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 OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES
 
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 OCCASIONAL 
 ADDRESSES 
 
 1893-1916 
 
 , 
 
 RIGHT HON. H. H. ASQUITH 
 
 F.R.S. J HON. D.C.L. OXFORD, DURHAM 
 
 HON. LL.D. CAMBRIDGE, EDINBURGH, GLASGOW, ST. ANDREWS, BRISTOL, LEEDS 
 HONORARY FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1918
 
 COPYRIGHT
 
 M. A. 
 
 LABORVM GAVDIORVM LVCTWM 
 
 CONSORTI 
 
 D.D. 
 
 H. H. A.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE Addresses collected in this volume have 
 been delivered on various occasions during the 
 last twenty-five years. They deal with diverse 
 subjects, and have only a negative connection 
 with one another : none of them trenches upon 
 the domain of controversial politics. 
 
 Though by nature (as I believe) of a pacific 
 temperament, I have been constrained by the 
 force of circumstances to divide nearly the whole 
 of my active life between two of the most con- 
 tentious of professions. A man who spends most 
 of his days and nights in the Law Courts and 
 the House of Commons has a special need for 
 the soothing and cleansing influences of literature 
 and scholarship. His time for reading, still more 
 for research, is of necessity limited ; but there 
 is nothing, even in the absorbing demands of 
 a dual vocation, that requires him to abate his 
 interest either in the ancient masterpieces or in 
 the newest phases of the Arts. And if he takes 
 advantage of such opportunities as present them- 
 selves from time to time to put forward opinions
 
 viii OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES 
 
 and judgments upon literary and academic 
 themes, his critics will in justice remember 
 what he is not likely himself to forget that such 
 productions are from the nature of the case the 
 work, not of an expert, but of an amateur. 
 
 I have added some appreciations of the lives 
 and characters of distinguished men whose deaths 
 have been the occasion of public sorrow. 
 
 In the compilation and revision of the volume 
 I have been more indebted than I can say to 
 the wise counsels and helping hand of my old 
 friend, Mr. Edmund Gosse. 
 
 H. H. A. 
 
 January 1918.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 I. CRITICISM . . . i 
 
 An Address delivered to the Students of the London 
 Society for the Extension of University Teaching, April 
 23, 1898. 
 
 II. BIOGRAPHY . . . . . .27 
 
 An Address delivered at the Edinburgh Philosophical 
 Institution, November 15, 1901. 
 
 III. ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES AND THE MODERN WORLD . 57 
 
 Rectorial Address delivered before the University of 
 Glasgow, January 11, 1907. 
 
 IV. CULTURE AND CHARACTER . . . .83 
 
 Rectorial Address delivered before the University of 
 Aberdeen, October 25, 1910. 
 
 V. THE SPADE AND THE PEN . . . .99 
 
 Presidential Address delivered before the Classical Asso- 
 ciation, Town Hall, Birmingham, October 9, 1908. 
 
 VI. THE ENGLISH BAR . . . . . 115 
 
 Address delivered at the Inner Temple Hall, July 10, 
 1908. 
 
 VII. AD PORTAS . . . . 123 
 
 Reply to an Address of Welcome from the Prefect of Hall, 
 Winchester College, July 27, 1909. 
 ix
 
 x OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES 
 
 PAGE 
 
 VIII. THE ENGLISH BIBLE . . . .127 
 
 Speech delivered at the Commemoration of the 300th 
 Anniversary of the Authorised Version of the Bible at 
 the Albert Hall, March 29, 1911. 
 
 IX. EDINBURGH ...... 137 
 
 Speech delivered at Edinburgh on receiving the Free- 
 dom of the City, December 20, 1910. 
 
 t 
 
 X. THE ROYAL SOCIETY . . , . . . 145 
 
 Speech delivered at the Celebration of the 250th Anni- ' 
 versary, July 16, 1912. 
 
 XI. THE RUBAIY^T OF OMAR KHAYYAM . . 155 
 
 An Address delivered to the Omar Khayyam Club, 
 April 27, 1898. 
 
 XII. BENJAMIN JOWETT . . . . .161 
 
 Delivered at the Meeting at the University of London, 
 December 2, 1893, " To consider the forms which could 
 be most appropriately given to Memorials to the late 
 Master of Balliol." 
 
 XIII. SIR HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN . . . 167 
 
 Speech delivered in the House of Commons, April 27, 
 1908. 
 
 XIV. KING EDWARD VII. . .175 
 
 Speech delivered in the House of Commons, May 11, 
 1910. 
 
 XV. ALFRED LYTTELTON . . . . -185 
 
 Speech delivered in the House of Commons, July 7, 
 1913. 
 
 XVI. EARL KITCHENER . . . . .189 
 
 Speech delivered in the House of Commons, June 21, 
 1916
 
 I 
 
 CRITICISM
 
 CRITICISM 1 
 
 THE subject upon which I am about to offer you 
 a few observations is one which I have selected 
 because it has always appeared to me that, if 
 what is called " the higher education " is worthy 
 of the name, it ought to stimulate and guide the 
 power and practice of criticism in its best and 
 largest sense. I cannot profess to treat the 
 matter in the exhaustive and scientific fashion 
 which it deserves. What I have to say has been 
 hastily put together under the storm and stress 
 of pressing occupations, and if you find, as I 
 fear you will, that it is at the same time desultory 
 and dogmatic, I must ask you to be indulgent to 
 one who has got out of the practice of lecturing. 
 
 What do we mean by Criticism ? What are 
 its functions and its limits ? These are the 
 questions which I propose briefly to discuss. 
 Let us upon the threshold disabuse our minds of 
 one or two misleading and narrowing associations 
 
 1 Delivered to the students of the London Society for the 
 Extension of University Teaching, April 23, 1898. 
 
 3
 
 4 CRITICISM i 
 
 which have gathered round the term Criticism 
 in popular thought and speech. In the eyes of 
 a great number of people a critic is nothing more 
 than a censor, a critical attitude is equivalent to 
 an attitude of disparagement, and criticism is 
 only another name for the science of finding 
 fault. According to the famous gibe of Lord 
 Beaconsfield, himself a great man of letters and 
 a great man of action, who in both characters 
 had had more than his share of ungenerous 
 treatment from the commentators of the day, 
 " the critics are the men who have failed in 
 literature and in art." Whether the phrase is 
 his own, or, as we are told, borrowed from Landor 
 or from Balzac, it expresses a view of the pro- 
 fessors of criticism which is neither uncommon 
 nor unnatural in those who are their favourite 
 targets. It is of course true that there have 
 been eminent men in whom their own want of 
 success in the sphere of action or production has 
 at once stimulated and soured the critical faculty. 
 But it is not in this dwarfed and distorted sense 
 that we are using the term to-day. Denigration, 
 whether it springs from baffled rivalry, or from 
 a morose and cynical temper, or from honest 
 shortsightedness, often amuses, is sometimes 
 useful, may now and then in the hands of a 
 writer like Junius exhibit some of the highest 
 qualities of literary art ; but it is not criticism. 
 There is another and a more legitimate applica-
 
 CRITICISM 5 
 
 tion of the word which nevertheless requires to 
 be closely watched. No antithesis is commoner 
 than that between criticism and construction. 
 We say of writers, of literatures, of epochs, that 
 one is constructive and another critical, as 
 though the faculties of creation and judgment 
 could not be brought to their highest perfection 
 in the same mental climate and environment. 
 Such a theory squares very ill both with the 
 psychology of intellectual production, and with 
 the facts recorded in the history of literature and 
 art. It is true that there are unique outbursts of 
 creative genius which baffle the analysis and defy 
 the so-called laws of the philosophical historian. 
 The wind blows where and when it lists, and no 
 formula of heredity or of adaptation will account 
 for the appearance at a particular time and place 
 of a Dante or a Shakespeare. But the most 
 conspicuous eras of intellectual fecundity the 
 ages of Pericles and Augustus, of Elizabeth and 
 Louis XIV., of the Sturm und Drang, of Scott 
 and Byron have produced not only great poets 
 and great historians, but great critics also. It is 
 not even true that in the intellectual world itself 
 the division of labour has ever been carried to 
 such a point that one set of men produce works 
 of art, while another set theorise about its prin- 
 ciples and formulate its canons. Look at Plato, 
 Bacon, Goethe to take only names which stand 
 in the front rank and ask yourselves how much
 
 6 CRITICISM 
 
 of their work, if it came to be analysed, would be 
 found to be creative and how much critical. A 
 great artist may be incapable of criticism, and 
 a good critic may be incapable of creation. But 
 neither in the individual nor in the generations 
 of men does the one set of gifts exclude the 
 other. Criticism in the true sense has a positive 
 as well as a negative function. By discriminating 
 between that which is true and that which is 
 false, between good and bad art, between reality 
 and imposture, by dethroning the ephemeral 
 idols of fashion, and recalling the wandering 
 crowd to the worship of beauty and of greatness, 
 criticism plays the part of a vitalising and 
 energising force in social and intellectual progress. 
 It performs the double duty of solvent and 
 stimulant. To take a single example, it was the 
 essentially critical speculations of Hume which, 
 as we know from their own avowal, awoke Kant 
 from his " dogmatic slumber," and first " caused 
 the scales to fall from the eyes " of Bentham, 
 and thereby became, at any rate, the indirect 
 occasion for two rival schemes of constructive 
 philosophy. There is no emptier fallacy than to 
 suppose that criticism is merely a form of intel- 
 lectual gymnastic the appropriate pastime of 
 epochs of torpor and stagnation the business of 
 second-rate minds in the relatively barren in- 
 tervals which separate the great vintage years 
 in the history of human culture. The business
 
 CRITICISM 7 
 
 of criticism, as Matthew Arnold says in a well- 
 known passage, is "to know the best that is 
 known and thought in the world, and by in its 
 turn making this known to create a current of 
 true and fresh ideas." 
 
 Nor, again, ought we entirely to confine our 
 attention to the perfectly legitimate, but at the 
 same time the narrow and technical, sense in 
 which criticism is understood to describe the 
 processes by which specific rules of interpretation 
 and canons of taste are developed and formulated. 
 Like every other form of intellectual activity, it 
 may be specialised within the confines of a 
 definite subject matter, as it is, for instance, in 
 the textual criticism of literature, and in the 
 aesthetic criticism of the arts. Both have at 
 various times fascinated the interest and absorbed 
 the energies of some of the best intellects of the 
 race. Few things indeed in literary history are 
 more striking than the effect produced by the 
 sudden unsealing of the treasure-houses of class- 
 ical antiquity in the middle of the fifteenth 
 century. The critical activity of Europe, which 
 had been for generations frittering itself away 
 upon the barren analyses of scholasticism, found 
 in the study and collation of the ancient texts an 
 untried field of boundless extent and inexhaust- 
 ible fertility. The Stephenses, the Scaligers, the 
 Casaubons, were but the most conspicuous figures 
 in a huge army of enthusiastic, even fanatical,
 
 8 CRITICISM i 
 
 explorers the confessors and martyrs of a new 
 literary faith, of which the humbler rank and file 
 have been depicted for us with incomparable 
 fidelity and pathos in Browning's Grammarian's 
 Funeral. Their work has been continued from 
 that time to this by an unbroken chain of suc- 
 cessors, to which we here in England, with our 
 Bentley and our Person, may claim to have 
 contributed some of the highest names. The 
 science of textual criticism is constantly annexing 
 new territories and developing wider and more 
 penetrating methods ; and in its application to 
 sacred literature, and to the slowly deciphered 
 records of the great religions and civilisations of 
 the East, it has achieved in our own time some 
 of its most memorable results. 
 
 If we turn to the other example, which I 
 mentioned a moment ago, of the more specialised 
 fields of critical activity the aesthetic criticism 
 of the arts it will, I think, be found that the 
 output, though even more copious, possesses in 
 a far lower degree the qualities either of scientific 
 exactitude or of practical utility. The plain 
 man, who seeks salvation with the art critics, 
 very soon finds that he has condemned himself 
 to wander in a blind and baffling twilight of 
 cloudy dogma and chaotic precept. It is true 
 that aesthetic criticism has been the subject of 
 some of the greatest masterpieces in literature. 
 The reading of Lessing's Laocoon has been to
 
 i CRITICISM 9 
 
 many smaller people what it was to Macaulay 
 an intellectual revelation. His masterly analysis 
 of the respective functions on the one side of 
 painting and the plastic arts, and on the other 
 of poetry, as the vehicles and organs of aesthetic 
 representation ; the one employing " forms and 
 colours in space," the other " articulate sounds 
 in time " ; and his luminous and precise develop- 
 ment of the limitations which those conditions 
 impose, as regards both subject and treatment, 
 upon the artist and the poet, have received no 
 substantial modification or addition from later 
 thinkers. Nor, again, can any educated English- 
 man or Englishwoman of our own time forget 
 the debt of enjoyment and suggestion which he 
 or she owes to the intellectual independence, the 
 spiritual insight, the golden-tongued eloquence, 
 of John Ruskin. But as a rule it must, I think, 
 be said of art criticism that it has a blighting 
 effect even upon good writers ; that it has been 
 comparatively unproductive either in speculative 
 or in practical guidance; and that it consists to 
 a large extent in the unilluminating discussion of 
 unreal problems in unintelligible language. Horn 
 said of Goethe that everywhere in him " you are 
 on firm land or island nowhere the infinite sea." 
 It is exactly the reverse with the bulk of our 
 modern professors of aesthetic. To change the 
 metaphor, and to borrow a phrase I think 
 from Matthew Arnold, they seem to spend their
 
 10 CRITICISM i 
 
 lives in " always beating the bush and never 
 starting the hare." We look in vain for guiding 
 principles in a jungle of jargon. Carlyle tells us 
 that at one time John Sterling took to art criti- 
 cism, for which he was well fitted by technical 
 and historical knowledge. But, says his bio- 
 grapher, " of all subjects this was the one I cared 
 least to hear even Sterling talk of " ; " indeed," 
 he adds and I am disposed respectfully to 
 agree with him" it is a subject on which 
 earnest men, abhorrent of hypocrisy and speech 
 that has no meaning, are admonished to silence 
 in this sad time, and had better . . . perambulate 
 their picture galleries with little or no speech." 
 
 But criticism, as I have said, is to be under- 
 stood in a larger sense than is covered by any 
 of its merely technical applications. It may, I 
 suppose, be roughly defined as the science or art 
 whichever it is to be called of passing judg- 
 ments upon the productions and the acts of men. 
 I say purposely of " passing " and not merely 
 of " forming " judgments, because it seems to be 
 of the essence of criticism that it should be 
 articulate. No one would be foolish enough to 
 set up as a test of the due development of the 
 critical faculty the capacity to compose an essay 
 or to write a review. Some of the best critics 
 whom many of us have known have never made 
 themselves answerable for a line of printed 
 matter. But criticism, as the developed activity
 
 CRITICISM 11 
 
 of an educated mind, is clearly something different 
 from the instinctive and unformulated opinions 
 and tastes which the mass of men hold as un- 
 consciously as they " talk prose." To use 
 Hazlitt's admirable phrase, " they think by 
 proxy and talk by rote." Before a man can 
 criticise the works or the doings of his fellows to 
 any purpose, he must have passed beyond this 
 stage. He must have acquired the faculty of 
 seeing things at first hand and for himself, of 
 finding his way to their central meaning, of 
 bringing to bear upon what is new the gathered 
 and reasoned knowledge which he has gained 
 elsewhere, and of expressing in words, intelligible 
 to himself and to others, degrees of comparison 
 and shades of difference. If representation is the 
 function of art, interpretation is the function of 
 criticism. 
 
 I am not going to-day to deal with the matter 
 on its historical side. To those who are interested 
 in that aspect of it, I venture to commend the 
 learned and suggestive work of Mr. Worsfold, 
 The Principles of Criticism, which has recently 
 been published. But I invite you to consider 
 with me for a few moments what are some of the 
 conditions to which criticism, if it is to be a 
 trustworthy and fruitful organ of interpretation, 
 must conform. The first and perhaps the most 
 obvious requirement of criticism is that it should 
 be open-minded, many-sided, not sectarian but
 
 12 CRITICISM i 
 
 catholic. Partisanship, which in the active con- 
 duct of human affairs is an almost indispensable 
 motive power, is fatal to the wholesome exercise 
 of the critical faculty. " It is the part of a 
 man like you," wrote Voltaire to Vauvenargues, 
 " to have preferences, but no exclusions." The 
 moment the critic becomes the disciple, or still 
 worse the propagandist, of a school the moment 
 he assumes the prophetic mantle, and begins to 
 deal in sentences of excommunication and threats 
 of anathema he abdicates his proper function, 
 which is that not of a preacher but of an inter- 
 preter. With many great authors Carlyle and 
 Ruskin are famous examples criticism becomes 
 a mere vehicle for the trenchant and fervid 
 exposition of a creed in which the writer himself 
 has a vivid faith, and for the defence of which he 
 often finds his most effective plan of campaign 
 to consist in bringing out and driving home the 
 fallacies and shortcomings of rival systems. This 
 may be and often is a work of the highest literary 
 and social value, but to cany it on with vigour 
 and success requires the temper of the contro- 
 versialist or the missionary, not the temper of the 
 critic. One may perhaps be permitted to suggest 
 even of so finished a master of the art as Matthew 
 Arnold that his growing zeal against Philistines, 
 dissenters, and dogmatists, if it did not actually 
 blur the clear serenity of his vision, at any rate in 
 time diminished both the quantity and the value
 
 CRITICISM 13 
 
 of his contributions to criticism. May we not 
 add that it is a sure sign of the degeneration of 
 the critic, as such, when he lapses into the habitual 
 use of catch -words and formulae? There is 
 nothing more hampering to the free and elastic 
 play of the judgment than the habit, easily 
 acquired because it saves trouble, of drawing 
 one's words and phrases from a particular literary 
 or artistic dialect. 
 
 Another distinguishing mark of criticism in its 
 best and largest sense is that it should be im- 
 personal. This criterion does not in the least 
 imply that it should be uncoloured by the person- 
 ality of the critic, or that it should ignore the 
 personal element in the antecedents, the structure, 
 or the style of the work upon which judgment is 
 pronounced. What it means is this that criti- 
 cism ought to aim at a disinterested appreciation 
 of whatever is worthy or unworthy in its subject 
 matter, and should not be merely or mainly a 
 pretext for the display of the resources of the 
 critic. The importance of this particular precept 
 can be best illustrated by one or two examples of 
 the mischief which results from its neglect. Take 
 for instance the methods of the founders of the 
 Edinburgh Review. With all their occasional 
 dexterity and their conspicuous freshness and 
 force, they perpetually suggest that the governing 
 purpose of the critic is to detect mistakes, to 
 expose absurdities and contradictions if possible
 
 14 CRITICISM i 
 
 to tear the author to tatters ; but in any case 
 and above all to leave in the mind of the reader 
 an abiding impression of relentless smartness and 
 omniscient facility. In nine cases out of ten 
 the apparent object is to show the skill with which 
 an accomplished executioner can ply the instru- 
 ments, of his calling. Flagellation in the sphere 
 of criticism is often not only a salutary discipline, 
 but a duty of imperative obligation ; and no one 
 but a puling sentimentalist will deny that in the 
 armoury of a well-equipped critic room must be 
 found for the bastinado and even for the knout. 
 But treatment of this kind should be reserved 
 for impenitent dullards and professional im- 
 postors the recidivists of the literary and artistic 
 world. More than two generations of amused 
 and admiring readers have been struck with a 
 sense of painful incongruity in the spectacle of 
 Macaulay bringing into play the whole battery 
 of his well -furnished torture -chamber to rack 
 an ephemeral driveller like Robert Montgomery. 
 Another illustration, in a widely differing style, 
 of the havoc which is wrought in the best- 
 informed criticism by the importunate egotism 
 of the critic is to be found in the writings of one 
 of the greatest masters of style in the whole 
 range of English literature Thomas de Quincey. 
 From the time of Milton, with perhaps the 
 exception of Burke, it may be doubted whether 
 that unsurpassed instrument of expression
 
 i CRITICISM 15 
 
 English prose has ever been handled with such 
 a width of range, such an easy command of its 
 multitudinous resources, such wealth of imagery, 
 such " flexibility of adaptation," such intuitive 
 apprehension of the subtle laws which define the 
 boundary line between ambition and audacity. 
 A tired man, who goes home after a day of 
 strenuous labour amid the fumum et opes 
 strepitumque Romae, can take down from his 
 shelves any one of the fourteen volumes of 
 Professor Masson's admirable edition of De 
 Quincey's works, with the assured certainty that, 
 wherever he opens the book, he will be able to 
 browse for half an hour on rare and succulent 
 pasturage. De Quincey was no doubt more 
 than a critic ; he was an artist of high rank in 
 what he himself calls " the domain of impassioned 
 prose." But, all the same, a large part of his 
 work is critical, and it is vitiated by exactly the 
 defect which I am attempting to describe. I lay 
 no stress upon his incurable and often intolerable 
 prolixity, which sometimes calls to mind the 
 caustic comment of the Scotch judge upon a 
 long-winded advocate that he " exhausted time 
 and encroached upon eternity." But De Quincey, 
 with all his powers, has in him more than a little 
 of the literary coxcomb. Whatever may be the 
 work or the author that for the time being 
 occupies his pen, he never ceases to be self- 
 conscious ; he rarely fails to remind the reader
 
 16 CRITICISM 
 
 of his own experiences, tastes, eruditions, accom- 
 plishments ; and, whether he praises or blames, 
 admires or disparages, you never feel that he has 
 lost himself in his subject, but always that he 
 wishes to interest you in the subject because it 
 interests himself. 
 
 I have said that criticism should be catholic 
 and impersonal. Let me add that for its proper 
 exercise it peculiarly needs imagination. The 
 failures of even accomplished critics to interpret 
 the phenomena with which they set themselves 
 to deal are for the most part to be put down, not 
 to dulness of which they were incapable nor 
 to prejudice against which they were sedulously 
 on their guard but to lack of imaginative 
 insight. It is this defect which has kept whole 
 generations of critics in bondage to the " letter 
 which kills." Literary history is full of examples- 
 of this sterilising subservience. The " dramatic 
 unities," the so-called " dignity of history," the 
 conventions by which poetry has been from time 
 to time confined to particular conditions of 
 subject, structure, and measure, are well-known 
 instances. The activity of the imagination is 
 needed to correct this mechanical view, which 
 treats it, to use an excellent comparison of Mr. 
 Saintsbury's, as though it were to be played 
 like a game of whist. The fatal consequences 
 of defective imagination are, of course, no- 
 where better illustrated than in the criticisms of
 
 CRITICISM 17 
 
 posterity upon historical characters and events. 
 Mr. Morley, in his study of Voltaire, speaks of 
 the " crippling of his historic imagination," and 
 of the " inability which this inflicted upon him 
 of conceiving the true meaning and lowest roots 
 of the Catholic legend." " The middle age," he 
 goes on, " between himself and the polytheism of 
 the Empire was a parched desert to him and to 
 all his school, just as to the Protestant the 
 interval between the Apostles and Luther is a 
 long night of unclean things." The greatest of 
 English historians, Gibbon himself, is not exempt 
 from the same reproach. When the account 
 comes to be taken between the eighteenth and 
 the nineteenth centuries, it will probably turn 
 out that some of our most vaunted assets are 
 after all bad debts ; but, whatever comes or 
 goes, one can hardly doubt that the establishment 
 which our age has witnessed of the sovereignty 
 of the historic method will be counted to us a 
 clear gain. Whether you are judging a book, a 
 picture, a character, or a movement, no one now 
 dreams of denying that it is the first duty of the 
 critic to put himself, so far as may be, imagina- 
 tively at the point of view of his subject, to take 
 into account the antecedents which led up to and 
 the atmosphere which surrounded its production, 
 and not to be a party to that worst form of ex post 
 facto legislation which imports modern standards of 
 
 thought and taste into our judgments of the past. 
 
 c
 
 18 CRITICISM 
 
 It is perhaps encouraging in this connection to 
 remind ourselves, who are novices in this great 
 art, of the evidence which shows that neither 
 culture, nor intuition, nor the completest union 
 of both, has saved even men of genius from 
 mistakes over which the most humbly equipped 
 student may now make merry. The blunders of 
 great critics would be a fascinating subject in the 
 hands of Mr. Leslie Stephen or Mr. Birrell. This 
 is not the occasion, even if I had the ability, to 
 attempt an exhaustive treatment of it ; but I 
 will venture to recall to your memory, from quite 
 modern times, a few conspicuous and familiar 
 instances. Voltaire, who, unlike his literary asso- 
 ciate, Frederick the Great, had a real admira- 
 tion for the genius of Shakespeare, spoke of 
 Hamlet as a " rude and barbarous piece such a 
 work as one might suppose to be the fruit of the 
 imagination of a drunken savage." Dr. Johnson, 
 as you know, emptied the vials of his contempt 
 upon Lycidas : ' ' The diction is harsh, the rhymes 
 uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. . . . Its 
 form is that of a pastoral ; easy, vulgar, and 
 therefore disgusting. . . . Among the flocks, and 
 copses, and flowers, appear the heathen deities ; 
 Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and Aeolus, with a 
 long train of mythological imagery, such as a 
 college easily supplies. . . . He who thus grieves 
 will excite no sympathy ; he who thus praises 
 will confer no honour." Not only Johnson, but
 
 CRITICISM 19 
 
 Richardson and Goldsmith, failed to see any 
 merit in Tristram Shandy, or to detect the zigzag 
 streak of genius in " the man Sterne." " Nothing 
 odd," said the great Doctor, " will do long. 
 Tristram Shandy did not last." By the way, I 
 may remind you that of Sterne's Sermons the 
 same potent authority said, perhaps with more 
 reason : " I did read them, but it was in a stage- 
 coach ; I should not have deigned to look at 
 them had I been at large." The great Goethe, 
 to whom if to any one we should look for catho- 
 licity of appreciation, told an Italian who asked 
 him his opinion of Dante that he thought " the 
 Inferno abominable, the Purgatorio dubious, and 
 the Paradiso tiresome." This may take us back 
 again for a moment to Voltaire, who himself 
 spoke of Dante as a poet " qu'on loue toujours 
 parce qu'on ne lit guere." Walter Scott, in 1810, 
 when he had just finished The Lady of the Lake 
 The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion having 
 already established his poetical reputation said 
 to James Ballantyne : " If you wish to speak of 
 a real poet, Joanna Baillie is now the highest 
 genius of our country." He added that he had 
 more pleasure in reading Johnson's London and 
 The Vanity of Human Wishes than any other 
 poetical compositions he could mention. Jeffrey, 
 whose critical reputation is perhaps nowadays 
 quoted rather too low, published in 1828 and, as 
 Mr. Leslie Stephen has shown, was content to
 
 20 CRITICISM ' 
 
 leave unretracted and unqualified to the end of 
 his life this truly astounding judgment on the 
 poetry of his time : " Keats, Shelley, and Words- 
 worth are melting fast from the fields of vision " ; 
 and the only two contemporary poets in whom 
 he saw any " promise of immortality " he declared 
 to be Rogers and Campbell. That this is not 
 the mere eccentricity of a prosaic Edinburgh 
 reviewer, born of caprice or paradox, is proved by 
 the contemporary judgment of no less an authority 
 than Byron himself. In a pamphlet written in 
 1820, not published in his lifetime, but set out 
 almost at length in Moore's biography, the most 
 popular poet of his age gives his view as to the 
 then state of English poetry. Recollect that he 
 was writing at a time when not only himself and 
 Scott, but Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge 
 had produced their greatest works, and when 
 Keats, whose Endymion had been damned two 
 years before in the Quarterly, had just brought 
 out the volume which contains Hyperion, Isabella, 
 Lamia, and The Eve of St. Agnes. What is the 
 judgment of Byron ? " That this is the age of 
 the decline of English poetry," he writes, " will 
 be doubted by few who have calmly considered 
 the subject." Crabbe, he says, is " the first of 
 living poets." And again : "As I told Moore 
 not very long ago, we are all wrong except 
 Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell." " There will 
 be found," he adds characteristically, " as com-
 
 i CRITICISM 21 
 
 fortable metaphysics, and ten times more pure 
 poetry, in Pope's Essay on Man than in The 
 Excursion" Such a strange failure of critical 
 insight is but poorly redeemed by his subsequent 
 grudging tribute to the genius of Keats, of whom 
 he says a year later that, " malgre all the fan- 
 tastic fopperies of his style, he was undoubtedly 
 of great promise." Take again, as a notable 
 instance of blurred and distorted vision in a case 
 where we should have looked for the light and 
 warmth of vivid sympathy, Carlyle's famous 
 review of Lockhart's Life of Scott. " It seems to 
 us," he says in a burst of the most challenging 
 Carlylese, " that there goes other stuff to the 
 making of great men than can be detected here. 
 One knows not w^hat idea worthy of the name of 
 great, what purpose, instinct, or tendency that 
 could be called great, Scott ever was inspired 
 with. . . . The great fact [about the Waverley 
 Novels] is that they were faster written and 
 better paid for than any other books in the 
 world." They are " addressed to the everyday 
 mind " ; they are " not profitable for doctrine, 
 for reproof, or for edification " ; they were not 
 dragged into being and hammered into shape 
 with the convulsive throes and at the fuliginous 
 smithy of genius, but tranquilly " manufactured 
 with a fatal productive facility." They opened 
 the floodgates to a " Noah's deluge of ditch water." 
 Such is the sentence passed by the greatest of
 
 22 CRITICISM i 
 
 his countrymen since born upon Scott, because, 
 like Goethe as we know him, and like Shakespeare 
 as we imagine him, he brought forth his master- 
 pieces with the serene detachment, the uncalcu- 
 lating profusion, the majestic effortlessness, which 
 belong only to supreme genius. 
 
 These illustrations will suffice. If time per- 
 mitted I might easily add to the catalogue. But 
 any one who presumes to speak even in the most 
 unambitious way about criticism may fairly be 
 asked if there are any practical rules by the 
 observance of which the critical faculty may be 
 trained and enriched. There is great danger in 
 attempting to prescribe such a code. One may 
 be warned by the example of an eminent Scotch 
 writer, who more than a hundred years ago 
 wrote a bulky work, now never read, on the 
 " Elements of Criticism," which elicited from Gold- 
 smith the disagreeable pleasantry that " it was 
 easier to write that book than to read it." Such 
 advice as I would venture to give would be 
 confined to a couple of seeming commonplaces 
 which appear to me to sum up all that can be 
 wisely said upon the matter, and that is, first, to 
 study great models, and secondly, to practise 
 diligently for yourself. As regards the first, 
 excellent and admirable as is the quality of 
 French criticism, there is no need to go beyond 
 our own literature, or farther back than the 
 present century, for a storehouse of great master-
 
 CRITICISM 28 
 
 pieces of the art. I have already spoken of 
 De Quincey and Carlyle. I know of no critic, 
 whether of literature or of painting, who, with 
 all his oddities, his waywardness, his egotism, 
 better repays an occasional visit than William 
 Hazlitt. What, for instance, can be better than 
 this sentence of his on Burke ? " Johnson and 
 Junius shrink up into little antithetic points and 
 well-tuned sentences. But Burke's style was 
 forked and playful like the lightning, crested like 
 the serpent." Lamb and Coleridge, Bagehot, 
 Matthew Arnold, Stevenson, and that fine and 
 subtle writer whom we have lately lost and 
 cannot replace, Richard Holt Hutton, maintain a 
 succession which is carried on with undiminished 
 brilliancy by a band of living critics whom I need 
 not name. Familiarise yourselves with these 
 masters with their temper, their method, their 
 style and you will not lack the inspiration and 
 guidance which great models supply. 
 
 But it is, as the French say, by working at the 
 smithy that one becomes a blacksmith. One of 
 the acutest critics that I have known belongs to 
 the other sex, and if she did not acquire, she 
 certainly improved, her aptitude by the habit, 
 whenever she finished the reading of a book 
 which left its footprints behind it, of writing out 
 for herself a critical account of it. This is not 
 a bad practice, particularly if you find, as you 
 probably will, that the criticism of the first book
 
 24 CRITICISM i 
 
 cannot be satisfactory to yourself until you have 
 read round and about it, and your criticism 
 insensibly widens into the study of a subject, a 
 period, or an author. It is astonishing how 
 continuously the resources are being increased 
 upon which we can draw for the interpretation 
 even of the most famous and most widely studied 
 writers. We are met here on the anniversary of 
 the birth of the greatest of them all. Shake- 
 speare, both as writer and as man, has been the 
 object of a more insatiable and a more micro- 
 scopic criticism than any one in the generations 
 of men. The most trivial episodes, real or 
 imaginary, with which his name is connected, 
 have been raked and sifted with Teutonic 
 thoroughness. The " chatter about Harriet " 
 is as nothing compared with the babel of tongues 
 about "Mr. W. H." and Mary Fytton. And 
 yet we have seen during the last twelve months 
 three memorable contributions to our knowledge 
 of Shakespeare and to our means of interpreting 
 both his writings and his life Mr. Sidney Lee's 
 article in The Dictionary of National Biography, 
 Mr. George Wyndham's Introduction to the 
 Poems, and the monumental work of Dr. Brandes, 
 which is now accessible to us all in an admirable 
 English translation. The stream of criticism 
 never runs dry, and there is no subject worthy 
 of the serious study of men upon which the last 
 word has yet been said.
 
 i CRITICISM 25 
 
 I must now bring to a close these scattered 
 hints on the study of the art of criticism. The 
 criticism of literature and art is after all but a 
 subordinate chapter in the criticism of life. In 
 the ideal scheme of ancient philosophy, the life of 
 action, immersed in matter, tinctured with pas- 
 sion, at its best but a halting compromise between 
 the pure energies of reason and the more or less 
 squalid exigencies of social co-operation, was 
 always regarded as an indifferent second-best 
 to the detached and isolated life of speculative 
 thought. For us who pass our days in Romuli 
 faece, the self-sufficing figure of the passionless 
 and anaemic theorist, who seemed to Plato and 
 Aristotle to be the fine flower of human develop- 
 ment, has yielded the place of honour to that 
 of the man who makes two blades of grass grow 
 where only one grew before. It is a truism, but 
 a truism which needs to be constantly repeated, 
 that we are too apt in all departments to adjust 
 our judgments to the vulgar modern rule of 
 14 payment by results." The disinterested pur- 
 suit of truth and beauty is always and everywhere 
 the worthy goal of the best energies of the sons 
 of men. In all ages and countries, under every 
 condition of social and intellectual environment, 
 those who have struggled, whether for the 
 extension of the boundaries of knowledge or for 
 the widening of the field of common refine- 
 ment and general happiness, have always found
 
 26 CRITICISM i 
 
 at the end of their journey that there still 
 lay before them and before those who were to 
 follow 
 
 that untravelled world, whose margin fades 
 For ever and for ever when we move. 
 
 There is no intellectual formula that can express, 
 and no scientific crucible that can resolve, the 
 ultimate and irreducible secret either of our 
 individual or of our corporate life. But by close 
 and daily intimacy with the best that has been 
 thought and said we may nourish that temper 
 of " admiration, hope, and love," by which, as 
 Wordsworth tells us, we really " live." 

 
 II 
 
 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 27
 
 II 
 
 BIOGRAPHY 1 
 
 To the lover of books there are few more fascinat- 
 ing or more indispensable companions than the 
 great Dictionary of National Biography, which, 
 with the issue of its supplement, has just been 
 brought (for the time being) to a close. The 
 man who has ' on his shelves, and within easy 
 reach, the sixty-six volumes of this monumental 
 work need never be at a loss for intellectual 
 nourishment and stimulus. Whatever may be 
 his mood, grave or frivolous, strenuous or de- 
 sultory, whether he wishes to graze, or, as one 
 sometimes does, only to browse, he can hardly 
 fail, as he turns over these infinitely varied pages, 
 to find what fits his taste. Literature in our 
 days tends to become more and more specialised ; 
 there are vast and ever-increasing tracts which 
 are made inaccessible to the general reader by 
 technicalities of dialect and of form ; but in the 
 written records of the lives of men and women 
 we have all a common territory, inexhaustible 
 
 1 Delivered at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, Novem- 
 ber 15, 1901 
 
 29
 
 30 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 in its range, perennial in its interest, from which 
 pedantry itself cannot shut us out. It seemed 
 to me, therefore, when the promise which, many 
 months ago, I improvidently made to address 
 the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution was at 
 last coming home to roost, that I might do worse 
 than speak to you this evening for a few moments 
 on Biography as a form of literary art. 
 
 I do not propose to theorise at length upon 
 the subject. It might, indeed, almost be said 
 that the good biography, like the good biographer, 
 is born, not made. There is no kind of composi- 
 tion for which it is more futile to attempt to lay 
 down rules ; none in which it is more difficult 
 a priori to say why one man should succeed, 
 and another, with equal knowledge, better brains, 
 and a readier pen, should ignominiously fail. We 
 can easily enumerate a number of qualities, some 
 of them commonplace enough, which the ideal 
 biographer ought to possess quick observation, 
 a retentive memory, a love of detail, a dash of 
 hero-worship. We can also say, negatively, that 
 it is not the least necessary to the production of 
 an immortal biography that the writer or, for 
 that matter, the subject either should be a man 
 of genius. But no theory, either of faculty, 
 opportunity, or environment, will enable one to 
 explain the supreme art, indefinable, incom- 
 municable, which could create, say, such a master- 
 piece as Boswell's Johnson. Still, it may, I
 
 n BIOGRAPHY 31 
 
 think, be worth while to endeavour, not as a 
 mere speculation, but by the aid of concrete 
 examples, to realise, if we can, some of the condi- 
 tions which go to the making, and which account 
 for the charm, of a good biography. 
 
 There is, I need hardly say, a wide difference, 
 from the point of view both of the reader and 
 the writer, between the summary and condensed 
 record of a life in a dictionary, and a biography 
 in the larger and fuller sense of the term. But, 
 though the products of different literary methods, 
 both depend for their interest upon their appeal 
 to, and their satisfaction of, the same kind of 
 intellectual curiosity. To the true lover of bio- 
 graphy it matters comparatively little how much 
 space the man of whom he is reading occupied 
 in the eyes of contemporaries, or retains in the 
 judgment of posterity. The interest of the life 
 depends far more on the stature of the man 
 than on the scale of his achievements. It must, 
 nevertheless, be admitted that there is a peculiar 
 fascination in trying to pierce through the gloom 
 which veils the life-history of some of the most 
 famous of our race. 
 
 To take an obvious, and at the same time an 
 extreme, instance, few things are more interesting 
 to watch than the attempts of scholars and critics, 
 like Dowden and Brandes and Sidney Lee, to 
 reconstruct the life of a man at once so illustrious 
 and so obscure as the greatest of our poets.
 
 32 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 n 
 
 The case of Shakespeare presents, perhaps, the 
 strangest array of difficulties and paradoxes in 
 the whole range of biography. The most splendid 
 genius of his own or any other time has left 
 behind him hardly a single undisputed trace of 
 his own personality. There has not been pre- 
 served so much as a single line in his own hand- 
 writing of any of his poems or plays. Such of 
 the plays as were published in his lifetime seem 
 to have been printed from stage copies to a 
 large extent by literary pirates. The apparently 
 unbroken indifference of the greatest of all artists 
 not only to posthumous fame, but to the safe- 
 guarding against defacement or loss of his own 
 handiwork, is without precedent or parallel. 
 The date and order of his plays, the identity of 
 the " only begetter " of the Sonnets, the manner 
 in which his wealth was acquired, the unpro- 
 ductiveness of his last five years he died at 
 fifty-two, the same age as Napoleon his easy 
 acquiescence in the sleek humdrum and the 
 homely dissipations of social and civic life in a 
 small provincial town that all these questions, 
 and a hundred more, should still be matters of 
 conjecture and controversy is a unique fact in 
 literary history. What else but this tantalising 
 twilight has made it possible for even the most 
 distraught ingenuity to construct the great 
 Baconian hypothesis ? The task which confronts 
 the writer of a life like Shakespeare's is not to
 
 BIOGRAPHY 33 
 
 transcribe and vivify a record ; it is rather to 
 solve a problem by the methods of hypothesis 
 and inference. His work is bound to be, not so 
 much an essay in biography, as in the more or 
 less scientific use of the biographic imagination. 
 The difficulty is infinitely enhanced in this 
 particular case by the impersonal quality of 
 most of Shakespeare's writings a quality which 
 I myself am heretic enough to believe extends 
 to by far the greater part of the Sonnets. We 
 do not know that the greatest teacher of antiquity 
 wrote a single line. Shakespeare, who died less 
 than three hundred years ago, must have written 
 well over a hundred thousand. And yet, thanks 
 to Plato and Xenophon, we have a far more 
 definite and vivid acquaintance with the man 
 Socrates than we shall ever have with the man 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 But dismissing problems of this kind, which 
 have to be judged by a standard of their own, 
 let me say a word first of that form of biography 
 in which success is at once rarest and, when 
 achieved, most complete autobiography. It 
 may, I think, be laid down, as a maxim of ex- 
 perience, without undue severity, that few auto- 
 biographies are really good literature. And the 
 reason lies upon the surface. Self-consciousness 
 is, as a rule, fatal to art, and yet self-conscious- 
 ness is the essence of autobiography. No man 
 
 ever sat down to write his own life, not even 
 
 D
 
 34 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 John Stuart Mill, without becoming for the time 
 an absorbed and concentrated egotist. It is 
 because he is, for the moment at least, so pro- 
 foundly interesting to and interested in himself, 
 that he feels irresistibly impelled to take posterity 
 into his confidence. The result too often is one 
 of the most unappetising products of the literary 
 kitchen a nauseating compound of insincerity 
 and unreserve. And yet in the hands of a true 
 artist there is hardly any form of composition 
 which has the same interest and charm. Even 
 Dr. Johnson said that every man's life may best 
 be written by himself. Take, for instance, that 
 which is, I suppose, at once the most shameless 
 and the most successful specimen of its class, 
 the Confessions of Rousseau. His object, he tells 
 us, was to show a man (meaning himself) in all 
 the truth of nature, and his belief is (as he also 
 avows) that no reader after going through the 
 Confessions will be able to declare himself a 
 better man than their author. It is amazing, 
 at first sight, that he can imagine that such a 
 belief will be able to survive the disclosure which 
 he proceeds to make, of ungoverned impulse, of 
 infirmity, and even of baseness. As Mr. Morley 
 says : " Other people wrote polite histories of 
 their outer lives, amply coloured with romantic 
 recollection. Rousseau, with unquailing veracity, 
 plunged into the inmost depths, hiding nothing 
 that would be likely to make him either ridiculous
 
 BIOGRAPHY 35 
 
 or hateful in common opinion, and inventing 
 nothing that could attract much sympathy or 
 much admiration." Or again, in the words of 
 Mr. Leslie Stephen, " he found realities so pain- 
 ful that he swore that they must be dreams, as 
 dreams were so sweet that they must be true 
 realities." And the same writer sums up his 
 point of view in a sentence of singular felicity 
 when he adds that " Rousseau represents the 
 strange combination of a kind of sensual appetite 
 for pure and simple pleasures." There are few 
 more difficult questions than that which is con- 
 stantly presenting itself to the reader of Rousseau, 
 namely, what ought to be the limit of unreserve 
 in autobiography, if indeed there ought to be 
 any limit at all. You will remember how Boswell 
 was rash enough on one occasion to say to Dr. 
 Johnson, " Sir, I am sometimes troubled with a 
 disposition to stinginess," and Johnson replied, 
 " So am I, sir, but I do not tell it." 
 
 The great autobiographies of the world are 
 to be found in many different shapes. Some of 
 the best are spiritual and largely introspective, 
 like Saint Augustine's Confessions, or Bunyan's 
 Grace Abounding, or Newman's Apologia. Some- 
 times, again, they veil or colour under the form 
 of fiction the personal experience of the writer, 
 as in Consuelo, or David Copperfield, or Villette. 
 Sometimes, without losing the note of egotism, 
 they are frankly objective and mundane, as in
 
 36 BIOGRAPHY n 
 
 the case of Benvenuto Cellini, and to a large 
 extent of Gibbon. But all that are worthy of 
 a place in this the highest class have one thing 
 in common. They are authentic human docu- 
 ments the very mirror of the writer's personality, 
 and it is by that quality that they make an 
 appeal to us, more vivid, because more direct, 
 than any narrative by another hand. 
 
 I will not venture on any critical estimate of 
 the famous works which I have just named. 
 But let me take, by way of illustrating this 
 branch of the subject, a less known, but, to my 
 thinking, a hardly less remarkable book the 
 Autobiography of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 
 the painter, one of the most tragic figures in 
 the history of art. The gigantic canvases by 
 which he confidently expected to achieve not 
 only fame but immortality his " Lazarus," 
 which he sometimes thought his masterpiece, 
 covers nearly 300 square feet are perhaps as 
 good an illustration as can be found of the 
 difference between the grandiose and the great. 
 He is probably best remembered in these days 
 by Wordsworth's noble sonnet addressed to him 
 as a fellow- worker in the school of " creative 
 
 art" 
 
 High is our calling, friend. 
 
 But Haydon, though cursed with a vain and 
 violent temperament, a prey to ambitions always 
 in excess of his powers of execution, perpetually
 
 BIOGRAPHY 37 
 
 hovering on the confines of the insanity to which 
 he at last succumbed, was one of the acutest and 
 most accomplished critics, and on the whole the 
 most strenuous and indomitable controversialist 
 of his time. In his journal and his unfinished 
 autobiography he discloses to us his own person- 
 ality with a freedom from reticence not unworthy 
 of Rousseau, though you will look in vain in 
 Rousseau or any of his imitators for Haydon's 
 simplicity and sincerity. There is not a single 
 phase of his experiences, from the day when he 
 records how, at the age of eighteen, he left his 
 home at Plymouth for London, full of buoyant 
 self-confidence, down to the last pathetic entry, 
 when, in front of his easel, and amid the wreck- 
 age of his ideals and his ambitions, he was about 
 to take up the pistol with which he put an end 
 to his life in the whole of that long, strenuous, 
 disheartening pilgrimage there is nothing that 
 he thought, felt, did, or failed to do, that is not 
 set down faithfully and without reserve. Hay don 
 was an egotist, afflicted by an almost diseased 
 vanity, but no reader can doubt the substantial 
 truth of his picture of himself. 1 
 
 1 In 4846, two months before his tragic death, Hay don opened 
 an exhibition of his pictures at the Egyptian Hall. But Tom 
 Thumb, the American dwarf, proved a greater attraction. On 
 April 21, Haydon notes in his diary: "Tom Thumb had 12,000 
 people last week. B. R. Haydon 133 (the a little girl)." Mr. 
 Birrell recalls the lines : 
 
 All London flocks to see a dwarf, 
 
 And leaves a Haydon dying.
 
 38 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 No picture of a man, however, whether by 
 himself or by others, is either true or adequate 
 which does not give us also his environment. 
 It is here that so many autobiographies, being 
 little more than the outpouring of self-conscious- 
 ness, disappoint and baffle us. But here, again, 
 Haydon appears to me to merit a high place. 
 He is said to have been an indifferent painter of 
 portraits with the brush. If he was, it was not, 
 as these pages show, from a lack of power either 
 to observe and remember superficial traits of 
 appearance and manner, or at least when his 
 prejudices were asleep to penetrate the depths 
 of character. You will, I think, be grateful if 
 I give you a few illustrations selected almost 
 at random from a long and varied gallery. 
 Here is a glimpse of two of his celebrated con- 
 temporaries Hazlitt, the critic, and Jeremy 
 Bentham, the philosopher. " What a singular 
 compound," he says of Hazlitt, " this man was 
 of malice, candour, cowardice, genius, purity, 
 vice, democracy, and conceit. One day I called 
 on him and found him arranging his hair before 
 a glass, trying different effects, and asking my 
 advice whether he should show his forehead more 
 or less. Bentham lived next door. We used 
 to see him bustling away in his sort of half- 
 running walk in his garden. Both Hazlitt and 
 I often looked with a longing eye from the 
 windows at the white-haired philosopher in his
 
 BIOGRAPHY 39 
 
 leafy shelter, his head the finest and most vener- 
 able ever placed on human shoulders. . . . Once 
 I remember," he goes on, " Bentham came to 
 see Leigh Hunt in Surrey Jail, and played battle- 
 dore and shuttlecock with him. Hunt told me 
 after of the profound powers of Bentham's mind. 
 He proposed, said Hunt, a reform in the handle 
 of the battledore." No abuse was too vast, and 
 it would seem that no abuse was too small, to 
 escape the reforming passion of the great Utili- 
 tarian. Elsewhere he says of Hazlitt and this, 
 I think, is a very remarkable picture : "As for 
 Hazlitt, it is not to be believed how the destruc- 
 tion of Napoleon affected him. He seemed pro- 
 strated in mind and body. He walked about 
 unwashed, unshaved, hardly sober by day, and 
 always intoxicated by night, until at length, 
 wakening as it were from his stupor, he at once 
 left off all stimulating liquors, and never touched 
 them after " surely one of the quaintest occa- 
 sions for taking the pledge in the whole history 
 of total abstinence. 
 
 Then, again, let me give you a portrait of 
 Wilkie, our great Fife painter, who was his fellow- 
 student, and his best friend through life. They 
 visited Paris together in 1814, after the first over- 
 throw of Napoleon. Haydon says that " not- 
 withstanding that Paris was filled with all the 
 nations of the earth, the greatest oddity in it 
 was unquestionably David Wilkie. His horrible
 
 40 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 French, his strange, tottering, feeble look, his 
 carrying about his prints to make bargains with 
 printsellers, his resolute determination here I 
 seem to see something of the soil from which he 
 sprang never to leave the restaurants till he got 
 his change right to a centime, his long disputes 
 about sous and demi-sous with the dame du 
 comptoir, while Madame tried to cheat him, and 
 as she pressed her pretty ringed fingers on his 
 arm without making the least impression, her 
 ' Mais, monsieur,' and his Scottish ' Mais, 
 madame,' were worthy of Moliere." Or again, 
 in a different vein, he tells us how he breakfasted 
 with Wordsworth, and Wordsworth, speaking of 
 three of the greatest men of his time, Burke, 
 Fox, and Pitt, said : " You always went from 
 Burke with your mind filled ; from Fox with 
 your feelings excited ; and from Pitt with wonder 
 at his having the power to make the worse appear 
 the better reason." One is reminded of Person's 
 remark, that while Pitt carefully considered his 
 sentences before he uttered them, Fox threw 
 himself into the middle of his, and left it to God 
 Almighty to get him out again. 
 
 Here is another of Haydon's sketches the 
 sketch, of a money-lender one of the fraternity 
 to whom he paid in the course of his life a long 
 series of unsatisfactory visits. This is his first 
 experience. He says : " When you deal with 
 a rascal, turn him to the light. I got him to the
 
 n BIOGRAPHY 41 
 
 light. His eyes shrank, his face was the meanest 
 I ever saw ; the feeble mouth, little nose, brassy 
 eyes, blotched skin, low forehead, and fetid 
 smell all announced a reptile." And afterwards, 
 when after a more extended experience of this 
 gentleman and his kind, he found himself at last 
 in the King's Bench prison, arrested for debt, 
 he writes and this is characteristic of the man : 
 " King's Bench. Well ! I am in prison. So 
 were Bacon, Raleigh, and Cervantes." He came 
 here to Edinburgh in 1821 to exhibit one of his 
 prodigious canvases, and it may be interesting 
 to you to know his first impressions of this great 
 city. " The season in Edinburgh," he says, 
 " is the severest part of the winter. Princes 
 Street in a clear sunset, with the Castle and the 
 Pentland Hills in radiant glory, and the crowd 
 illumined by the setting sun, was a sight perfectly 
 original. First you would see limping Sir Walter, 
 with Lord Meadowbank ; then tripped Jeffrey, 
 keen, restless, and fidgety ; you then met Wilson 
 or Lockhart, or Allan or Thompson, or Raeburn, 
 as if all had agreed to make their appearance at 
 
 once." 
 
 Of Keats he writes : " The last time I ever 
 saw him was at Hampstead, lying on a white bed 
 with a book, hectic and on his back, irritable in 
 his weakness, and wounded at the way he had 
 been used. He seemed to be going out of life 
 with a contempt of this world and no hope of
 
 42 BIOGRAPHY n 
 
 the other." Or, finally, to close my series of 
 impressions from this storehouse of living por- 
 traits, take what he says of Scott and Words- 
 worth, who had spent the morning with him 
 together : " It is singular how success and the 
 want of it operate on two extraordinary men- 
 Walter Scott and Wordsworth. Scott enters a 
 room and sits at table with the coolness and self- 
 possession of conscious fame ; Wordsworth with 
 a mortified elevation of head, as if fearful he was 
 not estimated as he desired. Scott is always 
 cool and very amusing ; Wordsworth often 
 egotistical and overwhelming. Scott seems to 
 appear less than he really is, while Wordsworth 
 struggles to be thought at the moment greater 
 than he is suspected to be. I think that Scott's 
 success would have made Wordsworth insuffer- 
 able, while Wordsworth's failure would not have 
 rendered Scott a whit less delightful. Scott is 
 the companion of nature in all her feelings and 
 freaks ; while Wordsworth follows her like an 
 apostle sharing her solemn moods and impres- 
 sions." I do not think it would be possible to 
 present a more vivid contrast in fewer words 
 between two great and distinguished men. 
 
 But I must leave autobiography and turn for 
 a few moments to biography in the stricter sense 
 the writing of one man's life by another. In 
 that form of literature no language is richer than 
 ours ; it may be doubted whether any language
 
 n BIOGRAPHY 43 
 
 is so rich. Colonel Hutchinson's Life by his wife, 
 Roger North's Lives of the Norths, Boswell's 
 Johnson, Lockhart's Scott, Carlyle's Sterling, 
 Stanley's Arnold, Lewes' Goethe, Mrs. GaskelPs 
 
 tf 
 
 Charlotte Bronte, Trevelyan's Macaulay these 
 are only the titles which first suggest themselves 
 in a brilliant and inexhaustible catalogue. Yet, 
 with the single but large exception of fiction, 
 there is no form of writing which lends itself so 
 readily to the production of that which is trivial 
 and ephemeral. It is hardly necessary to rule 
 out, from the point of view of art, the monuments 
 which filial piety or misdirected friendship is 
 constantly raising to those who deserved and 
 probably desired to be forgotten. Equally to 
 be excluded, from the same point of view, is 
 biography written with a purpose a class of 
 which those of us who were carefully brought up 
 can recall not a few doleful specimens. Mr. 
 Disraeli speaks somewhere, I think in Coningsby, 
 of a voluminous history which once had a great 
 vogue as " Mr. Wordy's History of the War, in 
 twenty volumes, to prove that Providence was 
 on the side of the Tories." The same taint of a 
 perhaps laudable but certainly irrelevant purpose 
 hangs about the didactic or edifying biography. 
 It is not the function of a biography to be a 
 magnified epitaph or an expanded tract. Its 
 business is the vivid delineation of a person, and 
 for its success there are two obvious conditions
 
 44 BIOGRAPHY n 
 
 first, that the person delineated should have the 
 power of permanently interesting his fellow-men ; 
 and, next, that the delineator should be able to 
 recall him to life. The enormous increase, not 
 only in the number but in the popularity of this 
 class of books, is probably due more to the 
 growth of the first class than the second. Man's 
 interest in man is always growing, but from the 
 nature of the case there is not and never can be an 
 academy of biographers. 
 
 And here it may be worth noting that some of 
 the most interesting personalities are the most 
 elusive, and, therefore, the worst subjects for 
 biography. There is about them a kind of 
 bouquet which, after they are gone, can never 
 be revived. For their friends, they may be 
 brought back to life by the reminiscence of some 
 slight, perhaps trivial, characteristic. It may be 
 a trait or even a trick, a gesture, the inflexion of 
 a voice, the turn of a phrase. But, for those who 
 never knew them, not even the highest and 
 subtlest art can reproduce them as they really 
 were. We have all of us known such men. The 
 late Master of Balliol, Mr. Jowett, was one. 
 Lord Bowen, I think, was another. But let us 
 suppose that the character and the life can be 
 reproduced. What is the secret of the art which 
 can make them live again ? Sometimes, of 
 course, the biographer may be said not so much 
 to recreate as to create his hero. One cannot
 
 n BIOGRAPHY 45 
 
 help feeling a suspicion of the kind in reading a 
 book like Carlyle's Life of Sterling. Sometimes, 
 on the other hand, his function is exactly the 
 opposite, and he is content to let his hero tell his 
 own tale out of his own sayings or letters. An 
 admirable example is Mr. Colvin's well-known 
 edition of the Letters of Stevenson. The best 
 selection of letters is, however, an inadequate 
 substitute for a real biography. Indeed, one 
 often feels that if we were given fewer of a man's 
 letters to his friends, and more of his friends' 
 letters to him, we should get to know him better 
 because, among other reasons, we should be 
 better able to realise how his personality affected 
 and appealed to others. 
 
 Look for a moment to the list of famous Lives 
 which I enumerated a little time ago, and you 
 will find in them, at any rate, one common 
 feature. With the single exception of Lewes' 
 Goethe, there is not one of these great biographies 
 which was not written either by a near relative or 
 an intimate friend. The authors were, no doubt, 
 all of them, in their degree literary artists ; but 
 we can measure the enormous advantage to the 
 biographer of personal intimacy when we compare 
 the result of their own, or in some cases of still 
 greater writers' attempts to bring back to life 
 those whom they have never known in the flesh. 
 " And did you once see Shelley plain ? " asks 
 Robert Browning. To have " seen Shelley
 
 46 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 plain " would have been, indeed, a godsend to 
 some of the accomplished gentlemen who have 
 contributed to " the chatter about Harriet." 
 The drawbacks of intimacy for this purpose are, 
 of course, sufficiently obvious. The bias of kin- 
 ship, the blindness of discipleship, are undeni- 
 able hindrances to just and even-handed judg- 
 ment. But the true biographer is not a judge. 
 He has no theory of his hero ; he presents him 
 to us as he appeared to those among whom he 
 acted and moved and suffered ; the living figure 
 of a man whom 'we feel we should recognise in 
 another world ; a figure, moreover, which is not 
 always the same, which grows and changes under 
 the stress of circumstance ; a figure which the 
 biographer, from his own store of direct know- 
 ledge, has, as it were, to be constantly recharging 
 with life. It is this quality which gives vividness, 
 charm, undying freshness to the pages of Boswell 
 and Lockhart. The biographer who has not this 
 advantage and has to seek for it elsewhere is 
 often in sore straits for the material which he 
 needs. Do you remember Dr. Johnson's account, 
 at Mr. Dilly's dinner, of his strenuous, but not 
 very successful, quest for authentic memories of 
 Dryden ? There were two people who had 
 known Dryden well still alive M'Swinney and 
 Gibber. And what had they to tell ? M'Swinney's 
 only information was that " At Wills' coffee- 
 house Dryden had a particular chair set for him-
 
 n BIOGRAPHY 47 
 
 self by the fire in winter, and called his winter 
 chair, and it was carried out for him to the 
 balcony in summer, and then called his summer 
 chair." Gibber could only say : " He was a decent 
 old man, arbiter of critical disputes at Wills'." 
 There is no nutrition to be got out of chopped 
 straw like this. Boswell : " Yet Gibber was a 
 man of observation." Johnson : " I think not." 
 Let me again take by way of illustration not 
 a celebrated book, one which in these days has 
 probably few readers, a book in which a wife tells 
 the story of a man who was in his time a solid 
 and fruitful worker in business, in politics, and 
 in literature. I mean The Personal Life of 
 George Grote, by his widow, Harriet Grote, 
 published in 1873. Grote was not a genius, but 
 he was a man of many interests and activities 
 a banker, for many years member for the City 
 of London, a politician who advocated with 
 serene and irrepressible courage unpopular 
 causes, and who at last, in despair at the inert- 
 ness of the public opinion of his time, abandoned 
 public life, devoted himself to research, and gave 
 up twelve years to writing The History of Greece. 
 Mrs. Grote, who was a woman of strong indi- 
 viduality, tells us in her preface how, late on 
 in his life, her husband one day came into her 
 room, and finding her poring over papers, asked, 
 " What are you so busy over, Harriet ? ' : " Well, 
 I am arranging some materials for a sketch of
 
 48 BIOGRAPHY n 
 
 your life." " My life ! " exclaimed Grote, " there 
 is absolutely nothing to tell." " Not in the way 
 of adventure, I grant, but there is something 
 nevertheless your life is the history of a Mind." 
 " That is it," he rejoined, with animation. " But 
 can you tell it ? " A conjugal query. But Mrs. 
 Grote had no doubt about the answer, and 
 proceeded with her task. Happily for its 
 interest as a biography, the book is something 
 very different from ' ' the history of a mind." 
 Even the great Goethe himself becomes barely 
 endurable when he soliloquises over the stages 
 of his own mental development. 
 
 Mrs. Grote had a keen eye, and the selective 
 judgment which is peculiarly necessary when a 
 wife undertakes to write the life of her husband. 
 Grote fell early in life among the Utilitarians, 
 and was brought in due course by James Mill to 
 the feet of Jeremy Bentham. You have had one 
 picture of the Patriarch already from the pen of 
 Haydon. Here is a sidelight on the same subject 
 from Mrs. Grote. " Mr. Bentham," she savs, 
 " being a man of easy fortune, kept a good table, 
 and took pleasure in receiving guests at his 
 board, though never more than one at a time. 
 To his one guest he would talk fluently, yet 
 without caring to listen in his turn." To this 
 convivial monologue Mr. Grote seems now and 
 again to have had the honour of being admitted. 
 His engagement to Harriet Lewin, who became
 
 n BIOGRAPHY 49 
 
 his wife and biographer, was protracted by 
 business and other difficulties beyond the 
 ordinary span. He sought to appease his im- 
 patience by learning German, playing on the 
 'cello, and drenching himself with political 
 economy. I quote a typical entry, dated 1818, 
 from the diary which he kept for his lady : 
 " Dined alone. Read some scenes in Schiller's 
 4 Don Carlos.' After reading these I practised 
 on the bass for about an hour. Then drank tea, 
 and read Adam Smith's incomparable chapter 
 on the Mercantile System until eleven, when I 
 went to bed." That is how the young Utili- 
 tarians whiled away their solitary evenings. 
 At last they married. Things were not at first 
 altogether easy. Mrs. George Grote, as she calls 
 herself, had, she tells us with delightful frankness, 
 " numerous friends and connections among the 
 aristocratic portion of society " ; but, as she says, 
 ' the aversion at this early period of his life to 
 everything tinctured with aristocratic tastes and 
 forms of opinion which animated G. G.'s mind 
 obliged his wife to relinquish her intercourse 
 with almost all families of rank and position 
 rather than displease her (somewhat intolerant) 
 partner." Another drawback was again to 
 quote her own words that " the elder Mr. Grote 
 bore very little share in the labours of the banking 
 house during these ten years, but appropriated the 
 greater portion of the profits." 
 
 E
 
 50 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 Mrs. Grote gives an animated narrative, which 
 will not bear abridgement, of her husband's public 
 life, with its strenuous labours and many dis- 
 appointments, and of the tranquil and industrious 
 later years, which were consecrated to scholarship 
 and philosophy. It is full of vivid sketches of men 
 and events, with not a few of those living touches 
 which light up the past for us as, for example, 
 when she records that in 1837 Lord William 
 Bentinck, the famous Governor- General of India, 
 calling on her after a dinner-party, said : " I 
 thought your American very pleasant company, 
 and it was a surprise to me, for I never in my 
 life before met an American in society." It 
 would seem that the world gets rounder as the 
 years roll on. In 1855 the twelfth and last 
 volume of the great History was published, and 
 Mrs. Grote determined to signalise the event. 
 " I had," she says, " a bowl of punch brewed 
 at Christmas for our little household at History 
 Hut (Grote's workshop) in celebration of the 
 completion of the opus magnum, Grote himself 
 sipping the delicious mixture with great satis- 
 faction, while manifesting little emotion out- 
 wardly." 
 
 This homely scene calls up, if only by way of 
 contrast, the accounts which still greater writers 
 than Grote have given of a like event in their lives. 
 The passage in Gibbon's Memoirs is deservedly 
 famous, but it will bear requoting : "It was
 
 BIOGRAPHY 51 
 
 on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 
 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, 
 that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a 
 summer-house in my garden. After laying down 
 my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or 
 covered walk of acacias, which commands a 
 prospect of the country, the lake, and the 
 mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was 
 serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected 
 from the waters, and all nature was silent. I 
 will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on 
 the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the 
 establishment of my fame. But my pride was 
 soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was 
 spread over my mind, by the idea that I had 
 taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable 
 companion, and that whatsoever might be the 
 future fate of my History, the life of the historian 
 must be short and precarious." Dr. Birkbeck 
 Hill, in his excellent edition of Gibbon's Life, 
 reminds us in this context of Carlyle's description, 
 in a letter to Emerson, of the completion of his 
 French Revolution : " You, I hope, can have 
 little conception of* the feeling with which I 
 wrote the last word of it, one night in early 
 January, when the clock was striking ten, and 
 our frugal Scotch supper coming in. I did not 
 cry ; I did not pray ; but could have done both." 
 Grote sipping his punch, Carlyle sitting down 
 to his oatmeal, Gibbon pacing the acacia walk,
 
 52 BIOGRAPHY n 
 
 each having finished a task which had added a 
 masterpiece to literature these are figures which 
 deserve to live in the memory. 
 
 In truth, the picture which we carry about 
 with us of some of the most illustrious men is 
 created, not so much by the rounded and measured 
 story of their lives, as by a single act or incident 
 or sentence which stands out from the pages, 
 whether of the best or of the most inadequate 
 biography. I think it is Boswell who quotes 
 Plutarch to the effect that it is very often " an 
 action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, 
 shall distinguish a person's real character more 
 than the greatest signs or the most important 
 battles." It is so with Bentley, who lives by 
 virtue of a single saying, to many who know 
 little or nothing of the letters of Phalaris or the 
 history of Trinity College. " It was said to old 
 Bentley " I am quoting from The Tour to the 
 Hebrides " upon the attacks against him 
 ' Why, they'll write you down.' c No, sir,' he 
 replied, 4 depend upon it, no man was ever 
 written down but by himself.' : Or take the 
 notable answer of Bolingbroke, when it was 
 suggested to him that he should make some 
 rejoinder to the virulent assaults of Bishop 
 Warburton : "I never wrestle with a chimney 
 sweeper." Or, again (you will forgive for a 
 moment, and not be unduly shocked by a bit 
 of bad language), when on the field of Waterloo,
 
 n BIOGRAPHY 53 
 
 Lord Uxbridge, riding by the side of the Duke 
 of Wellington, lost his leg, the cannon shot which 
 struck him having passed first over the withers 
 of the Duke's charger, " Copenhagen " : " By 
 God, I've lost my leg," cried Uxbridge. " Have 
 you, by God ? " was all the Duke's reply. You 
 all remember the page in Lockhart which describes 
 how, on the occasion of George IV.'s visit to this 
 city, Sir Walter Scott, having claimed for his own 
 the glass in which the King had just drunk his 
 health, and reverently placed it in his pocket, 
 found on his return home that Crabbe had arrived 
 as his guest, and in his joy and excitement at 
 greeting the poet, sat down upon the royal 
 present, and crushed it into fragments. Could 
 anything be more characteristic of the man ? 
 Or to take one other illustration from the 
 memories of this place what can be at once more 
 illuminating and more pathetic than the last 
 words of Dr. Adam, the head of the High 
 School, who had numbered Scott himself, and 
 Brougham, and Jeffrey among his pupils : 
 : ' But it grows dark. Boys, you may go." It 
 is by seizing on incidents like these, small 
 in themselves, but revealing as with a sudden 
 flash the heights and depths of character, that 
 biography brings back to life the illustrious 
 dead. 
 
 Let me give you an Oriental apologue, which 
 is not beside the point. " I forbid you," said the
 
 54 BIOGRAPHY n 
 
 tyrannical Emperor to the Chief of the Tribunal 
 of History, " to speak a word more of me." The 
 Mandarin began to write. " What are you doing 
 now ? " asked the Emperor. " I am writing 
 down the order your Majesty has just given me." 
 The Mandarin was a born biographer. 
 
 But I feel that I am becoming garrulous, and 
 that it is time to bring to a close this desultory 
 and far from philosophical discourse. Much has 
 been left unsaid. Upon one vexed question in 
 the ethics of biography, which was debated with 
 much vehemence a few years ago, first over 
 Mr. Froude's Memoirs of Carlyle, and then over 
 Mr. PurcelFs Life of Cardinal Manning, I will 
 only remind you of Voltaire's saying : " We owe 
 consideration to the living ; to the dead we owe 
 truth only." The abiding interest of biography 
 for each of us depends after all upon our estimate 
 of the worth and reality of human life. Byron 
 in one of his early letters I quote from the new 
 edition by which Mr. Prothero has laid all lovers 
 of literature under a heavy debt expresses in 
 his characteristic way the cynical view : " When 
 one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegeta- 
 tion), sleep, eating, and swilling, buttoning, and 
 unbuttoning how much remains of downright 
 existence ? The summer of a dormouse." If so, 
 the less said about it, the sooner it is forgotten, 
 the better. But, in truth, it is because we all 
 feel that life is to us the most serious of realities
 
 n BIOGRAPHY 55 
 
 that we crave to know more of the lives of others. 
 As Emerson says : " The essentials in it youth 
 and love, grief and action we all share ; the 
 difference of circumstance is only costume." 
 And thus the reading of biography becomes 
 something more than a form of literary recrea- 
 tion. True, it furnishes the memory with a por- 
 trait gallery of interesting faces. True, it makes 
 history and philosophy and poetry vivid with the 
 personalities of the men to whom we owe great 
 causes, great systems, great thoughts. But it 
 does more than this. It brings comfort, it 
 enlarges sympathy, it expels selfishness, it 
 quickens aspiration. " I console myself," says 
 Emerson again, " in the poverty of my thoughts, 
 in the paucity of great men, in the malignity and 
 dulness of the nations, by falling back on these 
 recollections, and seeing what the prolific soul 
 could beget on actual nature. Then I dare ; I 
 also will essay to be." And if at times we are 
 tempted, as who is not ? to doubt the ultimate 
 purpose and meaning of human existence, when 
 we think of the millions of lives which deserve 
 no record lives " which came to nothing," lives 
 full of " deeds as well undone " 1 we must take 
 refuge in the faith to which, in lines that ought 
 not to die, Edward FitzGerald has given noble 
 and moving expression : 
 
 1 R. Browning, " A Toccata of Galuppi."
 
 56 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 For like a child, sent with a fluttering light, 
 
 To feel his way along a gusty night, 
 
 Man walks the world : again, and yet again, 
 
 The lamp shall be by fits of passion slain ; 
 
 But shall not He who sent him from the door 
 
 Relight the lamp once more, and yet once more ? l 
 
 1 Attar's " Bird Parliament."
 
 Ill 
 
 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES AND THE 
 MODERN WORLD 
 
 67
 
 Ill 
 
 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES AND THE 
 MODERN WORLD 1 
 
 MY first duty to-day, and it is a most agreeable 
 one, is to express my heartfelt gratitude to the 
 students for the honour which they have done me 
 in choosing me as their Rector. I can conceive 
 of no man's ambition which ought not to be 
 more than satisfied with the affirmation, by such 
 a constituency, of his title to hold an office which 
 has been filled in the past (I omit the names of 
 those who are still alive) by such men as Burke 
 and Macaulay, Palmerston and Peel, Disraeli 
 and Gladstone. If I can make no claim as I 
 certainly cannot and do not to bend the bow 
 which has felt the touch of these giants of the 
 heroic age, I have special grounds for addressing 
 an appeal, which they did not need, to your kind 
 and indulgent consideration. Though an English- 
 man by birth and blood, I have now for more 
 than twenty years been a Scotsman by adoption. 
 
 1 Rectorial Address delivered before the University of Glas- 
 gow, January 11, 1907. 
 
 69
 
 60 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES 
 
 Whatever opportunities I have had of serving 
 the public, I owe first and foremost to the favour 
 and confidence of the men of Fife ; and only in 
 a less direct degree, to a great College at Oxford, 
 which is a purely Scottish foundation, and which, 
 as the illustrious names, among many others, of 
 Adam Smith and William Hamilton attest, has 
 for many generations been intimately allied with 
 the University of Glasgow. 
 
 Oxford and Glasgow there are hardly two 
 cities in the world which in their history, their 
 environment, all the conditions of their daily life, 
 would appear to be more remote and less akin. 
 The one still seems as a gifted son of hers has 
 said to breathe from her towers and gardens 
 the last enchantments of the middle ages ; the 
 other, in her manifold municipal and industrial 
 activities, is, perhaps, the most typical embodi- 
 ment in the whole Empire of the spirit of modern 
 progress. But in the things of which I propose 
 to speak to you, there is between them, as I hope 
 to show, by virtue of their Universities, a real 
 intellectual and spiritual relationship. 
 
 My purpose is to consider what is the true 
 service which in these days an ancient university 
 can render to the modern world. 
 
 We start with the fact that our Universities, 
 both English and Scottish, unlike most of our 
 educational appliances, have not been brought 
 into existence to supply modern needs, but are
 
 m AND THE MODERN WORLD 61 
 
 rooted in the past. There has been not a little 
 controversy as to their historical origin. As I 
 have had occasion to point out before, it is more 
 than possible that the academic existence of 
 Oxford and Cambridge was due in each case to 
 a quarrel between Church and State. If it had 
 not been for the controversy between Henry II. 
 and Becket, and the consequent expulsion or 
 recall of the large contingent of English students 
 from Paris, Oxford might never have obtained 
 the dignity of a Studium Generate. A little later, 
 the strained relations between King John and 
 the Pope seem to have been the cause which led 
 a colony of fugitives from Oxford to find a new 
 intellectual home in Cambridge. Here in Glasgow 
 we date our beginnings from the famous Bull of 
 the first of the ecclesiastical humanists, Pope 
 Nicolas V., issued on the very eve of the fall of 
 Constantinople, which may roughly be said to 
 have ushered in what we call the Renaissance. 
 But here, too, the real history of the University 
 does not begin until Church and State fall out ; 
 for it led a starved and struggling existence, 
 until the suppression of the convents of the 
 Mendicants in Reformation times provided it 
 with the bare necessaries of life. 
 
 The mediaeval Universities had two charac- 
 teristics which are to this day articuli stantis aut 
 cadentis Academiae. In the first place, they were 
 always in theory, and almost always in practice,
 
 62 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES 
 
 cosmopolitan. There were no barriers of birth 
 or class or fortune. The door was open to all. 
 Just as the Church was one and indivisible, 
 speaking one language, holding one creed, observ- 
 ing the same rites throughout Western Europe, 
 so, in the community of students and scholars, 
 there was a oneness of purpose and a comradeship 
 of speech and habit which transcended, though it 
 did not obliterate, racial and geographical distinc- 
 tions. The Scottish students, long before any 
 University had been planted in their own soil, 
 swarmed over Europe. They were to be found 
 in Paris, where they had a separate college ; in 
 Padua, where they had a Nation to themselves ; 
 and in almost all the academic towns of France, 
 Northern Germany, and of the Low Countries. 
 Scholars flocked to Oxford in the days of William 
 of Ockham and Roger Bacon from every part of 
 the Western World. The University of Bologna, 
 at the time when it held the first place among 
 the schools of Civil and Canon Law, is said to 
 have had no less than 20,000 students from 
 different countries. The Scottish Universities, 
 national as in a peculiar sense they have always 
 been, have in their turn exercised the same 
 hospitality, and have found room for outsiders 
 to whom Providence has denied the privilege of 
 being born on Scottish soil. When Adam Smith 
 lectured here in the middle of the eighteenth 
 century, quite a third of his class were Irish
 
 in AND THE MODERN WORLD 63 
 
 dissenters, shut out by religious tests from their 
 own Trinity College, and his fame attracted 
 students not only from England, but from 
 Geneva, and even from Russia. A less liberal 
 policy prevailed in those days, not only in Dublin, 
 but in Oxford and Cambridge, whose splendid 
 endowments and great traditions were in danger 
 of becoming though they never in fact became 
 the exclusive property of a limited class. 
 Cuncti adsint is the invitation addressed now, 
 as always, to the world of students by every 
 University that is worthy of the name. 
 
 But, further, the true University has always 
 been not only cosmopolitan in its composition, 
 but catholic in its range. A University such as 
 yours never was, is not, and never ought to 
 become, a technological institute for the crea- 
 tion and equipment of specialists. The modern 
 student may smile at the scanty proportions of 
 the mediaeval trivium and quadrivium. He may 
 be tempted to scoff at the pettiness and futility of 
 many of the problems upon which in those days 
 Angelic and Invincible Doctors broke their teeth. 
 The Latin of the Schoolmen is no doubt an 
 uncouth jargon which smacks more of the Vulgate 
 and the Corpus Juris than of Cicero or Livy. 
 Their dialectics are monotonous and infertile, not 
 because of any defect in their reasoning powers, 
 or indeed in their logical apparatus, but because 
 they were hedged in, both by authority and by
 
 64 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES 
 
 ignorance, within the narrow boundaries of a 
 single field. But whatever, within its confines, 
 was knowable, they knew. It was said of 
 Abelard, the forerunner of them all : Illi patuit 
 quicquid scibile erat. The limits of the knowable 
 wherever they are to be placed have in these 
 days expanded so far that no ambition and no 
 assiduity is equal to the task of taking all that 
 lies within them for its province. Nothing can 
 be more alien from the business of a University 
 than to produce the shallow and fluent omni- 
 science which has scratched the surface of many 
 subjects, and got to the heart of none. But the 
 fidelity of a University to the intellectual side 
 of its mission must now, as always, be judged by 
 the degree in which it has succeeded in enlarging 
 and humanising the mental outlook of its students, 
 and developing the love of knowledge for its 
 own sake. 
 
 Such an ideal, I need hardly say, does not 
 imply a divorce of knowledge from practice. Let 
 me recall to your recollection a well-known and 
 instructive incident in the history of this Uni- 
 versity. When James Watt in 1756 came back 
 to Glasgow from London, the Corporation of 
 Hammermen refused him permission to set up 
 his business in the burgh, because he was neither 
 son of a burgess nor an apprentice. The Faculty 
 of Professors, of whom Adam Smith was one, 
 at once appointed him mathematical instrument
 
 AND THE MODERN WORLD 65 
 
 maker to the University, and gave him a room, 
 as they had power to do, in the College buildings 
 for his workshop. It was in this workshop a 
 favourite resort of Adam Smith and while 
 engaged on the repair of a model of a Newcomen 
 engine belonging to the University, that Watt 
 evolved the idea of the separate condenser. It is 
 often out of the mouths of Professors, and at the 
 hands of Universities, that the practical man 
 learns for the first time the real meaning and the 
 latent possibilities of his own business. States- 
 men and financiers and industrialists have never 
 received two more magnificent presents than the 
 Wealth of Nations and the Steam Engine : and 
 both came to them from within the walls of 
 Glasgow College. 
 
 We may fairly remember such facts as these 
 when the term " academic " is used, as it often is 
 nowadays, as a label of reproach to designate 
 a proposition or an argument which is otiose or 
 fanciful of which, at any rate, the practical man 
 takes no account. I believe this to be an inde- 
 fensible perversion of language. As Hazlitt says : 
 " By an obvious transposition of ideas some 
 persons have confounded a knowledge of useful 
 things with useful knowledge." There is no 
 fallacy which, in all its forms, a University is 
 more bound by the very nature and object of 
 its being to combat and expose. 
 
 I spoke a moment ago of the intellectual 
 
 p
 
 66 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES 
 
 stamp which a University ought to leave on 
 those whom it teaches. But that after all is not 
 the supreme or ultimate test of its work. In 
 the long run, it will be judged not merely or 
 mainly by its success in equipping its pupils to 
 outstrip their competitors in the crafts and pro- 
 fessions. It will not be fully judged even by the 
 excellence of its mental gymnastic, or its con- 
 tributions to scholarship and science. It will be 
 judged also by the influence which it is exerting 
 upon the imagination and the character ; by the 
 ideals which it has implanted and nourished ; 
 by the new resources of faith, tenacity, aspiration, 
 with which it has recruited and reinforced the 
 untrained and undeveloped nature ; by the 
 degree in which it has helped to raise, to enlarge, 
 to enrich, to complete, the true life of the man, 
 and by and through him, the corporate life of the 
 community. 
 
 I shall not, therefore, be travelling beyond my 
 province to-day, if I endeavour to illustrate by 
 one or two examples the truth of a seeming 
 paradox : the essential utility, nay, the indis- 
 pensable necessity, from this wider point of view, 
 of some of those forms of knowledge which the 
 man of affairs is apt to discard as useless or 
 superfluous, but which it is the prerogative duty 
 of a University to keep alive. 
 
 Take, first of all, those literary studies to 
 which a large part of the time and energy of this
 
 m AND THE MODERN WORLD 67 
 
 and of other Universities continues to be given. 
 Nothing is easier than to belittle or disparage 
 their practical value. Nor will any one who is 
 acquainted, for instance, with the history of 
 scholarship deny that many of the hours and 
 days, and even years, which were devoted by 
 men of the type of Browning's Grammarian to 
 settling and unsettling and resettling the most 
 trivial minutiae, might have been almost as 
 profitably given to astrology or heraldry. " The 
 first distemper of learning," says Bacon in a 
 famous passage, " is when men study words and 
 not matter." He compares this " vanity " to 
 " Pygmalion's frenzy," and cites the leading case 
 of Erasmus. " Then did Erasmus take occasion 
 to make the scoffing echo : Decem annos con- 
 sumpsi in legendo Cicerone, and the echo answered 
 in Greek o^e, asine." 1 The revival of learning in 
 Western Europe in the fifteenth century supplies 
 one of the best illustrations of this kind of 
 intellectual demoralisation. Neglect and con- 
 tempt of literary form had reached their lowest 
 depth in the style of the later Schoolmen and 
 their pupils. It is humiliating to an Oxford man 
 to remember that, even in those bad days, the 
 Oxoniensis loquendi mos seems to have been a 
 byword for its slovenly incorrectness. Never 
 was transformation more rapid and complete. 
 Under the influence of the new passion for the 
 1 Advancement of Learning, Book I.
 
 68 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES m 
 
 ancient models, the study of words and style 
 became for the time a religion. The Humanists 
 were " intoxicated with the exuberance " of their 
 new " verbosity." But it was a passing disease, 
 and when it subsided the English of Cranmer, 
 the German of Luther, the Italian of Dante and 
 Petrarch and Boccaccio, had taken root, side by 
 side with the classical languages, each to become 
 the living source of a fresh and splendid progeny. 
 
 I will not enter upon the technical and singu- 
 larly barren controversy as to whether literature 
 or science affords the better training for the 
 reasoning powers. There are some intelligences 
 which no discipline can convert into accurately 
 working instruments. And those which possess 
 the capacity for being so developed vary as 
 greatly in their structure and tendencies, and are 
 therefore as little suited to a uniform regimen, 
 as men's bodies and characters. No one will 
 pretend that they ought all to be treated by the 
 same method, unless he is either a quack, or 
 possessed by that undiscriminating passion for 
 symmetry, which used to make the Minister for 
 Education in a neighbouring country reflect with 
 complacency that, at a particular minute of a 
 particular hour in the day, every schoolboy in 
 every school in France was being confronted with 
 the same fact in Roman History. 
 
 Nor shall I dwell, as an apologist for literary 
 studies from the utilitarian point of view would
 
 AND THE MODERN WORLD 69 
 
 be well justified in dwelling, on the obvious 
 services which they render to the development 
 of the memory, the taste, and the faculty of 
 expression. The claim I make for them covers 
 much wider ground. The man who has studied 
 literature, and particularly the literature of the 
 Ancient world, as a student should, and as only 
 a student can I am not speaking of those to 
 whom it has been merely a distraction or a 
 pastime such a man possesses resources which, 
 if he is wise, he would not barter for a king's 
 ransom. He finds among men of like training 
 with himself a bond of fellowship, a freemasonry 
 of spirit and understanding, which softens the 
 asperities and survives the conflicts of profes- 
 sional or political rivalry. He need never be 
 alone, for he can, whenever he pleases, invoke 
 the companionship of the thinkers and the poets. 
 He is always annexing new intellectual and 
 spiritual territory, with an infinitude of fresh 
 possibilities, without slackening his hold upon 
 or losing his zest for the old. There is hardly a 
 sight or a sound in nature, a passion or emotion 
 or purpose in man, a phase of conduct, an achieve- 
 ment of thought, a situation in life tragic or 
 comic, pathetic or ironical which is not illumin- 
 ated for him by association with the imperishable 
 words of those who have interpreted, with the 
 vision and in the language of genius, the meaning 
 of the world.
 
 70 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES 
 
 Let me take another illustration from another 
 branch of humane learning, which again, from the 
 merely material point of view, may not seem to 
 possess the quality of utility. I mean the study 
 the serious and scientific study of History. 
 Here, perhaps even more than elsewhere, both 
 teacher and student are peculiarly exposed to 
 the risks of specialism, and of the morbid excesses 
 to which specialism leads pedantry, want of per- 
 spective, over-emphasis of the unimportant, the 
 passionate pursuit of small game which is not 
 worth the efforts of the chase. . There is, for 
 instance, no better -attested fact in the history 
 of the world and few which are of less real 
 moment than that at some time, in or between 
 the years 129 and 135 A.D., the Emperor Hadrian 
 dedicated the Temple which, seven centuries after 
 it was begun, he had brought to completion the 
 Olympieion at Athens. But a learned German 
 writer has computed that there are no less than 
 130 different theories as to the precise date of 
 the ceremony. The mind of the historical student 
 is, indeed, in more danger than that of any other 
 scholar of becoming a kind of Pantechnicon, in 
 which every sort of furniture is heaped and packed 
 together, instead of being a habitable home, where 
 things useful and beautiful are arranged in their 
 proper places, and in due relation to their special 
 purposes. 
 
 But, if this peril is avoided, where can a man
 
 in AND THE MODERN WORLD 71 
 
 find better nutriment, both for his intellectual and 
 his moral judgment, than in watching the un- 
 folding of the purposes of Providence in the long 
 procession of men and events ? " Philosophy 
 teaching by example," it has been called, and 
 there is not an age nor a movement which has 
 not a message of its own. Look for example at 
 the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, of whom I 
 spoke just now. In not a few of its aspects it 
 has as good a title to be called the Golden Age 
 as any era in history. It is certainly one of the 
 times, if a man could select, say, half-a-dozen 
 since the days of the Flood, in which he would 
 be tempted to wish that he could have lived. 
 It was an epoch of profound peace. Hadrian 
 deliberately abandoned the uncertain conquests 
 of his great predecessor Trajan, made no attempt 
 to extend the boundaries of the Empire, and 
 concentrated his whole efforts upon the task of 
 bringing security, order, and the blessings of 
 good administration, to the ninety millions of 
 people over whom he reigned. In Pliny's fine 
 phrase l the immensa Romanae pads majestas 
 covered the world, and gave it rest. Vast tracts 
 of territory, Asia Minor, Syria, and a large part 
 of North Africa, have never since enjoyed such 
 happiness. Never at any time, before or since, 
 has the area of civilisation been endowed with 
 such a widely diffused wealth of works of art. 
 
 1 Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxvii. 1.
 
 72 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES 
 
 Not to speak of Rome itself, Athens, Ephesus, 
 Antioch, Smyrna, Carthage, Rhodes, Alexandria 
 contained, each of them, treasures of architecture 
 and statuary in a variety and abundance for 
 which the whole world might now be ransacked 
 in vain. The Museum of Alexandria the earliest 
 in date among Universities, and behind none of 
 its successors in the magnificence of its endow- 
 ments and the splendour of its traditions was at 
 the height of its activity and fame. Schools of 
 learning were to be found in every part of the 
 Empire. Hadrian himself the most indefatig- 
 able of builders established in the capital, which 
 already contained more libraries and books than 
 any other city, the Athenaeum which became the 
 University of Rome. 
 
 The means of communication throughout prac- 
 tically the whole distance from the Solway to the 
 Euphrates, were more perfect, and more freely 
 and securely used, than at any subsequent time, 
 until steam was applied to locomotion. No one 
 put them more frequently or more severely to the 
 test than Hadrian a Reisekaiser, if ever there 
 was one the most restless, curious, and untiring 
 of travellers. I have read somewhere that Sir 
 Robert Peel, when, in the winter of 1834, he was 
 summoned home from Italy by the King to form 
 a Ministry, took exactly the same time in posting 
 from Rome to London as the Emperor Hadrian 
 had occupied in making the same journey seven-
 
 AND THE MODERN WORLD 73 
 
 teen hundred years before. " The acta diurna," 
 says Professor Dill, " with official news and bits of 
 scandal and gossip regularly arrived in distant 
 provincial towns, and frontier camps. The last 
 speech of Pliny, or the freshest epigram of 
 Martial, were within a short time selling on the 
 book-stalls of Lyons or Vienne." x The last of 
 the considerable names in Latin literature belong 
 to Hadrian's time : Juvenal, Suetonius, Martial, 
 Statius, and (if he in fact survived Trajan) one 
 greater than any of these Tacitus. 
 
 And to turn from the world which he governed 
 to the Emperor himself, we have in Hadrian, 
 if one of the most inscrutable, certainly one of 
 the most attractive and interesting figures in 
 history. It may be doubted whether any ruler, 
 possessing absolute and irresponsible power, ever 
 devoted himself with more absorbing assiduity 
 to the work of good government. To that work 
 he brought great natural powers, a constructive 
 and, at the same time, a rarely cultivated in- 
 telligence, an intense interest in literature and 
 art, a genuine hatred of war and of all forms 
 of cruelty and oppression, a singularly humane 
 and tolerant temper, absolute freedom from 
 
 1 Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, by Samuel Dill, 
 London, 1904, p. 205 : a masterpiece, if I may venture to say so, 
 of scholarship, philosophic insight, and literary charm. Cf. The 
 Emperor Hadrian, by F. Gregorovius, Eng. trans., London, 1898. 
 and The Silver Age of the Greek World, by J. P. Mahaffy, Chicago 
 and London, 1906.
 
 74 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES m 
 
 ostentation or arrogance, an insatiable passion 
 for administrative reform. If there was, at the 
 same time, in his character a tincture of vanity 
 and of sensuality, a certain dilettantism in his 
 tastes, and, on the speculative side, an incon- 
 gruous and baffling blend of scepticism and 
 superstition, this is only to say that he did not, 
 and could not, transcend the conditions of his 
 age. Nothing can be more striking than the 
 contrast between his eager, full-blooded love of 
 the world and all its interests his buoyant joie 
 de vivre and the pessimism, the introspective 
 questionings, the unsatisfied yearnings, the un- 
 sleeping self-discipline, of the still greater man who 
 twenty years after his death succeeded to his office. 
 Hadrian is, in a sense, the Last of the Pagans. 
 Marcus Aurelius, among the occupants of thrones, 
 may fairly be called the First of the Saints. 
 
 And yet across this brilliant age were written, 
 as we now know, the letters of doom. " Death 
 is the lot of States just as it is of men," is a 
 saying of the great satirist of the next generation. 1 
 Tacitus says of Nerva, that he was believed to 
 have reconciled two hitherto incompatible things 
 despotism and liberty. 2 But that was a task 
 beyond the power even of a Hadrian. Of 
 political freedom not a vestige remained in Rome 
 itself, though the Emperor continued to show a 
 
 yap xa.1 7r6Xeu faairfp avOpwiroi (Lucian, ChdTOn, 23). 
 
 * ... res olim dissociabiles miscuerit principatum ac liber- 
 tatem (Tac. Agricola, c. 3).
 
 m AND THE MODERN WORLD 75 
 
 conventional deference to the formal authority 
 of the Senate. The free local life, which had 
 lingered on in the provinces, was already on the 
 wane, and its end was hastened by Hadrian's 
 own organisation of a great Imperial service. 
 And what of personal freedom ? Manumission 
 had become a fashionable form of philanthropy ; 
 the prolonged peace stopped the supply of captives 
 who could be sold into servitude ; but it is com- 
 puted by some authorities that still something like 
 a third of the population of the Roman Empire 
 were slaves. Society thus rested upon a founda- 
 tion which was economically and ethically rotten. 
 What, again, can be more significant of the 
 moral and religious atmosphere of the age than 
 the almost universal acquiescence in the deifica- 
 tion of Antinous, whose statues were to be found, 
 and whose worship was practised, in all the chief 
 cities of the Empire ? It was in vain that the 
 great teachers, the stoic Epictetus, the eclectic 
 Plutarch, preached, in terms which might often 
 have been borrowed from the New Testament, of 
 righteousness and self-suppression and even of 
 judgment. They spoke to a generation which, 
 in the midst of profound external order and 
 tranquillity, of peace, of material comfort, of 
 artistic refinement, was on the verge of spiritual 
 bankruptcy. Over the whole scene, with all 
 its brilliant superficial colouring, as Professor 
 Dill says, there " broods a shadow . . . the
 
 76 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES 
 
 swiftly stealing shadow of that mysterious eclipse, 
 which was to rest on intellect and literature till 
 the end of the Western Empire. It is the 
 burden of all religious philosophy from Seneca 
 to Epictetus, which was one long warning against 
 the perils of a materialised civilisation." 1 
 
 The woods decay, the woods decay and fall. 2 
 
 I have taken but one page out of a thousand 
 in the book of history which might be cited to 
 teach the same lesson. For the study of history 
 brings us to the same conclusion as that of 
 literature : that man does not, and cannot, live 
 by bread alone. 
 
 Finally, I will ask you, in the few moments 
 that remain, to take one further step with me. 
 Literature, the expression of man's feelings and 
 thoughts, his beliefs and hopes ; History, the 
 record of his achievements and his failures ; 
 Science, the ever-growing sum of his attempts 
 to know, by hypothesis and experiment, the 
 external conditions which determine his sensa- 
 tions and circumscribe his activity each of these 
 seemingly isolated efforts of the human intelli- 
 gence proceeds upon presuppositions which are 
 common to them all. But no student has got 
 the full benefit of University teaching unless he 
 has been led on to examine the presuppositions 
 themselves. We say of propositions that one is 
 
 1 Dill, op. cit. pp. 249-50. * Tennyson, Tithonus.
 
 m AND THE MODERN WORLD 77 
 
 true and another is false ; and the tests which 
 we are accustomed to employ as the criteria of 
 truth conformity to some external standard, 
 self -consistency, adequacy as explanation, con- 
 gruity with the rest of our experience vary 
 according to the subject matter with which the 
 proposition deals. But upon what does the 
 validity of any intellectual judgment finally 
 rest ? So, again, we say of an act that it is 
 right or wrong, and there is general consensus 
 as to the practical application of the terms. But 
 whence is the authority of the moral imperative 
 derived ? And then there emerges, equally insist- 
 ent, the larger and deeper question still : whether, 
 in the flux of phenomena, there is discoverable by, 
 or revealed to, man any ultimate basis of Reality ? 
 
 These things may not, and do not, trouble the 
 man in the street, but they have supreme interest 
 and urgency for those who take thought seriously. 
 Nowhere do we stand in greater need of courage 
 and honesty : courage, not to shirk problems, by 
 trying to believe that they do not exist ; honesty, 
 in facing solutions, whatever may be their conse- 
 quences. You cannot get rid of the debt which 
 you owe to yourself and the world as a sentient 
 and self-conscious personality a " being of large 
 discourse, looking before and after " by a simple 
 declaration of insolvency. 
 
 We have all known men of lofty courage and 
 inflexible honesty who, in the pursuit of these
 
 78 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES 
 
 inquiries, have been driven to the conclusion that 
 the highest categories of experience are illusions ; 
 that the boundaries ' of the knowable are drawn 
 just where the human spirit craves for more 
 and fuller light ; that beliefs which cannot be 
 measured by some material calculus must be 
 dismissed as superstitions ; except, perhaps, the 
 sunless creed which 
 
 . . . thanks with brief thanksgiving 
 
 Whatever gods may be 
 That no life lives for ever, 
 That dead men rise up never ; 
 That even the weariest river 
 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea. 1 
 
 But it is not in that direction that the best 
 philosophic teaching of our age is tending. The 
 enormous material development of the last thirty 
 years has been accompanied, in the sphere of 
 thought, especially among the English-speaking 
 peoples, by a growing revolt against the ascend- 
 ency of intellectual and spiritual Nihilism. Thirty 
 years and more ago, when I was at Balliol, my 
 own great teacher, Thomas Hill Green clarum et 
 venerabile nomen and his friend and fellow- 
 worker, Edward Caird, whom Glasgow has since 
 sent to the Mastership of my old College, were 
 almost solitary voices in the opposite sense. But 
 the Time Spirit was working with them, and the 
 living thought of to-day declares, with an ever- 
 
 1 Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine.
 
 AND THE MODERN WORLD 79 
 
 swelling emphasis, that there is a solid and 
 unshakable basis, in the very nature and condi- 
 tions of our experience, alike for knowledge, for 
 conduct, and for worship. ' 
 
 What then is the sum of the whole matter ? 
 For the moment you here can concentrate your- 
 selves on the things of the mind, installed as you 
 are in the citadel of knowledge. 
 
 Vfov veoi KparfiTf, Ka.1 SoKfire Srj 
 vaiciv OLTrev&ri Trepya//. 1 
 
 But after these student years are over, the 
 lives of most of us are doomed to be immersed 
 in matter. If the best gift which our University 
 can give us is not to be slowly stifled, we must 
 see to it that we keep the windows of the mind, 
 and of the soul also, open to the light and the 
 air. We must take with us into the dust and 
 tumult, the ambitions and cares, the homely joys 
 and sorrows, which will make up the texture of 
 our days and years, an inextinguishable sense of 
 the things which are unseen, the things which 
 give dignity to service, inspiration to work, 
 purpose to suffering, a value, immeasurable and 
 eternal, to the humblest of human lives. 
 
 Provided we live in this temper and spirit, it 
 matters comparatively little whether we take a 
 high or low view of what men's efforts can 
 actually achieve. There is a noble optimism 
 which, in spite of all disappointments and mis- 
 
 1 Aeschylus, Prom. 954-55.
 
 80 ANCIENT UNIVERSITIES m 
 
 givings, holds fast to the faith in what man can 
 do for man. There is also a noble pessimism, 
 which turns in relief from the apparent futility of 
 all such labour to a keener study and a fuller 
 understanding of the works of God. I cannot 
 better illustrate the difference, or more fitly finish 
 what I have to say to you to-day, than by setting 
 side by side two of the greatest utterances of two 
 of our greatest writers the prayer of a soiled 
 and worldly statesman, who was yet a monarch of 
 thought, and the aspiration of an unsoiled and 
 unworldly dweller in untrodden ways, who was 
 yet supreme in spiritual insight among poets. 
 The prayer is that of Bacon, on the threshold of 
 his Instauratio Magna : " Tu postquam con- 
 versus es ad spectandum opera quae fecerunt 
 manus tuae, vidisti quod omnia essent bona 
 valde ; et requievisti. At homo, conversus ad 
 opera quae fecerunt manus suae, vidit quod 
 omnia essent vanitas et vexatio spiritus ; nee 
 ullo modo requievit. Quare si in operibus tuis 
 sudabimus, facies nos visionis tuae et sabbati tui 
 participes." * The aspiration is that of Words- 
 worth, in the last of his Sonnets on the River 
 Duddon : 
 
 Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide ; 
 The Form remains, the Function never dies ; 
 While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, 
 We, Men, who in our morn of youth defied 
 
 1 Instauratio Magna: Distributio Operis, ad fin.
 
 AND THE MODERN WORLD 81 
 
 The elements, must vanish ; be it so ! 
 
 Enough, if something from our hands have power 
 
 To live, and act, and serve the future hour ; 
 
 And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, 
 
 Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent 
 
 dower, 
 We feel that we are greater than we know. 1 
 
 1 The River Duddon, Sonnet XXXIV. " After-Thought." 
 
 G
 
 IV 
 
 CULTURE AND CHARACTER 
 
 83
 
 IV 
 
 
 
 CULTURE AND CHARACTER 1 
 
 MY first duty is to thank you most gratefully for 
 the honour which the students of this University 
 have done me in electing me to be their Rector, 
 and to express my sincere regret that the pressure 
 of other duties has delayed so long my visit to 
 Aberdeen. The office to which you have elected 
 me is associated with some of the most splendid 
 traditions in the history of learning. It goes 
 back to the time when the Church and the 
 Empire, in theory at any rate, exercised an 
 unchallenged supremacy over the spiritual and 
 temporal concerns of the Western World. Three 
 out of our four Scottish Universities are of Papal 
 foundation. Aberdeen, the youngest of the three, 
 owes its origin in 1494, as you all know, to a 
 Bull of Alexander VI., which may, I suppose, 
 be regarded as a redeeming act in the career of 
 one of the most infamous of the Popes. It was, 
 at any rate, the final gift of the Papacy to learning 
 and the humanities in this island. For of the 
 
 1 Rectorial Address delivered before the University of Aber- 
 deen, October 25, 1910. 
 
 86
 
 86 CULTURE AND CHARACTER 
 
 two great disruptive forces the Renaissance and 
 the Reformation which within the next half- 
 century undermined and overthrew the spiritual 
 and ecclesiastical unity of Europe, the one had 
 already begun its invasion of Great Britain, and 
 both in England and Scotland, by diverse routes, 
 the way was being prepared for the triumph 
 of the other. But in neither country ought we 
 to erase from the national memory the debt of 
 obligation which British learning owes to the 
 great Churchmen of the Middle Ages a debt 
 which, I am glad to know, we here in Aberdeen 
 are about to recognise by a fitting commemora- 
 tion of our real founder, Bishop Elphinstone. 
 
 When we look back to the way in which organ- 
 ised education has been developed in Western 
 Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, we 
 are struck by the fact that it apparently began 
 at the top of the scale with the more advanced 
 forms of teaching. In point of time, you have 
 first the Universities, then what we call in Eng- 
 land the public schools and the grammar schools, 
 and, finally, the parish school, which the whole 
 English-speaking world owes, in so large a degree, 
 to the insight and foresight of John Knox. We 
 must, however, not be misled into wrong infer- 
 ences, which may easily be drawn from a super- 
 ficial survey of the facts. The mediaeval Uni- 
 versity was never intended to be, and was not 
 in fact, an aristocratic or exclusive institution,
 
 iv CULTURE AND CHARACTER 87 
 
 which opened its doors and offered its teaching 
 only to the children of the well-to-do. As I 
 tried to show some years ago, when on a similar 
 occasion to this I was addressing your fellow- 
 students at Glasgow, the typical University of 
 the Middle Ages, whether at Paris, or Bologna, 
 or Oxford, was cosmopolitan in composition ; 
 to some extent at any rate as this institution 
 of the Rectorship proves democratic in govern- 
 ment, and recruited by students drawn from 
 all ranks and classes, but for the most part the 
 sons of low-born or needy parents. University 
 education was then except, of course, for the 
 few who pursue learning for learning's sake, and 
 who are, at all times, in every home of learning, 
 a minority of a minority the most accredited 
 qualification for admission to, and for the practice 
 of, certain indispensable and much - frequented 
 professions in particular, the Law, and the 
 higher branches of Medicine, and the Church. 
 
 As time went on, and the so-called ages of 
 Chivalry were submerged by the Renaissance, 
 what we now describe as culture, in the academic 
 sense, came to be looked on as the proper and 
 necessary accomplishment of a gentleman. It 
 is true (as Mr. Sidney Lee has pointed out in the 
 learned and interesting book, which he has just 
 published, on The French Renaissance in England) 
 that the process was slower in this island than 
 elsewhere. More, Colet, Linacre, and their
 
 88 CULTURE AND CHARACTER w 
 
 teacher and friend Erasmus, sowed the seed 
 which did not ripen for harvest until Elizabeth 
 had been more than twenty years on the throne. 
 But the illustrious Queen herself, according to 
 the unimpeachable testimony of the younger 
 Scaliger, was better educated than all her con- 
 temporaries among the great of the earth, being 
 familiar with no less than five languages in 
 addition to her native tongue Latin and Greek. 
 French, German, and Italian. I hesitate to tres- 
 pass, even for a moment, upon thorny ground, 
 but with all the progress that female education 
 has made in the last three centuries, can it 
 produce a more conspicuous example of the 
 combination of culture and capacity ? 
 
 Culture, as I have said, came to be looked 
 upon, like good manners and good clothes, as 
 part of the social and personal equipment of the 
 well-born and well-to-do. It continued also, in 
 its more specialised forms, to be the recognised 
 avenue to eminence in the learned professions and 
 the Church. But the notion that education was 
 for the common man a part of his natural heritage, 
 a necessary condition of his civic usefulness, an 
 ingredient that could be safely mixed with the 
 drudgery of manual toil and the simple round of 
 homely pleasure except, indeed, to some extent 
 in Scotland such a notion would have been 
 everywhere dismissed as a dangerous paradox. 
 
 It is a little more than a hundred years since
 
 iv CULTURE AND CHARACTER 89 
 
 an eminent prelate of the Church of England 
 declared that all that the people of a country had 
 to do with its laws was to obey them. It was in 
 the same spirit, and from the same point of view, 
 that the mass of the population was expected 
 to leave letters to their betters. The growth 
 of enlightenment, a stimulated sense of social 
 community and corporate duty, and, it must be 
 added, the advent of democracy, have brought 
 about, without violence, and by general consent, 
 the most revolutionary of all the changes of our 
 time a national system of free and compulsory 
 teaching. The celebrated sarcasm of Mr. Lowe, 
 that we must begin to " educate our masters," 
 has been translated into practice ; and though 
 there are still plenty of ragged edges and ugly 
 gaps in the actual working of the machinery, 
 the ideal, at any rate, is universally accepted, 
 that no child shall start upon the work of life 
 unfurnished with the keys of learning, and that, 
 in the case of every child whom nature has gifted 
 with brains and ambition, the barriers of fortune 
 and circumstance shall no longer block its pro- 
 gress, at any stage of the way which leads to the 
 innermost courts of the palace of knowledge. 
 This is not an appropriate time or place to dis- 
 course, as I might otherwise be tempted to do, 
 on the lights and shadows of popular educa- 
 tion. It will be more to the purpose if I ask 
 your patience for a few desultory and discursive
 
 90 CULTURE AND CHARACTER 
 
 thoughts on some of the shortcomings and draw- 
 backs which seem in these days to threaten the aca- 
 demic pursuit of the higher forms of knowledge. 
 
 I would instance, first, the growing tendency 
 to Specialism, which has become a marked 
 feature of University work, both here and in 
 England, during the past fifty or sixty years. 
 It is much more common than it used to be for 
 a student to give exclusive, or almost exclusive, 
 devotion to one subject or group of subjects, 
 and to be content as regards the rest with the 
 bare minimum of academic requirement. The 
 change is, of course, largely due to the greater 
 thoroughness with which each subject is taught 
 and learnt ; to the enormous extension in the 
 area of the fields of research, which are still 
 called by the old names classics, mathematics, 
 science, philosophy ; to the higher standard, 
 both of information and of exactness, which has 
 naturally and legitimately been set up. All this 
 is to the good, in so far as it* tends to promote 
 erudition and accuracy at the expense of that 
 which is merely superficial and smart. But the 
 advantage is purchased at an excessive price if 
 it is gained by the sacrifice of width of range 
 and catholicity of interest. Pedantry is, on 
 the whole, more useful and less offensive than 
 Sciolism, but a University which is content to 
 perform the office of a factory of specialists is 
 losing sight of some of its highest functions.
 
 iv CULTURE AND CHARACTER 91 
 
 Nobody but an impostor can in these days 
 assume to take all knowledge for his province. 
 Such an encyclopaedic purpose as inspired Francis 
 Bacon, even he, perhaps the most gifted of our 
 race, if he could be reincarnated under modern 
 conditions, would recognise to be now beyond 
 the dreams of intellectual ambition. But the 
 man whom you turn out here as your finished 
 product at the end of his University course ought 
 to be, in Bacon's own phrase, a " full man." 
 Victor Hugo says somewhere, in his grandiose 
 and impressive way, that genius is a promontory 
 which stretches out into the Infinite. We cannot 
 lay down laws for genius ; that incommunicable 
 gift sets at nought both heredity and environ- 
 ment. But, genius apart, there is much to be 
 said for the old University ideal of the " all- 
 round " man not the superficial smatterer, who 
 knows something about everything and much 
 about nothing but one who has not sacrificed 
 to the pursuit of a single dominating interest 
 his breadth of outlook, the zest and range of his 
 intellectual curiosity, his eagerness to know and 
 to assimilate the best that has been and is being 
 thought and written and said about all the things 
 that either contribute to the knowledge or enrich 
 the life of man. 
 
 But, next, if a certain width of range is 
 essential to the reality of academic culture, it is 
 equally true that, in external form and expression,
 
 92 CULTURE AND CHARACTER 
 
 it is, or ought to be, marked by precision, aptitude, 
 harmony by the qualities, in a word, which 
 combine to make up what we call Style. In all 
 artistic production there are three factors the 
 subject, the form in which it is presented, and 
 the vehicle by which the presentation is effected. 
 In each of the separate arts painting, sculpture, 
 architecture, music the particular vehicle con- 
 trols and limits the choice of subject. But given 
 appropriate subject and apt vehicle and there 
 is nothing in which the insight of genius is better 
 tested than in the mating of the two it is the 
 formative capacity of the artist which deter- 
 mines the value of the product. That sounds 
 like a platitude when we are talking of the fine 
 arts ; but it is strange how careless of form 
 even highly educated people show themselves in 
 the commonplace everyday acts of speaking and 
 writing. A vast deal of the slipshod and prolix 
 stuff which we are compelled to read or to listen 
 to is, of course, born of sheer idleness. When, as 
 so often happens, a man takes an hour to say 
 what might have been as well or better said in 
 twenty minutes, or spreads over twenty pages 
 what could easily have been exhausted in ten, 
 the offence in a large majority of cases is due, 
 not so much to vanity, or to indifference to the 
 feelings of others, as to inability or unwillingness 
 to take pains. 
 
 And the uncritical world, just as it is apt to
 
 iv CULTURE AND CHARACTER 93 
 
 mistake noise of utterance for firmness of char- 
 acter, has an almost invincible tendency to think 
 that a writer or orator cannot be eloquent unless 
 he is also diffuse. In my opinion, it ought to 
 be regarded as one of the serious functions of 
 a University to inculcate the importance and to 
 cultivate the practice of Style. Remember that 
 in the English language we have received, as 
 part of our common inheritance, the richest and 
 most flexible organ of expression among living 
 tongues. I say nothing for the moment of 
 Poetry, which may be classed among the arts ; 
 but there is no department of the Prose, which 
 we all have to speak and write every day of our 
 lives, for which our literature does not provide 
 us with a wealth of models and examples. There 
 are fashions in style, as in other things, which 
 have their day, exhaust themselves, and cannot 
 be revived. No one, for instance, would nowa- 
 days set himself deliberately to copy the manner 
 of Archbishop Cranmer, the first great writer of 
 English prose ; or of Sir Thomas Browne, with 
 his magnificent organ of many notes ; or of 
 Gibbon, who stands in solitary splendour at the 
 head of our writers of history ; or of De Quincey, 
 with his curious and sometimes irritating medley, 
 imaginative, critical, discursive, but a master 
 who has rarely been surpassed in the manipulation 
 of the English sentence. Mechanical reproduc- 
 tion may be useful as an exercise ; it was resorted
 
 94 CULTURE AND CHARACTER iv 
 
 to, if I remember right, in his youth by the most 
 accomplished practitioner in the art of style that 
 Scotland has produced in our time Robert 
 Louis Stevenson. But the man who wants to 
 write or speak English will go to the great 
 authors, whom I have just named, again and 
 again ; not to echo their cadences or to mimic 
 their mannerisms; not merely even to enrich 
 his own vocabulary; but to study the secret of 
 their music ; to learn how it is that, with 
 them, language becomes the mirror of thought; 
 to master, step by step, the processes by which 
 these cunning artificers in words forge out of 
 them phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and give 
 to each its proper place and function in the 
 structure of an immortal work. 
 
 But, further, it is not enough that a University 
 should teach its students to eschew narrowness 
 in the range of their intellectual interests and 
 slatternliness in speech and writing. It should 
 put them permanently on guard against the 
 Dogmatic temper. We cannot get on without 
 dogma, which is nothing more than the precisely 
 formulated expression of what we believe to be 
 true. The term is sometimes used as though it 
 were restricted to the domain of theology, and 
 were specially appropriate to the accretions- 
 called by some excrescences, by others develop- 
 ments which councils and schoolmen and 
 doctors have embroidered upon the simplicity
 
 iv CULTURE AND CHARACTER 95 
 
 of the Gospel. But science and philosophy have 
 their dogmas also ; and if it be suggested that 
 that which differentiates a dogma is that it is 
 accepted in deference, not to reason, but to 
 authority, the same may be said of not a few of 
 the propositions which in every department both 
 of speculation and of practical life form the basis 
 of belief or conduct. But to give intellectual 
 acceptance to a dogma, or a series of dogmas, 
 is one thing; to carry on the operations of the 
 intellect in a dogmatic spirit is quite another. 
 There is a famous and familiar saying of Lessing, 
 that if the Almighty offered him the choice 
 between the knowledge of all truth and the 
 impulse to seek the truth, he would reverently 
 select the second as a greater boon than the first. 
 And this surely is the attitude which it should be 
 the aim and end of education to make easy and 
 natural. To be open-minded ; to struggle against 
 preconceptions, and hold them in due subjection; 
 to keep the avenues of the intelligence free and 
 unblocked ; to take pains that the scales of the 
 judgment shall be always even and fair ; to 
 welcome new truths when they have proved their 
 title, despite the havoc they may make of old 
 and cherished beliefs these may sound like 
 commonplace qualities, well within every man's 
 reach, but experience shows that in practice 
 they are the rarest of all. 
 
 The temper which I am endeavouring to
 
 96 CULTURE AND CHARACTER w 
 
 describe is not in any sense one of intellectual 
 detachment or indifference ; nor has it anything 
 in common with that chronic paralysis of the 
 judgment, which makes some men incapable of 
 choosing between the right and wrong reason, 
 or the better and the worse cause. It implies, 
 on the contrary, an active and virile mental life, 
 equipped against the fallacies of the market- 
 place and the cave, animated by the will to believe 
 and to act, but open always to the air of reason 
 and the light of truth. 
 
 One final counsel I will venture to offer to 
 you. I speak as an old University man who, in 
 a crowded and somewhat contentious life, has 
 never wholly lost touch with the interests and 
 the ideals of Oxford days. If the short span 
 which, in fuller or lesser measure, is allotted to 
 us all is to be wisely spent, one must not squander, 
 but one should husband and invest, what never 
 comes again, and what here and now is offered 
 to every one of you. The more strenuous your 
 career, the more you will need to draw upon 
 that unfailing reservoir. Sometimes, amid the 
 clash of public strife, there may steal back into 
 the memory of some of us the sombre lines of the 
 greatest of Roman poets : 
 
 Di Jovis in tectis iram miserantur inanem 
 Amborum, et tantos mortalibus esse labores. 
 
 That is but a passing mood, except in an ill- 
 furnished mind. Keep always with you, wher-
 
 CULTURE AND CHARACTER 97 
 
 ever your course may lie, the best and most 
 enduring gift that a University can bestow 
 the company of great thoughts, the inspiration 
 of great ideals, the example of great achievements, 
 the consolation of great failures. So equipped, 
 you can face, without perturbation, the buffets 
 of circumstance, the caprice of fortune, all the 
 inscrutable vicissitudes of life. Nor can you do 
 better than take as your motto the famous words 
 which I read over the portals of this College 
 when I came here to-day : " They have said. 
 What say they ? Let them say."
 
 THE SPADE AND THE PEN 
 
 99
 
 v 
 
 THE SPADE AND THE PEN 1 
 
 THAT it is my privilege as President for the 
 year of the Classical Association to deliver my 
 address to its members assembled in the Town 
 Hall of Birmingham may be regarded, I think, 
 as a striking illustration of the interdependence 
 in this country of culture and practice. 
 
 Birmingham, among all English towns, is 
 perhaps the one most associated in popular 
 thought and speech with the strenuous interests 
 of business and politics. I myself, for a long time 
 past, have been compelled to spend my waking 
 hours if I may use an ancient phrase without 
 offence non in Platonis republica sed in Romuli 
 faece. But Birmingham has set up a University 
 which of us does not feel to-night the gap on 
 our platform due to the much-regretted absence 
 of its illustrious Chancellor, Mr. Chamberlain ? 
 a University with a Faculty of Arts, and a 
 Professor of Greek and Latin in the person of 
 
 1 Presidential Address delivered before the Classical Associa- 
 tion, Town Hall, Birmingham, October 9, 1908. 
 
 101
 
 102 THE SPADE AND THE PEN v 
 
 Dr. Sonnenschein, who has been a pioneer of use- 
 ful experiments in the art of teaching the ancient 
 languages, and has done as much as any one to 
 organise and develop the work of the Classical 
 Association. And although, when I remember 
 that I am in the chair which was occupied by Dr. 
 Butcher, I am painfully sensible that one who is 
 not even worthy to be called a scribe has stolen 
 into Moses' seat, yet I can honestly say that I 
 have never wavered in my allegiance to the great 
 writers of antiquity, or ceased to take a lively 
 interest in the progress of criticism and discovery 
 which is every year throwing new light on their 
 meaning, and laying deeper and broader the 
 foundations of their imperishable fame. 
 
 The Classical Association has a double side 
 to its activities. It seeks to examine and im- 
 prove our English methods of studying and 
 teaching the Classics. It seeks also to co-ordinate 
 and bring together the ever-accumulating results 
 of the labours of British and foreign scholars. 
 Under the first head it has already, in the course 
 of two years, brought about a radical change, 
 which, both in the magnitude of its scale and 
 the rapidity of its execution, may well excite the 
 envious admiration of iconoclasts and revolu- 
 tionaries in other walks of life. The reformed 
 scheme of Latin pronunciation has been adopted, 
 and is in practical use in our Universities and in 
 most, if not in all, of our public schools. It was
 
 THE SPADE AND THE PEN 103 
 
 recommended for use in secondary schools by 
 the Board of Education in a circular issued in 
 February 1907, which, however, left it open to 
 the schools to retain if they pleased the traditional 
 English pronunciation. It will be interesting to 
 you to know the results, the details of which will 
 be set out in the forthcoming Report of the 
 Board. Broadly speaking, it may be said that 
 the use of the reformed pronunciation has become 
 normal in grant-earning schools. Returns have 
 been received from 577 schools in which Latin 
 is taught. Of these, no less than 550 use the 
 reformed pronunciation. In 24 out of the 550 
 the scheme of the Association has been adopted 
 with modifications of one kind or another, those 
 most commonly made being (1) the distinction 
 between u the vowel and v the consonant, and 
 (2) the retention of the traditional English 
 consonantal sounds as, for instance, the soft c 
 and g before the vowels e and i. You have thus, 
 in effect, in the course of two years made a clean 
 sweep of a system of mispronunciation which 
 has prevailed in this country for more than three 
 centuries, and which has done not a little to 
 isolate English scholarship. Encouraged by this 
 success, the Association is now attacking the 
 problem of the pronunciation of Greek. It will be 
 interesting to see whether, in this more broken 
 and difficult ground, it will be found equally easy 
 to rout the forces of conservatism.
 
 104 THE SPADE AND THE PEN v 
 
 Side by side with these large reforms, the 
 Association is prosecuting a less ambitious but 
 equally useful task in seeking to secure that the 
 highest educational value shall be got out of 
 the time which is given in most English schools 
 to the teaching of Latin. It is satisfactory to 
 observe that the best authorities, even those who 
 speak in the name of natural science, are practic- 
 ally unanimous as to the necessity of retaining 
 the study of Latin. When one remembers how 
 few of those who at present are learning Latin 
 in school can by any possibility develop into 
 scholars in any real sense of the term, it is 
 obviously of the first importance that Latin 
 should be taught in such a way as to be a pro- 
 paedeutic, and a real intellectual discipline. Too 
 often in the past the only permanent mental gain 
 from the hours devoted during many years to 
 the learning of Latin has been one of at least 
 dubious value a good memory for what is 
 trivial and just as well forgotten. 
 
 But, as I said just now, the Association has 
 charged itself with another function that of 
 bringing together in a coherent and connected 
 form, from time to time, the results of the 
 researches and discoveries of those who are 
 engaged in the different fields of scholarship. 
 How many those fields are, how indefinitely 
 varied is their yield, and yet how important it 
 is that the work done in each should be brought
 
 THE SPADE AND THE PEN 105 
 
 into reciprocal relation with the work done in all 
 the rest, will become at once apparent to any one 
 who looks at the admirable annual compendium 
 which is edited for the Council by Dr. Rouse. 
 The subjects treated are indeed almost bewilder- 
 ing in their number and diversity. Archaeology 
 in all its ramifications, Sculpture, Numismatics, 
 Mythology, Epigraphy, History, Grammar, 
 Textual Criticism even this comprehensive 
 catalogue by no means exhausts the various 
 forms of activity which the learned of all countries 
 are devoting every year to a better and closer 
 knowledge of the ancient world. It is a perusal 
 of this volume which has suggested to me one or 
 two reflections on the changes which within my 
 own memory, and that of many here present, have 
 been brought about in this country both in the 
 conception and the practice of classical study. 
 
 Let me make my meaning clear by an illustra- 
 tion. I was reading the other day a discourse 
 delivered to the Classical Association of Scotland 
 by Professor Ridgeway, whose Early Age of 
 Greece has laid me, among many others, under 
 a deep debt of obligation. Its subject is the 
 relation of archaeology to classical ^studies. His 
 main thesis appears to be that, after the death 
 of Person, English scholarship rapidly degener- 
 ated into pedantry and verbalism, of which the 
 highest achievements were a happy guess at a 
 new reading in a corrupt passage, or some tour
 
 106 THE SPADE AND THE PEN v 
 
 de force in the elegant and futile trivialities of 
 Greek and Latin versification. 
 
 If, as he appears to hold, the field has now 
 been broadened, and English scholarship has re- 
 covered, or is recovering, its sense of proportion, 
 the result is in his opinion largely to be attri- 
 buted to the introduction and acknowledgment of 
 archaeology as a necessary part of the scholar's 
 equipment. I think that Professor Ridgeway 
 is a little disposed to underestimate both the 
 range and the productiveness of classical scholar- 
 ship in this country, in what I may call the pre- 
 Schliemann era, when practically all that we knew 
 of the early history of Mycenae and Crete was to 
 be found in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yet these 
 were the days in which, to mention only a few 
 out of many possible examples, such books as 
 Munro's Lucretius, Conington's Virgil, Jowett 
 and Thompson's editions and translations of 
 Plato, and the earlier part, at any rate, of Jebb's 
 Sophocles, saw the light. But there can be no 
 doubt that Schliemann and his successors have 
 had what can only be described as a revolution- 
 ary influence, and have to some extent altered 
 the bearings of English and indeed of universal 
 scholarship. During the last twenty years it is 
 hardly an exaggeration to say that in this domain 
 the pen has become the servant of the spade. 
 We now know that the pre-Homeric civilisation, 
 of which nearly the first traces were unearthed
 
 v THE SPADE AND THE PEN 107 
 
 at Mycenae and Tiryns and Hissarlik, stretches 
 back into an almost immeasurable past. It may 
 be, and probably is, the case that it went through 
 stages of development and decadence in the 
 Cyclades and Crete before it crossed to the 
 Argolid. Mr. Evans and his school believe that 
 they can trace no less than eight so-called 
 Minoan epochs, each with a characteristic art of 
 its own, before they reach the era called Late 
 Minoan III., which begins with the sack of the 
 later Palace at Knossos about 1400 B.C., and 
 which, corresponding roughly with the so-called 
 Mycenaean of the mainland, perhaps lasts to 
 1000 B.C. The revelation of the existence during 
 centuries, possibly during thousands of years, 
 of this almost unsuspected Aegean world, has, 
 of course, compelled a revision of the traditional 
 notion, in which most of us were brought up, that 
 we have in the Homeric poems the first records 
 of historic Greece. There is, no doubt, much 
 that is still obscure, and, if I may venture to say 
 so, still more that is highly conjectural, in the 
 picture which Archaeology has constructed of 
 what may be called, without prejudice, the pre- 
 Achaean ages. The great Palace at Knossos, in 
 its wall decorations and in its sanitary and 
 hydraulic arrangements, was rarely, if ever, 
 surpassed in the later days of Greek art. We 
 gather from that which remains of their art that 
 the men who erected and lived in and about
 
 108 THE SPADE AND THE PEN 
 
 this wonderful building were a dark-skinned and 
 long-headed race, with shaven faces, short in 
 stature and narrow in waist, who were still in the 
 bronze age, and who buried and did not burn 
 their dead. Their language does not help us, 
 for, as I understand, none of the Cretan scripts, 
 whether pictographic or linear, have as yet been 
 satisfactorily deciphered. Can they be properly 
 described as a Greek race ? Is their art to be 
 called Greek Art ? In the successive waves of 
 migration, of which the origin, the succession, 
 and the effect seem to become more rather than 
 less disputable with the progress of research, were 
 they swept out of existence or absorbed either as 
 a dominant or a contributory factor in the historic 
 Hellenic race ? To these questions Professor 
 Burrows, who has collected in his excellent book x 
 everything that is relevant to the subject, admits 
 that at present no definite answer can be given. 
 
 Prehistoric archaeology in the region of the 
 Aegean has indeed raised more questions than it 
 has solved. To say this is not to disparage or 
 undervalue the service which it has rendered, 
 particularly to Homeric scholarship in correct- 
 ing crude theories, in setting aside false interpreta- 
 tions, in giving historic actuality to what used to 
 be regarded as manifestly legendary or fictitious, 
 and generally in recasting the perspective of the 
 
 1 The Discoveries in Crete, by R. M. Burrows. London : John 
 Murray, 1908.
 
 THE SPADE AND THE PEN 109 
 
 Poems. But to the student of ancient literature, 
 archaeology (as Professor Ridgeway rightly says) 
 must be kept in an ancillary position. It must 
 not occupy the foreground and dominate the 
 scene. There may be as much pedantry and 
 waste of time in wrangling over the question to 
 which of our nine hypothetical Minoan epochs a 
 particular potsherd belongs, as in elaborating 
 theories about the different usages of av and 
 owf. The shadow of the commentator, whatever 
 may be his particular calling textual criticism, 
 grammar, excavation should never be allowed 
 (as it so often has been) to obscure and almost to 
 obliterate the writing of genius. The true scholar 
 values and uses all these aids and lights, each in 
 its due proportion : but the true scholar is rare. 
 Amidst all the digging and scratching and 
 scraping that have been going on during the last 
 twenty years on all sides of the Mediterranean, 
 it is disappointing, though perhaps it ought not 
 to be surprising, that so few of the lost literary 
 treasures of the ancient world have been recovered. 
 The caprice of chance, which has preserved so 
 much, and left so much apparently to perish, 
 still seems to mock our hopes. It is tempt- 
 ing to speculate which of the works that we 
 know to have existed would, if rediscovered, be 
 most warmly welcomed by the educated world. 
 The lost Attic tragedies ? or the comedies of 
 Menander ? or those discourses and dialogues of
 
 110 THE SPADE AND THE PEN 
 
 Aristotle, which, if ancient tradition is credible, 
 reveal him as the master of a readable and even an 
 attractive style ? or the Philippica of Theopompus, 
 which, according to Wilamowitz von Moellen- 
 dorff' s 1 recent Oxford lecture, contained more than 
 the special merits of Herodotus and Thucydides, 
 and his equally remarkable Meropis, which was 
 actually in existence in the ninth century. We 
 would gladly exchange a little early Minoan pottery 
 for some of these masterpieces or indeed for some 
 genuine product of the chisel of Phidias or Poly- 
 clitus. But it may be that these things are still 
 only in hiding, to reward the patience or the good 
 luck of some fortunate member of the indefatig- 
 able and undefeated fraternity of the spade. 
 
 In truth, the great writers of antiquity remain, 
 as they have been and always will be, their own 
 best interpreters. Archaeology has thrown, as 
 it were from outside, new lights upon their 
 environment, which have in not a few instances 
 made real what seemed to be fantastic, and 
 intelligible what was all but meaningless. But 
 perhaps a still greater service has been rendered 
 in our time to English scholarship by the wider 
 knowledge and more comprehensive survey of 
 ancient literature itself which is now required 
 of any one who aspires to be a scholar. Thirty 
 or forty years ago, at both Oxford and Cambridge, 
 
 1 Greek Historical Writings, etc., translated by Gilbert Murray. 
 Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1908.
 
 v THE SPADE AND THE PEN 111 
 
 the so-called Classical authors were a select, 
 almost an aristocratic body. They were studied 
 with a minute and even meticulous care. I sup- 
 pose there was not a sentence or even a line 
 in the Ethics or the Republic, every possible 
 interpretation of which was not as familiar to 
 the great Oxford coaches as are the traditional 
 openings in chess to a Lasker or a Tarrasch. 
 The well-regulated student was kept somewhat 
 rigorously within this carefully fenced domain. 
 If he showed vagrant, migratory tastes, which 
 tempted him to roam afield, he was warned against 
 the double danger of a too superficial knowledge 
 of his authors and a vitiated style. Intensive 
 cultivation of the writers of the Golden Age was 
 the rule of life. Nocturna versate manu, versate 
 diurna, was its motto. It is probable that very 
 few of us who were immersed in the great 
 Augustans ever read a line of Strabo, or of Diony- 
 sius of Halicarnassus, or of the anonymous author 
 of the treatise on the " Sublime " though two 
 of them were certainly, and the third may 
 possibly, have been contemporary with Virgil 
 and Horace. There is, I am glad to say, a grow- 
 ing tendency to extend the range of classical 
 reading. There is no fear of the great masters 
 of style and literary charm being dethroned 
 from their seats of power. Homer, the Attic 
 dramatists, Herodotus. Thucydides, and Plato, 
 and, at Rome, Lucretius and Catullus, the
 
 112 THE SPADE AND THE PEN 
 
 Augustan poets, Cicero, Livy, and Tacitus, will 
 always maintain an undisputed ascendency. But, 
 even though a man should put in peril the purity 
 of his elegiacs and iambics, or of his Greek and 
 Latin prose, his scholarship is one-sided and 
 incomplete unless^ he makes himself at home in 
 less familiar epochs and in fields that have been 
 less assiduously tilled. The two fascinating books 
 of Professor Dill show what a mine of interest, 
 literary as well as historical, lies open for explora- 
 tion in the later centuries of the Western Empire. 
 And the History of Classical Scholarship by Dr. 
 Sandys, the accomplished Public Orator of Cam- 
 bridge, supplies a need from which we have all 
 suffered, and for the first time provides English 
 readers with a luminous and connected narrative, 
 to use his own words, of " the accurate study of 
 the language, literature, and art of Greece and 
 Rome, and of all they had to teach us as to the 
 nature and history of men." Dr. Sandys reminds 
 us of what, possibly, even some members of the 
 Association may have forgotten the true origin 
 of the term " Classical " which forms part of our 
 title and which has given its name to a whole 
 field of learning and research. In the Nodes 
 Atticae (xix. 8. 15) Aulus Gellius describes a 
 certain author as classicus scriptor, non prole- 
 tarius, a metaphor which apparently goes back 
 as far as the division of the Roman people into 
 classes by Servius Tullhis. A citizen in the
 
 v THE SPADE AND THE PEN 113 
 
 first class was called classicus; those who made 
 up the last and the lowest were proletarii. There 
 are many authors, ancient as well as modern, who 
 are more read than they deserve to be ; for they 
 belong irretrievably to the proletariat of literature. 
 But I venture to think that in days gone by we 
 have been a little too subservient to tradition 
 and convention in refusing to admit the title of 
 original and interesting writers to be ranked 
 with the Classics. 
 
 Lastly, may I not say, without any disparage- 
 ment of the great scholars of our youth, that 
 what we call the Classics whether as instrument 
 of education or as field for research have come 
 to be treated with a larger outlook, in a more 
 scientific spirit, with a quickened consciousness 
 of their relations to other forms of knowledge 
 and other departments of investigation. This is 
 indeed a characteristic of the general intellectual 
 movement of our time. It is more and more 
 recognised that the many mansions which go to 
 form the Palace of Knowledge and Truth open 
 out into each other. There is no longer any 
 question of mutual exclusion, still less of absorp- 
 tion or supersession. I was much struck with 
 this in reading the brilliant address delivered 
 this autumn to the assembled votaries of Natural 
 Science by the President of the British Associa- 
 tion. Mechanical theories and explanations no 
 longer satisfy the well - equipped biologist and
 
 botanist, who has to deal with the problem of 
 living matter even in its most rudimentary forms. 
 In like manner the facile and attractive simplicity 
 of many of the theories which had crystallised 
 almost into dogmas as to Greek origins, Greek 
 religion, the order and development of Greek 
 poetry, and as to a hundred other points, has 
 had to yield to the sapping operations of the 
 comparative method, and is found in the new 
 setting of a larger scheme of knowledge to be 
 hopelessly out of perspective. There is nothing 
 more irksome to the natural man than to have 
 the presuppositions on which he has liveol rooted 
 up and cast upon the rubbish heap. But this 
 is the often unwelcome service which Science is 
 always rendering to the world. Aristotle said 
 long ago that the being that could live in isola- 
 tion was either below or above humanity. There 
 is no form of study least of all the study of 
 language and literature, which are the vesture 
 of men's thoughts and emotions-^that can afford 
 to isolate itself without incurring the risks of 
 pedantry and sterility. 
 
 Here is a work which is worthy of the co- 
 operative efforts of this association of scholars. 
 For the literature of the two great European races 
 of the ancient world can never lose its supreme 
 attraction, its incommunicable splendour ; and of 
 them it is true, in the famous words of Roger 
 Bacon, notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae.
 
 VI 
 
 THE ENGLISH BAR 
 
 115
 
 VI 
 THE ENGLISH BAR 1 
 
 MR. ATTORNEY -GENERAL AND GENTLEMEN OF 
 THE BAR You do not need to be assured that 
 no compliment could be more grateful to me, or 
 to any man who, like myself, has been for more 
 than thirty years a member of the English Bar, 
 than such a welcome as has been given to me 
 to-night by the members of the great profession, 
 among whom the laborious days of my life have 
 been so largely spent. It enhances to me the 
 value of that compliment that you should have 
 selected as your mouthpiece my learned friend, 
 Sir Edward Clarke. It has been my misfortune 
 both in political and in professional life to be 
 more often against than with Sir Edward Clarke ; 
 but whether with him or against him I have 
 always felt and which of us has not ? that 
 there is no one among our contemporaries whom 
 I should more heartily advise a young man enter- 
 ing the professional arena to look to as model, 
 whether of temper, of method, of style, or of the 
 
 1 Delivered at the Inner Temple Hall, July 10, 1908. 
 117
 
 118 THE ENGLISH BAR 
 
 whole art of advocacy. Courage which, though 
 always undaunted, never blusters ; persuasive- 
 ness which seems rather to win than to capture 
 assent ; eloquence which never sacrifices light 
 to heat, those are qualities of which no man at 
 the Bar in my time has been a more perfect and 
 consummate exponent. Mr. Attorney, this is a 
 gathering of the Bar, and of the Bar alone ; and 
 almost for the first time (for it does not happen 
 frequently in our lives) we are able to talk without 
 turning our eyes, or directing our attention, either 
 to the Bench above or to the Well below. To me 
 I must confess that to speak anywhere in the 
 region of the Temple without a tribunal, without 
 a client, without a brief, and, I must add, without 
 a fee, is an unfamiliar and in some ways a nerve- 
 shaking experience. I can only wish that I 
 were imbued for the moment with some portion 
 of the magnificent sang-froid of that accom- 
 plished advocate Sir Richard Bethell, who is said 
 I daresay some of you know the legend in the 
 midst of a super-subtle argument, when harassed 
 by the interlocutory irrelevance of a Chancery 
 Judge, to have turned round to his unhappy 
 junior, and to have exclaimed in an audible aside, 
 44 The damned fool has taken your point." 
 
 Well, gentlemen, as I am among old friends 
 and brethren, I may, perhaps, be allowed for a 
 moment and only for a moment to be egotistic 
 and autobiographical. Let me, then, seize the
 
 THE ENGLISH BAR 119 
 
 opportunity and I am glad to have it of 
 recalling the names and the memories of two illus- 
 trious lawyers to whom I feel myself always under 
 special obligation. The first is my old master, 
 Charles Bowen, afterwards one of the brightest 
 ornaments of our Bench, in whose chambers 
 not far from here, in Brick Court, I served my 
 pupilage. I learnt, I hope, many things there, 
 and amongst the other lessons which I learnt 
 was one which every man who aspires to practise 
 with success at the Bar in these days has to learn 
 sooner or later, and that was the dangers, the 
 multiform and manifold dangers, of an encounter 
 with Danckwerts. Later on, after some pretty 
 lean years, in which one used to welcome as an 
 unexpected and grateful phenomenon a County 
 Court brief, marked one guinea, and coming from 
 a client whose time and method of payment were 
 both nebulous and problematical, I had the sin- 
 gular good-fortune of securing the favour and help 
 of a great man, my dear and revered friend, Lord 
 James of Hereford. I owe to him a debt which 
 he has never thought of exacting, and which I 
 can never repay. May I add to those a third 
 name the name of one whom, I think, all the 
 older men among us will agree with me in 
 placing in the very first and highest rank 
 of the advocates, either of our own or of any 
 other time, Charles Russell ? I was privileged, 
 as Sir Edward Clarke has reminded me, to be
 
 120 THE ENGLISH BAR 
 
 associated with him as his junior in the greatest 
 State trial of the Victorian era. We had as 
 colleagues my noble friend the present Lord 
 Chancellor, and a man of infinite humour and of 
 unique lovableness, whose untimely death was 
 to me and to all his friends an irreparable loss 
 the late Frank Lockwood. Mr. Attorney and 
 gentlemen, those are memories which time can 
 never efface. Sir Edward Clarke has referred 
 to the fact that it is just about one hundred 
 years since a practising member of the Bar was 
 last Prime Minister of England. He was kind 
 enough not to remind me that that predecessor 
 came to a sudden and untimely end. Absit 
 omen ! But every age has its own peculiar 
 dangers. It has been suggested to me by what 
 Sir Edward Clarke has said, that in our school- 
 days we all read of a certain legendary character, 
 who seems to have tried to deal with a feminist 
 movement somewhere in Thrace by euphonious 
 generalities, and he, as a result, was torn to 
 pieces by wild women. History, happily, does 
 not always, or even often, repeat itself. 
 
 It is natural, perhaps, that on an occasion like 
 this one should be tempted to reflect upon the 
 relations in our history between politics and the 
 law. The " gentlemen of the long robe," of the 
 " nisi prius mind," have provided from time to 
 time ample material for the cheap sarcasms of 
 superficial and uninstructed politicians. Once,
 
 vi THE ENGLISH BAR 121 
 
 at any rate, and I think only once, in our history 
 they were able to put these prejudices into 
 practice, and the disastrous experiment was tried 
 of a House of Commons from which all lawyers 
 were excluded. What was the result ? That 
 notorious body, pilloried in our history as the 
 Parliamentum indoctum, of which Lord Coke, not 
 perhaps an altogether impartial judge, declares 
 that the whole of its legislation was not worth 
 twopence. Gentlemen, I make this claim, that 
 there is no class or profession in our community 
 which has done more I will go further, I 
 will say that there is none which has done as 
 much to define, to develop, and to defend the 
 liberties of England. Sir Thomas More, Lord 
 Coke himself, Selden, Somers, Camden, Romilly 
 those are but a few of the names selected 
 almost at random from a long and illustrious 
 roll. They were all bred in the common law 
 of England, which is not a compendium of 
 mechanical rules written in fixed and indelible 
 characters, but a living organism, which has 
 grown and moved in response to the larger and 
 fuller development of the nation. The common 
 law of England has been, still is, and will con- 
 tinue to be, both here and wherever English 
 communities are found, at once the organ and 
 the safeguard of English justice and English 
 freedom. 
 
 There is another aspect of our meeting to-
 
 122 THE ENGLISH BAR vi 
 
 night a domestic rather than a public aspect 
 with which you will allow me for a moment, and 
 in conclusion, to deal. This is, as Sir Edward 
 Clarke said, in many respects a unique gathering ; 
 and while I am more touched and grateful than 
 I can find any words to express for your fraternal 
 hospitality, I am not vain enough to interpret it 
 merely as a personal tribute to myself. I think 
 it has a much wider significance. As the Attorney- 
 General said, our life, by the very necessities of 
 our profession, is spent in constant and unceasing 
 conflict. We breathe every day an atmosphere 
 of eager, strenuous, unsparing controversy. Your 
 gathering to-night is surely characteristic of the 
 temper and of the traditions of the English 
 Bar. Here we are sitting round these tables in 
 friendship and in brotherhood, united in doing 
 honour to a member of our common profession 
 to whom fortune has been kind. Why is that ? 
 The reason, to those of us who know the real 
 spirit of the Bar, is plain, and it is this. The 
 arduous struggle, the blows given and received, 
 the exultation of victory, the sting of defeat, 
 which are our daily experience, far from breeding 
 division and ill-will, only bind us more closely 
 together by the ties of a comradeship for which 
 you would look in vain in any other arena of the 
 ambitions and the rivalries of men. Gentlemen, 
 I thank you with all my heart for one of the 
 greatest honours of my life.
 
 VII 
 AD PORTAS 
 
 123
 
 VII 
 AD PORTAS 1 
 
 SALUTATIONI vestrae, Wiccamici, cum propter 
 singularem erga nos benevolentiam acceptissimae, 
 turn facundia perpolita haud minus admirandae, 
 ita respondere conabor ut, quamvis diutius a 
 Musis remotus, ad tantum orationis nitorem non 
 facile perveniam, amicitia tamen non desim. 
 Nullam enim sententiam, confiteor, Aulae Prae- 
 fecte, a te mini gratius excidisse quam illud " non 
 omnino externus ac peregrinus accedis." Nam, 
 si non Wiccamicum, tamen quasi Wiccamicum 
 adoptivum, ad egregiam illam Wiccamicorum 
 sodalitatem me benignius adscivisti. Immo for- 
 sitan si ut Romae, ita hie, jus trium liberorum 
 obtinere soleat, vestrae haud immerito societati 
 adrogatus esse videar : qui huic Collegio quat- 
 tuor jam dederim filios, quintum mox daturus, si 
 ad plenam civitatem non aliter licet aspirare. 
 
 Nimirum mihi perjucundum esse facile credetis, 
 publicarum onere eurarum diem licet unum re- 
 
 1 Reply to an Address of Welcome from the Prefect of Hall, 
 Winchester College, July 27, 1909. 
 
 126
 
 126 AD PORTAS vn 
 
 posito, fumo strepituque urbis procul relicto, e 
 tanta rerum vertigine ad hanc vestram Aca- 
 demiam, Musis tamdiu consecratam, confugere, 
 animum atque oculos inter serenas amoenitates 
 vestras recreare. Inter quas vir praeclarissimus, 1 
 Collega mihi valde dilectus, vires illas ingenii 
 cum solidi turn sobrii et, ut ita dicam, admodum 
 Wiccamici, otio puer operosiore corroboravit. 
 Quodsi, Aulae Praefecte, ut nuper intellexi, non 
 modo animi refectionem sed corporis etiam in- 
 columitatem polliceri potes, et Erinyas istas 
 licebit 7roppQ)8ev ao-7raeo-&u, has sedes unice securus 
 ingrediar. 
 
 1 Sir Edward Grey.
 
 
 VIII 
 THE ENGLISH BIBLE 
 
 127
 
 WHAT I am about to say I speak as a layman 
 who claims his allotted share in the most univer- 
 sally prized possession in the common heritage 
 of the English-speaking world. Three centuries, 
 as you have been reminded, have passed since, 
 after nearly seven years employed in research, 
 in translation, in revision, and in printing, our 
 Authorised Version of the Bible was first given 
 to the world. It is worth while to recall that 
 those seven years, during which the six com- 
 panies of translators were quietly engaged upon 
 their task, were in other fields the most re- 
 markable and fruitful in the annals of English 
 literature. The great Queen herself was dead, 
 but the two supreme geniuses of what we call the 
 Elizabethan era were still in the meridian and 
 plenitude of their powers. In 1605, the year after 
 the Hampton Court Conference, Francis Bacon 
 
 1 Speech delivered at the Commemoration of the 300th Anni- 
 versary of the Authorised Version of the Bible at the Albert Hall, 
 March 29, 1911. 
 
 129 K
 
 130 THE ENGLISH BIBLE vm 
 
 published his Advancement of Learning. Between 
 1604 and 1610 Shakespeare produced in succession 
 his tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, 
 and the year 1611 the year of the Authorised 
 Version was the year in which, as we believe, 
 he wrote The Tempest, and with it, in Prospero's 
 phrase, finally broke his magician's wand. But 
 in the meantime, in 1608, here in London, there 
 had been seen the birth of perhaps the only 
 English writer who was worthy to take up that 
 great succession the " God-gifted organ voice of 
 England," John Milton. Nor should it be for- 
 gotten that we had then among us, born ten 
 years earlier, and still " muing his mighty 
 youth," one Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 Sir, it was an age of giants in thought, in 
 writing, and in action ; and yet, as the Archbishop 
 has reminded us, our Authorised Version, which 
 was brought to birth in this heroic atmosphere, 
 was the joint product of what in these days we 
 call a syndicate of some fifty men, the names of 
 very few of whom are known to any but the 
 curious student of the bypaths of history. From 
 that point of view the English Bible may be 
 regarded as standing alone among the master- 
 pieces of literature. 
 
 But, as we have been already told, we ought, 
 when we are rendering gratitude to those to 
 whom we owe this unique treasure, to trace the 
 stream to its fountain-head. Great and incom-
 
 vm THE ENGLISH BIBLE 131 
 
 parable as were the services rendered by the 
 translators in the time of James I., our Bible in 
 its most essential and characteristic features is 
 not of Elizabethan, still less is it of Jacobean 
 authorship. The early translations of the dis- 
 ciples of Wycliffe, never perhaps with a wide 
 circulation, not even printed by Caxton himself, 
 were already archaic, and probably obsolete, when 
 the Renaissance reached England at the end of 
 the fifteenth century. Those versions seem to 
 have been unknown to the two great men to 
 whom, more than tp any one else, we owe our 
 English Bible William Tyndale and Miles 
 Coverdale. It is a singular fact that it was in 
 the reign of Henry VIII. , an otherwise relatively 
 sterile era in our language and literature, that 
 these two men of genius, with their contemporary 
 Cranmer, created the literary form, with its 
 matchless cadences and its sublime simplicity, 
 which is inseparably associated in the mind and 
 the thought of all English-speaking people with 
 the history of the Old Testament, with the 
 poetry of the Psalmists and the Prophets, with 
 the narratives of the Incarnation, with the 
 message of the Apostles and the Evangelists, and 
 with all the infinitely varied appeals of devotion, 
 praise, and prayer. 
 
 There is a celebrated retort reported to 
 have been made to an obscurantist critic by 
 Tyndale himself Tyndale, confessor and martyr,
 
 132 THE ENGLISH BIBLE vm 
 
 in the greatest campaign ever waged by the 
 soldiers of freedom against the forces of in- 
 tellectual and spiritual tyranny a celebrated 
 retort in which he said, " If God spare my life, 
 ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth 
 the plough to know more of the Scriptures 
 than thou dost." Never has what looked like 
 a hazardous prediction, if not a vainglorious 
 boast, been more amply or richly fulfilled. To 
 the common people of England, when Tyndale 
 began to translate the New Testament, the Bible 
 was a collection of oracles in a dead language. 
 Their interpretation was the monopoly of a 
 sacerdotal caste. Even Sir Thomas More himself 
 thought that an English translation should not 
 be hazarded except with a safeguard, the safe- 
 guard that all the copies should be entrusted to 
 the Bishops, and doled out at their discretion 
 only to such as the Bishops should perceive to 
 be " honest, sad, and virtuous." The circula- 
 tion of the Bible in English, first surreptitiously, 
 then with the connivance, and at last with the 
 open approval, of the State, as Tyndale's and 
 Coverdale's translations, the Great Bible, the 
 Bishops' Bible, the Geneva Bible, finally our 
 Authorised Version the circulation of the Bible 
 in English was, in my judgment, in a far truer 
 sense than the legislation of Henry and Elizabeth 
 the moving force of the Reformation. 
 
 It delivered our people from a yoke to which
 
 THE ENGLISH BIBLE 133 
 
 they will never again submit. It opened to one 
 and all, small and great, poor and rich, learned 
 and ignorant, the treasure-house of the Divine 
 wisdom. It gave to each, in the daily round of 
 labour and care, as well as in the supreme and 
 testing moments of life, an equal and unstinted 
 share in the teachings which inspire, the con- 
 solations which soothe, the faith which can 
 move mountains, the hope which endures to 
 the end. 
 
 And if the English Bible has been to the 
 English people an instrument of inspiration, has 
 not it also been, and ought it not increasingly 
 to be, the symbol and safeguard of unity ? There 
 are gathered here to-night on this platform and 
 in this hall the representatives of many Churches 
 and communities. He, let me add, must be a very 
 superficial student of history who thinks that 
 you can summarily account for the divisions of 
 Christendom as the product merely of mis- 
 understanding and confusion, of want of per- 
 spective, or of petty jealousies and rivalries. But 
 all of us, by whatever ecclesiastical label we are 
 designated, all of us have in the English Bible 
 a common possession, a common inheritance, a 
 common storehouse and reservoir of religious 
 thought and teaching. This tercentenary will not 
 have been celebrated in vain if it brings home 
 to us with a new emphasis the truth that, while 
 there are diversities of operation, there is one and
 
 134 THE ENGLISH BIBLE vm 
 
 the same spirit the spirit whose message we 
 have all of us read in the same familiar and yet 
 venerable language from the first moment that 
 we were able to speak. 
 
 As I have implied more than once, the English 
 Bible belongs not only to the subjects of the King 
 but to the whole English-speaking world. We are 
 delighted, as you, my lord, have already said, to 
 welcome on the platform my distinguished friend, 
 the American Ambassador. His presence re- 
 minds us that across the seas, mainly of our own 
 kindred, though owning a different allegiance, there 
 has grown up, since the date of the Authorised 
 Version, a mighty nation, who claim with us a 
 share in what is to us and to them a common 
 possession. It was John Robinson, as many of 
 you will remember, the Pastor of the Pilgrim 
 Fathers, who, on the eve of their departure, 
 declared in a memorable sentence that " the 
 Lord has more truths yet to bring forth out of 
 His Holy Word." 
 
 One of the truths which we have slowly realised, 
 and which is now firmly rooted, as I believe, in 
 the faith of all Christian men and women on 
 both sides of the Atlantic, is that war between 
 English-speaking peoples would not only be a 
 crime against civilisation, but an unforgivable 
 breach of those new commandments that are 
 enshrined and consecrated in the New Testament, 
 on which both nations have been bred. There
 
 THE ENGLISH BIBLE 135 
 
 surely could not be a worthier, a more appropriate, 
 a more splendid monument of this tercentenary 
 year, than that it should witness the sealing of a 
 solemn pact between us which would put an end 
 once and for all to the hideous, the unthinkable 
 possibilities of fratricidal strife.
 
 IX 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 137
 
 IX 
 EDINBURGH 1 
 
 I ESTEEM it a high honour to be allowed to sub- 
 scribe my name to the burgess roll of the capital 
 city of Scotland. Though not a Scotsman by 
 birth, I am, as the Lord Provost has already 
 said, very near being senior among the Scottish 
 representatives at Westminster. When I first 
 invaded Scotland, five-and-twenty years ago, a 
 ferry --boat conveyed me and my carpet-bag 
 across the turbulent and treacherous waters of 
 the Forth to the adjacent Kingdom of Fife, 
 which has been my political home ever since. 
 
 Since those days a great bridge has made com- 
 munication between Fife and the Lothians more 
 easy and more frequent. It remains true, as it 
 was then and as it will continue to be, that there 
 is no part of Scotland, however remote in distance 
 and however independent in spirit, that does not 
 recognise that the centre and mainspring of our 
 national life is to be found in this great historic 
 
 1 Speech delivered at Edinburgh on receiving the Freedom of 
 the City, December 20, 1910. 
 
 139
 
 140 EDINBURGH 
 
 capital. It would be late in the day, even if 
 it were becoming for your youngest burgess, to 
 attempt to sound the praises of this ancient and 
 famous city ; to speak of the unsurpassed beauty 
 of its situation and surroundings ; of the stirring 
 and moving scenes of which century after century 
 it has been the theatre ; of the great men that it 
 has bred and nourished and taught and sheltered, 
 the " hands that penned and tongues that uttered 
 wisdom " ; the poets, the orators, the philosophers, 
 the statesmen, the lawyers, the divines, and 
 most illustrious of them all that supreme 
 creative imagination which stands second only 
 to Shakespeare in our literature. One is some- 
 times tempted to think that one of the least 
 desirable results of the gigantic development in 
 the nineteenth century of the means of com- 
 munication has been its tendency to drain away 
 from the centres of our local life their separateness 
 and their individuality. Many of our ancient 
 English towns have felt, and to some extent 
 suffered from, the change. Even here, although 
 in a much lesser degree, you have not altogether 
 escaped the levelling influence of East and West 
 Coast services by night and by day. We shall, 
 I suppose, never see here again the same con- 
 centration and isolation if I may use the phrase 
 of social and literary interests as was to be 
 found in the Edinburgh of Robertson, of Mac- 
 kenzie, of Dugald Stewart, and of Walter Scott.
 
 EDINBURGH 141 
 
 But for all that, Edinburgh, it may be said 
 without flattery or exaggeration, maintains in a 
 large measure a life and a savour of its own. No 
 one who knows her at all can ever imagine while 
 he is here that he is anywhere else. The modern 
 world with its steam-roller methods, its levelling 
 of inequalities, its lopping of excrescences, its 
 rounding of angles and blunting of edges, all of 
 them in due place and season healthful and 
 even necessary processes, tends inevitably and 
 increasingly towards uniformity, sameness, mono- 
 tony. Let us do all we can, both in our children 
 and in our cities, to keep fresh and potent the 
 saving salt of individuality. 
 
 But the Edinburgh of to-day is not content 
 to live on the memories of its past. She is not 
 content even strong though the temptation 
 must sometimes be to gaze complacently as in a 
 looking-glass on the reflection of those gifts and 
 graces with which she is so richly endowed, and 
 which have been denied to more commonplace 
 towns. No ; she carries on an active, a pro- 
 gressive municipal life, and in no department, I 
 am glad to say, more conspicuously or more 
 fruitfully than in that of education in all its 
 branches. I need say nothing of the sustained 
 vigour and undimmed fame of your great Univer- 
 sity and its medical school. Nor is it necessary 
 to enlarge upon the efficiency of your elementary 
 schools, from each of which I am delighted to
 
 142 EDINBURGH 
 
 hear there are children present in this hall to-day. 
 I will only note in passing, and with sincere 
 gratification, the growing attention which is being 
 paid to those physical conditions proper feeding, 
 vigilant medical supervision without due regard 
 to which the best intellectual training is a futile 
 mockery. But here in Edinburgh the most 
 striking developments have been in other parts 
 of the educational field. I refer particularly to 
 your training college for teachers, the college 
 of art, the agricultural college, the school for 
 domestic economy, and last, but by no means 
 least, the more than encouraging measure of 
 success which is attending your continuation 
 classes for pupils who have left school and for 
 adults. Here, both in legislation and in ad- 
 ministration, we in Scotland may claim to be 
 well ahead of our own fellow- subjects on the 
 other side of the Border. I said some weeks ago 
 in Glasgow, when I had the honour of receiving 
 the freedom of that great city, that one of the 
 most tragic sights in our town life is that of the 
 boy sitting at the tail-end of a van reading some 
 trashy story ; forgetting every day more and more 
 of what he was taught at school ; receiving no 
 training of any kind for any permanent calling ; 
 rapidly graduating, as soon as his present pre- 
 carious short-lived occupation comes to an end, 
 for a place in the ranks of the unemployable. 
 For years past this has been the darkest blot
 
 EDINBURGH 143 
 
 and the most fatal gap in our educational system. 
 Edinburgh, in my judgment at any rate, can 
 perform no greater services to the nation than 
 by grappling with this evil, and thereby showing 
 to the other great communities of the country the 
 way towards the drastic and curative treatment 
 of one of the most fertile causes of poverty and 
 crime. 
 
 A large part of my life, practically the whole 
 of it that is known to my fellow-citizens, has been 
 spent in contention and in public controversy. 
 Nor am I sanguine enough to hope that I am 
 at this moment at the opening of a new chapter 
 which is to tell of nothing but peace, unanimity, 
 and repose. There are many members of your 
 corporation and civic roll who have not always 
 agreed with me in the past, and possibly may 
 not find it easy always to agree with me in the 
 future. But, following the generous traditions of 
 our public life, all alike have joined in this signal 
 and most welcome and touching tribute to one 
 who, sometimes in arduous circumstances, has 
 tried to do his duty and serve the State. I thank 
 you with a full heart, and I beg you to believe 
 that there is no honour which, after sitting as I 
 have twenty-five years as a Scottish representa- 
 tive at Westminster, could be more grateful to 
 me than that I should be thought worthy of the 
 freedom of the City of Edinburgh.
 
 X 
 
 THE ROYAL SOCIETY 
 
 145
 
 X 
 
 THE ROYAL SOCIETY 1 
 
 THE 250th anniversary of the Royal Society is 
 appropriately commemorated in this Guildhall. 
 For ' The Royal Society of London for the 
 Improving of Natural Knowledge," to give it its 
 original title, though it has become eminently a 
 national institution, has at the same time pecul- 
 iarly close associations with the City of London. 
 In the first charter, which, I think, was signed 
 250 years ago yesterday, permission was given 
 to the Society to " assemble in a college or other 
 public place or hall within our City of London, 
 or in any other convenient place within ten miles 
 of the same." When the Universities were 
 engrossed in the din of the Civil War, " to the 
 neglect," as a contemporary writer says, " of 
 academical studies," science and philosophy took 
 refuge in the comparative peace and tranquillity 
 which the streets of the City of London could 
 then afford. The troubled reign of Charles I. 
 
 1 Speech delivered at the Celebration of the 250th Anniversary 
 at the Guildhall, July 16, 1912. 
 
 147
 
 148 THE ROYAL SOCIETY 
 
 gathered to London I again quote contemporary 
 words " divers worthy persons inquisitive intc 
 natural philosophy and other parts of humai 
 learning," men whose imagination and enthusiasn 
 had been fired by the " New Philosophy " thei 
 recently propounded. In the later days of th< 
 Commonwealth their meetings were held for i 
 time in my own University of Oxford at Wadharr 
 College, of which I am glad to see the Warder 
 here to-night ; and after the Restoration thej 
 found their headquarters within a few hundrec 
 yards of this hall at Old Gresham College, whicl 
 was the birthplace and cradle, and for some time 
 the regular place of meeting, of the Royal Society 
 The record of the Society begins, I thin! 
 justly, with a tribute to the influence of Francii 
 Bacon, whose fertile mind not only conceivec 
 the advantages of a college co-operating in th( 
 investigation of natural philosophy, but also ir 
 his New Atlantis outlined a practical plan foi 
 its foundation. As Mr. Balfour said recently 
 Bacon's great service to science was that " he 
 created the atmosphere in which scientific dis 
 covery flourishes." From the publication oj 
 the Novum Organum we may trace a steady anc 
 an ever - increasing interest in* the experimenta] 
 sciences, and Bacon's scheme finally found realisa- 
 tion in the incorporation of the Royal Society, 
 Its proud motto, " Nullius in Verba," reproduces 
 the true spirit of what is best in Bacon's teaching.
 
 THE ROYAL SOCIETY 149 
 
 But if the Society can trace its spiritual ancestry 
 to Francis Bacon, the actual figure of the pious 
 founder is to be discovered in a very different 
 quarter. Strange as it may seem, the Royal 
 Society is to-day the most vital, if not the most 
 characteristic, monument of King Charles II. 
 Whether the interest in anatomy displayed, as 
 your annals show, by the Society in its earliest 
 years was due to the proclivities of its Royal 
 patron, I do not know ; but certain it is that 
 Charles II. not only founded the Society, but he 
 took an active interest in its proceedings and 
 frequently asked for its advice. And he could 
 not have found a body more representative of 
 the best and the widest culture of his time. 
 
 When one looks over the list of the original 
 Fellows, what strikes one is the width and the 
 universality of the interests represented. Science 
 could not then, whatever may be the case now, 
 be charged with being the preserve of specialised 
 studies. With Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, 
 Robert Hooke scientific men, in our somewhat 
 narrow use of the term there come Sir Chris- 
 topher Wren, that early prodigy, as he is called, 
 of universal science, astronomer, physicist, physi- 
 ologist, as well as our greatest architect, perhaps 
 the most versatile intelligence that Europe has 
 seen since Leonardo da Vinci ; Cowley and 
 Dryden, Denham and Waller, better known to 
 posterity as poets than philosophers ; Evelyn,
 
 150 THE ROYAL SOCIETY 
 
 Aubrey, Petty, and a host of others, whose names 
 recall the spiritual and intellectual wealth of ar 
 epoch which we are wont too often to decry. Ir 
 the same roll with John Dryden is one of the chie: 
 victims of his satire, George Villiers, Duke o 
 Buckingham, who amid his various qualification; 
 for the chief office of State was, as we know 
 " chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon." Anc 
 I see from your records that history tells us tha 
 when this, perhaps the most original of th< 
 original Fellows of the Royal Society, was com 
 mitted to the Tower, a special laboratory wa: 
 fitted up for him there in order that he migh 
 practise chemistry ; and according to Bishoj 
 Burnet, he was "nearly" successful in discover 
 ing the philosopher's stone an illustration whicl 
 suggests that some people might be more profit 
 ably employed at present than either at West 
 minster or Whitehall. 
 
 The bulk, however, of the original Fellows o 
 the Royal Society appear to have been, in th 
 words of your first historian, Bishop Sprat 
 " gentlemen, free and unconfined." The Societ; 
 to this day numbers among its Fellows thos 
 who, like myself, have no claim to take an; 
 part but that of spectators in the pursuit of th 
 natural sciences, and who belong, like our prc 
 decessors in the reign of Charles II., so far as thi 
 branch of activity is concerned, to the category c 
 the unemployed. In the genial diary of Samu(
 
 THE ROYAL SOCIETY 151 
 
 Pepys, himself a Fellow, and, indeed, at one time, 
 I think, President of the Society, there are 
 entries that throw light on its early activities, 
 which, in those days, whatever may be the case 
 now, were much given to experiment. On one 
 occasion he records meeting in a tavern " a man, 
 a little frantic, whom the College hath hired for 
 20 shillings to have some of the blood of a 
 sheep let into his body, and it is to be done 
 on Saturday next." From a later entry it 
 appears that " the gentleman found himself 
 much better since, and as a new man, and will 
 have it done again, but," adds the diarist, " he 
 is a little cracked." But if we are too ready to 
 laugh at these early extravagances of experi- 
 mental science, it is as well also to remember that 
 it was under the auspices of Pepys that Newton's 
 Principia was produced. 
 
 I will not linger over these reminiscences of 
 the early days of the Society. The foundation 
 so fairly started has had a continuous career of 
 success and illustrious work. It has not escaped 
 its share of criticism and ridicule ; but it has 
 justified itself by its deeds. The position which 
 makes the letters F.R.S. one of the proudest 
 additions which an Englishman can make to his 
 name has been won by the sheer weight of 
 meritorious work. 
 
 The Society has not, I think, at any time had 
 any direct financial assistance from the Govern-
 
 152 THE ROYAL SOCIETY 
 
 ment. For this the Government may be criti- 
 cised ; but I venture to think the Society is to be 
 congratulated. It is not well that Science should 
 be a mendicant for State endowment. I do not 
 forget the annual grants for scientific research 
 which are administered by the Society ; but their 
 administration is not a benefit conferred on the 
 Society by the State, but a service rendered to 
 the State by the Society. 
 
 It would not be possible for any one to traverse 
 in a few moments the history of the Society, or to 
 chronicle the achievements of its Fellows, without 
 at the same time traversing and chronicling the 
 history of English science itself. There is hardly 
 a year when your roll has not been enriched by a 
 name to which not only we, as Englishmen, but 
 the whole world is indebted for a share in the 
 slow but steady subjection of Nature to the 
 intelligence of man that process which is best 
 described in Bacon's immortal words : Natura 
 non nisi parendo vincitur. If we recall the 
 names of Isaac Newton, who was, I think, for a 
 quarter of a century President of the Society, 
 of Locke, Flamsteed and Halley, Sir Hans 
 Sloane, Adam Smith, Woolaston and Watt, 
 Davy and Faraday, Pringle and Young, or, 
 closer to our own time, Darwin, Huxley, Hooker, 
 Herschel, Huggins, Sir Michael Foster, Lord 
 Kelvin, and one whose loss we lamented only a 
 few months ago, perhaps the greatest benefactor
 
 x THE ROYAL SOCIETY 153 
 
 in our time of the human race, Lord Lister the 
 roll contains the names of England's worthiest 
 children in the wide field of work which is com- 
 prised in the original project of this foundation. 
 The Royal Society which honoured them, and 
 was honoured by them, is remembered when we 
 remember them one and all. It has grown with 
 the growth of England ; it has advanced with 
 the advance of science ; and it stands now, after 
 250 years, firmly established in the confidence 
 of the nation and the respect of the world, still 
 faithful, still fruitful in the cause of human 
 progress and human enlightenment.
 
 XI 
 THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM 
 
 155
 
 XI 
 THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM 1 
 
 I ESTEEM it a high honour, for which I return you 
 my heartfelt thanks, to have been invited here 
 to-night as the guest of your Club. There are 
 few greater benefactors of the species than the 
 man who discovers a new bond of human com- 
 panionship and a fresh excuse for social inter- 
 course. If that be true, as I believe it is, the 
 founders of this club are entitled to a special 
 measure of gratitude. For they have not only 
 hit upon a hitherto untried expedient for bringing 
 men together to eat and drink and talk, but they 
 have, at the same time, invented a most admirable 
 test if I may, without irreverence, borrow a 
 phrase from the terminology of the Presbyterian 
 Church for "fencing the tables" against the 
 intrusion of pedants, Philistines, and bores. I 
 do not say that faith in our Omar Khayyam, 
 and FitzGerald as his prophet, is the narrow road 
 by which alone a man may find his way to 
 literary and social salvation. Apart from other 
 
 1 Delivered to the Omar Khayyam Club, April 27, 1898. 
 
 157
 
 158 RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM 
 
 reasons which might be adduced, it is enough for 
 us here to say that such intolerance ought to be 
 impossible to the followers of a poet who, in his 
 most dogmatic mood, will not go farther than 
 to concede that 
 
 A hair perhaps divides the False and True ; 
 and who is uttering his settled judgment of men's 
 differences, whether of taste, opinion, or creed, 
 when he extols 
 
 The Grape that can with Logic absolute, 
 The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute. 
 
 But this, at least, we may assert with confidence, 
 that no man, who has breathed the true spirit 
 of our poet and his great interpreter, can be any 
 longer a slave to the conventions which sterilise 
 and devastate such large areas of social inter- 
 course. To admire and delight in Omar, as he 
 is presented to us by FitzGerald, is one of those 
 subtle bonds of sympathy which are constantly 
 creating new ties of kinship, and new groups of 
 association, among men who are moved by the 
 art which belongs not to one age or country 
 but to all. 
 
 You have had many appreciations of Omar 
 from far more capable hands than mine. Nor 
 has he escaped faithful treatment from the critics, 
 who shake their sorrowful heads over his manifold 
 lapses from the path of orthodox belief and 
 correct conduct. A poet who avows that he 
 sampled and rejected the various beliefs which
 
 xi RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM 159 
 
 were on exhibition in the market of his day 
 who tells us that he 
 
 evermore 
 Came out by the same Door where in I went 
 
 bears a perilous resemblance to the Agnostic 
 whom some of us have met. The preacher who 
 exhorts his followers to abandon the wearing 
 pursuit of the secret of life ; to sit down and fill 
 their cups with the " old familiar juice " ; and 
 not to " heed the rumble of a distant drum," is 
 not very far from the " sty of Epicurus." Why 
 is it that, from the moment the genius of Fitz- 
 Gerald made him known to all who speak the 
 English language, he has taken rank with the 
 immortals whom no change of taste or fashion 
 can dethrone ? I do not pretend to give a full 
 answer to the question, but there are one or two 
 considerations which are obvious. First, as re- 
 gards form, apart from the strange fascination 
 of the metre, there is within a narrow compass, 
 in point of actual bulk, a wholeness and com- 
 pleteness in Omar which belongs only to the 
 highest art. You remember Heine's apology for 
 the fragmentary character of his " Atta Troll." 
 It must be content, he says in the preface, to 
 remain unfinished, like so many of the great 
 works of German genius Cologne Cathedral, 
 the God of Schelling, and the Prussian Constitu- 
 tion. There is nothing in Omar's work that 
 could be added to or taken from it without
 
 injuring its perfection. Then, as regards sub- 
 stance, where else in literature has the littleness of 
 man, contrasted with the baffling infinitude of his 
 environment, and the resulting duty of serenity 
 and acquiescence, been more brilliantly painted 
 or more powerfully enforced ? The million 
 bubbles that the Eternal Saki pours from his 
 bowl ; the clay which lies passive under the thump- 
 ing of the Potter ; the ball that is thrown hither 
 and thither about the field ; the helpless pawns 
 that the great Player moves into impossible 
 positions with an inscrutable purpose ; the end- 
 less procession of empty pageantries ; the sultans 
 and heroes who, with all their pomp and pride, 
 are after all but passing inmates of this " batter 'd 
 caravanserai " such is the crowd of vivid and 
 moving images which Omar's panorama presents 
 to us. As we gaze upon it the individual withers ; 
 the great men, who seemed to the intoxicated 
 vision of their own time to be the dominating 
 forces of the world, are seen to be but the flicker- 
 ing motes in the sunbeam : the crest raised by 
 a gust of wind upon the rising and falling wave. 
 
 The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, 
 The Leaves' of Life keep falling one by one. 
 
 These, if I understand them aright, are the 
 thoughts and pictures with which Omar and 
 FitzGerald have permanently enriched the poetry 
 of the world.
 
 XII 
 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 161 M
 
 XII 
 BENJAMIN JOWETT 1 
 
 I HAVE one claim to speak to this Resolution 
 which is not shared by either of the noble Lords 
 who have addressed you. It is that I am an 
 old Balliol man, and, like all Balliol men, I 
 should feel that any tribute to the memory of 
 our late Master was not complete if it did not 
 include an expression, however inadequate, of 
 the gratitude and affection of the great College 
 to which the best energies of his life were given. 
 Both the country and the University of Oxford 
 are the poorer by his death. England has lost 
 in him a man of letters, who perhaps did more 
 than any one to unlock to English readers the 
 treasure-house of ancient literature. The Uni- 
 versity, represented to-day in this place by one 
 who has the best title to speak in its name, 
 recognises in him not only the great Professor 
 and the great Vice-Chancellor, but, if I may say 
 so, the last survivor of our heroic age. But 
 
 1 Delivered at the Meeting at the University of London, 
 December 2, 1893, " To consider the forms which could be most 
 appropriately given to Memorials to the late Master of Balliol." 
 
 163
 
 164 BENJAMIN JOWETT zu 
 
 those of us who belong, as the Speaker and I do. 
 to Balliol, feel a more personal sense of loss. 
 It is as difficult for us to think of our College 
 without the Master as it would have been to 
 think of the Master without the College. For the 
 best part of fifty years their lives have been 
 closely entwined, and I am not guilty of exaggera- 
 tion if I say that, during the greater part of that 
 time, his character and his influence, more than 
 any other single force, have been the thread 
 which has connected, unbroken, the continuous 
 identity of the College, and bound together 
 successive generations of Balliol men. That 
 thread, worn out by ceaseless service, has at last 
 snapped. It is difficult, as Lord Salisbury has 
 said, perhaps it is impossible, to define, or even 
 to explain, the subtle power of his personality. 
 He had none of the vulgar marks of a successful 
 leader either of thought or action. He founded 
 no school ; nor was he the author or the apostle 
 of any system, constructive or even critical. In 
 a sense it is true that he left behind him no 
 disciples ; and to those who think that no man 
 can stamp his impress upon his generation unless 
 he is either a dogmatist or a partisan, his career 
 will be a constant puzzle. But to us who knew 
 him and saw him in the daily life of the College, 
 the secret of his power is no mystery. We cannot 
 hope to see again the counterpart of that refined 
 and fastidious mind, in whose presence intellectual
 
 xn BENJAMIN JOWETT 165 
 
 lethargy was stirred into life, and intellectual 
 pretentiousness sank into abashed silence. Still 
 less can we hope to see a character such as his ; 
 the union of worldly sagacity with the most 
 transparent simplicity of nature ; an intelligence 
 keen and unsleeping, but entirely detached, and 
 absorbed in the fortunes of a great institution and 
 its members. Upon his generosity no call could 
 be too heavy : with his delicate kindliness he 
 was ever ready to give the best hours of either 
 the day or the night to help and to advise the 
 humblest of those who appealed to him for aid. 
 These are the qualities, or some of the qualities, 
 which were the secret of his personality, and 
 which now are buried in his grave. No man of 
 our time, and few men of any time, can be more 
 truly said to have lived for the sake of his work. 
 Of that work Balliol College was from the begin- 
 ning, and remained to the end, the centre and 
 the inspiration. He has gone. We who remain, 
 and who owe him so much, may be sure of this 
 that there is no tribute which would have been 
 more welcome to him, and there is no memorial 
 which can more fittingly perpetuate his name, 
 than one which, while it expresses the gratitude 
 and the admiration of Englishmen of every class 
 and creed, will provide for the continuance of his 
 work within the walls of the College where he 
 lived, and which he served, all the days of his 
 life.
 
 XIII 
 SIR HENRY CAMPBELL -BANNERMAN 
 
 167
 
 XIII 
 SIR HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN 1 
 
 MR. SPEAKER Many of us, sir, have come here 
 fresh from the service in Westminster Abbey, 
 where, amidst the monuments and memories of 
 great men, the nation took its last farewell of 
 all that was mortal in our late Prime Minister. 
 But, sir, there is not a man whom I am addressing 
 now who does not feel that our tribute to the dead 
 would be incomplete if this House, of which, by 
 seniority, he was the father, and which for many 
 years he led, were not to offer to his memory to-day 
 its own special mark of reverence and affection. 
 I shall therefore propose, before I sit down, that 
 we should lay aside for to-day the urgent busi- 
 ness which has brought us together, and that the 
 House do at once adjourn until to-morrow. 
 
 It is within a few months of forty years since 
 Sir Henry Campbell - Bannerman took his seat 
 in this Chamber. Mr. Gladstone had just entered 
 upon his first Premiership in the plenitude of 
 his powers and of his authority. A new House, 
 
 1 Speech delivered in the House of Commons, April 27, 1908. 
 
 169
 
 170 SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN xm 
 
 elected upon an extended suffrage, had brought 
 to Westminster new men, new ideas ; as some 
 thought, a new era. Among the newcomers 
 there were probably few, judged by the super- 
 ficial tests which are commonly applied, who 
 seemed less obviously destined than Mr. Camp- 
 bell, as he then was, to fill the position he ulti- 
 mately reached. There have been men who, in 
 the cruel phrase of the ancient historian, were 
 universally judged to be fit for the highest place 
 only until they attained and held it. Our late 
 Prime Minister belonged to that rarer class whose 
 fitness for such a place, until they had attained 
 and held it, was never adequately understood. 
 It is true that he reached office much earlier in 
 his Parliamentary career than is the case with 
 most politicians. In successive Governments, at 
 the War Office, at the Admiralty, at the Irish 
 Office, and at the War Office again, he rendered 
 devoted and admirable service to the State. It 
 is no secret, and it is sufficient proof that he him- 
 self had no ambition for leadership, that, when 
 he was for the second time a Cabinet Minister, 
 he aspired, sir, to be seated in your chair. But 
 though he had too modest an estimate of himself 
 to desire, and still less to seek, the first place in 
 the State, it fell to him, after years of much storm 
 and stress, by a title which no one disputed ; and 
 he filled it with an ever-growing recognition in 
 all quarters of his unique qualifications.
 
 XIH SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN 171 
 
 What was the secret of the hold, which in these 
 later days he unquestionably had, on the admira- 
 tion and affection of men of all parties and men 
 of all creeds ? If, as I think was the case, he was 
 one of those men who require to be fully known 
 to be justly measured, may I say that the more 
 we knew him, both followers and opponents, the 
 more we became aware that on the moral as .on 
 the intellectual side he had endowments, rare 
 in themselves, still rarer in their combination ? 
 For example, he was singularly sensitive to human 
 suffering and wrong -doing; delicate and even 
 tender in his sympathies ; always disposed to 
 despise victories won in any sphere by mere brute 
 force ; an almost passionate lover of peace ; and 
 yet we have not seen in our time a man of greater 
 courage courage not of a defiant and aggressive 
 type, but calm, patient, persistent, indomitable. 
 
 Let me, sir, recall another apparent contrast 
 in his nature. In politics I think he may be 
 fairly described as an idealist in aim, and an 
 optimist by temperament. Great causes ap- 
 pealed to him. He was not ashamed, even on 
 the verge of old age, to see visions and to dream 
 dreams. He had no misgivings as to the future 
 of democracy ; he had a single-minded and un- 
 quenchable faith in the unceasing progress and 
 the growing unity of mankind ; none the less, in 
 the selection of men for the daily work of tilling 
 the political field, in the choice of this man or
 
 172 SIR H. CAMPBELL-BAXNERMAX *m 
 
 that for some particular task, he showed not 
 only that practical shrewdness which came to 
 him from his Scottish ancestors, but a touch of 
 the discernment and insight of a cultured citizen 
 of the world. In truth. Mr. Speaker, that which 
 gave him the authority and affection, which, 
 taken together, no one among his contemporaries 
 enjoyed in an equal measure, was not one quality 
 more than another, or any union of them: it 
 was the man himself. He never put himself 
 forward, yet no one had greater tenacity of 
 purpose ; he was the least cynical of mankind, 
 but no one had a keener eye for the humours 
 and ironies of the political situation. He was a 
 strenuous and uncompromising fighter, a strong 
 party man, but he harboured no resentment. 
 He was generous to a fault in appreciation of the 
 work of others, whether friends or foes. He met 
 both good and evil fortune with the same un- 
 clouded brow, the same unruffled temper, the 
 same unshakable confidence in the justice and 
 righteousness of his cause. Sir Henry Campbell- 
 Bannerman had hardly attained the highest 
 place, and made himself fully known, when a 
 domestic trial, the saddest that can come to any 
 of us, darkened his days, and dealt what proved 
 to be a mortal blow to his heart. But he 
 never for a moment shirked his duty to the 
 State ; he laboured on we here have seen it at 
 close quarters he laboured on under strain
 
 *m SLR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN 173 
 
 and anxiety ; and, under a maiming sense of a 
 loss that was ever fresh, he was always ready to 
 respond to every public demand. And, sir, as 
 we knew him here, so after he was stricken down 
 in the midst of his work, a martyr, if ever there 
 was one, to conscience and duty, so he continued 
 to the end. 
 
 I can never forget the last time that I was 
 privileged to see him, almost on the eve of his 
 resignation. His mind was clear; his interest 
 in the affairs of the countrv and of this House 
 
 / 
 
 was undimmed ; his talk was still lighted up by 
 flashes of that homely, mellow wisdom peculiarly 
 his own. Still more to be remembered are his 
 serene patience, his untroubled equanimity, and 
 the quiet trust with which during these long, 
 weary days he awaited the call which he knew 
 was soon to come. He has gone to his rest, and 
 to-day in this House, of which he was the senior 
 and the most honoured member, we may call a 
 truce in the strife of parties, while we together 
 remember our common loss, and pay our united 
 homage to a gracious and cherished memory. 
 
 How happy is he born or taught, 
 
 That serveth not another's will ; 
 Whose armour is his honest thought, 
 
 And simple truth his utmost skill ! 
 
 This man is freed from servile bands 
 
 Of hope to rise, or fear to fall ; 
 Lord of himself, though not of lands ; 
 
 And, having nothing, yet hath all.
 
 XIV 
 KING EDWARD VII 
 
 175
 
 XIV 
 KING EDWARD VII 1 
 
 I FIND it my duty to make two Motions to the 
 House. Though in point of form they will no 
 doubt be put separately from the Chair, I think 
 it right to read them both at once, and I shall 
 confine what I have to say in support of both, 
 in accordance with precedent, within the compass 
 of a single speech. The first Motion is as follows : 
 
 That a humble Address be presented to His Majesty 
 to assure His Majesty of the heartiest sympathy of 
 this House in the grievous affliction and loss by the 
 death of the late King, His Majesty's father, of blessed 
 and glorious memory : 
 
 That we shall ever remember with grateful affection 
 the zeal and success with which our late Sovereign 
 laboured to consolidate the peace and concord of the 
 world, to aid every merciful endeavour for the allevia- 
 tion of human suffering, and to unite in justice and 
 freedom all races and classes of his subjects with his 
 Imperial Throne : 
 
 To offer His Majesty our loyal congratulations upon 
 his auspicious accession : 
 
 To assure His Majesty of our devotion to his Royal 
 person, and of our sure conviction that his reign will, 
 
 1 Speech delivered in the House of Commons, May 11, 1910. 
 
 177 N
 
 178 KING EDWARD VII 
 
 under the favour of Divine Providence, be distinguished 
 by unswerving efforts to promote the virtue, prosperity, 
 and contentment of the realm, and to guard the rights 
 and liberties of His Majesty's faithful people. 
 
 The second Motion will be to the following 
 effect : 
 
 That a message of condolence be sent to Her Majesty 
 the Queen-Mother to assure Her Majesty of the deep 
 and warm sympathy which this House feels for Her 
 Majesty in this melancholy time of sorrow and irrepar- 
 able loss ; and that this House and the nation will 
 ever preserve towards Her Majesty the sentiments of 
 unalterable reverence and affection. 
 
 Mr. Deputy-Speaker, the late King, who has 
 been suddenly taken from us, had at the time of 
 his death not yet completed the tenth year of 
 his reign. Those years' were crowded with mov- 
 ing and stirring events, abroad, in the Empire, 
 and here at home. In our relations with foreign 
 countries they have been years of growing friend- 
 ships, of new understandings, of stronger and 
 surer safeguards for the peace of mankind. 
 Within the Empire during the same time the 
 sense of interdependence, the consciousness of 
 common interests and common risks, the ever- 
 tightening bonds of corporate unity, have been 
 developed and vivified as they had never been 
 before. Here at home, as though it were by 
 way of contrast, controversial issues of the 
 gravest kind economic, social, constitutional 
 have ripened into a rapid maturity. In all these
 
 xiv KING EDWARD VII 179 
 
 multiform manifestations of our national and 
 Imperial life, history will assign a part of singular 
 dignity and authority to the great Ruler whom 
 we have lost. 
 
 In external affairs his powerful personal in- 
 fluence was steadily and zealously directed to 
 the avoidance not only of war, but of the causes 
 and pretexts of war, and he well earned the title 
 by which he will always be remembered, " The 
 Peacemaker of the World." 
 
 Within the boundaries of his own Empire, by 
 his intimate knowledge of its component parts ; 
 by his broad and elastic sympathy, not only with 
 the ambitions and the aspirations, but with the 
 sufferings and the hardships of his people; by 
 his ready response to any and every appeal, 
 whether to the sense of justice or to the spirit 
 of compassion ; he won a degree of loyalty, affec- 
 tion, and confidence which few Sovereigns have 
 ever enjoyed. 
 
 At home we all recognise that above the din 
 and the dust of our hard-fought controversies, 
 detached from party, attached only to the 
 common interest, we had in him an arbiter, 
 ripe in experience, judicial in temper, at once 
 a reverent worshipper of our traditions, and a 
 watchful guardian of our constitutional liberties. 
 
 One is tempted, indeed constrained, on such 
 an occasion as this to ask what were the qualities 
 which enabled a man called comparatively late 
 
 Nl
 
 180 KING EDWARD VII 
 
 in life to new duties of unexampled complexity 
 what were the qualities which in practice proved 
 him so admirably fitted to the task, and have 
 given him an enduring and illustrious record 
 among the rulers and governors of the nations. 
 I should be disposed to put first what sounds 
 a commonplace, but in its persistent and un- 
 failing exercise is one of the rarest of virtues, 
 his strong, abiding, dominating sense of public 
 duty. King Edward, be it remembered, was a 
 man of many and varied interests. He was a 
 sportsman in the best sense, an ardent and 
 discriminating patron of the Arts. He was as 
 well equipped as any man of his time for the 
 give-and-take of social intercourse ; wholly free 
 from the prejudices and narrowing rules of caste ; 
 at home in all companies ; an enfranchised 
 citizen of the world. To such a man, endowed 
 as he was by nature, placed where he was by 
 fortune and by circumstance, there was open, 
 if he had chosen to enter it, an unlimited field 
 for self-indulgence. But, sir, as every one will 
 acknowledge who was brought into daily contact 
 with him in the sphere of affairs, his duty to the 
 State always came first. In this great business 
 community there was no better man of business ; 
 no man by whom the humdrum obligations- 
 punctuality, method, preciseness, and economy 
 of time and speech were more keenly recognised 
 or more severely practised. I speak with the
 
 xiv KING EDWARD VII 181 
 
 privilege of close experience when I say that 
 wherever he was, whatever may have been his 
 apparent preoccupations, in the transaction of 
 the business of the State there were never any 
 arrears, there was never any trace of confusion, 
 there was never any moment of avoidable delay. 
 Next to these, sir I am still in the domain of prac- 
 tice and administration I should put a singular, 
 perhaps an unrivalled, tact in the management 
 of men, and a judgment of intuitive shrewdness 
 as to the best outlet from perplexed and often 
 baffling situations. He had in its highest and 
 best development the genius of common-sense. 
 
 These rare gifts of practical efficiency were, 
 during the whole of his Kingship, yoked to the 
 service of a great ideal. He was animated, 
 every day of his Sovereignty, by the thought 
 that he was at once the head and the chief 
 servant of that vast and complex organism 
 which we call the British Empire. He recognised 
 in the fullest degree both the powers and the 
 limitations of a Constitutional Monarch. Here, 
 at home, he was, though no politician as every 
 one knows a keen Social Reformer. Already, 
 as Prince of Wales, he had entered with zeal into 
 the work of two Royal Commissions one on the 
 Housing of the Working Classes, and the other 
 on the problems connected with the Aged Poor. 
 His magnificent service to our hospitals, both 
 before and after his accession, will never be
 
 182 KING EDWARD VII 
 
 forgotten. He loved his people at home and 
 over the seas. Their interests were his interests, 
 and their fame was his fame. He had no self 
 apart from them. 
 
 I will not touch for more than a moment on 
 more delicate and sacred ground ; on his personal 
 charm, the warmth and wealth of his humanity, 
 his unfailing considerateness for all who in any 
 capacity were permitted to work for him. I 
 will only say in this connection that no man in 
 our time has been more justly beloved by his 
 family and his friends, and no ruler in our or in 
 any time has been more sincerely true, more 
 unswervingly loyal, more uniformly kind to his 
 advisers and his servants. By the unsearchable 
 counsels of the Disposer of Events he has been 
 called, suddenly and without warning, to his 
 account. We are still dazed under the blow 
 which has befallen us. It is too soon, as yet, 
 even to attempt to realise its full meaning ; but 
 this, at least, we may say at once, and with full 
 assurance, that he has left to his people a memory 
 and an example which they will never forget ; a 
 memory of great opportunities greatly employed ; 
 and an example which the humblest of his 
 subjects may treasure and strive to follow, of 
 simplicity, courage, self-denial, tenacious devo- 
 tion, up to the last moment of conscious life, to 
 work, to duty, and to service. 
 
 I ask the House to join in the condolences
 
 KING EDWARD VII 183 
 
 which we offer to our new Sovereign, the expres- 
 sion of our deepest sympathies with her who for 
 nearly fifty years has shared the joys and sorrows, 
 the cares and responsibilities of the King whom 
 we have lost. Here words fail me. The Queen- 
 Mother, to call her by her new title, is already 
 enthroned in the love of the British people. 
 There is not a heart in the Empire which does 
 not beat with sympathy for her to-day in her 
 suffering and sorrow. 
 
 To these, our heartfelt condolences, I ask the 
 House to add its congratulations to His Majesty 
 King George V. on his accession to the throne 
 of his ancestors. Our new Sovereign has served 
 a long apprenticeship to his task. He has 
 personally visited almost every part of his 
 world -wide dominions, and none of us can 
 forget the weighty and impressive summary of 
 our Imperial problems which he delivered on his 
 return from Australia. He has the aid and 
 support of a gracious Consort, born and bred 
 among us. He takes upon his shoulders, at a 
 wholly unexpected call, and at a time of stress 
 and difficulty, as heavy a burden as could fall 
 to the lot of man. Let us, the Commons of this 
 United Kingdom, assure him that it is not only 
 the solemn prayer and the eager hope, but that 
 it is the confident belief of his people, that he will 
 show himself a worthy son and successor of the 
 great King whom we mourn to-day.
 
 XV 
 
 ALFRED LYTTELTON 
 
 186
 
 XV 
 ALFRED LYTTELTON 1 
 
 WE should not, I think, be doing justice to the 
 feelings which are uppermost in many of our 
 hearts if we passed to the business of the day 
 without taking notice of the fresh gap which 
 has been made in our ranks by the untimely 
 death of Mr. Alfred Lytteltpn. It is a loss of 
 which I hardly trust myself to speak ; for apart 
 from ties of relationship, there had subsisted 
 between us, for thirty-three years, a close friend- 
 ship and affection which no political differences 
 were ever allowed to loosen or even to invade. 
 Nor can I better describe him than by saying 
 that he perhaps, of all men of this generation, 
 came nearest to the mould and ideal of manhood 
 which every English father would like to see his 
 son aspire to, and if possible to attain. The 
 bounty of nature, enriched and developed, not 
 only by early training, but by constant self- 
 discipline through life, blended in him gifts and 
 graces which, taken alone, are rare, and in such 
 
 1 Speech delivered in the House of Commons, July 7, 1913. 
 
 187
 
 188 ALFRED LYTTELTON 
 
 attractive union are rarer still. Body, mind, and 
 character the school-room, the cricket-field, the 
 Bar, the House of Commons each made its 
 separate contribution of faculty and of experience 
 to a many-sided and harmonious whole. But 
 what he was he gave; gave with such ease and 
 exuberance that I think it may be said without 
 exaggeration that wherever he moved he seemed 
 to radiate vitality and charm. He was, as we 
 here know, a strenuous fighter. He has left 
 behind him no resentments and no enmities ; 
 nothing but a gracious memory of a manly and 
 winning personality ; the memory of one who 
 served with an unstinted measure of devotion 
 his generation and his country. He has been 
 snatched away in what we thought was the full 
 tide of a buoyant life, still full of promise and of 
 hope. What more can we say ? We can only 
 bow once again before the decrees of the Supreme 
 Wisdom. Those who loved him and they are 
 many in all schools of opinion, in all ranks 
 and walks of life, when they think of him will 
 say to themselves : 
 
 This was the happy Warrior ; this was He 
 That every Man in arms should wish to be.
 
 XVI 
 EARL KITCHENER 
 
 189
 
 XVI 
 EARL KITCHENER 1 
 
 I BEG to move- 
 That this House will, to-morrow, resolve itself into 
 a Committee to consider an humble Address to His 
 Majesty, praying that His Majesty will give directions 
 that a monument be erected, at the public charge, to 
 the memory of the late Field-Marshal Earl Kitchener, 
 with an inscription expressing the admiration of this 
 House for his illustrious military career, and its gratitude 
 for his devoted services to the State. 
 
 When the House adjourned for the Whitsun- 
 tide Recess Lord Kitchener had just received a 
 strong and unmistakable expression of its con- 
 fidence, and the next day he met in private 
 conference a large number of its Members, in- 
 cluding some of his most persistent and, as it 
 then seemed, irreconcilable critics, with the result 
 that he and they parted on terms not only of 
 mutual respect, but of complete understanding. 
 I am glad to remember that, at his last interview 
 with me, he expressed his pleasure at what had 
 happened, and his hope that this was the first 
 
 1 Speech delivered in the House of Commons, June 21, 1916. 
 
 191
 
 192 EARL KITCHENER xvi 
 
 step in a relationship of growing confidence and 
 sympathy. When we said farewell, after nearly 
 two years of daily intercourse, which had gone 
 on through all the strain and stress of the war, 
 there was no thought on either side of more 
 than a temporary parting; no foreshadowing of 
 a separation which neither time nor space can 
 bridge. Providence, in its wisdom, was prepar- 
 ing for him sudden release from his burden of 
 care and toil. We who for the moment remain 
 those of us in particular who shared, as I did, 
 his counsel in the greatest emergencies of our 
 time, with ever-growing intimacy and fulness- 
 can only bow our heads before the Supreme Will, 
 with whom are the issues of life and death. 
 
 Lord Kitchener, in whatever environment of 
 circumstances or condition he might have been 
 placed, would have been, as he was always and 
 everywhere, a great and a dominant personality. 
 He was tried in many different ordeals, and he 
 always survived and conquered the test. He 
 began his career in the Royal Engineers without 
 any advantage either of birth or of favour. I 
 ^remember well, about a year ago, when we were 
 talking one day of the importance of promoting 
 young officers who had distinguished themselves 
 in war, he told me that he himself had been for, 
 I think, twelve years, and remained, a subaltern 
 in that fine and illustrious Corps. He never 
 chafed nor fretted after the fashion of smaller
 
 EARL KITCHENER 193 
 
 men. The hour came to him, as it comes to all 
 who have discernment, faculty, and will, and 
 from that moment his future was assured. His 
 name is inseparably associated with that of Lord 
 Cromer in one of the greatest achievements of 
 our race and time the emancipation and re- 
 generation of Egypt. To his genius we owe the 
 conquest of the Sudan, and to his organising 
 initiative the process, which has ever since gone 
 on, of substituting over a vast, to a large extent 
 a devastated, area, civilisation for barbarism, 
 justice for caprice and cruelty, a humane and 
 equitable rule for a desolating and sterilising 
 tyranny. 
 
 From Egypt he was called, in a great Imperial 
 emergency, to South Africa, where, in due time, 
 he brought hostilities to a close, and helped to 
 lay the foundations of that great and rapidly 
 consolidating fabric which has welded alienated 
 races, and given us, in the great conflict of to- 
 day, a unique example of the service which local 
 autonomy can render to Imperial strength. The 
 next stage of his life was given to India, where 
 he reconstituted and reorganised our Army, 
 native and British. 
 
 Recalled to Egypt, he was displaying the same 
 gifts in civil administration which he had already 
 illustrated in the military sphere, when at the 
 outbreak of the war he obeyed, with the alacrity 
 of a man who has become the willing servant of
 
 194 EARL KITCHENER 
 
 duty, the summons to direct and to recreate our 
 Imperial Forces in the supreme crisis of our 
 national history. He brought to his new task 
 the same sleepless energy, the same resourceful- 
 ness, the same masterful personality, which never 
 failed him in any of the fields of action in which 
 he was, during nearly fifty years, called on behalf 
 of his country to play his part. His career has 
 been cut short while still in the exercise and 
 promise of unexhausted powers and possibilities. 
 No one is less fitted than I feel myself at this 
 moment to be, to make an analysis or appraise- 
 ment of his services to the State. I will only say 
 this, that few men that I have known had less 
 reason to shrink from submitting their lives to 
 
 those pure eyes 
 And perfect witness of all-judging Jove. 
 
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