Thomas Love Peacock to the intellectual fold. 
 Wherein, then, lies his charm.? The same 
 statement might be made, and the same ques- 
 tion might be asked, about Laurence Sterne. 
 Peacock had not the profound humour and the
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 subtle pathos which make "Tristram Shandy," 
 with all its faults, immortal. Neither had he 
 Sterne's love of indelicate allusions, nor his 
 cynical disbelief in the virtue of women. What 
 he had in common with Sterne was a fantastic 
 imagination, not his servant but his master, for 
 he could not choose but follow where it led. 
 
 His charm lies, however, not only in this, 
 but also in his ripe scholarship, his lively wit, 
 his caustic irony, and a style so exquisitely 
 felicitous that at its best it has scarcely ever 
 been surpassed. To which may be added a 
 power of creating graceful, delightful, and per- 
 fectly natural girls, in which only Mr. Mere- 
 dith has since surpassed him. Peacock is one 
 of the very few men who can draw the other 
 sex better than their own. Perhaps only 
 Walter Scott and George Meredith are equally 
 happy in both. Certainly Peacock's male 
 characters cannot be called natural. They 
 are for the most part types rather than indi- 
 viduals, except when celebrities like Shelley 
 and Coleridge are deliberately caricatured. 
 Peacock was as incapable as Sterne of con- 
 structing a plot. To read him for the story 
 is like reading Gaboriau for anything else. 
 Collections of his songs are popular enough, 
 for his severest critic could not deny that he 
 II I
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 was a genuine poet. I saw it stated the other 
 day that the true " Peacockians " only cared 
 for the songs in their proper places. I dare 
 not arrogate to myself that sebast and caco- 
 phonous title, as Peacock might have called it. 
 But I love Peacock's songs, as I love Shake- 
 speare's, wherever I find them, and I should 
 not consider them out of place in an inter- 
 leaved Bradshaw. Mr. Chromatic in " Head- 
 long Hall " expressly maintains that the words 
 of a song have no importance, except as a 
 setting for the music, and his own perform- 
 ances are by no means always topical. Except 
 in " Maid Marian," where everything is in 
 perfect harmony with everything else, and the 
 Friar leaves the room without a song when a 
 song would have been inappropriate. Peacock's 
 poetry occurs just because Peacock felt inclined 
 to write it. And indeed no man ever wrote 
 more exclusively to please himself than the 
 author of " Crotchet Castle," unless it were the 
 author of the " Sentimental Journey." " Those 
 who live to please must please to live," said the 
 austere moralist who died the year before Pea- 
 cock was born. Literature was at the most 
 Peacock's staff. His crutch was the India 
 House, where he seems to have done as little 
 work for his pay as he conscientiously could. 
 
 TI2
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 His own lines on the subject are well known, 
 and though they need not be taken as history 
 they have a curious interest as coming from 
 the successor of James Mill. 
 
 " From ten to eleven have breakfast for seven ; 
 From eleven to noon think you've come too soon ; 
 From twelve to one think what's to be done ; 
 From one to two find nothing to do ; 
 From two to three begin to foresee 
 That from three to four will prove a d d bore." 
 
 In Peacock's pages, as in Sterne's, every man 
 rides his hobby. Uncle Toby was beyond 
 Peacock, as Matilda, and even Marionetta, 
 were beyond Sterne. The crudity of Peacock 
 is seen in this, that his characters, at least his 
 male characters, represent merely qualities or 
 tendencies, and are seldom, as human beings, 
 complete. They are always playing a part, 
 never simply themselves, except under the 
 influence of some sudden catastrophe, such as 
 the appearance of a spectre, or bodily con- 
 cussion with a tangible object, or the advent 
 of a plentiful meal. Peacock was not so 
 much an epicurean scholar as a scholarly epi- 
 cure. He made of eating and drinking some- 
 thing very like a religion. The captain in 
 ** Headlong Hall " expresses an opinion that 
 a man who abstains from strong drink must 
 
 H3 H
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Chave a secret he is afraid involuntarily to 
 disclose. The parson in " Melincourt," who 
 undertakes to exorcise the ghost, requires the 
 simple apparatus of a venison pasty, three 
 bottles of Madeira, and a prayer-book. When 
 he is found asleep in the morning, the bottles 
 are empty, the pasty has disappeared, and the 
 prayer-book is open where it was open before. 
 When the lady guests of Squire Headlong 
 faint at the sight of the skulls on Mr. 
 Cranium's lecture-table, and call for water, 
 the little butler brings them the only water he 
 keeps, which is powerful enough to revive 
 them at once. There are no " three bottle 
 men " now. People do not reckon what they 
 drink. "Heel-taps" and "Skylight" are 
 obsolete terms. We do not breakfast in bed, 
 like Dr. FoUiott, on beer and cold pie, or 
 say "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," like 
 Dr. Gaster when he turned up the empty 
 egg-shell. 
 
 Peacock had a long life, and his novels are 
 distributed over the greater part of it. He 
 was seven years older than Shelley, and he 
 survived Thackeray for three years. He lived 
 into a world, as Professor Saintsbury says, 
 " more changed from that of his youth than 
 that of his youth was from the days of Addison 
 114
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 or even Dryden." It was not merely the 
 Reform Bill and Greek Iambics, which Porson 
 had written before his time, or Merivale's. It 
 was "the steamship and the railway, and the 
 thoughts that shake mankind." His clergy 
 and country gentlemen, his schoolmasters 
 abroad and philosophers at home, had become 
 before his death as obsolete as the guard who 
 woke up the inside passengers in the night 
 and claimed to be remembered. But for a 
 "^ satirist in the grain, as Peacock was, there is 
 '; little real change. Human folly seems to 
 obey the law known as the conservation of 
 energy. The quantity of it remains identical 
 or increases with the population. The forms 
 of it alone vary from age to age. If there are 
 no longer any rotten boroughs, there are con- 
 stituencies in which both the sitting member 
 and the standing candidate are expected to sub- 
 scribe towards every charity and every football 
 club. If there is no duelling in the army, and 
 no flogging of private soldiers, there is mutual 
 flagellation of officers and gentlemen among 
 themselves. Champagne answers its purpose 
 as well as Madeira, and at least two more 
 meals have been added to the collection of 
 Peacock, who seldom allowed for anything 
 f between breakfast and dinner. Scythrop and 
 
 "5
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Mr. Flosky are no more. Mr. Swinburne and 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer have never, so far as 
 I am aware, been put into a novel. Perhaps 
 the nearest approach in modern times to 
 " Nightmare Abbey " is Mr. Mallock's " New 
 Republic." But it is not a novel, and "Night- 
 mare Abbey " is. Thin as the story may be, 
 it is a story, and Scythrop's secret meetings 
 with the object of his affections are most in- 
 geniously arranged. Flosky is a rather cruel, 
 extremely vivid representation of Coleridge. 
 Scythrop is a not unkindly caricature of Shelley. 
 The art of Peacock is shown in producing the 
 impression that Scythrop was a caricature, and 
 that Flosky was not. Sometimes his like- 
 nesses are coarse daubs enough, and the most 
 sympathetic reader must be wearied by in- 
 numerable references to Lord Brougham as 
 " the learned friend." It was natural enough 
 that Peacock should have been disappointed 
 with Brougham. Many others were so too. 
 But the subject of Brougham's delinquencies, 
 however attractive in itself, is not suited to 
 works of fiction, nor, indeed, for that matter, 
 is the duty of discouraging colonial slavery 
 by not drinking sugar in tea, as recommended 
 by Mr. Forester in " Melincourt." But even 
 that is better than the attempt to humanise an 
 ii6
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 ape by conferring on him clothes, a baronetcy, 
 and a seat in Parliament. 
 
 Peacock passed his life in avoiding what 
 was disagreeable. He was not ambitious, and 
 he was neither physically nor mentally ener- 
 getic. Writing was with him a luxury, an 
 amusement, and a vehicle for conveying his 
 peculiar prejudices to the world. They were 
 very peculiar. He was in his way a keen 
 politician, and yet to classify him would have 
 taxed the ingenuity of Dod himself. There 
 have been statesmen and writers, such as 
 Palmerston and Bagehot, whom it would be 
 equally misleading to call . Liberal or Con- 
 servative. That is because they shunned ex- 
 tremes, or because they had one measure for 
 foreign countries and another for their own. 
 But Peacock held at the same time, and in 
 reference to the same subject-matter, opinions 
 which the utmost ingenuity cannot reconcile. 
 Forgetting that there must be some method 
 for choosing members of Parliament, he railed 
 with equal severity at pocket boroughs and at 
 Reform Bills. Now and then his whims and 
 oddities quite destroy the whole effect of his 
 books. " Melincourt " is an instance in point. 
 It contains some of Peacock's most attractive 
 writing, while Anthelia Melincourt, in spite of 
 117
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 a tendency to priggishness, has sense and spirit 
 enough. But Sir Oran Haut-ton is intolerable. 
 A single scene in which a monkey played the 
 part of a man might be endured in a roaring 
 farce. But a man-monkey as one of the 
 principal characters in a novel ; getting drunk, 
 falling in love, and being returned to the 
 House of Commons, is avo-ixaXu)^ avw/uLoXo?^ 
 purely grotesque, and an insult to the intelli- 
 gence of the reader. Nor do the copious 
 quotations from Lord Monboddo with which 
 the notes to " Melincourt " are garnished re- 
 move the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, 
 of accepting this zoological licence. Lord 
 Monboddo's vagaries, though they have been 
 described as anticipations of Darwin, are devoid 
 of all scientific or philosophic value, while even 
 the great name of BufFon cannot reconcile 
 one to the preposterous and rather disgusting 
 absurdity of an ape taking a lady in to dinner. 
 The name of Sir Oran Haut-ton may be 
 thought to deserve the praise of ingenuity. 
 But if so, it can only be in comparison with 
 Peacock's other efforts of the same kind. A 
 worse inventor of names never devoted him- 
 self to the art of writing novels. Thackeray's 
 names, though often ludicrous, are always 
 happy, and often inimitably droll. That Lady 
 ii8
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 Jane Sheepshanks should be the Earl of South- 
 down's daughter is so perfectly logical that 
 it moves only the inward mirth of blissful 
 solitude. The highly respectable family of 
 the Newcomes have so long lost all trace 
 of novelty that one forgets how the recency 
 of their origin contrasted with the antiquity of 
 Pendennis. How could The Mulligan have 
 been called anything else, or what other appel- 
 lation could the Fotheringay have chosen for 
 herself than that which she actually adopted ? 
 What grim and stately mansion in the London 
 of real life ever had such an appropriate title 
 as Gaunt House ? Sir Telegraph Paxarett 
 and the Reverend Mr. Portpipe are enough 
 to spoil the reputation even of a story with 
 such a pretty name as " Melincourt," " Mr. 
 Mystic of Cimmerian Lodge " shows an as- 
 tounding poverty of invention. The intoler- 
 able pedantry which disfigured '* Headlong 
 Hall" with sham classical derivations for the 
 patronymics of Foster, Escot, and Jenkison 
 is an even surer proof than his slovenly 
 habit of writing Greek without the accents 
 that Peacock was not a scholar in the highest 
 sense of the term. 
 
 Yet with all these drawbacks, which are 
 better faced and acknowledged at the outset, 
 119
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 " there are few more fascinating novelists than 
 Peacock. Perhaps " novelist " is hardly the 
 word, for his plots are of the thinnest, and 
 his tales are not exactly smooth. But his 
 humour is of that delicious sort which must 
 be felt and cannot be described ; his style at 
 its best was scarcely surpassed by his most 
 illustrious contemporaries ; his dialogue is 
 almost equal to Sterne's ; his passion for good 
 literature was no stronger than his love of 
 rural beauty ; while his young women, though 
 rather sketches than finished portraits, have a 
 grace and a glamour which it is scarcely pro- 
 fane to call Shakespearean. As for the songs 
 with which his books are interspersed, they are 
 all excellent, and some of them are abso- 
 lutely perfect. Peacock wrote only when he 
 
 = felt inclined, and, considering the length of 
 his life, he wrote very little. His first novel, 
 "Headlong Hall," appeared in 1816; his last, 
 " Gryll Grange," in 1861, two years before 
 his death. Dr. Richard Garnett, the accom- 
 plished editor of Peacock in succession to the 
 late Sir Henry Cole, discerns symptoms of 
 senility in " Gryll Grange." His eyes are 
 better than mine. I must confess that I should 
 have rather detected signs of failing power, 
 of course erroneously, in " Melincourt " or
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 "The Misfortunes of Elphin." Peacock was 
 never, from the cradle to the grave, under the 
 influence of reason. Perhaps we none of us 
 are. But with him prejudice followed pre- 
 judice in an unbroken series which enabled 
 him to see the ruin of the country in the 
 reform of every abuse he had denounced. 
 
 Peacock was no friend to the clergy, and 
 the Reverend Dr. Gaster of " Headlong Hall " 
 is, as his name implies, a mere glutton. His 
 brother divines. Dr. FoUiott and Dr. Opimian, 
 though good livers in the worst sense of that 
 term, are also scholars and gentlemen. Dr. 
 Gaster is as stupid as he is greedy, and repre- 
 sents the crudest shape of Peacock's undoubted 
 gift for caricature. The Homeric capacity 
 for eating and drinking exhibited by Peacock's 
 male characters is not exceeded even in " Pick- 
 wick," where there seems to be no appreciable 
 interval between one meal and another. Dr. 
 Opimian, a strictly moderate man in Peacock's 
 estimation, makes a large hole in a round of 
 beef at breakfast, lunches on cold chicken and 
 tongue, and only abstains from drinking more 
 than two sorts of wine in the middle of the 
 day lest he should spoil his zest for the bottles 
 of Madeira and claret with which he washes 
 down his copious dinner. But there is this 
 
 131
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 difference between Peacock and Dickens. Pea- 
 cock, at least the literary Peacock, was an 
 epicure, and Dickens, at least the literary 
 Dickens, was not. A good cookery book 
 might be made out of Peacock's novels, 
 especially if the dinners were reduced by one- 
 half and the breakfasts by two-thirds. This, 
 however, is by the way. The three things by 
 which Peacock will live, for they make him 
 as fresh now as he was seventy years ago, are 
 his poetry, his humour, and his style. In 
 " Headlong Hall " there is one capital poem, 
 the song of which the first line is : " In his 
 last binn Sir Peter lies." Take these two 
 couplets as specimens 
 
 " None better knew the feast to sway, 
 Or keep mirth's boat in better trim ; 
 For nature had but little clay 
 
 Like that of which she moulded him." 
 
 The humour of " Headlong Hall," not per- 
 haps very obvious in the preliminary scene 
 of the coach, full of humourists as that vehicle 
 is, breaks out after dinner when Dr. Gaster 
 quotes Moses to Mr. Escot. 
 
 " ' Of course, sir,' replies Mr. Escot, ' I do 
 not presume to dissent from the very exalted 
 authority of that most enlightened astronomer 
 and profound cosmogonist, who had, more- 
 
 122
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 over, the advantage of being inspired ; but 
 when I indulge myself with a ramble in the 
 fields of speculation and attempt to deduce 
 what is probable and rational from the sources 
 of analysis, experience, and comparison, I con- 
 fess I am too often apt to lose sight of the 
 doctrines of that great fountain of theological 
 and geological philosophy.' " 
 
 " Knight On Taste," unlike Moses and the 
 Pentateuch, is forgotten, but his methods of 
 forcing Nature into artificial shapes have not 
 been so entirely abandoned that a reference to 
 them will be unintelligible. Mr. Milestone 
 had not carried out his plans for the improve- 
 ment of Lord Littlebrain's park when Miss 
 Tenorina praised its beautiful appearance. 
 
 " Mr. Milestone. Beautiful, Miss Tenorina ! 
 Hideous ! Base, common, and popular. Such 
 a thing as you may see anywhere in wild and 
 mountainous districts. Now, observe the meta- 
 morphosis. Here is the same rock cut into 
 the shape of a giant. In one hand he holds 
 a horn, through which that little fountain is 
 thrown to a prodigious elevation. In the other 
 is a ponderous stone, so exactly balanced as to 
 be apparently ready to fall on the head of any 
 person who may happen to be beneath : and 
 there is Lord Littlebrain walking under it." 
 123
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 The artificial school of landscape gardening 
 has never been more happily hit oiF, In many 
 respects a philosopher of the Johnsonian school, 
 Peacock did not share the Doctor's preference 
 for the life of towns. Unfair as he often was 
 to Wordsworth, and incapable of appreciating 
 the Lake Poets at their true value, he was a 
 genuine Wordsworthian in his passionate love 
 of woods, and trees, and cataracts. Among con- 
 temporary novelists Mr. Hardy comes nearest 
 him in this line. As an artist in the widest 
 sense, the author of " The Woodlanders " is 
 incomparably superior to the author of " Melin- 
 \ court." " Melincourt " is indeed hardly a book 
 at all, but a burlesque grotesque, unlike any- 
 thing in the heaven above, or in the earth 
 beneath, or in the water under the earth. 
 Such names as Miss Danaretta Constantina 
 Pinmoney, the Reverend Mr. Grovelgrub, and 
 Lord Anophel Achtar would be in themselves 
 enough to ruin a story, if there were any story 
 to ruin. But Anthelia's country walk, so justly 
 praised by Dr. Garnett, would be difficult to 
 match for the ease, grace, and power of the 
 few strokes in which it is portrayed. When, 
 after resting on the knotted base of the ash- 
 trunk, she " rose to pursue her walk," she 
 " ascended, by a narrow winding path, the brow 
 124
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 of a lofty hill which sunk precipitously on the 
 other side to the margin of a lake that seemed 
 to slumber in the same eternal stillness as the 
 rocks that bordered it. The murmur of the 
 torrent was inaudible at that elevation. There 
 was an almost oppressive silence in the air. 
 The motion and life of nature seemed sus- 
 pended. The gray mist that hung on the 
 mountains, spreading its thin transparent uni- 
 form veil over the whole surrounding scene, 
 gave a deeper impression to the mystery of 
 loneliness, the predominant feeling that pressed 
 on the mind of Anthelia, to seem the only 
 thing that lived and moved in all that wide 
 and awful scene of beauty." Such a passage 
 as this redeems even " Melincourt " from the 
 oblivion which, considered as a novel, it un- 
 doubtedly deserves. 
 
 The first book in which Peacock's genius 
 had full play is "Nightmare Abbey." In wit 
 and humour it stands at the head of all his 
 works. Better and purer English has seldom, 
 if ever, been written, and the difficulty of 
 quoting from it is that one would like to quote 
 every word. Shelley's friendship with Peacock, 
 useful and honourable to both the friends, has 
 produced some of the most delightful letters 
 and one of the most delicious farces in our 
 
 '25
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 language. The letters were written to Peacock 
 by Shelley from Italy. The farce is " Night- 
 mare Abbey," in which Shelley, who much 
 enjoyed his own portrait, figures as Scythrop. 
 *' When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as 
 usual, to a public school where a little learning 
 was painfully beaten into him, and from thence 
 to the university, where it was carefully taken 
 out of him ; and he was sent home like a well- 
 threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head." 
 Peacock was an unsparing satirist of public 
 schools and universities, with which he had 
 no personal acquaintance. But he caricatured 
 Shelley as though he loved him, and did full 
 justice to the sound sense which was always 
 in the poet's mind, seldom as it may have 
 appeared in his behaviour. To Coleridge (Mr. 
 Flosky) he was far less kind, and his Byron 
 (Mr. Cypress) must be pronounced a failure. 
 In truth. Peacock had not the thoroughness 
 or the pertinacity to draw a finished portrait 
 of any one. He belonged to what, in the 
 language of modern art, is called the impres- 
 sionist school, and his caricatures suffer from 
 exaggeration. Caricature is like onion in 
 cookery. There can easily be too much of 
 it, and there can hardly be too little. But 
 Peacock sins against all rules, and succeeds 
 126
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 in spite of his transgressions or by the very 
 magnitude of his offences. Everything in 
 ' Nightmare Abbey," except the style, might 
 be condemned on Horatian or Johnsonian 
 principles, and if people are not amused by it 
 jhere is no more to be said, at least for them. 
 There is a sort of a plot (rare enough with 
 Peacock), for Scythrop made love to two 
 ladies at the same time, and thereby involved 
 himself in awkward complications. One of 
 the ladies, Marionetta, in spite of her too 
 suggestive name, is a perfectly natural speci- 
 men of the human race, feminine gender, and 
 her Shakespearean quotation, which maddens 
 Scythrop, is one of the happiest in all literature. 
 *' I prithee deliver thyself like a man of this 
 world " was her " arch " reply to Scythrop's 
 *' passionate language of romance." But the 
 loves of Scythrop and Marionetta are not the 
 real subject of " Nightmare Abbey," which is 
 a satire on German tales of horror, the meta- 
 physics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the novels 
 of Mrs. Radcliffe, and other pet objects of the 
 author's aversion. Mr, PMosky, which, as the 
 victims of compulsory Greek may be j-)ersuaded 
 into believing, means a lover of the shade, 
 expresses the opinion that " ' tea, late dinners, 
 and the French Revolution have played the 
 127
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 devil, and brought the devil into play.' ' Tea, 
 late dinners, and the French Revolution ? ' said 
 the Honourable Mr. Listless, ' I cannot exactly 
 see the connection of ideas,' ' I should be 
 sorry if you could,' replied Mr. Flosky ; ' I 
 pity the man who can see the connection of his 
 own ideas. Still more do I pity him the con- 
 nection of whose ideas any other person can 
 see.' " The satire of Coleridge in this singular 
 book is exquisitely malicious, because it is 
 informed by knowledge, and contains just 
 enough truth to make the misrepresentation 
 tell. Except that imperishable chapter in 
 Carlyle's " Life of Sterling," which begins with 
 the words " Coleridge sat on the brow of High- 
 gate," there is nothing quite so successful in 
 sarcastic delineation of him as some parts 
 of " Nightmare Abbey," and the genius of 
 Coleridge is so far above the reach of dis- 
 paragement that his warmest admirers can 
 afford to laugh at Mr. Flosky's boast that he 
 never gave a plain answer to a plain question 
 in his life. Besides a capital song (" Why are 
 thy looks so blank, grey friar .? "), perhaps 
 suggested by Suckling, an excellent parody of 
 Byron 
 
 " There is a fever of the spirit, 
 
 The brand of Cain's unresting doom " 
 T28
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 and a convivial song of unsurpassed merit ('*Sea- 
 men three, what men be ye?"), "Nightmare 
 Abbey " contains the best and shortest ghost 
 story in the English language. It is told by 
 the Reverend Mr. Larynx, and is as follows : 
 
 " I once saw a ghost myself in my study, 
 which is the last place where any one but a 
 ghost would look for me. I had not been 
 into it for three months, and was going to 
 consult Tillotson, when on opening the door 
 I saw a venerable figure in a flannel dressing- 
 gown sitting in my armchair and reading my 
 Jeremy Taylor. It vanished in a moment, 
 and so did I ; and what it was or what it 
 wanted I have never been able to ascertain." 
 
 Mr. Flosky's comment, " It was an idea 
 with the force of a sensation," is a more 
 scientific definition than the one really given 
 by Coleridge, " A man or woman dressed 
 up to frighten another." 
 
 The most characteristic, and to my mind 
 the most fascinating, of all Peacock's tales 
 is ** Maid Marian." It has been imputed to 
 Peacock that in this serio-comic romance of 
 Sherwood Forest, of Friar Tuck and Robin 
 Hood, he meant to make fun of "Ivanhoe." 
 Dr. Garnctt has shown that this is impos- 
 sible, because " Maid Marian " was completed 
 
 129 I
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 though not published before " Ivanhoe " made 
 its appearance. No two ways of treating the 
 Middle Ages more essentially different than 
 Scott's and Peacock's could well be imagined. 
 Scott wrote " Ivanhoe " because he thought 
 the public would be tired of the Land of 
 Cakes if he never crossed the Border. But 
 he had some portion of the antiquarian spirit, 
 and loved mediaeval chivalry, perhaps better 
 than he understood it. Peacock himself 
 described " Maid Marian," in a letter to 
 Shelley, dated the 29th of November 181 8, 
 as " a comic romance of the twelfth century, 
 which I shall make the vehicle of much 
 oblique satire on all the oppressions that are 
 done under the sun." But this hardly gives 
 any idea of the brightest and most fanciful 
 extravaganza ever inspired by forest trees and 
 rippling streams and poetic sentiment and 
 popular legend. The purest gem it contains 
 is that perfect lyric 
 
 " For the slender beech and the sapling oak 
 That grow by the shadowy rill, 
 You may cut down both at a single stroke, 
 
 You may cut down which you will. 
 But this you must know, that as long as they grow, 
 
 Whatever change may be, 
 You never can teach either oak or beech 
 To be aught but a greenwood tree." 
 130
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 Friar Tuck, otherwise Brother Michael, is 
 constitutionally incapable of making a con- 
 nected statement in prose. He is perpetually 
 breaking into verse, and his verse is always 
 of the best quality, strong, light, simple, and 
 melodious, Matilda, or Maid Marian, is the 
 most delicious of all Peacock's heroines, and 
 the devotion of the friar to her, "all in the 
 way of honesty," must be shared by every 
 reader of the story. Her father. Baron Fitz- 
 Water, who pretends to be her tyrannical 
 master and is really her submissive slave, dis- 
 plays Peacock's quaint, fantastic humour in 
 its most genial and jovial shape. When the 
 friar " kissed Matilda's forehead and walked 
 away without a song," we are to infer that 
 he was suffering from the violence of sup- 
 pressed emotion. But it was not many 
 minutes since he had sung, and not many 
 before that since he had got the better of 
 Matilda's noble parent in a verbal encounter 
 of considerable merit. 
 
 *' Ho ! ho ! friar ! " said the baron, '* sing- 
 ing friar, laughing friar, roaring friar, fight- 
 ing friar, hacking friar, thwacking friar ; 
 cracking, cracking, cracking friar; joke-crack- 
 ing, bottle-cracking, skull-cracking friar ! " 
 *' And, ho ! ho ! " said the friar, " bold baron, 
 131
 
 stray Leaves 
 
 old baron, sturdy baron, wordy baron, long 
 baron, strong baron, mighty baron, flighty 
 baron, mazed baron, crazed baron, hacked 
 baron, thwacked baron, cracked, cracked, 
 cracked baron ; bone-cracked, sconce-cracked, 
 brain-cracked baron." 
 
 Fooling, no doubt, but excellent fooling 
 all the same. To read " Maid Marian " is 
 like spending a long day in the country with 
 the company of the imagination, the best 
 company in the world. Peacock's knowledge 
 of human nature was limited. He saw weak- 
 nesses and oddities rather than character as a 
 whole. This it is which gives an air of 
 crudity to his books, and has even more than 
 their pedantry prevented them from being 
 appreciated by the general. Peacock is in 
 one respect like Carlyle, and Browning, and 
 Meredith. A taste for him is a taste which 
 he himself must give. We must make allow- 
 ance for his foibles, and grow accustomed to 
 his ways. But when we have fulfilled these 
 conditions, few authors wear better, or yield 
 more to those who read them again and again. 
 There is wit enough in a single dialogue, as 
 there is poetry enough in a single song, of 
 " Maid Marian " to make a literary reputa- 
 tion. " The Misfortunes of Elphin," for 
 _. 132
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 which I cannot share Professor Saintsbury's 
 enthusiasm (so much the worse for me), con- 
 tains, besides the lovely Song of the Four 
 Winds, the justly celebrated war-song of Dinas 
 Vawr, every line in which is golden, while the 
 first four verses are inimitable and better than 
 anything in Hookham Frere, as a specimen of 
 the mock heroic 
 
 " The mountain sheep are sweeter, 
 But the valley sheep are fatter ; 
 We therefore deemed it meeter 
 To carry off the latter." 
 
 But perhaps some acquaintance with Lady 
 Charlotte Guest's " Mabinogion," and some 
 familiarity with the " Dionysiaca " of Nonnus, 
 are necessary for the due appreciation of 
 Elphin and Taliessin. Peacock sometimes 
 forgets the words of Shakespeare which he 
 himself puts with such exquisite appropriate- 
 ness into the mouth of Marionetta. He does 
 not always deliver himself like a man of this 
 world. His want of invention, not of ima- 
 gination, and his love of eccentricity, led him 
 into strange and devious paths. 
 
 If we put personal predilections aside, 
 
 '* Crotchet Castle " is probably the book to 
 
 which the largest number of Peacock's admirers 
 
 would give the highest place. There are a 
 
 '33
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 gaiety, a vivacity, and a force in it which 
 carry the reader with ease and smoothness 
 from the first page to the last. The Rev. 
 Dr. FoUiott is the best of Peacock's clergymen, 
 by which I do not mean that he was a good 
 clergyman, nor anything of the kind. To 
 assist at the squire's dinner, to criticise his 
 cellar and his wine, accompanying his criticisms 
 with abundance of Greek and Latin, was in 
 Peacock's eyes the chief function of a beneficed 
 divine, the " educated gentleman " of the 
 parish. Dr. Folliott and Dr. Opimian, to say 
 nothing of Dr. Gaster and Mr. Portpipe, are 
 quite enough to justify the Oxford Move- 
 ment. Gaster and Portpipe, however, are simply 
 bibulous gluttons, hardly men at all. Folliott 
 of " Crotchet Castle " and Opimian of " Gryll 
 Grange " are capital as portraits. It is as 
 parsons that their inadequacy comes in. In- 
 capacity it can hardly be called. Their capacity 
 for eating and drinking may be favourably 
 described as Homeric, and unfavourably as 
 swinish. " I do not fancy hock," said Dr. 
 Folliott, " till I have laid a substratum of 
 Madeira." " Palestine soup " are the first 
 words which issue from the mouth of Dr. 
 Opimian, and he is left giving instructions 
 how to open simultaneously many bottles of 
 134
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 champagne. But Opimian and FoUiott are 
 not mere epicures. They are scholars, though 
 pedants, and proofs that a pedant may have 
 a sense of humour. There is nothing, for 
 instance, finer of its sort in all Peacock than 
 the conversation between Dr. Folliott and Mr. 
 Crotchet about the Sleeping Venus. Mr. 
 Crotchet, irritated by a magisterial order that 
 no plaster of Paris Venus should appear in 
 the streets of London without petticoats, 
 determined to fill his house with Venuses of 
 all sizes and kinds. Dr. Folliott, perceiving 
 this addition to his friend's furniture, suddenly 
 remembered his cloth, not, for once, the table- 
 cloth, and attempted experimentally a mild 
 protest. '* These little alabaster figures on the 
 mantelpiece, Mr. Crotchet, and those large 
 figures in the niches may I take the liberty 
 to ask you what they are intended to repre- 
 sent ^ " Mr. Crotchet's answer was not en- 
 couraging. " Venus, sir ; nothing more, sir ; 
 just Venus." " May I ask you, sir," proceeded 
 the reverend doctor, **why they are there?" 
 Mr, Crotchet was not embarrassed. *' To be 
 looked at, sir ; just to be looked at : the 
 reason for most things in a gentleman's house 
 being in it at all ; from the paper on the walls 
 and the drapery of the curtains even to the 
 US
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 books in the library, of which the most essential 
 part is the appearance of the back." The 
 dialogue is unhappily too long to quote in 
 full. Dr. FoUiott's austerity was partly as- 
 sumed, and there can be no doubt that he 
 enjoyed the discussion of the subject, if only 
 because it gave him an opportunity of showing 
 that he read the classics in the original, whereas 
 his friend only read them in cribs. His appeal 
 to Mr. Crotchet as a father, though futile, is 
 touching. " Now, sir, that little figure in the 
 centre of the mantelpiece as a grave pater- 
 familias^ Mr. Crotchet, with a fair nubile 
 daughter, whose eyes are like the fishpools 
 of Heshbon I would ask you if you hold 
 that figure to be altogether delicate." " The 
 Sleeping Venus, sir .? Nothing can be more 
 delicate than the entire contour of the figure, 
 the flow of the hair on the shoulders and neck, 
 the form of the feet and fingers. It is alto- 
 gether a most delicate morsel." Mr. Crotchet 
 was getting decidedly the best of it, and his 
 spiritual adviser took refuge in a gastronomic 
 metaphor. " Why, sir, in that sense, perhaps, 
 it is as delicate as whitebait in July. But the 
 attitude, sir, the attitude." Mr. Crotchet was 
 unyielding. " Nothing can be more natural, 
 sir." " That is the very thing, sir. It is too 
 136
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 natural, too natural, sir." And so forth, until 
 Mr. Crotchet, becoming, as Dr. Folliott re- 
 marks, rather weary, exclaims that to ** show 
 his contempt for cant in all its shapes he has 
 adorned his house with the Greek Venus in all 
 her shapes, and is ready to fight her battle 
 against all the societies that ever were instituted 
 for the suppression of truth and beauty.'* 
 
 *' Gryll Grange " is of all Peacock's novels 
 the most pedantic. It is strewn with quotations 
 from the classics, especially from Athenaeus, 
 and the friendship of Dr. Opimian for Mr. 
 Falconer arises from the remarkable fact that 
 they are both acquainted with Homer. The 
 story is not more interesting than the words 
 of Italian opera, and might almost have been 
 written for the songs, as the libretto of the 
 " Magic Flute " must have been written for 
 the music. Mr. Algernon Falconer and his 
 fantastic establishment of seven modest maidens 
 to wait upon one innocent bachelor lack the 
 verisimilitude which is literature's substitute 
 for truth. But the Reverend Dr. Opimian, 
 whose wife calls him *' doctor " even when they 
 are alone (and indeed his Christian name of 
 Theophilus is some excuse for her), is a per- 
 sonage such as only Peacock could create, a 
 pundit and an epicure, a dignified clergyman 
 37
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 who might have acted as chaplain to the 
 Rabelaisian brotherhood and sisterhood of 
 Thelema. Dr. Opimian is a variant of Dr. 
 FoUiott in " Crotchet Castle," and it is im- 
 possible to read of either without thinking 
 of Dr. Middleton in "The Egoist." But 
 indeed Dr. Opimian is quite as like Peacock 
 himself as Jonathan Oldbuck was like Walter 
 Scott. " I think, doctor," said Mrs. Opimian, 
 " you would not maintain any opinion if you 
 had not an authority two thousand years old 
 for it." "Well, my dear," was the reply, 
 '* I think most opinions worth mentioning have 
 an authority of about that age." In a charm- 
 ing and most appropriate note to this passage 
 Dr. Garnett mentions that one of Peacock's 
 last remarks to his old friend Trelawny was, 
 " Ah ! Trelawny, don't talk to me about any- 
 thing that has happened for the last two 
 thousand years." He was indeed a pure and 
 perfect Pagan born out of due time in an 
 uncongenial world of Tractarian Movements 
 and railway trains. His oddities were nume- 
 rous and ineradicable, following without dis- 
 placing one another. He was not much in 
 the habit of quoting Scripture. But there is a 
 text in Isaiah on which he could always have 
 preached. " Let us eat and drink, for to- 
 138
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 morrow we shall die,'* was the sum and sub- 
 stance of his philosophy. We find a tinge 
 of unwonted melancholy in his last book, as 
 of one bidding farewell to a long and happy 
 life, which suits well with his creed, and he 
 would have delighted in the melodiously fatal- 
 istic stanzas of Omar Khayyam. It is said 
 that in his last days, which were calm and 
 peaceful, his memory dwelt with continual 
 fondness upon a girl he used to meet in the 
 ruins of Newark Abbey, who died when he 
 was seventeen. His lovely poem, " Newark 
 Abbey," much admired, as Dr. Garnett tells 
 us, by Tennyson, is less appropriate to this 
 strange reversion, of which his granddaughter 
 was the witness, than those haunting lines 
 which begin with " What is he buzzing in my 
 ears .? " and ends with " How sad and bad and 
 mad it was But then, how it was sweet ! " 
 The poetry of *' Gryll Grange " is not as a 
 rule among Peacock's best. But the song 
 called "Love and Age" is unrivalled in all 
 the varied efforts of his muse for its simple 
 indefinable pathos. 
 
 '* There are some books," said the country 
 
 squire, " which it is a positive pleasure to 
 
 read." He was probably thinking of Surtees. 
 
 He was certainly not thinking of Peacock, 
 
 139
 
 stray Leaves 
 
 who, of all English authors, except perhaps 
 Burton and Southey, is the most bookish. One 
 must like Peacock because one likes reading. 
 One cannot like reading because one likes Pea- 
 cock. Peacock had an irritable and foolish 
 dislike of Scott, who appeals to all healthy 
 natures, whether they be literary or otherwise. 
 There was nothing in Scott, he said, which 
 could be quoted. It was a most characteristic 
 objection, and it is so far true that quotations 
 from Scott can hardly be confined to single 
 phrases or sentences. With Shakespeare Pea- 
 cock was familiar, for Shakespeare, as we all 
 know, is even too full of quotations. But, 
 indeed. Peacock's own pet authors, of whom 
 he never tired, from whom he seldom cared 
 to stray, were the classical writers of Greece 
 and Rome. They supplied him with an 
 inexhaustible fund of epigram, anecdote, and 
 illustration. Except his poetry and his 
 humour, they were the only intellectual 
 furniture he had. " Gryll Grange" might 
 well be edited for the use of schools as 
 an entertaining substitute for Bekker's 
 " Charicles," or the same learned writer's 
 "Gallus." He was perplexed by the tricks 
 which according to Athenaeus the Greeks 
 played with their wine, for he was not in the 
 140
 
 The Novels of Peacock 
 
 habit of mixing it even with fresh water, and 
 they arc said to have mixed it with water 
 from the sea. Dr. Folliott is even permitted, 
 but only because of his order, to express dis- 
 approval of the Athenian Aspasia, and the 
 Corinthian Lais. The Greeks in Peacock's eyes 
 were perfect. The darker features of their 
 life he ignored, or left to St. Paul. To him 
 they were simple people who made the best 
 of art and nature, of themselves and of the 
 world they inhabited. Rabelais he worshipped 
 for having restored something like the spirit 
 of ancient freedom, freedom to understand 
 and to enjoy. The sense of beauty penetrates 
 all his writings, and his most finished writing, 
 as in " Nightmare Abbey " or " Crochet 
 Castle," comes very near perfection. His 
 learning is so much enlightened with sense and 
 enlivened by humour that it never becomes 
 offensive and seldom becomes dull. When 
 the odd folk he sometimes brings together 
 grow quarrelsome over their cups, as in 
 " Headlong Hall," their differences are com- 
 posed by a glee or a catch. Peacock cared 
 not for the rules and restrictions which were 
 imposed on themselves by his beloved Greeks. 
 Except that he is never indecent, and that he 
 has not the great Frenchman's tremendous 
 141
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 force, he resembles Rabelais rather than 
 Lucian. Among Latin authors his favourite 
 was^ Tacitus, whose compactness of style, with 
 its undying charm for the literary palate, 
 exercised a noticeable influence upon his own. 
 His acquaintance with modern literature was 
 not wide, nor was his judgment of it sound. 
 He had none of his friend Charles Lamb's 
 genial catholicity in respect of all books that 
 deserved the name. The classics were his 
 Koran. What they did not contain was not 
 worth knowing. Short of offering sacrifices 
 to Jupiter and Venus, from which the fear 
 of ridicule, or perhaps the opinion of Cicero, 
 restrained him, he stuck at nothing which 
 was ancient, mature, and respectable. Even 
 in classical matters his taste was capricious. 
 But in spite of his irregularities, or perhaps 
 because of them, his books have an unfading 
 attraction for those who can relish them at all. 
 
 142
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 THE letter from Mr. Gladstone to 
 Lord Lyttelton on classical edu- 
 cation, which Mr. Morley has 
 printed in the appendix of his 
 second volume, expresses an opinion that 
 *' modem European civilisation, from the 
 Middle Age downwards, is the compound of 
 two great factors, the Christian religion for 
 the spirit of man, and the Greek, and in a 
 secondary degree the Roman, discipline for 
 his mind and intellect." Yet no one knew 
 better than Mr. Gladstone that Greek re- 
 ligion had exercised a profound influence 
 upon human thought. He indulged himself 
 in copious speculations on the subject, and 
 went astray because he had not the clue. 
 Miss Jane Harrison's " Prolegomena to the 
 Study of Greek Religion," published by the 
 University Press at Cambridge, is the modest 
 title of an original work founded on elaborate 
 research, and full of interest not only for 
 antiquaries and comparative mythologists, but 
 for every student of the language and litera- 
 ture without which the world would be quite 
 different from what we know it. With the 
 M3
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 materials and methods of Miss Harrison's 
 labours I am quite incompetent to deal, 
 though I think I can appreciate the sound- 
 ness of her learning and the acuteness with 
 which she argues her points. The fellowship 
 at Newnham, that has enabled her, she tells 
 us, to produce this book, is a singularly fruit- 
 ful example of intellectual endowment. Her 
 " Prolegomena " are more than an Introduc- 
 tion, which is all that that imposing word can 
 be made to signify. They contain the fullest 
 account that has yet been given of Greek ritual 
 before Homer. Miss Harrison begins with 
 snake-worship, and ends with the Orphic 
 mysteries. The rites and ceremonies, the 
 fancies and superstitions with which she deals, 
 were almost obsolete in Homer's time, or in 
 the time of the Homeric poems. The mytho- 
 logy of Homer is " sceptical and moribund 
 already in its very perfection." To those 
 who associate the Father of Poetry with the 
 undying freshness of wind from the sea, or 
 light from the stars, with a simplicity older 
 than self-conscious art, and with a closeness 
 to nature such as no one except our own 
 Chaucer has approached. Miss Harrison's 
 epithets may perhaps seem strange. But she 
 is applying them, of course, to Homer as a 
 144
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 mythologist, not to Homer as a poet. She 
 is contrasting his dim underworld of ghosts 
 and shades with the eternal punishment of the 
 Orphic eschatology, and his physical purifica- 
 tion of unclean dwellings with the moral atone- 
 ment which it originally symbolised. She is 
 thinking of the time when Zeus Meilichios, 
 the gracious father of gods and men, was wor- 
 shipped as a snake. So it appears from two 
 reliefs found at the Peiraeus, and now in the 
 museum at Berlin. This was the older 
 Chthonian worship upon which the Olympian 
 theology was imposed. 
 
 These investigations have their scientific 
 purpose and object in the development of 
 philosophical ideas. But they also serve to 
 illustrate Greek literature, and therefore all 
 literature from their day till our own. Under 
 Miss Harrison's treatment the oldest writers 
 are not always the most ancient. There may 
 be more antiquarianism in i?schylus than in 
 Homer, in Plutarch than in Aristophanes, in 
 Lucian even than in Thucydides. Theocritus 
 certainly did not worship Zeus as a snake, 
 even if he worshipped him at all. He was a 
 poet of the Court, as well as of the country, 
 and yet his second Idyll, perhaps the most 
 passionate utterance ever put by a poet into 
 145 K
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 the mouth of a woman, is the great authority 
 for ancient magic. The turning of a wheel, 
 the melting of a wax image, an invocation of 
 the moon, are the methods, familiar enough, 
 by which Simaetha avenges herself on Delphis, 
 her recreant lover, "the slave of Aphrodite 
 and of love." 
 
 " Turn, magic wheel, turn homeward him I love. 
 Even as I melt, not uninspired, the wax, 
 May Mindian Delphis melt this morn with love. 
 And, swiftly as this brazen wheel whirls round. 
 May Aphrodite whirl him to my door." 
 
 These lines are from Calverley's translation, 
 which Miss Harrison does not use. It is, I 
 think, one of the most brilliant ever made in 
 English from a classical author, though perhaps 
 this is not one of its most brilliant passages. 
 
 " Turn, magic wheel, turn homeward him. I love. 
 Next burn the husks. Hell's adamantine floor 
 And aught else that stands firm can Artemis move. 
 Thestylis, the hounds bay up and down the town : 
 The goddess stands i' the crossways : sound the gongs." 
 
 'A Qeo<s ev rpioSoiai is Diana of the Cross- 
 ways, whom our great novelist has made a 
 household word. But why are the gongs to be 
 sounded .? Artemis has been invoked, and the 
 brass is " apotropaic," meant to avert some evil 
 thing. It is not difficult to imagine that when 
 146
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 " fate and metaphysical aid " have been sum- 
 moned their approach may still be dreaded. 
 Don Giovanni invited the statue of the Com- 
 mendatore to supper, not believing that the 
 invitation would be accepted. When it was 
 accepted, and the Commendatore came, Don 
 Giovanni was alarmed, as well as surprised. 
 Nobody comes in this Idyll. The gong 
 counteracted the invocation, and the poem 
 ends with an address to the moon, hardly 
 surpassed even by Theocritus, the greatest 
 of all pastoral poets. From Theocritus Miss 
 Harrison passes to Aristophanes, because his 
 play of the *' Thesmophoriazusas " is called after 
 the Thesmophoria, a festival whereat curses were 
 uttered which Miss Harrison compares with 
 the Commination service for Ash Wednesday. 
 *' From the ' Thesmophoriazusae ' of Aristo- 
 phanes we learn almost nothing of the ritual 
 of the Thesmophoria save the fact that the 
 feast was celebrated on the Pnyx." But, at the 
 same time, if Aristophanes had not written the 
 *' Thesmophoriazusa:," we should not greatly 
 care to know what the Thesmophoria was, so 
 that literature may be the handmaid of those 
 higher studies which are severely superseding 
 it in learned societies like Cambridge. 
 
 In the " Thesmophoriazusa; " the women 
 >47
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 revenge themselves upon Euripides for mal- 
 treating them in his plays, which were too 
 moral and not religious enough for the great 
 comedian. In that astonishingly clever book, 
 "Euripides the Rationalist," so clever that 
 scarcely any one can help believing it while 
 he reads it, Dr. Verrall says that almost the 
 only charge of immorality Aristophanes could 
 bring against Euripides was founded on the 
 famous line in the " Hippolytus " " My 
 tongue has sworn, but my mind is not bound 
 by the oath." But if every dramatic author 
 were made responsible for all the sentiments 
 uttered by all his characters, iEschylus and 
 Sophocles would have been liable to the same 
 censure as Euripides. Aristophanes dealt with 
 the general tendency of an author whom he 
 regarded, if not as a " rationalist," at least as 
 a radical reformer and a bad playwright into 
 the bargain. Aristotle does not call him a 
 bad playwright. On the contrary, he says in 
 his " Poetics " that Euripides was " the most 
 tragic of poets," whatever that may mean. 
 Professor Butcher interprets it to signify that 
 Euripides had " the preference of the poet for 
 the true tragic ending," as in the " Medea," 
 " Hippolytus," and " Hecuba." But the play 
 of Euripides most closely connected with 
 148
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 religion is none of these, nor is it any of those 
 examined by Dr. Verrall to support his theory 
 that Euripides had a great moral purpose in 
 exposing a false and debasing theology. It is 
 the '* Bacchae " which contains one of the most 
 splendid descriptions of religious enthusiasm, 
 or superstitious madness, to be found in the 
 poetry of the world. The question whether 
 Euripides meant to write an encomium or a 
 satire has been the subject of much controversy 
 in modern times. Grote believed that he wished 
 in this wonderful drama, written at the close 
 of his life, '* to repel the imputations, so often 
 made against him, of commerce with the philo- 
 sophers and participation in sundry heretical 
 opinions." It is, however, extremely difficult 
 to accept the suggestion that then, or at any 
 other time, the author of the *' Alccstis," 
 familiar to English readers in " Balaustion's 
 Adventure," " favourably contrasted the un- 
 inquiring faith of the vulgar with the dis- 
 senting and inquisitive tendencies of sujierior 
 minds," though doubtless there are words in 
 the play which, construed literally, may be 
 taken to mean something of the sort. But 
 even if one cannot go all the way with Dr. 
 Verrall, who perhaps sees in Euripides more 
 than Euripides saw himself, one must at least 
 149
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 admit that there are insuperable difficulties in 
 the theory of Schlegel that he simply failed 
 where ^^Lschylus and Sophocles had succeeded. 
 And it is to be observed that Professor Bury, 
 in his excellent " History of Greece," written 
 on much better principles than those which 
 he laid down in his inaugural lecture at Cam- 
 bridge, takes Dr. Verrall's view as established. 
 " Euripides," says Mr. Bury, " used the tragic 
 stage to disseminate rationalism ; he under- 
 mined the popular religion from the very steps 
 of the altar. By the necessity of the case he 
 accomplished his work indirectly, but with 
 consummate dexterity. iEschylus and Sopho- 
 cles had reverently modified religious legend, 
 adapting it to their own ideals, interpreting it 
 so as to satisfy their own moral standard. 
 Euripides takes the myths just as he finds 
 them, and contrives his dramas so as to bring 
 the absurdities into relief." He must, then, 
 have been sarcastic if he meant to adopt him- 
 self the language which he assigns in the 
 " Bacchae " to Teiresias. " We make no 
 speculations about divine beings. No theory 
 will ever destroy the traditions, or the feelings, 
 which in our own lifetime we have acquired, 
 not even if the theory has been discovered by 
 the highest intellects." 
 
 150
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 Although the religion of which Miss Harri- 
 son traces the origin was merely traditional 
 in classical, even in Homeric, times, it explains 
 and illustrates much that would otherwise be 
 obscure in Greek literature, while for Greek 
 art it is indispensable. Miss Harrison's book, 
 a really great book, as well as a truly learned 
 one, is made not only more attractive, but very 
 much clearer, by beautiful illustrations from 
 ancient vases and reliefs. But they are much 
 more than illustrations. They are evidence, 
 sometimes the only evidence, of the way in 
 which myths grew, and legends were under- 
 stood, and gods were worshipped in this form 
 or that. The frenzy of the " Bacchae," who 
 are rather profanely compared by Miss Harri- 
 son with the Hallelujah lasses of the Salvation 
 Army, is essentially feminine. Perhaps few 
 people realised before the appearance of these 
 " Prolegomena " how feminine the origin of 
 Greek religion was. If many of Miss Harrison's 
 pages appeal, chiefly to adepts in archaeology, 
 her delightful chapter on " The Making of 
 a Goddess " should be read by every one who 
 cares for the history of art. The religion of 
 Greece is not peculiar in lx:ing anthropomorphic. 
 The familiar lines qf Xenophanes arc an anti- 
 cipation of the terrible comment made by 
 >5
 
 stray Leaves 
 
 Voltaire upon the words " In the image of 
 God made He man." " // Pa bien rendu^'' 
 said the Frenchman. Xenophanes wrote that, 
 as mortal man made gods in his own likeness, 
 so oxen, lions, and horses, if they had hands, 
 would make gods equine, gods leonine, gods 
 bovine. There was a time when the Greeks 
 worshipped a snake for Zeus, a mare for 
 Demeter, and a fish for Artemis. When the 
 Greek mind passed out of this stage, it did 
 not proceed at once to the adoration of human 
 and masculine divinities. St. Augustine, of 
 all people, tells a curious story to explain how 
 the Athenian women lost the franchise. The 
 competing claims of Athene and Poseidon were 
 referred to universal suffrage. For in those 
 days, it seems, the people elected their own 
 gods. The vote was according to sex, and 
 Athene headed the poll by a bare majority. 
 After this women were never allowed to 
 vote again, nor to call their children by 
 their own names, a senseless practice which 
 breeds confusion. The supremacy thus lost 
 originated with Earth, the mother of all 
 things, called by Homer (pva-i^oog^ life-giving, 
 as in the lovely passage from the third 
 book of the "Iliad," where Helen on the 
 walls of Troy condoles with her brethren, 
 152
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 Castor and Polydeuces, not knowing that 
 they were dead. 
 
 " So said she : they long since in earth's soft arms 
 were reposing. 
 There in their own dear land, their fatherland 
 Lacedaemon." 
 
 ** Earth's soft arms " is Dr. Hawtrey*s free 
 translation of (pva-ll^ooi. But with the instinct 
 of a scholar he keeps nearer to Homer's true 
 meaning than Ruskin, who, in his strange 
 fanciful way, imagines that Homer could not 
 think of death without also thinking of life. 
 Homer could use a fixed epithet without 
 thinking at all. But the universal mother is 
 represented on vases as ttotvcu Btjpwv^ lady of 
 the wild things, holding out her hands over 
 the animals, her subjects. The Lady of the 
 Wild Things was the goddess of a hunting 
 age. When man became agricultural there 
 was a goddess of fertility, a fruit-bearing 
 goddess, Demeter, nowhere more gloriously 
 honoured than in the seventh Idyll, the Har- 
 vest Home, of Theocritus, where she stands 
 and smiles before her shrine, holding sheaves 
 and poppies in both her hands, 
 
 "Spay/iara Kat fjuiKiovas Iv dfiif>',Tfpjjatv <;(Oicra." 
 
 I scarcely know another instance of words so 
 ^S3
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 absolutely simple invested with such magical, 
 inexplicable charm. The " Highland Reaper '* 
 might be quoted. But Wordsworth's art is 
 greater, as his ideas are higher. It is to 
 association, not to a mere picture, that he 
 appeals. Demeter, as every one knows, was 
 the mother of Persephone, the goddess of the 
 regions below, " who gathers all things mortal 
 with cold, immortal hands." Demeter ascended 
 to Olympus, and became part of the Olympian 
 theology. The early deification of women pro- 
 duced maiden trinities, of which there are curious 
 specimens on votive reliefs. Miss Harrison 
 discerns in them three persons and one goddess. 
 But this conception is only attributed to very 
 early work, where it may be due to imperfect 
 art, as other mysterious semblances are due 
 to imperfect observation. Certainly nothing 
 Trinitarian, except the number Three, is left 
 in the Judgment of Paris. Paris himself is 
 absent from the older representations of this 
 scene, which typifies and symbolises the diffi- 
 culty of choice without reference to the par- 
 ticular object chosen. Aphrodite is not always 
 rising from the sea. She is also of the earth, 
 and she is represented on a vase as " sailing 
 through heaven on her great swan." But 
 perhaps the most beautiful composition in 
 154
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 which she figures is the Ludovisi throne, now 
 in the National Museum at Rome. A hasty 
 observer would call it the Venus Anadyomene, 
 and would speak of it as the Goddess of Love 
 rising from the sea. There is no sea, though 
 the women who hold her up stand on sloping 
 banks of shingle. This sculptured- slab belongs 
 to the period just before Pheidias, which some 
 critics regard as the most exquisite of all, and 
 certainly there are few things so beautiful, even 
 in Italy. Whether she be ascending from the 
 ocean, or from a sacred river, or from a ritual 
 bath, she is a joy for ever. Aphrodite is the 
 most human form of feminine divinity, as 
 Byron recognised in his irreverent couplet, and 
 Lucretius in his " rich ProcEmion." When 
 the worship of the Earth Mother and of 
 the Earth Maids passed over to Zeus and 
 the new hierarchy of Olympus, " the great 
 Monotheistic figure of Venus Genetrix " re- 
 minded later ages that the origin of all things, 
 whether Ge or Hera, Athene or Aphrodite, 
 belonged to the feminine gender. And now 
 that every trace of her worship, at least of her 
 religious worship, has disappeared from the 
 world, at least from the western world, the 
 old matriarchal theory survives the centuries 
 which have rolled over the dethroned altars 
 '55
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 of Paganism, in the solemn words " Man that 
 is born of a woman." 
 
 Miss Harrison's chapters on Orphism are 
 the most soHd and consecutive part of her 
 religious history. They bring back the mind 
 by degrees to that mysterious play of Euripides 
 already cited, from which comes so much of 
 what we know about the religion of Greece. 
 It is a remarkable accident that has left us in 
 this matter to the dramatist who had least 
 sympathy with the popular faith of his country- 
 men. For iEschylus, too, wrote a drama, of 
 which religious frenzy' was the subject, and 
 two tantalising fragments of it have been pre- 
 served by Strabo. iEschylus himself could 
 hardly have produced a finer composition than 
 the " Bacchae." But, if he had, there would 
 have been no dark problems about his mean- 
 ing. He could not have been suspected of 
 turning the whole subject into ridicule. His 
 lines on the mysterious music with which 
 homage was paid to Dionysus have been pre- 
 served, and thus brilliantly translated by Miss 
 Harrison : 
 
 " The shawm blares out, but beneath is the moan 
 Of the bull-voiced mimes, unseen, unknown, 
 And in deep diapason the shuddering sound 
 Of drums like thunder beneath the ground." 
 156
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 If Miss Harrison had been able to give the 
 Greek as well as the English of this fragment, 
 numbered ^^ in the iEschylean collection, it 
 would be seen that bull-voiced mimes is a 
 literal, perhaps a too literal, translation, and 
 that " mimes," or actors, must have bellowed 
 in honour of their Bromios, their boisterous 
 god, although Miss Harrison derives the name 
 from ^p6/xo9^ oats, thus tracing him to the 
 Earth-Goddess on the one hand, and account- 
 ing for the intoxication of his votaries, because 
 wine can be made, so the Emperor Julian said, 
 of barley, if not of oats. Herodotus speaks of 
 Bacchic and Orphic rites as identical, further 
 describing them as Egyptian and Pythagorean. 
 The worship of Orpheus is as old as the 
 hills, or at least older than the wall-paintings 
 of Pompeii, where he figures as a magical 
 musician, "with power over all wild untamed 
 things in nature." Orpheus, says Miss Har- 
 rison, though killed by the Masnads, as Milton 
 in " Lycidas " reminds us, was also buried by 
 "the Maenads repentant, clothed, and in their 
 right minds," or, in other words, by the Muses. 
 This typifies the fact that Orphism is a spiritual 
 ecstasy, far removed from the orgies associated 
 with the worship of Bacchus. Concerning 
 the death of Orpheus there is a singular 
 57
 
 stray Leaves 
 
 passage in the most artistically beautiful of 
 all Plato's dialogues, which may be called in 
 some sense a part of English literature, because 
 it contains a prophecy of Shakespeare and has 
 been translated by Shelley. The subject of 
 the " Symposium," or, in less barbarous lan- 
 guage, the " Banquet," is love, and at the end 
 of his contribution to it Phaedrus describes the 
 fate of Orpheus when he visited the realms 
 of Dis in search of Eurydice. The gods sent 
 him away empty-handed, and only showed 
 him a phantom of his wife, because they 
 thought him an effeminate lute-player, who 
 durst not die for his love, like Alcestis, but 
 sought out inventions for making his way 
 alive into Hades. For this cause therefore 
 they inflicted as a punishment on him that 
 his death should be at the hands of women. 
 Phaedrus, in his discourse, was using an argu- 
 ment, and making a point. It was his busi- 
 ness, his part of the evening's entertainment, 
 to prove that extreme devotion to a beloved 
 object was the highest form of human virtue. 
 Achilles showed this in the case of Patroclus, 
 whose death he avenged at the cost of his 
 own life, and Alcestis showed it by dying 
 for her unworthy husband Admetus. Alcestis 
 was rewarded by restoration to the world she 
 158
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 had left, and Achilles by removal to the 
 islands of the blest. In Euripides, according 
 to Dr. Verrall, Alcestis never really dies, and 
 her resurrection is a sham. yEschylus, in a 
 lost drama, is recorded to have made the 
 Bassarids, or Maenads, who killed Orpheus, 
 the messengers of Dionysus himself, whose 
 wrath was kindled by the blasphemy of 
 Orpheus in prostrating himself before the 
 sun. Well might Socrates maintain in the 
 "Republic" that popular religion was not to be 
 reconciled with the first principles of morality. 
 The head of Orpheus was buried in Lesbos, 
 and the nightingales sang over it their sweetest 
 songs. It gave oracles in the name of Apollo, 
 and in the good old style, which could not be 
 wrong, because it could be made to square 
 with any event. Orphism became a recognised 
 creed, and was widely spread in Greece long 
 before classical times. As Orphism prevailed 
 in Crete, the discoveries now being made in 
 that island, perhaps the most important since 
 the study of archaeology began, may throw 
 a good deal of light upon Orphic rites and 
 ceremonies. Orphism, says Professor Bury, 
 rested on three institutions. One was the 
 worship of Dionysus, another was the mysteries 
 of the world below, the third was the order 
 '59
 
 stray Leaves 
 
 of itinerant prophets. Pythagoras was an 
 Orphic, and founded an ascetic brotherhood 
 in Italy, with which the Horatian " bean of 
 Pythagoras " has made us familiar. The 
 Pythagoreans were oligarchical in politics, and 
 about the middle of the fifth century before 
 Christ they were destroyed by the democratic 
 party. Mr. Bury believes that if Orphism, 
 instead of colouring the poetry of Pindar 
 and i^schylus, had taken hold of public 
 opinion, the priests would have become the 
 rulers of the people and would have set up 
 a sacerdotal system in place of civil govern- 
 ment. It affected, however, a passage in a 
 great poem, compared with which all institu- 
 tions then existing in the world were transient 
 and ephemeral. The eleventh book of the 
 " Odyssey " tells how Ulysses and his com- 
 panions, by the instructions of Circe, came to 
 the land of the Cimmerians enveloped in 
 cloud and darkness, that they might bring 
 up the souls of those whom in this life they 
 had known, and of the prophet Teiresias, 
 who foretells their destruction if they eat 
 the oxen of the Sun. It was then that by 
 the shore of that ocean which Homer, or the 
 author of the " Odyssey," supposed to encircle 
 the globe, Ulysses dug a trench with his 
 1 60
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 sword, and poured out three libations for 
 the dead. The first was honey and milk, the 
 second was wine, and over all he sprinkled 
 barley. By these means he brought up the 
 dead, as the witch of Endor brought up 
 Samuel for Saul. This wonderful episode is 
 supposed to have been revised with inter- 
 polations by Onomacritus, working under 
 Pisistratus, who procured the Homeric poems 
 to be edited and written down. There is no 
 torture, no actual punishment, in the Hades 
 of Homer. It is a grey, dim region, without 
 light or warmth or colour, but not a world 
 of pain, except in special cases, such as Tityus 
 with his vulture, Tantalus with, or rather 
 without, his water, and Sisyphus with his 
 stone. Of Heracles a mere image was to 
 be seen. He himself was feasting with the 
 immortal gods, and had Hebe of the fair 
 ankles for his companion. What Plato or 
 the Platonic Socrates thought of Orphic 
 eschatology we know from the second book 
 of the " Republic." Musasus and his son 
 Eumolpus were, says Socrates, stranger in 
 their notions of what was truly good, and 
 should therefore be given as a reward to 
 the righteous, than even Homer and Hesiod. 
 H'or when they bring the just to the life
 
 stray Leaves 
 
 beyond the grave, they recline them on 
 couches, and prepare for them a banquet 
 of holy things, and make them spend their 
 whole time crowned and drunk, deeming 
 perpetual inebriation to be the fairest reward 
 of virtue. And they spin yet longer tales 
 than these on divine authority, such as that 
 good and just men leave behind them a long 
 line of descendants, while the wicked have 
 a bad reputation in life, and after death 
 are put into baths of mud, or made to draw 
 water in a sieve. Against materialism in 
 religion Socrates never ceased to protest, and 
 so far he was in agreement with Euripides 
 the Rationalist. He brought religion to the 
 test of morality, and he found that it signally 
 failed. His own inward monitor, his negative 
 conscience, a restraining not a propelling force, 
 was the only guide he had which could in 
 any sense be called prasternatural. No one 
 can read the "Apology," the speech of 
 Socrates to the jury who condemned him, 
 and doubt that he sincerely believed in the 
 reality of this inner light. For even if 
 Plato invented all the rest of the speech, 
 he certainly did not invent that. When the 
 Olympian hierarchy had followed the Orphic 
 mysteries into the dimness of legendary tradi- 
 162
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 tion, and had no more influence upon conduct 
 than a fairy tale, there remained the fact that 
 Orpheus was a real man who had sought 
 eternal life through purity. Yet, although 
 in the greatest and best known ages of 
 Greece religion was little more than the 
 embellishment of literature and the handmaid 
 of art, we have to reconstruct it before we 
 can fully understand either one or the other. 
 And if it be said that to explain religion 
 by art, and art by religion, is to argue in 
 a circle, we may reply that when a sufficient 
 number of particular instances have estab- 
 lished a general rule, the rule itself can 
 in its turn be used for the solution of what 
 is still obscure. The wholesome scepticism 
 which research engenders should be a pre- 
 servative against riding even hobbies too 
 hard. 
 
 " Excepting Aristotle," says Mr. Murray in 
 his essay on Euripides, *' excepting Aristotle, 
 who clung characteristically to the concrete 
 city and the dutiful taxpaying citizen, all the 
 great leaders of Greek thought turned away 
 from the world and sought refuge in the 
 soul." Euripides, the critics tell us, wrote 
 the " Bacchas " after he had left Athens in 
 disgrace, and when he was living under the 
 163
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 protection of Archelaus, King of Macedonia. 
 The story of the play is simple and horrible. 
 Dionysus comes to Thebes, and the people will 
 not worship him. He makes them worship 
 him '* with a vengeance," with the wildness of 
 unrestrained religious emotion. Pentheus, the 
 King of Thebes, insults the god, intrudes upon 
 his mystic rites, and is torn to pieces by the 
 god-intoxicated Bacchanals, including his own 
 mother. Agave. It is not to be supposed that 
 Euripides intended by his magnificent setting 
 of this repulsive fable to inculcate fanaticism, 
 or hold it up for admiration. His sojourn 
 with King Archelaus would not have been a 
 good opportunity for expressing sympathy with 
 the murderers of King Pentheus. Plato in the 
 " Republic " quotes a line of Euripides, not 
 from any extant play, affirming that despots 
 become wise by associating with wise men, and 
 sarcastically remarks that the poet was speaking 
 of kings he had known. Yet if, as is said, the 
 Athenian democracy punished Euripides for 
 impiety, it was an honour which he shared 
 with the greatest of Athenians, the father of 
 scientific knowledge. 
 
 I think it is Bayle who says of Cicero that 
 his religion was in his heart and not in his 
 mind, that it was an instinct of his nature, with 
 164
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 which his philosophical theories had nothing 
 to do. Cicero's philosophy, though it has had 
 millions of readers who knew little or nothing 
 of its source, did not profess to be original. 
 He derived it from Plato, or from Socrates, or 
 from both. Greek metaphysics, Greek ethics, 
 Greek thought in general, culminated after the 
 political power of Greece, or at least of Athens, 
 had already begun to decline. Upon the con- 
 temporaries of Socrates, still more upon the 
 younger generation of his illustrious disciple, 
 the orthodox religion, the religion of the States 
 had ceased to exercise any practical influence. 
 Men were philosophers, or they were pure 
 materialists, unless indeed they were one and 
 the other at the same time. The main interest 
 of such books as Miss Harrison's, except for 
 highly cultivated specialists like herself, is the 
 help they give us in the study of literature and 
 art. Even in the Platonic age this was not far 
 from the truth. That part of the case against 
 Socrates which charged him with undermining 
 the foundations of faith would have been per- 
 fectly accurate if they had not been already 
 undermined. People do not like to be re- 
 minded of the difference between their theory 
 and their practice, or to be told that they have 
 ceased sincerely to hold the doctrines they 
 165
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 have inherited by tradition. If few verdicts 
 are more difficult to justify, few are less diffi- 
 cult to understand, than the condemnation of 
 Socrates. Of later ages, when Christians burnt 
 each other because they believed too much or 
 too little, it has been well asked and answered 
 " Who lights the fagot } 'Tis not the firm 
 faith, but the lurking doubt." The jury who 
 found Socrates to be an atheist were probably 
 sceptics to a man. So were those, if the 
 story be true, who procured the banishment 
 of Euripides. Diffi^rent as the two men of 
 genius were in their views of life, and in their 
 comparative estimate of human affairs, they 
 agreed in their use of the popular religion. 
 They both employed it to illustrate and adorn, 
 to supply examples which would be under- 
 stood, to give local colour. Plato, though he 
 constantly attacked Homer as the fount and 
 origin of an immoral habit, a habit of mingling 
 truth with falsehood under the glamour of 
 eloquence and verse, could not get away from 
 him, and quoted him as men of all opinions 
 now quote the Bible, because every one will 
 recognise the quotation. Euripides taught his 
 moral by means of a mythology which all his 
 hearers, and all his readers, think what they 
 might of it, knew by heart, just as St. Paul 
 i66
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 laid hold of the admission that there were 
 Athenians who worshipped an unknown God. 
 
 In that marvellous dialogue, the " Gorgias," 
 of which not the least wonderful feature is 
 that it was written four hundred years before 
 Christ, the examples of Tantalus, and Tityus, 
 and Sisyphus are put forward to show that 
 kings and princes and dictators are punished 
 beycnd the grave on a scale proportionate to 
 their offences. Just as St. James told the rich 
 men to weep and howl for the miseries that 
 were come upon them, so Plato or his master 
 picked out the great and mighty upon earth for 
 the future punishment which Homer borrowed 
 from -.he Orphic creed. Private persons, such 
 as Th;rsites, have not, Socrates remarks, been 
 depicted as undergoing these torments, because 
 luckily for them they had not the opportunity 
 of committing great crimes. They were not, 
 therefore, as Jowett says, counted worthy of 
 eternal damnation. In the " Gorgias," Socrates 
 seems to accept for the sake of the argument 
 the authority of Homer, which in the " Re- 
 public " he repudiates altogether. If poets 
 were regarded as moral teachers, or faithful 
 historians, they were a danger to the State. 
 But they were valuable as witnesses to that 
 common opinion of mankind which they fol- 
 167
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 lowed even when they seemed to lead it. Such 
 appears to have been the general attitude of 
 the Platonic Socrates towards the mythology 
 of the poets. There is, however, a cur;ous 
 and interesting exception. The passage in the 
 " Odyssey " which describes Minos bearing his 
 golden sceptre, and giving laws to the deid, 
 is quoted by Socrates in the " Gorgias " "vrith 
 all seriousness as the embodiment of a solemn 
 reality. He is convinced, he says, of its truth, 
 and he so orders his life that he may present 
 his soul in all possible purity to Minos> the 
 judge. These, he adds, are regarded as old 
 wives' fables by enlightened young men like 
 Callicles and Polus and Gorgias, whom he is 
 addressing. Yet, though they are the wisest 
 of living Greeks they have nothing better to 
 propound than the stories they reject. He is 
 not seriously arguing, he would be the last 
 man to argue, that Orphism, or any other 
 theology, must be adopted by every man who 
 cannot provide a substitute. He did not be- 
 lieve in the divine origin of the " Odyssey." 
 He asks how this doctrine of future retribu- 
 tion came into existence, and he answers that 
 it testifies to an indwelling sentiment of the 
 human mind. The more purely human it is, 
 the stronger his case becomes. The outward 
 i68
 
 The Religion of the Greeks 
 
 signs and symbols of earthly greatness, the 
 pomp of power, and the apparent impunity 
 with which it is abused ; the cynical indiffer- 
 ence of tyrants like Archelaus to everything 
 except their own interests and their own 
 pleasure ; the oppression of the good, the 
 triumph of the wicked, the open and success- 
 ful appeal to force as stronger than justice ; 
 all these things excuse, or at least explain, the 
 blunt assertion of Callicles that might is right, 
 or, as the modern blasphemer put it, that God 
 is always on the side of the strongest battalions. 
 " Yes," says Socrates, " that may be all very 
 well. You account, or you think you have 
 accounted, for the superficial aspect of things. 
 But how do you explain these stories of Minos, 
 and i^acus and Rhadamanthus ; of the stone, 
 and the sieve, and the wheel ? Homer did not 
 invent them. They are forms of the universal 
 belief, which no cynical paradoxes will ever 
 expel from the human mind, that the difference 
 between right and wrong is eternal, that it is 
 more blessed to be the victim than the author 
 of injustice." That the wisdom of this world 
 is foolishness with God might be called the text 
 or motto of the " Gorgias." The problems 
 with which it deals are for the most part 
 simple and elementary. When Callicles looked 
 169
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 at the little tyrants of Greek or Sicilian cities, 
 and saw that they came in no misfortune like 
 other folk, neither were plagued like other 
 men, he drew the inference which was not new 
 then, and is not old now, that it was wisest for 
 each man to imitate them in his own sphere. 
 Socrates was not content with vanquishing Cal- 
 licles in argument. He took him into the king- 
 dom of Minos, that he might understand the 
 end of these men. That was the use he made of 
 Greek religion. Himself guided, or at least 
 restrained, by his " dzemonic" conscience, he ap- 
 pealed to popular mythology, not as evidence 
 of facts, but as an indication of certain tenden- 
 cies in the human mind. If, as Miss Harrison 
 says, " the last word in ancient Greek religion 
 was said by the Orphics," it was capable of 
 being moulded by the hands of philosophical 
 genius into the austere and sublime morality 
 which made Thesetetus exclaim : *' If you could 
 persuade all men, Socrates, of what you say, as 
 you persuade me, there would be more peace 
 and less evil in the world." 
 
 170
 
 Bishops and Historians^ 
 
 NO bishop's letters are less epis- 
 copal, or more amusing, than the 
 letters of Dr. Stubbs. Stubbs was 
 thoroughly clerical, and severely 
 orthodox. But a bishop, except in name, he 
 was not. From the bottom of his soul, and in 
 almost equal proportions, he hated ceremony, 
 fuss, and waste of time. An old-fashioned 
 High Churchman by conviction, detesting 
 Erastianism with all the fervour of Becket, he 
 had no respect for the outward symbols of 
 Ritualism, and preferred an umbrella to a 
 pastoral staff. Simply and deeply religious, 
 he could not resist making fun of what he 
 despised, and he despised everything that was 
 not real. Learned as Germans are learned, 
 to an extent and in a degree which make an 
 Englishman a prodigy, he passed the second 
 half of his long and active career among men 
 who hardly knew what it was that he studied. 
 He described himself as unable to read any 
 book except one which began with a B, 
 
 ' " letters of William Slublw, Bishop of Oxford." Edited by 
 William Ilolden I lutton, B.D. London: Archibald Constable and 
 Co., Ltd., 1904. 
 
 171
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 meaning Bradshaw^ and as having no time to 
 take a seidlitz powder. About his friend and 
 younger contemporary, Dr. Creighton, there 
 may be much argument, and two opinions. 
 For, though there were many bishops, and 
 only one man who could finish the " History 
 of the Papacy During the Reformation," nobody 
 could deny that Creighton made a very good 
 bishop indeed. 
 
 Not even his faithful editor, Mr. Hutton, 
 can assert as much of Stubbs. Except personal 
 religion and personal kindness, he had no epis- 
 copal qualities at all. He was not a preacher, 
 or an administrator, or an organiser, or a man 
 of business. He did not suffer fools gladly ; 
 he cared nothing for music ; he thoroughly 
 disliked all shows ; he was not at home in 
 Convocation, or in London society, or in 
 the House of Lords ; his politics were pure 
 Toryism of the most uncompromising kind. 
 Of the statesmanship which restrains followers, 
 or conciliates opponents, he never showed a 
 trace. He would have thought it " under- 
 hand." He could not away with dissenters; and 
 when a Wesleyan school asked for an " occa- 
 sional monitor," he suggested that the Non- 
 conformist conscience was meant Of lawyers 
 he had a holy horror, so that the mere fact of 
 172
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 a clergyman being under the ban of the Courts 
 gave him a claim upon Stubbs's sympathies. 
 He was so little a man of the world that, 
 when he sat with Lord Coleridge on the Ritual 
 Commission, he marvelled to find the Lord 
 Chief Justice of England an Erastian, or be- 
 liever in the supreme authority of the State. 
 None of these peculiarities prevented Stubbs 
 from being a true historian, or a most lovable 
 man. A clergyman who had them all could 
 only have become a good bishop by a miracle ; 
 and the age of miracles has ceased. 
 
 The character of Dr. Stubbs must inspire 
 even those who did not know him with rever- 
 ence and affection. It is indeed wholesome to 
 read of a life so honest, simple, manly, and 
 true. The idea of cant or pretence was loath- 
 some to him. When he was bored by a long 
 service, with many hymns, he said so. Most 
 things did bore him, except history, real re- 
 ligion, and fun. His humour was irrepressible; 
 and he seldom attempted to repress it. He 
 did not even require an audience. I remember, 
 when 1 was at Oxford, contemplating with awe 
 the Professor of History, as he read in the 
 Union a magazine which contained a review by 
 Mr. PVoude of Sir George Trevelyan's " Life 
 of Macaulay." Suddenly he got up, and put 
 
 m
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 down his Fraser with the muttered words : 
 " When rhetoricians fall out, historians may 
 come by their own." That seems to me more 
 artistic than Mr. Hutton's solemn description 
 of Hallam as " the strangest of all pretenders 
 to impartiality where any Churchman or 
 Church question was concerned." Hallam was 
 a Whig. Stubbs was a Tory. It is possible 
 to admire one without sneering at the other ; 
 and Stubbs, at least, paid Hallam the com- 
 pliment of stopping where he began. Mr. 
 Hutton is apparently a prey to the delusion 
 that there can be only one kind of history and 
 one kind of historian. Stubbs never forgot 
 that he was a clergyman, or, as Mr. Hutton 
 says, a Churchman. But it would be as bigoted 
 to complain of him on that ground, as to find 
 fault with Hallam for taking the side of the 
 laity. Stubbs, like Hallam, had his prejudices ; 
 like Hallam, he was human, and he was always 
 loyal to the Church he served. What was 
 perhaps most admirable and most touching 
 was the quaint homeliness, the simple modesty 
 with which he concealed his vast store of 
 laboriously acquired information. Not even 
 the self-sacrificing generosity with which, in 
 spite of his large family, he cut down all 
 needless expenses that he might have more 
 174
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 to give away, is so truly Christian as his un- 
 natural freedom from the pride of intellect or 
 knowledge. 
 
 It was no easy path to learning that he took. 
 Although he came of a good old Yorkshire 
 stock, and his forebears had been yeomen time 
 out of mind, his father could not send him to a 
 public school, or to a good school of any kind ; 
 and he would not have gone to Oxford if he 
 had not been taken as a servitor at Christchurch. 
 He had, of course, great natural ability, and a 
 memory which never failed him. But he read 
 prodigiously before he won his First Class and 
 his Fellowship at Trinity. If he owed his early 
 chance to Archbishop Longley, whom he always 
 gratefully revered, from the moment he set 
 foot in Christchurch he did everything for 
 himself. He was never tired of reading, and 
 he never forgot what he read. If he had 
 become a College Tutor, he would certainly 
 have been popular, and would probably have 
 written some of the wittiest rhymes in the 
 Oxford anthology. In this respect he began 
 badly, as Mr. Hutton needlessly illustrates. 
 But he steadily improved ; and his well-known 
 lines on Froude and Kingsley, too familiar 
 for quotation, have all the marks of a good 
 epigram, except brevity. On the other hand, 
 7S
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 he found the country, as Creighton found it 
 after him, propitious for a student's life. He 
 had no great love of it in itself; and he re- 
 garded two daily services in his church as an 
 obligation. Like Creighton, he took pupils, 
 one of whom was Mr. Swinburne. Here, 
 again, Mr. Hutton is unfortunate, and with 
 less excuse than before. Because Mr. Swin- 
 burne wrote him a warm and affectionate letter 
 about his old tutor, Mr, Hutton must needs 
 make a personal attack upon the late Master of 
 Balliol, to whom Mr. Swinburne was sincerely 
 and deeply attached. Although there was not 
 much in common between Stubbs and Jowett, 
 they were on friendly terms ; and Stubbs became 
 Chaplain at Balliol while Jowett was Master. 
 But even a '* Churchman " is intolerable to 
 Mr. Hutton, when he happens to be a Broad 
 Churchman. While vicar of Navestock, in 
 Essex, Stubbs was also a guardian of the 
 poor and a diocesan inspector of schools. 
 When Archbishop Longley was translated 
 from York to Canterbury, in 1862, he made 
 Stubbs librarian at Lambeth, and in 1863 
 his appointment by Sir John Romilly, to 
 edit for the famous " Rolls Series " the 
 " Chronicles of Richard the First," was a vast 
 benefit to learning. His characters of Richard 
 176.
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 himself, of Dunstan, of Henry the Second, of 
 Edward the First, proved to historical students 
 that a new historian had arisen, compared with 
 whom Brewer, and Luard, and Shirley were 
 mere antiquaries and Dryasdusts. Although 
 Stubbs was rather afraid of eloquence, and 
 picturesque historians, such as Macaulay, did 
 not appeal to him, yet few men could be 
 more eloquent than he, or more vividly epi- 
 grammatic. Take, for instance, the contrast 
 between Richard and Saladin, which is much 
 more than the " trick of telling phrase " that 
 Mr. Hutton calls it. 
 
 " Saladin was a good heathen, Richard a bad 
 Christian ; set side by side, there is not much 
 to choose between them ; judged each by his 
 own standard, there is very much. Could 
 they have changed faith and place, Saladin 
 would have made a better Christian than 
 Richard, and Richard, perhaps, no worse 
 heathen than Saladin ; but Saladin's possible 
 Christianity would have been as far above 
 his actual heathenism as Richard's possible 
 heathenism would have been above his actual 
 Christianity." 
 
 Mr. Hutton has missed the point. Tricks 
 of phrase do not produce passages like this. 
 It is because Stubbs knew the two men, by 
 177 M
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 study and insight, as a contemporary knew 
 them, that he could describe them from the 
 soul outwards, not from the skin inwards. 
 Stubbs's perfect singleness of mind and dis- 
 interested love of truth for its own sake, his 
 native Yorkshire shrewdness, combined with 
 the thoroughness and accuracy of his research, 
 qualified him, as no other man was qualified, 
 to find the living among the dead, and to 
 draw from musty documents a human drama. 
 Although he said, in reference to Buckle, that 
 he did not believe in the philosophy of history, 
 he certainly did not treat history as a science. 
 He was full of historic aversions and predilec- 
 tions, from the days of Dunstan to his own. 
 He communicated his politics without reserve 
 to Freeman, who certainly did not share them. 
 In 1859, he was for Austria against the 
 "wretched Italians," and felt "extreme con- 
 tempt " for Victor Emmanuel. Perhaps Free- 
 man may have felt more inclined to agree when 
 Stubbs told him that no dissenter could write 
 a History of England, because they had no 
 ancestors and could see nothing good before 
 the Reformation. Stubbs was fond of drawing 
 pedigrees ; and he must have known that 
 every one has the same number of ancestors, 
 whether they were ennobled, beheaded, or left 
 178
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 to themselves. If he were joking, one can only 
 say that he usually jokes with less difficulty, 
 and more success. As, for example, in a letter 
 about Froude : " He mauls Cardinal Pole 
 pretty considerably, but / think it is the cheapest 
 thing to do^ as Gardiner and Bonner both come 
 so much better out of any examination than 
 he does ; " or about Capitular Masses, when 
 " the question turned into what were Chapter- 
 Houses used for, to which I cannot give an 
 answer ; nor, I think, can he probably to get 
 cold in ; " or in his quaint ejaculation that he 
 likes " the men who passed under the old 
 system better than the Balliolised idiots who 
 get classes under the new." 
 
 In 1 866, Mr. Goldwin Smith resigned the 
 Chair of Modern History at Oxford. With 
 the possible exception of Halford Vaughan, 
 no such brilliant lecturer had been known in 
 the University. He was an advanced Liberal, 
 not to say a Radical, and had taken a pro- 
 minent part in the politics of the day. Lord 
 Derby, who was Chancellor of Oxford as well 
 as Prime Minister, could hardly be expected 
 to keep up the Liberal tradition by appointing 
 Freeman, if a suitable Conservative were to be 
 found. He was indeed fortunate in his choice 
 of Mr. Stubbs, whose studies lay quite out of 
 179
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 his own line. Mr. Stubbs, for his part, 
 accepted the post without hesitation. Un- 
 disturbed research would perhaps have suited 
 him still better. But he had a family to 
 keep, and he must have felt, modest as he 
 was, that no man in England could maintain 
 the historical credit of the University better 
 than he. He was not an impressive lecturer. 
 He seemed to be more interested in his manu- 
 script than in his audience. The single volume 
 which is the sole monument of his professor- 
 ship shows him at his best, combining with his 
 native sagacity and unrivalled knowledge the 
 eloquence and the humour which he too often 
 suppressed. His character of Henry the 
 Eighth is a literary masterpiece, which neither 
 his predecessor nor his successor has excelled. 
 He knew too much, and assumed too much, 
 for the "Balliolised idiot," or even the ordinary 
 undergraduate, to follow him. His formal 
 deliverances on public occasions, which have 
 alone survived, were models of terseness, 
 thoroughness, and wit. In politics, which 
 cannot be eliminated from history, he stood 
 at opposite poles to the author of " Three 
 English Statesmen." In the unrestrained free- 
 dom of his private correspondence, it may be 
 seen what a Tory he was. 
 i8o
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 " We are very quiet," he wrote to Freeman 
 in 1 864, " now we have got rid of that 
 Garibaldi. I do not think that Gladstone 
 or Lord Shaftesbury were either of them 
 sensible enough to have sent him away for 
 political reasons. I believe that for once they 
 both spoke the truth when they denied that 
 but it is what they should have done." 
 
 Stubbs can hardly have believed Lord 
 Shaftesbury to be a liar, whatever he may 
 then have thought of Mr. Gladstone ; and 
 one must not take too seriously his persistent 
 chaff of Freeman. Nevertheless, his hostility 
 to the Italian movement was genuine, and of a 
 piece with his lifelong distaste for Liberalism. 
 He was too honourable a man, morally too 
 great a man, to abuse his position as professor 
 for the interests or the purposes of a party. 
 As he said himself in his Inaugural Lecture, 
 his object was not to make Whigs or Tories, 
 but to make them good Tories or good 
 Whigs. As for Radicals, he would, I think, 
 have left them to the police, with perhaps 
 a saving clause for Freeman, Green, and Mr. 
 Bryce. 
 
 When he came to deal with facts, his love 
 of truth prevailed over all other considerations, 
 though it was certain that the cause of the 
 181
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 mediaeval Church would not suffer in his hands. 
 He made no secret from the first of his con- 
 viction that history justified the ways of God 
 to man. He described himself as " steeped in 
 clerical and Conservative principles." Con- 
 servative he certainly was. But what did 
 he mean by " clerical " .'* He has himself 
 answered the question, in defining " the clerical 
 spirit and mind " to be that " which regards 
 truth and justice above all things, which 
 believes what it believes firmly and intelli- 
 gently, but with a belief that is fully convinced 
 that truth and justice must in the end confirm 
 the doctrine that it upholds, with a belief that 
 party statement and highly coloured pictures 
 of friend and foe alike are dangerous enemies 
 of truth and justice, and damage in the long 
 run the cause that employs them ; that all 
 sides have everything to gain and nothing 
 to lose by full and fair knowledge of the 
 truth." 
 
 This is not perhaps a good specimen of the 
 Professor's style, either from a logical or from 
 a grammatical point of view. But why a lay- 
 man should object to the substance of it, I 
 cannot imagine, Stubbs can hardly have 
 supposed that Freeman or Mr. Goldwin Smith 
 would have put any other thing above truth 
 182
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 and justice. Nor would he have cited his 
 colleague at Cambridge, the Reverend Charles 
 Kingsley, as one who never drew highly 
 coloured pictures of friend or foe. He once 
 said of himself: "What a good layman I 
 should have made ! " and to use " clerical " 
 in the sense of " religious " is to put oneself 
 on a level with Sir Wilfred Witwould, who 
 thought that " orthodox " was the Greek for 
 claret. Even in his Inaugural Lecture Pro- 
 fessor Stubbs could not abstain from the 
 clerical remark that the present of Italy, as 
 distinguished from her past, was a *' living 
 death." But, after all, in a teacher of history 
 it is knowledge, not opinion, that matters. 
 
 Professor Stubbs had little or no sympathy 
 with modern Oxford. Liberalism in politics 
 he thought foolish. Liberalism in theology 
 he thought wrong. It says much for the 
 kindness of his heart and his fidelity to 
 friendship that he never ceased his intimacy 
 with John Richard Green, who gave up his 
 Orders and became a Freethinker. When he 
 found a volume of Renan, he put it in the 
 waste-paper basket, though Renan was, at 
 least, a great Oriental scholar, and as little 
 like the "shallow infidel" as need be. He 
 had not much belief in examinations ; and for 
 183
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 philosophy, idealist or materialist, he had no 
 taste. His leader in academic matters was 
 Dr. Pusey, his staunchest ally was Dr. Liddon, 
 and in his first sermon from the University 
 pulpit on the 3rd of November, 1867, he 
 made the astounding statement that, " with 
 a few notable exceptions, the whole of the 
 popular Press was ostentatiously and im- 
 placably set against religion." Unless by 
 religion he meant the peculiar tenets associated 
 with the name of Pusey, a wilder assertion was 
 never made ; and, little as Stubbs knew of the 
 world, it is quite unpardonable in him to have 
 made it. But we forget trifles like this when 
 we come to consider the " Constitutional 
 History of England," which was published 
 in three volumes during the years from 
 1874 to 1878. Mr. Hutton is never tired 
 of comparing this work with the " Decline 
 and Fall," thus doing it a great injustice. 
 Stubbs would have been the last man to range 
 himself with the greatest of all English, per- 
 haps of all, historians. Gibbon has neither 
 equal nor second ; and the only subsequent 
 historian who has approached him in the mag- 
 nitude of his task, or the breadth of his treat- 
 ment, is Finlay. Stubbs's real rivals are Hallam 
 and Milman, whom he surpassed in learning, 
 184
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 if not in practical wisdom. He aspired rather 
 to the German ideal, and, when the first 
 volume appeared, a contemporary critic re- 
 marked that it was rather a German than an 
 English book. And yet Stubbs, as his name 
 implies, was English to the core. He had the 
 love of liberty, though not of Liberalism ; the 
 dislike of sentiment ; the hatred of equivoca- 
 tion and indirectness ; the aversion from " the 
 fetid atmosphere of a Court," which the in- 
 habitants of these islands cherish, or used 
 to cherish, as virtues. He knew a man as 
 his brother Yorkshiremen know a horse. 
 Although he laid stress in his Preface upon 
 the fact that he was writing a history of 
 institutions, there is plenty of flesh and blood 
 on his bones. He knew how to say much 
 in few words, as in the case of Henry 
 Beaufort. 
 
 " The Cardinal of England passed away ; 
 not, as the great poet has described him, in the 
 pangs of a melodramatic despair, but with the 
 same businesslike dignity in which for so long 
 he had lived and ruled." 
 
 Sometimes, but not often, he let himself go. 
 Henry the Fifth cxcitctl all his enthusiasm. 
 
 " He was religious, pure in life, temperate, 
 liberal, careful and yet splendid, merciful, 
 '85
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 truthful, and honourable ... a brilliant soldier, 
 a sound diplomatist, an able organiser and con- 
 solidator of all forces at his command ; the 
 restorer of the English Navy, the founder of 
 our military, international, and maritime law." 
 To the Plantagenets, and the England of 
 the Middle Ages, such ample justice had never 
 been done before. Stern moralist as he was, 
 though making dangerously " liberal " allow- 
 ance for the vices of " Churchmen " and kings, 
 he had the human sympathy without which it 
 is not really possible to reconstruct the past. 
 The *' Select Charters," which preceded his 
 greater work, displayed his initial power, and 
 vindicated his right to be an authoritative 
 exponent of the Constitution. He himself 
 thought that he was better appreciated in 
 Germany than in England. But in Freeman 
 he had the same sort of champion as Huxley 
 was to Darwin ; and Freeman used the 
 columns of the Saturday Review to trumpet 
 his fame, until he must have been almost 
 sick of it himself. He was not blind to the 
 faults of his trumpeting friends. He per- 
 ceived that Freeman's iteration deserved an 
 unclerical epithet, and he had no faith what- 
 ever in the enterprise which produced Green's 
 " Short History of the English People." 
 i86
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 " For a popular history," he wrote to Free- 
 man, "such as he contemplates, surely Charles 
 Knight and the Pictorial people have done 
 what is necessary and possible from existing 
 materials." 
 
 Wisdom did not die with Charles Knight ; 
 and every one knows what a splendid success 
 Green's book had. That Stubbs did not 
 altogether like it, is clear from his letters. 
 His views of Charles the First and of Laud 
 were, as he says, fundamentally different from 
 Green's. Even on George the Third he would 
 not trust him. Freeman was more remote 
 from the topics that burn ; and Stubbs would 
 indeed have been ungrateful if he had not 
 admired Freeman. 
 
 " Stubbs was not satisfied," says Mr. Hutton 
 with extreme unction, ** to be wholly without 
 pastoral cares." It must, however, be ad- 
 mitted that very little sufficed. When, in 
 1875, nine years after resigning Navestock in 
 Essex, he accepted Cholderton in Wiltshire, 
 it was on condition that he " might legally 
 count as residence in his benefice the whole 
 of the term-times at Oxford, and would still 
 be entitled to three months' leave without 
 licence," which used to be called PVench 
 leave. The Church of England is famous 
 187
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 for her admirable elasticity ; and perhaps this 
 is as good an instance of it as could be found. 
 It is pleasant to add that he did really visit 
 Cholderton for three months in the summer, 
 and was thought *' a nice kind gentleman " by 
 his flock. He did not think Mr. Disraeli a 
 nice kind gentleman when in this same year 
 he gave the Deanery of Ripon, which would 
 just have suited Stubbs, to another; and he 
 complained rather bitterly that he himself 
 " had not let down the party to which he 
 belonged." In 1879, however, Lord Beacons- 
 field gave him a Canonry at St. Paul's. It 
 was not altogether a suitable appointment, for 
 the Canons of St. Paul's ought to be popular 
 preachers. Stubbs should have been Canon 
 of Christchurch and Professor of Ecclesiastical 
 History, instead of Dr. Bright, a far less able 
 man. Still, it was a welcome recognition, even 
 from the unhonoured head of his own party ; 
 and it enabled him once more to be happy 
 without the cure of souls. It also brought 
 him into close relations with Dean Church, 
 which would have been an advantage to any 
 one. As might be expected, his sermons did 
 not draw large congregations ; and he charac- 
 teristically remarked that the newspapers, after 
 stating that Mr. This or Dr. That preached
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 in the morning, added : '* In the afternoon the 
 pulpit was occupied by the Canon in residence." 
 But the Canonry had the great merit of mak- 
 ing him comfortable, and enabling him to 
 pursue the work of his life without distraction. 
 Unfortunately, he allowed himself to be put 
 on the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, where 
 "every one had a psalm and no doctrine and 
 no patience." What had he to do with such 
 futilities.'' The lawyers, especially Lord 
 Coleridge, only irritated him by reading the 
 Reformation Acts as if they saw them for the 
 first time. But he himself proposed a fantastic 
 scheme of referring to the bishops points con- 
 sidered by the Lord Chancellor doctrinal, 
 which Parliament would never look at, ex- 
 cept as a curiosity. The Judicial Committee 
 he thought a " foul thing." It has at least 
 stopped the persecution of heretics, which is 
 a fouler thing still. As, however, nothing 
 came of the Commission, and ecclesiastical 
 appeals have been stopped by the veto of the 
 bishops, one can only regret that so much of 
 Stubbs's time was wasted in a manner so un- 
 profitable. 
 
 Then the crash came. Up to this point 
 the career of Dr. Stubbs had been perfectly 
 suited to his talents. He was the most learned 
 
 .89
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 of English historians, and he had, for nearly 
 twenty years, filled the Chair of Modern 
 History at Oxford with European renown. 
 For five years he had been also a Canon of 
 St. Paul's, in easy circumstances, a dignitary 
 of the Church which he adorned. He would 
 have been a perfect Dean, either of his beloved 
 Ripon or of any other cathedral. The one 
 ecclesiastical office for which nature had un- 
 fitted him was a bishopric ; and that was 
 what Mr. Gladstone offered him in February 
 1884. The see was Chester, out of which 
 the modern dioceses of Manchester and Liver- 
 pool had been carved. Mr. Gladstone had the 
 best intentions ; and he knew, of course, that 
 Stubbs was a political opponent. Mr. Hutton 
 quotes the high authority of Mr. Bryce for 
 the fact that one of Mr. Gladstone's "reasons 
 for offering a bishopric to Dr. Stubbs was the 
 importance he attached to his knowledge of 
 ecclesiastical law and custom." There are 
 some things which the least intelligent reader 
 may be assumed to know ; and it would have 
 been more interesting to learn what the other 
 reasons were. A modern bishop does not 
 require either great intellect or great learning. 
 Besides the moral and religious qualifica- 
 tions which may be taken for granted, he 
 190
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 needs dignity, courtesy, aptitude for business, 
 patience of detail, knowledge of men, and 
 taste for ceremonial observances. Stubbs*s 
 kindness made him courteous ; but he had an 
 unerring eye for a bore or a fool. Ceremony, 
 which he called " fuss," he detested ; and 
 even Mr. Hutton admits that as a professor 
 he was undignified. No one could help 
 respecting his simple goodness and his tran- 
 scendent ability. But the chief result of 
 making him a bishop was to prove the truth 
 of his own remark, that he would have been 
 an excellent layman. He hesitated, and took 
 advice. Church, Liddon, and the present 
 Dean of St. Paul's, all counselled acceptance. 
 If biographies tell the truth, about which 
 there can in this case be no sort of doubt, 
 such is the invariable consequence of consult- 
 ing clerical friends. Nor could any one deny 
 that Dr. Stubbs would increase the reputation 
 of the episcopal Bench, where none of his 
 colleagues, save Dr. Lightfoot, then Bishop of 
 Durham, could compare with him in learning. 
 Lightfoot, however, was a practical man ; and 
 if he had remained at Cambridge, he would 
 not in all probability have written a standard 
 book. Dr. Creighton, who afterwards deserted 
 history for episcopacy, became an excellent 
 191
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 bishop. He delighted to exercise his great 
 mental powers in work which bore immediate 
 fruit ; and he was naturally fitted to deal with 
 men. To Stubbs, nine-tenths of his new duties 
 seemed sheer waste of time. His heart and 
 mind were in his books. Earnestly pious and 
 devout, generous almost to a fault with money, 
 the Bishop of Chester grudgeH all outlay which 
 was not charitable, and every hour spent in 
 " that worst form of trifling called business." 
 A theologian, Mr. Hutton tells us, said that 
 he had a " sceptical mind," meaning, no doubt, 
 that he declined to accept historical conclusions 
 without historical evidence. He certainly be- 
 lieved in apostolical succession. But he did 
 not believe in diocesan conferences ; and he 
 was incapable of concealing his want of belief. 
 He took refuge in that incorrigible humour 
 which was rather stimulated than quenched by 
 the episcopal office. It is indeed melancholy 
 to reflect that, before his experience of Mr. 
 Gladstone's cruel kindness, he had proposed 
 to write a " Constitutional History of the 
 Reformation," which all the other bishops on 
 the Bench could not have compiled among 
 them. 
 
 The Bishop of Chester was said, by one 
 who knew him well, never to have changed an 
 192
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 opinion. His tastes and habits were not more 
 flexible. Though a High Churchman by con- 
 viction, regarding Erastianism as anathema, he 
 detested elaborate ritual, and was not even 
 fond of hymns. Asked on one occasion if he 
 thought them appropriate, he answered with a 
 quotation from the last of them : '* Oh, dear 
 me, yes, to be sure." 
 
 " ' Yet saints their watch are keeping, 
 Their cry goes up : How long?'" 
 
 Bisho^^, and even mere clergymen, can say 
 with impunity what in laymen would be 
 thought profane. Yet some of Dr. Stubbs's 
 more solemn incumbents thought they some- 
 times detected in him a slight inclination to 
 flippancy. If he had been without it, he 
 would have died of a plethora of "functions." 
 *' Life," he wrote to Freeman from Chester, 
 "is as much a burden here as it is everywhere 
 else : the advantage of being a bishop is that 
 one has no time to think about it." He had 
 to spend a large part of his time in trains ; 
 and could only "get an hour now and then for 
 William of Malmesbury." His humour was 
 his salvation. '* What a great many people 
 there are in the world," he wrote on his return 
 from Italy, "to whom the disestablishment of 
 '93 N
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 the English Church will make no difference." 
 Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, he 
 could not see what difference a great many 
 things made which bishops were supposed to 
 regard as very serious indeed. He emphatic- 
 ally declined to be "organised" himself; and 
 had not the slightest wish to organise other 
 people. He wanted to be let alone, to pray 
 without fuss, and to study in peace. He had 
 always been a great novel-reader ; and he now 
 read more novels than ever. Putting him at 
 Chester was like putting him on the rack. 
 But there was worse torture to follow. 
 
 Lord Melbourne used to say that the bishops 
 died to spite him. They resigned to spite 
 Stubbs. The resignation of Dr. Jacobson was 
 the first stroke. The resignation of Dr. Mac- 
 karness was the final blow. A retiring bishop, 
 it may be explained, takes away a third of the 
 income, and leaves all the work. Stubbs had 
 found himself a poorer man at Chester than 
 he was at St. Paul's. Just as Jacobson's death 
 had improved his pecuniary position, he was 
 offered another see burdened with another 
 pension. Lord Salisbury, like Mr. Gladstone, 
 was a well-meaning man. He thought, not 
 unnaturally, that Oxford was entitled to the 
 most learned bishop on the Bench ; and Dr. 
 194
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 Stubbs thought that he could not refuse 
 heavier work. So he accepted, and then he 
 suffered acute misery. The Bishop of Oxford 
 does not live in the city, but in a country 
 house called Cuddesdon, remote from railways, 
 with gardeners, and coachmen, and all the rest 
 of it. To this plain and homely scholar life 
 in such a place was repugnant. There was, 
 in his opinion, only one thing to be done with 
 Cuddesdon ; and that was to sell it. But to 
 this the Ecclesiastical Commissioners would by 
 no means give their consent ; and Archbishop 
 Benson, in a letter of remarkable shrewdness, 
 observed that " the Bishop of Oxford is not 
 wanted in that Cathedral. It would be im- 
 politic and not for the good of the University 
 that he should eclipse the Dean in affairs, and 
 worse more widely that the Dean should eclipse 
 him." The idea of any one eclipsing the 
 magnificent potentate who was at that time 
 Dean of Christchurch is hardly conceivable. 
 But, Chancellor of the Garter as he was, it 
 is possible that Dr. Stubbs might have been 
 eclipsed by Dr. Liddell. At any rate, as a 
 man who makes his bed must lie on it, he 
 had to live at Cuddesdon. He became rest- 
 less, impatient, hurried, disgusted with trivial 
 engagements, apprehensive of interruptions. 
 95
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 The parsons of his agricultural diocese were 
 oppressed by poverty ; and he had three glass 
 houses, which he would not even look at. He 
 would have given all the glass houses in the 
 world for the chance of reading at the Bodleian. 
 Occasionally, he stayed in the Lollard's Tower 
 at Lambeth, as when he attended Mr. George 
 Smith's Dictionary Dinner, and walked home. 
 " I was quite well, thank you," he said, to Mr. 
 Sidney Lee the next morning, " but my boots 
 were tight." Many good things were said at 
 the dinner, but nothing better, or at least 
 funnier, than that. 
 
 The plain truth is, that this great student 
 and sagacious historian was, as Bishop of 
 Oxford, bored to death. Without the safety- 
 valve of his humour, there would have been 
 some terrific explosions ; and even Mr. Hutton 
 would have had to admit that his hero could 
 despise the office of a bishop. As it was, he 
 sailed uncommonly near the wind when an un- 
 kind fate put him on the Archbishop's Court 
 at Lambeth, to try the Bishop of Lincoln for 
 unlawful ceremonial in a parish church. On 
 that occasion, at all events, Stubbs had no 
 business to be there. He did not believe that 
 the Bishop of Lincoln ought to be tried. He 
 did not believe that the Archbishop of Canter- 
 196
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 bury had any jurisdiction to try him. He did 
 not think that the lawyers knew what they 
 were talking about. He regarded it all as a 
 sham and a solemn farce ; and he did not 
 hesitate to say so. " It is not a Court," he 
 kept saying ; " it is an archbishop sitting in 
 his library." The whole case should be left to 
 a jury of matrons, whom he named. " How 
 does his Grace get his patience ? Is it from 
 the Stores ? I sit and admire him and then 
 sleep it off." His Grace was in his element, 
 thoroughly enjoying himself, and required no 
 commiseration. 
 
 " The use of crossing next appears 
 Too hard for our digestion ; 
 The question of the cross remains 
 A very crucial question." 
 
 Now it was verse, then it was prose. 
 
 " Oh, the wearing weariness of it all ! Once 
 the earth was without form and void ; now it 
 is full of forms, and has not ceased to be 
 void. . . . Certainly this court is quite in- 
 formal and the subject void of all interest. 
 One feels inclined to deal with forms without 
 any ceremony, and with ceremonies without 
 much formality." 
 
 Such quaint cries of despair never went up 
 before, either from a bishop, or from a judge, 
 197
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 or even from an assessor. A good man gone 
 wrong Bishop Stubbs could hardly be called. 
 A great man out of place he certainly was. 
 The thing of which he had the greatest horror 
 was wasting time ; and nobody wastes more 
 time than a modern bishop. His last duty, 
 which it did not require a bishop to perform, 
 was at once congenial and heroic. The death 
 of Queen Victoria, in January 1901, found 
 him depressed in spirits, and enfeebled by 
 illness. He had always felt a reverent admira- 
 tion for the Queen ; and, in spite of medical 
 warnings, he obeyed the King's command to 
 preach at St. George's, Windsor, the day after 
 the funeral, which he also attended. His 
 simple, manly, straightforward sermon is com- 
 pared, with curious infelicity, by Mr. Hutton, 
 to the splendid and highly artificial orations 
 of Bossuet, Massillon, and Bourdaloue. It 
 was a characteristic utterance from the Bishop's 
 heart, and therefore as unlike the "French 
 preachers of the great age " as anything could 
 well be. It was his last public effort. On the 
 22 nd of April he died, in his seventy-seventh 
 year, three months after his friend and brother 
 historian, Mandell Creighton, who was almost 
 twenty years his junior. 
 
 Both to the lay and to the ecclesiastical 
 198
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 mind it must seem that Professor Stubbs's 
 acceptance of a bishopric was the mistake of 
 his life. That he was a great bishop, only 
 flattery will assert. That he was a great, 
 though not a popular, historian, is the unani- 
 mous opinion of the few who are competent to 
 judge him. Nine-tenths of his episcopal work 
 was mechanical and secular. His History 
 always upholds the cause of the Church, whose 
 loyal and faithful minister he would, in any 
 circumstances, have been. What the Church 
 and the world have lost by his " hallow- 
 ing," as Freeman called it, we shall never 
 know ; but we may guess. No man of equal 
 learning has treated the English Reformation 
 from his peculiar platform. We can find 
 Protestantism and eloquence in Froude, Catho- 
 licism and accuracy in Lingard. But Stubbs 
 was a sturdy Anglican, whose sympathies were 
 neither with Ridley, nor with Gardiner, but 
 with Laud. Although he would never have 
 perverted evidence or falsified a fact, he would 
 have told the story better than any one else 
 could tell it, as an Englishman and an ecclesi- 
 astic. That the Bishop of Rome neither hath 
 nor ought to have any jurisdiction within this 
 realm of England, Stubbs held as strongly as 
 Froude. He adhered with equal firmness to 
 199
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 the doctrine, that the Church of England had 
 never lost its identity since Britain was con- 
 verted to the Christian faith. He was not, 
 like Gibbon, a citizen of the world, with an 
 impartial contempt for everything except his- 
 torical truth. He was, like Macaulay, an 
 intensely patriotic Englishman, and as much 
 a Tory as Macaulay was a Whig. His Liberal 
 friends, such as Freeman and Green, never 
 made the smallest impression on him. While 
 he admired Gladstone's Churchmanship, he 
 abhorred his politics. I do not myself believe 
 in absolutely impartial history. What we want 
 is both sides. There is no book in the English 
 language to supply the place of that which 
 Stubbs would have written on the Reforma- 
 tion. Creighton's admirable and delightful 
 " History of the Papacy " is, in setting, Italian, 
 not English ; and no one would guess that it 
 was written by a clergyman. Stubbs would 
 have given the clerical and Conservative view 
 of Henry the Eighth's legislation, upon which 
 the whole controversy really turns. He would 
 have done much more. He would have drawn 
 an indelible picture of a great constitutional 
 struggle, a struggle for first principles, between 
 Church and King. He might have gone on 
 to depict the rise of Puritanism, the temperate 
 200
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 or temporising policy of Elizabeth, the change 
 of Tudors for Stuarts, the great catastrophe 
 that followed. He would not have settled 
 questions which will be debated and disputed 
 till the end of time. But he would have 
 written a book which no one who took part 
 in them could ever neglect, which would have 
 remained the classical statement of a Tory 
 Churchman's historic creed. Disr. aliter visum ^ 
 he said, when he did not get the Deanery of 
 Ripon. When he did get the Bishopric of 
 Oxford, he said that he had committed suicide. 
 If historicide be a crime, he was a criminal. 
 " In they broke, those people of importance," 
 Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, and slew, 
 not a life, but an immortality. But he was 
 himself /)^r/;V^/)j cnminis. 
 
 In a quiet deanery, Dr. Stubbs would have 
 had all the clerical opportunities he desired, 
 and could have done work which would never 
 have died. What he did as a bishop, hundreds 
 could have done as well, and scores could have 
 done better. His successor in the See of 
 Oxford has contributed to this volume just 
 three pages, which have, no doubt, an esoteric 
 meaning for clergymen, but, to my lay mind, 
 mean nothing at all. Every page written by 
 Stubbs himself is full of significance, and often 
 
 20I
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 suggests far more than it says. That he was 
 an honour to his order, is of course true. 
 But at this moment there is hardly an English 
 bishop known outside his diocese except the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, who travels, and 
 the Bishop of Hereford, who represents the 
 people in the House of Lords. Yet they are 
 all excellent men; pious, efficient, and indus- 
 trious, with no sense of divided allegiance 
 to neglected studies. In the House of Lords 
 Bishop Stubbs did not count. What did his 
 dioceses, apart from the University, care for 
 his erudition .? As much as a public meeting 
 cares for a Senior Wrangler. Creighton had 
 great gifts for administration, for speaking, for 
 managing men. Stubbs had none. He was 
 the best joker on the Bench, and the most per- 
 sistent grumbler. Humanly speaking, he was 
 bored with his life. History never bored him, 
 never tired him, never exhausted his keenness, 
 his sagacity, his patience, his love of truth, his 
 faith in the providential government of the 
 world. A late Prime Minister used to say 
 that the clergy might be exhaustively divided 
 into two classes. The first consisted of those 
 who wanted to be bishops, and were unfit to 
 be. The second comprised those who were 
 fit to be bishops, and did not want to be.
 
 Bishops and Historians 
 
 Stubbs belonged to neither class. Although 
 he thought for some time that his Party 
 neglected him, he was free from ambition. 
 He was a victim to a sense of duty, and to a 
 belief that episcopal functions were religious 
 in some sense in which history is not. The 
 awful line of the great Epicurean poet ascribes 
 to religion the sacrifice of an innocent girl. 
 The religion of which Lucretius speaks was 
 Pagan, as Mr. Pecksniff said, with regret, of 
 the Sirens. That must surely be a narrow 
 view of historical study which excludes it 
 from the field of Christian labour. Nor does 
 it conduce to reverence for the ideal of a 
 Christian Church, that it should involve the 
 principle of a round man for a square hole. 
 
 ao3
 
 Mr, Balfour's Horce Subsecivce ^ 
 
 IT is not perhaps, in all respects, desir- 
 able that a Prime Minister should 
 divert himself with politics. Mr. 
 Gladstone used to say that a change 
 of employment was the best recreation ; and 
 he found it in controversial theology. Mr. 
 Balfour finds it in metaphysics, which are 
 safe, because, since the time of Plato, they 
 have led to no very definite conclusion, while 
 they are profitable as an excellent sharpener 
 of the wits. No public man since the time 
 of Bulwer Lytton, not even Mr. Haldane, 
 has been more frankly metaphysical than Mr. 
 Balfour. Nor is he only metaphysical him- 
 self. He is the cause that metaphysics are 
 in other men. Mr. Wyndham is, perhaps, 
 the most distinguished of his intellectual 
 pupils. But, while even the otherwise united 
 Party which he leads are believed to differ 
 in opinion upon the merits, and even the 
 meaning, of his economic doctrines, they are 
 all ready to adopt, if not to read, his Address 
 as President of the British Association in 
 
 ^ " Essays and Addresses." By the Right Hon. Arthur James 
 Balfour, M.P. Edinburgh : David Douglas, 1905. 
 204
 
 Horce Subsecivce 
 
 1904. In reprinting that dexterous document 
 Mr. Balfour has done well. Charmingly 
 modest in tone, artfully simple in style, 
 graceful and courteous in its patronage of 
 such amateur philosophers as "John Mill," 
 it is adapted with singular perfection to an 
 audience which might be called scientific as 
 the congregation at Westminster Abbey might 
 be called theological. Whatever else may be 
 said, or thought, of Mr. Balfour as a Prime 
 Minister, we must all revere and admire his 
 intellectual enthusiasm, his genuine and ab- 
 sorbing interest in things of the mind. He 
 is the exact opposite of Sir Robert Walpole, 
 whose tastes outside politics were trivial or 
 low. Mr. Balfour's brain is never idle, and 
 never busy with unworthy themes. This 
 volume contains several essays which would 
 be well worth reading if they had been 
 written by a Secretary, or even an Under 
 Secretary, of State. " The Pleasures of 
 Reading" is altogether delightful, if not 
 original, or profound. " Bishop Berkeley's 
 Life and Letters " and " Handel " belong 
 to a higher order. The thorough knowledge 
 which they show is accompanied by a sym- 
 pathetic insight and a forcible presentment, 
 which give them a value quite inde|x:ndent 
 
 205
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 of their authorship. On the other hand, 
 the review of Mr. Morley's *' Life of Cobden " 
 might have been left where it was. It was 
 published just twenty years before Mr. 
 Chamberlain thought fit to revive a con- 
 troversy which for forty years had been 
 regarded as closed, and has no direct bearing 
 upon any question of the day. But Mr. 
 Balfour does not like Cobden, nor did he 
 at that time like Cobden's biographer. The 
 book irritated and annoyed him. That he 
 should express his irritation and annoyance 
 in a monthly magazine was natural enough. 
 Mr, Balfour, as well as inferior people, is 
 entitled to a reasonable amount of prejudice. 
 He should have remembered Johnson's reply 
 to Boswell's inquiry whether he sometimes 
 had a " fit of narrowness." " Yes, sir, but 
 I do not talk about it." The crime, however, 
 if it be a crime, has brought its own punish- 
 ment. Mr. Balfour has stereotyped his 
 marvellous discovery, that Cobden " did not 
 rise superior to the ordinary radicalism of 
 the day." After the death of Peel there 
 were three great personal forces in the English 
 politics of the nineteenth century. One was 
 called Cobden, another Gladstone, the third 
 Disraeli. Mr. Balfour would not think much 
 206
 
 Horce Suhsecivce 
 
 of a critic who said that Disraeli did not 
 rise superior to the ordinary Conservatism 
 of the day, or that Gladstone did not rise 
 superior to the ordinary Liberalism of the day. 
 Such a judgment would be what the French 
 call saugrenu. It would pass the bounds of 
 legitimate difference in opinion, and, if seri- 
 ously meant, would be a disqualification. 
 
 The attack on Cobden is in the older part 
 of this book, which first appeared twelve years 
 ago. Four new essays have now been added, 
 one of which is the Sermon to the British 
 Association at Cambridge. Impatient con- 
 gregations have sometimes started to their 
 feet on the injudicious use by a preacher of 
 the word " Now " at the beginning of a 
 sentence. Mr. Balfour never tries the patience 
 of any one who does not wish to succeed him 
 in office ; and he was precluded by custom 
 from repeating the clerical formula. His 
 substitute was to hint in his final words 
 his " own personal opinion that as Natural 
 Science grows, it leans more, not less, upon 
 a teleological interpretation of the universe,'* 
 The doctrine of final causes has never been 
 insinuated with more delicacy, or dismissed 
 with more despatch. But, if the transition 
 from electricity was sudden, it was also ortho- 
 
 207
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 dox, and scarcely more abrupt than the 
 application boldly made in Eton chapel of 
 an unpromising text from the book of Esther 
 about the posts of King Ahasuerus. " My 
 brethren," said the Fellow who occupied the 
 pulpit, " the Word of God operates upon the 
 heart of man as quickly as King Ahasuerus's 
 posts conveyed his letters." Mr. Balfour's 
 lecture on the " Nineteenth Century " is one 
 of his happiest efforts. " Poet- philosophers 
 like Bacon " must have resembled him in 
 something else than the poetic faculty, unless, 
 indeed, Mr. Balfour credits Bacon with works 
 still attributed by the man in the street to 
 Shakespeare. But that is a small point, and the 
 end of this essay deals with a very large ques- 
 tion indeed. Mr. Balfour is sometimes too fond 
 of indulging in those cheap paradoxes which 
 are no more than inverted platitudes. Here is 
 a paradox in the true sense, a theory which 
 runs counter to received opinion, and yet may 
 embody a profound truth. 
 
 " We have frequently seen in the history 
 of thought that any development of the 
 mechanical conception of the physical world 
 gives an impulse to materialistic speculation. 
 Now, if the goal to which, consciously or 
 unconsciously, the modern physicist is pressing, 
 
 208
 
 Horce Subsecivce 
 
 be ever reached, the mechanical view of things 
 will receive an extension and a completeness 
 never before dreamed of. There would then 
 in truth be only one Natural Science, namely 
 Physics; and only one kind of explanation, 
 namely the dynamic. . . . Would this con- 
 ception, in its turn, foster a new and refined 
 materialism .? For my own part, I conjecture 
 that it would not. I believe that the very 
 completeness and internal consistency of such 
 a view of the physical world would establish 
 its inadequacy. The very fact that within it 
 there seemed no room for Spirit would con- 
 vince mankind that Spirit must be invoked 
 to explain it." 
 
 Whether physical science is really capable 
 of establishing all these grand conclusions, I 
 do not know. But even if they be established, 
 the mystery of life, the miracle that we can 
 put our hands to our mouths, would remain 
 as miraculous and as mysterious as ever. 
 
 Most people who take up Mr, Balfour's 
 book will go straight to the politics and stay 
 there. Politics do not mix well with other 
 things, even when, as in this case, they are 
 not serious. "Economic Notes on Insular 
 Free Trade," and "Dr. Clifford on Education," 
 do not resemble Mr. Baifour*s metaphysics, 
 209 o
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 which are serious enough. They are like 
 Coleridge's metaphysics, which, as Lamb said, 
 were " only his fun." The fun might not be 
 very funny if the joker were not Prime Minister. 
 But then that is just the point of the joke. 
 Free Trade is a term of art, which has a fixed 
 and definite meaning. It means a tariflF for 
 revenue only. Protection means a tariflF for 
 the benefit of the native manufacturer, at the 
 cost, as Protectionists say, of the foreigner, 
 or, as the Free Traders say, of the native 
 consumer. Unless those definitions, which are 
 more than a hundred years old, be accepted, 
 controversy is futile, and leads to nothing. 
 A Free Trader who denounces protection may 
 be asked if he does not think that the country 
 ought to be protected by the army and navy. 
 If he extols Free Trade, he may be asked 
 whether he wishes for free trade in liquors, 
 for free trade in poisons, for free trade in 
 obscene literature, for free trade in Chinamen. 
 A judge suggested from the Bench, the other 
 day, that there should be a moderate duty on 
 foreign revolvers. He meant that they ought 
 to be prohibited because they were used for 
 criminal purposes. I dare say they ought, and 
 home-made revolvers too. There would be 
 nothing contrary to Free Trade in either 
 
 210
 
 HoroB SuhaecivcB 
 
 step. But it did not strike the judicial mind 
 that the object of a tax is to raise money 
 for the public service, and that, if it be a 
 prohibitive tax, it defeats its own object. It 
 is unlawful, I believe, to make nitro-glycerinc 
 without a license. That has no more to do 
 with the doctrine of Free Trade than with the 
 differential calculus. 
 
 Not having taken the trouble to master the 
 beggarly elements of economic science, Mr. 
 Balfour drifts helplessly down the stream, 
 without a rudder or an oar. He seems to 
 think that there are many varieties of Free 
 Trade, and that a statesman, like a customer, 
 may choose which he prefers. There are 
 varieties of Protection, though they are 
 varieties of degree, not of kind. Free Trade 
 is one and indivisible. A man must be a 
 Free Trader, or not. It is unilateral, having 
 nothing to do with the examples set by other 
 countries, good or bad. So far as this country 
 is concerned, it is entirely self-regarding, 
 exclusively English. It was adopted by 
 Englishmen for Englishmen, to suit British 
 interests, and British interests alone. Cobden 
 thought that foreign nations would follow 
 suit. He was wrong. He was a bad prophet, 
 if indeed the phrase be not tautological. But 
 
 211
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 if that proves him to have been a bad econo- 
 mist, logic, like prophecy, must have perished 
 from the world. Mr. Villiers once said in my 
 hearing that he never shared Cobden's interest 
 in what foreign countries did. "If Free Trade 
 is a good thing," he said, " for God's sake let 
 us keep it to ourselves." The commercial 
 supremacy of Great Britain is not entirely 
 due to Free Trade. It has been assisted and 
 promoted by the Protectionist tariffs of other 
 countries. The policy of profiting by foreign 
 sugar-bounties might by austere moralists 
 be considered narrow and selfish. From the 
 purely patriotic point of view its wisdom 
 could not be doubted. If Free Trade must 
 be universal, it has of course never existed ; 
 and the fierce controversies of 1846 were 
 waged about nothing at all. As for "free 
 imports," they do not exist here and now. 
 A very large part of our taxation is raised 
 by duties on imported tobacco and imported 
 spirits. No Free Trader objects, because 
 every penny added to the price of spirits 
 and tobacco goes into the Treasury and is 
 spent upon the nation. There is a dangerously 
 large number of persons who wish to divert 
 taxation into their own pockets ; and Mr. 
 Balfour is their innocent advocate. Not 
 
 212
 
 Horce SuhsecivoB 
 
 without reason did Sir Robert Peel say, that 
 he should leave a name execrated by every 
 monopolist. The only other name which 
 they hate as much as his is the name of 
 Richard Cobden. 
 
 Mr. Balfour comes at times so near economic 
 truth, that his failure to attain it is almost 
 miraculous. He thinks that he overthrows 
 what he is pleased to call the " manufacturing 
 ideal " when he says : *' Inasmuch as conditions 
 of climate render it obligatory to import many 
 of our luxuries, and conditions of population 
 and manufacture render it obligatory to import 
 many of our necessaries, a large export trade 
 is necessary, in order that these things shall 
 be paid for." Clumsily worded as this sentence 
 is, it contains the whole doctrine of Free Trade, 
 and is quite inconsistent with Mr. Balfour's 
 many deviations therefrom. The fundamental 
 difference between a Free Trader and a Pro- 
 tectionist is, that one regards foreign trade as 
 good, and the other regards it as evil. Accord- 
 ing to the Protectionist, it displaces native 
 employment, and impoverishes the country by 
 draining it of gold. According to the Free 
 Trader, it encourages labour at home, and 
 widens its area by turning it into more 
 productive channels. By admitting, what is 
 
 213
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 of course the fact, that imports necessitate 
 exports, Mr. Balfour gives up the Protec- 
 tionist case, and cuts his own ground from 
 under his own feet. Yet he goes on, with 
 the utmost unconcern, to talk about the world 
 rejecting Free Trade, as if the question were 
 an international one, and as if no country 
 could adopt a tariff for revenue only, unless 
 every other country did the same. " Inter- 
 national Free Trade," he tells us, "promotes 
 wealth, because it conduces to an international 
 division of labour." Mr. Balfour falls, here 
 and elsewhere, into the vulgar error of sup- 
 posing that one country trades with another. 
 The commercial unit is not the nation, but 
 the individual. If foreign individuals were 
 not hampered in neutral markets by the re- 
 strictive tariffs of their own Governments, they 
 would have a better chance of underselling 
 their British rivals. The universal adoption 
 of Free Trade would benefit the world, and 
 England as a part of the world. But, though 
 it may be unchristian, it is very tempting for 
 a mere Englishman, to rejoice in the Naviga- 
 tion Laws of the United States, which have 
 tied the hands of American shipowners, and 
 left Englishmen what, if it were not for the 
 Free Traders of Norway, would be almost 
 
 214
 
 HorcB SuhsecivcB 
 
 a monopoly of the world's carrying trade. 
 One should always rejoice in the victory of 
 right reason, whatever the consequences to 
 one's self. But insular prejudice, and narrow- 
 minded patriotism, sometimes make one fear 
 lest the fiscal controversy should injure one's 
 own countrymen by leading the United States 
 to abandon a system which places their artisans 
 at the mercy of grasping millionaires. A tariff 
 for revenue only, such as Huskisson, Peel, and 
 Gladstone established in this country, '* seems, 
 and has always seemed" to Mr. Balfour, "ex- 
 traordinarily foolish." The feeble intellects 
 of these bungling Ministers, who were wholly 
 without support beyond the House of Com- 
 mons, the commercial classes, the working 
 classes, and a few harebrained fanatics, such 
 as Adam Smith, Ricardo, Cobden, and Mill, 
 conceived that free access to foreign markets 
 was an incalculable benefit to England, and 
 that whatever foreigners might do, our best 
 course was to buy in the cheapest market, even 
 if we could not also sell in the dearest. Mr. 
 Balfour exults almost unkindly over the failure 
 of their predictions, and the ruin of their 
 hopes. As Memlx;r for Manchester, he is 
 brought into continual contact with the 
 miserable results of the wretched Cobdenitc 
 215
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 craze. The spectacle fills him with gloom, 
 almost with despair. " I see," he says 
 in words which deserve immortality, " I 
 see no satisfactory symptoms," forgetting, in 
 his modesty, that he has raised the price of 
 sugar from six pounds to sixteen pounds a 
 ton. What is the remedy ? The situation is 
 almost irretrievable. Only the starving little 
 country of Holland persists in impoverishing 
 itself by adhering to " one-sided Free Trade." 
 Let us, then, be up and doing. Let us no 
 longer " take it lying down." Let us act in 
 the noble spirit of Swift, when he advised the 
 Irish people, not perhaps without a suspicion 
 of irony, to burn all the products of England 
 except her coal. There is one hope, and only 
 one. " The only alternative is to do to foreign 
 nations what they always do to each other." 
 Here is wisdom. Foreign nations have in- 
 dulged in tariff wars, which wasted their sub- 
 stance, while the British trader said nothing, 
 and took advantage of the opportunity. There 
 was folly. Christ said, "Do, unto others as ye 
 would they should do unto you." Mr. Balfour 
 says, " Do unto others as ye see them doing." 
 It is not without significance that Cobden's 
 favourite religious exercise was to hear his 
 daughter read the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 216
 
 HorcB Subsecivce 
 
 But it showed a narrow fanatical spirit, which 
 Tariff Reformers and philosophic statesmen 
 have outgrown. If the Prime Minister will 
 read " Mary Barton," he will see what a 
 glorious time the people of Lancashire had 
 in the good old days of Protection and 
 Retaliation, when we did unto others what we 
 saw them doing to themselves. 
 
 I do not think that the abstract reasoning 
 of Mr. Balfour's "Notes" will make many 
 converts. But that is not where the element 
 of danger comes in. If the issue between 
 Protection and Free Trade, between a tariff 
 for revenue and a tariff for corruption, could 
 be decided by argument, it would have been 
 decided long ago. Sophistry becomes really 
 formidable when it rests upon cupidity ; and 
 there can be no doubt that Free Trade vastly 
 diminishes the chances of a dishonest livelihood. 
 The umbrella-maker, said Bastiat, whom Mr. 
 Balfour would do well to study, is in favour 
 of Free Trade in wood, silk, and whalebone. 
 He merely wants protection for umbrellas. 
 Intelligent and enlightened merchants arc Free 
 Traders because they realise that they buy far 
 more things than they sell. Honest ignorance 
 may not see this. But honest ignorance is not 
 what we have to dread. Mr. Balfour has 
 
 217
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 supporters of whose existence he is unconscious, 
 and with whom he would not willingly sit at 
 meat. They are men whose mouths water, 
 and whose fingers itch, when they read of 
 corners in American wheat, of growing rich 
 beyond the dreams of avarice by the simple 
 process of starving a district. The antiquated 
 system of benighted Cobdenism, to which this 
 incorrigible old country clings, draws their 
 teeth and blunts their claws. But their cry 
 goes up : How long ^ They are hustling all 
 they know to be in a big steal ; and there is 
 a side of Mr. Balfour's economic scepticism 
 which they regard as good " biz." They are 
 downy coves, who want to have their knives 
 in the Liberal Party for blowing the gaff, and 
 setting the coppers on them. I hope I make 
 myself intelligible. Verb. sap. 
 
 Mr. Balfour's second contribution to the 
 politics of the day, his reply to Dr. Clifford, 
 is a vigorous and unsparing piece of personal 
 satire. If it had come from a young and 
 ambitious candidate for a seat in Parliament, 
 it would have fulfilled its purpose by drawing 
 attention to the writer. That a Prime 
 Minister, with his heart in metaphysics, should 
 have taken the trouble to compose it, is rather 
 strange. For Mr. Balfour has no vanity to 
 
 218
 
 HorcB Subsecivce 
 
 gratify, and never, so to speak, shows off. 
 Still stranger is it that he should not, while 
 he- was about it, have been at the pains to 
 discover why the Nonconformists opposed his 
 Education Bill. It seems never to have struck 
 him that they were not all fools, and that they 
 must have a meaning of some kind. He treats 
 them like fractious children who will come to 
 their senses when they have been well shaken, 
 and not before. Dr. Clifford's style is by no 
 means academic ; and his monotonous exaggera- 
 tion palls. He would be much more effective, 
 in the opinion of one humble Liberal, if he 
 were a little quieter. But he is not, as Mr. 
 Balfour seems to suppose, a raving maniac. 
 He knows what he is talking about. He has 
 a case, and chop-logic will not dispose of it. 
 " His constitutional studies," says Mr. Balfour 
 with a sneer, " have apparently convinced him 
 that in an assembly where the majority govern 
 a dissentient minority is a negligible quantity.*' 
 Even in the House of Commons, the Prime 
 Minister has done his best to make it so. But 
 can he not see the difference between a 
 temporary and a permanent minority .? Surely 
 he must sometimes have reflected of late that 
 those who are a minority in this House of Com- 
 mons may be a majority in the next. But, under 
 219
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 the Education Act the representatives of the 
 public on the managing body of a " non-pro- 
 vided " school must always be in a minority ; 
 and this vital distinction destroys the whole of 
 his argument. No Opposition in Parliament 
 could continue if it did not live in hope of 
 redressing the balance, and crossing the House. 
 Mr. Balfour's favourite polemical weapon is 
 what logicians call ignoratio elenchi. Take, for 
 instance, his retort to Dr. Clifford on the sub- 
 ject of the last General Election, when Mr. 
 Balfour and several of his colleagues argued 
 that Liberals might vote for them, because 
 the only question at issue was the inevitability 
 of the war. Who now believes that the war 
 was inevitable I do not stay to inquire, and I 
 quite admit that the British Constitution 
 knows nothing of " mandates," fond as Con- 
 servatives are of appealing to them. If Mr. 
 Balfour chooses to say that the electors were 
 simpletons to take him literally, well and 
 good. If it is not chivalrous, it is true. But 
 his references to the abolition of the Corn 
 Laws, to the Irish Land Act of 1881, to the 
 Home Rule Bill of 1886, are wholly im- 
 material and misleading. Neither in 1841, 
 nor in 1880, nor yet in 1885, was the country 
 told by responsible statesmen that national 
 
 220
 
 HoTce SuhsecivoB 
 
 interests of supreme importance required the 
 severance of Party ties. So again with the 
 question of rates and taxes. Why, asks the 
 Prime Minister, should Dissenters object to 
 paying rates for sectarian schools over which 
 they have no control, when they have paid 
 taxes for them ever since 1870.? Even a 
 junior Lord of the Treasury might be ex- 
 pected to perceive that the Education Depart- 
 ment represented the taxpayer, and that no 
 school of which the Department did not 
 approve could receive a grant from the public 
 purse. If every school in receipt of rates were 
 subject to the County Council, Mr. Balfour's 
 gibe would have some point. At present it 
 has none. It seems to me, if I may respect- 
 fully say so, rather beneath the Prime Minister 
 of England to make an opponent appear 
 ridiculous by carefully leaving out the points 
 of his arguments and the substance of his 
 complaints. Any fool can do it. It is not 
 an occupation for a statesman, even in his 
 leisure hours. Politics spoil this volume. 
 Without them it would be a singularly charm- 
 ing example of what a brilliant, cultivated 
 intellect, open to the best influences of its age 
 and country, can make of time too often 
 wasted in writing unreadable books. 
 
 231
 
 Charles Lannb 
 
 NOBODY can say that Mr. Lucas 
 has not written a complete book. 
 These two bulky tomes, I had 
 almost written " tombs," con- 
 tain all that is mortal of poor Lamb. He 
 lies buried in them, or under them, as if he 
 had been an Archbishop of Canterbury, or 
 the hero of a hundred fights. It is hard to 
 think of "Lamb the frolic and the gentle" 
 behind so heavy a lock and key. Lighter 
 treatment would have been more becoming 
 to him. His puns are fitter for duodecimos. 
 He said little, and did less, that required 
 exhaustive analysis. Scotsmen, as we know, 
 took him literally. Mr. Lucas takes him 
 biographically, puts a pin through him, and 
 exhibits him in his museum. To Mr. Lucas 
 it never occurs that what the soldier said is 
 not evidence. Any one who said anything 
 about Lamb is called as a witness, and then 
 cross-examined to his credit, or discredit, as 
 the case may be. Lamb would have been 
 bored to death with it all. He would have 
 
 ^ " The Life of Charles Lamb." By E. V. Lucas. Two volumes 
 with 50 illustrations. London; Methuen & Co., 1905. 
 
 222
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 sung " Heigh diddle diddle, my son John," 
 and asked to see the gentleman's bumps. 
 Yet it would be very ungrateful to find fault 
 with Mr. Lucas and his methods. Another 
 Life of Lamb after this there could hardly 
 be. But, if there were, Mr. Lucas has pro- 
 vided the materials for it. With humble 
 reverence, and patient toil, he has dug up 
 and arranged every conceivable detail about 
 Lamb's progress from the cradle to the grave. 
 All lovers of Lamb, all who keep on the first 
 of April the festival of the human race, have 
 reason to thank this untiring inquisitor for the 
 facts which his researches have laid bare. We 
 all know the Shakespearean enthusiast who 
 wrote a paper on the question whether the hus- 
 band of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet^ God rest 
 his soul, was really a merry man, or whether his 
 widow was deceived into thinking so by affec- 
 tionate partiality for his memory. None of 
 us have forgotten that George Dyer, after 
 calling on Lamb at Islington, walked out 
 of his friend's house into the New River. 
 But here is a photograph of Colebrooke 
 Cottage, with the river running in front of 
 it as natural as may be, and nothing left out, 
 except George himself. Even if Lamb had 
 invented the whole story, the illustration would 
 
 223
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 be none the worse for that. The bust of 
 Samuel Salt, the Bencher to whom Lamb's 
 father was clerk, is no less appropriate than 
 decorative. For if there had been no Samuel 
 Salt, Lamb might never have gone to Christ's 
 Hospital ; and if he had not gone to Christ's 
 Hospital, he might never have known Cole- 
 ridge ; and if Coleridge had not asked him : 
 " Have you ever heard me preach .'' " he could 
 hardly have replied : " I've n never heard 
 you d d do anything else." Mr. Lucas 
 has left no stone unturned. He has neglected 
 no indication. He has deserted no clue. He 
 is not merely Lamb's biographer, but his 
 scientific historian. At the same time, his 
 tact and sense and judgment, his sound taste 
 and good feeling, his devotion to Lamb and 
 suppression of himself, make his book really 
 delightful, and more precious than the most 
 ambitious of critical estimates. 
 
 Although Lamb has been dead more than 
 seventy years, there are thousands to whom 
 he seems a familiar friend. Ever since he 
 died, within a few months of Coleridge, his 
 popularity has been growing. The mighty 
 poet, with the deep harmony and rich magic 
 of his glorious verse, sits on an unapproach- 
 able throne, too god-like not to be worshipped, 
 
 224
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 scarcely human enough to be loved. The 
 perfect essayist, the delicate humourist, who 
 played upon the English language as upon 
 an old fiddle, is never far away from the hearts 
 of his readers. They cannot make a joke 
 without thinking of Charles Lamb, and of 
 how much better he would have turned it. 
 Lamb did not always treat the author of 
 " Kubla Khan " with reverence. But then he 
 knew Coleridge ; and we have the great ad- 
 vantage of not knowing him. Any one would 
 have been the better for knowing Charles 
 Lamb, who brought out all that was good 
 in people, and kept back all that was not. 
 Enough, and more than enough, has been 
 made of Carlyle's splenetic outburst, which 
 may well claim the charity of oblivion, Mr. 
 Lucas does well to remind us that Carlyle also 
 called Lamb " humane, ingenuous, pathetic, 
 sportfully much enduring." After all, it would 
 be difficult for the staunchest Agnomaniac to 
 beat that. Thackeray's "Saint Charles" falls 
 far short of it. Mr. Lucas discusses Thackeray's 
 meaning at some length. It does not seem to 
 me very obscure. Most men's practice falls 
 lamentably short of their professions. Lamb's 
 professions fell laudably short of his practice. 
 Unselfish, uncomplaining, tender-hearted, afFec- 
 
 225 p
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 tionate, faithful, and sincere, he loved to hold 
 himself out as flippant, frivolous, self-indul- 
 gent, mischievous, and heartless. Hypocrites 
 abhorred him. Pharisees thanked God that 
 they were not like him. He didn't care. He 
 lived for his sister, for his friends, for his 
 books, laughing at all pretence of superior 
 merit, doing those little nameless unremembered 
 acts of kindness and of love which are the best 
 portion, even of a good man's life. He was 
 not much given to religious observances, or to 
 formality of any kind. But he had a Master. 
 At the end of a long conversation on " Persons 
 one would wish to have seen," which ultimately 
 led to Stratford-on-Avon, Lamb said : " There 
 is only one other person I can ever think of 
 after this. If Shakespeare was to come into 
 the room, we should all rise up to meet him ; 
 but if that person was to come into it, we 
 should all fall down and try to kiss the hem 
 of his garment." It was seldom indeed that 
 Lamb let himself go like this. He was no 
 Methodist ; he inclined to scoff at clerical 
 and ecclesiastical pretensions. He sometimes 
 said what in other people would have been 
 profane. One fervent admirer, Alfred Ainger, 
 late Master of the Temple, was distressed by 
 this trait in him. But it was his hatred of 
 226
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 humbug, his objection to what Sterne called 
 " the wagging of the beard." His delicious 
 drollery never gave pain. He was as full of 
 Christian charity as an egg is full of meat. 
 From theology he had the same sort of aversion 
 that he had from mathematics, with the added 
 feeling that it lowered higher things. 
 
 The Preface of this book, enlarging the 
 title, promises a Life of Charles and Mary 
 Lamb. But indeed it is impossible to separate 
 them. In the whole region of biography, 
 there is no more beautiful example of sacrifice 
 than Charles Lamb's devotion to his elder 
 sister. Mary's mental derangement, which led 
 her early in life to kill her own mother, would 
 have ended in Bedlam, or worse, if Charles had 
 not solemnly undertaken the care of her, and 
 fulfilled it loyally until he died. She was 
 never again violent ; and, when she was her- 
 self, her literary gifts were only less remark- 
 able than her brother's. But she was always 
 liable to recurrent fits of insanity ; and, when 
 they occurred, he would take her quietly to 
 her place of seclusion. He never made a 
 grievance of it, or seemed to feel the burden. 
 He never boasted of doing his duty. He did 
 it as if it had been the most natural thing in 
 the world, always disclaiming any sort of 
 i2^
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 pretence, religious or moral. He could not 
 remember life without Mary, who was by ten 
 years his senior; and, though they agreed that 
 she ought to die before him, she survived him 
 for thirteen years. 
 
 Our earliest story of Lamb is connected with 
 Mary. When she was taking him through a 
 churchyard, he said : " Mary, where are the 
 naughty people buried ? " Here perhaps Mr. 
 Lucas assumes too little intelligence on the 
 part of his readers. For he tells them that 
 the churchyard in question was " filled with 
 testimonies to the virtues of the dead," and 
 that the incident must have occurred after 
 Lamb had learnt to read. From neither 
 conclusion is it possible to dissent. But per- 
 haps in an age of scant leisure there are some 
 things which may be taken for granted. That 
 Lamb would be happy at school, is perhaps 
 another of them. Christ's Hospital was rough 
 in his time ; and the boys did not fare sumptu- 
 ously every day, or any day. Lamb, however, 
 managed to enjoy himself, as his own charming 
 descriptions in Elia are quite enough to prove. 
 Of his easy-going master he has left one of 
 those perfect descriptions which no one else 
 could write. 
 
 " Matthew Field belonged to that class of 
 228
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 modest Divines who affect to mix in equal 
 proportion the gentleman, the scholar^ and the 
 Christian ; but, I know not how, the first 
 ingredient is generally found to be the pre- 
 dominating dose in the composition." The 
 type of clergyman thus depicted is, perhaps 
 fortunately, obsolete ; and Dr. Hawtrey of 
 Eton was too accomplished a scholar to sit 
 for the portrait. But in one respect there 
 was a perfect sympathy between Field's pupil 
 and himself There never lived a truer 
 gentleman than Charles Lamb ; and the story 
 of his proposal to Miss Kelly, the actress, 
 all told in three letters, is one of the prettiest 
 in the world. When Lamb contemplated 
 matrimony, he never thought of leaving Mary, 
 who had nothing to do with Miss Kelly's 
 reason for refusing him. The only revenge 
 he took on Miss Kelly was to write her a 
 half-humourous letter, craftily designed to spare 
 her pain ; but he also paid her in public, as a 
 dramatic critic, a compliment of which any 
 woman might be proud. "She is in truth," 
 he wrote for the Examiner, " not framed to 
 tease or torment even in jest, but to utter 
 a hearty ' Tes ' or *A^o ' ; to yield or refuse 
 assent with a noble sincerity. We have not 
 the pleasure of being acquainted with her; 
 
 229
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 but we have been told that she carries the 
 same cordial manners into private life." 
 
 Such manners as Lamb's are not to be learnt 
 at Christ's Hospital, or any other school. 
 Among his school-fellows the most famous 
 is, of course, Coleridge. Equally congenial 
 to Lamb, perhaps in some respects more 
 congenial, was the witty Charles Valentine 
 Le Grice, who, when asked to say grace, 
 inquired whether there was not a clergyman 
 present, and, being assured that there was 
 not, ejaculated heartily: "Thank God." Le 
 Grice might have remembered Benedick, for 
 he became a clergyman himself. No one 
 understood Lamb better, as his picture of his 
 old friend's wit, quoted by Mr. Lucas, is 
 sufficient to show. " It did not sharpen the 
 arrows of satire, it did not grin with a pro- 
 voking malice, it did not thirst for reward, 
 it did not cater for vanity, it did not live 
 on adulation. It was his own quiet posses- 
 sion and delight." Some of Lamb's puns, if 
 regarded as made for display, are execrable. 
 But they are made for amusement. Like 
 their author, and Horace, circum pracordia 
 ludunt. They appeal rather to the heart than 
 to the head. Only a good man could have 
 made them ; they are so very bad. 
 230
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 Mr. Lucas has, I think, told at length, for 
 the first time, the awful tragedy of Lamb's 
 life. Even at the distance of more than a 
 century, it seems indecent to dwell on such a 
 horror as involuntary matricide, or upon the 
 haunting demon which always lurked behind 
 the sweet reasonableness of Mary Lamb. It 
 is the highest praise of Mr, Lucas to say, as 
 can be said with truth, that he neither avoids 
 the miserable subject nor says of it one jarring 
 word. The event brought out the best side of 
 Coleridge, whose private conduct and personal 
 character were otherwise very different from 
 Lamb's. At the end of a letter which Lamb 
 justly called "an inestimable treasure," Cole- 
 ridge wrote : " I charge you, my dearest friend, 
 not to dare :o encourage gloom or despair. 
 You are a temporary sharer in human miseries, 
 that you may be an eternal partaker of the 
 Divine Nature. I charge you, if by any 
 means it be possible, come to me." There 
 and then Lamb, at the age of twenty-two, 
 took upon himself the sole responsibility for 
 his afflicted sister during the remainder of his 
 life. He discharged it so long as he lived 
 himself, not grudgingly or of necessity, but 
 from the simple goodness of his heart. To be 
 praised for it he would have regarded as an 
 231
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 insult. Coleridge and Lamb, like Coleridge 
 and most other people, afterwards quarrelled. 
 The immediate occasion was a lofty remark of 
 the philosophic poet : " Poor Lamb, if he 
 wants any knowledge he may apply to me." 
 Lamb did apply with a vengeance. He wanted 
 to know whether the higher order of Seraphim 
 lUuminati ever sneered, and whether the Vision 
 Beatific were anything more or less than a 
 perpetual representment to each individual 
 Angel of his own present attainments and 
 future capabilities, somehow after the manner 
 of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual 
 complacency and self-satisfaction. This in- 
 formation Coleridge might. Lamb thought, 
 obtain for him in Germany, whither he was 
 going with the Wordsworths. After that 
 incident, Coleridge was to Lamb an Archangel 
 a little damaged ; and his metaphysics were 
 " only his fun." Yet there was no man on 
 earth for whom Lamb had a higher admira- 
 tion ; and, during the last few months of his 
 own life, he would repeat to himself, with a 
 mournful cadence : " Coleridge is dead." 
 
 For Byron, except as a satirist, he never 
 cared. Misanthropy was not in his line ; and 
 he used to say that the Vision of Judgment was 
 the only good-natured thing the noble poet 
 
 232
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 ever wrote. So far as Lamb had any politics, 
 he was a Radical, and in sympathy with his 
 friend Leigh Hunt, especially after Hunt had 
 been imprisoned for libelling the Regent, as if 
 anybody could. Shelley's poems he found 
 "thin-sown with aught of profit or delight"; 
 and he never really appreciated Keats. Words- 
 worth, though he once called him to his face, 
 a " rascally old Lake Poet," he held in proper 
 reverence ; but his favourites were the Eliza- 
 bethan poets, and Cowley, and Pope. When he 
 said that he wrote for antiquity, he meant that 
 he wrote for them. 
 
 Among his contemporaries, Lamb cherished 
 George Dyer, whose name he has pickled and 
 preserved in humour. " George," said he, 
 ** writes odes wherein the rhymes, like fashion- 
 able man and wife, keep a comfortable distance 
 of six or eight lines apart, and calls that ob- 
 serving the laws of verse." Dyer was a per- 
 petual dream of enjoyment to Lamb. " To 
 G. D.," he told Wordsworth, of all people, "a 
 poem is a poem. His own as good as any- 
 body's, and (God bless him ! ) anybody's as 
 good as his own ; for I do not think he has 
 the most distant guess of the possibility of one 
 poem being better than another. The gods, 
 by denying him the very faculty itself of dis- 
 33
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 crimination, have effectually cut off every seed 
 of envy in his bosom." Lamb clearly thought 
 that the lack of envy was well worth the loss 
 of discrimination ; and indeed he was not 
 always the most discriminating of critics him- 
 self. He did not care for the Waverley Novels^ 
 though we may well forgive him for a fault 
 which, after all, was its own punishment, in 
 consideration of his having persuaded Dyer 
 that they were written by Lord Castlereagh. 
 " There is nothing in my pages," he proudly 
 apprised the "rascally old Lake Poet," '* which 
 a lady may not read aloud, without indecorum, 
 which is more than can be said of Shakespeare^ 
 " A line of Wordsworth's is a lever to lift the 
 immortal spirit," he said in a more serious 
 vein, though he did not hesitate to tax Words- 
 worth with stupidity for calling Candide dull. 
 Perhaps Wordsworth desired to prevent the 
 young from reading that work ; and feared 
 that to denounce it for immorality would 
 have the opposite effect. Lamb could not 
 let Wordsworth alone. Though as far as 
 possible from sympathising with Jeffrey and 
 the Edinburgh Review^ the spirit of mischief 
 in him was excited by the self-consciousness 
 and self-complacency of the illustrious Excur- 
 sionist. " Wordsworth, the great poet, is 
 
 234
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 coming to town," he informed his friend 
 Manning. " He is to have apartments in 
 the Mansion House. He says he does not 
 see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, 
 if he had a mind to try it. It is clear that 
 nothing is wanting but the mind." Lamb 
 would never let anything stand in the way of 
 his jest. But the " rascally old Lake Poet " 
 had no more sympathetic reader. 
 
 Mr. Lucas is perhaps a little too careful in 
 tracing, or attempting to trace, the connection 
 of the Lambs with Lincolnshire. Dr. Johnson 
 himself was not a more thoroughgoing, un- 
 compromising Londoner, than Lamb. " Barry 
 Cornwall tells us that, on being asked how he 
 felt when amongst the lakes and mountains of 
 Cumberland " (such a question would justify 
 any answer), " Lamb replied, that he was 
 obliged to think of the ham-and-beef shop 
 near St. Martin's Lane, in order to bring 
 his thoughts from their almost too painful 
 elevation to the sober regions of everyday 
 life." A familiar injunction in the Book of 
 Proverbs might be held to account for this 
 particular retort. But alas, " Leigh Hunt 
 somewhere remarks that Lamb stopped him 
 in the midst of a beautiful country lane to 
 point out how inferior it was to Wardour 
 "35
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Street." Lamb was no traveller, though he 
 did once go to Paris, and profess to like 
 frogs, which the Parisians, to his surprise, 
 called " green eels." He did not object to 
 the suburbs, because they were connected 
 with the full tide of human existence at 
 Charing Cross. But it is the Temple with 
 which one associates him most ; and in the 
 late Master of the Temple, his best critic, 
 his spirit seemed at times to move. They 
 were both Shakespearean men. Nobody who 
 heard Mr. Ainger read "Falstaff" can ever 
 forget it ; and one can almost hear him make 
 the comment which Lamb made on Shake- 
 speare's anachronistic mention of Aristotle in 
 " Troilus and Cressida" : " That's what Johnson 
 referred to when he wrote 
 
 ' And panting Time toils after him in vain.' " 
 
 Surely one of the happiest quotations ever made. 
 Judicious advantage has been taken in this 
 book of Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary. 
 Lamb, without meaning it, attached to him 
 two literary lawyers. One was Talfourd, who 
 became his biographer. The other was Crabb 
 Robinson, who never forgot, so to speak, that 
 he himself was on his oath. Such an entry 
 as this owes nothing to adventitious arts. 
 236
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 ''May 15, 1 8 14. At the Colliers*. Lamb 
 and his sister this evening expressed great 
 kindness towards me, and it gave me great 
 pleasure. They indeed belong to the very 
 best order of persons. Their moral qualities 
 are as distinguished as their intellectual." 
 
 If Charles and Mary had ever wanted a tes- 
 timonial, Crabb Robinson would have written 
 it for them while they were waiting. Talfourd 
 had a different type of mind. He sums up 
 the outer Lamb with the " quivering sweet- 
 ness " of his face, in a single sentence. " Deep 
 thought striving with humour, the lines of 
 suffering wreathed in cordial mirth, and a 
 smile of painful sweetness, present an image 
 to the mind it can as little describe as note." 
 Lamb, as is well known, did not keep silence 
 on his own failings. The *' Confessions of a 
 Drunkard," though preposterously exaggerated 
 as applied to himself, would hardly have been 
 written by a water-drinker. Drunkenness did 
 not tell much against a gentleman when the 
 nineteenth century was young. But Lamb's 
 excess was not so much convivial as con- 
 solatory. He smoked as well as drank, too 
 much at times ; and one day he wrote, with 
 emphasis: "This very night I am going to 
 leave off tobacco!''' Then he added, with one of 
 
 237
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 his inimitably characteristic touches : " Surely 
 there must be some other world in which this 
 unconquerable purpose shall be realised." "An 
 unconquerable purpose " is an immortal phrase. 
 Whether Lamb ever did leave off tobacco is 
 doubtful. He certainly never left off gin ; 
 but on this subject I prefer the manly indig- 
 nation of Mr. Birrell in "Obiter Dicta" to 
 feeble and apologetic excuses. 
 
 " Be untruthful, unfaithful, unkind ; darken 
 the lives of all who have to live under your 
 shadow, rob youth of joy, take peace from 
 age, live unsought for, die unmourned, and, 
 remaining sober, you will escape the curse of 
 men's pity and be spoken of as a worthy 
 person. But if ever, amidst what Burns called 
 ' social noise/ you so far forget yourself as to 
 get drunk, think not to plead a spotless life 
 spent with those for whom you have laboured 
 and saved ; talk not of the love of friends 
 or of help given to the needy ; least of all 
 make reference to a noble self-sacrifice passing 
 the love of women. For all will avail you 
 nothing. You get drunk and the heartless, 
 and the selfish, and the lewd, claim the privi- 
 lege of pitying you, and receiving your name 
 with an odious smile." 
 
 I can add nothing to that passionate protest, 
 238
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 except that Lamb, often as he apologised for 
 his faults, never claimed credit for any of his 
 virtues. He rather tried to conceal them, 
 except when the concealment would have done 
 injury to others. He had a much keener 
 sense than more orthodox persons possessed, 
 of the harm done to religion by connecting it 
 with unfairness or intolerance. Southey, like 
 Johnson, was loth to admit that a freethinker 
 could be a good man. " One of the most 
 candid, most upright, and single -meaning 
 men," Lamb wrote to him, "was the late 
 Thomas Holcroft, I believe he never said 
 one thing and meant another in his life ; and, 
 as near as I can guess, he never acted other- 
 wise than with the most scrupulous attention 
 to conscience. Ought we to wish the character 
 false for the sake of a hollow compliment to 
 Christianity ? *' 
 
 Lamb had the art, if art it be, of com- 
 pressing into a single sentence whole volumes 
 of sermons. But the great sermon was his 
 life. His humour is irradiated with the sheer 
 goodness which turned his duties into plea- 
 sures. He even fished George Dyer out of 
 the water, though he never allowed him to 
 forget that he had fallen into it. A better 
 friend than Lamb it would be difficult to 
 
 239
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 imagine. He could have cheered almost any 
 sorrow, and lightened those he could not 
 cheer. How the deaths of those he loved 
 affected him, he has told, as only he could tell 
 it, in a letter to Wordsworth. Wordsworth 
 was always a tempting subject for fun. Few, 
 indeed, are the fools who have not laughed at 
 his poetry ; and even Lamb, the exact opposite 
 of a fool, could turn him into ridicule, when 
 he himself was in the mood. But the real 
 Wordsworth, the great immortal part of him, 
 was as far beyond the reach of criticism as the 
 depths of the Pacific are beyond the reach of 
 a storm. Byron understood nothing in him 
 that was worth understanding. Therefore he 
 gibed and sneered. Lamb wrote to him with 
 the simple seriousness which is the unconscious 
 tribute, not of admiration, but of reverence. 
 
 " Deaths overset one," he confided to 
 Wordsworth, after the death of his own 
 brother John, " and put one out, long after 
 the recent grief. Two or three have died 
 within this last twelve months ; and so many 
 parts of me have been numbed. One sees a 
 picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual 
 fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person 
 in preference to every other the person is 
 gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. 
 
 240
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 It won't do for another. Every departure de- 
 stroys a class of sympathies. There's Captain 
 Burney gone ! What fun has whist now ? 
 What matters it what you lead, if you can no 
 longer fancy him looking over you ? One 
 never hears anything, but the image of the 
 particular person occurs with whom alone, 
 almost, you would care to share the intelli- 
 gence. Thus one distributes oneself about; and 
 now, for so many parts of me, I have lost the 
 market. Common natures do not suffice me. 
 Good people, as they are called, won't serve. 
 I want individuals. I am made up of queer 
 points ; and I want so many answering 
 needles." 
 
 Wordsworth was different. His mind to 
 him a kingdom was. In society he was no- 
 thing. When he withdrew into himself, the 
 inspiration came ; and he wrote like the Spirit 
 of Nature, "whose dwelling is the light of 
 setting suns." To the man of the world it 
 was a stumbling-block. To the Edinburgh 
 Review it was foolishness. But Lamb under- 
 stood it very well. 
 
 To write of Lamb's humour is almost an 
 impiety. One feels like a housemaid destroy- 
 ing cobwebs in dusting a room. Yet it had quite 
 a common side. For Lamb was almost alone 
 24 Q
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 among really great humourists in loving, not 
 only puns, but even practical jokes. His best, 
 or worst pun, at least in these volumes, was 
 suggested by Talfourd. Lamb said he would 
 like to see the witnesses against Queen Caroline 
 at supper. " You would not sit with them ^ " 
 exclaimed the horrified lawyer. " Yes," said 
 Lamb, " I would sit with anything but a hen 
 or a tailor." This, however, was surpassed by 
 Theodore Hook, when Lamb proposed that 
 they should run round the garden at Cole- 
 brooke Cottage. " No," quoth Hook, " I can 
 outrun no one, except the constable." Practical 
 jokes belong, as a rule, to the class of crimes 
 which exclude their perpetrators from decent 
 society. But Lamb's genius came out, even 
 in a quarter so unpromising as that. He had, 
 as we all have sometimes, to meet a minor 
 poet, whose verses he was invited previously 
 to read. Like most imaginative persons, Lamb 
 had a good memory, and, when the poetaster 
 arrived, was prepared for him, even to the 
 point of quotation. But he had also ex- 
 temporised a little preface. " That reminds 
 me," he would say, " of some verses I wrote 
 when I was very young," and then would 
 follow the other gentleman's lines. The victim 
 was so meek, that Lamb went further, and 
 
 242
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 claimed to have written the opening lines of 
 Paradise Lost. This was more than the votary 
 of the Muses could bear in silence. He had 
 *' allowed his own little verses to be taken 
 without protest; but he could not endure to 
 see Milton pillaged." Success could not have 
 been more triumphant ; and not the worst 
 part of the story is, that the minor poet comes 
 rather well out of it. The definition of a 
 practical joke not having been authoritatively 
 settled, one may be permitted to include in 
 the category Lamb's solemn explanation : " I 
 always call my sister ' Maria ' when we are 
 alone together, ' Mary ' when we are with our 
 friends, and ' Moll' before the servants." His 
 remonstrance with the doctor who addressed 
 some medicine to *' Miss Isola Lamb " is 
 certainly practical enough, and too delicious not 
 to quote. " Emma Isola " was the name of the 
 Italian girl, afterwards Mrs. Edward Moxon, 
 whom Charles and Mary Lamb adopted. 
 
 " * No such person is known on the Chase 
 Side,' wrote Lamb, who was then living at 
 Enfield ; ' and she is fearful of taking medicines 
 which may have been made up for another 
 patient. She begs me to say that she was born 
 in Isola and christened Emma. Moreover, that 
 she is Italian by birth, and that her ancestors 
 
 243
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 were from Isola Bella ("Fair Island") in the 
 kingdom of Naples. She has never changed 
 her name, and rather mournfully adds that 
 she has no prospect at present of doing so. 
 She is literally I. Sola, or single at present. 
 Therefore she begs that the obnoxious mono- 
 syllable may be omitted on future phials an 
 innocent syllable enough, you'll say, but she 
 has no claim to it. It is the bitterest pill 
 of the seven you have sent her. When 
 a lady loses her good name^ what is to 
 become of her .? Well, she must swallow it 
 as well as she can, but begs the dose may 
 not be repeated.' " 
 
 In a still more fanciful mood, he wrote to 
 his friend Bernard Barton, a banker's clerk, 
 and a Quaker, on the day after the execution 
 of Fauntleroy for forgery. 
 
 " You think it impossible that you could ever 
 commit so heinous an offence. But so thought 
 Fauntleroy once ; so have thought many beside 
 him, who at last have expiated as he has done. 
 You are as yet upright. But you are a banker, 
 at least the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy 
 of the subject ; but cash must pass through 
 your hands, sometimes to a great amount. If, 
 in an unguarded hour but I will hope better. 
 Consider the scandal it will bring upon those 
 
 244
 
 Charles Lamh 
 
 of your persuasion. Thousands would go to 
 see a Quaker hanged, that would be indifferent 
 to the fate of a Presbyterian or an Anabaptist. 
 Think of the effect it would have on the sale 
 of your poems alone, not to mention higher 
 considerations." 
 
 The best of Lamb*s humour is, of course, 
 in " Elia,'* which, as he observed, is an anagram 
 of '* a lie." The literal truth rather bored him. 
 He liked to get round it, and put it in another 
 way. A '* matter of fiction man," he once 
 called himself; and fiction was to him more 
 real than fact. Although he went regularly, 
 if late, to the India House, he lived in litera- 
 ture, from Shakespeare to John Woolman, 
 from the classics to the Lake poets. He has 
 confessed his perplexity when a fellow-passenger 
 on a coach asked him what he thought would 
 be the value of the shops in Cheapside. *' If," 
 he says, pensively, " the man had asked me, 
 what song the sirens sang, or by what name 
 Achilles went when he hid himself among 
 women, I might have hazarded a wide solu- 
 tion," But it is a far cry from the Symple- 
 gades to Cheapside. Christ's Hospital had 
 not taught Lamb to dispense with translations. 
 It was the " full proud sail " of Chapman's 
 "great verse" that wafted him, as it wafted 
 245
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Keats, through Homer. But he wore the 
 garb, if not the clothes, of the ancients. 
 
 Lamb had not much good to say of the 
 India House during the thirty years of his 
 bondage there. Yet in the ten years of his 
 freedom, he often missed the old chains ; and 
 his essay on Superannuation is a sad one. 
 Sad, indeed, at bottom, his whole life was, and 
 sadder as he grew older. His sister, to whom 
 he had sacrificed everything, slowly failed in 
 mental power, and became less, rather than 
 more, of a companion. His own writing, if 
 possible, improved ; but his fame was chiefly 
 posthumous. While he lived, and long after- 
 wards, it was confined to the initiated. It is 
 now conterminous with English literature. 
 Beyond that it is not likely to go. He dis- 
 claims writing for posterity ; and posterity 
 persists in reading him. He certainly never 
 thought of writing for the foreigner ; and to 
 translate him adequately into any other tongue 
 would require a genius not unlike his own. 
 The end of his life, though sad, was very 
 beautiful. " Her rambling chat is better to 
 me," he wrote of Mary, " than the sense and 
 sanity of this world." The perfect unselfish- 
 ness of his devotion was, in the end, its own 
 reward. Lamb had no more expectation than 
 
 246
 
 Charles' Lamb 
 
 his contemporary Jane Austen of a permanent 
 place among the British authors of the nine- 
 teenth century. Even now, those to whom 
 a sense of humour has, by the inscrutable 
 wisdom of Providence, been denied, look 
 puzzled and uncomfortable when either name 
 is mentioned. The two knew nothing of each 
 other ; and, except humour, they had nothing 
 in common. The position of each is now 
 unassailably secure. Miss Austen, a classic 
 perfect in her kind, had no poetry in her. The 
 poetic vein in Lamb was not less deep, nor less 
 genuine, because it seldom found a metrical 
 expression. "The Old Familiar Faces" is, 
 of course, famous. A few sonnets are well 
 known. Mr. Lucas has picked up some odds 
 and ends. But it is by his unmetrical poetry, 
 by his prose which never becomes prosaic, that 
 Lamb lives. With sound judgment, Mr. Lucas 
 quotes from '* The Popular Fallacy : ' That 
 we should rise with the Lark,' " a specimen 
 of Lamb at his best. I will quote from the 
 quotation : 
 
 *' In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we 
 contract political alliances with shadows. It is 
 good to have friends at Court. The abstracted 
 media of dreams seem no ill introduction to 
 that spiritual presence upon which, in no long 
 
 347
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying 
 to know a little of the usages of that Colony, 
 to learn the language and the phrases that we 
 shall meet with there, that we may be the less 
 awkward at our first coming among them. We 
 willingly call a phantom a fellow, as knowing 
 we shall soon be of their dark companionship. 
 Therefore, we cherish dreams. We try to 
 spell in them the alphabet of this invisible 
 world ; and think we know already how it 
 shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, 
 which, while we clung to flesh and blood, 
 affrighted us, have become familiar. We fall 
 attenuated into their meagre essences, and have 
 given the hand of half-way approval to incor- 
 poreal being. We once thought life to be 
 something ; but it has unaccountably fallen 
 from us before its time. Therefore we choose 
 to dally with visions. The sun has no pur- 
 poses of ours to light us to. Why should we 
 get up .f* " 
 
 Few passages in Lamb remind one more 
 clearly of his master in style, Sir Thomas 
 Browne ; and yet few are more characteristic. 
 Behind all Lamb's humour, except when he 
 is forcing himself to be gay in self-defence, 
 there is a back-ground of melancholy. The 
 " doubtful doom of human kind " haunted 
 
 248
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 him, as it haunted Virgil, despite intervening 
 centuries and revolutions of faith. He was 
 not of the earth earthy. The " spiritual 
 presence " of which he speaks, he had already 
 in some degree realised. He was far more 
 delivered from the burden of the flesh than 
 the mystic Coleridge. It is the airy, fantastic, 
 element in him, which makes the process of 
 tracking him from Edmonton to Enfield just 
 a little ridiculous. Nobody could have done 
 the thing better than Mr. Lucas, with more 
 thoroughness, or with less egoism. It is all 
 right, I suppose. Every fact connected with 
 Lamb is brought together in these volumes. 
 But how Lamb did hate facts ! There is a 
 Concordance to Shelley ; and yet Cruden 
 sleeps in his grave. Shelley, too, and Lamb, 
 are undisturbed by the attentions of their 
 votaries. Even Dr. Parr, a Whig of the 
 Whigs, a man fanatical in his Whig principles, 
 cannot avenge himself upon Mr. Lucas for 
 making him a ''sturdy old Tory." This is 
 the only mistake I have observed in Mr. 
 Lucas's book ; and I mention it as the excep- 
 tion which proves the rule, a tribute to his 
 general accuracy. His work is final. He 
 has written the full, entire, and comprehensive 
 Life of Lamb. The tautology is my own. 
 
 249
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 The tribute to Lamb is magnificent. If some 
 of Elia's lovers have a lurking or sneaking 
 sense of incongruity about these methodical 
 annals of an unmethodical life, and think 
 how Lamb would have 1-1-1-laughed at the 
 idea, they must also feel that, when every 
 extra glass has been set down on the wrong 
 side of Lamb's account, the balance on the 
 right side is beyond human calculation. 
 
 250
 
 The Author of '* lonica 
 
 }) 1 
 
 THE collection of poems known as 
 " lonica" is familiar to all students 
 of English literature. Many of 
 them were published nearly half 
 a century ago, and have long been favourites 
 with a small circle of scholarly folk. Upon 
 the general reader, they have never taken 
 much hold. For, with all their beauty and 
 charm, they are rather artificial and academic 
 copies of verses than the spontaneous expression 
 of natural genius. One of the best among 
 them, perhaps the best of all, '* Heraclitus," is 
 translated from the Greek Anthology, though 
 printed here as an original poem. " Phaedra's 
 Muse " is a translation from Euripides, and 
 *' Barine " a translation from Peel's favourite 
 Ode of Horace, though this little volume 
 gives no hint of either fact. " Mimnermus 
 in Church," a lovely lyric, is Greek in every- 
 thing except the language. " After Reading 
 ' Ajax ' " might be set in an examination paper 
 for candidates to explain the allusions. The 
 
 ' "lonica." By William Cory ; with Riofjraphical Intrcxluction 
 and Notes by Arthur C. Benson, Fellow of Magdalene College, 
 Cambridge. London : George Allen, 1905. 
 
 251
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 jolly " Ballad for a Boy " is one of the few 
 really original pieces, though " Amaturus " was 
 written in ignorance of Crashaw. If William 
 Johnson, who afterwards changed his name 
 to Cory, had been only the author of " lonica," 
 a new edition of his poetry would hardly de- 
 serve particular notice. For while its peculiar 
 taste and flavour are so well known that they 
 need no recommendation, as good wine needs 
 no bush, it is vain to expect that this little 
 book will ever be popular, in the largest sense 
 of that term. But Johnson was for twenty- 
 seven years a master at Eton ; and, during the 
 whole of that time, he exercised a peculiar 
 influence upon his pupils, many of whom are 
 distinguished men, one of whom has been 
 Prime Minister of England. As a teacher, 
 he was in a class by himself, difi^ering, not in 
 degree but in kind, from all the other teachers 
 I, at least, have ever known. At Eton, as 
 most people know, the important thing is the 
 tutorial system ; a boy depends more upon 
 his tutor than upon the Head Master and all 
 the other masters put together. Yet I have 
 heard many Eton men, who were not Johnson's 
 pupils, say that they took no interest in school 
 or pupil room, and nobody seemed to take any 
 interest in them, until they were in Johnson's 
 
 252
 
 The Author of ^^ lonica'' 
 
 division. Then for the first time they felt the 
 contact of a mind which understood their own. 
 Even in boys who seemed to other masters 
 hopelessly stupid, Johnson would discover a 
 bright side which responded to sympathetic 
 treatment. Such a man cannot be at the 
 greatest school in England for a quarter of a 
 century without producing some effect upon 
 the life of the nation. Johnson wrote very 
 little for the public. His " Guide to Modern 
 English History " was a financial failure ; and 
 he never completed it. It covers the first 
 twenty years of the Peace, from 1815 to 1835. 
 The title was unfortunate, suggesting a manual 
 of facts and dates. It is brilliantly epigram- 
 matic in style, if rather paradoxical in judg- 
 ment ; and some of the best critics regard it 
 as unrivalled for luminous appreciation of 
 character. But it did not get beyond a narrow 
 group, chiefly, if not solely, composed of the 
 author's personal friends. It was caviare to 
 the general. 
 
 "No one," says Mr. Arthur Benson, "who 
 knew William Cory, will think it an exaggera- 
 tion to say that his mind was probably one of 
 the most vigorous and commanding minds of 
 the century." I should be rather inclined to 
 say, that no one who knew William Cory 
 
 253
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 would have written that sentence. It is not 
 an exaggeration, because an exaggeration is an 
 overstatement of a fact. It is altogether wide 
 of the mark. I think I must have known 
 William Cory. I was his pupil for six years. 
 After he left Eton, I stayed with him at his 
 house in Devonshire. During the last years 
 of his life, which he spent at Hampstead, I 
 was his constant visitor and guest. The most 
 vigorous and commanding minds of the century 
 are those which have had most effect upon 
 public opinion. Cory's had none at all. 
 When he attempted to address the public, 
 nothing came of it ; they did not understand 
 him, nor he them. When he tried to defend 
 Eton against the attacks of a popular writer, 
 Matthew Higgins, who called himself "Jacob 
 Omnium," he failed altogether. He was great 
 simply as a teacher. My intellectual debt to 
 him is such that I may be prejudiced ; but I 
 cannot imagine that in that character he was 
 ever surpassed. 
 
 He was a Devonshire man, born at Tor- 
 rington, and his father had close relations of 
 friendship, as well as of business, with the landed 
 gentry. The results of this early training were 
 never effaced. All his years at Eton could 
 not remove from William Johnson's mind the 
 
 254
 
 The Author of ^^ Ionic a'' 
 
 delusion that there is in this country a caste 
 called the aristocracy, with virtues and vices, 
 especially virtues, of its own. He went to 
 Eton as a Colleger, and won the Newcastle. 
 He went to Cambridge, or rather to King's, 
 and won the Craven. He became, in the 
 ordinary course, a Fellow of King's, and re- 
 turned to Eton as a Master at the age of 
 twenty-three. He was the first, I think, to 
 break through the tradition by which the 
 entire staff took Holy Orders. Although 
 his health was good, and his physical strength 
 considerable, his extreme shortness of sight 
 disqualified him for athletic exercises ; and he 
 led the life of a book-worm, though by nature 
 peculiarly sensitive to beauty, refinement, and 
 grace. At that time, and within the memory 
 of men now living, every Eton Master had 
 been a Colleger; and almost all of them were 
 Kingsmen. Their training had been extremely 
 narrow ; and their experience was as narrow as 
 their training. 
 
 Mr. Benson says that my tutor, as I must 
 be allowed to call him, "became a first rate 
 classical scholar." This reminds me of the late 
 Lord Crewe asking Mrs. Gladstone whether her 
 husband did not take a considerable interest in 
 politics. The late Professor Munro, *' Lucre- 
 
 255
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 tius Munro," said that William Johnson had 
 written the best Latin lyrics since the death 
 of Horace. His scholarship was so far beyond 
 my power of appreciation that I hesitate to 
 describe it. When he was explaining a clas- 
 sical author, it was hard to believe that he 
 had not written the book himself. For he 
 seemed to know what was in the mind of 
 Sophocles, or of Virgil, and why they had 
 used particular phrases, not merely what the 
 phrases meant. He seldom employed com- 
 mentaries, or referred to them. Thompson's 
 '* Phaedrus " was one of the few excep- 
 tions. The bits of translation from Plato 
 in Thompson's notes he was never tired of 
 praising. Of " cribs " he had a horror ; and 
 the sight of a Bohn produced a violent con- 
 vulsion of pupil room. Even an English- 
 Latin dictionary was taboo. "Always use 
 the Latin-English, never the English-Latin," 
 was a favourite maxim of his. When the 
 son of a celebrated statesman rendered " naval 
 victory " by umhilica victoria^ he at once said, 
 probably with truth : " That comes of using 
 the English-Latin." His own translations 
 were perfect. Stock phrases always irritated 
 him. " Don't translate 'yap ' for,' " he would 
 shout ; and indeed that is the weakest point 
 
 256
 
 The Author of ^^ lonica" 
 
 in the Authorised Version of the New Tes- 
 tament ; yap is often no more to be trans- 
 lated than a comma, vvv Se " but as it is," I 
 seem to hear now, and *' ;'//<?, the former," 
 " A/V, the latter," will remain with me to my 
 dying day. When the Romans meant that an 
 athlete was as strong as a lion, they said that 
 he was stronger ; and, in reading Cicero's 
 " Letters," it is useful to remember that a 
 thousand sestertii make one sestertium^ worth 
 about eight pounds not a coin, but a sum. 
 These are small points ; and I only use them 
 to illustrate my tutor's familiarity with those 
 old Greeks and Romans who, to many learned 
 persons, seem insoluble mysteries. He boasted, 
 though by no means given to boasting, that, 
 blind as he was, he found his way about Rome 
 without a guide, simply from his knowledge 
 of Horace and Ovid, of Tacitus and Juvenal. 
 After quoting Munro, it is perhaps absurd 
 to express any opinion of my own. But it 
 seems to me that my tutor wrote better in 
 Greek than in English, and that his Greek 
 elegiacs in " Arundincs Cami " (a book, by 
 the way, of which he had a very poor opinion) 
 are at least equal to anything in " lonica." 
 I refer to his translations of the canto from 
 *' In Memoriam " beginning : *' He passed, a 
 
 257 R
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 soul of nobler tone," and of Matthew Arnold's 
 song : *' Strew on her roses, roses.'* The Latin 
 lyrics which excited Munro's enthusiastic ad- 
 miration are contained in the key to a little 
 schoolbook called " Lucretilis." Cory was a 
 severe critic of Latin verse ; but his power of 
 improving a boy's exercise in that line by a 
 touch here, and a touch there, would be in- 
 credible to anybody who had not seen it done. 
 If he had edited a classical author, the edition 
 would have been a masterpiece. He never 
 wasted time on easy passages. He never left 
 a difficulty unexplained. I doubt whether 
 emendations of the text interested him much. 
 He wanted to get at the real meaning. The 
 pedantry of scholarship he loathed. The 
 author with whom he had most affinity was 
 Plato ; and he taught some of the Dialogues 
 as a special subject, not in pupil room but 
 in school. There was a good deal of re- 
 semblance, more than appeared at first sight, 
 between him and Socrates. He certainly had 
 the maieutic faculty, the gift of bringing 
 other people's ideas to the birth. His teach- 
 ing was the exact negation of cramming. 
 Unless you could put an idea in your own 
 words, if you could only repeat the official 
 version of it, he did not consider that you 
 
 258
 
 The Author of ^^ lonica^' 
 
 knew it at all. There were ways of getting 
 round my tutor with which no mental pro- 
 cess had anything to do. But, intellectually, 
 1 do not think that he was ever deceived. 
 Few men talked less about themselves ; and to 
 his poetry, with one exception, I never heard 
 him make the most distant allusion. He 
 always maintained that he ought not to have 
 won the Chancellor's English Medal at Cam- 
 bridge for a poem on Plato. The prize should 
 have gone, he said, to Henry Maine, whose 
 beautiful verses he kept, and was fond of 
 lending. Of Cambridge in those days when 
 Leslie Ellis was a star, and George Denman 
 persuaded the Examiners that he was a better 
 scholar than Munro, there exists a singularly 
 faithful memorial called "Five Years at an 
 English University," by an American writer 
 named Bristed, who, by almost incredible exer- 
 tions, obtained a second class. Bristed thought 
 that he could say anything he liked about 
 anybody if only he altered the name; and 
 his book is, in consequence, diverting. But 
 perhaps the funniest things in it are his own 
 longs and shorts. I still bless the day when 
 I found it on my tutor's shelves with all the 
 right names supplied. 
 
 Johnson had, says Mr, Benson, a wide know- 
 259
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 ledge of history, of politics, both home and 
 foreign, of political economy, of moral science. 
 His knowledge of moral science he kept, so 
 tar as his pupils were concerned, to himself. 
 Political economy he taught, like everything 
 he taught at all, incomparably well. When 
 I tell people that I became a Free Trader at 
 Eton, they think me a liar or a prig. But it 
 is the simple fact. My tutor was a student 
 of Ricardo and Bastiat. He was fond of 
 French, which he had taught to himself, and 
 frequently declared that it was the best lan- 
 guage for all kinds of science. In his evidence 
 before the Public Schools' Commission, Lord 
 Clarendon's Commission in 1862, he pro- 
 posed that French themes on modern subjects 
 should be set in place of Latin, which had 
 not the proper words. I doubt whether his 
 general knowledge of history was very great. 
 On legal and constitutional questions, he was 
 certainly not to be trusted. In naval and 
 military history he was infallible. I really 
 believe that he knew the career of every regi- 
 ment in the British Army, and every ship in 
 Her Majesty's Service. A regiment marching 
 down town from Windsor always brought 
 him to the door. He loved to talk of 
 martial exploits, and wrote rather morbidly 
 
 260
 
 The Author of '' lonica'' 
 
 of the " vile eyes that had made him a mufF." 
 I have seen him called a "Jingo." No de- 
 scription could be more absurd. Jingo is a 
 cant term invented for the supporters of Lord 
 Beaconsfield's foreign policy in 1878. To 
 that policy Johnson was resolutely opposed. 
 He hated the Turk. He had no love for 
 Disraeli, *' one who had nothing to do with 
 useful legislation, except to cavil at it." He 
 attacked Sir Henry Elliot, whose son had been 
 one of his favourite pupils, in the Devonshire 
 Press. He was as little of a Jingo as Mr. 
 Gladstone himself. On the other hand, he 
 was never a Gladstonian. Gladstone's High 
 Churchmanship, like Lord Salisbury's, excited 
 his suspicion and distrust. For, though he 
 seems to have leaned himself to that school 
 of thought when he was very young, all trace 
 of it had disappeared before I knew him, and 
 he had become a rationalising Erastian Whig. 
 He speaks contemptuously in his History of 
 men old in years, or old before their time in 
 thought, who had a fumbling dread of the 
 human reason. The Whigs, perhaps not the 
 real Whigs, but the Whigs of his historical 
 imagination, were philosophers, governed by 
 pure intellect. He gloried in the name, and 
 justly denounced as vulgar the pretence that 
 
 261
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 only a few families had a right to be Whigs. 
 At the same time, he almost worshipped Sir 
 Robert Peel, claiming that he could appreciate 
 Peel without depreciating Melbourne. Lord 
 Melbourne never had a warmer admirer than 
 Johnson, who regarded him as an embodiment 
 of the golden mean between the Toryism he 
 despised, and the Radicalism he dreaded. But 
 perhaps Sydney Smith's Preface to his own 
 Collected Essays gave him more satisfaction 
 than any other political writing, disrespectful 
 to Melbourne as it is. For Macaulay, espe- 
 cially the speeches, he expressed an almost 
 unbounded admiration. Gibbon, he had the 
 temerity to assert, should be re-written. He 
 could not get over the Gallicisms or the 
 artificial elaboration of the style. 
 
 Outside the literature of Greece and Rome, 
 Johnson's taste was not sure. Shelley was 
 antipathetic to him. He never appreciated 
 Thackeray or Carlyle. He amused himself 
 with the paradox that Shakespeare was a bad 
 play-wright, inferior to Sardou. His ideal 
 dramatist in modern times was Victor Hugo. 
 He never tried to force his literary taste on 
 anybody. That was not his way. I remember 
 once making to him a foolish, flippant remark 
 about Wordsworth, whom I was pleased to 
 
 262
 
 The Author of '' lonica" 
 
 credit with fine passages. " You'll read him 
 through some day," was his only answer. I 
 had left school before I took the implied 
 advice ; but I have never ceased to be thankful 
 for it, and never shall. A long lecture on 
 the importance of a study of Wordsworth as 
 a whole would not have produced the same 
 result. That was the secret of his influence. 
 He dropped the hint, and left it to work. 
 
 Mr. Benson, who is useful in keeping one 
 more or less to the point, says that my tutor 
 " had a thorough acquaintance with and a 
 deep love of literature, and all this (J) in spite 
 of the fact that he lived a very laborious and 
 wearing life as a school-teacher with impossibly 
 large classes, and devoted himself with whole- 
 hearted enthusiasm to his profession." I do 
 not think that he was in the least enthusiastic 
 about his profession. He was certainly fond 
 of depreciating it, and contrasting it with 
 more active forms of life. He was enthusiastic 
 about particular boys, not always the best ; 
 and he liked to think that he was training 
 statesmen. The gerund-grinding part of the 
 business bored him. But he was such a con- 
 summate scholar, that it gave him no trouble; 
 and nothing that he taught could ever for a 
 moment, while he taught it, be dull. He 
 263
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 never seemed as if he tried to be interesting, 
 but as if he could not be anything else. In 
 scholarship he began where some of his 
 colleagues left off; and I have wondered at 
 times whether he thought in Greek. That he 
 was teaching "dead languages" never occurred 
 either to him or to his pupils. It was the 
 living voice that came to us. He talked of 
 Virgil as he talked of Wordsworth, and, as 
 " An Invocation " shows, Theocritus was 
 equally familiar to him with Tennyson. Of 
 " impossibly large classes " I know nothing. I 
 suppose Mr. Benson means classes so large 
 that it would be impossible to teach them. 
 Jol nson's division in my time was of the same 
 size as other people's, about thirty-five ; the 
 discipline was perfect. We behaved far better 
 in that room, now part of the school library, 
 than we behaved in Chapel. If Johnson 
 could not see he could hear ; and the faintest 
 sound reached him. He very seldom com- 
 plained of a boy, which meant a flogging from 
 the Head Master. But he had a tongue that 
 cut like a razor ; and he was quite merciless 
 in the use of it. Mr. Benson speaks of his 
 " courtesy " ; and in later life, after his mar- 
 riage, he was invariably courteous. But then 
 he was in many respects a different man, and 
 
 264
 
 The Author of '' lonica" 
 
 much more like other people. I have only 
 space to describe him as he was at Eton. 
 There he became notorious for his rudeness, 
 being extremely shy, extremely irritable, and 
 versed in the vocabulary of contempt. In 
 teaching he never aimed at effect, " We are 
 not learned enough to show off," he said 
 sharply to Halford Vaughan, when that eccen- 
 tric scholar examined him before the Com- 
 mission. No human being I have ever known 
 was more free from vanity. He had extra- 
 ordinary terseness of expression, and never 
 wasted a word. His comments upon a diffi- 
 cult passage, or a passage which would have 
 been difficult to others, seemed to come of 
 themselves in the form most easily remem- 
 bered ; his translation was always idiomatic 
 and pointed. "Thorough acquaintance with 
 literature " does not describe him to me in the 
 least. He was anything but an omnivorous 
 reader ; for his taste in modern literature was 
 capricious. I have already mentioned his 
 dislike of Shelley, Carlyle, and Thackeray. 
 He could not read Jane Austen, confounding 
 form with substance, and calling her trivial. 
 He did not care for Dickens. I do not know 
 whether he often read Shakespeare. Char- 
 lotte Bronte and George Eliot, a strange pair, 
 
 265
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 he exalted above all other novelists, except 
 Walter Scott. He was a devout Tennysonian, 
 and a fervent admirer of Mr. Swinburne's 
 " Atalanta in Calydon " ; Matthew Arnold's 
 poems he never tired of, nor of contrasting 
 them favourably with his prose. Browning 
 he could not or would not read. Only a few 
 stanzas of " The Last Ride " appealed to him 
 at all. A less catholic appreciation it would 
 be hard to find. 
 
 One of my tutor's methods as a teacher, 
 perhaps the most characteristic of them all, 
 was to rouse a boy's combative instincts by 
 flouting his prejudices, questioning his beliefs, 
 treading, so to speak, on his corns. Suddenly 
 put on the defensive, the dullest fellow, if he 
 had any spirit in him, would try to say some- 
 thing for himself. If he talked nonsense, no 
 pity was shown him. But if he made any 
 sort of case, he received an encouragement 
 which was peculiarly flattering, because it had 
 the appearance of a reluctant concession. The 
 one thing impossible in that pupil room was 
 intellectual torpor. Acquiescence would not 
 do. You were allowed to disagree if you had 
 a reason. Without one it was not enough to 
 agree. Mr. Benson says, quite truly, that in 
 general conversation Johnson disliked argu- 
 
 266
 
 The Author of *' lonica" 
 
 ment. One of the few practical precepts for 
 conduct in life that I can remember to have 
 heard from him was, that if you did not know 
 the opinions of your company, you should 
 " confine yourself to facts." But he en- 
 couraged boys to dispute his statements, be- 
 cause he thereby discovered whether they 
 understood what he was saying. He became 
 more, not less, didactic in the company of 
 adults ; and it was in general society, not in 
 pupil room, that he appeared to be a peda- 
 gogue. Mr. Benson justly praises his " Essay 
 on the Education of the Reasoning Faculties " 
 in Dr. Farrar's book, perhaps the most char- 
 acteristic thing he ever wrote, though it ought 
 to be read along with his evidence before the 
 Royal Commission, and his " Hints to Eton 
 Masters." He had a profound contempt for 
 the purely grammatical teaching of the classics, 
 " pottering," for instance, over the " little 
 ingenuities" of Ovid. Although he made 
 no real attempt to explain the metaphysics 
 of Plato, and had no great knowledge of 
 metaphysics himself, it was not merely as a 
 supreme master of style that he loved and 
 held up to us the author of the '* Thea;tetus " 
 and the *' Gorgias." It was the moral and 
 political doctrines that attracted him, and that 
 267
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 he brought out. Grammar was necessary, be- 
 cause without it the books were unintelligible. 
 When once it had been mastered, there was no 
 need to think anything more about it. Plato 
 was a philosopher, not a maker of sentences. 
 What was the use of reading Thucydides, if 
 he threw no light on the problems of modern 
 state-craft } Niebuhr and Grote were favourites 
 with him, because they used their knowledge of 
 the past to explain the present, making scholar- 
 ship a mean, not an end in itself. That, how- 
 ever, is a common view enough. Johnson's 
 peculiar gift was to make scenes and persons 
 and episodes in the classics so intensely vivid, 
 that all difference between ancient and modern 
 faded away. 
 
 What Mr. Benson means by saying that 
 Johnson " had strong common sense and much 
 practical judgment," I cannot imagine. He 
 was morbidly, sometimes painfully, eccentric ; 
 and he knew nothing of the world. He stayed 
 in a few country houses, where he idealised 
 everything he saw. Shyness and blindness (he 
 used to say that he had never seen a bird fly) 
 made him quite unsociable. He would not 
 mix. As a talker, chiefly in monologue, with 
 a few boys or intimate friends, there was 
 scarcely any one like him for pouring out 
 
 268
 
 The Author of '' Ionic a" 
 
 knowledge, humour, even eloquence. He 
 enjoyed hearing about public affairs from any 
 one who had ever been concerned in them ; 
 and he remembered what he was told. He 
 wrote the best possible letters, especially about 
 his pupils, original and penetrating ; for he 
 had some insight into the characters of boys, 
 though he was at the mercy of superficial 
 graces. His genius was for the education 
 of the reasoning faculties ; and it sometimes 
 almost amounted to creating them. His chief 
 fault as a teacher was favouritism, which he 
 indulged to excess, so that it finally destroyed 
 his moral influence altogether. But he never 
 allowed it to interfere with his duty to others. 
 I was not the sort of boy he liked ; for in 
 those days he detested the commonplace. But 
 he knew that it was important for me to get a 
 scholarship at the university ; and he gave me 
 just twice the amount of time that 1 had a 
 right to expect. When the desired result was 
 achieved, he said : "Well, you've satisfied the 
 examiners." I replied : " I suppose so, sir ; " 
 and the subject dropped. Somehow 1 pre- 
 ferred his remark to the most elaborate eulogy. 
 His horror of gush was contagious. 
 
 My tutor's political opinions were, through- 
 out his later life, perfectly consistent. He 
 
 269
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 always asked himself what the Whigs would 
 have thought or done. Even for Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer he preferred Cornewall Lewis 
 to Gladstone ; and the late Lord Halifax was 
 to him an object of reverence, as embodying 
 the good old Whig tradition. Though he 
 was tutor to most of Mr. Gladstone's sons, he 
 did not like the great man personally, nor 
 trust him politically. " Oxford tutor plus 
 Liverpool bagman," he used to call him. I 
 always thought it a magnificent compliment ; 
 but he did not mean it as such. He meant 
 a mixture of Jesuitical subtlety and mercan- 
 tile prudence. Lord Salisbury's " Italian in 
 the custody of a Scotsman " is a more com- 
 plimentary form of the same idea. My tutor 
 sometimes had strange delusions ; and I believe 
 he really imagined that Mr. Gladstone wanted 
 to see whether he was getting value for his 
 money when he came down to talk about his 
 own sons. Yet he would often speak of the 
 same many-sided person's " dignity and high 
 courtesy" as examiner for the Newcastle 
 Scholarship. He always voted Liberal till 
 1886, after which it was hardly safe to speak 
 to him about Gladstone, the Liberal Party, 
 or Home Rule. In one respect he did not 
 resemble those *'high statesmen," his favourite 
 
 270
 
 The Author of '* lonica" 
 
 Whigs. He never saw two sides to a question 
 about which he really cared. He would have 
 been happier if John Bright, the Radical bogey 
 of his youth, had not been a Unionist. But 
 one cannot have everything in this imperfect 
 world. Lord Hartington had to represent the 
 " high statesmanship " and all the rest of it. 
 
 I have often been amused at the zeal on be- 
 half of *' denominational education " professed 
 for political purposes by men who send their 
 sons to public schools. When I went to Eton, 
 there were numerous services in Chapel at which 
 attendance was compulsory. Some, those on 
 surplice days, to which the choir of St. George's, 
 Windsor, came, were extremely beautiful. 
 Others merely saved the Head Master the 
 trouble of calling "absence"; and there was 
 a " conduct," or chaplain, whose lungs, and 
 legs, were such, that, if the lessons were short, 
 he could be in a fives'-court at a quarter past 
 three, after saying : " When the wicked man " 
 at three o'clock precisely. The other recog- 
 nitions of the Christian faith, about which the 
 Fellows, mostly inaudible, were understood to 
 preach on Sunday, were a lesson in the Greek 
 Testament on Monday morning, " Sunday 
 questions " answered from hooks of reference, 
 and " Sunday private " with one's tutor. John- 
 
 271
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 son did not try to inculcate theology. I never 
 heard him express belief or disbelief in any 
 theological proposition whatsoever. But he 
 had a very serious, reverent mind ; he abomi- 
 nated flippancy ; and one carried away from 
 his Sunday privates, colloquial as they were, 
 the conviction that it is impossible to divide 
 the sacred from the secular, not because every- 
 thing is secular, but because everything is 
 sacred. He was a perfect reader ; he read 
 without the huge gold spectacles which dis- 
 figured him ; and one of his favourite passages 
 in Ruskin, always taken from " Modern Pain- 
 ters," or "The Stones of Venice," was far more 
 impressive than most of the sermons in Chapel. 
 The only Biblical commentary I ever heard 
 him recommend was Archbishop Leighton on 
 St. Peter, a purely spiritual and devotional 
 work. Though a regular church-goer, he was, 
 as Lord Selborne said of the Duke of Devon- 
 shire, " not ecclesiastically minded." The 
 clergy, he would grumble, got all the good 
 things both in this world and in the next. His 
 pet quotation from Bishop Butler, " Every- 
 thing is itself, and not another thing," would, 
 in his opinion, prevent most sermons from 
 being preached. The curious, now obsolete 
 rule, which excluded even clerical masters 
 
 272
 
 The Author of ^' lonica'' 
 
 from the pulpit, he defended before the Com- 
 missioners, on the ground that boys did not 
 like being preached at. They liked to be 
 " preached to as ordinary Christians." 
 
 I have wandered from *' lonica " ; and yet 
 I feel that I have not done justice to the most 
 remarkable man I ever knew or am likely to 
 know. We are all made for some purpose, 
 though it may not be in every case easy to 
 see what that purpose is. William Johnson 
 came into the world to train the reasoning 
 faculties of boys, not to increase the number 
 of minor poets by one. To extract an esti- 
 mate of him from his poetry is impossible. 
 Mr. Benson has done his best ; and he no 
 doubt derived assistance from other sources. 
 A few characteristic sayings he has correctly 
 transcribed ; and he has written an interesting, 
 ingenious little essay, on a character evolved 
 from his own mind. But he has for once, 
 through no fault of his own, missed the 
 mark. He had not the material. Johnson 
 once listened, with great expectations, to talk 
 about himself in an inn parlour. All he 
 could hear was, that he was like a man who 
 once lived at Leamington. He thought it 
 dull. Mr. Benson is never dull ; but, in this 
 single instance, he has failed to grasp the right 
 
 273 s
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 end of the stick. My tutor was a teacher, and 
 nothing but a teacher. He did not teach on 
 any system. He taught because he could not 
 help it. If you took a walk with him, or 
 steered him on the river, you learned more 
 than if you had been in school " up to " any- 
 body else. It was all intellectual, got from 
 books. About the affairs of life, a monk in 
 a cloister could have told you as much ; and 
 a girl at Newnham could tell you a great deal 
 more. But then nobody read books quite as 
 he did. If they were the kind of books which 
 suited him, they gained in richness and in 
 form by passing through his mind. His verbal 
 memory was not remarkable ; and he seldom 
 quoted. His memory for facts was pro- 
 digious. I doubt whether a question could 
 have been asked him out of James's " Naval 
 History " which he would not have answered. 
 I have been told, and I can well believe, that 
 when Lord Roberts was commanding the Indian 
 army he consulted my tutor by letter about 
 the details of past events on the north-west 
 frontier. Mr. Benson's best anecdote describes 
 how Johnson " went down to Portsmouth to 
 see a friend who was in command of a man-of- 
 war ; he was rowed about among the hulks ; 
 the sailors in the gig looked half contemptu- 
 
 274
 
 The Author of '' lonica" 
 
 ously at the sturdy landsman, huddled in a 
 cloak, hunched upon the stern-sheets, peering 
 about through his spectacles. But contempt 
 became first astonishment, and then bewildered 
 admiration, when they found that he knew 
 the position of every ship, and the engage- 
 ments in which each had fought." Political 
 history, though he knew it far less well, was 
 almost equally interesting to him ; and he 
 always referred with veneration to the authority 
 of his friend the present Master of Trinity, as 
 one whose store of anecdotes was equally accu- 
 rate and large. In encyclopaedic learning, he 
 would not have dreamt of competition with 
 his colleague at Eton, William Wayte. He 
 was not, in the general sense, a learned man at 
 all ; and yet it was impossible to be in his 
 company without learning. He might have 
 compared himself, as Socrates did, with the 
 torpedo fish, that gave electric shocks. He 
 had the art of under-statement, and the 
 brevity, sometimes the incompleteness, of his 
 sentences fixed them on the mind. Not that 
 he had swallowed all formulas. Every visitor 
 to his pupil room, from the Provost to the 
 lowest of the lower boys, including the most 
 distinguished strangers, male or female, was 
 greeted with the words : " Wipe your shoes." 
 275
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Another formula, which had small influence, 
 was : " Don't talk about the weather." To 
 begin a conversation with him was not easy ; 
 and he would seldom begin one himself. Once 
 started, he would talk by the hour. He would 
 listen most^ patiently to practical men on 
 practical things. What never failed to bore 
 him was talk for talking's sake. For the 
 inanities of conventional existence, he felt as 
 fierce a scorn as Byron himself; and parents 
 who came to see him were soon made to feel 
 that they were not wanted, unless they had 
 something very special to say. " People are 
 so fond of railway journeys," he used patheti- 
 cally to complain ; and no doubt there is a 
 type of mind that likes Bradshaw. 
 
 Mr. Benson says, doubtless on authority, 
 that in i860 Lord Palmerston was for appoint- 
 ing William Johnson to the Chair of Modern 
 History at Cambridge. He would have been 
 a far better professor than Charles Kingsley, 
 who owed his selection, Mr. Benson assures us, 
 to the Prince Consort. Once at least he gave 
 a formal lecture at Eton, not written but 
 spoken ; and most delightful it was. When 
 he stepped forward to begin, the boys cheered 
 him. "Stop that rubbishing row," he ex- 
 claimed roughly, and plunged into his subject. 
 276
 
 The Author of " Ionic a" 
 
 The expression was more forcible than elegant ; 
 but the boys liked him none the less for that. 
 They knew that he was honourable and kind- 
 hearted. The private wounds inflicted by his 
 tongue, he probably did not realise. He could 
 no more conceal his likes and dislikes than a 
 dog or a child. He might with practice have 
 become a very powerful speaker ; for he had a 
 great command of colloquial English, and the 
 oratorial instinct for dramatic surprises. His 
 course of lessons in Political Economy, de- 
 nounced in those days by Carlyle as the dismal 
 science and apotheosis of selfishness, con- 
 cluded with the words : *' Bear ye one another's 
 burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." 
 Then, as if afraid that he had been led into 
 sentiment, he jerked out : " I have nothing 
 more to say." What more could be said .'* A 
 great deal more could be said about him ; but 
 I must stop. Garrulity is stealing upon me ; 
 and garrulity was a thing he abhorred. Early 
 in life he wrote his own epitaph, and with it I 
 will conclude this sketch : 
 
 
 
 " And when I may no longer live, 
 They'll say, who know the truth, 
 He gave whate'er he had to give, 
 To freedom and to youth." 
 
 277
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill} 
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 
 has all the requisites of a filial 
 biographer, except filial rever- 
 ence. He writes of his father 
 as he would write of any other public man 
 whom he sincerely admired. But this is 
 probably the new style, and will meet with 
 general approbation. Lord Stanmore, who 
 observes that *' censure or commendation of a 
 father by a son alike tremble on the verge 
 of disrespect," and Sir Spencer Walpole, who 
 says much the same thing in diflFerent language, 
 belong to an older school, which, for want of 
 a better name, may be called the School of the 
 Fifth Commandment. Mr. Churchill, how- 
 ever, is quite unconscious of the defect he has 
 inherited. He is as proud of his parentage 
 as any son can be. The people of whom 
 Matthew Arnold said that they spoke of God 
 as if He were a man in the next street, were 
 sincerely religious after their fashion. I can- 
 not think that a Life of a father by a son is 
 appropriately illustrated by caricatures from 
 
 1 " Lord Randolph Churchill." By Winston Spencer Churchill, 
 M.P. London: Macmillan & Co., 1906 (2 vols.). 
 278
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 Punchy even though that true gentleman and 
 splendid draughtsman, Sir John Tenniel, be 
 the caricaturist. But de gustibus non est dis- 
 putandum. 
 
 In every other respect this is an excellent, 
 almost a great book. The only dull chapter 
 is frankly headed " The Party Machine," so 
 that any one may skip it ; and to make that 
 sort of machinery interesting would require the 
 pen of Voltaire. It is perhaps a superfluous 
 caution to warn oflF those who take no interest 
 in politics. As a politician. Lord Randolph 
 Churchill was one of the most attractive, power- 
 ful, and entertaining characters in the Parlia- 
 mentary drama of England. From any other 
 point of view he does not deserve fifty pages, 
 and hardly gets as many. With the instinct 
 of a true artist, Mr. Churchill saw this point 
 at once ; and he wastes no time in coming to 
 it. After that, the difficulty is not to get on 
 with the book, but to put it down for meals, 
 exercise, or sleep. 
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill called himself a 
 Tory Democrat. The best account of this 
 curious species that I know may be found 
 in '* Waterdale Neighbours," which was written 
 by my old friend, Mr. Justin McCarthy, before 
 any one had heard of Lord Randolph. Disraeli 
 
 279
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 was its real originator, and " Coningsby " is its 
 classic. It was inspired in part by a hatred of 
 Whiggery, the government of the people by 
 the people for the benefit of Whigs, and in 
 part by a far-sighted perception that the work- 
 ing classes had the promise of the future. The 
 Reform Act of 1832, the crowning triumph 
 of Whig principles, did nothing for workmen. 
 The Factory Acts, framed and passed on their 
 behalf, were chiefly due to Lord Shaftesbury, 
 who was anything but a Whig. Cobden and 
 Gladstone had no sympathy with these Acts. 
 They were strongly opposed by Peel and Bright. 
 The Reform Act of 1867, which enfranchised 
 working men in boroughs, though really a 
 Liberal measure, was actually carried through 
 both Houses by Derby and Disraeli. The 
 Education Act of 1870, a thoroughly demo- 
 cratic statute, met with more resistance from 
 Radical Dissenters than from Tory Church- 
 men. The Charter of Trade Unionism, the 
 Employers and Workmen Act of 1875, was 
 granted by a Tory Government. Such, in 
 brief outline, was the Tory Democrat's case. 
 The very next year, the third of Disraeli's 
 second and only real Administration, he and 
 his colleagues became involved in Eastern 
 affairs ; and social reform went to the wall. 
 
 280
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 Lord Randolph, who had been elected in 1874 
 for the family borough of Woodstock, had no 
 philo-Turkish propensities of any kind. On 
 the contrary, his sympathies were with the 
 suffering victims of the Porte. Even at the 
 beginning of 1878, when the Jingo fever was 
 raging, and Gladstone was hardly safe in the 
 streets of London, this young Tory, then in 
 his thirtieth year, wrote to Sir Charles Dilke 
 from Dublin Castle, where he was acting as 
 private secretary to his father, the Duke of 
 Marlborough : 
 
 " The Government have too great an ad- 
 vantage ; but I think if we are led into taking 
 any decisive steps hostile to Russia, a great 
 effort should be made for an authoritative de- 
 claration that the ultimate aim and object of 
 any move on our part is the complete freedom 
 and independence of the Slav nationality, as 
 opposed to any reconstruction of the Turkish 
 Empire.*' 
 
 Nothing came of this bold and independent 
 line. From his own side of the House, Lord 
 Randolph could not expect, and did not re- 
 ceive, any support. Except Mr. Walpole, they 
 were Turks almost to a man. Lord Beacons- 
 ficld had his way; and his followers voted Mr. 
 Gladstone down, until, in 1880, the flood came 
 
 281
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 and destroyed them all. Yet, even at the 
 Congress of Berlin, Gladstone's policy pre- 
 vailed ; and his Bulgarian pamphlet, scouted 
 in the drawing-rooms of London, received the 
 diplomatic sanction of the Great Powers. Mr. 
 Churchill's generous tribute to that illustrious 
 man, whose true stature will be realised when 
 he stands alone, is worth quoting : 
 
 "So long as his light lasted, the House of 
 Commons lived, and, amid the fiercest passions, 
 and even scenes of violence, preserved its hold 
 upon the sympathies and the imagination of 
 the whole world ; and at his death it sank at 
 once, perhaps for ever, in public esteem." 
 
 Nevertheless, it was ostensibly against Glad- 
 stone that the Fourth Party directed its attacks, 
 even when the real object of them was Sir 
 Stafford Northcote, whom Mr. Churchill syste- 
 matically under-rates. Sir Stafford was not a 
 good Party man. He was a Liberal Conser- 
 vative ; and sometimes the Liberalism pre- 
 ponderated. But the quickness of his intellect, 
 the sureness of his memory, and his thorough 
 knowledge of public business, would have 
 made him an excellent Leader if his authority 
 had been loyally supported, and not secretly 
 undermined. The Fourth Party made the 
 House of Commons a more amusing place
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 than it would have been without them. If 
 any other justification for their conduct can 
 be produced, Mr. Churchill has not been 
 successful in finding it. Their behaviour in 
 the case of Mr. Bradlaugh was a far more 
 scandalous outrage to everything which de- 
 serves the name of religion, than Brad laugh's 
 pocket testament and private oath. 
 
 Although Lord Randolph Churchill was 
 often purely factious in his conduct (if faction 
 can be pure), he usually thought for himself. 
 His quick, independent, versatile mind was 
 never satisfied with phrases, or catchwords ; 
 and with the rows of Tories behind him he 
 had no more real sympathy than if they had 
 been, as in some respects they were, identical 
 with the benches on which they sat. When, 
 in the last days of the eventful year 1880, 
 the Boers of the Transvaal rose in revolt, 
 and took up arms for their independence, 
 Lord Randolph wrote to Sir Drummond 
 Wolff, with a wisdom beyond his years : 
 
 *' I attach the greatest importance to this 
 news from South Africa, and am of opinion 
 that the question of reducing the Boers will 
 divide the Liberal Party by a sharper and 
 more insuj->erable line than any Irish question. 
 The arguments that formerly were of force 
 
 283
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 for the annexation of the Transvaal can no 
 longer be used with effect. The Zulus are 
 broken, and Secocoeni and his tribe gone, and 
 there is no danger of a native irruption into 
 Natal. The Boers, on the other hand, can- 
 not be said to have ever ceased to be an 
 independent nationality, and are showing now 
 their perfect fitness to take care of them- 
 selves." 
 
 Mr. Churchill calls this a " curious letter." 
 I should call it one of the most long-sighted 
 and sagacious that were ever written by a 
 young man. Each sentence hits the mark 
 with unerring aim. The Liberal Party were 
 divided. The first division was in the 
 Cabinet, where Lord Kimberley and most of 
 his colleagues fought hard for keeping the 
 Transvaal, against Mr. Bright and Mr. Cham- 
 berlain. When the Radical section carried 
 the Prime Minister with them, and prevailed, 
 the question became a Party one. But, ten 
 years afterwards, when Lord Randolph visited 
 the Cape himself, he expressed regret for the 
 line he had taken after Majuba, and complete 
 agreement with the policy of restoration. The 
 great cleavage of the Liberal Party, however, 
 came after his death. The cause of it was 
 the Boer war of 1899; and it was at least 
 
 284
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 as deep as the schism of Home Rule. It 
 was not less bitter than deep. It broke up 
 political combinations, and sundered private 
 friendships. It reduced the Liberal Party at 
 the General Election of 1900 to an impotent 
 and paralysed rump. Not until every pre- 
 diction of the war party had been falsified, 
 and every prediction of the peace party had 
 been verified ; not until Lord Selborne had 
 begun, painfully and laboriously, to undo the 
 work of Lord Milner ; not until the country, 
 put at length in possession of the real facts, 
 swept the authors of the war from power by 
 an avalanche of moral indignation, was the 
 virulent poison of a fraudulent Imperialism ex- 
 pelled from the Liberal system. The rest of 
 Lord Randolph's letter is equally wise ; and, 
 though it failed to convince Sir Drummond 
 Wolff then, it will convince every impartial 
 reader now. 
 
 The relations of Lord Randolph Churchill 
 with Mr. Balfour are a more delicate subject. 
 If Mr. Balfour's weak point as a public man 
 has been his want of fidelity to others, his 
 strong point has been the fidelity of others 
 to him. He never showed much considera- 
 tion for Sir Stafford Northcote. But for his 
 uncle Lord Salisbury he had a sincere rever- 
 
 285
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 ence ; and he declined altogether to join his 
 more detached friends in their attempt to 
 capture the caucus. The details of this in- 
 trigue are nauseous. Mr. Churchill's defence 
 of Mr. Balfour against the reproach of dis- 
 ingenuousness is worthy of Mrs. Candour 
 herself : 
 
 " Certainly Lord Randolph Churchill's cor- 
 respondence lends no support to such a charge. 
 He liked Mr. Balfour as a companion. He 
 did not consider him formidable as an op- 
 ponent. He was delighted to bear the evils 
 of his antagonism for the pleasure of his 
 society." 
 
 How much more deadly is this murderous 
 politeness than the most acrid invective, or 
 the most violent abuse. " I'll meet you again 
 at Philippi." They call it Manchester now. 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain is treated with rather more 
 severity, but with an ironic lightness of touch 
 that is never brutal or rough. In October 
 1 8 84, as is well known. Sir Stafford Northcote 
 and Lord Randolph Churchill visited Aston 
 Park near Birmingham, to take their share in 
 a demonstration against the Liberal Govern- 
 ment on behalf of the Tory Peers. Free 
 speech is not the object, or even one of the 
 objects, which the Birmingham Caucus was 
 
 286
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 formed to promote. Imported Conservatives, 
 "alien immigrants," could not be allowed to 
 misrepresent the opinion of a Radical borough. 
 
 " It became known," says Mr. Churchill 
 demurely, " that a large number of tickets 
 were being forged. Of course no one in 
 authority in the Liberal Party lent any counte- 
 nance to such proceedings. Mr. Schnadhorst 
 went away for the day upon important busi- 
 ness. A few working men a mere handful 
 of trampled toilers spontaneously, with no 
 help from their Party, inspired by no other 
 emotion than zeal for freedom and Reform, 
 organised a counter-demonstration. The place 
 of meeting was selected, by an unlucky coinci- 
 dence, just outside the walls of Aston Park ; 
 and there also it happened that, on the 
 appointed day, a cart containing ladders and 
 other useful appliances drew up." 
 
 " Useful appliances " is good, distinctly 
 good. What followed is history. Half bricks, 
 and even whole bricks, were heaved at the 
 strangers. The judicial bench was nearly de- 
 prived in advance of an illustrious occupant ; 
 but Providence intervened, and " Mr. Darling 
 was lucky enough to make an escape from a 
 window before the door of the room in which 
 he had taken refuge was battered down." A 
 287
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 small but sufficient majority in the House of 
 Commons absolved Mr. Chamberlain from com- 
 plicity in these proceedings, though a man upon 
 whose affidavit he relied was afterwards con- 
 victed at the assizes. As Mr. Churchill drily 
 says : 
 
 " No evidence was ever produced to sustain 
 any charge against Mr. Chamberlain of having 
 himself fomented the disorders ; but an im- 
 pression was created that the whole affair 
 especially the discharge of the fireworks upside 
 down showed that he had been only partially 
 successful in exerting those influences of moral 
 restraint which are so much to be commended 
 in political leaders during times of popular 
 excitement." 
 
 Birmingham does not change its methods 
 with its politics. When Mr. Lloyd-George 
 went there at the time of the war, he went at 
 the risk of his life. 
 
 Public men do not come very well out of 
 the private correspondence published in this 
 book. The late Lord Salisbury, for instance, 
 was in all the personal relations of life a man 
 of stainless rectitude and honour. But he 
 would hardly have cared to be judged by 
 his treatment of his political friend and col- 
 league, Sir Stafford Northcote. When Glad-
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 stone obtained his vote of credit for eleven 
 millions in April 1885, he made an earnest 
 and eloquent appeal to the whole House of 
 Commons for union in the face of Russia 
 and the world. He succeeded, and he pre- 
 served peace with honour. When he sat down 
 at nine o'clock, the money was immediately and 
 unanimously voted. Lord Randolph, who had 
 gone away to dinner, was furious at the neglect 
 of so fine an opportunity for faction, and 
 dashed off at eleven o'clock from the Turf' 
 Club (he belonged to half the clubs in London) 
 an indignant letter to Lord Salisbury. Lord 
 Salisbury's course as a patriot and a gentleman 
 would have seemed clear. A hearty com- 
 mendation of Sir Stafford's magnanimity, a 
 hope that the conduct of the House would 
 have, as it had, a salutary effect upon the 
 Russian Government, a protest against putting 
 Party before Country, and a few sedative words 
 on indiscriminate zeal, would have displayed 
 the best side of public life in England. Here 
 is what Lord Salisbury actually wrote : 
 
 " I sympathise with you very heartily. But 
 what can I do ? It is not a case where advice 
 would be of any service. In fact I sometimes 
 think that my advice does more harm than 
 good ; for, if only partially followed, it may 
 289 T
 
 stray Leaves 
 
 produce exactly the reverse of the intended 
 effect. I hope the papers will attribute the 
 collapse to our exalted patriotism. At least, 
 that is the only hope with which one can con- 
 sole oneself." 
 
 It is painful to read this note. For a com- 
 bination of treachery to a colleague, sneering 
 cynicism, and utter disregard of national in- 
 terests, its parallel could hardly be found. 
 And from such a respectable, religious man 
 too ! Bradlaugh would have been ashamed 
 of it. 
 
 Mr. Churchill reports a brief but interest- 
 ing conversation, which shows at least what 
 the Tory leaders meant when they denied the 
 existence of any compact with Parnell before 
 the defeat of the Liberal Government in June 
 1885, " There was no compact or bargain of 
 any kind," said Lord Randolph in his own 
 house to Lord Justice Fitzgibbon ; " but I told 
 Parnell, when he sat on that sofa, that if the 
 Tories took office and I was a member of 
 their Government, I would not consent to 
 renew the Crimes Act. Parnell replied : ' In 
 that case you will have the Irish vote at the 
 elections.' " What more either Party wanted, 
 Mr. Churchill does not explain. It was con- 
 sidered certain that Lord Randolph would take 
 
 290
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 office ; and both sides were loyal to the com- 
 pact which did not exist. 
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill was no respecter 
 of persons ; and his relations with the Court 
 were never friendly. After he became Secre- 
 tary of State for India in the summer of 1885, 
 he asserted his independence with a courage 
 and a vigour which Mr. Chamberlain himself 
 could scarcely have surpassed. Queen Victoria, 
 who liked her sons to be useful, was anxious 
 that the Duke of Connaught, an excellent 
 soldier, should be appointed to the Presidency 
 Command at Bombay. The nomination rested 
 in strictness with the Secretary for War, Mr. 
 Smith, with whom Lord Randolph took coun- 
 sel, and with whom he agreed. The Queen, how- 
 ever, communicated directly with Lord Salisbury 
 as Prime Minister, and with Lord DufFerin as 
 Viceroy, urging the claims of His Royal High- 
 ness. Lord Randolph held strongly that the 
 office, being in part political, and carrying with 
 it a seat on the Governor's Council, ought 
 not to be held by a member of the Royal 
 P'amily. That, however, was not the point 
 to which he attached most importance, as 
 apj'>ears from the following passage in a letter 
 which he wrote to Lord Salisbury : 
 
 " I cannot continue to hold with any ad- 
 291
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 vantage the high position which H.M. the 
 Queen has conferred upon me, unless I feel 
 I have the confidence of the Sovereign and her 
 principal advisers. This elementary qualifica- 
 tion I am without. Some time ago, I placed 
 you in possession of the objections which I 
 and others saw to the Bombay command being 
 conferred upon the Duke of Connaught. I 
 was not aware that it was possible, under 
 such circumstances, that communications 
 should pass between the Prime Minister and 
 the Viceroy, at the instance of H.M. the 
 Queen, without the knowledge of the Secre- 
 tary of State, on a matter on which the latter 
 held very strong and deliberate opinions." 
 
 Lord Randolph had his way. Lord Salis- 
 bury promised to give up his private corre- 
 spondence with the Viceroy ; the Cabinet 
 acquiesced in Lord Randolph's view ; the 
 Bombay command was not filled up until the 
 Conservatives came in once more, and all 
 objection to the Duke's appointment had been 
 removed by abolishing its political character. 
 But the Indian Secretary had not made to 
 himself friends at Court. 
 
 Those who entered into a competition of 
 cynicism with Lord Randolph never won the 
 game. We have seen Lord Salisbury's attempt 
 292
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 after the Vote of Credit in April 1885. 
 When SaHsbury had succeeded Gladstone in 
 office, and the General Election had yielded 
 indecisive results, the Prime Minister suggested, 
 among other things, a little ecclesiastical re- 
 form. The Indian Secretary answered him 
 with refreshing candour : 
 
 " If those ornamental, but, on the whole, 
 rather useless and expensive Lords Spiritual 
 care to justify their privileges by attempts at 
 legislation, smile on them, give them every 
 encouragement for bringing the Lords Tem- 
 poral into a devout and heavenly frame of 
 mind. Some good may possibly issue from 
 such a source, if such should be the will of 
 Providence. But Church reform which is the 
 product of a Cabinet checked and controlled 
 by Party Whips and guided by House of 
 Commons lobbies is surely in its nature a 
 monstrosity, possibly a profanity, certainly a 
 farce." 
 
 Gladstone would, of course, have expressed 
 himself in very different language. But he 
 would have arrived at much the same con- 
 clusion. He could not bear to see the affairs 
 of the Church brought before the House of 
 Commons at all. 
 
 What was Lord Randolph Churchill's real 
 293
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 opinion about Home Rule ? It is hard to tell, 
 and perhaps not very important to ascertain. 
 From the day when he took office, in June 
 1885, till the close of the General Election in 
 December, he observed a politic silence on the 
 subject. If he held out no hopes, he shut no 
 doors. Before Christmas he had a confidential 
 chat with his friend Mr. Labouchere, and heard 
 a few things which astonished even him. A 
 rumour was current, and found its way into 
 a Dublin newspaper, that Lord Ashbourne, 
 then Irish Chancellor, had drawn up a Home 
 Rule Bill on a blank page in his copy of 
 "Thom's Almanac." This, Lord Randolph 
 told Mr. Labouchere, was " merely the folly of 
 the Daily News^'' of which Mr. Labouchere 
 was part owner. Lord Randolph himself must 
 describe what ensued : 
 
 "Then I was very much upset, for he pro- 
 ceeded to tell me that on Sunday week last 
 Lord Carnarvon had met Justin McCarthy, and 
 had confided to him that he was in favour of 
 Home Rule in some shape, but that his col- 
 leagues and his party were not ready, and asked 
 whether Justin McCarthy's Party would agree 
 to an inquiry, which he thought there was a 
 chance of the Government agreeing to, and 
 which would educate his colleagues and his 
 
 294
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 Party if granted and carried through. I was 
 consternated, but replied that such a statement 
 was an obvious lie ; but, between ourselves, I 
 fear it is not perhaps not even an exaggera- 
 tion or a misrepresentation. Justin McCarthy 
 is on the staff of the Daily NewSy Labouchere 
 is one of the proprietors, and I cannot imagine 
 any motive for his inventing such a statement. 
 If it is true. Lord Carnarvon has played the 
 devil." 
 
 The irony of the situation was complete, 
 and must have amused even so jaded a cynic 
 as Lord Salisbury. He knew, though Lord 
 Randolph did not, that Mr. McCarthy had 
 seen Lord Carnarvon before, had, in fact, 
 prepared the way for the Lord Lieutenant's 
 celebrated interview with Parnell in July, of 
 which he himself, as Prime Minister, ex- 
 pressly approved. Yet, when Gladstone wrote 
 and urged that the Government should take 
 up Home Rule because it would be a public 
 calamity if that great question fell into the 
 line of Party conflict, his hypocrisy made the 
 colleagues of Lord Salisbury and Lord Car- 
 narvon sick. Living in a glass house never 
 yet deterred a politician from throwing stones. 
 After Gladstone had definitely taken up Home 
 Rule, Churchill always opposed it ; and the 
 
 = 95
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 Government threw down a challenge in the 
 Queen's Speech of 1886, by describing the 
 Legislative Union between Great Britain and 
 Ireland as a " fundamental law." It appears 
 that Mr. Buckle, the editor of the Times, was 
 the author of this suggestion, and that he took 
 the hint from the language of Lord Grey used 
 by William the Fourth in 1834. As a matter 
 of fact, it had no particular result. The Irish 
 did not move an amendment ; and the Govern- 
 ment went out on " three acres and a cow." 
 Mr. Churchill makes a needless apology for 
 the phrase " an old man in a hurry," applied 
 by his father to Gladstone. Lord Randolph's 
 election address in 1886 contains many worse 
 things than that ; and to reprint the whole of 
 it, even in an Appendix, was unwise. Its 
 coarse savagery is revolting. But Gladstone 
 was in a hurry ; and so was the Duke of 
 Wellington when he uttered his one great 
 saying : "I have not time not to do what is 
 right." 
 
 Mr. Churchill usually succeeds in suppressing 
 himself. But we are all human, and once the 
 temptation to point a moral proved irresist- 
 ible : 
 
 " Some respect is due to the forbearance 
 of the Liberal majority. For six weary years 
 
 296
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 the Liberal Unionist leaders sat on the Front 
 Opposition Bench. Their followers held the 
 balance of every division. Their authority sus- 
 tained the Conservative Government. Their 
 debating skill was always at hand when all else 
 failed. They supported Coercion ; they justi- 
 fied Mitchelstown ; they even defended the 
 Special Commission ; and with decisive effect. 
 Yet never once, even at times of sharpest 
 indignation, were they denied by those who 
 surrounded them their freedom of debate." 
 
 An inferior writer would have drawn an 
 obvious contrast. Mr. Churchill makes no 
 comment at all. 
 
 The culmination of Lord Randolph's career 
 was his appointment at the age of thirty-seven, 
 the " fatal age for genius," as Disraeli called it, 
 to preside over the Exchequer and to lead the 
 House of Commons. His brief management 
 of the House was masterly ; and, when Parlia- 
 ment had risen, he expounded at Dartford in 
 Kent, where Sir William Hart-Dyke thought 
 that he himself had a scat for life, an attrac- 
 tive outline of progressive legislation. But, 
 well adapted as it was to catch the ears and 
 win the votes of the working classes, it went a 
 good deal too far for some members of the 
 Conservative Cabinet, From a Liberal Unionist 
 
 297
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 they might, while they grumbled, have put up 
 with it. From a man calling himself a Tory, 
 it seemed indecent, almost blasphemous. Lord 
 Randolph wrote on the 6th of November to 
 the Prime Minister : 
 
 " I see the Dartford programme crumbling 
 into pieces every day. The Land Bill is rotten. 
 I am afraid it is an idle schoolboy's dream to 
 suppose that Tories can legislate as I did, 
 stupidly. They can govern and make war and 
 increase taxation and expenditure a merveille^ 
 but legislation is not their province in a demo- 
 cratic constitution. ... I certainly have not 
 the courage and energy to go on struggling 
 against cliques, as poor Dizzy did all his life." 
 
 Lord Salisbury's reply, like most of his other 
 letters in this book, is purely cynical. He does 
 not attempt to argue with his disappointed 
 colleague on any ground of duty or principle. 
 He simply tells him that it will not do. There 
 is, however, a wonderful shrewdness in his 
 analysis of the situation : 
 
 " I think such a poHcy will fail. I do not 
 mean that the ' classes ' will join issue with 
 you on one of the measures which hit them 
 hard, and beat you on that. That is not the 
 way they fight. They will select some other 
 matter on which they can appeal to prejudice, 
 298
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 and on which they think the masses will be 
 indifferent; and on that they will upset you." 
 It is to be observed that Lord Salisbury 
 frankly adopts as useful and convenient Mr. 
 Gladstone's celebrated distinction between the 
 classes and the masses, even admitting, in the 
 Liberal Leader's own words, that ** class and 
 the dependents of class " are the backbone of 
 the Conservative Party. Still more noticeable 
 is his intimate acquaintance with the House of 
 Lords and its ways. The Lords do not, except 
 on very rare occasions, and then not for long, 
 directly oppose a popular Bill. They lie in 
 wait, and bide their time. Sooner or later, a 
 Liberal Government introduces an unpopular 
 measure ; and then comes the time for wiping 
 out old scores. Ministers who mean to fight 
 the Lords should be very careful to have the 
 people behind them. 
 
 The great Budget which Lord Randolph 
 framed, but never introduced, is published for 
 the first time by his son. It was really brilliant 
 in conception, anticipating in its principal char- 
 acteristics the Succession Duties of Sir William 
 Harcourt, and the Finance Act of 1894. It 
 involved, however, a reduction of the Army and 
 Navy Estimates to which the Cabinet would 
 not consent ; and the Chancellor of the Ex- 
 299
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 chequer resigned. " He knew," says his son, 
 " that although the cry of ' Less waste and no 
 jobbery' might appeal to many, 'Economy' 
 was not in itself a popular cause to submit to 
 a Democratic electorate, and was, moreover, 
 foreign to the instincts and traditions of Tory- 
 ism." This is not quite historical. Gladstone 
 used to say that, when he was a Tory, the 
 Tories were the Party of economy and peace. 
 No more economical Government than the 
 Duke of Wellington's ever existed in England. 
 It was Disraeli, or rather Lord Beaconsfield, 
 who began the era of extravagance in which 
 modern Tories have rioted unashamed. At 
 the end of 1886, the peace of Europe was by 
 no means secure ; and there were those who 
 thought that Germany was preparing to pounce 
 upon the French Republic. 
 
 " I am as much committed to economy as 
 you are," wrote Mr. Smith from the War 
 Office on the i6th of December, "but I can- 
 not be the head of a great department in times 
 like these and ask for less than the absolute 
 minimum required for the safety of the country. 
 I will go into figures with you if you like ; but 
 it is out of the question for you to talk of 
 retiring. If one of us goes, I shall claim the 
 privilege ; and you may rest assured that if a 
 
 300
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 man can be found to take my place, I shall be 
 delighted to give all the help in my power to 
 a successor brave enough to assume responsi- 
 bility which I am not prepared to bear." 
 
 No hope of compromise was held out here. 
 Lord George Hamilton, then First Lord of 
 the Admiralty, was willing to make reasonable 
 reductions. Smith was adamant ; and he did 
 not stand alone. 
 
 "The Cabinet, happily, not I," Lord Salis- 
 bury wrote from Hatfield, " will have to decide 
 the controversy between you and Smith. But 
 it will be a serious responsibility to refuse the 
 demands of a War Minister so little imagina- 
 tive as Smith, especially at such a time. It is 
 curious that two days ago I was listening here 
 to the most indignant denunciations of Smith 
 for his economy from Wolseley." 
 
 There is always some distinguished soldier 
 whom no military expenditure will satisfy. It 
 was Lord Wolseley then. It is Lord Roberts 
 now. On the 20th of December, when Lord 
 Randolph was at Windsor, he burnt his boats. 
 He said nothing on the subject to the Queen. 
 To the Prime Minister he wrote : 
 
 " I am pledged up to the eyes to large reduc- 
 tions of expenditure ; and I cannot change my 
 mind on this matter. If the foreign policy of 
 
 301
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 this country is conducted with skill and judg- 
 ment, our present huge and increasing arma- 
 ments are quite unnecessary, and the taxation 
 which they involve perfectly unjustifiable. The 
 War Estimates might be very considerably re- 
 duced if the policy of expenditure on the 
 fortifications and guns and garrisons of military 
 ports, mercantile ports, and coaling stations 
 was abandoned or modified. But of this I see 
 no chance, and, under the circumstances, I can- 
 not continue to be responsible for the finances." 
 " Believe me," he wrote afterwards, " I pray 
 you, that it is not niggardly cheese-paring or 
 Treasury crabbedness, but only considerations 
 of high State policy which compel me to 
 sever ties in many ways most binding and 
 pleasant." 
 
 Lord Randolph had the entire sympathy 
 of Mr. Chamberlain, who thought, by a 
 strange misconception, that the Government 
 was doomed. Lord Salisbury shared this 
 singular delusion. Mr. Chamberlain, full of 
 himself, and of self-pity, wrote : 
 
 " You will have a hard time to go through. 
 Your case will be mine almost exactly, and I 
 can tell you it is a bitter pilgrimage which is 
 in prospect. The Party tie is the strongest 
 sentiment in this country stronger than 
 302
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 patriotism or even self-interest. But it will 
 all come right in the end for both of us." 
 
 How little any of us know about the end. 
 Lord Randolph had not many friends in the 
 Government, or in the Conservative Party. 
 To one of them, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, 
 the present Lord St. Aldwyn, who resigned the 
 Irish Office in the spring of 1887, he wrote : 
 
 '*Now that you are gone, there is no one 
 in the Government I care a rap about. I 
 should so much like to see you and have a 
 long talk. I have as yet seen none of my late 
 colleagues, nor do I want to." 
 
 Lord Randolph never quarrelled by halves. 
 Mr. Smith and others made friendly overtures 
 to him. But they were not reciprocated. 
 Lord Iddesleigh's sudden death led to an 
 exchange of civil but rather cold notes with 
 Lord Salisbury, whose own account of that 
 tragic event is sufficiently curious to be 
 quoted : 
 
 " It was a very painful scene that I witnessed 
 on Wednesday in Downing Street. I had 
 never happened to see any one die before and 
 therefore, even apart from the circumstances, 
 the suddenness of this unexpected death would 
 have been shocking. But there was, in addi- 
 tion, the thought of our thirty years' com- 
 303
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 panionship in political life ; and the reflection 
 that now, just before this sudden parting, by 
 some strange misunderstanding which it is 
 hopeless to explain, I had, I believe for the 
 first time in my life, seriously wounded his 
 feelings. As I looked upon the dead body 
 stretched before me, I felt that politics was 
 a cursed profession." 
 
 That was a feeling of which, for very 
 different reasons, Mr. Gladstone and Lord 
 Randolph were equally incapable. Mr. Glad- 
 stone always persuaded himself that what he 
 did was right. Lord Randolph disliked the 
 intrusion of morality into political affairs. 
 Lord Salisbury knew when he was going 
 wrong ; but there were times when he could 
 not swim against the stream. 
 
 Mr. Churchill selects, as a typical specimen 
 of his father's sagacity, the Memorandum 
 drawn and sent to Mr. Smith, then First Lord 
 of the Treasury, the day after the Parnell 
 Commission Bill had been introduced. It is 
 indeed a masterly document, and the follow- 
 ing paragraph could scarcely have been 
 improved by Lord Herschell himself: 
 
 "The whole course of proceeding, if the 
 character of the allegations is remembered, 
 will, when carefully considered, be found to 
 
 304
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 be utterly repugnant to our English ideas of 
 legal justice, and wholly unconstitutional. It 
 is hardly exaggerating to describe the Com- 
 mission contemplated as ' a revolutionary 
 tribunal ' for the trial of political offenders. 
 If there is any truth in the above or colour 
 for such a statement, can a Tory Government 
 safely or honourably suggest and carry through 
 such a proposal } " 
 
 That three Judges should have been found 
 to sit upon this " revolutionary tribunal " is 
 a proof that the passions excited by Home 
 Rule had invaded even the Judicial Bench. 
 
 Always a fertile, and seldom a scrupulous 
 schemer, Lord Randolph suggested an in- 
 genious refuge for the Tory Government at 
 the beginning of 1892. 
 
 " H. M. G. have no imagination or origin- 
 ality. The keystone of their policy has been 
 to play against the life of Mr. G. This (not 
 very noble, but still human) policy should, 
 once tak*. n up, be pursued remorselessly. To 
 carry on the policy, the life of the Parliament 
 should be prolonged into '93. How to do 
 this ? Introduce a measure dealing largely 
 with the registration laws. ' One man one 
 vote,* a trifle, could be conceded ; twelve 
 months' residence in lieu of eighteen estab- 
 305 u
 
 ?|^ Stray Leaves 
 
 lished ; paid officials for preparing register 
 appointed in all constituencies. The new 
 register could not be ready before the early 
 spring of next year, and the convenient time 
 for the Election would be the summer or 
 autumn. Now, my dear Fitzgibbon, imagine 
 the consternation, fury, and utter paralysis of 
 the Gladstonians if the Government were to 
 make this complete volte-face this tremendous 
 surprise (all so logical and defensible as it is), 
 the relief and joy of the Tories at getting rid 
 of Local Government, and at getting another 
 year of life ! Do not show this to any one, 
 unless it be to David Plunket, if he is with 
 you the Government are too fond of appro- 
 priating my ideas without acknowledgment 
 but write me all you think about it. I could 
 write pages in support of it, but your own 
 wily and Ulysses kind of mind will suggest 
 to you all the wonderful elaboration of which 
 it is susceptible." 
 
 It need hardly be said that these ideas were 
 not adopted. To make Parliament last for 
 seven years would have been a wild infringe- 
 ment of a custom which has acquired the force 
 of law; and "one man one vote" would have 
 destroyed the Tory domination in the counties. 
 The General Election of 1892, like the General 
 
 306
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
 Election of 1885, was mischievously indecisive; 
 and an observer remarked at the time that the 
 long faces were on the winning side. Lord 
 Randolph did not live to see the turn of events 
 in 1895, which gave his Party more than ten 
 years of place and power. After 1886 he never 
 returned to office ; nor did his colleagues make 
 any effort to bring him back. He remained a 
 Unionist, though he admired Gladstone more 
 than any other living statesman. Like Disraeli, 
 he took up questions which concerned the 
 masses ; his particular favourite being the 
 Eight Hours Bill for miners. 
 
 " You can realise," he wrote to Mr. Balfour, 
 " how much importance I attach to the ques- 
 tion, when I tell you that I am actually coming 
 up from Lincoln, and missing three important 
 races in which our horses run, to vote for the 
 Bill. I do not think I would do this for the 
 Monarchy, the Church, the House of Lords, 
 or the Union." 
 
 The element of Conservatism had been left 
 out of Lord Randolph Churchill's composition; 
 and, in fact, his principles were not much 
 stronger than the great Duke of Marl- 
 borough's, But his interest in the working 
 classes was genuine ; and he foresaw that they 
 would successfully claim for themselves a 
 
 307
 
 Stray Leaves 
 
 larger share of political power. Eleven years 
 after his death, his prescience has been justi- 
 fied. His life was a fragment, a broken 
 column, a riddle without an answer, a begin- 
 ning and middle without an end. His son 
 has traced the working of the unfinished plot, 
 with indefatigable patience and consummate 
 skill. The literary quotations which he prefixes 
 to his chapters are exceedingly well chosen ; 
 and the whole book shows that he might have 
 attained real eminence as a man of letters. 
 If he fulfils the promise of his youth, Mr. 
 Churchill will climb to the top of the tree.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 Mb 14: RECD 
 
 URL HFC 9 f9w 
 
 REC 
 
 MAIN 
 
 / DEC 
 
 I A.M, 
 
 P M 
 
 Form L9-42m-8,'49(B5573)444 
 
 THE LTRT^A^^
 
 ^Kf^^-^ \j'^^o^-'<"v\ 
 
 AA 000 035 711 
 
 AC8 
 P289
 
 ^^'^"^^n^S^iSj'^yfe^ jS'j'^l^