I CARLYLB 
 DARWIN 
 
 GLADSTONE 
 _ ELIOT 
 ; IBSKN 
 ARNOLD 
 
 BRADLAUGH 
 WATTS 
 MAZZINI 
 7ICTORIA ' 
 
 ' NEWSMAN 
 STANLEY 
 
 MARTINEAU 
 
 uiiiiniiimiitniiinumiiiuiiiniiiiiHiimiiHiniiiiiiin
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 /
 
 ^^^Ku^ 
 
 MAKERS OF THE 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY
 
 THE MIND OF THE CENTURY. 
 
 Small Crown Svo, cloth, 2s. ; paper, is. 
 
 Poetry, by Lionel Johnson. 
 Drama, by William Archer. 
 Fiction, by Arthur Waugh. 
 Essays, by Henry W. Nevixson. 
 Art, by Joseph Pennell. 
 Music, by G. C. Ashton-Jonson. 
 History, by J. A. NiCKLiN. 
 Travel, by Major Martin Hume. 
 Tiieology, by Rev. A. W. Hutton. 
 Philosophy, by W. F. Alexander. 
 Economics, by J. A. HoBSON. 
 Education, by Francis Storr. 
 Chemistry, by Dr. W. A. Tilden. 
 Medicine, by Dr. H. J. Campbell. 
 Natural Science, by Edward Clodd. 
 And Applied Science, by W. A. Price. 
 
 London : T. Fisher Unwin, 
 Paternoster Square, E.C.
 
 Makers of the 
 Nineteenth Century 
 
 By 
 
 Richard A. Armstrong, B.A. 
 
 Author of " God and the Soul," " Faith 
 and Doubt in the Century's Poets," &c. 
 
 London 
 
 T. Fisher Unwin 
 
 Paternoster Square 
 
 1901
 
 ^All rights reserved)
 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE addresses gathered in this volume are 
 simply pulpit lectures given in the ordinary 
 course of my ministry on Sunday evenings. Their 
 appeal as printed is the same as their appeal as 
 spoken : not to the critic or the widely read, but to 
 the average thoughtful man or woman, and espe- 
 cially the young man or woman, of our time. 
 I therefore do not assume in them that the works 
 of the writers I discuss are familiar to the reader. 
 Doubtless in many cases they are, for there is 
 nothing recondite in these studies. But I have learnt 
 to know that most books have not been read by 
 most men, and that the knowledge conventionally 
 ascribed to " every schoolboy " overlaps the actual 
 knowledge of most of us. Therefore, even in treat- 
 ing those whose names are commonest on our lips, 
 I have told something of what they have said or 
 done, before entering on the criticism thereof. 
 
 My principle of selection has been far from 
 scientific. I have spoken and written about such 
 "Nineteenth Century Makers" as have had for me 
 some special interest, either by the influence of their 
 characters or writings on my own thought and life, 
 or by some personal contact. I am not guilty of 
 
 iP.^3<^-1 n
 
 PREFACE 
 
 thinking that these thirteen have been the supreme 
 " Makers " of our age. Some of them, indeed, 
 would so rank on any principle of computation ; 
 but others can advance no such claim. Omissions, 
 too, are accounted for in other ways. I had recently 
 published lectures on Wordsworth and on Browning 
 with other poets ; lectures by other preachers on 
 Shelley, Tennyson, and Ruskin, were intercalated 
 with those treated in this book. But a host of others, 
 statesmen, reformers, thinkers, writers, rise up in 
 the imagination claiming foremost rank. Here I 
 have been content to discuss one representative of 
 each of my thirteen types. 
 
 The order of presentation is unscientific too. It 
 is simply the order in which it was convenient to 
 prepare the lectures, and, save in the case of the 
 final trio, there is little organic connection between 
 one subject and the next. 
 
 I have erased such notes of time and place as 
 could have no significance for the reader. But an 
 utterance on Queen Victoria delivered but five days 
 after her " passing " could not but bear the impres- 
 sion of that sad and solemn moment. And a 
 discourse on" James Martineau delivered from the 
 pulpit and in the church which were erected for his 
 ministry could not be stripped of local reference. 
 He was the incumbent of Hope Street Church, 
 Liverpool, from 1849 to 1857. 
 
 RICHARD A. ARMSTRONG. 
 
 Liverpool, 
 April, igoi. 
 
 VI
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Preacher : Thomas Carlyle . . i 
 
 II. The Man of Science : Charles Darwin . 15 
 
 III. The Statesman : William Ewart Glad- 
 
 stone . . . . -31 
 
 IV. The NoveHst : " George Eliot " . .47 
 
 V. The Dramatist : Henrik Ibsen . . 65 
 Yl, The Critic : Matthew Arnold . / • ^3 
 
 VII. The Iconoclast : Charles Bradlaugh . loi 
 
 VIII. The Painter : George Frederick Watts . 119 
 
 IX. The Patriot : Giuseppe Mazzini . . 135 
 
 X. The Monarch : Queen Victoria . .151 
 
 XI. The Ecclesiastic : John Henry Newman . 167 
 
 XII. The Broad Churchman : Arthur Penryhn 
 
 Stanley . . . . -183 
 
 XIII. The Prophet- Philosopher; James Martineau 199 
 
 vii
 
 ^f 
 
 t
 
 THE PREACHER: THOMAS 
 CARL YLE 
 
 fi
 
 I 
 
 THE PREACHER: THOMAS 
 CARL YLE 
 
 THE Nineteenth Century of the Christian era 
 has run its course. What has the dead cen- 
 tury achieved ? What hes hidden in the century 
 that has dawned ? They are great questions. The 
 first may be answered in considerable measure. 
 The second can be answered hardly at all. 
 
 I propose to consider some things that have been 
 said and done these hundred years in some of the 
 departments of human thought and life. And to 
 each of those departments I would attach some one 
 great representative name, and see what he who 
 bears it has accomplished, what up-lift and on-lift 
 he has given to our common humanity. 
 
 And I begin with the Preacher, — the man, that 
 is, who by living word has touched the springs of 
 emotion and of conduct. For of all men I incline 
 to think the great preacher — the man who preaches 
 by heart and soul and life, and not by pen and lip 
 alone — is the very greatest, the one the world has 
 needed and will need most of all that the kingdom 
 of God may come. 
 
 3
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 And for Nineteenth Century preacher I might 
 have taken Robertson, of Brighton, the kiminous 
 exponent of Christian verities under new aspect and 
 with new meaning ; or Liddon, the golden-mouthed ; 
 or Spurgeon, the mighty hammerer, whose titanic 
 force gave new Hfe to an old and almost dead theo- 
 logy; or Martineau, who so blended religion and 
 philosophy that it is hard to untwist their strands. 
 But I have taken Thomas Carlyle, who never in all his 
 life stood in any pulpit, who held the priesthood of 
 no Church, who subscribed no Creed ever drawn 
 by the hand of man. And I have chosen him in 
 preference to all the professional preachers, Channing 
 or Newman, Liddon or Spurgeon, because I think 
 that the appeal of his books to the conscience and 
 soul of England exceeded in power and effect — in 
 awakening and revolutionising energy — that of any 
 other preacher of them all. 
 
 Every Briton should try to realise the grim, strong, 
 rough-hewn personality of this man, as he looked 
 out from the farmsteads of Ecclefechan and Craigen- 
 puttock, or from that quiet little house at Chelsea, 
 on the great seething world with its stupendous 
 problems and its terrific struggles. Says Emerson, 
 who visited him at Craigenputtock : " I found the 
 house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely 
 scholar nourished his mighty heart." " He was tall 
 and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed, and 
 holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in 
 easy command, clinging to his northern accent with 
 evident relish ; full of lively anecdote, and with a 
 streaming humour which floated everything he 
 looked upon." Such was the young man. Yet he 
 
 4
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 had marvellous powers of taciturnity as well. And 
 who does not know the portrait when age was 
 creeping on — the shaggy hair unkempt, the head 
 leaning, not a little weary, on the hand, the sad eye 
 outlooking, taking in all things to transmute them 
 in that great brain compacted so nobly, so finely 
 strung ? 
 
 What was the man's message ? What did he 
 preach ? Chief of all, surely, that without which no 
 man, no nation, no era can be great — earnestness, 
 veracity. 
 
 For Carlyle woke upon a time when thought and 
 art and life were shallow. In politics, in religion, in 
 all the supreme concerns of man, formulae were 
 accepted which were formulas and little more, 
 unprobed by any ; conventions prevailed which had 
 no root in reality ; creeds were recited, shibboleths 
 ran current, which were out of relation to any deep- 
 lying and enduring truth ; principles there were not, 
 known or proclaimed to men in general, by which 
 to steer a course or frame a purpose. A deep under- 
 current indeed there was, but inarticulate as yet ; on 
 the surface of society all was superficial. The philo- 
 sophy of the Eighteenth century had faded out ; the 
 philosophy of the Nineteenth was forging over there 
 in Germany, but as yet found no voice in England. 
 When Carlyle first spoke, the world was mid-way 
 between the reaction from the French Revolution 
 of the 1790's, and the New Revolutionary movements 
 of 1848. What genuine honest belief there was, was 
 for the most part materialistic ; the most earnestly 
 propounded maxims of life were utilitarian ; God, if 
 believed in at all, was a clever mechanician ; and 
 
 5
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 not wisdom, or insight, or reflection was preached as 
 the highest intellectual good, but correct information 
 on the surface of nature and of history. 
 
 And the great soul of Carlyle burst the bonds ; 
 and his words came like molten fire upon an un- 
 believing and dilettante age. 
 
 Earnestness, Veracity : these were the first and 
 supremest needs. " Sartor Resartus," the great auto- 
 biographical self-revelation of Carlyle, throbs with 
 that message from end to end. Earnestness : all the 
 conventions of society, the "aesthetic teas" with their 
 pretty compliments and petty gossip, the superficial 
 learning, the little scratchings of the current science 
 on the rock-face of nature, the "clothes" that alone 
 differentiate king from beggar, these are absolutely 
 worthless in the eyes of earnest men. Life is a 
 great, an awful task. It is for men to bring to it all 
 their powers wrought up by utmost striving to 
 highest possible efficiency. And veracity : away with 
 the shams ! Let thought be deep and strong. 
 Better doubt and disbelief than to believe a lie. 
 The absolute worth or worthlessness of things, let 
 us know it as it is, and make no pretence, whether 
 to cajole others or to deceive our own selves. 
 
 Yes, for most strenuous minds Unbelief must 
 come before Belief, Doubt before Conviction. With 
 Teufelsdrockh at any rate, the figure which Carlyle 
 clothes with his own soul-history, so it was. "Not 
 till after long years and unspeakable agonies did the 
 believing heart surrender." "But through such Pur- 
 gatory pain, it is appointed us to pass ; first must 
 the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop 
 piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, 
 
 6
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 freed from this its charnel-house, is to arise on us, 
 new-born of Heaven, and with newheahng under its 
 wings." 
 
 And so I suppose the greatest chapters Carlyle 
 ever wrote are those three in the second book of 
 "Sartor," named "The Everlasting No," "Centre of 
 Indifference," and "The Everlasting Yea." They 
 describe his own soul as the blank unbelief came 
 sailing over him, blotting out, as in a fog, all the 
 traditional religious beliefs which he had learnt at 
 his mother's knee ; and then the reactionary period 
 of indifference to the whole perennial problem ; and 
 then the soft dawning of the brighter day, and the 
 profound conviction of God and Duty and Love and 
 the Eternal Life. 
 
 First, the sweeping of unbelief over the eager 
 mind: there is no guide. He stands "shouting 
 question after question in the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, 
 and receiving no answer but an Echo." " It is all a 
 grim Desert, this fair world of his ; wherein is heard 
 only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of 
 despairing, hate-filled men ; and no Pillar of Cloud 
 by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer 
 guides the Pilgrim." 
 
 Yet even so, he knew afterwards that it had all 
 been the leading of God. " Unprofitable servants 
 as we all are," he writes, " perhaps at no era of his 
 life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, 
 the Servant of God, than even now when doubting 
 God's existence." Yet awful was the blank. " To 
 me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of 
 Volition, even of Hostility : it was one huge, dead, 
 immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead 
 
 7
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the 
 vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and Mill of Death 1 " 
 
 But then came a day to Teufelsdrockh — and he 
 surely is but the symbol of Carlyle himself — when 
 walking the hot and steaming streets, suddenly there 
 rose in him a Thought — great, far-reaching, sig- 
 nificant. " I asked myself : ' What art thou afraid 
 of ? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever 
 pipe and whimper, and go cowering and trembling ? 
 Despicable biped ! what is the sum-total of the 
 worst that lies before thee ? Death ? Well, Death ; 
 and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the 
 Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee ! 
 Hast thou not a heart ; canst thou not suffer what- 
 soever it be ; and as a Child of Freedom, though 
 outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while 
 it consumes thee ? Let it come then ; I will meet 
 it, and defy it ! ' And as I so thought, there rushed 
 like a stream of fire over my whole soul ; and I 
 shook base Fear away from me for ever." 
 
 So he has shaken himself free from old super- 
 stitions, affirmations and negations alike. But he 
 has made the great discovery that behind this vast 
 material universe, this grinding steam-engine of 
 forces, there is an unseen world, that the real 
 powers are not in the seen things, which are but 
 clothes, but in the unseen, which are spirit. 
 Laws, Government ? Where are they ? Not in 
 Downing Street or Palais Bourbon, nor in Papers 
 tied with tape. But "everywhere, nowhere." 
 Government ? " Seen only in its works, this too 
 is a thing aeriform, invisible ; or if you will, mystic 
 and miraculous. So spiritual is our whole daily 
 
 8
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 life : all that we do springs out of Mystery, Spirit, 
 invisible Force." 
 
 Yes, the invisible rules the visible, the spirit of 
 man his body ; it is the will that shapes the world 
 to its purpose. But man : is that all ? This great 
 Universe itself, this grinding steam-engine, this 
 loom with its rattling shuttle ; nay, this great, 
 mysterious outspread heaven, those stars which are 
 strewn through the infinite space : behind them is 
 there no unseen Spirit ? Man made not them, nor 
 guides them. Who breathed them forth ? Who 
 moves them through their orbits ? 
 
 His young enthusiasms had been slain in the 
 collapse of all belief, their crop burnt up in the heat 
 of his despair. But there was to be " a second 
 crop." He was presently to " see the perennial 
 greensward, and sit under umbrageous cedars, 
 which defy all Drought (and Doubt)." 
 
 He sits one day, in his wanderings, on a high table- 
 land, facing the great mountains. The wondrous 
 unity of Nature possesses him. Nature, so beautiful, 
 majestic, tender, seems to speak, to whisper to him 
 with a strange soothing and uplifting. Nature : 
 " Or " — he cries — " what is nature ? Ha ! why 
 do I not name thee God ? Art not thou 'the Living 
 Garment of God ? ' O Heavens, is it in very deed 
 He, then, that ever speaks through thee ; that lives 
 and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me ?" 
 
 " Fore-shadows," he goes on in what must be 
 taken as the supreme classical passage in all the 
 writings of Carlyle, " Fore-shadows, call them rather 
 fore-splendours, of that Truth, and Beginning of 
 Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter 
 
 9
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 than Day-spring to the ship-wrecked in Nova 
 Zembia ; ah, hke the mother's voice to the Httle 
 child that strays bewildered, weeping, in unknown 
 tumults ; like soft streamings of celestial music to 
 my too-exasperated heart, came that Evangel. The 
 Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-Jwuse 
 ■with spectres; but godlike and my Father's!" The 
 Universe not dead or demoniacal — but Godlike and 
 our Father's. Take that to heart as the Supreme 
 Word of this great doubter, questioner, shouter into 
 the Sibyl-cave ; in whom at last, because he was 
 earnest and veracious, and of a great courage and 
 determination, the questioner was merged in the 
 prophet, the doubt transmuted to transcendent 
 conviction. 
 
 "Godlike and my Father's." And so, says he, 
 " With other eyes, too, could I now look upon my 
 fellow man : with an infinite Love, with an infinite 
 Pity. Poor wandering, wayward man ! Art thou 
 not tired, and beaten with stripes, even as I am ? 
 Ever, whether thou bear the royal mantle or the 
 beggar's gabardine, art thou not so weary, so heavy- 
 laden ? — and thy Bed of Rest is but a Grave. O my 
 Brother, my Brother, why cannot I shelter thee in 
 my bosom, and wipe away all tears from thy eyes ? " 
 
 But immense as is the value of Carlyle's proclama- 
 tion to the Nineteenth Century of that " Everlasting 
 Yea" which is the one only possible solution of the 
 existence of the universe and the regal power of the 
 mind of man, not less strenuous is his practical 
 message to the men of his time. He saw in the 
 practical life of our race the ceaseless conflict between 
 the iron bonds of necessity in which the world is 
 
 10
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 bound, and the free spirit which is our inheritance 
 as sons of God. And he perceived that only in 
 obedience, loyal and unswerving, can our freedom 
 be truly realised. Duty is the key of life. Not what 
 we would are we to do ; but often what we must, 
 and always what we should. " Obedience," so he 
 writes, " is our universal duty and destiny ; wherein 
 whoso will not bend must break : too early and too 
 thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that 
 Would, in this world of ours, is as mere zero to 
 Should, and for most part as the smallest fractions 
 even to Shall." But obedience is a leading, not a 
 slavery. It leaves us free initiative. We can take 
 up our task and throw into it the zeal, the love that 
 burns in us. The spirit of service may always be 
 our guide. Only we must not be idle. We must 
 not merely reflect and feel. Above all things we 
 must do. And it is the thing at hand that we are to 
 do. " ' Do the duty which lies nearest thee,' which 
 thou knowest to be a duty. Thy second duty will 
 already have become clearer." " The situation that 
 has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by 
 man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, 
 despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, 
 here or nowhere is thy Ideal ! Work it out there- 
 from ; and working, believe, live, be free." And 
 closely connected with this call to Duty (this small 
 imperative syllable " Do," with its boundless wealth 
 of meaning) is the warning of the misery and futility 
 involved in the life-method of such as make their 
 own happiness their highest end, who let the desire 
 thereof overgrow the heart. In work there is indeed 
 nothing for a brave man to complain of. " Who," 
 
 II
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 he demands, " art thou that complainest of thy hfe 
 of toil ? Complain not. Look up, my wearied 
 brother ; see thy fellow-workmen there in God's 
 eternity ; surviving there, they alone surviving ; 
 sacred band of the Immortals, celestial bodyguard 
 of the empire of mankind." There is a satisfaction 
 higher, sweeter, holier than happiness. "There is 
 in man a higher than love of happiness : he can do 
 without happiness, and instead thereof find blessed- 
 ness." "Man's Unhappiness, as I construe," says 
 Teufelsdrockh, " comes of his Greatness ; it is because 
 there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning 
 he cannot quite bury under the finite." " Will the 
 whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Con- 
 fectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint- 
 stock company, to make one Shoe-black happy ? " 
 " PitifuUest Whipster," he styles the man who thinks 
 the universe should so be made that he, the piti- 
 fullest whipster, shall be happy. And he recalls the 
 story of the ghost for ever croaking, " Once I was 
 hap, hap, happy, but now I'm uicescmblc," which 
 ghost turned out to be a rusty meat-jack. 
 
 And so the preacher preached. Mostly I have 
 sought his sermon in that immortal "Sartor Resartus" 
 which with so" great difficulty found its way into a 
 monthly magazine. But " Past and Present," " Latter 
 Day Pamphlets," and all the rest preach perpetually 
 the same twofold Gospel of God behind the Universe, 
 and Duty as man's behest. The Heroes of his Hero- 
 worship are heroes for their doing. To strip the 
 calumnies from the name of Cromwell, and set him 
 forth the greatest and grandest of English rulers, 
 was grateful to him because Cromwell was a strong 
 
 12
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 man who believed in God and did great doing. 
 Indeed his admiration for the strength which works, 
 which achieves, which does, was so great that it 
 sometimes bHnded him to the faults of men. It set 
 him defending Governor Eyre, of Jamaica. It 
 moulds many a paragraph in the " French Revolution " 
 and in " Frederick the Great." And we have to 
 remind ourselves sometimes that even most strenuous 
 doing is not glorious unless it be inspired by some 
 great Ideal lighting up the soul — love of God, or 
 truth, or man. 
 
 What, then, was the total effect of this first " Maker 
 of the Century " whom we have called to witness ? 
 How much did he affect his time ? He opened his 
 eyes on the world in 1795. He only lay down to 
 die in that modest Chelsea house in 1881. He was 
 the victim of cruel dyspepsia, and often his temper 
 was sardonic, and the stranger who approached him 
 was rebuffed, while the wife found matrimony no 
 bed of roses. But always within burnt the fire of 
 his message to the world. What is the sum of it 
 and how much has he effected ? 
 
 He found the world, as we saw, very full of shams 
 and given over to convention. Men vv-ere only 
 scratching at the surface for the diamond of truth. 
 No man dug deep. Sincere religion there was not 
 very much ; and care for the masses of men burnt 
 only in a few generous bosoms. But I think through 
 the middle section of the century, the 40's, the 50's, 
 the 6o's, there was a deepening earnestness slowly 
 penetrating through English society, and a stronger 
 craving for veracity. It showed itself in many ways. 
 It worked in some directions for which Carlvle but 
 
 13
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 little cared. It produced a searching criticism of 
 the Bible records ; it led to great and far-reaching 
 theological reconstructions ; it touched with an 
 Ithuriel spear the philosophy of the age and set it 
 trying to be more spiritual ; it deepened thd awe of 
 scientific men before the mysteries which every fresh 
 discovery revealed ; above all, it wakened the temper 
 of philanthropy and reform, and left its mark upon 
 the statute-book in great measures associated with 
 the names of Bright and of Gladstone. With many 
 of these modes of earnestness, I say, Carlyle had 
 but scanty sympathy. But I think it was largely 
 his spirit, the quickening due to his molten word, 
 that moved the men and the masses who brought 
 these things about. 
 
 We seem to-day to have fallen on a season of 
 slackened earnestness, a season in which men like a 
 flattering lie better than an unpleasant truth, a time 
 of the reviving of tinsel ideals, love of gold or of 
 ease or of military ghtter ; a time when the cry for 
 reform is hushed ; and the selfishness of classes or 
 individuals once more erects its head as a master- 
 force. The voice of Carlyle grows faint. The 
 young men no longer turn to him as guide and 
 leader, teacher and prophet. The old men have 
 laid his volumes aside upon the shelf. But for this 
 generation, as for that of our fathers, he has a 
 message of flame, would men but listen to his word. 
 And we shall not recover from our paralysis till 
 earnestness like his, veracity like his, high faith like 
 his, and the great doctrine of the holiness of duty 
 once more have sway with statesmen and with 
 people. 
 
 14
 
 II 
 
 THE MAN OF SCIENCE: CHARLES 
 
 DARWIN
 
 II 
 
 THE MAN OF SCIENCE: CHARLES 
 
 DARWIN 
 
 IF the Preacher has greatly influenced the hearts 
 and consciences of men in the nineteenth 
 century, the Man of Science has enormously in- 
 fluenced not only the machinery of practical life, 
 but the fundamental thought of men on the nature 
 and history of the universe and its denizens. It is 
 in the latter branch of his influence that I propose 
 to consider the man of science. And so I take, by 
 way of illustration, not an Edison, who, with his 
 confreres, has transformed the streets of our cities, 
 giving us electricity for our slave, but a Darwin who 
 has taught us to think new thoughts concerning the 
 making of the world. 
 
 Even for this, indeed, I might have made a choice 
 among other names : Helmholtz or Haeckel in 
 Germany, Lyell, Tyndall, or Huxley in England, 
 and many another ; for the outburst of scientific 
 genius has been, I suppose, by far the most marked 
 intellectual feature of our century. But there is not 
 one of the great masters of science' of the century 
 who would not acclaim the transcendent pre- 
 
 17 c
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 dominance of Charles Darwin, both for the 
 extraordinary care and patience of his investiga- 
 tions and for the stupendous effect of his con- 
 ckisions on human thought. 
 
 Darwin was born in that great year, 1809, which 
 gave us also Tennyson, Gladstone, and Mendelssohn. 
 Seeing the supreme idea with which his fame is 
 connected, it is profoundly interesting to note that 
 his grandfather, Erasmus, who died seven years 
 before he was born, and was more distinguished as 
 a poet than as a man of science, nevertheless wrote 
 these pregnant words : " Would it be too bold to 
 imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen 
 from one living filament, which the Great First 
 Cause endowed with animality, . . . possessing the 
 faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent 
 activity, and of delivering down these improvements 
 by generation to its posterity, world without end ? " 
 
 The grandson was born in 1809. It was not till 
 he had lived just half a century that the famous 
 work appeared which has placed him at the head of 
 all the scientific men of his age, and given him an 
 influence on human thought not surpassed in range 
 and depth by a dozen men in the whole history of 
 the world.. 
 
 In Sefton Park, Liverpool, is a ring of most 
 remarkable statues by M. Chavalliaud, surrounding 
 the great palm-house. You will find among these 
 the marble figure of an old man clad in a short, 
 loose cloak, with a stout staff in one hand and a 
 flower, which he is closely examining, in the other. 
 The rough exterior of the man is reproduced with 
 extreme fidelity — the careless dress, the face with no 
 
 18
 
 CHARLES DARWIN 
 
 comeliness of feature, the long tangled beard, the 
 extraordinary beetling shaggy brows, the great fore- 
 head and splendid dome of head. It is the counter- 
 feit presentment of Charles Darwin. I know not 
 how far Liverpool is appreciatively aware of the 
 treasure it possesses ; but of this statue and the 
 companion one of Linnaeus, young, buoyant, 
 beautiful, any city in the world might well be 
 proud. 
 
 I think you will read there something of the 
 exceeding modesty of the mighty naturalist. At 
 fifty years of age he had for nearly half his lifetime 
 been pondering the most crucial problem that in 
 those days faced biologists — the origin of species. 
 Animal and vegetable tribes had long been grouped 
 in genera and species, each species marked by its 
 own proper characteristics. All the world had 
 assumed that each species had been created perfect 
 at the first, and had its exclusive line of descent from 
 its own particular parent. There were indeed those, 
 Lamarck most prominent among them, who had 
 said that many species blended in a common 
 ancestry. But such speculation remained little 
 better than a guess, for no explanation save the 
 wildest had ever been attempted of how one species 
 could become progenitor to another. And orthodox 
 science held firm by the conviction that every 
 species was a separate creation set down upon the 
 earth at a particular date by the sudden act of God. 
 That view seemed to rest on unchallengeable 
 authority in the statement of Genesis that each 
 brute and bird and fish and creeping thing was 
 created after its kind. But from the time of his 
 
 19
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 voyage in southern seas in the early thirties, on 
 through the increasing years of his manhood, 
 Darwin had been laboriously observing, collecting, 
 and registering facts, till by an overwhelming mass 
 of evidence and an overwhelming force of reasoning, 
 he had reached the conclusion that the species of 
 all living things have been gradually modified and 
 spread out mto their infinite variety ; and there had 
 shone in upon him the exquisite and beautiful 
 explanation of how by sure and natural processes, 
 still active in our midst, this immense development 
 had come about. 
 
 But firm and lucid as the demonstration was in 
 the mind of the master himself, so profound and 
 ingrained was his modesty, that he displayed the 
 utmost diffidence in sending his book to brother 
 naturalists. After his name and fame were world- 
 wide, he thus estimated his own success : " With 
 such moderate abilities," he wrote, "as 1 possess, it 
 is truly surprising that I should have influenced to 
 a considerable extent the belief of scientific men 
 on some important points." Compare that with 
 Huxley's deliberate verdict on the book. " The 
 most potent instrument," wrote that great warrior 
 of science,- "for the extension of the realm of 
 natural knowledge, which has come into men's 
 hands since the publication of Newton's ' Prin- 
 cipia,' is Darwin's ' Origin of Species.' " 
 
 What, then, was this "potent instrument" that 
 issued from the snug and modest country-house at 
 Down ? To his close friend Hooker — the custodian 
 of Kew — he had long ago confided that to tell this 
 new scientific thought that was in him was " like 
 
 20
 
 CHARLES DARWIN 
 
 confessing a murder." It was indeed a stupendous 
 heresy, and made such a stir in the European world 
 as perhaps no other intellectual utterance has made 
 since the Protestant Reformation. The way was 
 first prepared by such questions in his mind as how 
 the woodpecker came by beak and tongue and claws 
 to be so perfectly adapted to tap the tree and extract 
 the insect for his food ; or how the tree-frog became 
 adapted to climb trees ; or how a seed came to be 
 furnished with hooks or plumes to aid in its dis- 
 persal. Of course you might say, " God made them 
 so, and there is an end." But there was that in the 
 atmosphere of the time that made it difficult for a 
 mind like Darwin's to be quite content with such a 
 so-called explanation. And presently Lyell — a very 
 kindred spirit — showed how vast was the mistake of 
 those who taught that the changes in the earth's 
 crust had been made by sudden miraculous inter- 
 vention at successive eras ; how rather mountain 
 and valley, granite and flint, owed their formation 
 to the steady operation of the very same physical 
 forces that play on the world to-day ; and so the 
 suggestion was in the air that the successive and 
 varied species of living things, these also, owed 
 their origin, not to sudden unprefaced fiats of the 
 divine will, but rather to some play of forces still 
 active in our mxidst which it needed only a suffi- 
 ciently keen vision to detect. What, then, could 
 that play of forces be ? The answer to that question 
 — to which hitherto no man had found a clue — was 
 the supreme achievement of the man of Beckenham. 
 The answer to that question is now known to all the 
 world as " Darwinism." 
 
 21
 
 Makers of the nineteenth century 
 
 The young naturalist first cast his eyes upon 
 Certain operations of the breeder and the gardener. 
 " I soon perceived," says he, " that selection was 
 the keystone of man's success in making useful 
 races of animals and plants." Horses, cattle, poultry, 
 pigeons, fruit, and flowers had actually been changed, 
 species with quite new characteristics developed, 
 created, under the hand of man. How did he do 
 it ? By taking advantage of slight variations in 
 individuals, selecting the individuals having in 
 some faint measure the characteristics he desired, 
 and providing that these should be propagated 
 while those not having such characteristics were 
 sutifered to die out, the breeder or gardener 
 gradually produced a race differing so widely from 
 the original type as practically to constitute a quite 
 new species. 
 
 So with artificial selection : yes. But this was 
 ruled by the selective will of man. Could there be 
 any natural selection, any selection working by 
 natural law quite independently of human will, 
 throughout the wide area of living things, which 
 would produce the like results ? What undetected 
 force was there in the natural world parallel in 
 effect to the will of man in the farmyard and the 
 garden ? 
 
 While this problem was floating in his mind the 
 young investigator read a book very famous in its 
 day, " Malthus on Population." The teachings of 
 that book are largely exploded now. Wise men 
 know that the curse of our civilisation is not that j 
 
 there are too many people in the world, but the i 
 
 selfishness of the rich and the improvidence of the 5 
 
 22 *
 
 CHARLES DARWIN 
 
 poor ; the seizure of the land by the few, the 
 exclusion from its use of the many. But Malthus 
 talked of ''the struggle for existence" in the human 
 race, showed how the strong prevailed and the 
 weak went to the wall, and those who had not wit 
 or might to secure them bread died in the dread 
 competition. And that hint was enough for 
 Darwin. There was clearly a struggle for existence 
 in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, since the 
 unchecked increase of many an individual tribe 
 would in itself in a few short years be enough to 
 overwhelm the world. Multitudes must die leaving 
 no progeny behind them. The world and the 
 future, in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, were 
 to the comparatively few. What then determined 
 the conquerors ? By w^hat virtue did the survivors 
 survive ? What was the fundamental condition of 
 the internecine struggle ? Why, obviously, in the 
 slight variations of individuals from one generation 
 to another, some would be better adapted to the 
 surrounding conditions than others, and these 
 would tend to survive, the others to die out. Here 
 the modification of a claw, there that of a beak, 
 here the thickening of the hide, there the increased 
 length of leg, would tend, even if ever so little, to 
 the preservation of life. The favoured individuals 
 would survive and propagate their kind. In the 
 new generation some would carry the new variation 
 to a higher and more effective degree. These again 
 would be the more probable survivors, while their 
 brethren would go under. And so by very, very 
 slow degrees, but by a method very sure, and 
 through forces absolutely natural and normal, new 
 
 23
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 species would come about adapted to their environ- 
 ment, while those individuals not so adapted would 
 go under, and their kind would vanish from the 
 face of the earth. 
 
 That was the doctrine of the " Origin of Species." 
 As in artificial selection man chooses out the varia- 
 tions he desires, and intensifies these by breeding, so 
 in natural selection, in the great sweep of creation 
 over the area of the earth and through the ages, the 
 external conditions of climate, habitat, food, and a 
 hundred other elements of the environment, select 
 the variations which they render favourable and 
 cause these to be intensified from generation to 
 generation till a new species, perfectly adapted to 
 its circumstances, lives and thrives and multiplies. 
 "The suggestion," says Huxley, "that new species 
 may result from the selective action of external 
 conditions upon the variations from their specific 
 type which individuals present — and which we call 
 'spontaneous' because we are ignorant of their 
 causation ... is the central idea of the * Origin of 
 Species,' and contains the quintessence of Dar- 
 winism." 
 
 "The Origin of Species " appeared in 1859. To 
 the few select spirits — men like Hooker, Huxley, 
 Lyell — and to a very few also of the religious 
 thinkers, it came as a revelation. It was the key 
 that had long been wanted — one more great step — 
 nay, the greatest step — in the unfolding of the 
 orderliness of the universe and the perfection of the 
 laws on which it hangs. But from the ordinary 
 critic and the so-called religious world it evoked a 
 tempest of ridicule, a hurricane of contumely and 
 
 24
 
 CHARLES DARWIN 
 
 abuse. For it seemed to upset the very foundations 
 of religion. 
 
 " The Origin of Species " dealt with the problem 
 of the mutability of species only. It did not ascend 
 to genera, to families, to kingdoms. But in its final 
 paragraph it did make what were to the orthodox 
 ominous suggestions. "There is grandeur," says 
 Darwin in the closing sentence, " in this view of 
 life, with its several powers, having been originally 
 breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into 
 one." And just before, he has said of researches 
 such as the book is based on, that by them " much 
 light will be thrown on the origin of man and his 
 history." That is all he said at the time ; for he 
 would be reticent till he had fully made out his case. 
 But twelve years afterwards he published to the 
 world " The Descent of Man," therein arguing with 
 extraordinary wealth of marshalled facts that even 
 regal man himself, with all the kingdoms of living 
 things, must trace his ancestry, through the long 
 chain of natural selection, to some primordial forms 
 of life emerging from the inorganic world back in 
 the dim recesses of unrecorded time. 
 
 It had been seen so plainly that that would be the 
 ultimate goal of the argument, that "The Descent of 
 Man " in 1871 did not rouse so tremendous a storm 
 as had raged over " The Origin of Species " a decade 
 early. But we must take the whole vast argument 
 together, this great and revolutionary heresy which 
 has been so potent in the making of the thought, 
 the science, the philosophy of the century now 
 locked up with its predecessors in the cabinet of the 
 past. 
 
 25
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 How on the whole stands this Darwinism, in its 
 integrity, related to the teachings of the orthodox 
 Christian Church, Catholic or Protestant, Noncon- 
 formist or Conformist ? 
 
 That orthodox Christian Church rests on the 
 assumption that the one authoritative account of 
 the origin of the world — of plants, of animals, of 
 men — is given once for all in the opening para- 
 graphs of the Book of Genesis. That is the founda- 
 tion. All the vast structure of orthodox religion is 
 built up on that basis. Take it away, and the whole 
 structure totters. All its walls are shaken. All its 
 parts lose their sure cohesion ; and the Church is 
 confronted with the tremendous task of building up 
 a new cosmogony, a new theory of the make of the 
 universe in which we live. The Copernican system 
 of astronomy had long ago dealt a like blow at the 
 credit of received theology. The geology of Lyell, 
 a few years before the utterance of Darwin, had 
 dealt another. But the blow which Darwinism 
 dealt was felt far more keenly, far more widely. It 
 seemed to discredit Church and Bible, nay, to do 
 away with the Living God himself. And the resist- 
 ance offered to the new teaching was strenuous, 
 determined, in many bewildered minds most honest 
 and most earnest, in many others unscrupulous and 
 bigoted to the last degree. But great is truth, and 
 she will prevail ; and the last forty years have seen 
 the essential elements of Darwinism accepted by all 
 educated men. The great revolution has been 
 accomplished, and orthodox theology is left to shift 
 for itself as best it may. 
 
 That is the relation of Darwinism to orthodox 
 
 26
 
 CHARLES DARWIN 
 
 theology. But the relation of Darwinism to pure 
 religion, what is that ? Why, we are beginning to 
 see that it is a relation of no hostility whatever ; at 
 worst a relation of indifference, not touching it at 
 all ; at best the relation of a true ally and friend, 
 making more glorious and wonderful the revelation 
 of the Living God. 
 
 At worst, I say, a relation of indifference, not 
 touching pure religion at all. Even Huxley, the 
 eloquent champion of Agnosticism, the very in- 
 ventor of the term, declares that the doctrine of 
 Darwin leaves the doctrine of Theism, the doctrine 
 of a Supreme God, quite unaffected. It would only 
 show, if there be a God, that his way of working is 
 other than men thought ; that his creative wisdom 
 has so constituted the world that no new decree was 
 needed to set the higher plants, the nobler animals, 
 great Man himself upon the earth ; but that by the 
 orderly working ordained of Him species has grown 
 from species, genus from genus, kingdom from 
 kingdom, till the oak and the ash, the lily and 
 the rose, the lion and the elephant, the lovely 
 butterfly and the busy bee, a myriad other orders 
 of separate being and all the diverse races of man- 
 kind, dwell in the world as in a garden, and all the 
 earth is musical with the hum and roar of infinitely 
 varied life. 
 
 And indeed Darwinism, which is but a part of 
 the great doctrine of Evolution, makes for us who 
 believe in God the majestic reign of his providence 
 more wonderful and beautiful than the mind of man 
 had before conceived. How solemn, how magnifi- 
 cent is that procession which the new philosophy 
 
 27
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 opens out ! From the primitive world-dust which 
 is the furthest back that the human mind has as yet 
 conceived, on through the gradual forming of suns 
 and planets, worlds and systems, to the upspringing 
 of primeval life all round this globe of ours and 
 doubtless millions more ; then life itself struggling 
 on and up, through ever nobler forms touched to 
 finer issues, on and on to rational man himself, first 
 rudely reasoning in matted jungle and hollow cave, 
 on and ever up to civilised communities, ordered 
 tribes and nations, and on and up through the 
 forces working in individual hearts and brains to 
 a Plato, to a Paul, to a Shakespeare, to a Carlyle, to 
 a Darwin, to a Gladstone. Marvellous foresight 
 and design of God ! Marvellous and unswerving 
 execution through the endless ages ! If thus far 
 the progress has been made from such beginnings, 
 to what shall our human kind, the last and highest 
 product of the evolution, attain in ages yet unborn ? 
 How shall our progeny at last reach up and on till 
 the earth be peopled with men of heart and intellect 
 and power akin to the very angels of God ! 
 
 If you ask Darwin's own position with regard to 
 these transcendent themes, he would reply, " I am 
 but a man of science of moderate ability, with little 
 power of abstract thought. I only contribute certain 
 facts and try to show how life has developed on the 
 earth. Concerning God, I affirm not ; I deny not. 
 Take my facts and weld them as you will in the 
 structure of your spiritual philosophy." I myself 
 had a letter from him long ago in which he said 
 that he had never been able to arrive at a full con- 
 viction of the reality of a personal God. Years 
 
 28
 
 CHARLES DARWIN 
 
 after, in his Life and Letters, appeared notes and 
 memoranda in which he made the same confession. 
 But he intimated, and not without some sadness, 
 that so immersed had his mind been in scientific 
 observation, that the capacity of his early manhood 
 to be moved by music and by poetry had failed 
 him, and that sublime scenery had lost its power 
 to make him conscious of a presence Divine breath- 
 ing through wood and glade. But all those higher 
 experiences of the soul he treated with respect ; and 
 he never uttered or wrote one word which, legiti- 
 mately understood, tends to subversion of our faith 
 in Him who weaves the ages as a work upon the 
 loom. 
 
 Only he cleared religion of cant. He forced it 
 back on its true foundations in the spiritual nature 
 of man. He pushed miracle out of the circle of 
 religion. He dealt a deathblow at ancient super- 
 stitions ; and he cleared the air for nobler and 
 purer forms of faith in the twentieth Christian 
 century than any to which the churches of the 
 Christian world have as yet attained. 
 
 29
 
 Ill 
 
 THE STATESMAN : WILLIAM 
 EWART GLADSTONE
 
 Ill 
 
 THE STATESMAN : WILLIAM 
 EWART GLADSTONE 
 
 AMONG the makers of the Hfe and character of 
 the nineteenth century, we have ah-eady dealt 
 with the Preacher and the Man of Science. We 
 are now to consider the Statesman ; and whatever 
 our particular opinions, we could hardly set up any 
 other as type of the statesman at his best and noblest 
 than the great man who closed his eyes at Hawarden 
 in the spring of 1898. 
 
 There are two main channels through which the 
 statesman acts upon the world. He legislates, and 
 he administers. Law and administration, these 
 between them touch the life of every man among 
 us at many points. It is true we may rarely come 
 into direct and sensible touch with either of them. 
 But they are there, the framework of our citizenship, 
 controlling, restraining, directing at every turn, 
 developing our liberties or curtailing our freedom, 
 determining the conditions of life's battle for us 
 from day to day and from year to year. 
 
 And so it is easy to depreciate the influence of 
 the politician and to affect to be superior to politics. 
 It is easy to say that the people make the politicians 
 
 33 D
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 rather than the poHticians the people ; and it is 
 largely true. Nevertheless, a great political indi- 
 viduality exercises for good or evil an influence 
 deep and far-reaching which it is impossible for 
 one who would discriminate and sum up the social 
 forces acting on his time to neglect or to ignore. 
 
 The statesman exercises an influence both direct 
 and indirect on countless multitudes of his fellow- 
 men. He wields an influence direct through the 
 laws he passes or repeals, the wars he makes or 
 the peace which he consolidates, the purity or the 
 laxity which, taking its rise in him, flows through 
 all the varied channels of the public service. He 
 wields an influence indirect, sometimes still more 
 momentous, through the personal character and 
 temper, which, moving on so conspicuous a stage, 
 he impresses on the public mind. The great 
 patriotic statesman who loves the good name of 
 his country more than its military glory, who 
 stands above all things for justice and for human 
 freedom, who respects the rights of others, and 
 would make his nation a shield to the weak, a 
 menace to the lustful strong, who can be tempted 
 neither by pelf nor place nor love of power nor 
 love of ease to swerve from the noblest policy, 
 strengthens indefinitely the moral fibre of his 
 people, and by the sheer force of his personality 
 makes for truth and righteousness over the whole 
 area of our race. The statesman, on the other 
 hand, whose highest ideal of greatness for his 
 nation is either military conquest or the multiplica- 
 tion of markets, or who is mainly moved by 
 personal ambition or party spleen, or is of unscrupu- 
 
 34
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 
 
 lous, overbearing, and tyrannical temper, a braggart 
 and a bully, is nothing less than a national 
 corrupter, a destroyer of ideals, a degrader of the 
 whole sphere of public life. 
 
 There is no line of life which a man may take 
 up which has not its own special and sore tempta- 
 tions — temptations to which the weak or unprinci- 
 pled will surely yield. But I suppose there are few 
 lines of life so strewn with such temptations as 
 that of the politician. Even the good man will 
 meet many a subtle solicitation. It will so often 
 seem that that which he honestly believes to be 
 good can best be brought to pass by a little com- 
 promise with truth, with integrity, with a white and 
 stainless honour, to say nothing of the grosser 
 temptations which at every turn assail the ambitious, 
 the lovers of place or power. And so the sad fact 
 comes about that many are sceptical about any honest 
 or disinterested service in the political world ; and 
 include the whole of that which should be the 
 noblest of all modes of activity in one sweeping 
 condemnation, totally disbelieving that Liberal or 
 Tory, Minister or Opposition, ever acts on the 
 higher plane of motive and of conduct. 
 
 Such condemnation, thank God 1 is wholly un- 
 warranted by fact. We all know politicians both 
 in and out of Parliament, as we all know physicians 
 and all know lawyers and all know merchants, who 
 are the very soul of honour and high-minded 
 service. In every honourable calling there are men 
 who rise above its temptations. Nevertheless, I 
 fear it remains true that of statesmen of the first 
 rank in the past century there are very few of 
 
 35
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 whom we can say with absokite conviction that, 
 whether right or wrong in poHcy, they consistently 
 acted on the highest principle and were true 
 through life to their own moral ideal. I will name 
 in England Sir Robert Peel, Richard Cobden, John 
 Bright, Sir Stafford Northcote, Gladstone, and John 
 Morley. How many more can you add to the list ? 
 
 Perhaps the most impressive event in English 
 history during the nineteenth century was the 
 illness, death, and obsequies of William Ewart 
 Gladstone in the May of its antepenultimate year. 
 Recall the emotion which swept with resistless 
 power through all ranks of men amongst us. 
 
 The ten days from May 19 to May 29, 1898, 
 remain for ever memorable beyond compare. The 
 morning papers of the 19th left the press before 
 the last breath had been drawn, and they could 
 only announce that the end was a matter but of 
 hours or of minutes. But the newspapers of the 
 20th — of whatever party or clique — were one chorus 
 of something too grave, too sorrowful, too deeply 
 moved to be called praise. Newspaper men had 
 forgotten their mannerisms. Lofty editorialism 
 gave way to the simple utterances of living men 
 in the distress of a great sorrow and the unstudied 
 eloquence of a profound emotion. Nothing ever 
 before passed over the newspaper press of England 
 like that dying breath from Hawarden. It was not 
 only that for a moment party strife was hushed : it 
 would give but a false impression — seeing what the 
 average sermon is — to say that leading articles were 
 sermons. They were almost prayers. Men wrote 
 as though hitherto their eyes had been holden, and 
 
 36
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 
 
 now they saw a great light. The voice of the Press 
 — though mostly issuing from "men of the world" 
 or conventionalised pohticians— was a sort of long- 
 drawn sigh after a purer and nobler life, an involun- 
 tary cry of recognition at a new revelation. The 
 veil between was taken away ; and at that hour the 
 Press of England spoke with the tongue of the 
 evangelist or the prophet. 
 
 And when on the Thursday night, and again on 
 the Friday, the moment came for colleagues and 
 for rivals to speak their word in the Parliament of 
 England, a great sincerity broke down the bars of 
 the Parliamentary manner, and trembling tongues 
 and broken voices gave utterance to the over- 
 whelming emotions of the hour. Not only did 
 old lieutenants of the dead chief with faltering 
 cadence bear their testimony before a listening 
 nation ; but men who in the zest of battle or the 
 tourney of debate had had no words too hard, no 
 barbs too sharp, no gibes too biting for their use, 
 now spoke as though moved by a spirit that held 
 them in its sway, and confessed their littleness in the 
 memory of his surpassing greatness. The solemn 
 awe of nearness to holy things filled the benches 
 thronged with the Empire's law-makers, while even 
 the formal announcements from the chair took a 
 strange, hushed tone unlike aught that Parliament 
 had ever heard before. 
 
 But it was neither the Press nor the Legislature 
 that gave the most impressive testimony to the 
 feelings of the people. It was the people them- 
 selves who bore that testimony. English history 
 has never yielded the like ten days to those. First, 
 
 37 
 
 t
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 every eye and ear was strained to catch some 
 glimpse or echo of the mourning at Hawarden 
 Castle. Then with a great sigh of relief the nation 
 learnt that the family had acceded to the prayer 
 that the burial should be the nation's charge and 
 should take place in Westminster Abbey, the only 
 stipulations being severe simplicity and room for 
 the remains of the wife beside those of her husband 
 in that sacred shrine, when her time should come. 
 Then followed the solemn stages of the ceremonial 
 — the lying of the mortal clay in " the Temple of 
 Peace," a chamber of the Castle, and subsequently 
 in the little village church, the pilgrimage of thou- 
 sands to the spot, the proposal — necessarily refused 
 — that relays of men should carry the coffin all the 
 two hundred miles to London, the actual journey 
 by special train, the deposition of the precious 
 burden for two days and nights in the venerable 
 and time-seamed Hall of William Rufus, severed 
 but by a corridor and a flight of steps from the 
 scene of the great orator's most splendid triumphs ; 
 the slow, sorrowful procession of hundreds of thou- 
 sands of men and women, through two whole days, 
 without pause, without noise, without a moment's 
 breach of the grave decorum, past the plain and 
 simple coffin, peer and artisan mingling in one 
 common stream of mourning ; and the long night 
 watches, with a few candles sending their dim 
 beams up to the rafters of the ancient hall. Then 
 at last the funeral itself — princes and ministers for 
 pall-bearers, all that was great and famous in 
 England assembled in the Abbey, the venerable 
 widow with bowed head in the awful sanctity of 
 
 38
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 
 
 her grief, scions of the blood royal and statesmen 
 doing her homage after the last Auicn. 
 
 At the same hour all over England, in cathedrals, 
 in humble parish churches, in great public halls, 
 memorial services were being held, the same hymns 
 sung, the same noble Scriptures read as around the 
 open grave into which the mortal clay of the 
 nation's greatest son was lowered. Those days 
 were a national baptism not to be forgotten ; and 
 they taught not a few of us, who had sometimes 
 well-nigh despaired of the public conscience of this 
 people, that then at least the heart of England was 
 still sound at core and that God and righteousness 
 were not forgotten. 
 
 I go back on the path of memory a few months 
 further. I recall the scene in the early autumn of 
 1896, when Gladstone made, at Hengler's Circus, 
 Liverpool, the last of his great orations. See the 
 old man with slow and dragging steps advancing 
 from the door behind the platform to his seat 
 before that sea of eager faces. The figure is 
 shrunken. The eyelids droop. The cheeks are 
 as parchment. Now that he sits, his hands lean 
 heavily upon his staff. We think, '' Ah ! it is too 
 late ; the fire has flickered out ; the speech will be 
 but the dead echo of bygone glories." But lo ! he 
 rises. The colour mantles to his face. He stands 
 erect, alert. The great eyes open full upon his 
 countrymen. Yes, the first notes are somewhat 
 feeble, somewhat painful ; but a few minutes pass, 
 and the noble voice falls as the solemn music of 
 an organ on the throng. The eloquent arms seem 
 to weave a mystic garment for his oratory. The 
 
 39
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 involved sentences unfold themselves with a perfect 
 lucidity. The whole man dilates. The soul breaks 
 out through the marvellous lips. Age ? Not so : 
 this is eternal youth. He is pleading for mercy to 
 an outraged people, for fidelity to a national obliga- 
 tion, for courage and for conscience in a tremen- 
 dous crisis. And the words from the Revised 
 Version of the Psalms seem to print themselves 
 on the listener's heart : " Thou hast made him but 
 little lower than God, and crownest him with glory 
 and honour." 
 
 Truly when that mighty statesman passed away 
 none would have denied him the foremost place 
 among the " Makers of the Nineteenth Century" — 
 at any rate for us Englishmen. Yet what did it 
 amount to ? True, for those ten days a great 
 reverence rested on the hearts of the British 
 people. What has it left behind ? The temper 
 we all so profoundly admired, have we kept it 
 alive ? The high and holy purposes of policy, 
 whether sought by wise or unwise ways, have we 
 retained them in the forefront of our minds ? The 
 noble ideal of an England, the friend of the weak, 
 the restrainer of the strong, an England great and 
 glorious, not by wars which crush the people, but 
 by generosity, magnanimity, justice, freedom, does 
 it still shine forth from our hearts ? Hardly had 
 that venerable dust been laid in the vault of the 
 historic Abbey when the wrangling of politicians 
 again began, the policy and character of the mighty 
 dead were again assailed, the chivalric temper lost, 
 the noble purposes betrayed, the high ideal for- 
 gotten or depreciated, not only by the recognised 
 
 40
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 
 
 opponents of the great dead chief, but by many a 
 poHtician and large sections of the people who still 
 professed themselves his followers. 
 
 Yes, it seems a melancholy and pathetic tale. 
 When but two years were gone, so little left of 
 his brave and chivalric spirit. False ideals, false 
 glory, false patriotism, false purposes in place of 
 all he taught. A nation feasting on military glory, 
 with deaf ears for the pleadings of its foe, and every 
 shade of contumely and abuse for those who would 
 plead that both sides be heard and the scales held 
 evenly. Willingness to believe any slander against 
 the people we are fighting. Unwillingness to hear 
 any criticism of ourselves. Obedience to the great 
 command of Christ to love our enemies, denounced 
 as treason to the State. The spirit of Gladstone 
 to all seeming dead as his mortal dust, trampled, 
 crushed, destroyed, forgotten. 
 
 Are we then to say that the great and good have 
 no effect on after times ? Can an impression such 
 as that which Gladstone made indeed perish utterly 
 in a few short months ? God forbid ! If that w^ere 
 so, then indeed were the building up of civilisation, 
 the bringing in of the kingdom of God, a rolling 
 of the stone of Sisyphus for ever up the hill only 
 to tumble to its base before it reach the top. The 
 influence of our great Englishman to the superficial 
 glance seciiis gone ; but deep down in the hearts of 
 tens of thousands of our countrymen, depend on it, 
 stirs at this moment a great yearning for his spirit 
 in the arena of the politician and the statesman. 
 It is not dead in England, that pure spirit, with its 
 love of truth and freedom and justice and peace 
 
 41
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 and brotherhood, its hate of braggadocio and greed 
 and cruelty and fraud and the reckless beating of 
 the war-drum. It is not dead. Perhaps for a little 
 while it has been asleep. But be very sure it is 
 waking and will awake. We protest indeed against 
 government by the dead hand. But the living 
 spirit, the vital memory of William Gladstone will 
 be potent for good in the public life of England 
 in the twentieth Christian century. 
 
 But I shall be told that after all Gladstone was a 
 party man, and that it behoves a true patriot and 
 Christian to rise above party. And a party man 
 Gladstone was indeed— in early life "the hope of 
 the stern, unbending Tories," in the great and 
 fruitful years of his highest fame captain and 
 leader of the Liberals. Was that a shame to him ? 
 Is it a reproach ? It all depends on how he con- 
 ceived of party. If party be but an organisation 
 of persons desiring the interests of themselves and 
 their associates, if it be a mere side in the game 
 for power, then it is a shame for any lover of the 
 true and of the good to bind himself up with the 
 fortunes of this party or of that. But wherever 
 there is a sound and wholesome political life, there 
 party is but the association of men together for the 
 promotion of some principle which to them seems 
 fraught with beneficent results for the nation which 
 they serve. In one form or another the two great 
 historic parties of England, Tory and Whig, or 
 Conservative and Liberal, stand for two great 
 principles the play of which one against the other 
 makes the life and evolution of society. The one 
 principle is the holding by the old, by existing 
 
 42
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 
 
 privileges and castes and interests, lest their up- 
 setting should bring disaster in its wake. The 
 other principle is the pressure for reform, for the 
 remoulding of institutions to meet the newer needs 
 of the newer time, for the enfranchising of the 
 oppressed, for the wider distribution of all that 
 makes life worth living. There have been men 
 in either party who have been false to the principle 
 for which it stood. But in either party there have 
 been men to whom its principle seemed a sacred 
 thing, its ideal a purpose to which all strength and 
 gifts and talents might well be consecrated. And 
 to such men it is no reproach — it is a glory — that 
 they are party men. We are often exhorted to rise 
 above party ; but such exhortation is not seldom 
 foolish and fatuous as any behest can be. For my 
 part, I am a party man. But that does not mean 
 that I would sacrifice principle to get a particular 
 set of politicians into power ; but that the true and 
 historic ideal of one of the great parties in the 
 State seems to me so noble, so beneficent, so 
 fraught with the public good, that I would wil- 
 lingly give my life to hold my party faithful to it 
 and to make its purposes prevail in the counsels 
 of the nation. 
 
 It is in that sense that Gladstone was a party man. 
 Again and again with reverberant voice he called 
 his party to be faithful to its principle, to have 
 faith in its ideal. Sometimes he led them to 
 splendid victory. Sometimes he called in vain. 
 But once he had laid hold of the principle at stake, 
 he was true to it through good and ill report, and 
 so far as he was a moulder of party, he moulded it 
 
 43
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 solely for an instrument for promoting those great 
 ends of justice, freedom, brotherhood, which were 
 the breath of his nostrils, the meat of his soul, in 
 the civic life of his people. 
 
 And so it is not for the opinions of Gladstone 
 that I plead here. I am far from thinking that 
 he was always right. In my little sphere and my 
 humble way I have opposed him more than once. 
 It is not for his opinions, but for his spirit that I 
 call — that pure and fearless spirit which never lost 
 sight of its ideal nor faith in its realisation, nor 
 resolve to stand by it and fight for it and spend 
 and be spent in its behalf. He is the rebuke to 
 timorous men, the rebuke to half-hearted men, 
 the rebuke to self-seeking men, the rebuke to men 
 whose hearts beat with no generous patriotism. 
 He stands the nineteenth century signal-post 
 pointing to chivalry in politics, to pure and high 
 ideals in the craft of statesmanship. 
 
 And if you ask me how this man came to be 
 so steadfast in his grand integrity, so consecrated 
 to high and noble purposes, how it was that the 
 common intrigues of politics passed him by un- 
 scathed, I answer that it was because there was that 
 in him which lay yet deeper than his political 
 opinions, a thousand times deeper than his poli- 
 tical ambitions. And that was his religion. 
 
 Here was a man of genius magnificent, of purpose 
 indomitable, of strength well-nigh unmatched in the 
 great arena of political conflict ; and at his heart lay 
 the religion of a little child. He believed in God, 
 in Christ, in prayer, in goodness with all his heart 
 and soul and mind and strength. No pressure of 
 
 44
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 
 
 the world's affairs ever cancelled the hour of still 
 communion with his God. The form of his faith 
 was far other indeed than mine. It is one of 
 history's bewilderments that he, the mighty emanci- 
 pator, was a sacerdotal ist, that he, the brilliant 
 scholar, was a biblical literalist. The liberal move- 
 ment in theology never touched him. But the 
 religion was there, deep, vital, the most intimate to 
 him of all concerns. He loved God ; his manhood 
 bowed in profoundest reverence before the Christ ; 
 the law of Christianity he carried as norm and rule 
 into every affair. The doctrine that the Sermon on 
 the Mount cannot be applied to politics, pronounced 
 by bishops, was to him abhorrent. This was God's 
 world. All men were brethren of Him of Nazareth. 
 The Gospel was for all time and place. It was the 
 root of his politics. It gave all its interest and 
 worth to public life. His statesmanship was based 
 on it. And so while other men were swayed by 
 every wind and wave of politics, he stood steadfast 
 as a rock though the tempest howled around him 
 and the billows beat upon his front. 
 
 And so it was that he towered above all statesmen 
 of his time. So it was that there was a Titan's 
 power in his speech. So it was that his deeds were 
 pure. So it was that, when they stood in the palace 
 of truth the day after his passing on, even his 
 bitterest foes confessed that on his repute there 
 could lie no stain. So it is that his influence lies 
 deep down to-day in the hearts of our best and 
 truest. So it is that that it will stretch far into 
 future ages. So it is that I adjure all the young 
 who have the making of the coming century in 
 
 45
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 their hands to rise to the height of his spirit, to 
 learn of him to practise a citizenship pure, patriotic, 
 unselfish, steadfast, consecrated, fraught with the 
 temper of Christ and the love of the great brother- 
 hood of man. 
 
 46
 
 \ 
 
 IV 
 
 TN£ NOVELIST: GEORGE ELIOT
 
 IV 
 
 THE NOVELIST: GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 TO some it will undoubtedly seem strange that 
 a preacher should include the Novelist among 
 the " Makers of the Century," among the large and 
 serious human influences that played their part in 
 shaping thought and sentiment and character and 
 life in the nineteenth Christian century and helped 
 to make it that which it actually was at the moment 
 of its close. And yet, if we except newspapers, 
 more time has been spent by more men and women, 
 at any rate in our generation, in reading novels than 
 in reading any other kind of literary composition. 
 Every librarian will tell us that the demand for 
 novels exceeds the demand for books of any other 
 sort. Commercially, novels are the only species of 
 literature that brings solid returns not only to the 
 first-class hands, but to the second and third-class 
 hands as well ; the only species save only, strangely 
 enough, sermons. And as a pecuniary speculation 
 the novel far excels the sermon. Its readers are 
 counted by myriads. It is read rapidly, voraciously. 
 There are tens of thousands, especially among the 
 young, who look to it as their chief, if not their 
 
 49 K
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 only recreation. It is obvious, then, that the intel- 
 lectual and moral character of the novel is of vast, 
 of immeasurable importance to our civilisation. 
 For good or for evil it is perpetually, and on an 
 enormous scale, shaping the character of the men 
 and women who constitute the civilised world. It 
 touches character at innumerable points, elevating 
 or degrading, ennobling or corrupting. Even the 
 feeble novel that has no power directly to inspire, 
 and which cannot be accused of direct defilement, 
 by the mere time that is spent over it fosters habits 
 of lassitude and intellectual vacuity that react dis- 
 astrously on life. And if we can point to a novelist 
 of splendid genius, of brilliant artistic gifts, and of 
 lofty and ideal purpose, we may know that we are 
 pointing to one who is rendering service in the 
 " making " of the century on a par with the 
 preacher, the man of science, and the statesman. 
 
 How shallow, then, is the criticism of those who 
 speak of novels as if they were all of one class ! To 
 ask us to approve or to condemn novel-reading 
 without distinction is like asking us to approve or 
 condemn associating with our fellows. It all 
 depends on ivhat company we keep. There is 
 good company in the novel-world as in the human 
 world, and there is bad company. There is com- 
 pany that is wholesome, purifying, bracing ; and 
 there is company that is lowering, debasing, de- 
 bauching. The one is to be sought, the other to 
 be shunned. There are, indeed, novels of incident 
 and movement, like the romances, for instance, of 
 Wilkie Collins or Stanley Weyman, which are quite 
 free from all taint of corruption, which are excellent 
 
 50
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 as a rest and distraction from the cares and fatigues 
 of life so long as they are indulged in with strict 
 moderation and not allowed to absorb time and 
 energy sacred to duty, which nevertheless have little 
 or no direct action on the characters of men. But 
 there are other novels which strengthen all that 
 is good in men, purifying, fortifying, enlisting 
 sympathy for all that is beautiful and true, wakening 
 into hfe the highest aspirations and quickening the 
 holiest ideals. 
 
 For what is the novel at its best and noblest ? It 
 is a study of human character, of its growth and 
 development, of the forces and situations that act 
 upon it, of the forces within the soul that may be 
 roused to do battle with the outward forces, of the 
 great human drama enacted, mostly without spec- 
 tators or audience, in every bosom — the drama, 
 which, if only it is faithfully told with the inspira- 
 tion of sympathetic vision, has never failed to com- 
 mand, to absorb the interest of him before whom 
 its silent action is unveiled. To most men the 
 evolution of human character is the most pro- 
 foundly interesting of all objects of thought and 
 observation. It gives its strongest hold on men to 
 every department of art. And the historian, the 
 dramatist, the novelist, and the poet speak with 
 the most luminous directness on this transcendent 
 theme. 
 
 And the great novelist can infuse an interest into 
 this which engages not the cultured and the highly- 
 trained only, but the ordinary men and women of 
 the market, of the street, of the home. He can 
 find readers to whom historian, dramatist, and poet 
 
 51
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 appeal in vain. He does not demand the intellectual 
 preparedness which they demand. He is for the 
 multitude, and especially for the young. His theme 
 is the theme of the preacher. But his congregation 
 neither leave empty pews nor slumber while he 
 drones or thunders. 
 
 And the nineteenth century was the richest the 
 world has ever known in novelists. To take the 
 greatest only and Great Britain only : we have 
 Scott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, 
 Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith. In the next 
 rank the names are a host : Charles Reade, Bulwer- 
 Lytton, Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, 
 Hardy, Stevenson, Hall Caine, Mrs. Ward — whom 
 the ultimate verdict may perhaps set yet higher — and 
 a legion more. I select George Eliot, not because I 
 do not believe that there are others who may rank 
 with her, but, first, because she best illustrates the 
 lofty influence a novelist may wield; secondly, 
 because I love her best of all ; and, thirdly, as a 
 protest against the depreciation fashionable at the 
 moment, and a testimony of faith in her security in 
 the end of a place among the immortals. 
 
 *' George Eliot," for woman though she was, she 
 has made that name her own, was of an intellectual 
 type among the noblest. The strange cast of her 
 features, from brow to chin, somewhat harsh in 
 a woman, was that of three other great leaders 
 and inspirers of men — John Henry Newman, the 
 mighty re-inforcer of the Roman Church in our 
 century ; Savonarola, the fiery assailant of the 
 corruptions of that Church four centuries ago ; 
 and, in a refined and glorified form, the sublime 
 
 52
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 Dante, greatest seer and prophet since the apostolic 
 time. Like Charlotte Bronte, her great predecessor 
 and compeer, she was bred amid rustic and obscure 
 surroundings, and there was nothing in girlhood to 
 promise extraordinary achievement. But the in- 
 calculable energies of genius were there, and she, 
 the country-bred woman, issuing from the narrow 
 circle of the little market-towai, became not only 
 the most charming story-teller of her day, but, 
 through her stories, a mighty moral force playing 
 on the evolution of society and stamping her 
 thought and sentiment and ethics on tens of 
 thousands of earnest minds. 
 
 And what a procession of books they are, these 
 stories of hers — rising by sure development from the 
 short yet perfect tales of the *' Scenes of Clerical 
 Life," through the noble stories of Adam Bede 
 and Maggie Tulliver, to name no others, to the 
 great culminating epic — for it is nothing less — of 
 " Middlemarch," in which the life and thought and 
 intricate interrelations of a whole town, a w^hole 
 society, are set before us, and not only Dorothea 
 and Ladislaw, Lydgate and Rosamond, Fred Vincey 
 and Mary Garth become our intimate acquaintances 
 whose very souls we read ; but in their several 
 degrees of fulness, Fairbrother and Mrs. Cadwal- 
 lader, Mr. Brooke and Celia and Sir James, Caleb 
 Garth and Bulstrode, Featherstone and Raffles, and 
 a score or two more are presented to us in vivid 
 strokes, and engage our enduring affection or 
 waken our detestation, stir our pity or arouse our 
 contempt, in the marvellous reality and individuality 
 of their persons. 
 
 53
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 George Eliot, then, paints on a growing scale. 
 She begins with vignettes ; goes on to full-sized 
 pictures ; and proceeds at last to vast canvasses 
 covered with innumerable figures, not motionless as 
 in the painter's art, but moving in and out among 
 each other constantly, yet always dominated by the 
 laws of balance and proportion and perspective, 
 so that the artistic whole is never marred. 
 
 And in these wonderful romances it is the 
 development of character that gives everywhere 
 the inmost interest to the tale. And the forces 
 determining the development of character are plain 
 to be discerned by every thoughtful reader. They 
 are, first and foremost, the inborn, inexplicable, 
 original individuality of the person, that element in 
 his being which it is impossible to connect either 
 with heredity or with environment, the vera persona, 
 the actual self, of that particular soul. Then, 
 secondly, and in all George Eliot's writings most 
 strongly marked, heredity, the qualities inherited 
 with form and feature, from father or mother or 
 forbears further back in the ancestral line. Thirdly, 
 contact with others, the impact for good or evil of 
 other souls, lifting up or dragging down, always 
 deflecting in some degree the development of the 
 inward nature. And, fourthly, the combat with 
 circumstances, the impact of fortune or misfortune, 
 the opportunities, the exaltations, the depressions, 
 the temptations, that come from the play of out- 
 ward happenings all around the casket of the 
 individual life. These four, personality, heredity, 
 companionship, circumstances, are the great inter- 
 mingling forces that determine the drama, and in 
 
 54
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 the mutual play of these four and their sum of 
 effect is the interest, the purpose, the power, the 
 thrill of the immortal stories told to the world by 
 George Eliot. 
 
 There is no pair in all George Eliot's writings 
 that illustrate these things more luminously than 
 Tom and Maggie Tulliver in " The Mill on the 
 Floss." First, Tom. He inherits on his mother's 
 side all the family pride, the steadfast integrity, the 
 perfectly sincere self-righteousnes, the narrowness 
 of sympathy, the business faculty of the Dodsons ; 
 on his father's the inflexibility of will, the liability 
 to violent prejudice, the absolute and enduring 
 fixity in such prejudice, which brought the kindly 
 old miller to so pathetic an end. And to these he 
 adds as his own individual contribution, so to 
 speak, to his character a passion for justice — a 
 justice which he would be the first to administer 
 to himself but that he is honestly convinced that he 
 never does anything wrong, a justice which he 
 wields against others with unrelenting sternness, 
 which he permits no affection to deflect, and which 
 falls with cruel power on the one human being 
 subject to him — subject mainly through her love 
 for him — Maggie, his sister. And with all that 
 sternness, all that virtual cruelty of his, no reader 
 can withhold a certain respect and admiration from 
 Tom Tulliver, as the stress of misfortune presses on 
 him and with dogged and unflinching will, and 
 persistent loyalty to his father's memory, by slow 
 degrees he builds up again the family prosperity. 
 But there is marvellous steadiness in the hand that 
 draws him ; and Tom, the school-boy, who punishes 
 
 55
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 with his displeasure the Httle Maggie whose care- 
 lessness has cost him his pet rabbits, is the veritable 
 father of Tom, the substantial young merchant, 
 who turns Maggie, the crushed and broken-hearted 
 woman, from his door, because she has betrayed the 
 sacred bonds of obligation. 
 
 But it is Maggie herself who gives sample of all 
 the great novelist's powers. Maggie Tulliver and 
 Tertius Lydgate, those two — drawn from far- 
 sundered periods of her authorship — I should pro- 
 nounce the two most wonderful examples of George 
 Eliot's power of drawing the evolution of character, 
 did not a score of other figures — Adam Bede and 
 Hetty Sorrell, Romola and Tito, Dorothea, Ladis- 
 law, and Bulstrode — rise up in protest against the 
 verdict even as I pronounce the words. 
 
 But Maggie Tulliver : — First, the little brown girl, 
 a mass of imagination and emotion, hungering 
 always for affection, but meeting none save the 
 fitful condescension of brother Tom, alternating 
 with harshest judgments, and the sparing caresses 
 of the anxious, toiling father, with his one phrase 
 of endearment, " the little wench." Then all 
 through childhood the passionate outbursts when- 
 ever her own affections met a rebuff, the indignant 
 protests burning unspoken in the little heaving 
 bosom against the wise saws and cramping precepts 
 of the dreaded aunts, the revelation of new possi- 
 bilities in life when poor deformed Philip first 
 betrayed to her the glory of her great dark eyes. 
 By and by the family misfortunes and the great 
 hunger in the maiden's breast for happiness, for 
 response to all the tangled longings of her heart. 
 
 =^6
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 Then Thomas a Kempis, with his calm wisdom, his 
 gospel of self-renunciation, his crucifix held before 
 the eyes ; and the wave of devotion and consecra- 
 tion sweeping over that hot young spirit. Then 
 Philip again among the pines in the Red Deeps, the 
 leaping of heart to heart, the clandestine meetings 
 through one delicious year ; the discovery by Tom, 
 the forced vow of separation ; by and by the 
 father's tragic death, and the years of patient toil on 
 the brink of womanhood, without joy, without 
 hope, the stern yoke of duty fitted heavy on the 
 shoulders. Then at last the nobly formed and 
 gifted woman, glorious in her unconscious beauty, 
 for the first time plunged into the society of the 
 wealthy, the educated, the refined. The fatal com- 
 panionship with Stephen Guest, her cousin's all but 
 acknowledged lover, man of the world, gentleman 
 according to the accepted standards, loyal of heart, 
 by temperament truthful, honourable, intending to 
 do right, but never trained in self-restraint or self- 
 denial — and the rush of passion between him and 
 Maggie, terrible in its strength, of a vividness to 
 which the old love for Philip could show no 
 match ; and then the hand to hand struggle by this 
 woman to retain faithfulness, loyalty, obedience to 
 olden obligation, the failures of resolve at critical 
 moments when eyes met or low-voiced whispers 
 pleaded, and finally the supreme conquest over the 
 heart's longings, when it was too late to save the 
 happiness of others or to escape the goads of gossip 
 and of scandal ; the poor wrecked life quenched at 
 last, while still years were few and youth was strong, 
 in the flood of the beloved river that had flowed 
 
 57
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 past her childish home, the flood that beat brother 
 and sister down in a common death. 
 
 It is in the portrayal of the awful conflict in this 
 woman's spirit, between the passion of her heart and 
 the dictate of her conscience, under the wooing of 
 Stephen Guest, that George Eliot gives us the very 
 essence of her gospel of morals in more concen- 
 trated phrase than in any other of her writings that I 
 recall, unless it be in some of the utterances of 
 Romola. 
 
 He is pleading with her to forget all other ties 
 and accept the fact of their love as the pointing of 
 the one right path. " O it is difficult," she cries in 
 response, "life is very difficult 1 It seems right to 
 me sometimes that we should follow our strongest 
 feeling ; — but then, such feelings continually come 
 across the ties that all our former life has made for 
 us — the ties that have made others dependent on us 
 — and would cut them in two. . . . Many things 
 are difHcult and dark to me ; but I see one thing 
 clearly — that I must not, cannot seek my own 
 happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural ; 
 but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are 
 natural too. And they would live in me still and 
 punish me if I did not obey them." And then 
 when, later on, poor Maggie already irretrievably 
 compromised, Stephen urges that "the natural law" 
 of their mutual love "surmounts every other, we 
 can't help what it clashes with " : — " It is not so, 
 Stephen — I'm quite sure that is wrong. I have 
 tried to think it again and again ; but I see, if we 
 judged in that way, there would be a warrant for all 
 treachery and cruelty — we should justify breaking 
 
 58
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on 
 earth. If the past is not to bind us, where can duty 
 lie ? We should have no law but the inclination of 
 the moment." And then presently again : "Faith- 
 fulness and constancy mean something else besides 
 doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. 
 They mean renouncing whatever is opposed to the 
 reliance others have in us — whatever would cause 
 misery to those whom the course of our lives has 
 made dependent on us." And then finally : " We 
 can't choose happiness either for ourselves or for 
 another : we can't tell where that will lie. We can 
 only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in 
 the present moment, or whether we will renounce 
 that, for the sake of obeying the divine voice within 
 us — for the sake of being true to all the motives that 
 sanctify our lives. I know this belief is hard ; it 
 has slipped away from me again and again ; but I 
 have felt that if I let it go for ever, I should have no 
 light through the darkness of this life." Such are 
 the phrases wrung from the tortured girl in the 
 agony of her struggle. There are those who would 
 count them frivolous or secular, because they are 
 printed on the pages of a novel. But they repre- 
 sent the inmost thought and conscience of George 
 Eliot. And they spoke so directly to the thought 
 and consciences of men in the closing of the 
 nineteenth century, that you will find them trans- 
 ferred to the pages of many a published anthology 
 alongside with texts from A Kempis or Tauler or 
 Augustine or the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures 
 themselves. 
 
 So Maggie Tulliver grew from the seed of her 
 
 59
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 own delicately compacted individuality under the 
 stress of the three great forces of heredity, com- 
 panionship, and circumstances, till she became fit 
 figure to be prophetess to us of the deepest and 
 loftiest that the great soul who created her had to 
 teach. 
 
 And Lydgate : Do we not see in him also the 
 gradual shaping of a character through force at 
 least of companionship and circumstances acting — 
 but alas, in his case, for grievous injury and 
 deterioration— on a spirit originally most finely 
 wrought ? 
 
 A young man of fine and free ambitions— brightly 
 gifted, an enthusiast for his great profession, dream- 
 ing of discovery to be made by hard and persevering 
 toil for the blessing of mankind — quick to respond 
 to all noble prompting — one who, if Dorothea 
 Brooke or Mary Garth had become his wife, would 
 have risen to splendid achievement and most just 
 honour. But Rosamond Vincey captures him. 
 And the daily pressure of her small and selfish 
 nature, together with the cramping, sordid cares in 
 which her vanities engulf him, corrode his manli- 
 ness, make him first a mendicant for favours, then 
 a compromiser with the highest law of professional 
 honour, then by degrees a mere medical drudge, a 
 fee-seeker, a cajoler of fashionable patients, a courtly 
 writer on rich men's diseases, a weary, worn, 
 morose plodder, instead of the noble exponent of 
 his science he had it in him to become. And we 
 learn the awful lesson that the frivolous, the narrow, 
 and the vain are not mere negligible quantities in 
 the moral world, but corroders of the consciences 
 
 60
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 of others, destroyers of virtue, desolaters of a manly 
 and nobly purposed life. 
 
 This obligation stamped upon us by our past, 
 by our race, our family, our parentage, by the 
 memories of our childhood, by the bonds we have 
 voluntarily taken on us in the years that are gone, 
 by the set and drift of circumstances in which our 
 lives have become imbedded — the awful sanctity of 
 such obligation, the misery, the disaster, the moral 
 ruin that are the fruit of its defiance — these are 
 illustrated again and again in George Eliot's pages, 
 in the call to Deronda to be the faithful son of his 
 race in spite of all Gentile allurement; in the call to 
 Fedalma, in the wonderful dramatic romance of 
 "The Spanish Gypsy," to give up the Christian 
 knight her lover, and take the place of leader of her 
 father's forlorn and hunted people ; in the call to the 
 Christian knight himself to stand true champion of 
 Christendom at the cost of the love that fills all his 
 veins with fire. It is, I think, the supreme ethical 
 lesson George Eliot has to teach. 
 
 But there is another which we may not pass by 
 altogether — and one that is of moment to every soul 
 amongst us in every hour of waking life. 
 
 We see Bulstrode — a man whose religion was by 
 no means a mere hypocrisy — under the stress of 
 circumstances becoming in one crucial moment the 
 virtual murderer of the scoundrel, Raffles. You 
 remember the narrowing down of his doom upon 
 him. How in the crookednesses of his early life 
 Raffles had been his confidant and agent, how in 
 the days of his high prosperity and repute this 
 Raffles fastens on him again, how by bribe after 
 
 6i
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 bribe Bulstrode strives to purchase his silence, how 
 at last Raffles lies in mortal illness and it rests, to 
 all human seeming, with him, by strict or lax 
 adherence to the physician's orders, to save or 
 sacrifice his life ; how he honestly means to save it 
 by a strict adherence, how nevertheless, secure in 
 this intention, he permits his thought to dwell on 
 the stupendous relief it would be to him were 
 Raffles indeed to die — till the image of that is bright 
 and vivid in his mind, the image of his upright 
 intention faint and pale. And then when the 
 moment comes he permits that to be done by the 
 ignorant nurse which swiftly brings the fatal end. 
 You remember, again, how Tito— in the noble 
 romance of " Romola " — harbours vaguely the 
 design to redeem his foster-father from Turkish 
 slavery, but lets his pleasure-loving nature dwell 
 rather on the ease and brilliance to be enjoyed in 
 Florence by spending the rescue money on himself, 
 how he pushes away from him the thought of the 
 tortured galley-slave on the plea that the time for 
 action has not yet arrived, how thus the image of 
 the commanding duty grows faint and dull, the 
 image of life in Florence with glorious Romola 
 vivid and possessing ; and so when the hour strikes 
 he lets the duty slip, and swiftly sliding down the 
 moral incline, ends with treachery, cowardice, and 
 cruelty foul as that of any criminal in history. In 
 the stories of both these men and in many others, 
 George Eliot teaches how the preparation for virtue 
 or for crime, for heroic fidelity or for dastardly 
 treachery, is made in the attention which the mind 
 gives to images of good or of evil long before the 
 
 62
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 crisis of action arrives — so that it would almost 
 seem that by long habit the image of good may 
 become so pale and nerveless that when the time 
 comes it cannot command us, the image of evil so 
 full of colour and strength that when the time 
 comes we cannot resist it. The teaching is that the 
 free action of our will — the field for the free action 
 of conscience — is in the habitual attention we give 
 through life to images divine and holy, or to images 
 of greed or lust ; and that if we fail to discipline 
 ourselves well long before the hour of temptation, 
 when the temptation comes our freedom will be 
 gone, and we shall have no force at command to 
 deliver ourselves out of the devil's hands. The 
 teaching is : Practise the mind in contemplation of 
 the pure, the good, the beautiful, the holy; if there 
 be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these 
 things — hold back the mind with a grasp of iron 
 from harbouring images of the contaminating, the 
 base, the foul; so only when the path must suddenly 
 be taken to the right or to the left will you have any 
 force to turn to the right and prefer the stony way 
 to the flowery path of sin. 
 
 Such is the ethical teaching of this great novelist, 
 this mighty moralist. And speaking to thousands 
 of men and women for whom some of the old 
 arguments for virtue, for goodness, for uprightness 
 have lost their force, for whom the old supernatural 
 sanctions are dying or dead, she has planted a noble 
 ethics in the very nature and make of the soul 
 itself, in the very structure and fibre of human life. 
 
 63
 
 V 
 THE DRAMATIST: HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 65
 
 V 
 THE DRAMATIST: HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 THE Dramatist maybe regarded either from the 
 Hterary or from the histrionic point of view — 
 as the author of works to be read or as the maker of 
 plays to be acted. 
 
 If we regard him in the kitter capacity, and ask 
 what he did in the making of the nineteenth century, 
 we shall have to ask not only whether his literary 
 page was of wholesome tendency, but whether the 
 spectacle he provided fed the better or the worse 
 sentiments in the human breast. And indeed the 
 vast majority of the plays put upon the stage are 
 never read as literature at all, so that it is their stage 
 effects only that have to be considered. And for 
 myself, I am one of those who recognise to the full 
 the purifying and ennobling influence whicli the 
 stage may yield. I cannot forget how for Athens of 
 old it provided the very loftiest and most powerful 
 expression of religion, touching the springs of awe 
 and reverence as no other art in the history of the 
 world perhaps has ever touched them. But then I 
 remember that the theatre of Athens — and indeed 
 the theatre of England in Shakspeare's day — lent 
 
 67
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 itself to little spectacular effect, and presented actors 
 by no means made up to look the part ; so that the 
 impression was not sensuous, but purely intellectual 
 and moral. And I have to confess that I greatly 
 doubt whether the lavish scenic effects and costumes 
 of the modern stage have tended to the elevation of 
 its influence. We do not want the corruption of 
 manners and of morals brought vividly before the 
 eye, whether in the modern society of London or of 
 Paris, or in the ancient court of Cleopatra. 
 
 But it is with the dramatist as the author of 
 works to be read that I propose to deal. And here, 
 too, as in the case of the novelist, I have to point 
 out that the dramatist as such is neither to be 
 praised nor to be condemned — that there is good 
 company and bad among dramas as among novels 
 and among men ; that there are dramas wholesome, 
 purifying, bracing, and dramas lowering, debasing, 
 debauching. 
 
 And the dramatist whom I select as greatest in 
 the nineteenth century is one whom many believe 
 to be demoralising rather than the reverse. I pro- 
 foundly dissent from that opinion, and shall try to 
 show the reason why. But before passing on to 
 the analysis of some of the dramas of Ibsen and the 
 attempt to" expound their message, I point out in 
 passing, and beg you to note the fact, that there is 
 no scene in any play of his from first to last which, 
 set upon the stage, presents anything to the eye to 
 feed the lower side of our nature. His men and 
 women discuss all the affections and the passions of 
 mankind ; but they discuss them in armchairs or on 
 garden benches, and you never find them trembling 
 
 68
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 on the verge of setting base things before you 
 visually. And I ask you to compare Ibsen in this 
 with some very famous living English playwrights, 
 of whom the same cannot be said. 
 
 Henrik Ibsen, unlike any other "Maker of the 
 Nineteenth Century " whom we have hitherto con- 
 sidered, still lives in the world of men. He was 
 born in 1828, and as lately as 1899 gave his latest 
 drama to the world. When a youth of twenty, far 
 away in his Scandinavian home, he caught the 
 echoes of the struggles of Kossuth and of Mazzini, 
 and they stirred in him the poet's powers. The 
 heroic temper, the love of freedom, the strife for 
 justice and for truth, always set his pulse a-beating. 
 And the next twelve or fifteen years of his life saw 
 the composition of several dramas of extraordinary 
 genius, most prominent and powerful among them 
 those which made the old Norse life live again, and 
 in hero and in viking recalled the glories half- 
 historic, half-mythic, of the bold and vigorous youth 
 of the Scandinavian race. He clung to the belief 
 that that dauntless temper might still be found 
 along the fjords and on the mountain sides of 
 Norway; and in 1864 the opportunity came, and 
 the call to the ancient patriotism sounded on the 
 ears of the sturdy fishers and farmers of that grim 
 and rock-girt coast. Germany in her might swept 
 down on little Denmark, and the king of Norway 
 and Sweden had given his pledge that his people 
 would not stand by and see their Danish kinsmen 
 wronged. High beat the heart of Ibsen. Loud was 
 his cry for the great encounter. But lo ! both king 
 and people failed his hopes, and not a ship was 
 
 69
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 manned, not a gun was fired, to save Danish soil 
 from the invader's tramp. 
 
 Then a vast sorrow and a mighty anger fell on 
 the heart of Ibsen. He shook the dust of Norway 
 from his feet, and from a far retreat in Southern 
 Europe sent back to his countrymen his reproach 
 and scorn in the two dramatic poems, so over- 
 whelming in their power, "Brand" and "Peer Gynt." 
 They were the burning denunciations of a prophet. 
 They laid the lash without sparing on the Norwegian 
 people. But so magnificent were they in their 
 strength, so redolent of fjord and tarn and precipice 
 and skree, that they went straight to the Norwegian 
 heart, and no Norwegian to-day can climb the fells 
 or cross the glacier, baffle in his boat the sudden 
 storm, or hear the roar of the cataract smiting the 
 trembling rock, but Brand seems to stride beside 
 him or Peer to be bragging at his elbow. No other 
 poems ever so quickly or so completely took a whole 
 race by storm. 
 
 But if the collapse of the national repute was the 
 occasion of these two extraordinary dramas, like the 
 works of all largest genius, they have their roots 
 deep in the universal experience and character of 
 man. Their lesson is for all time and all lands. 
 And we can treat them without further reference to 
 the immediate circumstances of their origin. 
 
 Let me briefly rehearse both stories, familiar now 
 no doubt to many, but probably unknown still to 
 most ; since even those, in this country, who count 
 themselves critics or disciples of Henrik Ibsen, for 
 the most part entirely ignore these two, the most 
 transcendent productions hammered on his anvil. 
 
 70
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 " Brand" was published in 1866, when Ibsen was 
 thirty-eight. It is primarily a passionate plea for 
 whole-heartedness as against the half-heartedness 
 which was corroding the world and taking all truth 
 and courage out of human Hfe. " All or nothing " is 
 its perpetually recurring motto ; and Ibsen would 
 have more hope of a man thorough and whole- 
 hearted in wrong, than of the trifier who has a little 
 bit of morals and a little bit of religion and a little 
 bit of worldliness ; for evil can be transmuted into 
 good, but cowardice can never be wrought to 
 courage. 
 
 Brand is a stalwart young priest of the Lutheran 
 Church, all afire to proclaim his doctrine of whole- 
 ness, thoroughness in faith, in conduct, in devotion, 
 in consecration to eternal truth, to all who will hear 
 his word. " Everything or nothing " is his cry, and 
 he is ready, eager, ardent to give himself utterly to 
 his cause. But practical life has terrible experiences 
 in store. Again and again he is confronted with 
 the choice between being false, as he deems, to his 
 foundation principle and sacrificing that which is to 
 his heart inexpressibly dear. First, the call comes 
 to him to settle as pastor in a remote and poverty- 
 stricken village where the great cliffs shut out the 
 sun well-nigh the whole year round ; and after a 
 fierce inward struggle he abandons for this nearer 
 duty his dream of a mission covering the nation and 
 redeeming his race. Next, he sees his beloved baby- 
 boy sickening under the chill of his bleak and sun- 
 less home ; and he believes that he is obeying the 
 call of duty in letting the little one die rather than 
 desert his parish. Next, his wife herself — Agnes, 
 
 71
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 perhaps the sweetest and most pathetic heroine in 
 all romance — pales under the rigour of the life and 
 the ceaseless grief of the death of her child ; and 
 Brand, grimly steadfast in his settled course, sees 
 her too perish at his side. Finally, having driven 
 back as temptations of the evil one all the pleadings 
 of human love, that he may not swerve in the 
 discharge of his office, he conceives the idea that 
 the religion of his people may be made large and 
 real and strong by building them with his little 
 fortune a great and noble church in place of the 
 cramped and dilapidated building with whose tradi- 
 tions are woven vague reminiscences of the old 
 pagan faith. But on the day of the great ceremonial 
 of the opening, when his praise is loud in the 
 mouths of all men, it is revealed to him, as his 
 fingers wander over the organ-keys, that this dream 
 too is empty, that lofty arches and architectural 
 glory make for display and materialistic convention 
 rather than for true and pure religion, and he flings 
 the keys of the church into the rushing stream, and, 
 worn and broken — his mind adrift in the delirium 
 of madness — he calls the faithful to follow him up 
 the mountain-scarp to the ice-temple on the pathless 
 heights. The populace press upon his footsteps, 
 but soon grow weary of the aimless toil, and drop 
 away back to the village with its drudgery and sleepy 
 contentment with the conventional religion. Then, 
 bleeding and abandoned, the heart-broken priest 
 mounts to the home of the winds and the snows, 
 flings out on the empty air the passionate question 
 why he has failed, wherein he has missed the will of 
 God, and as the murderous avalanche crashes down 
 
 72
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 on his devoted head, he hears amid its thunders a 
 voice which answers, " He is God of Love." 
 
 The tragedy is overwhehiiing, and as one presses 
 to the story's end, its wild and sonorous poetry, its 
 awful and heartrending situations, deprive one of 
 the power of reflection on what all this chaos of 
 nobility and failure means. But days or weeks 
 after — perhaps not till after a second or a third 
 perusal — the meaning dawns. And one sees that 
 Brand failed, in spite of the adhesion of his iron 
 will from first to last to that which he deemed his 
 duty, in spite of the absoluteness of his consecration 
 and his sacrifice, because he beat back the prompt- 
 ings and pleadings of that natural affection and 
 those human sympathies which God has given us 
 as instruments indispensable in the discharge of 
 the highest tasks to which human nature can be 
 called. 
 
 As foil to Brand appears again and again upon 
 the scene the district bailiff or sheriff, a functionary 
 conscientious in the exercise of his duty within 
 the limits prescribed by custom and tradition, but 
 smug, self-satisfied, comfortable, portly, dapper, 
 without a thrill of aspiration or one fibre that can 
 respond to the lofty yearnings of the priest. And 
 while Brand is beaten with many stripes and dies 
 a broken and forsaken soul, this good official thrives 
 and prospers and finds life a very agreeable thing. 
 
 " Brand " is the tragedy of noble failure ; " Peer 
 Gynt," which succeeded it in the following year, 
 the tragedy of ignoble failure. Both are tragedies ; 
 they teach companion lessons ; but they show 
 opposite facets of the coin of truth. 
 
 73
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 If Brand was great with the greatness of a hero 
 soul, Peer Gynt was great only in his own esteem, 
 a very littleness of littleness in his essential character. 
 And in him Ibsen typifies the Norwegian people. 
 
 He is the son of a widowed peasant-woman 
 reduced to the meanest poverty by his idleness 
 and inveterate day-dreaming. Young, handsome, 
 athletic, he has boundless faith in his talents and 
 his destiny. He will be emperor of the world ; but 
 meanwhile he lies sky-gazing, the crops unreaped 
 and the cow and the goat neglected. He weaves 
 yarns by the league of his prowess and adventure, 
 and pours them into his mother's ear. She breaks 
 out in reproaches : why, that very day their rich 
 neighbour's daughter is to be wedded, whom he 
 might have had were he not the village ne'er-do- 
 well ; he is not even invited to the marriage. But 
 he springs up and goes, uninvited though he be, 
 and forces himself on the festive company. Then 
 comes to the festival the beautiful Solveig, pure and 
 innocent in her budding maidenhood ; and a strange 
 sense fills Peer that with her he could be another 
 man, that to love and be loved by her would be his 
 soul's redemption. But her mother forbids her to 
 dance with one of such ill-repute. And Peer turns 
 from her to the bride, and seizing her in his arms, 
 climbs the mountain like a goat, and the pair are 
 quickly far beyond pursuit. He deserts her next 
 day with a flout, and flings himself into such 
 dissipation as the mountain haunts afford. Then 
 presently Solveig appears before him, sweet and 
 innocent and fair as ever. She had been irresistibly 
 drawn to him, by divine intuition discerning in him 
 
 74
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 a something deeper and holier than any other eye 
 could see — the thought God had of him when He 
 breathed into him the breath of life. And for a 
 little while Peer turns to Solveig, building her a 
 little timbered house which shall be their home 
 up there in the mountain height. But the steadiness 
 of faithfulness is not in him, and he wanders away 
 and leaves her there under the excuse that he has 
 work to do ; while there falls on his ear through the 
 widening distance her promise that she will wait 
 for him there till he comes back. 
 
 Then he sets out on a career marked throughout 
 by self-sufficiency, self-seeking, and self-conceit ; 
 while he is for ever priding himself on his self- 
 development, self-realisation, and self-respect — the 
 phrase for self-reverence and for self-sufficiency, 
 for being one's true self and indulging oneself, 
 being almost the same in Norwegian, and he not 
 perceiving the difference between them at all, on 
 which confusion turns the whole action and lesson 
 of the story. He becomes a wealthy merchant in 
 America, a mighty capitalist, a great social figure ; 
 loses all by a sudden turn of fortune, but still goes 
 on playing one role after another to his own intense 
 satisfaction — man of learning, Oriental prophet, 
 king of a madhouse, I know not what — always 
 pluming himself on his self-realisation, his perfect 
 culture of himself, and never suspecting the truth 
 that his real self — the self God meant him to be — 
 is utterly swathed and buried and stifled and 
 destroyed in his immeasurable self-conceit and 
 fathomless selfishness. Even an evil self he does 
 not fairly develop. He is always half-hearted, 
 
 75
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEETH CENTURY 
 
 always sitting on the fence, always hedging between 
 his earthly and his heavenly interests, never wholly 
 giving himself up to one purpose, save only his 
 self-indulgence. And so all true manliness, all 
 distinctive personality is worn out of him, till at 
 last he finds himself an old man, weary, shiftless, 
 penniless, on his native hills ; and one comes to 
 him commissioned to put his soul in the smelting- 
 pot to be smelted down to raw material for the 
 making of other souls hereafter. " For," says this 
 emissary, " thou hast never truly been thyself." 
 " Never been myself ? " cries Peer. 
 
 " I could almost smile ; 
 I have been m3'self the livelong while ; 
 Why, if in the depths of my heart thou shouldst stare, 
 Thou wouldst come upon Peer and nothing but Peer." 
 
 But clearly he who confronts him means by " being 
 oneself" something other than he has ever con- 
 ceived ; so he asks, " What, then, is this ' being 
 oneself ?" And the strange messenger answers — 
 
 "Tc be thyself is thyself to slay ; 
 Or, lest thou follow not what I say, 
 Let being thyself be thus expressed : 
 'Tis to vvear God's thought of thee as thy crest." 
 
 So, that his soul may not be doomed to the grim 
 annihilation of the smelting-pot, old Peer goes 
 wandering to find some one who shall tell him 
 where his true self really is, that he may reclaim 
 it and be saved. And at last he sees a light dimly 
 burning, and pushing his painful way through briar 
 
 76
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 and thicket, falls at the feet of Solveig — an old, 
 blind woman, still standing in the doorway of the 
 little timbered house, waiting, waiting, waiting. 
 And after the first cry of recognition he urges 
 his momentous question — 
 
 " Where has Peer Gynt been from first till now, 
 With the mark of his calling upon his brow ? 
 Been as he sprang from the thought of God ? 
 Cannot tell ? If not, I must under the sod. 
 Where was I myself, as the whole, the true, 
 Where was I with God's stamp on my brow ?" 
 
 And Solveig answers — 
 
 "In my faith, in my hope, in my love for thee." 
 
 That love has made her life a beautiful song, for 
 the wealth of love is in giving, not receiving. Then 
 she takes him weeping to her arms and croons over 
 him a cradle song — 
 
 " Sleep, ah, sleep, my darling boy, 
 I will rock thee, I will watch ; " 
 
 and the soul of Gynt is saved by a love that is half 
 wife's, half tender mother's. 
 
 Both Brand and Peer Gynt, then, teach, the one 
 by example, the other by warning, the splendour of 
 a life that is truly lived in loyalty to noble purpose, 
 the meanness of a life that forgets God's calling and 
 knows no touch of self-devotion. But both teach 
 also in the culminating verses with which they 
 close that love is greatest of all ; that consecrated 
 
 77
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 heroism itself will fail if the just call of love and 
 sympathy have been thwarted, that even the mean 
 and dastardly may be redeemed by the sympathy 
 and love of another heart. 
 
 I have left bare time to touch on the long series 
 of social dramas written in the thirty years that have 
 elapsed since " Peer Gynt " first took the Norwegian 
 people by storm, and by which alone Ibsen is 
 known and judged by the mass of his British critics. 
 But in the more familiar medium of prose they all 
 teach or illustrate the same great thought which 
 palpitates through the noble poetry of those two 
 mighty national dramas. They are a protest against 
 conventionalism, against half-heartedness, against 
 the bonds that fetter individuality and prevent men 
 and women in this modern day from being " them- 
 selves," from realising God's meaning in them, from 
 " wearing God's thought of them as a crest." The 
 theme is, indeed, illustrated in a vast variety of 
 circumstances, but always it is there : How in the 
 midst of society, with the conventional rules that 
 bind us all, with the real obligations which we are 
 under to those among whom we live, children to 
 parents, parents to children, husbands to wives, 
 wives to husbands, citizens each to all and all to 
 each — how are we to realise that free and individual 
 self for which God has compacted us — compacted 
 you, compacted me — to realise that thought of us 
 which God had when he breathed into each the 
 breath of life ? How am I to wear God's thought 
 of me as my crest ? 
 
 It is in the marriage relation that this problem 
 comes out most vividly in our modern society. For 
 
 78
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 marriage is a merging of two individualities, and 
 involves of necessity a certain subordination of 
 each to the other, a certain modification of self- 
 dom and adoption of the other's sentiments and 
 sympathies and purposes. That, indeed, is its 
 essence and its glory. And yet it is fatal if the 
 original individuality be lost. God's thought of me, 
 my inmost self, I must try to keep, though I desire 
 to be the most true and faithful husband. Thou 
 must still wear God's thought of thee as thy crest, 
 though thou wouldst be the most faithful and loving 
 wife. The bearing and forbearing of true marriage 
 is the very quintessence of the problem set before 
 us all in all the relations of life. And again and 
 again Ibsen sets us the problem, telling us stories in 
 which husband or wife acted thus or thus, under 
 the stress of this twofold condition, acted rightly or 
 wrongly — Ibsen never tells us whether he thinks 
 this one or that one was right or wrong in the 
 culminating word or deed — but by the tremendous 
 hold his impersonations get of us, he leaves us 
 wondering, pondering, thinking, weighing, arguing 
 for or against, and gradually realising more and 
 more how great, how incessant, how ubiquitous the 
 problem is. So is it when, in "A Doll's House," 
 Nora leaves her husband because he has only cared 
 for her as a toy, and has not helped her to realise 
 her womanhood. So is it when, in " The Lady from 
 the Sea," Ur. Wangel at last gives Ellida, his wife, 
 free leave to go wath the olden lover who wields so 
 weird a power over her ; and w'ith the snapping of 
 her formal bond to her husband, the power of the 
 lover is in a moment shattered, and the loyalty of 
 
 79
 
 MAKERS (3F THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 her heart springs back to her husband, Wangel. So 
 is it in many another drama. You put it down 
 bewildered, puzzled ? " Was he right ? " " Was 
 she wrong ? " you say ; and as the days pass the 
 problem turns up again and again in thought, this 
 perpetual, universal problem of the reconciliation of 
 our obligations to others with our own moral and 
 spiritual self-realisation. 
 
 And other vast and momentous truths, too, are 
 wrought into the lives and words of these men and 
 women whom Ibsen presents to us with such 
 marvellous reality and power. I will but state one 
 more of them and have done. Ibsen is the hater of 
 convention. And he holds that there are not only 
 conventional lies current in the world, false and 
 rotten bases of conduct, but that there is con- 
 ventional truth as well. He teaches that the 
 vigorous life of a newly discovered truth is in its 
 youth and freshness. Then it seizes the imagina- 
 tion, cleanses the heart, nourishes and stimulates the 
 conscience. But many and many a truth, by the 
 time it is eighteen or nineteen years old, is withered 
 and sapless and has no health in it. It has all the 
 evil efifects of a lie — is, in fact, a lie in the form in 
 which it is apprehended by ordinary men and 
 women. It is usually when a truth has finished its 
 fight for a footing and is already professed by a 
 majority that it enters on this stage of decrepitude. 
 In "An Enemy of the People," "the compact 
 majority " is represented as always wrong ; the few, 
 the individuals are right. 
 
 The meaning is that the mere fact of a truth 
 becoming accepted tends to rob it of the juice of 
 
 80
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 life, to make it in effect a falsehood, without power 
 to mould character and life. Instead of conviction 
 it becomes convention. Even the sublimest of 
 truths— that "God is our Father," that "God is 
 Love," that " Christ is a Saviour," may suffer from 
 this fatal senile decay. When it becomes embedded 
 in creeds, professed as a matter of course, universally 
 voted respectable, the life is no longer in it, and all 
 sorts of false doctrines wholly incompatible with it 
 are taken up alongside of it without a suspicion of 
 discord. 
 
 And so a generation that is content with the truths 
 discovered by its fathers or its grandfathers, and 
 already wrought into the everyday professions of 
 society, really knows not the wholesome taste and 
 nutritive power of truth at all. We must find new 
 truth for to-day, or at any rate clothe old truths in 
 forms that shall make them strike home as new, if 
 we are to have vigour, freshness, reality, inspiration 
 in our lives. And it is the men who are for ever 
 mouthing truths that have grown respectable that 
 are murdering the fresh young life of humanity ; 
 the men who, perhaps crudely, yet with a glowing 
 sincerity propound new truths, that shock and 
 startle perhaps, yet are the ultimate saviours of 
 society. 
 
 And so we part from this great, original, rugged, 
 often grim and gloomy teacher, who stands like a 
 weather-beaten rock defying the waves of criticism 
 at the turning of the centuries. The more we know 
 him, the more we shall learn from him ; for he is 
 that best teacher who compels us to think ourselves. 
 There are those who have called him pessimist ; but 
 
 8i G
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 no man ever yet was pessimist who urged men on 
 from truth to truth, who revered principle and 
 fidehty as he reveres them, who beheved in pressing 
 ever on toward the unseen goal, who threw on men 
 and women the responsibility of true self-realisation, 
 of " wearing God's thought of them as a crest." ^ 
 
 ' In all my views of Ibsen I have been largely influenced 
 by my brother-in-law, Mr. Philip H. Wicksteed, who, in the 
 year 1888, first called my attention to the great Scandinavian 
 dramatist. See his " P'our Lectures on Henrik Ibsen." 
 
 82
 
 VI 
 THE CRITIC: MATTHEW ARNOLD
 
 I
 
 VI 
 THE CRITIC: MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 OF Matthew Arnold, the Poet, the sweet singer 
 — now strong, now gentle — of "The Eternal 
 Note of Sadness," I have spoken elsewhere. ^ But 
 we cannot omit the Critics from the number of the 
 wielders of intellectual and moral forces who helped 
 to make the nineteenth century. And among Eng- 
 lish critics, at any rate, this same Matthew Arnold 
 stands easily pre-eminent ; and in that capacity we 
 have to do with him at this present. 
 
 Matthew Arnold the Poet and Matthew Arnold the 
 Critic seem at first sight to be absolutely opposed 
 and contrasted individualities. In the Poet there is 
 a sympathy, a tenderness, above all a self-control, 
 that makes one feel: "Here is a man so touched with 
 the emotion of our common humanity that he could 
 never say one word which could hurt or sting or 
 goad ; we may safely put ourselves in his hands, 
 secure that he will respect every shade of human 
 feeling and judge us, not by the crude expression of 
 
 ' " Faith and Doubt in the Century's Poets." J. Clarke and 
 Co., 1898. 
 
 85
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 our thoughts, but by the deep inward feeling which 
 underhes all words." But we turn to the Critic, and 
 we find one who delights in dainty barbs that prick ; 
 who makes travesty not seldom of things seriously 
 and conscientiously said ; whose delicate irony 
 knows no mercy ; who will not let us off when 
 we have said or written foolish things simply 
 because our feelings may be sensitive, or because 
 in our blundering way we meant well in the words 
 we used. 
 
 Arnold the Poet is, to my mind, nobler and greater 
 than Arnold the Critic. But Arnold the Critic has 
 forced multitudes to revise careless or second-hand 
 thinking, and has helped to destroy many a fashion 
 or profession which was a protection to untruth. 
 And I find the fundamental unity between Arnold 
 the Critic and Arnold the Poet in an intense loyalty 
 and passion — I will not say for truth, but for truth- 
 fulness—for thought, for sentiment, and for expres- 
 sion absolutely truthful and sincere, as closely in 
 touch with the reality of things as the structure of 
 mind and heart will allow. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's criticism covered an immense 
 range of subject matter, social, political, and reli- 
 gious. Let us touch briefly on the social and 
 political utterances, and then dwell as fully as 
 may be on the religious. 
 
 And having so little time for so much matter, it 
 will perhaps be best that we should almost confine 
 ourselves to the examination of certain phrases of 
 our Critic in which he packed into the smallest com- 
 pass the thoughts he most desired to impress. 
 
 And while I shall have very seriously to question 
 
 85
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 some parts of Matthew Arnold's teachings, there are 
 others which have, in my opinion, worked for nothing 
 but good, and worked most effectively in the mind 
 of the nineteenth century towards its close. 
 
 The true purpose of a true human hfe, he teaches, 
 is " to grow towards perfection." All apparent ad- 
 vances in civilisation which do not tend to develop 
 perfection in the individuals of the human race are 
 so many mischievous illusions. And there are many 
 purposes in life most sedulously taught and praised 
 among us which have not this tendency at all. They 
 do not help to make men happy, or wise, or good. 
 They do not help us to that temper which Arnold 
 praises in a phrase borrowed from Swift, the temper 
 of "sweetness and light." There is a full half of 
 Arnold's whole doctrine in this one little paragraph, 
 which should be very carefully read and allowed to 
 sink into the mind : — 
 
 " The pursuit of perfection is the pursuit of sweet- 
 ness and light. He who works for sweetness and 
 light, works to make reason and the will of God 
 prevail. He who works for machinery, he who 
 works for hatred, works only for confusion. Cul- 
 ture" (which he has described as being "a study of 
 perfection ") " looks beyond machinery ; culture hates 
 hatred ; culture has one great passion, the passion 
 for sweetness and light." 
 
 Elsewhere in many places he adds to sweetness 
 and light, life and sympathy. Culture is the study 
 of perfection ; and perfection is the constant grow- 
 ing in sweetness, and in light, and in life, and in 
 sympathy. 
 
 You perceive that Arnold speaks of "machinery" 
 
 87
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 as of a very hateful thing. And he has in mind two 
 great truths. The first is that we are so apt to look 
 on the machine as if it were itself the end. We boast 
 of our freedom, of our vast population, of our huge 
 coal supply, of our railroads, of our wealth, of our 
 religious organisations, as if they were in themselves 
 each a great good. But they are only good as 
 machinery, and the machinery is only good if kept 
 always steadfastly and consciously in subordination 
 to a good purpose which they can help us to fulfil. 
 And the good purpose they may help us to fulfil is 
 growth towards perfection, increase of sweetness and 
 light, of life and sympathy. Unless they help these, 
 they are a great curse blocking the way. And in so 
 many minds the machinery is loved, but the purpose 
 forgotten ; and then machinery — so holds Matthew 
 Arnold — is hateful. 
 
 But in another way, too, he finds machinery often 
 hateful. For one form of machinery is party- 
 organisation and sect-organisation. I myself am a 
 party man, holding party the necessary machinery 
 by which we may work for certain great and noble 
 ends. I am not myself a sect-man, for I belong to a 
 religious group which disclaims sect ; but I own it is 
 hard sometimes, both for outsiders and for insiders 
 too, to distinguish this group from just one more 
 religious sect. But, however that be, heart and soul 
 I accord with Arnold in hating some of the develop- 
 ments of party -spirit and of sect -spirit. These 
 political and religious organisations do again and 
 again so lapse from their high purpose, that they 
 make for bigotry and fanaticism, for misrepresenta- 
 tion and hate. And those of us who become 
 
 88
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 members of party or of sect, or of what looks 
 like sect, need to pray and strive all the time to 
 keep free from the evil tempers these things are 
 apt to breed ; and to see to it that we bring into 
 them such a culture, such a constant seeking to use 
 them for developing perfection, that out of them 
 shall grow increased sweetness and light, increased 
 sympathy and life. 
 
 All this discussion is in the essay on "Culture 
 and Anarchy" ; and that essay contains also certain 
 other famous words and phrases which our Critic 
 has stamped upon the lips and minds of English- 
 men. Thus it contains his division of all ordinary 
 Englishmen into the three great classes, the Bar- 
 barians, the Philistines, and the Populace — the 
 Barbarians being the aristocracy with their love of 
 ease and of field-sports, their polite and sometimes 
 noble bearing, and their externality and want of 
 soul ; the Philistines being the middle-class, from 
 the great manufacturer or merchant to the superior 
 working - man, with all their organisations and 
 machinery and their sad inaccessibility to ideas ; 
 the Populace being the rude mob with their leaning, 
 as he thinks, to riot and the plentiful imbibing of 
 beer. 
 
 Now as I suppose most of us, I and my hearers 
 and readers, belong to that middle-class which is 
 nicknamed Philistine, we may leave the Barbarians 
 and the Populace alone, and meekly hear what Mr. 
 Arnold has to say about us, and why he gives us the 
 name. He gives us the name because, as he says, 
 " it gives the notion of something particularly stiff- 
 necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its 
 
 89
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 children ; and therein it specially suits our middle- 
 class, who not only do not pursue sweetness and 
 light, but even prefer to them that sort of machinery 
 of business, chapels, and tea-meetings " which makes 
 up so dismal and illiberal a life. Pretty severe that, 
 we shall feel, and very far from just. But if it does 
 not represent the fact, it does represent our danger ; 
 and I would plead with all of you — yes, and plead 
 most earnestly with myself, because I know the 
 danger — not to fall in love with the machinery 
 itself, whether the counting - house business of 
 commerce, or the committees and conferences and 
 meetings that gather round corporate religion, but 
 to keep minds ever open to the purpose beyond, the 
 growing into sweetness and light, and hearts ever 
 open to sympathy with thoughts and modes of life 
 quite different from our own, refreshing our souls 
 with draughts from the wells of wholesome litera- 
 ture far outside our own personal interests, and 
 keeping in touch with the broad life of humanity 
 far beyond our counting-houses and committee- 
 rooms. An open mind, an open heart, these are 
 the cure for the Philistinism on which our critic 
 pours the copious streams of his satire. 
 
 In the same essay is the famous teaching con- 
 cerning Hellenism and Hebraism. And this cuts 
 very close to the roots of life. Two great and 
 leading mental habits have alternately swayed the 
 movements of the world. And the Hebrews, or 
 Israel, best exemplify the one ; the Hellenes, or 
 Athens, best exemplify the other. Israel's supreme 
 idea was righteousness. That was the burden of 
 the prophets. And a mental habit governed by the 
 
 90
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 idea of obedience, of conscience, Arnold stamps 
 with the name of Hebraism. In Greece the idea 
 that shaped the nation's soul was knowledge, wis- 
 dom. That was the burden of the sages. And a 
 mental habit governed by that idea, the idea of 
 seeing and knowing things as they truly are, Arnold 
 stamps with the name of Hellenism. And from 
 these two, study of conduct, study of wisdom, 
 pursuit of duty, pursuit of knowledge — the per- 
 fection of mankind, increase of sweetness, life, 
 light, sympathy, the happiness and goodness of 
 men, have to be brought forth. 
 
 But needful as each is, the balance between the 
 two has never been long maintained. Hellenism 
 had sway in Greece and Rome, but " the world by 
 wisdom knew not God," and anarchy swept down 
 on the classic civilisation. 
 
 But the day came when the Church, represen- 
 tative of Hebraism, got all into her own hands. 
 Hellenism was strangled, and obedience to rules, 
 rites, ceremonies, pilgrimages, penances, took its 
 place. But that brought on the period known 
 through history as pre-eminently " the dark ages." 
 Every slavery and debasement of mind and 
 body flourished, and the intellect of the world 
 slept save in a chosen few. 
 
 Then at the renaissance Hellenism was born 
 again, and the history of Europe since then has 
 been the competition of the two great habits — rule 
 of knowledge, rule of duty — for the leadership of 
 civilised mankind. 
 
 Now the complaint of Matthew Arnold is that 
 just as the wave of Hellenism was rising to 
 
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 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 its height, and art, hterature, poetry, science, 
 discovery were opening a new and more splendid 
 world, all this so far as Britain is concerned was 
 nipped and spoilt by that counter-movement of 
 Hebraism which is known by the name of 
 Puritanism. 
 
 Puritanism was an intense revival of the Bible, 
 but of the Bible unilluminated by any discrimi- 
 nating sagacity. It was a fierce strike for righteous- 
 ness, but for a righteousness conceived in a narrow 
 and ignorant spirit. It was a vehement Hebraism 
 unguided or uninformed by a spark or breath of 
 Hellenism. And, according to Matthew Arnold, 
 just when the need of the world was not so much 
 to be urged to do the right as to learn by under- 
 standing wherein the right consisted, it proclaimed 
 with the passion of Isaiah the inalienable claims of 
 righteousness, but shut eyes and ears quite fast 
 against any fresh consideration of the question 
 wherein righteousness consisted. 
 
 And our Critic pertinaciously complained that 
 still Puritanism is cramping and starving our life, 
 that we are even to this day overdone with an 
 excess of Hebraism, and suffering from sore lack of 
 the Hellenic counterpoise. What we need above 
 all else to-day, he taught, is that spontaneity of 
 consciousness, free movement of intelligence, free 
 Hellenic endeavour to see things as they truly are, 
 should take the lead of the rude old Hebrew 
 strictness of conscience. 
 
 Now surely here Matthew Arnold is both right 
 and wrong — right that we need a larger and more 
 open mind, that we should more intelligently 
 
 92
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 inquire wherein duty and righteousness consist, 
 be more ready to beheve that there are urgent 
 duties outside those conventionally accepted, be 
 more hospitable to pleadings against habits of greed 
 and sensuality, of drunkenness and war and cruelty. 
 Right, yes, profoundly right. But wrong, yes, pro- 
 foundly wrong in minimising the need of Hebraism. 
 It is true, we judge in many things untruly wherein 
 duty and righteousness consist. But it is at the 
 least equally true that in multitudes of instances, 
 knowing full well wherein duty and righteousness 
 consist, we do not practise them. The needle of 
 conscience points straight enough ; but we do not 
 steer accordingly. 
 
 Why, I ask you young men, any one of you, 
 wherein is your difBculty ? Wherein are you failing 
 to move towards perfection ? Is it that you do not 
 know your duty, or that you do not do it ? Is it 
 that you do not know what is good and wise and 
 noble, or that you pass it by ? More Hellenism, 
 less Hebraism ? No, be not content with Hellen- 
 ising. You cannot fruitfully Hellenise unless the 
 centre and pivot of your being be your Hebraising. 
 The first need for any real rise and spread of 
 wisdom is that conscience be quick and vivid and 
 strict. You know what is right by unswerving 
 instinct. It is honesty and self-control, purity and 
 courage and kindness. But the awful fact is that 
 conscience is weak, and that knowing the right, you 
 fail to face straight for it, but walk by the paths of 
 the sinners, and the light of the child's sweet purity 
 fades from the young man's eye. 
 
 But it is time that we hastened on to other 
 
 93
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 teachings of our Critic closely concerned with the 
 Bible and Christianity and religion. 
 
 The hard and mechanical treatment of the Bible, 
 the treatment which makes it a magazine of texts 
 for the proving of ecclesiastical doctrines, was hate- 
 ful to this Critic's soul. For he knew that the Bible 
 was a great living literature, beating with the pas- 
 sions, throbbing with the ardours and aspirations, 
 instinct with the thought and sentiment of a great 
 line of prophets, historians, psalmists, evangelists, 
 each in his day full of the life of his country and 
 his time, and striving to speak the needed word, 
 without thought of doctrines of the Trinity or nicely 
 balanced schemes of posthumous salvation. And 
 he desired to quicken in the men of to-day a sense 
 of the feeling breathing through it all, and an 
 appreciation of the deep wisdom so often under- 
 lying its utterances. And so all through his 
 writings you will find the quotations from Scripture 
 which he weaves into his argument wonderfully 
 fresh and alive — not like the dead inscriptions of a 
 forgotten age, or the articles of a dictionary for the 
 proving or refuting of a dogma, but like the words 
 of men speaking to us now eye to eye in our own 
 tongue out of the deep experience of life. And I 
 would particularly commend to any of you who 
 desire to know how real and alive and helpful even 
 the difficult Epistles may be made by an under- 
 standing and sympathetic interpreter, the little book 
 called " St. Paul and Protestantism," where that 
 noble Apostle appears, not teaching the doctrines 
 of orthodoxy at all, which his writings have been 
 tortured to support, but pouring out lessons of life 
 
 94
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 like those of Jesus himself, how self-renunciation 
 is the secret of gladness, and how self-control and 
 love are more than any theology the intellect of 
 man ever constructed. 
 
 And that takes me to the deep wisdom and in- 
 sight of the chapters in the famous " Literature and 
 Dogma " which treat of the method, the secret, and 
 the temper of Jesus. These, so Arnold would per- 
 suade us, make up the sum and substance of the 
 teaching of Jesus. His method of finding the secret 
 of life was quite a new one in his day, one from 
 which even now' we are constantly breaking away, 
 though we acknowledge it with our lips. It was 
 summed up in the hint, "The kingdom of God is 
 within you," and taught us to look for light, for 
 guidance, for the law of conduct, for the pearl of 
 great price, withm the heart and not in the outward 
 world at all. Happiness and blessing w^ere to be 
 found, not in any ceremonials or observances, but 
 in a certain manner of thinking and feeling and 
 behaving inwardly. 
 
 That was the method of Jesus — to look within. 
 And the secret of Jesus was the great and astonish- 
 ing practical truth which he discovered by looking 
 and searching thus within. The secret was that self- 
 renunciation is the only way to peace and gladness — 
 just the very thing which you would think must 
 make against it is the only thing which can make for 
 it. This priceless secret — itself the pearl — Jesus 
 expresses in such phrases as, " Whosoever will save 
 his life shall lose it ; but whosoever shall lose his 
 life for my sake and the sake of the good news, the 
 same shall save it " ; or, " Take up your cross and 
 
 95
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 follow me"; or, "Take my yoke upon you and 
 learn of me that I am mild and lowly in heart, and 
 ye shall find rest unto your souls." 
 
 But as well as the method and the secret, Matthew 
 Arnold tells us, we must heed the temper of 
 Jesus — that temper in which alone the metliod 
 can be rightly used, and the secret will come 
 out true, and exaggeration and fanaticism will be 
 avoided. 
 
 And the temper, says Arnold, must be one of 
 mildness, or, to use his favourite word, " sweet 
 reasonableness," a temper " full of grace and truth," 
 as the disciples said ; a temper such as is displayed 
 in the " exquisite, mild, winning felicity " with which 
 Jesus answers the hot, eager question, who is the 
 greatest in the kingdom of heaven, by drawing to 
 him a little child, and saying, " Whosoever receives 
 the kingdom of God as a little child, the same is the 
 greatest in it." 
 
 The method, the secret, the temper, inwardness, 
 self-renunciation, sweet reasonableness — these, says 
 Matthew Arnold, are the things Jesus gave himself 
 to teach. 
 
 So far as it goes I do not think any critic ever 
 gave a truer summary of the Christian gospel ; and 
 if we all lived in the spirit of that teaching the 
 kingdom of heaven would indeed be realised here 
 on earth. But there is to my mind one great and 
 strange blindness on the part of Arnold which 
 cramps, and in its degree vitiates, his interpretation 
 both of Jesus and of the Prophets, both of the New 
 Testament and of the Old. He does not recognise 
 the teaching of Jesus concerning Our Father. He 
 
 96
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 does not emphasise Israel's trumpet-tongued pro- 
 clamation of a Living God. 
 
 Yet, as the greatest living scholar and critic of the 
 New Testament — the famous German, Harnack — 
 has even now declared, the relation of man to God 
 as a child to a Father is the very centre and essence 
 of the message and testimony of Jesus, out of which 
 all the rest flows as its consequence and corollary. 
 And the inspiring sentiment of the mighty prophets 
 of the olden time — in which they braved the per- 
 secution of kings and the wrath of an apostate 
 people — was passionate loyalty to a Living God of 
 righteousness. Large areas of Matthew Arnold's 
 writings are given up to the contention that the 
 Israelites were no metaphysicians, that they never 
 argued that God is a Person, that they never even 
 considered what the terms Person and personality 
 may mean. And it is true. But for all that, right 
 or wrong, it was as a Person, a Being with thought 
 and will and affection, one akin to man, however 
 transcendently above him, that Isaiah and Micah 
 and the Psalmists, Jesus and John and Paul, thought 
 and spoke and felt concerning God. And he who 
 falls short of recognising this misses the dominating 
 note of their message to mankind. 
 
 Mr. Arnold, indeed, speaks of God. He even 
 cites from the Bible language in which the Deity 
 is personified. But he regards this as poetical, as 
 an imagination, as outside the realm of scientific or 
 critical truth ; and he insists that we are not justified 
 in conceiving God as more than a " Power, not 
 ourselves, that makes for righteousness," or even 
 "the stream of tendency by which all things seek to 
 
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 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 fulfil the law of their being." After " sweetness and 
 light," those two are his most reiterated and cele- 
 brated phrases. 
 
 "A Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteous- 
 ness" : yes, God is that. The long history of the 
 world, with its slow, sure straining off of evil, and 
 the gradual drawing of mankind towards " sweet- 
 ness and light and life and sympathy," proves that. 
 But the teaching of the Prophets is that this Power 
 is no dumb, blind, insensate force, but a very 
 living God, who speaks to the prophet as a man to 
 his friend, who approves or condemns, rewards or 
 chastises. And the preaching of Jesus is that this 
 Eternal Power is no other than our Heavenly Father, 
 a God who cares for his children with more than a 
 mother's love, one to whom we may go with our 
 prayer, our contrition, or our thanksgiving, and 
 know that the Father hears and heeds. 
 
 " The stream of tendency by which all things 
 seek to fulfil the law of their being." That he offers 
 us as a rigidly scientific definition of God. He is 
 perfectly satisfied with it, repeats it again and again, 
 dwells on it, caresses it. But a " stream of ten- 
 dency" : who can be loyal or grateful to a stream? 
 where are reverence and love and the enthusiasm 
 of devout attachment to come in ? And what is 
 " tendency," that you can have a " stream " of it ? 
 And how can "things" "seek"? There is not a 
 word in the definition which will bear examination. 
 A stream must rise from some originating spring. 
 It is a mere passive flow. Not such is the Power 
 that lies behind the ages and the worlds, and holds 
 them in its eternal grasp. 
 
 98
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 And for an interpreter of the Hebrew Scriptures ? 
 Why, those Scriptures are saturated with the sense 
 of communion with a Living Being. And if 
 Matthew Arnold had gone to Isaiah and said, 
 "Why not call your Holy One a stream of ten- 
 dency ; after all, all that you know is that there is 
 a Power not yourself that makes for righteousness," 
 Isaiah would have put him on a level with the 
 workman who set the goldsmith to spread over 
 his graven image with gold and cast for it silver 
 chains ; and would have given us one more sub- 
 lime and immortal outburst concerning " the ever- 
 lasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of 
 the earth." 
 
 I commend to you, then, the writings of Matthew 
 Arnold, foremost English critic in his age, a true 
 "maker" of the century that has ebbed to its 
 close. They are pure and wholesome, stimulating, 
 quickening, educative in a rare degree. They 
 compel you to revise old opinions, to test the 
 dead formulae which prevail in State and Church ; 
 to abjure and scorn manufactured views and a 
 sham wisdom that has no true culture for its 
 source. But while with some mighty wielders of 
 words, it is safe for you to give yourselves over to 
 their charm and power and let them lead you 
 whither they will, with this master of criticism it is 
 needful that you should keep alive and alert your 
 own critical faculty, test and try each phrase and 
 turn by the gauge of fact and truth. 
 
 And if now and again he mock at men or truths 
 which you hold sacred, as mock he will, and you 
 are irritated by his light and vivid raillery, if some- 
 
 99
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 times his words seem words of a vain conceit, then 
 turn to his pure and beautiful, most truthful and 
 noble poetry, to " Dover Beach " or " Rugby 
 Chapel," and learn how sweet and brave a spirit 
 lay behind those clear blue eyes, how close to God 
 beat the heart of him who yet dared not pray to 
 Him as his living Friend and Father. 
 
 lOO
 
 VII 
 
 THE ICONOCLAST: CHARLES 
 BRAD LA UGH
 
 VII 
 
 THE ICONOCLAST: CHARLES 
 BRADLAUGH 
 
 AMONG the "Makers of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury " I include the " Iconoclast," which is 
 Greek for the image-breaker. In the eighth Chris- 
 tian century a great controversy raged in regard to 
 the worship of sacred effigies — representations of 
 Christ, of Mary, of the Saints. And the ardent 
 reformers of the day were wont to resort to the 
 forcible argument of shattering the images which to 
 others were objects of veneration. And so the 
 term " Iconoclast " has become incorporated in 
 language to stand for one who is a breaker of such 
 images as, held sacred by some, seem to him but 
 symbols of the false and allurements to superstition 
 and to wrong. And at the very outset of his career 
 young Charles Bradlaugh chose that title under 
 which to fight his vigorous battles, and he held by 
 it till, at the outset of his more public political 
 career in 1868, he elected to fling away all pseu- 
 donyms and stand always in his own person — the 
 person of Charles Bradlaugh — strenuous and defiant 
 before the world. 
 
 103
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 And the world needs Iconoclasts — image-breakers 
 — as well as reformers by milder methods. The 
 " sweet reasonableness " which Matthew Arnold 
 recommended, but did not always practise, will 
 not do all the reforming work which the progress of 
 mankind requires. The mellifluous flow of gentle 
 speech will not always arouse the sleepers or prick 
 the sluggards to activity ; and the lava stream of a 
 potent tongue moved by a mighty indignation has 
 its function also in the making of the better world. 
 
 To break up and destroy the idols of the market- 
 place, the current phrases which stand for lies, the 
 traditional notions which stand in the way of free- 
 dom and justice and mercy and progress and truth, 
 is in itself a service to humanity in which many a 
 hero has earned right well his crown of martyrdom. 
 Without such rough and hardy pioneers to level 
 the way before them, the meeker philanthropists 
 would often find the path they would take impas- 
 sable. It is honourable and necessary work, but it 
 is work that is dangerous too. 
 
 It is dangerous, because tender affections and 
 living reverences so intertwine with the supersti- 
 tions of men, because the true and the false are so 
 intimately mingled, because it is so easy to break 
 down, so difficult to build up, so easy to destroy, so 
 difficult to create, so easy to smash and crush, so 
 difBcult to separate the good and the evil and to see 
 that with the dissolving of the evil no good be dis- 
 solved as well. The faiths, the reverences, the 
 affections by which men live, which give them 
 hope, enthusiasm, courage, are sacred things ; and 
 if you take away from a man that which inspires 
 
 104
 
 CHARLES BRADLAUGH 
 
 him to high and holy service, you do him and 
 the world irreparable harm. So the business of 
 iconoclasm is one of high value, a very necessary 
 element of the advance of our race ; but it is one to 
 be pursued with great caution lest with the evil you 
 destroy the good, lest for the faith which you pull 
 down you can build up no other equally inspiring in 
 its place. 
 
 If the space around which the iconoclast has 
 swung his club be left by him a chaos of broken 
 pottery and chips of marble, his work needs supple- 
 menting that new forms of truth and beauty may be 
 reared in that desert place. 
 
 A typical Iconoclast of the nobler sort was that 
 Charles Bradlaugh, whose name has aroused a 
 virulence of abuse and a passionate ardour of 
 devotion such as accrue but to one man here and 
 there in a generation or a century. How extra- 
 ordinary a man he was to look on ! The only other 
 I ever met in the least resembling him was Dr. 
 Parker of the City Temple. A full figure of a man, 
 muscular, titanic, great shoulders carrying an 
 enormous head. Arms that could quell a mob, a 
 chest that could send forth speech to overtop the 
 groans or hootings of a multitude, a forehead 
 towering to an enormous height, a nose so small 
 that it seemed to belong to another face, but eyes, 
 and still more lips, of tremendous character and 
 power, with an underjaw so large and powerful that 
 in moments of storm or indignation it gave an 
 animal force to the countenance suggestive of 
 something like ferocity. 
 
 And he began life with everything against him. 
 
 105
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 From his very youth a writer against the current of 
 popular sentiment, many men have held senti- 
 ments as unpopular as he. But few have carried in 
 their breast his restless desire to proclaim them to 
 mankind. In matters social, political, religious, he 
 was on fire to bring all men to what he deemed 
 the truth, with that strange flame which has leapt up 
 in the hearts of prophets and set them with their 
 burning words to confront and defy the world. 
 Only in his case he was without that tremendous 
 motive which in an Isaiah, a Paul, a Luther, a 
 Wesley had such compelling and commanding force. 
 These, one and all, felt themselves ambassadors of 
 God. With them it was ever a " thus saith the 
 Lord." They seemed to themselves to hear a 
 living voice from out the eternal silence, a voice of 
 One Unseen, Almighty, who spoke within them, 
 whose interpreters they were to be. They had the 
 immeasurable help of the conviction that a Friend, 
 mightier, holier than all the tribes of men, was on 
 their side. And so they spoke, faced buffetings and 
 scourgings, mockery and hatred, ever with the sense 
 that they were God's own preachers, God's own 
 ministers. And so it was that their speech faltered 
 not, and in the midst of scorn the ring of triumph 
 was in their tones. To stand God and oneself 
 against the world — that, indeed, calls for courage of 
 no mean order. To be called fanatic, upbraided for 
 heresies, mistrusted, misrepresented, hotly rebuked 
 even by good men while others turn coldly from 
 you, and old friendships are broken by the strain, 
 even when your whole soul throbs with the con- 
 viction that God is with you, that is no light thing. 
 
 io6
 
 CHARLES BRADLAUGH 
 
 But, ah ! what must it be when you have not that ; 
 when you beheve in no God, when earth is without 
 Him and heaven is blank of Him, when you cannot 
 reh^esh your panting soul with prayer — when it is 
 just you, you alone, in a fatherless world, with all 
 mankind against you — to stand defiant, rebuked of 
 all men, alone, alone, unaided, no Unseen Friend 
 in the silence of the night or the glare of the 
 battling day ? — just because you believe what you 
 have to say is true and is for the helping of men — 
 surely that is a heroism before which our criticisms 
 may well be hushed. 
 
 And we who know how to help us to keep our 
 hearts from bitterness and to guard our lips from 
 sharpness, all the blessed help of our daily prayer, 
 of turning again and again to God, our Father, is 
 not too much ; how even so again and again we fail 
 even in the common affairs of life — surely we should 
 be very, very slow to condemn our brother who is 
 without that Shepherd or knows Him not, without 
 that rod and staff to comfort him, without the music 
 of that blessed faith : " Surely goodness and mercy 
 shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall 
 dwell in the house of the Lord for ever." 
 
 And so if it sometimes happened that the word of 
 Charles Bradlaugh smote as a two-edged sword, if 
 now and again the fierceness and passion of his 
 rejoinder to men who taunted him was terrible to 
 see — and I have seen him in the torrent of his 
 words shaking his opponent like a wild beast 
 shaking the life out of an antelope or kid — why, 
 who shall cast the first stone ? Are we who have 
 God never passionate ? And how should mortal 
 
 107
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 man — without that guarding presence — not some- 
 times be carried in the whirlwind of his indigna- 
 tion to excess of language and violence of denun- 
 ciation ? 
 
 Charles Bradlaugh was a heretic all round. He 
 was made that way. Many of his heresies I share ; 
 from others I turn away, since he disbelieved in 
 doctrines which command all my intellect and my 
 affections. But he was true to the convictions 
 which he reached ; true with a fidelity which shames 
 ninety-nine out of every hundred of us all. 
 
 Politically he was a tremendous Radical. In 
 spite of waves and periods of reaction the English 
 world is slowly, surely moving towards the accept- 
 ance of most of these Radicalisms of his. Socially 
 he held views honestly and earnestly, some of which 
 I personally think tended towards the subversion 
 of society and the loosening of the bonds of 
 morality. But he held his views conscientiously 
 and believed them to be for the good of mankind ; 
 and he suffered cruelly under the gross and false, 
 the unscrupulous and reckless misrepresentations of 
 his views which were generally current. Religiously 
 he was an atheist. I hold Theism, as opposed to 
 atheism, to be the fundamental truth of the universe, 
 the one ultimate bond of all truth, morality, and 
 religion. But I would rather have the earnest and 
 reasoned atheism of this man than the loose and 
 conventional Christianity of that Conservative 
 colleague of his in the House of Commons, who 
 said to him lightly, " Whj^, Bradlaugh, what in the 
 world does it matter whether there is a God or 
 not ? " And I hold that if one of those two men 
 
 io8
 
 CHARLES BRADLAUGH 
 
 is to be called an infidel — unfaithful — that man is 
 not Charles Bradlaugh. 
 
 It is needless for me to speak of that great consti- 
 tutional struggle in which he engaged when the 
 British House of Commons refused to excuse him 
 from the oath and then refused to let him take it, 
 and by which chiefly his name is secure of a place 
 in history. As a representative of the people in 
 what should be the people's House he was ever 
 on the side of justice, an opponent of oppression, 
 a determined advocate of the rights of weak and 
 unfriended peoples. " He took up," says his 
 biographer, " the cause of India as he had done 
 those of Italy, Poland, Ireland, of Boers, Zulus, 
 and Egyptians, with no thought or prospect of 
 personal gain, out of sheer zeal for justice and 
 hatred of oppression." Royal favour never con- 
 ferred on any man a more honourable title than 
 that which was accorded in popular parlance to 
 him, "The honourable member for India." Not 
 for nothing did a leading Irish Nationalist declare 
 to him once on the floor of the House, " Mr. 
 Bradlaugh, you have been the best Christian of us 
 all." 
 
 I met him in debate at Nottingham when he was 
 forty-five years of age. He had lectured a little 
 while previously in the town on Max Muller's 
 Hibbert Lectures. I had ventured a few words of 
 criticism on his address. The result was a chal- 
 lenge to debate, which challenge was earnestly and 
 courteously pressed upon me by the local Secularist 
 society. After some hesitation and consultation of 
 friends I accepted the challenge. And on the 
 
 109
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 evenings of the 5th and 6th of September, 1878, 
 we met in the Co-operative Hall, which was densely 
 crowded with an audience in which his friends and 
 mine were fairly mingled. The subject was, " Is it 
 Reasonable to Worship God?" — a subject selected 
 by me that I might lay the stress on personal and 
 practical religion rather than on vague and vain 
 metaphysical word-spinnings either for or against 
 the abstract belief in the existence of Deity. In 
 every respect Mr. Bradlaugh treated me with a 
 perfect and generous courtesy. He was of course 
 not only a man of the rarest platform power, but 
 also a most practised debater, while I was but a 
 novice. Accordingly he gave me such advantages 
 in the order of proceedings as must fall to one or 
 the other, allowing me the first word on the first 
 night and the last on the second ; and when the 
 debate was published he invited me to supply the 
 preface. Both of us kept our tempers perfectly, 
 which indeed was little credit to either of us, since 
 neither gave the other provocation. The debate 
 was afterwards translated into Dutch by a Liberal 
 Protestant pastor, which seemed to show that he at 
 any rate thought the balance of its argument was in 
 favour of faith in God. It was a deep delight to 
 me, when "a few years ago the Life of Charles 
 Bradlaugh appeared, to read that though he had 
 left London depressed by the bigotries displayed on 
 occasion of the release of Edward Truelove from 
 prison that morning, and in little humour for the 
 engagement, the atmosphere cleared for him at our 
 meeting. At the close of the first evening's discus- 
 sion, he wrote or said to his daughter, " I left 
 
 no
 
 CHARLES BRADLAUGH 
 
 London in no mood for debating. Coldbath Fields 
 atmosphere hung about me all day, but the debate, 
 as far as the first night has gone, is the most pleasant 
 one in which I have ever taken part." 
 
 In that debate Mr. Bradlaugh's line of argument 
 was broadly the same as he adopted in many other 
 discussions both in the spoken and in the written 
 word. Atheism did not mean with him the actual 
 denial of God. It meant, like Huxley's Agnosticism, 
 the contention that we cannot know anything about 
 a God, whether He exists or not. The plea was that 
 men should live without God, make no reference to 
 Him in prayer or worship, face life, seek truth, do 
 duty apart from any conscious dependence on a 
 Living Deity. But practically his argument always 
 made for the definite conclusion that there is no 
 God, for it was an attack on every argument put 
 forward to convince men that there is. 
 
 His method consisted very largely in an invitation 
 to his opponent to frame some metaphysical defini- 
 tion of Deity. And since God is, like all ultimate 
 existences — like time, space, matter, force — indefin- 
 able in any terms more clear than the simple word 
 itself, he was wont to get his unwary opponent into 
 inextricable confusion, and triumphantly expose the 
 futility of whatever definition he advanced. It was 
 a favourite formula of Bradlaugh — one which he 
 pressed on me again and again — that we cannot 
 believe in that which we cannot define. To which 
 it seems sufficient answer that every man believes in 
 the existence of himself, yet there never was a man 
 who could scientifically define himself. There are 
 mysteries that are pressed in upon our consciousness, 
 
 III
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 which are wrought into our hourly experience, 
 which we know and cannot help knowing by direct 
 apprehension, which nevertheless the philosophers 
 may discuss for ever and a day before they can 
 girdle them round with a definition. 
 
 Mr. Bradlaugh, again, contended thaf we cannot 
 believe things on other men's experience, and this he 
 pressed on me when I argued from the testimony of 
 religious men to the reality of religious truth. Yet 
 there is not one of us who does not every hour 
 assume the verity of other men's experience. That 
 the Atlantic Ocean is very wide, that Mont Blanc is 
 very high, that the Equator is hot and the Pole is 
 cold, that men in Australia gaze on other constella- 
 tions than we, these are testimonies, experiences, 
 which the stay-at-homes among us accept on the 
 bare word of others, and concerning whfc^ no 
 Bradlaugh expresses scepticism. Indeed, with all 
 respect, I must say that his argumentative quiver 
 was largely stocked with arrows which were mere 
 true-sounding general formulae — true-sounding, but 
 capable of absolute exposure and destruction by the 
 application of a little common sense. 
 
 No, the real strength of his case lay elsewhere. It 
 lay in his scathing exposure of the many mean ideas 
 of God put forth by the historic orthodoxies of the 
 world. The great Iconoclast wielded a club that 
 dealt shattering blows against the Jehovah who 
 smiled on the slaughter of women and children and 
 incited the passions of Israel against the foe, who 
 loved human sacrifice and cared for but one people 
 on all the face of the earth ; or against a Father who 
 could only forgive through the oblation of his Son 
 
 112
 
 CHARLES BRADLAUGH 
 
 and called for blood to atone for blood ; or against 
 a God who condemned to eternal torture all who 
 would not pronounce the shibboleth of a worn-out 
 creed, or shut out from his grace for ever such souls 
 as had refused the pretended sacraments of a false 
 and superstitious priesthood. Against all vain 
 images of God his assault was terrible ; and young 
 men whose reason and conscience alike responded 
 with quick delight to denunciatiofis such as these, 
 were carried by the impetus he gave, away past all 
 sane and thoughtful Theism, to that blank Atheism 
 which to so many has proved a waste too arid to 
 nourish the roots of their higher spiritual being. 
 This is no occasion to try to meet point by point 
 \the powerful criticisms which Mr. Bradlaugh, with 
 undoubted sincerity and conviction that he was 
 serving the cause of truth, levelled at every form of 
 Theistic faith, at every mode of belief in God, and 
 the spirit of prayer and trust and hope and reverence 
 that is rooted in such belief. It is rather for us to 
 strive briefly, in conclusion, to distinguish the great 
 fundamental elements in human nature which make 
 against the permanent establishment of Atheism as 
 the creed of the human race — which indeed give us 
 hope that the lapse of another Christian century may 
 yield a far more living and uplifting faith in the 
 Heavenly Feather than any to which the nations have 
 as yet attained. 
 
 Is it not enough to point to the historic fact that 
 the mind and heart of man continually revert to 
 faith in God after every adverse argument, as the 
 needle, however violently deflected, the moment it 
 regains its freedom, quivers back upon the index to 
 
 1T3 I
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the north ? Only once in history has a mighty 
 teacher striven to build up a civilisation in absolute 
 alienation from all Theism. Sakya-muni, the 
 Buddha, with heart burning with compassion for 
 the woes of men, strove to do that thing. And 
 behold ! the Buddhists of the after centuries, how- 
 ever loyal to his ethics, by the compulsion of the 
 spiritual nature in which we are wrought, reverted to 
 prayer, to worship, to adoration, to the psalm of 
 praise, as though the Buddha had proclaimed a 
 Living God. Thrust out nature with a pitchfork, 
 yet always she returns. If the element of faith be 
 cast forth at the front door, it creeps in at the back 
 ere many days. No steady and united forward 
 movement of mankind has ever been made without 
 the binding and propelling power of some faith in a 
 higher Being than man, without the humbling of the 
 soul before a high and holy One who evokes the 
 great and noble passions of love and loyalty and 
 reverence. You may dash to pieces the cobwebs of 
 metaphysics, tear to shreds the texture of theology, 
 but human nature refuses to proceed on its mighty 
 march through the ages without the element of 
 worship, of the upward look, of hands folded and 
 head bowe.d down before the ineffable Mystery, the 
 Living One, the Supreme who inhabits eternity. 
 
 It is true that the moment we begin to picture, to 
 image forth, to describe, to define, we are plunged 
 into anthropomorphism. We make God in our 
 image, simply because, being men, we can only 
 think and imagine in the terms of men. All our 
 anthropomorphisms fall infinitely below the being 
 of the Eternal. But because a child cannot draw 
 
 114
 
 CHARLES BRADLAUGH 
 
 the glorious face of a Madonna, you do not deny the 
 existence of the grace and lovehness of womanhood. 
 And because neither our feeble hands nor our fal- 
 tering tongues can make a likeness of Him, the In- 
 effable, you are neither to say that He is not, nor to 
 deny that in our measure we can know Him. We 
 feel Him, we experience Him, the Unseen Authority 
 who commands our conscience, the Supreme Love 
 who whispers his consolations to our torn and bleed- 
 ing hearts, the All-Holy who wakens in us ideals of 
 goodness and beauty and purity which hush our 
 spirits to the moods of prayer. And though you 
 baffle us again and again in our poor and tentative 
 definitions, you no more take our God away, than 
 you can rob a little child of his mother by showing 
 the inadequacy or error of his account of her nature 
 and her being. 
 
 Charles Bradlaugh, by the high gifts of his talent, 
 his eloquence, his culture, still more by the noble 
 intrepidity of his contention for freedom and for 
 justice among men, won the loyal allegiance of a 
 great multitude of the working-men of England. 
 But because there was nothing in his account of the 
 universe to satisfy the religious element in man, his 
 following fell much to pieces when the thrill of his 
 presence was removed. And even in his life-time, 
 to one who moved about much among his followers, 
 as I did in the seventies and eighties, it became 
 evident that many of them were moved more by the 
 love of perpetual debate than by any passionate 
 ardour at all costs to find the truth. And so I think 
 that his name will be held in honour in the twen- 
 tieth century much more for his splendid advocacy 
 
 115
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of political and social justice than for any contribu- 
 tion to the perennial problem of man's relation to a 
 higher and holier Power. 
 
 But the atheism of Bradlaugh is pure and sweet 
 compared to the atheism of such as, bowing the 
 knee to God and making profession of his worship, 
 yet bring no living love of God into their conduct of 
 life. The men who uphold ancient wrongs, who 
 trample on human right, who set their faces as flint 
 against all pleadings for a larger justice and a loftier 
 mercy, do many of them utter the shibboleths of 
 orthodoxy and are in good repute in the churches. 
 But the atheist Bradlaugh walks into the kingdom of 
 heaven a league in front of these ; and the " well 
 done, good and faithful servant " greets the ear of 
 such as he long before it reaches that of the man 
 who, in the savour of orthodoxy, for a pretence 
 made long prayers, or devoured the houses of 
 widows or orphans, or gave tithe of mint and 
 anise and cummin, neglecting the weightier matters 
 of the law, justice and mercy and faith. It is a 
 shame and a scandal to Christendom that if we are 
 to name three who in this England in the nine- 
 teenth century have stood forth always and unflinch- 
 ingly for truth, for righteousness, for justice, there 
 spring to our lips among the most prominent the 
 names of three men who profess no knowledge of 
 God — John Stuart Mill, Charles Bradlaugh, and John 
 M or ley. 
 
 But Theism, the faith in God, the message of 
 Christ, remains, despite the assaults of the Brad- 
 laughs and the Holyoakes, despite even the falsity of 
 so many who with their lips do it reverence. The 
 
 ii6
 
 CHARLES BRADLAUGH 
 
 deeper the love of good in the hearts of men, the 
 stronger the cords that draw them towards the love 
 of God. And whatever the attitude of the men who 
 are without ideals, the idealists of the world — who 
 are its salt, its savour, its saviours — are never long 
 without the light of the love of God rising and 
 shining in their hearts. 
 
 117
 
 VIII 
 
 THE PAINTER: 
 GEORGE FREDERICK WA TTS
 
 VIII 
 
 THE PAINTER: 
 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 
 
 WE turn now to " the Painter " as a " Maker of 
 the Century," and we are confronted at once, 
 as in the cases of the novelist and the dramatist, with 
 the perennial question of the function of art. We 
 have seen that the writer of romances and the writer 
 of dramas rise to the highest expression and power 
 in their art when they make it the minister and 
 messenger of great ethical and spiritual truths. In 
 their case, at any rate, there is no beauty and glory 
 of art which is not touched to a still finer beauty 
 and glory if there be something of the glow of the 
 prophet at the artist's heart, and he wish not only 
 to please, but to teach and to lead. 
 
 And I believe that with the musician and the 
 painter it is not otherwise. Concerning music and 
 musicians I have not the knowledge or the skill to 
 speak. But this 1 will venture : music, or what 
 passes as such, may either simply amuse and please ; 
 or it may nobly elevate and refine, quickening in 
 the heart sentiments of reverence, of aspiration, or 
 of spiritual love ; or it may degrade, inviting the 
 
 121
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 fancy to images sensuous and relaxing, or simply 
 fanning the popular passions of the moment. The 
 whole range from the pure and sublime to the gross 
 and the base may find expression in terms of the 
 scale and the chord, and there are to be found in 
 the ranks of the musicians alike the seer of divine 
 visions and the seducer of the soul from purity. 
 
 And that is so with the Painter no less. This art 
 of tracing forms and mixing colours gives mar- 
 vellous variety of power of expression. There is at 
 the centre the vast range of paintings which serve 
 simply to please. Some of these indeed, if pure, are 
 fraught with a wonderful beauty, and beauty itself 
 is holy. Take the exquisite harmonies of the late 
 Albert Moore. They had no pretension whatever to 
 teach or to inspire. But in their graceful outlines 
 and lovely harmonies of colour they were a pure 
 delight. And for such pleasures we may well have 
 grateful memories. But then, up above these 
 pictures of mere and sheer beauty, and down below 
 them too, there are pictures of very different 
 qualities. Painting can corrupt as well as purify. 
 There are schools of painters who, under the 
 specious plea of "Art for art's sake," and with no 
 sense of the responsibility which is inseparable 
 from every talent, tamper with the imagination and 
 waken the lower elements of feeling to quick life. 
 It is astonishing how the picture is a mirror to the 
 artist's mind, revealing to the spectator of his 
 canvases how noble or how base he is. None 
 perhaps could say just wherein the difference of 
 treatment lies. But it is there, and the man stands 
 revealed behind it. The great sculptor, Power, 
 
 122
 
 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 
 
 gives us that statue of the Greek Slave — which was 
 famous in the middle of the century — absolutely 
 pure in every curve of the beautiful limbs ; and it 
 is impossible to conceive its waking an evil thought. 
 Watts gives us the young figure of Life, climbing 
 the steep stairway of time, undraped in her pure 
 simplicity, and the mind is only touched to sympathy 
 and reverence. But there are men of the French 
 school whose studies of the nude, though observing 
 all the conventionalities of art, leave a stain upon 
 the imagination. It is because of the contrast in 
 inward character and intention between the artists. 
 But in the hands of the worthy the painter's art 
 has wonderful elevating power. Even landscape 
 may become a very psalm of praise, a hymn of 
 harmony between earth and heaven. I remember a 
 memorial exhibition of the pictures of Alfred Hunt 
 three or four years ago — views mostly of quiet 
 scenery in England and in Wales. Thousands of 
 skilful hands have painted the same familiar scenes, 
 Whitby and Durham, Capel Curig and Moel Siabod, 
 and many of them with as much faithfulness and 
 accuracy as Hunt. But while they for the most 
 part tell only of grassy slopes and rugged rocks, of 
 arms of the sea and clouded skies, under his touch 
 these all are messengers of the unseen. He was of 
 an intense religious sensibility. All the message of 
 Ruskin had sunk deep into his soul. He " regarded," 
 says his biographer, " all the mighty and beautiful 
 phenomena of nature as manifestations of the 
 divine." He painted not with senses and brain 
 alone, but also with the soul. And so to visit that 
 exhibition where his modest pictures hung round 
 
 123
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the walls was like visiting a beautiful village church, 
 with solemn music sobbing and sighing through the 
 nave ; one felt that it was a holy place ; and one 
 came away feeling that one had been in touch with 
 God. It was hill and stream and sea and sky ; but 
 it was hill and stream and sea and sky with God 
 speaking through them all. 
 
 But doubtless it is in figure-painting that the 
 message of higher things can be made most direct, 
 can best be understanded of the people. All the 
 emotions of humanity can there be visibly set forth, 
 and spirits higher than the spirit of man can be 
 clothed by genius in symbolic figures, and set to 
 speak to the human soul. 
 
 And it is in this lofty and ideal art that George 
 Frederick Watts stands forth the supreme prophet- 
 painter of the century. 
 
 Born as far back as 1817 — two years after 
 Waterloo — this famous artist is still in our midst. 
 Two or three years ago — when he was already eighty 
 years of age— he held out his right arm for me to 
 see, that 1 might note how regular was the pulse, 
 how firm and steady the hand and gifted fingers ; 
 and he told me how it was his habit always in the 
 summer to be at his easel at four o'clock in the 
 morning, when the holy stillness of a new and 
 virgin day was in the air. A beautiful old man — in 
 the velvet cap and the ruffles at the wrist just a 
 touch of the more picturesque costume of an earlier 
 time ; but the man transcending the dress, with the 
 white hair and beard and the shapely form, and the 
 fine-cut features, and the mingling benevolence and 
 thoughtfulness speaking from eyes and lips — one to 
 
 124
 
 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 
 
 be with whom for a little while, and to hear his 
 simple talk about the pictures which one after 
 another he showed me in his great octagonal gallery, 
 was in itself a consecration and a benediction. 
 
 And for more than sixty years he has never 
 swerved from his high purpose — to make his art 
 talk to men of what is beautiful and true and good, 
 so that they may be kindled to the love of these 
 things and the longing for them in their own hearts ; 
 to speak to them, too, very plainly of what is ugly 
 and false and evil, but always in such a way as to 
 give these things no glamour of attraction, to feed 
 no prurient curiosity, but to draw men away from 
 them, revealing to them how foul are the greed and 
 the lust lurking in the heart. For sixty years he has 
 painted his parables. F'or far the greater portion of 
 that time he has never painted for pecuniary profit, 
 never taken a subject which should have nothing to 
 teach — even in portraits only painted the faces of 
 the great, or wise, or good ; and most that he 
 has painted he has given to the nation, or to 
 cities that seemed to him to deserve them, such as 
 happy Manchester. And so his lessons have sunk 
 into the hearts of them who are of an understanding 
 spirit, and they will abide like great and good books 
 for us all to read long after the few short years that 
 alone can still remain to him on earth. 
 
 George Frederick Watts heard long ago God 
 speaking to him in his studio. The word of the 
 Lord came unto him as truly as to any prophet 
 in the Hebrew Canon. Modest, retiring, diffident, 
 dreading display, shrinking from publicity, he has 
 yet never dared to say, with hesitating Jeremiah, 
 
 125
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 " Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot speak, for I am a 
 child " ; but on his tomb, when he too shall be 
 called on to pay his fearless tribute at " the Court 
 of Death," we may well engrave as epitaph the 
 brave, strong words of Ezekiel in the vision of the 
 valley of dry bones, " So I prophesied as I was 
 commanded." 
 
 I am so happy as to posssss two letters from Mr. 
 Watts dwelling on the true function of the artist. 
 In the earlier one, dated 1888, he says : " I do not 
 presume to be a teacher, but I do endeavour and 
 hope to give my work some power to suggest reflec- 
 tions. It is an encouragement to me to find serious 
 minds feeling with me that this is as much the artist's 
 mission as the poet's." In the second, under date 
 1897, he says: "I do consider art should take its 
 place with the most solemn utterances of poetry and 
 literature. But [it is] too often wanting in what 
 appears to me to be of the deepest significance. I 
 want our poets especially to stand by the side of 
 the great Hebrew prophets in denouncing and 
 encouraging. This has been my desire in my 
 feeble way." 
 
 So he prophesied as he was commanded. 
 
 Let us glance at three or four of these great 
 prophecies by oil and pigment, and try to interpret 
 the visions set before us by the seer. 
 
 Here is "The Minotaur." It is a marble parapet 
 of Greek device on the face of a high cliff looking 
 out over the deep blue sea. And over the corner of 
 the parapet gazing seawards leans that mythologic 
 figure, half human, half bovine, seeking if there be 
 sign there of any victim drifting Creteward whom 
 
 126
 
 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 
 
 he may devour. This Minotaur, as drawn by Watts, 
 is no patch-work with head of man and Hmbs of ox. 
 Rather the whole gross personaHty is wholly both, 
 human, yet altogether brute-human, ox-formed yet 
 with brute lusts quickened by man's intelligence. 
 It is the incarnation of the " sheer delight of 
 cruelty." In his clawed hand the beast crushes a 
 little bird in empty wantonness. The spectator must 
 indeed be dull who does not turn away with a new 
 throb of hatred for all base passions which brutalise 
 mankind. 
 
 And here is " Mammon." It is a man stout and 
 full-blooded, past the meridian of life, the figure 
 robed in brocade of gold and purple, the face with 
 its brute strength lined with cruelty, avarice, and 
 insolence, ass's ears pricking above the head, one 
 heavy fist pressed on the nape of the neck of a 
 woman whose head is crushed down on his knee, 
 one foot resting heavily on the prone form of a 
 young man lying in the dust — the other hand grasp- 
 ing a bag of gold. 
 
 No young Englishman wavering between the 
 service of God and Mammon could look on that 
 awful picture and not feel a rush of longing to purify 
 himself from the Mammon-worship and turn to the 
 God of purity and truth and love. 
 
 These things then — the hatefulness of cruelty and 
 greed — our painter received command from God to 
 prophesy, — and he has prophesied as he was com- 
 manded with all the rugged faithfulness of a Hosea 
 or a John the Baptist. 
 
 But sweeter, happier messages than these have been 
 whispered in his ear by the Holy Spirit, and these 
 
 127
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 also, with manifest delight and joy in his high com- 
 mission, he has declared to us in symboled figure. 
 
 Chief of all, I think, it is a new reading of the 
 relation of death and love that has worked as a 
 gospel in his heart and moved him to declare it in a 
 series of pictures in which he touches his very 
 highest point of achievement. 
 
 Let me try to expound this doctrine from four 
 pictures, all very great. They are "The Court of 
 Death," "Death crowning Innocence," "Love and 
 Death," and " Love and Life." 
 
 "The Court of Death" is a canvas thirteen feet 
 high and nine feet wide. Central sits throned the 
 winged figure of Death — a woman, folding on her 
 knee a baby child. On either side stand female 
 figures guarding the unknown territory that lies 
 behind and beyond the Sovereign Death. And from 
 every side troop mortals to render up their tribute to 
 the universal queen. Here is the soldier in the pride 
 of youthful strength, laying his sword upon her foot- 
 stool. Here is the noble laying his coronet at her 
 feet. Here the cripple, quietly glad at his emancipa- 
 tion. Here a worn and weary girl lays her head 
 softly against the kindly form of Death. And a 
 chubby, laughing little boy plays hide-and-seek in 
 the winding-sheet, passing without a pang to the 
 land beyond ; while a lion tamed and gentle lays his 
 head at the feet of the all-compelling queen. And 
 he who beholds hears the whisper in his heart that, 
 after all. Death is the great Atoner, the Comforter, 
 the Healer, the Physician who allays the sorrows 
 and pains of men. 
 
 In the famous picture of " Love and Death," it is 
 
 128
 
 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 
 
 the threshold of the House of Life, — and Love, a 
 winged boy, stands there striving to guard the way. 
 But the draped figure of Death, with face averted, 
 presses gently forward, with arm stretched forth 
 above the boy's curly head. Love's wings are 
 crushed against the lintel, and the petals are falling 
 from the roses that deck the porch. Love cannot 
 thrust back this mysterious, conquering force. But 
 all the while, by some magic of art and inspiration, 
 that figure of Death is declaring its own benignity. 
 As you gaze on the unequal contest, irresistibly you 
 feel that the defeat of Love will be Love's own 
 triumph, and that that dread decree of mortality only 
 means a new life for Love in a purer and more 
 tender sphere. The miracle of this marvellous 
 painting is in the eloquence of its gentleness, its 
 proclamation of a higher and holier love, its pre- 
 sentation of that High Power to which we must all 
 in our turn submit, as a Friend, a Helper, a Consoler, 
 an Uplifter — and that all expressed in the pose of the 
 grey and silent figure, with face unseen, pressing 
 resistless through the doorway where Love stands 
 sentinel in vain. 
 
 I had always doubted whether this or the smaller 
 painting, " Death crowning Innocence," was Watts's 
 most beautiful picture, until in an exhibition in 
 London I saw them hanging almost side by side. 
 Then, after long and earnest gazing, it seemed to me 
 that the verdict, wonderful as is " Love and Death," 
 must be for the smaller picture. 
 
 It is an angel figure, sitting with beautiful dark 
 wings curving over the bent head, — again the figure 
 of a woman, the seat low, so that the knees are 
 
 129 K
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 gathered a little up, making a warm nest of the lap. 
 And on that lap a baby-form fondled with an infinite 
 tenderness by the gentle hands. Oh ! the pity and 
 the kindliness of Death — the exquisite motherhood, 
 the incarnate love. 
 
 Or see again the exquisite grace and goodness 
 of the woman, Death, in " Time, Death, and 
 Judgment." How beautiful it is, the thought of 
 this mighty artist, as he himself draws ever nearer 
 to the day of inevitable fate, ever gazing into the 
 face thereof with deeper and gladder trust, and 
 throbbing with the desire to teach us all that that 
 mysterious passage is the crowning joy and gift of 
 life — the moment when love will come most fully 
 by its own, and the harmony of the being which 
 God has given us be fullest, strongest and most 
 lovely ! I cannot imagine one who has understood 
 the message of these incomparable pictures ever 
 being afraid to die. Rather does the promise of 
 that high moment of the soul's experience fling back 
 a radiance over all the struggles and sorrows of life, 
 and consecrate us all with the sureness of the triumph 
 of love under the guiding hand of God. 
 
 For Watts's reverence for Death is only the recog- 
 nition that Death is, after all, no despot queen, but 
 in truth the handmaid of the eternal and all-encom- 
 passing Love. Death is the nurse ; but Love the 
 mother. And in the last of the four pictures I have 
 named it is made clear — how Love is in the end the 
 true and unfailing guide. 
 
 For in " Love and Life " the highest lesson of all 
 is taught. Life is a fragile woman painfully toiling 
 up the steep. She would faint and fall on the stony 
 
 130
 
 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 
 
 stairway, were it not for the radiant winged figure of 
 Love, a young man brave and stalwart, who turns to 
 her with helpful hand from the height above, and 
 so leads her gently up the rude and rugged path. 
 The Love that Death could conquer in the other 
 picture, was but a child not knowing the things that 
 make for the soul's true peace. Love here is a man, 
 stalwart and wise. His wings are crushed against no 
 lintel-post. No drooping roses drop their petals 
 where he treads. He is leader, master, in the storm 
 and stress by which trembling Life is beset. And in 
 his strength Life is able to mount the giddy height, 
 no fear of Death threatening her on her way. 
 
 Walt Whitman, in his strange and rugged verse, 
 has nobly sung the theme of the fearlessness of 
 Death. But I think that our English prophet-painter 
 has declared it in language much more clearly to be 
 understanded of the people. He paints no illusions, 
 never pretends that there are not sorrow and pain and 
 struggle and darkness in human life. He knows that 
 untutored Love fears death and would fain banish 
 it from the story of the world. Rut he sees and 
 knows that tutored Love will ever recognise that 
 the order of life and death and life again is God's 
 own holy law, and that, through it all, Love's king- 
 dom ever comes, and God's way is full of gentle 
 sympathy with the longings of the human heart. 
 
 This message of the kindliness of death will 
 perhaps find a more open way to the hearts of the 
 elderly than to those of the young. But our prophet 
 has prophecies for those on the threshold of life as 
 well, and they are inspiring in their noble strength. 
 
 For he would fill the young man with a sense of 
 
 131
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the splendour of his opportunities, the adequacy of 
 his powers. Be pure, be steadfast, be brave, he 
 seems to say, and your success is assured— success 
 not indeed in self-aggrandisement, but in priceless 
 service to the world. Look at his "Sir Galahad," 
 a figure in the first glory of manly youth, his armour 
 undinted upon his breast and limbs, his arm leaning 
 on his horse's neck, his face aglow with strength 
 and hope and purpose. To him the world is a 
 field for highest chivalry ; and all that he has and is 
 he is eager to devote to the service of that which is 
 good. Or come with me to the stable at the rear 
 of Little Holland House, observe the little tram-line 
 running from the stable to the courtyard outside, 
 and see the colossal equestrian statue, wheeled 
 on its stand out into the open under the blue June 
 sky— a work which for many a long year the artist 
 has been slowly building. His heart and conscience 
 are in that titanic sculptured group. He hints that 
 it is on this he would rest his fame. The splendid 
 steed champing at the bit, with curved and stately 
 neck and limbs in which the mighty muscles swell, 
 is held in check, mastered, controlled, by the youth 
 who sits astride his back. The horse represents all 
 the difficulties of life which a noble courage has 
 overcome and subdued to be but as a servant to the 
 great purposes yet to be achieved. And the athlete 
 who has tamed him leans back in his seat, holding 
 the bridle short and firm in the right hand, with the 
 left shielding his eyes from the sun, that he may 
 gaze undazzled on the difficulties yet to be faced and 
 conquered. It is a glorious group in conception and 
 execution ; and the wine of a new manhood flows 
 
 132
 
 GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS 
 
 into the veins of the beholder as he takes in the 
 mighty hnes and harmonies of this marble symbol 
 of the greatness which true manhood may achieve. 
 
 Let us turn, lastly, to that picture which Watts 
 labels " Sic transit gloria mundi " — " Thus passeth 
 the glory of the world." He led me up to it and 
 told me how this was to him chief among his 
 pictures, because it taught the lesson which to him 
 seemed greatest and deepest of all truths in human 
 life. It is a warrior dead and stretched upon the 
 bier. The form is covered with a shroud — a picture 
 to hush, perhaps to sadden, with its sombre tints. 
 On the floor and about the bed are scattered — 
 useless — all the things that had seemed of most 
 interest in life, the musical instruments which had 
 wakened pleasure, the books that had stood for 
 knowledge and for learning, the shield that had 
 befriended him in many a doughty fight, the laurel 
 wreath which had recorded success and fame. 
 These all, what are they now ? Ah, what are those 
 words broidered on the curtain that hangs behind 
 the couch ? " What I spent, 1 had ; what I saved, 
 I lost ; what 1 gave, I have." There is the lesson, 
 so simple, so paradoxical, so profoundly true. 
 What he had spent, this brave fighter, that he had 
 had : all the good and joy of possession had lain in 
 the act and effort of expending ; only in devoting it 
 to service had there been delight in the vigour of 
 his youth, in the manly strength of his maturer 
 years. What he had saved, he had lost : all that he 
 had gathered for himself, the riches, the learning, 
 the pleasures, the fame, they were nothing, had been 
 nothing just so long and so far as he used them for 
 
 133
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 himself. What he had given, that he still possessed 
 — the love, the service, the gifts of kindness and 
 generosity, the care for others, the enthusiasms for 
 the good, the true — these, because he had given 
 them, given them lavishly, keeping nothing for 
 himself, are all still his now and for ever. And 
 as I left the house the old man told me once 
 again, in simplest phrase, how for himself he had 
 no ambition, did not care at all for fame, only in 
 giving, bestowing, serving, helping, found any 
 happiness or any rest. 
 
 Truly when finally he lays down his brush, leaving 
 to his nation all that he wrought, all those glorious 
 canvases with lessons of life and truth painted so 
 wonderfully into them, every picture the testimony 
 of a soul bright with the light of God and burning 
 with its prophetic message for his fellow-men, he 
 being dead yet shall speak, and his inspiration shall 
 pass into many lives, and the twentieth century with 
 its impenetrable secrets he will help to " make," no 
 less than the century which saw the birth and 
 maturity of his rare and glorious powers. 
 
 134
 
 IX 
 THE PATRIOT: JOSEPH MAZZINI
 
 IX 
 
 THE PATRIOT: JOSEPH MAZZINI 
 
 TO have passed a few days even in such com- 
 panionship as books can give with Joseph 
 Mazzini is to have been baptised with lire ; for base 
 and poor indeed would be the soul that should not 
 catch from him the glow of the noblest passions that 
 can burn in the human breast — the passions of free- 
 dom, of justice, of self-sacrifice, of patriotism, of the 
 love of man, of the love of God. 
 
 One and all these burned and glowed again in 
 the bosom of him, the hunted exile, the dauntless 
 em^ancipator, with a flame which no agony could 
 extinguish, as he passed through the dramatic ex- 
 periences of his sublime career, with varying fortune, 
 but with conviction and purpose that never varied 
 and never for an instant swerved. The nineteenth 
 century saw many great and notable patriots — 
 thank God 1 not the least of them here in our 
 England. But supreme among them all for the 
 height, the fervour, the wisdom, the devotion, the 
 idealism, the religion of his patriotism will stand in 
 the eye of history this Joseph Mazzini, son of the 
 
 137
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Genoese physician, born into the world when that 
 century was not yet five years old. 
 
 Of great physical delicacy, reared in the fastidious 
 little aristocracy of a provincial capital, there seemed 
 little in the boy's antecedents to promise the man 
 that was to be. There was, however, it is said, a 
 thousand years of unadulterated republicanism in 
 his veins. At twenty-six the young law student was 
 already an exile from his native land. Already he 
 had passed six months a prisoner in a cell high up 
 in the tower of Savona, the sea, the sky, the Alps 
 the daily preachers to him through his window- 
 bars ; and here the burden of his prophecy was 
 borne in upon his soul. At twenty-six his name 
 suddenly rang through all Italy. For he had 
 written to the young King, Charles Albert, his 
 famous letter of appeal to identify himself with the 
 loftiest and most ideal destinies of Italy. 
 
 Every young Englishman ought to acquaint 
 himself with the stirring story of this man's life. 
 Behold him on the threshold of manhood : hair 
 black and flowing, complexion that pale Italian 
 olive which seems to harmonise so well with the 
 olive-groves of the country-side, high forehead and 
 features delicately cut, deep-set eyes which, we are 
 told, "could smile as only Italian eyes can smile, 
 but could also flash astral infinitudes of scorn." 
 He who looked with discerning eye would see in 
 that fragile figure and rare mould of countenance 
 the promise of a will which should achieve those 
 conquests beyond every material triumph which are 
 the miracles which it is only given to faith to bring 
 to pass. 
 
 138
 
 JOSEPH MAZZINI 
 
 We must glance but at a scene here and there in 
 the Hfe-drama of the man, and then hasten on to 
 the gospel which he taught — a gospel in which 
 religion and politics, faith and policy, principle and 
 practice, were fused into one brilliant and consum- 
 mate unity. 
 
 Here he is an exile in London, pawning his coat 
 and his boots for bread, yet collecting together in 
 school the little Italian hurdy-gurdy boys and 
 monkey-keepers, and learning to know the Italian 
 working-men of London. 
 
 And here he is when victory, success, and triumph 
 seem at last to be his lot— chief of the installed 
 triumvirate at Rome, commandant of the Eternal 
 City, ancient mother of freedom so long enslaved 
 under tyrant priests — master of Rome, sanguine that 
 thence shall spread out the unity and liberty of Italy, 
 till there be but one people in one commonwealth, 
 servants of one God. And the cunning adventurer 
 of France, the basest of the Napoleons, sends his 
 troops with fair words on the one hand to IMazzini, 
 and fair words on the other to the Pope, under 
 Ferdinand de Lesseps — afterwards of canal en- 
 gineering fame. And Lesseps, who has orders to 
 negotiate with the Legislative Assembly only and 
 not with the Triumvirate, nevertheless creeps one 
 night stealthily past the sleeping guards and through 
 the open doors and corridors of Mazzini's palace, 
 till he comes upon the patriot asleep in a little room 
 on a narrow iron bedstead, and he gazes awe- 
 stricken on that beautiful, unconscious face, till the 
 patriot awakes and calmly asks, " Hast thou come to 
 assassinate me ? " — and then in the dead of the 
 
 139
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 night — the two — the representative of humanity 
 and ckity and God, and the representative of am- 
 bition and cunning and greed — alone talk over the 
 problem of Rome and Italy, of Church and King 
 and people. 
 
 And then soon afterwards : the French masters of 
 Rome, the mask thrown off, the republic crushed 
 the Triumvirate deposed, Mazzini wandering, dazed, 
 distracted, as one in a dream, about the streets of 
 Rome. 
 
 And then, in 1872, almost contemporaneously 
 with that march of Victor Emmanuel with the 
 flag of Italy to the Capitol of Rome, which com- 
 pleted Italian unity, IMazzini, alone and unsatisfied 
 because with the unity there was not perfect free- 
 dom, preaching with his dying breath that men 
 should live not for the material, but for the ideal, 
 hard by the leaning tower of Pisa, bowed his 
 sorrowing head and died. And just one day too 
 late there came and was laid at his dead feet the 
 noble poem of his English friend and singer, 
 Harriet Eleanor Hamilton King, whom long ago 
 he had bid to sing the cause of Italian unity ; 
 and she wrote at last of his disciples, not of him, 
 saying : 
 
 "I write of the Disciples, because He 
 Who was their Master, having left on earth 
 The memory of a face that none could paint, 
 The echo of a voice that none could reach, 
 Hath left his own immortal words and works 
 To be a witness for him. Who should dare 
 To add one line or lesson unto these ? 
 
 140
 
 JOSEPH MAZZINI 
 
 Joseph Mazzini, Master, first of those 
 
 The Sons of Men who are the Sons of God ! 
 
 ■ • • • • 
 
 Who walked alone with God, and had no Higher 
 Of humanlvind to be a help to him." 
 
 What, then, was the gospel, the message, the 
 purpose, the ideal, what were " the immortal words 
 and works " of this man, that he left so profound 
 an impression on the consciences and hearts of 
 such as came under his magnetic influence ? 
 
 Here was a man of sorrows and acquainted with 
 grief. Like Him of whom he most reminds us, he 
 was without a home, without the solace of domestic 
 love, and alone he fought and taught through the 
 tragic years on the face of the cruel earth. " He 
 who, from some fatality of position, has been 
 unable to live the calm life of the family, sheltered 
 beneath this angel's wing, has a shadow of sadness 
 cast over his soul, and a void in his heart which 
 nought can fill, as I who write these pages for you 
 know." These words we find in the chapter on 
 Duties towards the Family in his supreme essay, 
 "The Duties of Man." Alone he lived, alone he 
 died, so far as concerns the most intimate com- 
 munion of the heart. And his life was spent in 
 prisons or in exiles, in plots and insurrections or 
 in sudden revolutions. He was one who believed 
 that there comes a time when the sabre is the only 
 argument ; and the sublime altitude of the ideals 
 which possessed him often found expression in the 
 agonies of the field of battle. For he held human 
 freedom a yet more holy and inviolable thing than 
 human life. Yet not the sword, but the pen, was 
 
 141
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 his keenest and most potent weapon. And he has 
 left behind him writings which touch the very Hfe- 
 spring of duty and humanity, which set forth what 
 we are here to do and to be and to serve, as no 
 other writings of his century at any rate have set 
 them forth. The suffering Messiah was he of the 
 nineteenth century, bruised and buffeted for our 
 transgressions. The weight of the iniquity of many 
 was upon him, and with his stripes a multitude 
 were healed. " Severe and exacting as a stoic 
 towards himself," so one describes him who held 
 him in highest reverence; "gentle and compas- 
 sionate as a woman towards others ; beautiful, not 
 merely in regularity of feature and proportion of 
 form, but in the varying expression of his lustrous 
 eyes, and the ineffable sweetness of his smile," 
 possessing an unspeakable charm which radiated 
 on all who came within his influence. 
 
 And his gospel ? It is set forth more at length 
 and in order in his " Duties of Man " than in all his 
 other writings. And no young man should enter 
 this twentieth century, with its blessed hopes and 
 its awful fears, its tremendous impending struggle 
 between the love of good and the love of ease, 
 allegiance to God and allegiance to gold, without 
 taking the teaching of that noble appeal for the 
 instruction of his head and the consecration of his 
 heart. 
 
 " The Duties of Man." The famous reformers 
 hitherto had declaimed on the Rights of Man — the 
 Right to freedom, the Right to the means of 
 happiness, the Right to equal opportunity. And 
 those Rights meet with a response in the minds and 
 
 142
 
 JOSEPH MAZZINI 
 
 consciences of all just men. And great social and 
 political and national revolutions had been carried 
 through in their behalf, immediately before and 
 during the life of Joseph Mazzini. But when that 
 dauntless exile — a man approaching forty — in the 
 inhospitable hospitality of London looked out upon 
 the peoples, chiefly on the working-classes, and most 
 of all on his own Italian countrymen, he knew that 
 the doctrine he was called by God to preach was — 
 not the Rights of Man, but the Duties of Man. 
 Both are real. Both are holy. Both in a well- 
 ordered State must be inviolate. But when you 
 call on men to claim their rights, it is not the 
 noblest in them that you evoke. You may unchain 
 their selfish passions, their egoism, their temper of 
 violence and hate. But when you call on them to 
 discharge their duty, you appeal to the unselfish in 
 them, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the noblest, the 
 ideal. And it is by these and by these alone that 
 the highest life of the world is carried forward. 
 
 You say that the people will not respond to such 
 an appeal ? Ah, but hear how the words of this 
 nineteenth century patriot-prophet ring out ! 
 
 " Working men ! brothers," he cries : " When 
 Christ came and changed the face of the world, he 
 spoke not of rights to the rich, who needed not 
 to achieve them ; nor to the poor, who would 
 doubtless have abused them in imitation of the 
 rich ; he spoke not of utility, nor of interest to a 
 people whom interest and utility had corrupted : he 
 spoke of Duty, of Love, of Sacrifice, of Faith ; and 
 he said that they should be first among all who had 
 contributed most by their labour to the good of all. 
 
 143
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 And the words of Christ, breathed in the ear of a 
 society in which all true life was extinct, recalled it 
 to existence, conquered the miUions, conquered the 
 world, and caused the education of the human race 
 to ascend one degree on the scale of progress." 
 
 And in the patriot appeal which Mazzini made to 
 Young Italy to break the chains which bound the 
 people of Piedmont, of Venice, of Naples, of Sicily, 
 of Rome, it was ever the appeal to the call of Duty 
 that he voiced ; and lo ! he gathered round him 
 disciples of a devotion so lofty and unswerving as 
 the world has rarely seen — the brave, the generous, 
 the rich, the cultured, giving their lives with joy to 
 the cause. If he had preached not Duty, the ideal, 
 but Rights, the so-called practical, Italy to this day 
 would have been under the heels of the Ferdinands 
 and the Bombas, the Popes of the Vatican and the 
 Despots of the Palace. 
 
 Duty : and what in the mind of Mazzini was the 
 source and fountain of Duty ? 
 
 God. God exists. That was his dogma, his 
 beginning, his foundation principle, his under- 
 lying truth. God exists. To deny it, he said, is to 
 be mad ; to try to prove it, is to blaspheme. Truly 
 he was a dogmatist ; a dogmatist of the nobler and 
 grander sort, one whose soul is held and possessed 
 by an overmastering conviction, from which he 
 cannot escape, and who simply declares that con- 
 viction as hewn from the rock of eternal truth, 
 trusting to its intrinsic power to command the 
 assent of men. 
 
 God exists, taught Mazzini. We know Him in 
 conscience, we see Him in the order and the 
 
 144
 
 JOSEPH MAZZINI 
 
 grandeur of nature, we detect Him in the evolution 
 of human history. We do not infer Him, we do 
 not argue Him, we do not accept Him on the 
 authority of Church or Book, of Philosopher or 
 Priest. We experience Him : and He cannot be 
 taken away. 
 
 Here again Mazzini parts company with many 
 reformers, true lovers of the people, but in whose 
 work, because they did not know God, there was a 
 flaw, a weakness that ultimately told. When men 
 strive to build up reform without God, without 
 worship, so he pointed out, soon the people revert 
 by a necessity of their being to some substitute for 
 God, some new form of worship. And so the 
 French Revolution furnishes us with a goddess of 
 Reason or a goddess of Nature. 
 
 God exists then, and Duty flows from God. 
 Here was his second great and firm-fixed dogma, 
 wrought into his very nature, a necessary con- 
 stituent of his thought, so that he neither felt on 
 the one hand any necessity laid on him to prove it, 
 nor on the other hand hesitated to proclaim it as 
 an evident and self-revealing truth in the ultimate 
 constitution of things. God exists, and human 
 Duty flows from God. 
 
 Duty, then, the principle of life, not Rights ; and 
 Duty the offspring of God. Let us hear his words 
 to the working-people once again : — 
 
 The " principle is Duty. We must convince men 
 that they are all sons of one sole God, and bound to 
 fulfil and execute one sole law here on earth : that 
 each of them is bound to live, not for himself, but 
 for others ; that the aim of existence is not to be 
 
 145 L
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 more or less happy, but to make themselves and 
 others more virtuous ; that to struggle against in- 
 justice and error, wherever they exist, in the name 
 and for the benefit of their brothers, is not only a 
 right but a Duty : a duty which may not be neglected 
 without sin, the duty of their whole life." 
 
 Yes, God— God and Duty : these are the supreme 
 facts of the universe. And it is that appeal alone 
 which can carry revolutions to their highest con- 
 summation, can stir the people to their most sublime 
 activity. 
 
 " The cry," he proclaims, " which has resounded 
 in all great and noble revolutions, the 'God wills it, 
 God wills it ! ' of the Crusades, will alone have 
 power to arouse the inert to action, to give courage 
 to the timid, the enthusiasm of sacrifice to the 
 calculating, and faith to those who distrust or reject 
 all merely human ideas. . . . Without God you 
 may compel, but not persuade ; you may become 
 tyrants in your turn ; you cannot be educators or 
 apostles." 
 
 And so during that brief and wonderful triumvirate 
 of the Republic of Rome, the motto he gave, the 
 rallying cry he proclaimed was "God and the 
 People." For, said he, "the Peoples have no 
 Master but God, no Ruler but his law." 
 
 And Duty, this Law of Life, wherein does it con- 
 sist ? Mazzini is distinguished, as we have seen, 
 from many reformers, first, in that he proclaimed 
 Duties, not Rights ; secondly, in that he neither 
 denied nor ignored God, but made Him the source 
 and fountain of human duty. His third distinc- 
 tion from other reformers lay in the division he 
 
 146
 
 JOSEPH MAZZINI 
 
 made of duty and the order in which he ranged its 
 parts. 
 
 There are three great spheres of Duty, so taught 
 the patriot — Mankind, your Country, and your 
 Family. And the first in importance of your duties, 
 the first too in logic, though not in time, is your 
 duty to Mankind, to Humanity at large. For that 
 springs from the primal fact that you are children of 
 God, and therefore brothers — with all the duties of 
 brothers — to each other over all the earth. Nor 
 can you ever realise your own manhood, till you 
 realise your brotherhood with the whole race. If 
 you shut out any part of the human race from your 
 sympathies — whether they be of Europe or of Asia 
 or of Africa, whether they be white or black, whether 
 they be rich and great or poor and oppressed, 
 whether they be of yesterday, of to-day, or of to- 
 morrow — you warp and starve a part of your own 
 being, as though you bound a ligature about a limb 
 so tightly that the blood from your heart could not 
 flow through its veins. 
 
 "You are all soldiers in one army," cried Mazzini. 
 " In whatsoever land you live, wheresoever there 
 arises a man to combat for the right, the just, and 
 the true, that man is your brother. Whereso- 
 ever a man is tortured through error, injustice, 
 or tyranny, that man is your brother. Free 
 men or slaves, you are all brothers." Then serve 
 Humanity. Feel the throb of universal kin in your 
 every pulse-beat. Say not you are too weak. In 
 every act in the circle of the family or the country, 
 ask yourself, " If all men did thus everywhere, 
 would it be for the benefit of Humanity?" Strive 
 
 147
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 not to serve household or nation at the cost of man- 
 kind. Such service is always vain and must recoil 
 in suffering on the very people you would serve. 
 
 And next to Humanity, our Country. Yes, he, the 
 mightiest Patriot of the nineteenth century, the very 
 prophet and seer of patriotism, who gave it a glow 
 it had in no other heart, set patriotism midway, 
 between the love of all mankind and the love of the 
 dear ones of the home. It was not to him the first, 
 but the second element in virtue. 
 
 You are men, said he, before you are citizens or 
 fathers. 
 
 Yet humanity is so wide ; the speech, the manners, 
 the thoughts of the peoples are so diverse. You need 
 comrades whom you understand and who under- 
 stand you, so that you can act with them ; and so 
 God has divided men into races, set them down in 
 nationalities, given them countries bounded by wide 
 seas or great mountain-ranges, so that they have 
 each a life of their own other than the life of the 
 rest of mankind. And this is one of the sacred facts 
 of nature, in the ground-plan of creation, which a 
 monarch or a people does ill wantonly or from lust 
 of conquest to destroy. 
 
 And each country, with its circumstances, its 
 traditions, its character, acquires a mission different 
 from that of any other. You, the individual man, 
 are to incarnate your country in yourself, to help on 
 her mission, to take into your own life all that is 
 best in her soul, to infuse into her all that in your 
 own soul is best and truest. So will God's work be 
 done in the world. You must strive that your people 
 be free ; and help them to use their freedom for the 
 noblest purposes. 
 
 148
 
 JOSEPH MAZZINI 
 
 And, thirdly, the duty in the Family. " The Family 
 is the Heart's Fatherland." Do not make the mis- 
 take of thinking you do well by the family if you 
 teach them to prosper, if you limit your aims to 
 their culture, their wealth, their comfort, even their 
 purity and loveliness of character. No, you must 
 teach them that the household is a unit in the 
 nation, as the nation is a unit in mankind. 
 " Speak to your children," says Mazzini to the fathers 
 amongst us, " of your country ; of what she was, 
 and is, and ought to be. Repeat to them the names 
 and deeds of the good men who have loved their 
 country and the people, and who have striven, amid 
 sorrows, calumny, and persecution, to elevate their 
 destiny. Instil into their young hearts the strength 
 to resist injustice and oppression." None is true 
 father or mother who does not bring up the young 
 to feel that they are not isolated, that they are not a 
 little group alone, but bound by innumerable cords 
 of sympathy and affection to the myriads outside, to 
 the dear mother-land, their larger home, and to the 
 vast brotherhood of humanity, the family of the 
 universal Father, God. 
 
 Such is the main teaching on the greatest themes 
 of the great Italian patriot. Such are the convic- 
 tions, the sentiments, in which he lived and died, 
 the inspiration of that great evangel which was his 
 special message to Italy, to Europe, to the world. 
 That special message, which he held as a com- 
 mission direct from God, was the unification of 
 Italy — that " Italy " should cease to be a mere geo- 
 graphical expression, and become a living organism, 
 a servant of God among the nations of the world. 
 
 149
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 For his part he longed that it should be as a Re- 
 public that the redemption should come to the 
 people who trod the soil and in whose veins ran the 
 blood of Rome. But the unity came before the 
 form of government. A monarchy limited and con- 
 stitutional if it must be, though for his part his 
 formula, " God and the People," left no room for 
 kings or princes. But that they should be one 
 people, feeling a common throb of race and country, 
 that was the sacred dream for which he suffered 
 life- long martyrdom and endured a hundred deaths. 
 And he lived to see it, though not in the form of his 
 desire. Three other names stand beside his in that 
 achievement : Garibaldi, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel. 
 But Mazzini was the seer, the prophet, of a courage 
 dauntless as the soldier, a wisdom outstripping far 
 the statesman, a royalty of natural endowment out- 
 towering further still the king. 
 
 Ah ! that this dawning century had Mazzinis 
 manifest before us all. Young men and women, 
 who have the century in your hands, believe me, life 
 for you can have no dignity, no sterling worth and 
 weight, unless you largen your minds and con- 
 sciences, your imagination and desires, to those 
 wider fields which were the zone of his prayers and 
 strivings. " Unless you can shake off the selfishness, 
 outgrow the littleness, which make your own ease 
 or pleasure or money-getting the boundaries of your 
 active interest and zeal, unless you can rise up into 
 the spirit of the nobler patriotism and the passion 
 for human good, your lives will be small and barren, 
 and with mean and wizened souls at last you will 
 present yourselves at the bar of God. 
 
 150
 
 THE MONARCH : QUEEN 
 VICTORIA
 
 X 
 
 THE MONARCH : QUEEN 
 VICTORIA I 
 
 IT is hard to know how to approach the great hfe 
 and the great death on which the thoughts of 
 .all of us are concentrated. The surprise of the 
 event has startled us. The grandeur of the great 
 sweep of life impresses us. The possible results of 
 the solemn death bewilder us. We scarce know 
 what to say or think or feel. It almost seems to us, 
 in the immense impressiveness of what has happened, 
 as though indeed she were of another order of being 
 to ordinary humanity — as though this imperial 
 royalty were a divine stamp, a mark from the hand 
 of God, not a mere human distinction, a title from 
 the lips of man. Our circle is so small and hers so 
 vast, our names are so obscure and hers is so far- 
 famed. We are inclined to feel as though she were 
 indeed of higher rank in God's eye as in man's. 
 But then rise before us pictures of her as the little 
 
 ' This lecture was delivered, in place of one on "The 
 Thinker : Herbert Spencer," on the Sunday evening following 
 the Queen's death. 
 
 153
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 girl playing in Kensington Gardens or on Ramsgate 
 sands, as the young bride in the first rapture of a 
 most human love, as the young mother hearing her 
 little ones say their prayers, as the widow weeping 
 with tears unquenchable, as the grave and gracious 
 mother of her people, sympathising in their joys, 
 sorrowing in their sorrows ; as the aged woman by a 
 great effort of kindliness striving to win over dis- 
 affected hearts in Ireland ; and then, later still, 
 silently crying because of the pains of her soldiers 
 and the griefs of the widows and the sad breach of 
 peace and goodwill on earth, — and we feel : No, this 
 was a woman, a woman like our mothers, of the 
 same flesh and the same spirit, the same womanly 
 mind and heart, with mingling strength and weak- 
 ness in a world of mingling sunshine and shadow. 
 
 It would be easy in this hour to run through the 
 record of that marvellous reign after the manner of 
 the newspapers, to add one more telling of the long 
 and dramatic story with its wealth of incident and 
 variety of emotion. But it is not easy to find some 
 new thing to say, some new lesson to educe. 
 
 Let us, then, be content with simply saying many 
 things that have been said before, and drawing from 
 them such lessons as are obvious and inevitable. 
 
 And first, surely, we must all be impressed with 
 the fact that, however narrowly limited, however 
 strictly constitutional the monarchy which this 
 royal lady wielded for the great space of three-and- 
 sixty years, she, the Monarch, has indeed been a 
 true " Maker of the Century," on the whole second 
 to no other. For though she herself was not, like 
 some of her mighty predecessors, one who could 
 
 154
 
 OUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 say to her people "Ye shall" and "Ye shall not," 
 and compel obedience to her will, though the source 
 and fountain of political power and legislation in 
 her day was no longer the throne but the people's 
 own Parliament, yet such was her position in the 
 blaze of a magnificent publicity, and such her con- 
 tact with men whose influence was diffused in every 
 direction through human society — princes, states- 
 men, prelates, men of genius — that her own influence 
 flowed continuously in a thousand streams, and 
 affected the life, not of a Court alone, but of 
 England, of Europe, of the world. How different 
 a place this country in which we dwell would be 
 to-day if, instead of the woman Victoria, a succession 
 of half a dozen Georges and Williams after the 
 pattern of the Queen's uncles had occupied the 
 throne of this realm these sixty years, it passes 
 imagination to say. In all probability the throne 
 itself would have been overturned in that great 
 wind of revolution which swept through Europe in 
 the middle century. Or if the throne had been 
 maintained, the life and fame of England would 
 have been so soiled and spoiled that men good and 
 grave could no longer have taken any pride in their 
 birth as Englishmen. 
 
 "I will be good." Seventy years ago those 
 simple words broke from the lips of the little eleven- 
 year-old maiden, who, opening-her lesson-book, had 
 found slipped into it the evidence that she was heir- 
 presumptive to the British throne. " I will be 
 good." It had burst on her all suddenly, that 
 dazzling probability of queenship. And with swift 
 intuition she perceived that that of all things
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 mattered most. I know not whether any vision of 
 the immense temptations of a throne passed through 
 her infant mind. But beautifully characteristic was 
 it of the woman that was to be that that was the 
 immediate inspiration, the instantaneous resolution. 
 She became a woman of solid and massive ability — 
 a statesman the peer of any who ever sat in her 
 Council or her Cabinet. She became "great," the 
 rare indefinable quality of some monarchs in the 
 world's history, an Alfred, a Charlemagne, a 
 Frederick. But her greatness and her statesman- 
 ship had for their foundation and beginning her 
 simple goodness ; and her *' I will be good " was 
 not the resolve of her early childhood only, but the 
 persistent purpose of all the storied years of her 
 illustrious life. 
 
 What, then, on the whole, are the effects which 
 Queen Victoria has \vrought in the land and on the 
 nation where she held her sway ? 
 
 Apart from her the Victorian age has been great. 
 It has rivalled, nay, perhaps surpassed, the Augustan 
 age of Rome and the Elizabethan age of England 
 in the genius and the greatness of the men it has 
 produced in every sphere of human activity, alike in 
 the fields of splendid enterprise, of magnificent 
 discovery, and of lofty ministry by literature and 
 art. The Victorian age, covering two-thirds of the 
 nineteenth century, stands for ever great and 
 memorable even apart from the noble lady who 
 has 'conferred on it its name. Nevertheless, she has 
 wrought on it powerfully and well. What is it 
 that she has done ? W^hat are the marks indelible 
 of her brain-craft and her heart-craft ? 
 
 156
 
 OUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 It seems to me that the beneficent effects of her 
 great personality lie mainly in three directions. 
 
 By the development she gave to the principles of 
 constitutional government she greatly extended the 
 boundaries of English freedom. By the stainless 
 purity of her own example she brought a wholesome 
 purification into many layers of English society. 
 By her capacity, her industry, and her character, 
 she raised to a higher point than it had ever reached 
 before in England the consideration in which 
 women at large were held. Let us glance at each 
 of these three splendid services. 
 
 The enlargement of English freedom. Does it 
 seem to you that that is a topic rather for the 
 political platform than the religious pulpit ? Nay, 
 but have you reflected what human freedom means, 
 how it is only in the measure in which the individual 
 is left free to decide on his own course and act in 
 his own way that character can be developed, since 
 character is the making of right choices and the 
 carrying out of right purposes ? And you cannot 
 find one instance in all history of national character 
 pure and noble diffused among the people save 
 where political institutions have been free, and the 
 people have thus had the building up of their own 
 conduct. Now of the kings and queens that came 
 before Victoria in English history, some of them 
 had been strenuous, some lax ; some had played 
 the despot to the utmost of their opportunity, some 
 had let things drift. The monarchs that came 
 immediately before her had been alternately violent 
 and careless. They interfered spasmodically ; they 
 had had no well-ordered theory, and their practice 
 
 157
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 had been without order too. Indeed, so shiftless 
 had been their conduct, so poor a mixture of 
 irresponsibility and spasms of the tyrant's temper, 
 that monarchy itself had been brought into con- 
 tempt, and the very throne was in danger of being 
 overturned as an antiquated and mischievous 
 survival. Then a young girl ascended that same 
 throne. She held it through the great fiscal reforms 
 of the forties, through the republican and revolu- 
 tionary fever of the middle century, through the 
 political reforms of the sixties and the seventies, and 
 right on till the old century had worn itself away. 
 And in her hands monarchy, from an anomaly and 
 an anachronism and an offence to thinking men, 
 became the pivot of a great democratic organism, 
 the centre of an ever-evolving and developing 
 system of self-government, the safeguard against 
 convulsion, yet the guarantee of steady and cautious 
 progress. The question of course still remains open 
 whether monarchy be or be not the best and wisest 
 form of human government ; but it is amazing how 
 in the hands of Victoria monarchy has come to be 
 the pledge and symbol of many of those elements of 
 national life which it was hitherto supposed could 
 thrive only under the flag of a republic. 
 
 And it is all because that young girl, sixty-three 
 years ago, had in her the instincts of the statesman, 
 and by a marvellous intuition saw that the monarch 
 could no longer wisely play the old part, but yet 
 had a function of unsurpassed importance to dis- 
 charge. For amid the rapid changes of ministers 
 and parliaments involved in a democratic system, it 
 was important that there should be some constant 
 
 158
 
 OUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 element, some one who should carry on the know- 
 ledge of the inward facts of contemporary history 
 from cabinet to cabinet, some one who should be 
 able to take a wider than a party view, some one 
 who, while debarred from actual personal power, 
 should be able to advise from full stores of know- 
 ledge and continuous experience. And so Victoria 
 became the adviser of her advisers, the counsellor 
 of her councillors, and gave the vast stores of her 
 ever accumulating experience and her ever ripening 
 judgment to the service of her people — knowing 
 that they were sovereign, bowing willingly to their 
 sovereignty, yet serving them ever with a loyalty 
 and allegiance of heart and mind which won, as it 
 deserved, their heartiest loyalty and allegiance in 
 return. And so it was that during her incomparable 
 reign our English freedom "slowly broadened down 
 from precedent to precedent." 
 
 And the example of her purity. On that it is 
 difficult to speak. She herself declared to a trusted 
 Scottish preacher that it u^as from her husband that 
 she learned what love and purity meant. But 
 assuredly the world has never seen anything more 
 pure and sweet than the love of those two during 
 their too brief alliance and the gentle domesticity 
 of their home. If we lift the veil from the English 
 Court in the days of her immediate predecessors 
 and then enter the drawing-rooms and boudoirs of 
 Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle during the 
 married life of Albert and Victoria, we shall be 
 amazed at the moral revolution. The rot that was 
 setting in in English society was stayed at its 
 source. The purest and sweetest domesticity 
 
 159
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 revealed itself at the very apex of the social 
 pyramid. The young prince tended his wife like 
 a woman. The young wife had no pleasure save 
 in the love of her husband and her children. 
 Stories of the nursery and the schoolroom that 
 might come from any middle-class home penetrated 
 all ranks from the royal palace. The glamour was 
 stripped from gilded vice. The moral confusion 
 inevitable when the language of loyalty is applied 
 to the unworthy, and the sentiment of loyalty is 
 demanded for princes destitute of high and noble 
 virtues, was done away. The sentiment of loyalty 
 and the sentiments of affection and respect were at 
 last conjoined ; and as the years rolled by, the 
 affection and respect deepened into love and reve- 
 rence. The manners of the Court were purged ; 
 the manners of society purified ; and a new and 
 priceless influence for good penetrated through the 
 circles round about the throne. We owe it in an 
 incalculable measure to the Queen and her devoted 
 consort that England has taken on a new respect 
 for social purity, that vice has to a large extent been 
 stripped of the mask of fashionable respectability, 
 and that a wave of redeeming love and pity has 
 gone out from the best heart of England to those 
 who are the victims of the base passions of men, 
 such as the world has not known before. 
 
 When Prince Albert died, and that vast sorrow 
 took possession of the widowed heart which for 
 well-nigh forty years held our sovereign lady in 
 comparative retirement from social functions, the 
 loss became manifest all too quickly. A potent 
 restraint was removed; and that "smart" society 
 
 1 60
 
 OUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 which has been one of the most dire curses of our 
 time was evolved with deplorable rapidity. It must 
 be one of the most earnest of our prayers in this 
 new time that the sweet and gentle Queen Consort 
 who now stands beside the new-made King may 
 have strength and grace and courage to renew that 
 olden influence for good ; so that of her also it may 
 be recorded by some right loyal poet of the new 
 time that "her court was pure," and from the 
 palaces in which she rules the example of domestic 
 love and social cleanness may descend on every 
 circle of society in this English land. 
 
 The extension of freedom, the purification of 
 society, these are two of the far-reaching and 
 beneficent effects of the character of the illustrious 
 woman whom we mourn to-day. 
 
 Thirdly, she raised to a higher point than it had 
 ever reached before in England the consideration 
 in which women at large were held. 
 
 And I, for my part, hold that a service to her 
 country and the human race which cannot be 
 surpassed. 
 
 She did this in spite of the fact that in her own 
 mind there lingered some of the old tradition con- 
 cerning the place of woman in the community. 
 When it was suggested to her that it was not for 
 her, a monarch, to promise in the marriage service 
 to "obey" her husband, it is said that she refused to 
 have the word struck out ; though another account 
 has it that she herself doubted the propriety of such 
 a promise from one entrusted with highest secrets 
 of state. Nor does she seem to have risen to that 
 highest point of view which regards the vice of man 
 
 i6i M
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 as a fall in the same sense in which it is so regarded 
 in the woman. There was something of the 
 German feeling in her regarding the relation of the 
 sexes ; and she would have been the last to relish 
 classification as an "emancipated" woman. Never- 
 theless, " emancipated " in the true and only right 
 sense she was. Her qualities of intellect were such 
 that she could not take opinions ready made. It 
 was her nature to build them up for herself. And 
 her sense of responsibility was such that she could 
 not take duties by dictation. It was her nature to 
 think them out for herself. And she thought out 
 the duties of a constitutional sovereign as no one 
 who ever lived had thought them out before. And 
 her statesmanship, by universal testimony, was on a 
 par with that of the great ministers of England and 
 the Continent — Peel, Russell, Gladstone, Thiers, 
 Bismarck, Cavour — who one by one became con- 
 spicuous during her long and splendid reign. And 
 so when Bismarck met her he found one with 
 whom intellect must be pitted against intellect; and 
 he had to revise or make exception to those false 
 philosophisings of his in which a woman counted 
 as but a plaything or a fool, a mischievous meddler 
 in what she did not understand whenever she set 
 her hand to politics. 
 
 And standing there at the head of the English 
 nation, the acknowledged compeer of the wisest 
 and the greatest, Victoria thus became in her own 
 person the irrefutable argument of those who 
 demanded for women a regard, a consideration, an 
 opportunity, a scope from which hitherto they had 
 been shut out. And the women who in her time 
 
 162
 
 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 have infused themselves with blessed result into the 
 higher life of our country have in her their involun- 
 tary patroness. And the fame of her abides to 
 rebuke all men who would vaunt the superiority of 
 their sex and hold women bound within the circles 
 of the drawing-room, the nursery, and the kitchen. 
 
 And the pricelessness of the demonstration she 
 has made of womanly character and capacity lies 
 most of all in this, that her masculine understanding, 
 her virile force of will, trenched not at all on the 
 softer and more tender attributes of womanhood ; 
 and she has displayed on the most conspicuous 
 stage in all the world the union in one mind and 
 heart of the gentleness and compassion of the 
 woman with the capacity and forcefulness hitherto 
 supposed to be the peculiar attribute of the man. 
 And so she has done a mighty stroke for that 
 mutual respect and equal companionship of men 
 and women on which depends so much of the 
 happiness, the purity, the progress, and the highest 
 welfare of the world. 
 
 And now she is gone. In great pageant and 
 splendour her ashes will be borne to the grave in 
 these next ensuing days. A week ago, and we 
 hardly realised that she was ill. And now five days 
 she has been dead. Monarch though she was, one 
 whose dominions girdled the broad earth, a woman 
 whose ears were greeted for sixty years with 
 ascriptions of majesty, chief and greatest of the 
 sovereigns of mankind, mother of her people, 
 patriarchal in years, exalted in wisdom, she is dead. 
 The grey king Death touched her as he would touch 
 any other mortal, and she succumbed like the 
 
 163
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 humblest cottager in all her lands at that solemn 
 touch. The essential equality of the human race 
 prevailed ; and her heart ceased to beat as other 
 hearts have ceased and must cease through the ages. 
 And now it is in no robes of earthly majesty that 
 her soul presents itself to God, but in the garment 
 of the wife, the mother, her only crown the love she 
 carries with her even beyond the grave, her only 
 sceptre the love in her own pure spirit for those she 
 leaves and for those she at last rejoins. 
 
 We think of her the tender child, who, when first 
 her great inheritance flashed on her, cried, " I will 
 be good." We think of her the fair young girl, 
 who, when in the raw dawn they told her the 
 inheritance was hers, said, " Pray for me." We 
 think of her the bride, the wife, the sweet young 
 mother, when the cup of happiness was full. We 
 think of her in many a great pageant when tens of 
 thousands shouted their plaudits as she passed. 
 We think of her the widow, in the newness of her 
 grief pouring out her heart to the sympathetic 
 Scottish minister, sobbing out how "now all on 
 earth seemed dead to her," yet " she would never 
 shrink from duty." We think of her in the softer 
 happiness of old age, with grandchildren and great- 
 grandchildren about her knees. We think of her 
 white-haired, crippled, with sight that was waxing 
 dim, in these last sad months sitting silently 
 weeping, either for friends that were gone or for 
 the bitter sorrow of this sad war which harrowed 
 her very soul. And even in our own deep sorrow 
 we can hardly forbear a gleam of joy that at last the 
 great peace has fallen on her and surrounded her — 
 
 164
 
 ^UEEN VICTORIA 
 
 that at length the last and sweetest of those conso- 
 lations has been given her which her noble poet- 
 friend prayed for her in her early widowhood nigh 
 two score years ago, when he sang — 
 
 " May all love, 
 His love, unseen but felt, o'ershadow Thee, 
 The love of all Thy sons encompass Thee, 
 The love of all Thy daughters cherish Thee, 
 The love of all Thy people comfort Thee, 
 Till God's love set Thee at his side again." 
 
 She is gone, and we are left with our King with 
 the old historic English name, and the Queen 
 Consort, whom all of us whose memories date back 
 to that time, loved from the moment her bright 
 smile first glanced on the London streets, and the 
 great English people, with all its splendid virtues 
 and its grievous faults and its destinies for good and 
 evil in its hands as it remembers God and truth and 
 honour and duty, or forgets them. It is a moment 
 of exceeding great crisis. The two paths diverge. 
 On the one hand there is pure and generous 
 aspiration after the higher national life, that the 
 records of England may be sweet and clean, that 
 we may hand down to our children an empire the 
 home of justice, freedom, and righteousness between 
 man and man. On the other hand, surging pas- 
 sions, lusts for gold, scoffings at holy things, 
 mockings at God and at religion, open professions 
 of a coarse and base materialism. From the Court 
 which is the residence of kings, to the court which 
 holds the cellar and the garret of the poorest, the 
 
 i6s
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 great choice lies before us. Let every man and 
 woman who believes in God and goodness, in faith, 
 in high purpose, in religion, dedicate the soul afresh 
 to the truest patriotism, the patriotism which prefers 
 the good name of this sea-girt land to all the wealth 
 that all the continents can pile together. 
 
 i66
 
 XI 
 
 THE ECCLESIASTIC: 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
 
 XI 
 
 THE ECCLESIASTIC- 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 I WISH to close these lectures on the '* Makers of 
 the Nineteenth Century " with some account of 
 the relations of three illustrious men to the seething 
 ecclesiastical problem of the age in which they lived. 
 These three are John Henry Newman, first a leader 
 of the Anglicans and afterwards a submissive son 
 of Rome ; Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, who strove to 
 liberate Anglicanism itself from the dead hand 
 of traditional dogmatic control ; and James Mar- 
 tineau, who stood outside all dogmatic ecclesias- 
 ticism and championed a spiritual communion 
 which should be free from the imposition of any 
 ecclesiastical creeds whatever. The position 
 assumed by each of these three was absolutely 
 destructive of the positions held by the other two. 
 They were entirely irreconcilable. Yet all three 
 were men not only of brilliant intellectual parts, but 
 of luminous spiritual goodness. To try to under- 
 stand the position of each successively can hardly 
 fail to be instructive to thoughtful and earnest 
 minds. 
 
 169
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 The nineteenth century, of all centuries which 
 the world has yet lived through, was most remark- 
 able for the sweeping tide of liberalism in religion 
 which has carried the average mind to positions 
 which a hundred years ago lay far beyond the re- 
 motest anticipation of the Churches. John Henry 
 Newman is the mightiest representative among 
 Englishmen of the back-wash which made against 
 that strong and over-mastering tide. He is the one 
 very great Englishman of the nineteenth century 
 who set his face against religious liberalism. He 
 alone succeeded in creating a coherent and sub- 
 stantial movement dead against the overwhelming 
 tendencies of the age in which he lived. 
 
 Brought up in an evangelical home — though not, 
 it would seem, a very strict one, since in his youth he 
 read both Tom Paine and Hume — Newman tells us 
 that even as a boy he was absolutely certain of only 
 two existences, himself and God. It seemed to him 
 more possible that the whole external world and all 
 other human beings save himself should be mere 
 creatures of his imagination, than that there should 
 be no God. And though in later life he paid due 
 respect to the reasons set forth by philosophers and 
 theologians for the belief in God, he felt that belief 
 itself to be prior to and independent of all reason — 
 a certitude immediately created in the soul, of 
 parallel rank with a man's certitude that he himself 
 exists. At Oxford he was at first under the influence 
 of Whately, the logician, afterwards Archbishop of 
 Dublin, and was drawn by him in the direction of 
 religious liberalism. But the moment he detected in 
 himself and recognised that drift, he pulled up sharp ; 
 
 170
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 and from that day his whole soul was set on build- 
 ing up an Anglican theology which should be a 
 bulwark against liberalism and beat back its advance 
 upon the Church of God. 
 
 To me, who all my life have believed with all my 
 heart and soul in the principle of liberalism in all 
 the concerns of man, the language in which Newman 
 habitually speaks of it was strange and startling when 
 first I began to read him. " The vital question was," 
 says he near the beginning of his famous " Apologia," 
 " how were we to keep the Church from being 
 liberalised ? " Again, to me, in whose ears the 
 words " the right of private judgment " have 
 always had a sacred ring, an appeal which stirred 
 my blood, it was bewildering to read, " We have too 
 great a horror of the principle of private judgment 
 to trust it in so immense a matter." You, perhaps, 
 for the most part agree with me in doing homage to 
 the fundamental principles of private judgment and 
 of liberalism — not, of course, a mere name of 
 liberalism twisted and distorted from time to time 
 to suit the exigencies of a party. You, perhaps, 
 with me, look on the right of private judgment and 
 liberalism in thought and word as sacred instru- 
 ments for the progress and salvation of the world. 
 If so, it will be all the more educative and whole- 
 some to try to understand why a great and noble 
 Englishman, a scholar, well-nigh a saint, set his face 
 for sixty years against these two things as flint. 
 
 In the " Apologia pro Vita Sua" Newman has left 
 us the most remarkable autobiography of a soul 
 since Augustine of Hippo, 1,500 years ago, poured 
 out the lava stream of his " Confessions." Charles 
 
 171
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Kingsley had committed the terrible error of publicly 
 charging Newman with teaching that truth for its 
 own sake neither need nor ought to be a virtue with 
 the Roman clergy; and insinuating against Newman 
 a habit of " cunning equivocation." The Apologia 
 is the great Catholic's reply ; and it is the record of 
 a mind so transparently sincere, so solicitous for 
 truth, so earnestly devout, that it stands in the 
 literature of the world among the most priceless 
 possessions in the treasury of Christendom. 
 
 Briefly we will recall from this world-famed book 
 the successive stages in the religious development of 
 Newman, from that day when he drew apart from 
 Whately and set himself " to keep the Church from 
 being liberalised," to the day when quietly at Little- 
 more the Passionist Father received the worn and 
 weary controversialist into the bosom of the Roman 
 Church. 
 
 When two-and-thirty years of age, John Henry 
 Newman, with that brilliant son of genius, Hurrell 
 Froude, set forth for a tour through Italy. Of 
 Catholic society they saw almost nothing. But 
 they communed together on how the English 
 Church was to be saved from the corroding influ- 
 ence of the besetting liberalism. After Froude had 
 gone back home Newman pushed on into Sicily, 
 his mind and heart a cauldron of conflicting feelings. 
 He would break into fits of sobbing. When his 
 servant asked what ailed him, he could only answer, 
 " I have a work to do in England ! I have a work 
 to do." At last, in the early summer of 1833, he 
 sailed in a Palermo orange-boat for Marseilles, en 
 route to England. On that small ship, as the sunset 
 
 172
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 glow overhung the Mediterranean waters, he wrote 
 the hnes : 
 
 " Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, 
 Lead thou me on. 
 The night is dark, and I am far from home, 
 Lead thou me on." 
 
 Then, once more in classic Oxford, with St. 
 Mary's pulpit for his rostrum, he girded himself 
 for battle. " I felt," says he, " as on board a vessel, 
 which first gets under weigh, and then the deck is 
 cleared out, and luggage and live-stock stowed away 
 into their proper receptacles." 
 
 For what, then, was this young stalwart about to 
 make his fight ? He tells us very plainly the three 
 great principles for which he strove : 
 
 First was the principle of dogma. " From the 
 age of fifteen," he declares, " dogma has been the 
 fundamental principle of my religion ; I know no 
 other religion ; I cannot enter into the idea of any 
 other sort of religion." 
 
 Second was his conviction that there is a visible 
 Church ordained of God, with sacraments and rites 
 which are the channels of invisible grace. Such 
 Church he conceived to have through its bishops 
 absolute claim on the obedience of Christians, and 
 he believed that its doctrines were guaranteed by 
 unbroken continuity down from Apostolic times. 
 
 Holding these two principles, Newman was bound 
 to fight against liberalism, which denied all such 
 authority to bishops or the Church. He was bound 
 also to fight against Evangelical Protestantism, first, 
 because it rejected those sacramental means of 
 
 173
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 grace which he beHeved to be the one divinely 
 appointed medicine for the soul ; and secondly, 
 because it seemed to him to have no authority for 
 its dogmas, and those dogmas, so far as they differed 
 from the High Anglican, seemed to him heretical 
 and false. But there was nothing in these two 
 principles, that of dogma and that of a visible 
 Church discharging sacramental functions, to hold 
 him to the Anglican in preference to the Roman 
 Church. 
 
 What, then, was the third of the leading prin- 
 ciples which he infused into that famous historic 
 movement which in the next ten years gathered 
 round his person, and rent the religious world in 
 twain ? It was rejection of the Church of Rome. 
 When young, he distinctly held the Pope to be actual 
 Antichrist, and ''the stain" of that prejudice, he 
 assures us, clung to him more or less till he was 
 forty years of age. He held that Rome, in her 
 later doctrines, had distinctly broken with antiquity 
 and the tradition of Apostolic truth, and he especially 
 condemned the honours which she paid to the Virgin 
 and the saints. 
 
 And so there was left to him only the Anglican 
 Church in all the world, incarnating the three lead- 
 ing principles which he held with so great fervour 
 and tenacity. 
 
 These, then, were the stones with which was paved 
 that " Via Media," that middle way, between 
 Romanism and Protestantism, which he strove to 
 lay down for the feet of the English people. And 
 these things he preached with a fervour and a 
 learning that concentrated on him the eyes of 
 
 174
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 Oxford and the world. His sermons, indeed, were 
 mainly ethical and practical. Though unclothed in 
 rhetoric, and dehvered without gesture and with 
 eyes fixed steadily on his manuscript, they appealed 
 to the consciences of men with extraordinary power. 
 But they were steeped in the atmosphere of his 
 ecclesiastical beliefs. And at the same time with 
 the sermons, he and the band who had gathered 
 round him were issuing a series of " Tracts for the 
 Times," which penetrated into the rectories and 
 vicarages of England, and compelled the attention 
 of all religious and educated men. And with never 
 swerving persistence these tracts enforced the three 
 points of his doctrine — that dogma is the funda- 
 mental principle of all true religion ; that there is a 
 visible Church ordained of God which by sacraments 
 confers invisible grace on the souls of men ; that 
 not the Roman but the Anglican communion 
 possesses the distinguishing note of that Church, 
 inasmuch as she, and she alone, has steadfastly 
 held by Apostolic doctrine and can claim the full 
 authority of antiquity. 
 
 So things went on from 1833 to 1839, the ^^'^ o^ 
 the warfare resounding more and more throughout 
 the English world. The controversy was nominally 
 a controversy against Rome, a contention for 
 Anglican as against Roman churchmanship. But 
 its real drift, though Newman knew it not, was to 
 lead those who were deeply moved by it in the 
 direction of Rome ; while it threw others — who 
 perceived this drift — into the arms of that very 
 liberalism which Newman most abhorred. It was 
 only that Evangelical Protestantism which neither 
 
 175
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 on the one hand could boast historic ecclesiastical 
 authority, nor on the other hand frankly accorded 
 the right of private judgment and the liberal method 
 of thought, that suffered in the conflict— as suffer it 
 always must, in my opinion, whenever disputants 
 on either side get down to the bed-rock of first 
 principles and are pledged to intellectual con- 
 sistency. 
 
 " The Movement " then — as its promoters called it 
 — was an effort strenuous and enthusiastic to erect 
 the Church of England into a great sacerdotal insti- 
 tution, and to bring the sacramentalist view of 
 religion home to the minds and lives of all men. 
 Newman held that all external things are but signs 
 and symbols of the spiritual ; and so it accorded 
 entirely with his philosophy to think that in baptism 
 or the Eucharist, the outward material is the 
 ordained and veritable symbol of spiritual grace. 
 The effect of the genius and devotion of this young 
 Anglican still vibrates through the English Church, 
 and though it be more than half a century since he 
 abjured her communion and finally embraced the 
 discipleship of Rome, yet his influence is still 
 unspent, and it is he who has been the agent in 
 chief of that reaction which makes the sacerdotal 
 party at this day the strongest and the boldest in the 
 church of Cranmer and Ridley, of Chillingvvorth 
 and Tillotson. 
 
 But it was soon to appear on what perilous 
 foundations the uncompromising Anglican had 
 built his argument. He based the supreme claim 
 of his church to be the true Church of Christ on 
 the faithfulness of her doctrines to those of the 
 
 176
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 early centuries. But burrowing in the records of 
 the controversies of those olden times, he suddenly 
 discovered condemned as heresy by the undivided 
 Church of the fifth Christian century doctrines which 
 in the nineteenth century were widely held by the 
 English Church. He could not set aside the con- 
 demnation as irrelevant, for his whole case rested on 
 the contention that the doctrine of the Church of 
 England now was identical with that of the un- 
 divided Church in ancient times. Yet he could not 
 well admit that the condemnation applied to-day, 
 for that was to say that Rome was right and 
 England — or at any rate her prevailing teaching — 
 wrong. It was the first small seed of doubt 
 concerning the validity of the English claim. 
 
 And he fell almost at the same moment on that 
 great saying of St. Augustine, " Securus judicat 
 orbis terrarum " — " What the whole round world 
 believes, that has the guarantee of truth." The 
 words came to him with a strange and challenging 
 power. They rang in his ears, as he says, like the 
 " Turn again, Whittington," of the London chime. 
 " Securus judicat orbis terrarum." And which had 
 the greater claim to speak for the whole round 
 world — the Anglican communion, insular and 
 solated, or the Roman with her missions, her 
 orders, her monks, her prelates in every land ? 
 
 Could it, then, be that the proud claims he had 
 made for the Church of his fatherland and his 
 people were unfounded ? Had his zeal, his enthu- 
 siasm, his devotion, the fervour of the brilliant 
 men who had gathered round him, the whole 
 inspiration of the Movement itself, which was his 
 
 177 N
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 life, been for a delusion and deceit ? Was the Via 
 Media a false track, leading to heresy and schism ? 
 He would not, could not believe it. Where lay the 
 stronghold of the alleged heretical teaching of the 
 Church of England ? What was the most Pro- 
 testant, the least Catholic, portion of her accepted 
 formularies ? Undoubtedly the Thirty-nine Articles 
 of Religion, commonly regarded as a buttress against 
 Rome. He would seize the Articles themselves and 
 show that even they were capable of a Catholic 
 interpretation, an interpretation consonant with the 
 faith of the united Church before the Protestant 
 Reformation. And Newman sat down to this bold 
 task, and produced the last and most famous of the 
 Tracts. 
 
 And so was launched upon the world "Tract XC." 
 It was a most elaborate, most ingenious, and, I am 
 persuaded, most ingenuous examination of the 
 Articles of the Church of England ; and its con- 
 tention was that while those Articles condemned 
 many practices and doctrines which had crept into 
 the current usages of the Church of Rome, they 
 condemned no practice and no doctrine authorita- 
 tively enforced by the Catholic Church prior to the 
 Reformation. 
 
 The Tract was ingenious. It was also, I believe, 
 ingenuous — as honest as it was earnest, as straight- 
 forward as it was erudite. But the bulk of English 
 churchmen were Protestants, and believed the 
 Articles to be the very citadel and keep of Pro- 
 testantism. Accordingly the Tract at once roused a 
 fury of opposition in Oxford, and in every city and 
 parish of the land. It was thought that for the first 
 
 178
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 time Newman had shown his hand ; that for the 
 first time he had committed himself incontrovertibly 
 to the Romanising of the English Church. For the 
 first time it was said that the Movement, which had 
 hitherto been but an ecclesiastical agitation in- 
 teresting chiefly to the clergy, " came into collision 
 with the nation." 
 
 The shock of the collision reverberated far and 
 wide. England was aroused ; and forces of 
 opposition sprang into active being, which shook 
 the Movement to its foundation and filled Newman 
 and his friends with sheer amazement. 
 
 His bishop — always a generous friend and pastor 
 — remonstrated and counselled the total discon- 
 tinuance of the Tracts. Newman at once obeved 
 and stopped the series. But bishop after bishop 
 " charged " against him. It was not enough that 
 the Tracts were discontinued. Their Romanising 
 teachings must be wiped out of the English 
 Church. 
 
 Then came an incident which did more than any 
 other single occurrence to shake the waning faith 
 of Newman in the Church of his allegiance. 
 
 The Archbishop of Canterbury combined with 
 Lutheran Prussia to plan the installation of a 
 Bishop of Jerusalem who should have charge over 
 all consenting Protestant communities in Palestine. 
 It was to abandon the local character of the English 
 Church on which Newman laid great stress. It was 
 further to recognise and receive into communion 
 heretical bodies which abjured the very principle of 
 Episcopacy. To Newman it was a blasphemous 
 apostacy, a capitulation of religion to worldly 
 
 179
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 politics, a breach with CathoHcity and Antiquity 
 which no explanation could repair. 
 
 The great controversialist resigned the living of 
 St. Mary's, and presently retired into lay communion 
 with the Church of England. But there was no 
 rest for him there even in the quiet retreat of 
 Littlemore. The persecution never flagged. And 
 step by step with the outward persecution proceeded 
 the silent changes in his own mind which prepared 
 him at last for the final act. This is how he himself 
 describes this change of mind : 
 
 " I came gradually to see that the Anglican Church 
 was formally in the wrong, . . . that the Church of 
 Rome was formally in the right ; then that no valid 
 reasons could be assigned for continuing in the 
 Anglican, and again that no valid objections could 
 be taken to joining the Roman. Then, I had 
 nothing more to learn ; what still remained for my 
 conversion was, not further change of opinion, but 
 to change opinion itself into the clearness and 
 firmness of intellectual conviction." 
 
 Then at last in October, 1845, twelve years after 
 he had set forth in the first ardour of his call to 
 arouse the Anglican Church against the threatening 
 liberalism, and when he had lived just half the eighty- 
 nine years which were his span on earth, quietly at 
 his house at Littlemore he was received by the 
 Passionist Father, Dominic, into that Church whose 
 head he had for so large a portion of his life regarded 
 as the very Antichrist accursed in Scripture. 
 
 It was a strange pilgrimage ; one in which none 
 of us, I suppose, can follow him. Yet that man's 
 Protestantism must surely be of a hard and ungenial 
 
 180
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 type who does not feel some gleam of gladness that 
 at last the brave and dauntless combatant, bearing 
 his scars upon him, had found his rest. A score of 
 years later he wrote of his life since then : " I have 
 been in perfect peace and contentment ; I never 
 have had one doubt. ... It was like coming into 
 port after a rough sea ; and my happiness on that 
 score remains to this day without interruption." 
 
 It was a strange pilgrimage ; but starting from his 
 starting-point it seems to me it was the only consistent 
 journey he could make. 
 
 If you assume that there is a body of dogmatic 
 truth and a system of sacramental practice on the 
 receiving of which the salvation of the soul depends 
 — then, it seems to me, you are forced to the belief 
 that there is some one authorised Church of God 
 which is to be the guardian of that faith and the 
 channel of that grace. To suppose that God has 
 made the eternal welfare of the soul dependent on 
 the acceptance of one precise theology and the 
 practice of one precise ritual, and yet has left the 
 theology and the ritual to the chance judgment of 
 each individual mind, with all our differences of 
 capacity, of circumstance, of training, of disposi- 
 tion, of opportunity, of prejudice, of bias ; is to 
 suppose that he has recklessly cast us into a 
 seething ocean of conflict in which scarce one in 
 a million will make the land. Grant the premises, 
 and an authoritative Church is a moral necessity of 
 the case. And if there is to be an authoritative 
 Church, that which for all these centuries has had 
 her centre on the seven hills of Rome, which has 
 stretched forth her hand over all nations, which 
 
 i8i
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 nursed the civilisation of man through the early 
 and the mediaeval centuries, which has continued 
 steadfast, unshaken, through all the shocks of 
 controversy and the revolutions of the nations, 
 can set forth claims to be that Church with which 
 no other can compete. There is no true resting 
 place between Authority and absolute freedom of 
 individual thought — or, rather, no true resting place 
 between an external, a visible, an historic Authority 
 and the Authority of a man's own mind and con- 
 science, the experiences of the individual soul of 
 each child of God. 
 
 Newman held that there are but two consistent 
 positions for the human mind — the one blank 
 Atheism, the other Catholicity in the obedience of 
 Rome. It is for men who love freedom, who hold 
 private judgment no temptation of the devil, but a 
 trust from God, liberalism no easy way to infidelity, 
 but the instrument of the highest righteousness and 
 the truest faith, to show that there is a third con- 
 sistency, higher, nobler, purer than either of the 
 other two, the consistency of the man who has been 
 led to simple Theism, pure trust in God as the 
 Father of us all, conceived in the spirit and loved in 
 the temper of that great Son of Man who taught us 
 that God listens to our prayer and cares for us with 
 a love which knows no exception of person and no 
 bound of time. 
 
 T82
 
 XII 
 
 THE BROAD CHURCHMAN: 
 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY
 
 XII 
 
 THE BROAD CHURCHMAN: 
 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 
 
 THE preceding lecture dwells on the life and 
 work of a great Englishman who counted 
 dogma the very foundation of religion, and to 
 whom the only question was, " What ecclesiastical 
 organisation has preserved and developed Christian 
 dogma in its greatest purity ? " We are now to 
 turn to one whose religion was independent alto- 
 gether of dogma properly so called, and whose only 
 interest in dogmas was in the historical and personal 
 associations entwined with them — the figures of 
 Athanasius and of Arius, of Cranmer and of Laud. 
 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was the son of Edward 
 Stanley, who first held a living at Alderley and was 
 afterwards Bishop of Norwich. Edward Stanley 
 was among that group of clergymen in the early 
 part of the nineteenth century who led the reaction 
 in favour of decency, decorum, and pastoral devo- 
 tion, against the gross worldliness and self-indulgence 
 which too many of the rectories and vicarages of 
 England had witnessed in the preceding decades. 
 From his father and his mother Stanley drew much 
 
 185
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 of his sweet and noble character. But from Arnold 
 of Rugby he drew the greatest intellectual and 
 religious influences of his life. He is the "Arthur" 
 of " Tom Brown's School Days." He came up 
 from Rugby to Oxford in the first swellings of that 
 mighty influence which we have already traced, the 
 " Movement " of Newman, the proclamation of the 
 Via Media. But he wore a breastplate of triple 
 brass, which the shafts of no sacerdotalism could 
 ever pierce. The vital question, said Newman, is 
 " how to keep the Church from being liberalised." 
 The vital question, taught Stanley, is how to 
 liberalise the Church, how to prevent her ever 
 becoming the domain and preserve of a single 
 party, how to broaden the bounds of her freedom, 
 how to make the spirit of Christ her inspiration as 
 against the insistance on any particular dogma, how 
 to rear her sons to the spirit of truth and love 
 above and behind and beyond all particular versions 
 of theology. 
 
 Let us glance at his outward career. In 1834, at 
 nineteen years of age, he began a residence at Oxford, 
 which, in various capacities, he continued almost 
 unbroken till he was thirty-six. In 1851 he took a 
 canonry at Canterbury. In 1856, aged forty-one, he 
 returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of Eccle- 
 siastical History. In 1864, at forty-nine, he entered 
 on the Deanery of Westminster, with which his name 
 and fame remain imperishably intertwined. 
 
 I well remember the first time that I saw him. It 
 was in 1876 or 1877, when already he was past his 
 sixtieth year, and the noble wife who for a brief 
 twelve years had shared his every thought and 
 
 186
 
 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 
 
 aspiration was no longer at his side. I desired to 
 enlist his co-operation in a matter which I knew 
 would command his sympathy. And I visited him by 
 invitation in that vast study of his which w^as littered 
 all over with a veritable chaos of letters and papers 
 and books. He looked an old man already, small, 
 wiry, with quick grey eye, and a countenance on 
 which every phase of thought and feeling played in 
 swift variety — but always with kindliness — with an 
 infinite " sweetness and light," as his old school- 
 fellow would have said — underlying it all. I made 
 my suggestion to him, and he pondered in doubt. 
 Then, casting his glance at a marble bust of his 
 wife which stood on the table beside him, with a 
 gentle pathos he said, " Ah, if she were here, she 
 would tell me what I ought to do." A few years 
 later, at the age of sixty-six, he was called up to join 
 her in the life beyond. 
 
 The qualities of mind and heart which were ever 
 revealed in the countenance and conversation of 
 Dean Stanley shine also in his writings. Seldom 
 have any man's books been so perfect a mirror of 
 himself. Indeed, he could write only what he 
 thought and felt. His eyes, his tongue, his pen 
 always spoke what was to him the truth — and they 
 always spoke the truth in love. This love, so easy 
 to talk about, to preach about, so rarely maintained 
 as the ruling spring of life, was by him steadfastly 
 so maintained. " Dean Stanley," said one who was 
 of his own spirit, " stood higher in the respect and 
 affection of a larger and more varied circle of 
 members of many churches than any ecclesiastic 
 in the world." None had more combated the 
 
 187
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 spirit of Dissent. Yet Nonconformists counted it a 
 priceless privilege to be amongst his pall-bearers, 
 and loved the taunt of his enemies that he was 
 "honorary member of all the denominations." 
 Against none had he shot out such shafts of 
 raillery as at the Ritualists. Yet it was the hot- 
 headed Archdeacon Denison who a few hours after 
 his death spoke the most touching tribute of tender 
 friendship which was laid on his grave. His love 
 extended not only to the Arnolds and Stanleys of 
 other churches, to Philaret, the gentle bishop of 
 Moscow and Kolomna, to Chunder Sen, the Theist 
 of Bengal, but (what is so much rarer) to the most 
 vehement opponents of his own principles and 
 policy in his own land and his own Church. For 
 he had an almost miraculous power of realising the 
 inner mind and heart of men of every type and 
 character. He had a sympathy which placed every 
 chance acquaintance at his ease. He had a depth 
 of spiritual and religious feeling which was con- 
 centrated in that sentiment of brotherhood to all 
 men in sonship to the Father, which was the 
 inspiration and the power of Jesus Christ. 
 
 What, then, was the theological, what was the 
 ecclesiastical position of this man in whom flowered 
 to so rare a bloom the spirit of Christ ? 
 
 It is neither as theologian nor as ecclesiastic that 
 his position is most eminent, but as an historian of 
 extraordinarily vivid and picturesque endowment. 
 The Hebrew chieftain leading his hordes across the 
 Sinaitic desert ; the Apostle of the Gentiles preaching 
 the Gospel of the Cross to the sailors and loungers 
 on the quays of Corinth ; Athanasius, the " small, 
 
 i88
 
 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 
 
 insignificant young man of hardly twenty-five years 
 of age, of lively manners and speech and of bright, 
 serene countenance," " taking the words out of the 
 Bishop's mouth " at the Council of Nicaea ; Arius, at 
 that same Council of their mortal conflict, "sixty 
 years of age, very tall and thin, apparently unable to 
 support his stature," with " an odd way of contorting 
 and twisting himself w^hich his enemies compare to 
 the wrigglings of a snake," " a strange, captivating, 
 moon-struck giant ; " Columba in rapt vision on lona ; 
 St. Margaret on the beach of the Firth of Forth — 
 these all live before us on his pages as though we 
 saw them with our eyes and heard them with our 
 ears. The fascination of the picture diverts Stanley 
 from any historical criticism properly so-called. Yet 
 he remains, perhaps, the foremost historian for 
 sheer brilliancy whom the nineteenth century pro- 
 duced, that century which also gave us Motley and 
 Macau lay. 
 
 But the theologian ? The ecclesiastic ? 
 
 They are not wise who, like his successor in the 
 Deanery, have held up Arthur Stanley as a great 
 theologian. To be a great theologian a man must 
 not only be a deeply religious man, though that is 
 the first qualification, but he must have habits of 
 accurate scientific thought ; and Stanley himself 
 once said to me, and said most truly, " I have not a 
 grain of science in my composition." He was, 
 therefore, not a great theologian ; yet some of the 
 best elements of a great theologian he exhibited in 
 almost unexampled brilliancy. No man ever had a 
 firmer grasp of the principle that statements con- 
 cerning God and divine things are to be judged still 
 
 189
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 more by the vital force with which they energise the 
 soul, than by the nicety with which they can be fitted 
 into a metaphysical construction. He demanded 
 moral significance of a theological statement if it 
 was to be held to embody a living truth. And it 
 was he, the Very Reverend Arthur Stanley, Dean of 
 Westminster, as Dean Bradley has pointed out, who 
 wrote, "When Bishop Pearson in his work on the 
 Creed vindicates the Divinity of Christ without the 
 slightest mention of any of those moral qualities by 
 which He has bowed down the world before Him, 
 his grasp on the doctrine is far feebler than that of 
 Rousseau or Mill, who have seized the very attributes 
 which constitute the marrow and essence of His 
 nature." Seeing what the average theologian is, we 
 cannot afford to put out of the theological court a 
 man who pertinaciously insisted on testing theologi- 
 cal conclusions by the touch of the conscience and 
 the spirit. 
 
 But in intellectual exactitude he was strangely 
 deficient. So charitable was he that he wanted to 
 make out every one else as charitable as himself. 
 He would take any theologian at haphazard, it would 
 seem, men of the most precise habits of definition, 
 who linked their reasonings together in a metallic 
 chain of logic, and proceed to dissolve all the links 
 and interpret their utterances into delightful agree- 
 ment with his own large and benevolent tolerance. 
 So he treated the great theologians of antiquity. So 
 he treated Luther and Calvin and the stern com- 
 pilers of the W^estminster Confession. So he treated 
 the various schools of the English Universities in 
 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
 
 190
 
 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 
 
 In this fashion he dissolved away the Atonement ; 
 he dissolved away the Trinity. But all the while he 
 used the traditional language of those great doctrines, 
 seemingly unaware that he was absolutely denying 
 them in any sense which any Church which had 
 ever been would have passed as orthodox. He 
 reduces the three Persons of the Trinity, for ex- 
 ample, to mere expressions of Natural, of Historical, 
 and of Spiritual Religion respectively, dissolving in 
 the alembic of his vague and generous liberalism the 
 historical theology of the Church. From that essay 
 the reader may well rise with a sense of general 
 agreement. Undoubtedly divine influences may be 
 contemplated under these three aspects. But why 
 not five, or a dozen, or a score ? This the ancient 
 doctrine of the Trinity preserved in the bosom of 
 the Catholic Church ! Spirit of Athanasius, what 
 parody is this of the great teaching for which thou 
 didst strive and suffer with a constancy and courage 
 to which even thy foes must for all time do homage ? 
 
 But as with Newman, so with Stanley, it is the 
 ecclesiastical position which is of the profoundest 
 interest and significance. He and Frederick Maurice 
 will stand in history as the two great pillars in the 
 nineteenth century of the Broad Church interpreta- 
 tion of the Church of England. But they stood for 
 two very different phases and methods of Broad 
 Churchism. Maurice was profoundly interested in 
 ■iogma for its own sake, and with extraordinary 
 subtlety put an interpretation on the Creeds conso- 
 nant with the liberal spirit and with a modern 
 philosophy. But he valued the Creeds as arks of 
 the eternal truth. Stanley cared nothing at all for 
 
 lyi
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 the Creeds except as monuments of the historical 
 conflicts out of which they arose. His whole 
 strength was thrown into the struggle to minimise 
 to the utmost the binding significance of subscrip- 
 tion, of creeds, of liturgy, in order that every 
 religious man might feel himself free — no matter 
 what his theology — to enter the English Church and 
 discharge its sacred offices. 
 
 Accordingly, in 1850, in an article on the famous 
 Gorham judgment, he emphatically declared "that 
 the Church of England, by the very condition of 
 its being, was not High, or Low, but Broad," and had 
 always included, and been meant to include, oppo- 
 site and contradictory opinions on points even more 
 important than those raised by the Gorham case. 
 
 And so we have the spectacle of a man in whose 
 own mind dogma had dissolved in a mist of religious 
 sensibility and Christian sympathy fighting in turn 
 for the inclusion of every kind of dogmatist within 
 the four walls of the Church of England. Mainly 
 through his eftorts legislation was effected which 
 somewhat relaxed the terms of clerical subscription. 
 He battled strenuously, though in vain, to get the 
 recital of the Athanasian Creed made optional instead 
 of obligatory. When Newman's Tract XC. burst 
 upon the world and " came into collision with the 
 nation," Stanley was among the foremost to resist 
 the movement for turning Newman and all his kind 
 out of the English Church. In 1850, when the 
 Gorham judgment secured the position of the Evan- 
 gelicals in the Church against their extrusion by the 
 High Church party, he applauded that judgment 
 loudly. Broad Churchman though he was, he dis- 
 
 192
 
 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 
 
 liked intensely Colenso's method of criticising the 
 Pentateuch. But when in the Lower House of 
 Convocation a motion of censure against that bold 
 prelate was under discussion, Stanley threw a bomb- 
 shell into that reverend assembly by a sudden blank 
 avowal of naked heresies which hitherto he had 
 always draped in decorous garb, and a challenge to 
 the House to excommunicate him himself instead of 
 the Bishop of Natal. 
 
 The arguments by which such a man sought to 
 defeat all efforts at exclusion were by no means 
 always agreeable to the threatened party for whom 
 he fought. He never could take sacerdotalism alto- 
 gether seriously, and pleaded the absolute indiffer- 
 ence of the cherished High Church vestments 
 inasmuch as they were but survivals of the shirt, the 
 shawl, the overcoat of the peasantry of early times. 
 
 But for the historic Estabhshment of England 
 Stanley had a love and an enthusiasm that knew no 
 bounds. He believed that the Church should in- 
 clude the whole Christian people of England. He 
 held that as the Church of the nation, a Church 
 knowing no other head than the monarch on the 
 throne, no other fountain of law and regulation than 
 the nation's Parliament, that Church afforded a free- 
 dom and a latitude to ministers and people which 
 no private sect could offer. 
 
 It was in consonance with views thus broad and 
 generous, though to my mind essentially fallacious, 
 ♦hat he sought to relax the bonds of subscription to 
 u.^ Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. He 
 got a general assent to the doctrine of that volume 
 substituted for assent and consent to each and every 
 
 193 o
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 doctrine which it contained. And he could not 
 understand why any Christian man should any longer 
 hesitate to set his hand to it. 
 
 But there is another difficulty which Stanley failed 
 altogether to realise or appreciate. The clergyman 
 of the Church of England has not only at the outset 
 to subscribe his assent to the documents and doc- 
 trine of that communion ; he has in every service 
 to repeat, amid every sanction of solemnity, certain 
 dictated Creeds, averring before God and man his 
 personal belief in each and every clause of which 
 they are built up. He has not only to submit him- 
 self to a table of Lessons and a selection of Psalmody 
 which wholly deprive him of discretionary choice, 
 but he has to pray in the very words and syllables 
 set down for him more than three centuries ago and 
 in no others whatsoever. It has once more been 
 contended lately, as it often has been contended, that 
 a clergyman of the Church of England is more free 
 than the minister of any other Christian body. The 
 contention seems incomprehensible and extra- 
 ordinary, seeing that he is under unrelaxing disci- 
 pline in every moment of public worship, and his 
 very prayers to God — his confessions, his apirations, 
 his petitions, his thanksgivings — are with absolute 
 rigidity dictated and prescribed. 
 
 To those of us who are accustomed to a more 
 spontaneous worship in the assembly of the people, 
 it would seem that even to a man who believes 
 every phrase of every collect, of the litany, and of 
 the three creeds, so inflexible a formulary must 
 sometimes be sorely trying. But for one who, like 
 the kindly Dean himself, knew that the Prayer-book 
 
 194
 
 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 
 
 represented a multitude of differing minds, now 
 reflecting the rigid Protestantism of Cranmer, 
 now the High Anglicanism of Laud, one would 
 have thought the difficulty of submission would 
 have presented itself as ethically very grave. Yet 
 Stanley took manifest pleasure in now voicing one 
 layer of historic theology and now another ; for his 
 historic sense always outmeasured all else. But to 
 a man not of this easy type, to a man who clearly 
 sees that one utterance in the liturgy is the sheer 
 dogmatic contradiction of another, to a man who 
 has emerged from mediaevalism in theology and 
 thinks with a modern mind and cares much about 
 the subject - matter of religion, to a man who, 
 believing, let us say, neither in the virgin-birth, nor 
 in the resurrection of the body, nor that Christ 
 descended into hell, in any simple and natural 
 interpretation of those phrases, counts it the first 
 law of righteousness to speak the truth and nothing 
 but the truth, and in the solemn moment in which 
 as spokesman of the people he addresses God or 
 addresses in the name of God and Christ the people, 
 holds himself doubly bound to that transparent 
 truthfulness, — to such a man what a mockery it is 
 to tell him that the Church of England will give 
 him freedom, what a fatuous futility to invite him 
 to become her minister 1 
 
 Do not misconceive me. I know that many of 
 these Broad Churchmen who accepted the good 
 Dean's counsels have been and are amongst the 
 most tender-hearted, brave, and lovable of men. 
 jFor the Dean himself I conceived an affection 
 warmer, I think, than for any other man I ever 
 
 195
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 met of whom I saw so little. I only met him 
 thrice. But surely this is a sophisticated con- 
 science that permits a man to use in the solemn 
 worship of God words which do not represent his 
 own sincerest intellectual convictions. It seems to 
 me an awful example of the power of custom and 
 usage to cauterise the moral judgment that good 
 men should hold themselves justified in playing 
 fast and loose with terms and phrases in the 
 functions of public prayer and exhortation. Again 
 and again I have heard men praised for their 
 candour and their daring in flinging to the winds 
 in their sermons the doctrines of the creeds they 
 just now stood up and repeated in the solemn 
 public service of religion. Yet surely to a plain 
 man there could be no greater scandal than that 
 one claiming to be a teacher and exemplar of morals 
 and religion should thus utter himself with a two- 
 fold voice. How must such example act and re-act 
 on the consciences and practice of society, of men 
 engaged in law, in politics, in commerce, in the 
 multitudinous affairs of the world ! All mutual 
 trust, all honour, all honesty, all health in the 
 business of mankind hangs on the fidelity of men 
 in their spoken word, on their refusing at any cost 
 to shape their lips to declarations which do not 
 correspond to the actual belief that is in them. 
 And that sturdy Quaker, William Forster, was 
 surely right when he said that no man could 
 estimate the measure in which this practice of so 
 many clergy is answerable for the commercial 
 immorality which every honourable mind deplores. 
 Dean Stanley at all times rejoiced in Compromise. 
 
 196
 
 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 
 
 He held that word to be the name of a great and 
 gracious virtue, implying mutual concession and 
 consideration on the part of men of divergent views. 
 But there is one case at least in which Compromise 
 ceases to be virtuous ; and that is when it makes 
 infraction on the impregnable claims on our 
 allegiance which belong to that to which we give 
 the august name of Principle. 
 
 A mass of bright, loving, generous inconsistency, 
 Stanley gave his life to the increase of Christian 
 kindness. He made his ancient and glorious Abbey 
 the centre of a Christian charity that puts to shame 
 the prevailing temper of ecclesiastics. Even the 
 Unitarian heretic he invited and welcomed, with 
 his fellow Revisers, to the solemn Communion 
 Service of his Church. But all the sweetness and 
 beauty of his fraternal spirit cannot cancel the 
 weakening which he countenanced of the claims 
 of uncompromising veracity. 
 
 I know well the objections there are to leaving it 
 to every pulpiteer to carve and shape the public 
 services of religion as he will. I know how it opens 
 the door to slovenliness, to vulgarity, to offences in 
 many degrees. I know how heavy a responsibility 
 it imposes on those who hold the solemn office of 
 leading the worship of the people. I know how 
 much we may thereby miss of beauty, of refinement, 
 of impressiveness in the assembly for prayer and 
 praise. But 1 believe that the first of all require- 
 ments when souls are invited to open themselves 
 to God is that no man should be required or consent 
 to pronounce words which in his inmost heart he 
 ^does not believe to be true. 
 
 197
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Stanley sought to liberalise the English Church, 
 first, by relaxing the terms of subscription to her 
 formula3 ; secondly, by discouraging what he deemed 
 an excessive scrupulosity in the use of the language 
 of prayer and creed. His zeal for a wide compre- 
 hension within the portals of that historic Church 
 was generous and noble. But we will ask James 
 Martineau, in our final lecture, whether there be not 
 a better way of building a Church wide as the love 
 of Christ, of gathering a community of worshipping 
 souls from which none shall be outcast and in which 
 no scrupulous conscience shall suffer violence. 
 
 198
 
 XIII 
 
 THE PROPHET-PHILOSOPHER 
 JAMES MARTINEAU
 
 XIII 
 
 THE PROPHET-PHILOSOPHER : 
 JAMES MARTINEAU 
 
 THE persecution of the Huguenots in France 
 gave England some of her finest samples of 
 brain and conscience. Near the end of the seven- 
 teenth century Gaston Martineau, surgeon, forsook 
 the land of his birth, and settled first in London 
 and then in Norwich. More than a hundred years 
 later, in the fourth generation from Gaston, was 
 born in that same town James Martineau, in wdiom 
 was developed in its finest essence the Huguenot 
 intelligence and character. 
 
 Of the thirteen '* ]\Iakers of the Nineteenth 
 Century " whom I have striven to set before you 
 in imagination, this James Martineau stands much 
 the nearest to me. My predecessor in this pulpit, 
 for whom indeed this church was built,^ my tutor 
 for the six years of my college life, the master of my 
 thinking throughout the years of my maturer man- 
 
 ' Hope Street Church, Liverpool, to which Martineau and 
 his congregation migrated from Paradise Street Chapel in 
 1849. 
 
 201
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 hood, the supreme object of my reverence and regard 
 among the men whom I have closely known, his 
 figure, his personality, is no easy one for me to draw 
 with due perspective and proportion. 
 
 A youth of seventeen he is apprentice to an 
 engineer at Derby, but travels the sixteen miles to 
 Nottingham to attend the funeral of the husband of 
 his cousin, one Henry Turner, a young minister cut 
 off in the morning of his days through his faithful- 
 ness in visiting cases of infectious fever. And the 
 emotion and the love displayed around the open 
 grave so touch the heart of the engineer apprentice, 
 that henceforth he would himself be a minister ; and 
 he is presently student in the little academy at York 
 where tutors barred out from the Universities of the 
 nation are teaching with an erudition and a wealth 
 of scholarship rarely equalled in those Universities 
 themselves. And of all their pupils young James 
 Martineau is the most diligent and brilliant. Then 
 a brief ministry at Dublin, terminated by his con- 
 scientious scruple against receiving the so-called 
 royal bounty levied by tax on Protestant and 
 Catholic alike while he is teaching doctrine accept- 
 able neither to one or other. Then the invitation 
 to Paradise Street Chapel, Liverpool. The young 
 man of twenty-seven is thus described by Charles 
 Wicksteed,- his life-long friend : the pulpit-staircase 
 " was quietly ascended by a tall young man, thin, 
 but of muscular frame, with dark hair, pale but not 
 delicate complexion, a countenance full in repose 
 of thought, and in animation of intelligence and 
 enthusiasm, features belonging to no regular type or 
 order of beauty, yet leaving the impression of a very 
 
 202
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU 
 
 high kind of beauty, and a voice so sweet and clear 
 and strong without being in the least loud, that it 
 conveyed all the inspiration of music, without any 
 of its art or intention." 
 
 The preaching of this young man in the city, like 
 that of a still younger, John Hamilton Thorn, in the 
 country chapel of Toxteth at the same time, was of 
 an order which Liverpool had not heard before. 
 Absolutely free intellectually, unhampered by any 
 creeds or articles, transparently sincere, profoundly 
 earnest, intensely spiritual, it captured the minds 
 and charmed the hearts of not a few of the best and 
 most cultured men and women in the seaport town 
 just showing the first prophecy of its commercial 
 greatness. In a day when breadth of thought in 
 pulpits seemed almost a contradiction in terms, and 
 no magazines brought daring speculations into the 
 drawing-rooms and libraries of the home, the 
 Sunday utterances of a man like Martineau had a 
 width and depth of influence which was quite 
 unique. Indeed, so alarmed did orthodoxy become 
 at the attention paid to these young Unitarian 
 divines — Mr. Thom himself also now transferred 
 to a city pulpit — that presently thirteen clergymen of 
 the Establishment — the Rev. Fielding Ould at their 
 head — announced that in thirteen successive dis- 
 courses they would "refute" Unitarianism. Mar- 
 tineau, Thom, and Mr. Giles (now minister at 
 Toxteth) took up the challenge. Every Wednesday 
 evening they occupied what was known as "the 
 condemned pew " at Christ Church, and heard their 
 faith denounced as a blasphemous infidelity. Every 
 following Tuesday one or other of them replied in 
 
 203
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 Paradise Street Chapel to the preceding lecture. 
 The orthodox attack was from a position which few 
 educated theologians would defend to-day, a position 
 of absolute acceptance of the infallibility of Scrip- 
 ture, supplemented by something very like assump- 
 tion of the infallibility of Mr. Fielding Ould and his 
 twelve associates. The heretical replies were from 
 the standpoint of a liberal and generous learning, 
 untouched by the spirit of intolerance, rejoicing in 
 every ray of light which God casts upon the world. 
 They were illustrated with an amplitude of scholar- 
 ship amazing when the haste and pressure of their 
 preparation is remembered. And if they won but a 
 few fresh adherents to the ministrations of their 
 authors, they gave to their teaching a status and a 
 consideration in the eyes of their fellow-citizens 
 which such teaching had never enjoyed before. 
 And it was unquestionably James Martineau who 
 stood out as protagonist, foremost champion of the 
 wider gospel. 
 
 Then in the forties he put forth under the title of 
 " Endeavours after the Christian Life," volumes of 
 sermons which sent the currents of his fame down 
 many channels far beyond the reach of his living 
 voice ; and England began to know that she had a 
 new teacher who was to count in the evolution of 
 the nineteenth Christian century. 
 
 As the forties were closing, his people set to work 
 to build him a church on the outskirts of the town, 
 which should be worthy of his rising reputation. 
 This Hope Street Church was the issue of their 
 effort. While its stones were being laid and its 
 spire reared, he took a year of studious retreat in 
 
 204
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU 
 
 Germany, and quite new vistas of thought and 
 knowledge opened out before his ingenuous mind. 
 Now it was that the old mechanical metaphysics 
 and utilitarian ethics began rapidly to fall away from 
 him, and he awoke to a spiritual philosophy having 
 its base in the mind and the conscience of man, and 
 providing a fastness for religion which no scientific 
 discoveries and no revolutions in historical criti- 
 cism could by any possibility ever imperil. At the 
 very moment when the doctrine of evolution was 
 shadowing itself forth in the minds of Darwin and 
 others, when the preparation was being made for 
 those vast revelations of the religious mind of anti- 
 quity outside the bounds of Israel, which Max 
 Miiller was presently to popularise, when the inves- 
 tigations of Baur and Strauss were beginning to be 
 talked of in England, and the startling conclusions 
 of the "Essays and Reviews" and of Bishop Colenso 
 were secretly preparing, at the very moment when a 
 whole array of new learning all along the line was 
 about to make the old defences of religion unten- 
 able by informed and candid minds, Martineau 
 was preparing for his people, for his country, for 
 the world, a new theory and philosophy of religion, 
 which the new scholarship could never imperil, 
 could only, where it came in contact at all, confirm. 
 Only eight years of ministry in Liverpool re- 
 mained. In 1857, in the fulness of his powers, 
 INIartineau removed to London as Professor in 
 Manchester New College, the only institution in 
 England devoted to free teaching and free learning 
 in theology, and imposing no subscription to articles 
 of faith either upon teacher or on student. And for 
 
 205
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 nearly thirty years, with unfaiUng punctuality, he 
 discharged his academical functions, letting no 
 avocation call him off from his duty to the youths — 
 often not more than two or three — who awaited him 
 in the college class-room. But meanwhile, by essay 
 after essay on the loftiest and profoundest themes of 
 human thought, he was compelling the attention 
 and regard of the thinking world. And when, at 
 eighty years of age, he at last began his larger lite- 
 rary life, and in the succeeding half-dozen years put 
 forth his three monumental works, the " Types of 
 Ethical Theory," the " Study of Religion," and the 
 " Seat of Authority in Religion," already the wisest 
 and best throughout England and America were 
 awaiting the full unfolding of his philosophy with 
 an eagerness of anticipation not often paralleled. 
 
 Indeed, if his full recognition as a master-mind, 
 a " Maker of the Nineteenth Century," was slow in 
 coming, when once it came it was swift and com- 
 plete. Five great Universities — first of all bold 
 Harvard, then learned and liberal Leyden, then the 
 more cautious Edinburgh and Dublin, and Oxford 
 most timid of all, bestowed on him doctorships of 
 honour. In the Metaphysical Society he met in 
 friendly debate most of the other master-minds of 
 England both in orthodoxy and in heresy, and was 
 felt by more than one to be greatest of them all. 
 Finally, on the day that he was eighty-three, he 
 received an address of deepest reverence and affec- 
 tion, bearing the signatures, among those of a multi- 
 tude of men of light and leading, of Tennyson and 
 Browning, of Lecky and of Lowell, of Max Muller 
 and of Jowett, of Cheyne and of Sanday, of Phillips 
 
 206
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU 
 
 Brooks and Stopford Brooke, and of the great 
 leaders of Continental scholarship, Renan, Pfleiderer, 
 Lipsiiis, Kuenen, and many more. 
 
 There still remained twelve years of quiet and 
 honoured age — and one or two magazine articles, a 
 book of prayers, and a little volume of sermons 
 were given to the world, the last when the author 
 was ninety-two. On the verge of ninety-five, in the 
 early days of the year 1900, James Martineau passed 
 up into that unseen world which his prophetic 
 inspiration had done something to unveil to such 
 as were of his spirit. 
 
 And w^hat was the teaching of this great mind, 
 master of the thinking of the ages, comrade in soul 
 with such as have pierced deepest into the mysteries 
 of God, on the themes which touch most nearly the 
 permanent interest of mankind ? " Prophet-philo- 
 sopher" I have ventured to entitle him ; and such he 
 truly was : that prophet-vision was his which at all 
 times has revealed to holy men the deep things of 
 the spirit ; but instructed philosopher was he also, 
 adjudicating at the bar of reason on every claim put 
 forth by the moral and spiritual nature of man. 
 
 It is not possible here to offer any detailed account 
 of the convictions or the faith which he attained. 
 We must be content to note the general principles 
 which he reached, and how they affect his attitude 
 towards such great practical questions of eccle- 
 siasticism as so deeply interested John Henry New- 
 man and Arthur Stanley. 
 
 When Martineau made that fruitful visit to the 
 University of Berlin at the close of the first half of 
 the century, he carried with him — already, indeed, 
 
 207
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 somewhat torn and discredited— the philosophy 
 which he had learned of Paley, of Hume, of the 
 Mills. No doctrine, indeed, could enter the alembic 
 of his mind, without being coloured and shaped by 
 his own personality. But as yet he had not put off 
 the thinking of the materialistic and utilitarian 
 schools. Accordingly, in metaphysics, he was 
 accustomed to modes of thought which had re- 
 solved the idea of cause into a mere unvarying 
 sequence of phenomena. '' A " was not the cause 
 of " B " in any other sense than that when '' A " 
 happened, " B " always happened after, or " B " the 
 effect of " A " in any other sense than that when 
 "B" happened, "A" had always happened before. 
 But now the study of Plato and the teaching of the 
 famous Trendelenburg set free his thinking from 
 the artificiality of the schools, and he recognised 
 that there was a deeper meaning in cause than that 
 — that always there was a determining power pass- 
 ing from the causal antecedent to the consequent. 
 Pain always followed - a blow on the head, and 
 Tuesday always followed Monday. But there was 
 some closer causal bond between the blow and the 
 pain than between the second day of the week and 
 the third. And interrogating the working of his 
 own mind rather than the formulas of books, he 
 discovered - that he never spoke of cause without 
 thinking of some living power, and that when he 
 traced back from cause to cause, he could never rest 
 till he came to a living Will determining all the 
 movements of the natural world, and must by the 
 very make of his faculties think " God " behind 
 the movements of the stars upon their courses, and 
 
 208
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU 
 
 every motion down to the opening of the flower on 
 its stem. The universe was charged with this Hving 
 power — not slumbering and waking up, not inter- 
 mittent, not interfering now and again, but per- 
 petual and universal, present and energising in 
 every moment of everlasting time, in every spot of 
 illimitable space. And so God was, for him, not the 
 mechanician watching his worlds go round from 
 the spin he gave them at the start, but the ever 
 present energy in every throb of matter, in every 
 quiver of ether through the heavens. 
 
 That was the first great revolution. All cause in 
 its ultimate analysis the action of living will ; and 
 the supreme and ultimate cause of all, the living will 
 of God. The structure of his mind was such that 
 when he faithfully obeyed it, then he could think no 
 other. 
 
 And Martineau had brought with him to Germany 
 the characteristically English doctrine that utility 
 was the criterion of right, that virtue meant the 
 enlightened pursuit of pleasure, the enlightened 
 avoidance of pain. There was indeed a certain 
 haze as to whether the pleasure to be sought, the 
 pain to be shunned was ultimately just the man's 
 own pleasure or pain, or that of the human race at 
 large. Paley, the theologian, had constantly taught 
 the former. Virtue was to seek heaven and to 
 escape hell. Reward and punishment were the only 
 incentives and preventives. The younger Mill, with 
 a generous inconsistency, had sought by some loop- 
 hole to let in the weal or woe of our brother men 
 as determining motives. But that the calculable 
 pleasure or pain resulting determined the rightness 
 
 209 p
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 or viciousness of conduct, that goodness, that 
 hoHness had no other criterion, this was the basal 
 doctrine ; and Martineau brought it with him to 
 BerUn. But when — under the tutorship of Tren- 
 delenburg — he began to steep his mind in the 
 atmosphere of Plato, by degrees he found that 
 doctrine fading and dissolving. And there dawned 
 upon him the sublime conception of an absolute 
 righteousness, an absolute holiness which was its 
 own guarantee and sanction, stood before the soul 
 in its own primeval right, apart from all support 
 from considerations of utility or measurements of 
 pleasure or pain. He found that the actual call of 
 duty in the secret places of his own soul was not a 
 reasoned inference from probable results, but a 
 voice sounding in him from the depths and altitudes 
 of the eternal, a command bearing in its own awful 
 tones the witness of its authority ; and he knew 
 now in the silence that this was God speaking to 
 him out of the mystery of his infinite being ; and 
 he apprehended God anew as the living Righteous- 
 ness, the Author and Fountain of duty, the all- 
 authoritative Holiness, whom to obey was life, whom 
 to defy was death. 
 
 And so by a second avenue of his spiritual 
 nature God was revealed to him. The infinite 
 Goodness coalesced with the infinite Power ; the 
 eternal Authority with the eternal Will ; and the 
 God of Nature and the God of Conscience en- 
 compassed and commanded him with a flashing 
 brilliance of reality which the halting philosophy of 
 his youth had veiled. 
 
 With that twofold message — that twofold argu- 
 
 2IO
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU 
 
 ment, that twofold revelation — the preacher returned 
 to his congregation, the philosopher to his native 
 land. And from this very spot where with falter- 
 ing lips I stand to-day, facing down this pillared 
 sanctuary, the voice of the prophet-philosopher a 
 little more than fifty years ago first ejiunciated that 
 message which was to swell into a great volume, 
 and ere he died be recognised and hailed as the 
 mightiest defence of spiritual religion in the strifes 
 and battles of his time. 
 
 Religion, then, was a far deeper thing than the 
 common teachers and preachers had supposed. It 
 was the realisation by man of the relation in which 
 he stood to a God who was immanent, perpetual, 
 permeating, penetrating, the causal Agent of all the 
 phenomena of the world, the Commandant speaking 
 in the breast of every man who was called to the 
 combat between good and evil. 
 
 That relation was a fundamental and universal 
 fact. Nothing could ever alter it. It was there — 
 there yesterday, to-day, and for ever. All that could 
 vary was man's realisation of the fact, his measure 
 of appreciation of this supreme relation. Just in 
 the measure in which men thought deeply and 
 obeyed loyally, would the vividness and certainty of 
 their appreciation grow. And so Bibles, Churches, 
 declarations of Councils, authority of Creeds, could 
 never in the nature of things be more than 
 secondary. The true veritable "orthodoxy" — the 
 "straight thinking and judging" — was a matter 
 between the man and his Maker. Bibles might 
 illuminate him. Churches might train him. But 
 the fact lay between him and God ; and so any who 
 
 2] 1
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 claimed authority over his mind and conscience, 
 withdrawing him from immediate allegiance to 
 God, was an usurper of the right divine, were he 
 Presbyter or Pope. 
 
 There was one way and one way only by which 
 the individual soul could draw into the fullest 
 recognition of which it was capable of the fact of 
 its relation with God, and that was by freest inter- 
 course with God in the secret audience-chamber of 
 the understanding and the conscience. Freedom 
 was the very condition of progress in the truth. 
 There was an authority waiting for a man in the 
 arcana of his being that lay behind all Synods, all 
 Councils, all Westminster Assemblies ; and what 
 the preacher had to do was to cut away all that 
 impeded the man's entrance into the chamber of 
 communion, to thrust him within and bid him close 
 the door. 
 
 Hence the ecclesiasticism of Martineau could not 
 possibly be the ecclesiasticism of Newman. New- 
 man saw the one ark of truth in a Church pre- 
 serving unaugmented and undiminished, though 
 developed in expression, the legacy of Apostolic 
 truth. Martineau saw the one ark of truth in the 
 mind and heart of a man himself ; its one revela- 
 tion in the speaking voice and unveiled face of God. 
 And so the one toiled to bind men fast in the 
 leashes of the Church ; the other sought to cut 
 them loose and leave them free to listen for the 
 heavenly speech, to watch for the light that lighteth 
 ev^ery man born into the world. 
 
 But neither could Martineau's ecclesiasticism be 
 that of Stanley. For Stanley sought to draw men 
 
 212
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU 
 
 together in one ecclesiastical organisation wherein 
 the utterance of collect or of creed should be but 
 the rehearsal of historic layers of faith held by 
 successive generations of the dead. But Martineau 
 would bid the living man go pray to the living God ; 
 and in that act there could be no more dire dis- 
 loyalty than to shape the lips to doctrines which 
 found no response from the deep experiences of the 
 soul. A naked sincerity was the very condition of 
 worship — whether in the silent secrecy of the closet 
 or in the great assembly of the church. 
 
 But Martineau had an ecclesiastical ideal of his 
 own for which he often pleaded and to which he 
 lived faithful throughout long and laborious days. 
 He would have men come together for prayer and 
 praise ; he would have them form societies for 
 worship and for service. Only the bond was not to 
 be community of creed, adhesion to any articles, 
 acceptance of any dogma, still less the repetition of 
 dogmas unbelieved. It was to be a common love, 
 a common aspiration, a common sentiment, a 
 common yearning for union with God, a common 
 spirit of brotherhood among men. He saw no 
 reason why men of widely varying theology — of 
 widely varying interpretation, that is, of the pheno- 
 mena of the religious consciousness — should not 
 kneel side by side to seek a common blessing, and 
 together voice their praises to the Supreme. He 
 did not see why the Churches themselves should not 
 be left free, with the advance of light and learning, 
 to pass on into new and loftier phases of thought 
 and hope. And so, though himself a convinced 
 and persuasive Unitarian, never cither ashamed or 
 
 213
 
 MAKERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 afraid so to declare himself, he would be no party 
 to the construction of a Church tied up to Unita- 
 rianism or any other creed. He would open the 
 doors to all. Above all he would leave in God's 
 hands the evolution of faith in generations to come. 
 And so when this church of ours was built, he was 
 the first to insist on a clause in its trust forbidding 
 its members ever to require that any particular 
 doctrine should or should not be taught. For he 
 wished ministers and people alike to be for ever 
 free to follow the free motions of the Spirit, and to 
 believe and to say the thing that should seem to 
 them to be the very truth of God. 
 
 Free was he, and would have all men so, in the 
 solemn matters that lie between the soul and the 
 Father of Spirits ; but he looked back across the 
 ages and recognised in one who taught in Galilee nigh 
 two thousand years ago, the fairest Soul, the faith- 
 fulest Child of God, who had ever looked forth from 
 human eyes and spoken with human lips. His love 
 of Jesus, his reverence, his loyalty, his allegiance, 
 knew no bounds ; and was surely the more gracious 
 that it was not strained, but was the free offering of 
 a judgment independent and an affection caught 
 and held by him to whom it was addressed. He 
 saw how all that is best and truest in the religion of 
 the Western peoples is drawn from the ministry of 
 Christ, and how each of sixty generations has been 
 historically affiliated to him. He felt in his love for 
 him no bonds ; in his gratitude only the sacred 
 stimulus to try to be like him and to reflect the 
 Heavenly Father's love in his own affections. And 
 while Plato and many another commanded the 
 
 214
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU 
 
 homage of his intellect, he had language of humblest 
 discipleship to address to Jesus which was for no 
 other under the blue skies in all the records of our 
 race. 
 
 UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRERHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON,
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. ONE SHILLING. 
 
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