Page 77 II (continued 2)

It may be said, without doubt or exaggeration, that Samuel Whitbread was the ideal Member of Parliament. To begin with physical attributes, he was unusually tall, carried himself nobly, and had a beautiful and benignant countenance. His speaking was calm, deliberate, dignified; his reasoning close and strong; and his style, though unadorned, was perfectly correct. His truly noble nature shone through his utterance, and his gentle humour conciliated the goodwill even of political opponents. His ample fortune and large leisure enabled him to devote himself to Parliamentary work, though the interests of his brewery and of his landed estate were never neglected. He was active in all local business, and had a singularly exact knowledge of all that concerned his constituents, their personalities and desires. A man thus endowed was clearly predestined for high office, and, in 1859 Lord Palmerston, who believed in political apprenticeship, made Samuel Whitbread a Lord of the Admiralty. But this appointment disclosed the one weak joint in the young politician's armour. His circulation was not strong enough for his vast height, and sedulous attention to the work of an office, superadded to the normally unwholesome atmosphere of the House of Commons, was more than he could stand. "I cannot," he said, "get a living out of the London air;" and so in 1863, just on the threshold of high preferment, he bade farewell to official ambition and devoted himself Page 142 thence-forward to the work of a private Member. But the leaders of the Liberal party did not resign such a recruit without repeated efforts to retain him. Three times he refused the Cabinet and twice the Speakership; while every suggestion of personal distinctions or hereditary honours he waved aside with a smile.

The knowledge that these things were so gave Whit bread a peculiar authority in the House of Commons. His independence was absolute and assured. He was, if any politician ever was, unbuyable; and though he was a sound Party man, on whom at a pinch his leaders could rely, he yet seemed to rise superior to the lower air of partisanship, and to lift debate into the atmosphere of conviction. The St. James's Gazette once confessed that his peculiar position in the House of Commons was one of those Parliamentary mysteries which no outsider could understand. He seemed, even amid the hottest controversies, to be rather an arbiter than an advocate. Once Mr. T. W. Russell, in a moment of inspiration, described him as "an umpire, perfectly impartial—except that he never gives his own side out." Whereupon Whitbread, with a quaint half-smile, whispered to the man sitting next to him: "That hit of 'T. W.'s' was not very bad." A singular tribute to Whitbread's influence, and the weight attaching to his counsel, is found in the fact that, in the autumn of 1885, before Mr. Gladstone had announced his conversion to Home Rule, Whitbread was one of the very few people (Goschen was another) to whom he confided Page 143 his change of view. Of the estimation in which Whitbread was held by his neighbours, even after he had ceased to represent them in Parliament, the present writer once heard a ludicrous, but illuminating, instance. Among the men sentenced to death after the Jameson Raid was one connected by ties of family with Bedford. For a while his kinsfolk could not believe that he was really in danger; but, when ominous rumours began to thicken, one of his uncles said, with an air of grave resolve: "This is becoming serious about my nephew. If it goes on much longer, I shall have to write to Mr. Whitbread."

In the general course of politics Whitbread was a Whig, holding to the great principles of Civil and Religious Liberty, Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform; but he was a Whig with a difference. He stuck to the party after it had been permeated by Gladstonianism, advanced in Liberalism as he advanced in years, and became a convinced Home Ruler. His political prescience, founded on long experience and close observation, was remarkable. Soon after Lord Salisbury's accession to power in the summer of 1895, he said to the present writer: "I fancy that for two or three years the Government will go on quietly enough; and then, when they find their popularity waning, they will pick a quarrel with somebody, and go to war. It is always difficult for an Opposition to attack a Government which is conducting a war, and I think Chamberlain is just the man to take advantage of that difficulty."

Page 144 In religion Whitbread was an Evangelical of the more liberal type, mistrusting extremes, and always on the friendliest terms with Nonconformists. As regards the affairs of common life, he was a most hospitable and courteous host; a thorough agriculturist, and a keen sportsman. His size and weight debarred him from hunting, but he was a first-rate shot, whether on the moor or in the stubble, and a keen yachtsman. At home and abroad, everywhere and in all things, he was a gentleman of the highest type, genial, dignified, and unassuming. Probity, benevolence, and public spirit were embodied in Samuel Whitbread.

VII

HENRY MONTAGU BUTLER

The loved and honoured friend whose name stands at the head of this section was the fourth son and, youngest child of Dr. George Butler, Dean of Peterborough, and sometime Head Master of Harrow. Montagu Butler was himself-educated at Harrow under Dr. Vaughan, afterwards the well-known Master of the Temple, and proved to be in many respects the ideal schoolboy. He won all the prizes for composition, prose and verse, Greek, Latin, and English. He gained the principal scholarship, and was Head of the School. Beside all this, he was a member of the Cricket Eleven and made the highest score for Harrow in the match against Eton at Lord's.

In July, 1851, Montagu Butler left Harrow, and Page 145 in the following October entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Scholar. He won the Bell University Scholarship, the Battie University Scholarship, the Browne Medal for a Greek Ode twice, the Camden Medal, Porson Prize, and First Member's Prize for a Latin Essay, and graduated as Senior Classic in 1855. Of such an undergraduate career a Fellowship at Trinity was the natural sequel, but Butler did not long reside at Cambridge. All through his boyhood and early manhood he had set his heart on a political career. He had a minute acquaintance with the political history of modern England, and his memory was stored with the masterpieces of political eloquence.

In 1856 he accepted the post of Private Secretary to the Right Hon. W. F. Cowper, afterwards Lord Mount Temple, and then President of the Board of Health in Lord Palmerston's Administration. In this office he served for two years, and then, retiring, he spent eleven months in foreign travel, visiting in turn the Tyrol, Venice, the Danube, Greece, Rome, Florence, and the Holy Land. During this period, he changed his plan of life, and in September, 1859, he was ordained Deacon by Bishop Lonsdale of Lichfield, on Letters Dimissory from Bishop Turton of Ely. His title was his Fellowship; but it was settled that the College should present him to the Vicarage of Great St. Mary's, Cambridge; and till it was vacant he was to have worked as a classical tutor in Trinity. Then came another change. "Dr. Vaughan's retirement," he wrote, "from the Head Mastership of Page 146 Harrow startled us. We all took quietly for granted that he would stay on for years." However, this "startling" retirement took place, and there was a general agreement among friends of the School that Vaughan's favourite pupil, Montagu Butler, was the right man to succeed him. Accordingly, Butler was elected in November, 1859, though only twenty-six years old; and, with a view to the pastoral oversight of Harrow School, he was ordained priest, again by Bishop Lonsdale, at Advent, 1859.

In January, 1860, Montagu Butler entered on his new duties at Harrow, and there he spent five-and-twenty years of happy, strenuous, and serviceable life. He found 469 boys in the School; under his rule the numbers increased till they reached 600.

Butler's own culture was essentially classical, for he had been fashioned by Vaughan, who "thought in Greek," and he himself might almost have been said to think and feel in Latin elegiacs. But his scholarship was redeemed from pedantry by his wide reading, and by his genuine enthusiasm for all that is graceful in literature, modern as well as ancient. Under his rule the "grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum," which Matthew Arnold satirized, fought hard and long for its monopoly; but gradually it had to yield. Butler's first concession was to relax the absurd rule which had made Latin versification obligatory on every boy in the School, whatever his gifts or tastes. At the same time he introduced the regular teaching of Natural Science, and in 1869 he created a Page 147 "Modern Side." An even more important feature of his rule was the official encouragement given to the study of music, which, from an illicit indulgence practised in holes and corners, became, under the energetic management of Mr. John Farmer, a prime element in the life of the School.

In January, 1868, Butler admitted me to Harrow School. My father had introduced me to him in the previous September, and I had fallen at once under his charm. He was curiously unlike what one had imagined a Head Master to be—not old and pompous and austere, but young and gracious, friendly in manner, and very light in hand. His leading characteristic was gracefulness. He was graceful in appearance, tall and as yet slender; graceful in movement and gesture; graceful in writing, and pre-eminently graceful in speech. He was young—thirty-four—and looked younger, although (availing himself of the opportunity afforded by an illness in the summer of 1867) he had just grown a beard. He had a keen sense of humour, and was not afraid to display it before boys, although he was a little pampered by a sense of the solemn reverence due not only to what was sacred, but to everything that was established and official. To breakfast with a Head Master is usually rather an awful experience, but there was no awe about the pleasant meals in Butler's dining-room (now the head Master's study), for he was unaffectedly kind, overflowing with happiness, and tactful in adapting his conversation to the capacities of his guests.

It was rather more alarming to face him at the Page 148 periodical inspection of one's Form. ("Saying to the Head Master" was the old phrase, then lapsing out of date.) We used to think that he found a peculiar interest in testing the acquirements of such boys as he knew personally, and of those whose parents were his friends; so that on these occasions it was a doubtful privilege to "know him," as the phrase is, "at home." Till one reached the Sixth Form these social and official encounters with Butler were one's only opportunities of meeting him at close quarters; but every Sunday evening we heard him preach in the Chapel, and the cumulative effect of his sermons was, at least in many cases, great. They were always written in beautifully clear and fluent English, and were often decorated with a fine quotation in prose or verse. In substance they were extraordinarily simple, though not childish. For example, he often preached on such practical topics as Gambling, National Education; and the Housing of the Poor, as well as on themes more obviously and directly religious. He was at his best in commemorating a boy who had died in the School, when his genuine sympathy with sorrow made itself unmistakably felt. But whatever was the subject, whether public or domestic, he always treated it in the same simply Christian spirit. I know from his own lips that he had never passed through those depths of spiritual experience which go to make a great preacher; but his sermons revealed in every sentence a pure, chivalrous, and duty-loving heart. One of his intimate friends once spoke of his "Arthur-like" Page 149 character, and the epithet was exactly right.

His most conspicuous gift was unquestionably his eloquence. His fluency, beauty of phrase, and happy power of turning "from grave to gay, from lively to severe," made him extraordinarily effective on a platform or at a social gathering. Once (in the autumn of 1870) he injured his right arm, and so was prevented from writing his sermons. For three or four Sundays he preached extempore, and even boys who did not usually care for sermons were fascinated by his oratory.

In the region of thought I doubt if he exercised any great influence. To me he never seemed to have arrived at his conclusions by any process of serious reasoning. He held strongly and conscientiously a certain number of conventions—a kind of Palmerstonian Whiggery, a love of "spirited foreign policy;" an admiration for the military character, an immense regard for the Crown, for Parliament, and for all established institutions (he was much shocked when the present Bishop of Oxford spoke in the Debating Society in favour of Republicanism); and in every department of life he paid an almost superstitious reverence to authority. I once ventured to tell him that even a beadle was a sacred being in his eyes, and he did not deny the soft impeachment.

His intellectual influence was not in the region of thought, but in that of expression. His scholarship was essentially literary. He had an instinctive and unaffected love of all that was beautiful, Page 150 whether in prose or verse, in Greek, Latin, or English. His reading was wide and thorough. Nobody knew Burke so well, and he had a contagious enthusiasm for Parliamentary oratory. In composition he had a curiosa felicitas in the strictest meaning of the phrase; for his felicity was the product of care. To go through a prize-exercise with him was a real joy, so generous was his appreciation, so fastidious his taste, so dexterous his substitution of the telling for the ineffective word, and so palpably genuine his enjoyment of the business.

As a ruler his most noticeable quality was his power of discipline. He was feared—and a Head Master who is not feared is not fit for his post; and by bad boys he was hated, and by most good boys he was loved. By most, but not by all. There were some, even among the best, who resented his system of minute regulation, his "Chinese exactness" in trivial detail, his tendency to treat the tiniest breach of a School rule as if it were an offence against the moral law.

I think it may be said, in general terms, that those who knew him best loved him most. He had by nature a passionate temper, but it was grandly controlled, and seldom, if ever, led him into an injustice. His munificence in giving was unequalled in my experience. He was the warmest and staunchest of friends; through honour and dishonour, storm and sunshine, weal or woe, always and exactly the same. His memory for anything associated with his pupils careers was extraordinarily Page 151 retentive, and he was even passionately loyal to Auld Lang Syne. And there is yet another characteristic which claims emphatic mention in any attempt to estimate his influence. He was conspicuously and essentially a gentleman. In appearance, manner, speech, thought, and act, this gentlemanlike quality of his nature made itself felt; and it roused in such as were susceptible of the spell an admiration which the most meritorious teachers have often, by sheer boorishness forfeited.

Time out of mind, a Head Mastership has been regarded as a stepping-stone to a Bishopric—with disastrous results to the Church—and in Butler's case it seemed only too likely that the precedent would be followed. Gladstone, when Prime Minister, once said to a Harrovian colleague, "What sort of Bishop would your old master, Dr. Butler, make?" "The very worst," was the reply. "He is quite ignorant of the Church, and would try to discipline his clergy like school-boys. But there is one place for which he is peculiarly qualified—the Mastership of Trinity." And the Prime Minister concurred. In June, 1885, Gladstone was driven from office, and was succeeded by Lord Salisbury. In October, 1886, the Master of Trinity (Dr. W. H. Thompson) died, and Salisbury promptly offered the Mastership to Dr. Butler, who had for a year been Dean of Gloucester. It is not often that a man is designated for the same great post by two Prime Ministers of different politics.

At Trinity, though at first he had to live down Page 152 certain amount of jealousy and ill-feeling, Butler's power and influence increased steadily from year to year, and towards the end he was universally respected and admired. A resident contemporary writes: "He was certainly a Reformer, but not a violent one. His most conspicuous services to the College were, in my opinion, these: (1) Sage guidance of the turbulent and uncouth democracy of which a College Governing body consists. (2) A steady aim at the highest in education, being careful to secure the position of literary education from the encroachments of science and mathematics. (3) Affectionate stimulus to all undergraduates who need it, especially Old Harrovians. (4) The maintenance of the dignity and commanding position of Trinity and consequently of the University in the world at large."

To Cambridge generally Butler endeared himself by his eager interest in all good enterprises, by his stirring oratory and persuasive preaching, and by his lavish hospitality. As Vice-Chancellor, in 1889 and 1890, he worthily maintained the most dignified traditions of academical office. Those who knew him both on the religious and on the social side will appreciate the judgment said to have been pronounced by Canon Mason, then Master of Pembroke: "Butler will be saved, like Rahab, by hospitality and faith."

Page 153 VIII

BASIL WILBERFORCE[*]

In the House of God the praise of man should always be restrained. I, therefore, do not propose to obey the natural instinct which would prompt me to deliver a copious eulogy of the friend whom we commemorate—an analysis of his character or a description of his gifts.

But, even in church, there is nothing out of place in an attempt to recall the particular aspects of truth which presented themselves with special force to a particular mind. Rather, it is a dutiful endeavour to acknowledge the gifts, whether in the way of spiritual illumination or of practical guidance, which God gave us through His servant; and, it is on some of those aspects as they presented themselves to the mind of Basil Wilberforce that I propose to speak—not, indeed, professing to treat them exhaustively, but bearing in mind that true saying of Jeremy Taylor: "In this world we believe in part and prophesy in part; and this imperfection shall never be done away, till we be transplanted to a more glorious state."

1. I cannot doubt about the point which should be put most prominently.

Wilberforce's most conspicuous characteristic was his vivid apprehension of the Spiritual World. His eyes, like Elisha's, were always open to Page 154 see "the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire." Incorporeal presences were to him at least as real as those which are embodied in flesh and blood. Material phenomena were the veils of spiritual realities; and "the powers of the world to come" were more actual and more momentous than those which operate in time and space. Perhaps the most important gift which God gave to the Church through his ministry was his lifelong testimony against the darkness of Materialism.

2. Second only to his keen sense of the Unseen World was his conviction of God's love.

Other aspects of the Divine Nature as it is revealed to us—Almightiness, Justice, Awfulness (though, of course, he recognized them all)—did not colour his heart and life as they were coloured by the sense of the Divine Love. That Love seemed to him to explain all the mysteries of existence, to lift

"the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world";

to make its dark places light, its rough places plain, its hard things easy, even its saddest things endurable. His Gospel was this: God, Who made us in His own Image, loves us like a Father; and therefore, in life and in death, in time and in eternity, all is, and must be, well.

3. "He prayeth best, who lovest best All things both great and small. For the dear God Who loveth us, He made and loveth all."

Page 155 Those familiar words of Coleridge perfectly express Wilberforce's attitude towards his fellow-creatures, and when I say "fellow-creatures," I am not thinking only of his brothers and sisters in the human family.

He was filled with a God-like love of all that God has made. Hatred and wrath and severity were not "dreamt of" in his "philosophy." Towards the most degraded and abandoned of the race he felt as tenderly as St. Francis felt towards the leper on the roadside at Assisi, when he kissed the scarred hand, and then found that, all unwittingly, he had ministered to the Lord, disguised in that loathsome form. This was the motive which impelled Wilberforce to devote himself, uncalculatingly and unhesitatingly, to the reclamation of lives that had been devastated by drunkenness, and which stimulated his zeal for all social and moral reforms.

But his love extended far beyond the bounds of the human family; and (in this again resembling St. Francis) he loved the birds and beasts which God has provided as our companions in this life, and perhaps—for aught we know—in the next. In a word, he loved all God's creatures for God's sake.

4. No one had a keener sense of the workings of the Holy Spirit in regions beyond the precincts of all organized religion; and yet, in his own personal heart and life, Wilberforce belonged essentially to the Church of England. It is difficult to imagine him happy and content in any communion except our own. Nowhere else could he have found that unbroken chain which links us to Catholic antiquity Page 156 and guarantees the validity of our sacraments, combined with that freedom of religious speculation and that elasticity of devotional forms which were to him as necessary as vital air. Various elements of his teaching, various aspects of his practice will occur to different minds; but (just because it is sometimes overlooked) I feel bound to remind you of his testimony to the blessings which he had received through Confession, and to the glory of the Holy Eucharist, as the Sun and Centre of Catholic worship. His conviction of the reality and nearness of the spiritual world gave him a singular ease and "access" in intercessory prayer, and his love of humanity responded to that ideal of public worship which is set forth in John Inglesant: "The English Church, as established by the law of England, offers the Supernatural to all who choose to come. It is like the Divine Being Himself, Whose sun shines alike on the evil and on the good."

5. In what theology did Wilberforce, whose adult life had been one long search for truth, finally repose? Assuredly he never lost his hold on the central facts of the Christian revelation as they are stated in the creed of Nicæa and Constantinople. Yet, as years went on, he came to regard them less and less in their objective aspect; more and more as they correspond to the work of the Spirit in the heart and conscience. Towards the end, all theology seemed to be for him comprehended in the one doctrine of the Divine Immanence, and to find its natural expression in that significant phrase of St. Paul: "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

Page 157 Spiritually-minded men do not, as a rule, talk much of their spiritual experiences; but, if one had asked Wilberforce to say what he regarded as the most decisive moment of his religious life, I can well believe that he would have replied, "The moment when 'it pleased God to reveal His Son in me.'"

The subject expands before us, as is always the case when we meditate on the character and spirit of those whom we have lost; and I must hasten to a close.

I have already quoted from a writer with whom I think Wilberforce would have felt a close affinity, though, as a matter of fact, I never heard him mention that writer's name; I mean J. H. Shorthouse; and I return to the same book—the stimulating story of John Inglesant—for my concluding words, which seem to express, with accidental fidelity, the principle of Wilberforce's spiritual being: "We are like children, or men in a tennis-court, and before our conquest is half-won, the dim twilight comes and stops the game; nevertheless, let us keep our places, and above all hold fast by the law of life we feel within. This was the method which Christ followed, and He won the world by placing Himself in harmony with that law of gradual development which the Divine wisdom has planned. Let us follow in His steps, and we shall attain to the ideal life; and, without waiting for our mortal passage, tread the free and spacious streets of that Jerusalem which is above."

Page 158 IX

EDITH SICHEL

This notice is more suitably headed with a name than with a title. Edith Sichel was greater than anything she wrote, and the main interest of the book before us[*] is the character which it reveals. Among Miss Sichel's many activities was that of reviewing, and Mr. Bradley tells that "her first object was to let the reader know what kind of matter he might expect to find in the book, and, if necessary, from what point of view it is treated there." Following this excellent example, let us say that in New and Old the reader will find an appreciative but not quite adequate "Introduction"; some extracts from letters; some "thoughts" or aphorisms; some poems; and thirty-two miscellaneous pieces of varying interest-and merit. This is what we "find in the book," and the "point of view" is developed as we read.

To say that the Introduction is not quite adequate is no aspersion on Mr. Bradley. He tells us that he only knew Miss Sichel "towards the close of her life" (she was born in 1862 and died in 1914), and in her case pre-eminently the child was mother of the woman. Her blood was purely Jewish, and the Jewish characteristic of precocity was conspicuous in her from the first. At ten she had the intellectual alertness of sixteen, and at sixteen she could have held her own with ordinary people of Page 159 thirty. To converse with her even casually always reminded me of Matthew Arnold's exclamation: "What women these Jewesses are! with a force which seems to triple that of the women of our Western and Northern races."

From the days of early womanhood to the end, Edith Sichel led a double life, though in a sense very different from that in which this ambiguous phrase is generally employed. "She was known to the reading public as a writer of books and of papers in magazines.... Her principal books were warmly praised by judges competent to estimate their value as contributions to French biography and history;" and her various writings, belonging to very different orders and ranging over a wide variety of topics, were always marked by vigour and originality. Her versatility was marvellous; and, "though she had not in youth the severe training that makes for perfect accuracy," she had by nature the instinct which avoids the commonplace, and which touches even hackneyed themes with light and fire. Her humour was exuberant, unforced, untrammelled; it played freely round every object which met her mental gaze—sometimes too freely when she was dealing with things traditionally held sacred. But her flippancy was of speech rather than of thought, for her fundamental view of life was serious. "Life, in her view, brings much that is pure and unsought joy, more, perhaps, that needs transforming effort, little or nothing that cannot be made to contribute to an inward and abiding happiness."

Page 160 Some more detailed account of her literary work may be given later on; at this point I must turn to the other side of her double life. She was only twenty-two when she began her career of practical benevolence among the poor girls of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and Shadwell. She established in the country Homes for the girl-children of an East End work-house, and maintained them till she died. For twenty-two years she was treasurer of a Boys' Home. She was a manager of Elementary Schools in London. She held a class for female prisoners at Holloway. She was deeply impressed by the importance of starting young people in suitable employment, and threw all her energies into the work, "in case of need, supplying the money required for apprenticeship." In this and in all her other enterprises she was generous to a fault, always being ready to give away half her income—and yet not "to a fault," for her strong administrative and financial instinct restrained her from foolish or mischievous expenditure. All this work, of body and mind, was done in spite of fragile health and frequent suffering; yet she never seemed overburdened, or fussed, or flurried, and those who enjoyed her graceful hospitality in Onslow Gardens would never have suspected either that her day had been spent in what she called "the picturesque mire of Wapping," or that she had been sitting up late at night, immersed in Human Documents from the Four Centuries preceding the Reformation.

We have spoken of her humour. Those who would see a sample of it are referred to her description Page 161 of the Eisteddfod on p. 22; and this piece of pungent fun may be profitably read in contrast with her grim story of Gladys Leonora Pratt. In that story some of the writer's saddest experiences in the East End are told with an unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in it. Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly disgusting. "It might," she said, "be well for the modern realist to remember that literalness is not the same as truth, nor curiosity as courage."

She was best known as a writer of books about the French Renaissance, on which she became an acknowledged authority. She was less well known, but not less effective, as a reviewer—no one ever dissected Charlotte Yonge so justly—and she excelled in personal description. Her accounts of her friends Miss Emily Lawless, Miss Mary Coleridge, and Joseph Joachim, are masterpieces of characterization. All her literary work was based on a wide and strong foundation of generous culture. German was to her a second mother-tongue, and she lectured delightfully on Faust. Though she spoke of herself as talking "fluent and incomprehensible bad French," she was steeped in French scholarship. She had read Plato and Sophocles under the stimulating guidance of William Cory, and her love of Italy had taught her a great deal of Italian. The authors whom she enjoyed and quoted were a motley crowd—Dante and Rabelais, Pascal and Montaigne, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, Tolstoi and George Borrow, "Mark Rutherford" Page 162 and Samuel Butler, Fénelon and Renan and Anatole France. Her vein of poetic feeling was strong and genuine. In addressing some young girls she said: "We all think a great deal of the importance of opening our windows and airing our rooms. I wish we thought as much of airing our imaginations. To me poetry is quite like that. It is like opening the window daily, and looking out and letting in the air and the sunlight into an otherwise stuffy little room; and if I cannot read some poetry in the day I feel more uncomfortable than I can tell you." She might have put the case more strongly; for poetry, and music, and painting, and indeed all art at its highest level, made a great part of her religion. Her family had long ago conformed to the Church of England, in which she was brought up; but she never shook off her essential Judaism. She had no sympathy with rites or ordinances, creeds or dogmas, and therefore outward conformity to the faith of her forefathers would have been impossible to her; but she looked with reverent pride on the tombs in the Jewish cemetery at Prague. "It gave me a strange feeling to stand at the tombstone of our tribe—900 A.D. The oldest scholar's grave is 600 A.D., and Heaven knows how many great old Rabbis lie there, memorable and forgotten. The wind and the rain were sobbing all round the place, and all the melancholy of my race seemed to rise up and answer them." Though she was a Churchwoman by practice, her own religion was a kind of undefined Unitarianism. "The Immanence of God and the life of Christ are my Page 163 treasures." "I am a heretic, you know, and it seems to me that all who call Christ Master with adoration of that life are of the same band." Her favourite theologians were James Martineau, Alfred Ainger (whose Life she wrote admirably), and Samuel Barnett, whom she elevated into a mystic and a prophet. The ways of the Church of England did not please her. She had nothing but scorn for "a joyless curate prating of Easter joy with limpest lips," or for "the Athanasian Creed sung in the highest of spirits in a prosperous church" filled with "sealskin-jacketed mammas and blowsy old gentlemen." But the conclusion of the whole matter was more comfortable—"All the clergymen in the world cannot make one disbelieve in God."

X

"WILL" GLADSTONE

"He bequeathed to his children the perilous inheritance of a name which the Christian world venerates." The words were originally used by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce with reference to his father, the emancipator of the negro. I venture to apply them to the great man who, in days gone by, was my political leader, and I do so the more confidently because I hold that Gladstone will be remembered quite apart from politics, and, as Bishop Westcott said, "rather for what he was than for what he did." He was, in Lord Salisbury's words, "an example, to which history Page 164 hardly furnishes a parallel, of a great Christian, Statesman." It was no light matter for a boy of thirteen to inherit a name which had been so nobly borne for close on ninety years, and to acquire, as soon as he came of age, the possession of a large and difficult property, and all the local influence which such ownership implies. Yet this was the burden which was imposed on "Will" Gladstone by his father's untimely death. After an honourable career at Eton and Oxford, and some instructive journeyings in the East and in America (where he was an attaché at the British Embassy), he entered Parliament as Member for the Kilmarnock Boroughs. His Parliamentary career was not destined to be long, but it was in many respects remarkable.

In some ways he was an ideal candidate. He was very tall, with a fair complexion and a singular nobility of feature and bearing. To the most casual observer it was palpable that he walked the world

"With conscious step of purity and pride."

People interested in heredity tried to trace in him some resemblance to his famous grandfather; but, alike in appearance and in character, the two were utterly dissimilar. In only one respect they resembled each other, and that was the highest. Both were earnest and practical Christians, walking by a faith which no doubts ever disturbed, and serving God in the spirit and by the methods of the English Church. And here we see alike Will Gladstone's qualifications and his drawbacks as a candidate for Page 165 a Scottish constituency. His name and his political convictions commended him to the electors; his ecclesiastial opinions they could not share. His uprightness of character and nobility of aspect commanded respect; his innate dislike of popularity-hunting and men-pleasing made him seem for so young a man—he was only twenty-seven—austere and aloof. Everyone could feel the intensity of his convictions on the points on which he had made up his mind; some were unreasonably distressed when he gave expression to that intensity by speech and vote. He was chosen to second the Address at the opening of the Session of 1912, and acquitted himself, as always, creditably; but it was in the debates on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill that he first definitely made his mark. "He strongly supported the principle, holding that it had been fully justified by the results of the Irish Disestablishment Act on the Irish Church. But, as in that case, generosity should characterize legislation; disendowment should be clearly limited to tithes. Accordingly, in Committee, he took an independent course. His chief speech on this subject captivated the House. For a very young Member to oppose his own party without causing irritation, and to receive the cheers of the Opposition without being led to seek in them solace for the silence of his own side, and to win general admiration by transparent sincerity and clear, balanced statement of reason, was a rare and notable performance."

When Will Gladstone struck twenty-nine, there were few young men in England who occupied Page 166 a more enviable position. He had a beautiful home; sufficient, but not overwhelming, wealth; a property which gave full scope for all the gifts of management and administration which he might possess; the devoted love of his family, and the goodwill even of those who did not politically agree with him. His health, delicate in childhood, had improved with years. "While he never neglected his public duties, his natural, keen, healthy love of nature, sport, fun, humour, company, broke out abundantly. In these matters he was still a boy"—but a boy who, as it seemed, had already crossed the threshold of a memorable manhood. Such was Will Gladstone on his last birthday—the 12th of July, 1914. A month later the "Great Tribulation" had burst upon the unthinking world, and all dreams of happiness were shattered. Dreams of happiness, yes; but not dreams of duty. Duty might assume a new, a terrible, and an unlooked-for form; but its essential and spiritual part—the conviction of what a man owes to God, to his fellow-men, and to himself—became only more imperious when the call to arms was heard: Christus ad arma vocat.

Will Gladstone loved peace, and hated war with his whole heart. He was by conviction opposed to intervention in the quarrels of other nations. "His health was still delicate; he possessed neither the training nor instincts of a soldier; war and fighting were repugnant to his whole moral and physical fibre." No one, in short, could have been by nature less disposed for the duty which Page 167 now became urgent. "The invasion of Belgium shattered his hopes and his ideals." He now realized the stern truth that England must fight, and, if England must fight, he must bear his part in the fighting. He had been made, when only twenty-six, Lord-Lieutenant of Flintshire, and as such President of the Territorial Force Association. It was his official duty to "make personal appeals for the enlistment of young men. But how could he urge others to join the Army while he, a young man not disqualified for military service, remained at home in safety? It was his duty to lead, and his best discharge of it lay in personal example." His decision was quickly and quietly made. "He was the only son of his mother, and what it meant to her he knew full well;" but there was no hesitation, no repining, no looking back. He took a commission in the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and on the 15th of March, 1915, he started with a draft for France. On the 12th of April he was killed. "It is not"—he had just written to his mother—"the length of existence, that counts, but what is achieved during that existence, however short." These words of his form his worthiest epitaph.

Page 168 XI

LORD CHARLES RUSSELL

A man can have no better friend than a good father; and this consideration warrants, I hope, the inclusion of yet one more sketch drawn "in honour of friendship."

Charles James Fox Russell (1807-1894) was the sixth son of the sixth Duke of Bedford. His mother was Lady Georgiana Gordon, daughter of the fourth Duke of Gordon and of the adventurous "Duchess Jane," who, besides other achievements even more remarkable, raised the "Gordon Highlanders" by a method peculiarly her own. Thus he was great-great-great-grandson of the Whig martyr, William, Lord Russell, and great-nephew of Lord George Gordon, whose Protestant zeal excited the riots of 1780. He was one of a numerous family, of whom the best remembered are John, first Earl Russell, principal author of the Reform Act of 1832, and Louisa, Duchess of Abercorn, grandmother of the present Duke.

Charles James Fox was a close friend, both politically and privately, of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, and he promised them that he would be godfather to their next child; but he died before the child was born, whereupon his nephew, Lord Holland, took over the sponsorship, and named his godson "Charles James Fox." The child was born in 1807, and his birthplace was Dublin Castle.[*] Page 169 The Duke of Bedford was then Viceroy of Ireland, and became involved in some controversy because he refused to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act. When Lord Charles Russell reached man's estate, he used, half in joke but quite half in-earnest, to attribute his lifelong sympathy with the political demands of the Irish people to the fact that he was a Dublin man by birth.

The Duke of Bedford was one of the first Englishmen who took a shooting in Scotland (being urged thereto by his Highland Duchess); and near his shooting-lodge a man who had been "out" with Prince Charlie in 1745 was still living when Charles Russell first visited Speyside. Westminster was the Russells' hereditary school, and Charles Russell was duly subjected to the austere discipline which there prevailed. From the trials of gerund-grinding and fagging and flogging a temporary relief was afforded by the Coronation of George IV., at which he officiated as Page to the acting Lord Great Chamberlain. It was the last Coronation at which the procession was formed in Westminster Hall and moved across to the Abbey. Young Russell, by mischievousness or carelessness, contrived to tear his master's train from the ermine cape which surmounted it; and the procession was delayed till a seamstress could be found to repair the damage. "I contrived to keep that old rascal George IV. off the throne for half an hour," was Lord Charles-Russell's boast in maturer age.[*]

Page 170 From Westminster Lord Charles passed to the University of Edinburgh, where his brother John had preceded him. He boarded with Professor Pillans, whom Byron gibbeted as "paltry"[*] in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," and enjoyed the society of the literary circle which in those days made Edinburgh famous. The authorship of the Waverley Novels was not yet revealed, and young Russell had the pleasure of discussing with Sir Walter Scott the dramatic qualities of The Bride of Lammermoor. He was, perhaps, less unfitted for such high converse than most lads would be, because, as Lord Holland's godson, he had been from his schooldays a frequenter of Holland House in its days of glory.[**]

On leaving Edinburgh, Lord Charles Russell joined the Blues, then commanded by Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, afterwards King of Hanover; and he was able to confirm, by personal knowledge, the strange tales of designs which the Duke entertained for placing himself or his son upon the throne of England.[*] He subsequently exchanged into the 52nd Light Infantry, from which he retired, with Page 171 the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, in order to enter Parliament. In December, 1832, he was returned at the head of the poll for Bedfordshire, and on Christmas Eve a young lady (who in 1834 became his wife) wrote thus to her sister:

"Lord Charles Russell is returned for this County. The Chairing, Dinner, etc., take place to-day. Everybody is interested about him, as he is very young and it is his first appearance in the character. His speeches have delighted the whole County, and he is, of course, very much pleased." This faculty of public speaking was perhaps his most remarkable endowment. He had an excellent command of cultivated English, a clear and harmonious voice, a keen sense of humour, and a happy knack of apt quotation.

On the 23rd of February, 1841, Disraeli wrote, with reference to an impending division on the Irish Registration Bill: "The Whigs had last week two hunting accidents; but Lord Charles Russell, though he put his collar-bone out, and we refused to pair him, showed last night." He sate for Bedfordshire till the dissolution of that year, when he retired, feeling that Free Trade was indeed bound to come, but that it would be disastrous for the agricultural community which he represented. "Lord Charles Russell," wrote Cobden, "is the man who opposed even his brother John's fixed duty, declaring at the time that it was to throw two millions of acres out of cultivation." He returned to Parliament for a brief space in 1847, and was then appointed Serjeant-at-Arms—not, as he always insisted, Page 172 "Serjeant-at-Arms to the House of Commons," but "one of the Queen's Serjeants-at-Arms, directed by her to attend on the Speaker during the sitting of Parliament." In 1873 the office and its holder were thus described by "Jehu Junior" in Vanity Fair:

"For the filling of so portentous an office, it is highly important that one should be chosen who will, by personal mien and bearing not less than by character, detract nothing from its dignity. Such a one is Lord Charles Russell, who is a worthy representative of the great house of Bedford from which he springs.

"For a quarter of a century he has borne the mace before successive Speakers. From his chair he has listened to Peel, to Russell, to Palmerston, to Disraeli, and to Gladstone, and he still survives as a depository of their eloquence. He is himself popular beyond the fair expectations of one who has so important a part to play in the disciplinary arrangements of a popular assembly; for he is exceptionally amiable and genial by nature, is an excellent sportsman, and has cultivated a special taste for letters.[*] It is rarely that in these times Page 173 a man can be found so thoroughly fitted to fill an office which could be easily invested with ridicule, or so invariably to invest it, as he has, with dignity."

Sir George Trevelyan writes: "You can hardly imagine how formidable and impressive Lord Charles seemed to the mass of Members, and especially to the young; and how exquisite and attractive was the moment when he admitted you to his friendly notice, and the absolute assurance that, once a friend, he would be a friend for ever."

Lord Charles Russell held the Serjeancy till 1875; and at this point I had better transcribe the record in Hansard:

Monday, April 5, 1875:

Mr. Speaker acquainted the House that he had received from Lord Charles James Fox Russell the following letter:

HOUSE OF COMMONS, April 5th, 1875.

SIR,

I have the honour to make application to you that you will be pleased to sanction my retirement from my office, by Patent, of Her Majesty's Serjeant-at-Arms attending the Speaker of the House of Commons. I have held this honourable office for twenty-seven years, and I feel that the time is come when it is desirable that I should no longer retain it.

I have the honour to be, Sir, Your very obedient servant, CHARLES J. F. RUSSELL, Serjeant-at-Arms.

THE RIGHT HONBLE. THE SPEAKER.

Page 174 Thursday, April 8, 1875:

Mr. DISRAELI: I beg to move, Sir, that the letter addressed to you by Lord Charles Russell, the late Serjeant-at-Arms, be read by the Clerk at the Table.

Letter [5th April] read.

Mr. DISRAELI: Mr. Speaker, we have listened to the resignation of his office by one who has long and ably served this House. The office of Serjeant-at-Arms is one which requires no ordinary qualities; for it requires at the same time patience, firmness, and suavity, and that is a combination of qualities more rare than one could wish in this world. The noble Lord who filled the office recently, and whose resignation has just been read at the Table, has obtained our confidence by the manner in which he has discharged his duties through an unusually long period of years; and we should remember, I think, that occasions like the present are almost the only opportunity we have of expressing our sense of those qualities, entitled so much to our respect, which are possessed and exercised by those who fill offices attached to this House, and upon whose able fulfilment of their duties much of our convenience depends. Therefore, following the wise example of those who have preceded me in this office, I have prepared a Resolution which expresses the feeling of the House on this occasion, and I now place it, Sir, in your hands.

Mr. Speaker, read the Resolution, as follows: "That Mr. Speaker be requested to acquaint Lord Charles James Fox Russell that this House entertains a just sense of the exemplary manner Page 175 in which he has uniformly discharged the duties of the Office of Serjeant-at-Arms during his long attendance on this House."

The MARQUESS OF HARTINGTON: Sir, on behalf of the Members who sit on this side of the House, I rise to second the Motion of the Right Hon. Gentleman. He has on more than one occasion gracefully, but at the same time justly, recognized the services rendered to the State by the house of Russell. That house will always occupy a foremost place in the history of the Party to which I am proud to belong, and I hope it will occupy no insignificant place in the history of the country. Of that house the noble Lord who has just resigned his office is no unworthy member. There are, Sir, at the present moment but few Members who can recollect the time when he assumed the duties of his office; but I am glad that his resignation has been deferred long enough to enable a number of new Members of this House to add their testimony to that of us who are better acquainted with him, as to the invariable dignity and courtesy with which he has discharged his duties.

The Resolution was adopted by the House, nemine contradicente.

Lord Charles now retired to his home at Woburn, Bedfordshire, where he spent the nineteen years of his remaining life. He had always been devoted to the duties and amusements of the county, and his two main joys were cricket and hunting. He was elected to M.C.C. in 1827, Page 176 and for twenty years before his death I had been its senior member. Lilywhite once said to him: "For true cricket, give me bowling, Pilch in, Box at the wicket, and your Lordship looking on."[*] He was a good though uncertain shot, but in the saddle he was supreme—a consummate horseman, and an unsurpassed judge of a hound. He hunted regularly till he was eighty-one, irregularly still later, and rode till his last illness began. Lord Ribblesdale writes: "The last time I had the good fortune to meet your father we went hunting together with the Oakley Hounds, four or five years before his death. We met at a place called Cranfield Court, and Lord Charles was riding a young mare, five years old—or was she only four?—which kicked a hound, greatly to his disgust! She was not easy to ride, nor did she look so, but he rode her with the ease of long proficiency—not long years—and his interest in all that goes to make up a day's hunting was as full of zest and youth as I recollect his interest used to be in all that made up a cricket-match in my Harrow days."

In religion Lord Charles Russell was an Evangelical, and he was a frequent speaker on religious platforms. In politics he was an ardent Liberal; always (except in that soon-repented heresy about Free Trade) rather in advance of his party; a staunch adherent of Mr. Gladstone, and a convinced advocate of Home Rule, though he saw from the outset that the first Home Rule Bill, without Chamberlain's support, was, as he said, "No go." Page 177 He took an active part in electioneering, from the distant days when, as a Westminster boy, he cheered for Sir Francis Burdett, down to September, 1892, when he addressed his last meeting in support of Mr. Howard Whitbread, then Liberal candidate for South Bedfordshire. A speech which he delivered at the General Election of 1886, denouncing the "impiety" of holding that the Irish were incapable of self-government, won the enthusiastic applause of Mr. Gladstone. When slow-going Liberals complained of too-rapid reforms, he used to say: "When I was a boy, our cry was 'Universal Suffrage, Triennial Parliaments, and the Ballot.' That was seventy years ago, and we have only got one of the three yet."

In local matters, he was always on the side of the poor and the oppressed, and a sturdy opponent of all aggressions on their rights. "Footpaths," he wrote, "are a precious right of the poor, and consequently much encroached on."

It is scarcely decent for a son to praise his father, but even a son may be allowed to quote the tributes which his father's death evoked. Let some of these tributes end my tale.

June 29th, 1894.

My DEAR G. RUSSELL,

I am truly grieved to learn this sad news. It is the disappearance of an illustrious figure to us, but of much more, I fear, to you.

Yours most sincerely, ROSEBERY.

Page 178 June 30th, 1894.

DEAR G. RUSSELL,

I saw with sorrow the announcement of your father's death. He was a good and kind friend to me in the days long ago, and I mourn his loss. In these backsliding days he set a great example of steadfastness and loyalty to the faith of his youth and his race.

Yours very truly,

W. V. HARCOURT.

July 31rd 1894.

DEAR RUSSELL,

I was very grieved to hear of your revered father's death.

He was a fine specimen of our real aristocracy, and such specimens are becoming rarer and rarer in these degenerate days.

There was a true ring of the "Grand Seigneur" about him which always impressed me.

Yours sincerely, REAY.

July 1st, 1894.

My DEAR RUSSELL,

I thank you very much for your kindness in writing to me.

You may, indeed, presume that it is with painful interest and deep regret that I hear of the death of your father, and that I value the terms in which you speak of his feelings towards myself.

Though he died at such an advanced age, it is, I think, remarkable that his friends spoke of him to the last as if he were still in the full intercourse of daily life, without the disqualification or forgetfulness that old age sometimes brings with it.

Page 179 For my part I can never forget my association with him in the House of Commons and elsewhere, nor the uniform kindness which he always showed me.

Believe me, most truly yours, ARTHUR W. PEEL.

June 29th, 1894.

My DEAR RUSSELL,

I have seen, with the eyes of others, in newspapers of this afternoon the account of the death—shall I say?—or of the ingathering of your father. And of what he was to you as a father I can reasonably, if remotely, conceive from knowing what he was in the outer circle, as a firm, true, loyal friend.

He has done, and will do, no dishonour to the name of Russell. It is a higher matter to know, at a supreme moment like this, that he had placed his treasure where moth and dust do not corrupt, and his dependence where dependence never fails. May he enjoy the rest, light, and peace of the just until you are permitted to rejoin him. With growing years you will feel more and more that here everything is but a rent, and that it is death alone which integrates.

On Monday I hope to go to Pitlochrie, N. B., and in a little time to return southward, and resume, if it please God, the great gift of working vision.

Always and sincerely yours, W. E. GLADSTONE.