YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
DEPOSITED BY THE
LINONIA AND BROTHERS LIBRARY

EETEOSPECTS

EETEOSPECTS

BY
WILLIAM^ KNIGHT
EMEBITUS PROFESSOR OP PHILOSOPHY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OP ST. ANDREWS

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCEIBNER'S SONS
1904

PBEEACE

In these Betrospects no attempt is made to trace the
full career, or describe the varied work, of those whose
names occur in them. Neither finished portraiture, nor
detailed biography, is aimed at. Only a few prceterita,
regarding some notable English men and women of last
century — which would otherwise have been unrecorded —
are brought together, and set down in a sort of miscellany.
It has been prepared for the sake of those who now care
for, and others who may yet be interested in, the memory
and the words of those included in it. The majority are
well-known persons; and 'Memoirs,' ' Lives,' ' Journals,'
' Letters,' or slighter ' Sketches ' of several of them — the
work of competent and accredited authors — now exist.
The ground thus occupied is not retra versed by me ; and
the chief interest of the book will be found in Letters
hitherto unpublished and unknown, which cast light on
the character of their writers, in Anecdotes and Re
miniscences, as well as fragments of unrecorded Conver
sations, along with the impressions made on those who
heard and have preserved them.
Those who are described, whose dicta are given, or
whose letters and conversations are reported, were all

vi RETROSPECTS
personal acquaintances. In one or two cases our meet
ings were only occasional; but with the majority my
intercourse was frequent, sometimes continuous, and our
correspondence extended over many consecutive years.
I now regret that I did not, except in rare cases,
write down at the time of hearing them the literary and
social judgments, the criticism of men and things, and
the casual sayings of these men (all now deceased), as I
did in the Colloquia Peripatetica of John Duncan, and
in the case of one or two whose names occur in Some
Nineteenth Century Scotsmen. Unfortunately I trusted
to what might enter, and be retained in, the storehouses
of memory ; but after the lapse of years many things
preserved in these crypts of necessity become dim.
Others, however — and these the most important ones —
now stand out all the clearer on the horizon, and come
back with photographic distinctness to the inward eye ;
so that I need not say, in the words of a poet, some of
whose unpublished letters will be found in these pages —
I seem left alive
Like a sea-jelly weak on Patmos strand,
To tell dry sea-beach gazers how it fared
When there was mid-sea, and the mighty things.
It has been described as the best of all kinds of
education for men or women to live under the influence
of characters that are strong, original, exalted, and
benign ; that are many-sided, fertile-minded, and ideal.
There is truth in the remark. When so large a part of
every life has to be spent in a prosaic world of details,
where mere routine becomes unfruitful if not fettering,

PREFACE vii
and begets commonplace if it is not barren of result,
the privilege of occasional converse with those who live
in the realm of ideality, whence they step out to greet
and to cheer the toilers in the actual, is great. To meet
these higher men and higher women, to hear them speak,
and to see how an ideal character can wreath itself with,
and unveil itself through, the hindrances of the actual is
perhaps the surest way of getting to know our Human
Nature at its best. The next, and probably an easier,
way is to learn of their conversation, their views of
things, their ideas of ' the true, the beautiful, and the
good ' through books ; if those books are a veracious
record by those who wrote of what they know, and of
experiences in which they have themselves taken part.
It is for this, among other reasons, that the following
pages have been written.
They may contain some materials for future criticism,
but I nowhere assume the role of critic, which is so
easy to take up, and so unproductive when laid down.
Posterity is not much the wiser if it merely gets to
know the estimates of distmguished people, formed by
those who had an opportunity of meeting them. Hence
it is that ' critical biographies ' are as a rule so disap
pointing and useless, sometimes even pernicious. What
is posterity the better for knowing the verdict of A, B,
and C upon ' the great of old,' whose spirits still ' rule
us from their urns ' ; more especially when there is much
more of the A, B, and C, the new critics, than of the
departed sage or seer in the books which the former
write ? What it surely needs much more is to have an

viii RETROSPECTS
adequate and trustworthy re-presentation of the past,
and new pictures of the men and women — these ' great
of old ' — as in a mirror, so that the living may be able
to realise the dead as they lived and moved and had
their being in the flesh.
To those who wish to have the past revivified for
them, and to be revivified by it, the perusal or the study
of such an admirable work as our Dictionary of National
Biography will not wholly suffice. That work has
obtained a unique and assured place in the literature
of England, and it must be consulted by everyone who
wishes accurately to know the great landmarks of
History in the light of Biography. But those now
referred to will receive, perhaps, quite as powerful an
influence from a series of visits to our great National
Portrait Galleries. I do not refer to the excellent one
at Trafalgar Square, but to those numerous literary
Galleries which a competent reader may enter at any
time, and traverse at will. Not that to the Dictionary
on the one hand, or the Portrait Gallery on the other, an
inferior position can be assigned ; but they must be sup
plemented. I remember a friend once asking me to
meet him next day at the Dictionary of National Bio
graphy ! He meant the National Portrait Gallery ; but
I thought his mistake a happy one, and the parallel
between the two so just and apposite that I suggested,
should he ever dine with his fellow-contributors to our
noble Dictionary, he should see that the chief toast of
the evening was proposed as that of ' Our National
Portrait Gallery ' !

PREFACE ix
But however accurate relevant and full, yet severely
concise, the Dictionary articles are to the scholar, to
the majority of readers they are — and are only meant
to be — a dry epitome of facts. While more useful to
posterity, and more likely to live, than the ordinary
' Memoir ' or ' Autobiography ' — unless the latter be a work
of genius — they have not the same interest to contem
poraries ; and to them Reminiscences that are accurate
as well as many-sided, even if a few things intrinsically
trivial be taken up along with the more important ones,
will be welcomed at least for a time. We all wish to
know a good deal about our recent contemporaries which
will not interest a later generation, and which it may
gladly forget. Such records must of necessity contain
some local colourings ; but time is needed for the
removal of these, and the substitution of a clearer
light. As I have said, it is my aim not to repeat what has
been already written, or to walk over well-trodden
ground. Even in the case of such a friend as James
Martineau — several of whose letters to me have been
published in his Life and Letters and in Inter Amicos 1
— I have included only those as yet unpublished, except
in two instances, where they appear with addenda pre
viously omitted. In the case of Browning's letters,
which were sent to Mrs. Sutherland Orr when she was
writing the poet's life, but few of which she used, they
are now printed nearly in extenso.
1 The originals of the 109 letters I received from him are now at
Manchester College, Oxford.

x RETROSPECTS
There is a well-known temptation to which every
recorder of conversation is exposed, which the modern
' interviewer ' has intensified, and to which many of the
interviewed succumb. It is to add to, or embellish, the
reports that are given ; so that the first question to which
almost every reader of ' Reminiscences ' desires an
answer is the obvious one — ' Are these things true ?
Are the reports authentic ? Is the chronicle veracious
throughout, or at least as accurate as that through
which Boswell has transmitted to us the dicta of Dr.
Johnson ? ' In the case of the greatest recorder of Dia
logue, no one can tell how much is a literal transcript,
and how much is due to the idealisation of the writer ;
and in a case so supreme, when we are in the company
of Socrates and Plato, we really do not need to know.1
But, with reference to the conversations of lesser men
recorded by modern writers, the case is very different,
and a general principle may easily be reached.
There is no doubt that,
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
We summon up remembrance of things past,
imagination should be almost dormant, while memory
should be ' distinct and clear.' In such circumstances
alone can the office of recorder be permissible, and the
result trustworthy. But many of our contemporary
books and magazines contain accounts of lengthy inter
views with distinguished people, in which it is obvious
even to the un-initiate that the recorder has coloured
1 We are profoundly grateful that there were no stenographers at
Athens, and no typewriters.

PREFACE xi
his report, idealised his subject, invented details, and
allowed imagination to work alongside of memory in
producing the result he gives us. To this, perhaps
as much as to anything else, is due the truth of the
maxim that ' there are more false facts than false
theories abroad in the world.'
So far as I am concerned, however, the reports given
in these pages, and to be continued in subsequent ones,
are not only not idealised, but are perhaps ultra-
realistic. I lack the power of recasting or reconstructing
a conversation out of a minimum of actual fact. In no
instance is an attempt made to reproduce a lengthened
conversation with those whose letters are printed. Many
detached remarks are given, but no continuous discourse
or discussion. In the case of Mr. Ruskin, however — a
retrospect of whom will appear in my Second Series —
I had the help of another, who accompanied me in one
of my visits to Brantwood, and who haB reproduced a
longish conversation almost in its entirety.
I once listened to the following desultory conver
sation in a railway carriage, where so many curious
confidences are at times revealed by loquacious people.
After a long discussion on literary matters and biogra
phical anecdotes, one traveller said, ' But take Mr.  .
He didn't record all these sayings about the poet  ;
he invented them, and must have done so.' ' I beg
your pardon,' was the rejoinder, ' Mr.  is incapable
of invention. He is as true a recorder of actual facts
as anyone who lives.' ' Well, well,' was the reply, ' I
don't believe in him a bit, as a recorder ; but I accept

xii RETROSPECTS
his picturesque upbuildings. He had to make his book
a readable one, and his exaggerations are at any rate
much better than those of the autobiographic egotist,
who gives to the world a chronicle of his own dyspepsia.'
'But don't you prefer the veracious record of a great
man's thoughts given us by his friends rather than by
himself ? ' ' Yes,' was the rejoinder ; ' but I wish still
more to read his own letters, or the memoranda he has
left us.'
It is now many years since these Betrospects were
begun, and when an early chapter was printed — under
the present title, which was then copyrighted — I hoped
to be able to finish them soon. Many circumstances
have prevented the completion of the First Series till
now. I fear I cannot apply to myself the consolation
which Browning gave to all the world in his sentence,
' Works done least rapidly, Art more cherishes ' ; but at
any rate the delay has enabled me to include in this
volume — and will further enable me to include in its
sequel — letters and reminiscences of some writers, both
English and American, which would otherwise have
been left out.
It will be seen that the sketches differ in one im
portant respect. In the case of Carlyle, anecdote and
reminiscence preponderate ; in the case of Browning,
Martineau, and Stanley, these are given along with
the letters which they wrote ; while in others, such as
those of Shorthouse, Davies, Smetham, and Elwin, their
letters are the chief interest throughout.
What I have written is not addressed to those ' who

PREFACE xiii
run to read,' and much of it may be 'caviare to the
general.' I recall, however, a remark written somewhere
by Carlyle, and which I heard him repeat with variations
one evening at Cheyne Row in his sonorous musical
monotone : ' Is a thing nothing because the Morning
Papers have not chronicled it ? And can a nothing be
made a something by ever-so-much babblement of it
there ? '
Reminiscences of and letters from Ruskin, Cardinal
Newman, George Frederick Watts, James Russell Lowell,
Lords Selborne and Coleridge, Herbert Spencer, Lecky,
Henry Sidgwick, Roden Noel, Dora Greenwell, Aubrey
de Vere, the late Master of Balliol, Sir John Seeley,
Leslie Stephen, William Morris, Dante Rossetti, Mrs.
Oliphant, and many others will be found in my Second
Series. What is writ is writ ; would it were worthier.
It may be of use to a few, but only for a time. There
is no such thing as finality in the estimates of the dead,
and fresh material is sure to be ingathered in reference
to those whose words and deeds are recorded here. It
would be well to have it collected soon, as it is only for
a brief period that our existing records will be either
available or needful.
We pass ; the path that each man trod
Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds ;
What fame is left for human deeds
In endless age ? It rests with God.
W. K.
September 1904.

CONTENTS

PAGE
THOMAS CARLYLE  1
FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE  29
ALFRED TENNYSON  46
ROBERT BROWNING  69
JAMES MARTINEAU  102
ARTHUR STANLEY  144
MATTHEW ARNOLD .  193
W. E. GLADSTONE  205
WILLIAM DAVIES  212
JAMES SMETHAM  245
WHITWELL ELWIN  268
ANNA SWANWICK  276
J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE  294

RETROSPECTS

THOMAS GABLYLE
It is more than forty years since I first met Carlyle,
the sage of Chelsea. It was at that delightful home
of happy memories — Linlathen House in Forfarshire — •
where Thomas Erskine used to gather round him, and
ask his friends to meet, such men as Carlyle, Maurice,
Kingsley, Arthur Stanley, McLeod Campbell, Bishop
Ewing, and other kindred spirits. We sat in the
house, or walked in the grounds and by the sea-coast
at Monifieth, while our genial Socrates talked in his
marvellous way of many persons and things ; his
conversation being often a continued series of meteoric
flashes, splendours of the imagination blending with
rapier thrusts of logic, incisive criticism of contem
porary men, and discursive commentary on all things
human and divine.
One warm autumn afternoon we were sitting under
the shade of a noble tree, when a man whom I knew
slightly came up on his way to the house, and asked
to be presented to ' his oracle,' as he put it. So soon as
the formal introduction was over, Carlyle said to him,
I. B

2 RETROSPECTS
' Well, Sir ! and where in the universe are you working ? '
The grip of the question so astonished the stranger that
he could give no coherent answer, and soon departed.
There was a different tone in Carlyle's talk when
he was a guest at Linlathen from what it was in his
own London home. Not that there was the smallest
inconsistency between them ; but, in his friend's house
in the north, with its atmosphere of radiant gracious-
ness, he seemed more full of reverence. He was im
pressed, to a larger extent perhaps than others were,
by the genial dignity of our host and the elevation
of his character, which so guided conversation that it
was almost invariably directed into channels where the
current flowed clear, and strong, and bright. There were
few wayward digressions in the talk of the breakfast or
dinner table at Linlathen. It was not that any subject
was taboo, and the variety of topics introduced was
remarkable ; but the trivial and the gossipy had not
time to live, and what was ' of the earth, earthy, ' was
extinguished in the most natural manner. The social
atmosphere of that household made weak natures strong,
and noble ones nobler for the time being. And the
effect of Erskine's presence on Carlyle was that the con
versation of the latter, while he was a guest, became
more many-sided, joyous, and iridescent.
For some years after first meeting him in Forfarshire
I had the pleasure of spending occasional hours at
Carlyle's house in Cheyne Row ; and it is of that London
home of his that the majority of those who knew him
have the most abiding memories. When the inspired

THOMAS CARLYLE 3
mood was his, he used to discourse at large, his face —
with the small red apple in the cheek, which remained rosy
till his latest year — becoming more eloquently expressive
as the monologue went on ; and his words sometimes as
musical ' as the voice of many waters.' I have heard him
pour forth a continuous stream of impassioned declama
tion for more than an hour at a time ; and so keen were
his characterisations, so felicitous his arrow-shots of
criticism, so rich his satire, so intense his patriotic
sympathy with all that belonged to national life and cha
racter, that no listener could wish the wonderful utterance
to cease. The only desire possible was that Carlyle
should have had some one associated with him, resembling
Boswell in his relation to Johnson. I once tried to write
out a conversation of his at some length, but in vain. It
was such a torrent of felicitous criticism — with fireworks
of the fancy and imagination combined — that no one
but a shorthand reporter could have taken it down ;
and if anyone had ventured to do so in his presence,
the conversation would have either ceased or changed.
Dean Stanley, however, once read to me at Westminster
his memoranda of a long conversation he had with
Carlyle, extending to more than forty pages of a note
book, which reproduced the Socratic talker in so realistic
a fashion that it is a great loss to posterity that the MS.
has disappeared. I asked three men who perhaps knew
the Dean best, and who were successively asked to write
his life — Sir George Grove, Theodore Walrond, and Dean
Bradley— if they had ever seen it. They had not, and no
trace of it now survives.

4 RETROSPECTS
I have only one thing to record of Mrs. Carlyle. I
had been spending the afternoon with her husband in the
upper room — half drawing-room, half library — and we
came down to the dining-room to smoke. Carlyle used
then to keep a collection of long churchwarden pipes at
the corner of this room by the fire ; and when a visitor
who smoked came in, he would hand him one with the
remark ' See if it has got breath, Sir ' (meaning, was the
pipe-stem clear to draw the smoke from the bowl).
We were sitting in the 'golden silence' he loved so
much, and yet ignored so often, when Mrs. Carlyle
entered. I was struck by her gracious air. That after
noon it was most gracious. She was preparing tea,
when her husband made a disparaging remark on one
of our modern writers ; and she said, with the utmost
naivete, 'Oh, Tom, you're so eccentric' 'Yes'
exclaimed — I may say growled — her husband ; ' Yes,
but can you find my centre ? '
Carlyle was often unjust to his contemporaries,
especially to Darwin, and to the work and aim of those
who led the band in the great scientific renaissance of
the nineteenth century. He was once speaking about
Darwin, in the broad Scottish dialect into which he often
relapsed when conversing with a Scotsman. He said :
' I think that they scienteefic men must expect God
Almighty to come to them some fine mornin, and gie
them a patent to make a warld ; they seem sae curious
to know how this one was made.' I humbly ventured
to say that I thought him unjust to Darwin, and was
trying to explain what I considered the chief point in

THOMAS CARLYLE 5
Darwin's magnificent scientific theory. He at once inter
posed : ' Maister Darwin is no better than John Mull '
[Mill] ' or Maister Herbert Spencer : they're a' magneefi-
cent asses ! ' We had been talking of Mill and Herbert
Spencer beforehand. It was reported to him that, when
Mill was asked what he thought of a certain political
problem, he replied, 'Well, this is my opinion [giving
it in a sentence] ; but, you see, I must consult my con
stituents.' Carlyle said, ' Did John Mull say that ? a
wake cratur, John Mull ; a varra wake cratur ! '
He asked me much about what was going on in
the North, about Scottish life and character ; and was
curious to know whether the religious customs of his
youth continued among the peasantry. ' Do the Scotch
folk keep up the guid auld practice of family-worship ? '
I said I thought it less common than it used to be.
He replied, ' So much the worse for Scotland. I re
member, in my young days, when you could hear in
every cottage in Ecclefechan — aye and even in the
neighbourhood of Edinburgh— in the early morning or
late evening some psalm-singing, and the reading of the
Book.' He then lapsed into a long and somewhat
fantastic praise of Calvinism ; and when I suggested
that there might be another side to the question, he said
sternly — ' There is no other side. It's Calvinism that
makes heroes. It made Oliver, and there never was
a greater hero than Oliver.' It was impossible for a
youth to discuss the merits of Cromwell with his arch-
apologist !
He used to be terribly plagued by lion-hunters,

6 RETROSPECTS
autograph-collectors, and interviewers. I remember his
once telling me that an American had called, and asked
to see him. He was informed by a servant that Mr.
Carlyle was dining. ' Oh but I must see him,' was the
reply ; ' I have come all the way from New York to do so.'
He was asked to call at another time ; but he would
neither go away, nor promise to return. So Carlyle rose
from dinner, went to the door, and said to the stranger,
' Well, sir, and what can I do for you ? ' The reply was,
' Mr. Carlyle, I have just come from New York, and I
want to send to the  newspaper your opinions of our
civil war, and of a book upon it which has just appeared
across the water.' Carlyle said to me, ' I'm not accus
tomed to do rude things, and I try to " suffer fools gladly,"
but I just slammed the door in that fellow's face.'
There are delightful stories of his visits to Fifeshire
— when he came as the honoured guest of his old friend,
Provost Swan of Kirkcaldy — which I tried (many years
ago) to induce Mr. Froude to incorporate in his ' Re
miniscences.' I was indebted to Mr. Swan for them.
One was the story of his conducting family worship one
night, by his own request, in the Provost's house, and
reading aloud one half of the Book of Job, till all the
domestic servants had fallen asleep ; and apologising
for it afterwards, ' because I had not read that Eliphaz
the Temanite for a long time, and he was varra in
teresting.' Another was his visit to the room — then a
factory-store — in which, as a young man, he had taught
mathematics and Latin at Kirkcaldy ; when he looked
round, and said, ' Aye, there's where  sat, and

THOMAS CARLYLE 7
there's where Miss  sat, and this is the room in
which I tried to teach those boys and girls Latin and
Mathematics. Dear me, what a bad teacher I must
have been ! How strange it all is to me now ! ' He was
taken to see a new Board School in the Lang Toon.
The teacher, apprised beforehand of the visit, had
arranged that the pupils would sing some hymns in
honour of it. Carlyle listened, and then said, ' But
can't ye sing some of Robbie Burns's sangs ? ' The
teacher had to tell him that he feared they could not.
Then, lifting up his hands, he said, ' Oh ! Scotland,
Scotland ! and has it come to this, that yer bairns
canna sing Robbie Burns's sangs ! '
There had been an exposure in the newspapers of some
great scandal in the matter of Government contracts ;
bad work, entailing disaster, and shoddy supplies, lead
ing to loss of life. I think it was certain army-contracts
for the supply of shoes, sent out to our soldiers in the
Crimea ; although it happened half a dozen years before
I heard his version of it. Carlyle told the story, and
said, ' I think we need some Hebrew prophet to come
amongst us, to rend his clothes, and put on sackcloth,
and scatter ashes, and go up and down in this great
Babylon of ours, and cry aloud, " Oh ye manufacturers
of shoddy, either some of you must die for this, or I
must die for you." '
Carlyle once gave to Mr. Blunt, the late rector of
Chelsea, some recollections of his childhood, which that
kind rector handed on to me. Speaking of the pious
care of his mother, and the lessons she had taught him,

8 RETROSPECTS
he said that he was once left alone on a cold snowy day
to take care of the cottage, while his parents had gone
to the nearest market town to buy provisions. A miser
able half-starved beggar came to the door, and his heart
was at once touched by the sight of such abject misery.
'I had saved up,' said Carlyle, 'in a small earthen
thrift-pot all the pennies that had been given to me,
and kept it safely on the high shelf over the fireplace :
and I well remember climbing up, and getting it down,
and breaking it open that I might give all its contents
to the poor wretch.' He added, ' I never knew before
what the joy of heaven must be.' Thus early at any
rate did the boy learn that it was ' more blessed to give
than to receive.'
A somewhat curious reminiscence is of Carlyle's one
interview with her late gracious Majesty Queen Victoria.
It was one of Dean Stanley's delightful audacities that
he effected an interview between Carlyle and the Queen.
On that occasion he collected several living specimens
of genius, all of whom he thought should be introduced
to her Majesty. The meeting was at the Deanery of
Westminster. Soon afterwards, as Carlyle was plodding
his solitary way towards Cheyne Row, Mr. Blunt made
up to him, and said, ' What did you think of the Queen,
Mr. Carlyle?' 'Well,' he replied, 'no one could see
her without perceiving that she was the greatest Lady
in the land. She came into the room with such a grace
as no other lady ever had.' ' And how did you get on
with her ? ' ' Ah ! well, I don't know. I said to her
that I was an old man, and would she permit me to sit

THOMAS CARLYLE 9
down ? I think she didn't quite like it ; but I could
not stand up in that room, like a pump-handle, just to
be pumped out.' ' But what did she say to you ? '
' Well, she praised my country and its people very
much. I felt sure she would do that, and I said, " Well,
they are just like other folks, neither better nor worse
than the rest of your Majesty's subjects." ' ' Do you
think she had read any of your books, Mr. Carlyle ? '
' No, I don't suppose she had read much of anyone's
books. I don't think she was a great reader. She had
many more important things to do than reading any
one's books.' From this account of the conversation by
Carlyle himself, Mr. Blunt gathered that it had been a
short one ; and he heard afterwards that the good Dean
— who had been watching the interview — saw that things
were not progressing very easily, and so he brought up
some other of his live specimens of genius, and released
Carlyle from what was evidently a somewhat strained
position. Although little progress had been made,
the old man was genuinely and deeply impressed by the
majestic grace of the Queen, unequalled by that of any
other lady he had seen, and he was a good judge of
character. Some time afterwards, Mr. Blunt asked Dean
Stanley how things had gone on at the interview. He
only laughed and shook his head ; as though the remem
brance was not quite satisfactory. I may add that
Carlyle never did justice to Stanley, or to his party in
the Church of England. He once said in sardonic
fashion, ' Eh, the Dean ! he's a man who just gets drunk
on toast and water ! '

10 RETROSPECTS
Talking of Gladstone and Disraeli (Lord Beacons-
field) both of whom he rather disliked — Gladstone for
his verbosity, and Disraeli for the tinsel which was
round about him— he said, 'I don't know that Dizzy
has got a conscience. Gladdy has a conscience, but he
just turns it any way he has a stomach to, and im
mediately thinks it a call from God ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! '
Of the Duke of Wellington he said : ' I had never
heard the Duke speak, and I thought I would like to
hear him : there's a sort of physiognomy in a man's
voice, you know. I got an order for the House of Lords,
and I went in. Brougham spoke for a long time, but he
was just like a hurdy-gurdy wound up. On he went,
but never a bit did I know what he was speaking about.
Then some others got up, and talked away, without
throwing any light on the subject. Presently the Duke
got up. He spoke in short disjointed sentences, and
only for about ten minutes ; but he made the whole
thing as clear as daylight. It was just like a man
scratching a thing out on the wall— so clear it was.'
I have already quoted what he said to me about
John Stuart Mill. The following was said to a Scots
friend : ' John Mull wrote a book on Leeberty. What
is there to say about it ? I can think what I like, and
say what I like, and do what I like : and no one can
prevent me. What more leeberty do I need, or want ?
Whoo-oo ! '
Of De Quincey he said, ' The first time I met De
Quincey I thought he was the most beautiful talker I had
ever listened to. When he went away, I said to myself

THOMAS CARLYLE 11
" I would just like to have that man in a box, and bring
him out whenever I wanted. Ha ! ha ! ha ! " '
In the following story the humour did not compen
sate for the extraordinary anti-scientific bias. Dining
at Lord Ashburton's, soon after Darwin's doctrine of
pangenesis was published, the conversation turned to
this subject. After talk had gone on for some time,
Carlyle — who had up to then kept silence — broke in
thus : ' Darwin says, God made man a little higher than
the tadpoles. I prefer David's version of it, that He
made him a little lower than the angels.'
From 1860 onwards his appearance in the streets of
London was that of a countryman who had entirely
disregarded appearances, and only consulted comfort.
He was constantly seen walking along the Chelsea
streets, or journeying in an omnibus, but he very seldom
took notice of persons or things. The following will
recall an earlier story : ' Excuse me, Sir,' said an
American — who had been lingering for some time in the
vicinity of Cheyne Row, in order if possible to see
Carlyle come out of his house — ' excuse me looking at
you, Sir, for I have travelled four thousand miles to do
so.' ' Look on, man,' said Carlyle. ' It will do me no
harm, and you no good.' And so saying, he went slowly
on his solitary walk.
On receiving a book recording the talk of an old
teacher of his correspondent he said : ' I see here a
valiant and valorous man, pursuing his way in the mirk,
again with his foot on the rock, or thinking that it is
there ; his eye mostly turned to the light. It's clear

12 RETROSPECTS
that he can't put up with shams, or makeshifts, in the
matter of belief ; and that's a great thing when you are
on the roadway, even if there are no guide-posts.' Of
another volume he sent to me this verdict in 1870:
' I find in this little book many traces of serious and
vigorous original thought, the like of which is always
valuable and interesting to serious persons, in whatso
ever dialect it runs.'
On one occasion a visitor had been praising Newman's
Apologia for its acumen, its subtlety and remorseless
logic. ' Kingsley,' said Carlyle, ' had the best of the
argument ' ; and he added, ' John Henry Newman
is a very clever man, but he has got Borne palpable
mendacities in his intellect, and he seems to me to say,
"With these I will face the Eternal." ; He was alto
gether unjust to Newman.
His conversation was often in short swallow-flights,
and was strangely digressive ; all the more because of
that it would come round and round again, without
being repetition, to what was fundamental in human
nature. He had a vast fund of occasionally misdirected
sympathy, and an equally vast one of antipathy ; but
his antipathetic tendency was towards the thousands
whom he described as ' mostly fools,' and the shafts of
his satire were turned against the evils and the tumults
of our time. The wrongs under which humanity suffers
affected him acutely, and led to a savage denunciation of
all oppressors. But the storm of his wrath did not fall
on one class only. Wherever tyranny or iniquity met
his eye, the old Hebraic wrath against evil seemed to

THOMAS CARLYLE 13
burst forth from him. It was sava indignatio, im
petuous, absorbing, consuming. Underneath even his
calmest moods there was always the possibility of a
volcanic outburst against unveracity of any kind, while
he had the finest eye of appreciation for merit every
where. One always felt that the lightning of his wrath,
and the loud thunder of his invective, proceeded from
a really gentle and tender spirit. But his all-dominant
admiration for strength, for robustness of fibre, moral
grit, and tenacity of purpose often obscured this. It is
a calumny to say that Carlyle identified might with
right. In his books, and in all his talk, he differentiated
them, to use Jeremy Collier's phrase, ' by the whole
diameter of being ' ; but he held that they coincided in
the long run. It was because Might was a revelation of
Law and Order, alike in cosmic force and Bismarckian
policy, that he habitually glorified strength. ' Isn't
Right omnipotent ? ' he once said. The reply was,
' Always in the long run, but it often takes time, for,
as one has said, Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small.' '
' Yes, yes,' he answered, ' but it's the end I look to, the
conclusion of the whole matter, which is this, that these
two things are one, or are to be so in time.'
As an illustration of the way in which he passed
rapidly from theme to theme, on the day when he talked
of the Apologia, he suddenly went aside to glorify a life
1 See the Smneqedichte of Friedrich von Logau (1650), translated
by Longfellow.

14 RETROSPECTS
of toil. He insisted on the need of steady ' rhythmic
drill ' for all our peasantry and operative workers. He
said he had himself toiled in a sort of groove all his
life, but it was a wholesome one. It had light in it,
and good air ; and he thanked Heaven that he had been
compelled to work in it. He said, ' I once thought that
if a blessed millennium of work set in, hard homely
honest work for all, everyone might be able to live on a
penny a day. I don't think that now. It was a dream
of my youth.' At another time he said, 'I've some
times thought that if most of the copies of the Bible were
burnt, or all of them buried for a time, and that then a
reprinting of it took place, after people had tried to get
on with miserable substitutes, there would be a universal
demand for it all the world over. But now it is so cari
catured and transmogrified by critics and interpreters —
each with his own " note of doctrine," his own egotism —
that a plain honest man cannot get at its meaning ;
that is, if he pays heed to the scribes, who are blind
leaders of the blind. But, Sir, that book is still the
oracle of the world. I said the other day to a fellow
who was parading its old-fashionedness, " What ails ye
at the Bible ? It's the best book that ever was, or is,
however it came to be written ; and that's what neither
you nor I can fathom just now." I don't think it's
easily found out. But, bless me, why shouldn't people
try? They're trying to find out who wrote Homer;
and, if they succeed with the Iliad, why shouldn't they
find out who wrote Genesis, or Isaiah ? '
Carlyle did not often talk of the ultimata of belief ;

THOMAS CARLYLE 15
but when he did, it was obvious that to him— as to the
Jews of old — the essence or principle at the root of
all things was both dark and bright, unknown and yet
well-known, inscrutable in essence but evidenced by its
outcome. Matter had not created mind, although it
mirrored it ; but, after all our sounding in the depths,
the unknown and unknowable was as certain as the
known. However, he once said, ' I have for a long time given
up the argle-bargle of metaphysics, with its jargonings,
and hair-splittings, and general dreariness. It's a big
desert. I once cared for it, and wandered in it awhile ;
but ey, mon, it's an awfu' obscure country. Have you
been in it ? ' I said, ' Not professionally,1 but to me it is
the radical quarter, whence comes all our knowledge of
other things.' ' What do you say ? The radical quarter !
Well, that's a good phrase, but it's not true, as regards
metaphysics and the metaphysicians, They argle-bargle,
I say ; they chatter, I say ; and they're all " voices crying
in the wilderness," voces et prceterea nihil.' Here I
ventured to interpose, and said that one of the chief uses
of Philosophy was to compel us to think ' clare et dis-
tincte,' as Descartes put it, and to define our words.
He then said he could make some exceptions, and that
he preferred the German metaphysics to all the rest.
He spoke of Kant with enthusiasm, ' the grand modern
Stoic,' and with almost equal regard of ' that great good
man Fichte,' but not of his system. ' Now don't you get
1 This was six years before I became a University professor of
Philosophy.

16 RETROSPECTS
more from Goethe than from Kant, and from Schiller
than from Fichte, and from Jean Paul than from Schel-
ling ? ' ' No,' I said, ' I don't. Others may ; but, when
we are in search of first principles, we must surely go
to the philosophers who are at the fountain-head. Was
not Socrates greater than any "literary man"?' 'Well,
well,' he replied ' it may be so ; but your " metaphysics "
have no more any interest for me.'
' By the way there was a great strong countryman of
yours, of ours I should say, who came up here to work
as I did, and worked well, John Downes. I think he
edited your Encyclopaedia Brita?inica in Edinburgh.'
' Sub-edited it,' I replied, ' which was a harder task
than to edit it.' ' Well,' he said, ' that good man came
to see me. I thought him as fine a sample of Scotland
as I had seen since I left it. He was from the south
country, from Wigtonshire I think. He was one of
Nature's self-sown modest gentlemen.' ' But,' I replied,
' he was a philosopher, a metaphysician. His best work
for the Encyclopaedia was on Philosophy, on Spinoza
&c. Do you know he has passed away ? ' He paused,
and looked straight out of his wonderfully clear eye,
and said, ' Is it so ? ' ' Yes, and he has left a widow.'
' Who is looking after her ? ' he asked. I said, ' A distant
relative of your own, Mr. Gavin Carlyle, a Presbyterian
minister in Town.' ' I am glad of that, I am glad of
that. She will be well cared for.'
At Cheyne Row I met several of Carlyle's friends,
Ruskin amongst them ; and on one occasion, when he
and the Provost of Kirkcaldy, Mr. Patrick Swan, were

THOMAS CARLYLE 17
there, as we were about to leave, Ruskin asked us
to accompany him in his carriage, if our abodes lay
on his way, as the evening was wet. I remember
only one thing that happened. Mr. Swan said to
Ruskin, ' Do you think that our friend is all safe for
the future ? ' ' What do you mean ? ' said Ruskin. ' I
mean safe when he dies, with all these opinions of his.'
' I think, Mr. Swan,' was Ruskin's reply, ' we had better
leave that to God Almighty.'
I am not sure that the following stories have found
their way into print. Carlyle had his shoes made at
Ecclefechan, because he had failed to be adequately
' fitted ' in London. On one occasion his Dumfries-shire
supply fell short, and he had to take what he could get
from a local tradesman. He found them satisfactory,
and wrote and signed a letter to the Chelsea shopman
in which he said that he had at last found a good
honest workman. The shoemaker lost no time in
framing the letter, and hanging it up in his window.
It was said to have brought him some patronage.
Another story is this : Carlyle was visiting the
Ashburtons, when the Bishop of Oxford — Samuel
Wilberforce — was also a guest. They both enjoyed
exercise on horseback, and on one occasion had an
afternoon ride together, when mist came on and made
it difficult to progress. When they returned Lady
Ashburton inquired where they had been and what
they had done. ' Oh ! ' said the Bishop, ' we were
enveloped in mist. Mr. Carlyle and I were like the
spectres on the Brocken, Faust and Mephistopheles.

18 RETROSPECTS
Whereupon Carlyle curtly interjected : ' And which was
which ? '
I owe the following to the late Rector of Chelsea :
'While Carlyle was writing the greater part of his
Frederick the Great, he used to ride almost daily into
the country, or in one of the parks. About the time
when he finished that great work he gave up riding,
having ridden, aB he said, some 20,000 miles, and
getting weary of the trouble of it. So he turned his
horse over to me, not liking to sell it, as it had been
given him by Lady Ashburton. Thus " Frederick the
Great," as we called the quadruped, came round to the
Rectory stables, which were close at hand ; and I took
charge of him, on the understanding that if Carlyle ever
wished to ride him he was to let my man know, and
he could bring the horse round. It had been a capital
hack ; but alas ! it had fallen into evil habits, through
the influence of its " absent-minded " master. Along
certain turnings and streets it utterly refused to
proceed ; and having been allowed always to have its
own way, it resented any difference of opinion between
itself and its rider. Those who had often seen Carlyle
riding across Clapham Common frequently saw the
horse grazing along the edge of the road, with the reins
hanging loose on its neck ; and Carlyle sitting deep in
meditation, until " Frederick the Great " was persuaded
to move on. I forget,' says Mr. Blunt, 'how long I
kept the horse ; but I remember that it was ultimately
sent back to Lady Ashburton, to enjoy an honourable
and of life in a comfortable paddock.'

THOMAS CARLYLE 19
Our common physician-friend, Dr. Maclagan, wrote
to me thus : ' My personal experience of Carlyle was
this. He was the most courteous man I ever met.
Never once did that old man fail to rise up to receive
me, nor allow me to leave his room without walking to
the door with me, while he had strength to do so. After
death all the ruggedness and the wrinkles disappeared
from his face. But for the beard, it was like that of a
woman, so delicately and beautifully moulded it was.'
I think that there were more interesting English
conversationalists than Carlyle in the nineteenth century
— men who were not autocratic monopolists of talk,
or so intensely dominant that, when the torrent-rush
commenced, they did not understand the gracious gift
of ' give and take ' (and some of these will be referred
to in another section of this book). Nevertheless, in his
best hours of colloquial oratory and controversial lam
pooning, Carlyle was absolutely supreme ; so opulent, as
already said, in his use of adjectives, so varied in the art
of bringing out of his treasury incisive nouns, so tren
chant in his use of adverbs, so picturesque in all his
sentences, and home-thrusting in his satire and his
verdicts. But with all this multitudinous and at times
dazzling brilliance, there was also a (perhaps uncon
scious) self-assertion which took the form of a desire
for deference. I never felt that he spoke — as Tennyson,
Browning, Maurice, Martineau, Ruskin, and Newman
usually did— in independence of his listeners, or with
out care for their verdicts.
He once admitted to me that his high appreciation c 2

20 RETROSPECTS
of Mathematics, and his under-estimate of Philosophy,
were due to the circumstances of his own university
education ; ' and doesn't that account,' he added, ' for
much in all our lives ? ' I recalled the fact which many
had forgotten, that in his young manhood he had been
a candidate for a chair of Philosophy in Scotland, and
that Goethe had given him a testimonial ; and he said,
' What a mercy that I didn't get it ; but Goethe was
very kind.'
Referring once more to his marvellous conver
sational gift, I think there is no doubt that he owed
much of his influence to it. It led his contemporaries,
and in fact all who heard him, to be profoundly
interested in him, perhaps even more than their perusal
of his books did.
His wildly adverse judgments on those from whom he
differed were more than unfortunate. At times he had
hardly a good word to say for any of them, his diagnosis
was so one-sided. I have mentioned his comments on
Gladstone, Disraeli, and Darwin. He also ran down
Macaulay and Hallam, Thackeray and Jane Austen.
Great as was my admiration of the man I must not
conceal my dissent from many of his critical verdicts.
He was full of prejudice — steeped in it I could say — so
far as the genius and work of the Church Catholic are
concerned. He had a very genuine appreciation of moral
goodness, especially in humble life ; and the most filial
(although at times an exclusive) hero-worship for that
special type of piety which had been exemplified by his
own parents. At the same time, I think he divined what

THOMAS CARLYLE 21
was best in the stern Calvinism in which they had reared
him. But, with all his width of vision and cosmopolitan
sympathy, he could not appreciate the work that was
being done, and done admirably, by labourers in grooves
that really ran parallel to his own ; and when that work
was referred to he often grumbled and became taciturn.
When he was the victim of dyspepsia he positively
growled at many whom he had met in the flesh,
especially if his intercourse with them was like that
which he had with Coleridge and Wordsworth.
I should add that he cared little for the minutias
of scholarship, which rather bored him, as they bored
Emerson. He had a greater appreciation for the attempt
made to popularise the classics by good translations. He
once asked how Bohn's Libraries of the great writers were
esteemed in Scotland, adding that in his judgment it
was a most wonderful series of books. He spoke of
public libraries with enthusiasm, asked his visitors if
they used that in the British Museum, and, if they
answered that they did not use it much, would say ' You
don't know what you lose.'
Carlyle's house in Cheyne Row has been described by
many. I may quote a few sentences from Mr. Reginald
Blunt's admirable account of it, which was published as
a postscript to his appeal on behalf of the purchase-fund
in 1894 :
' Descending to the basement there is the dimly lit
stone-paved kitchen, with its still surviving pump, and
the broad-barred open grate, where Mrs. Carlyle made
the famous marmalade, " pure as liquid amber, in taste

22 RETROSPECTS
and in look almost poetically delicate " ; and where
Leigh Hunt's " endlessly admirable morsel of Scotch
porridge " was stirred at the evening's close. On that
mantel stood, in early years, the tinder-box to which
Carlyle had often groped his way, when the sleepless
night became insufferable, to find flint and steel for his
pipe. Then, returning to the ground floor, is the little
dining-room and the breakfast-room at the back over
looking the strip of weed-grown garden, where the
troubled worker " delved to compose himself " or " stayed
smoking in the back court " through the June night, " till
the great dawn streamed up " before his eyes. The
roomy stairway, with those beautiful spiral balusters of
pitch pine, which lend character to so many old Chelsea
homes, carries one to the drawing-room, " the room she
gradually made so beautiful and comfortable," the " warm
little parlour " where they two " sat snug most evenings
in stuffed chairs " ; which Mrs. Carlyle had enlarged
at the expense of her own bedroom, and in which Carlyle
himself died. Here are the quaint double doors which,
one evening towards the end of the long illness that
foreran the last, she " suddenly opened to him in the
drawing-room, leaning on her hazel staff, absolutely
beautiful, so gracefully and with such child-like joy
and triumph, to irradiate his solitude." There, by
the comfortably proportioned fireplace, is the spot
where Carlyle was wont to sit on the rug, " his back
against the mantel-jamb, his wife reclining on the
sofa, a bright kindly fire, candles hardly lit, all in
trustful chiaroscuro, with a pipe of tobacco, and door

THOMAS CARLYLE 23
ever so little open, so that all the smoke went up the
chimney.' And what names are associated with this room !
Leigh Hunt, Irving, John Stuart Mill, Cavaignac, Baker,
Erasmus Darwin, Owen, Sterling, Mazzini, Emerson,
Southey, Tennyson, John Forster, Harriet Martineau,
Jeffrey, Chalmers, Kingsley, Spedding, Bright, Colenso,
Tyndall, Froude ;— these are but few of those whose feet
have trodden these stairs, whose voices these walls have
heard. To this same adjoining bedroom, on the after
noon of that terrible 21st of April, 1866, Mrs. Carlyle's
lifeless form was borne from her carriage after the fatal
drive ; hence she was taken to her last resting-place ' in
the silence of the Abbey Kirk at Haddington.'
Carlyle wrote thus of the house to his wife, when she
became his, in 1834 :
'The street is flag-paved, sunk-storied, iron-railed,
all old-fashioned and tightly done up. The house itself
is eminently antique, wainscoted to the very ceiling ;
broadish stairs with massive balustrades (in the old
style), corniced ; floors thick as a rock, with thrice the
strength of a modern floor. Then as to rooms ; three
stories beside the sunk story, in every one of them three
apartments, in depth something like forty feet in all,
first dining-room, then a back breakfast-room, then out
of this a china -room or pantry, shelved, and fit to hold
crockery for the whole street. Such is the grand area
which continues to the top, and furnishes every bedroom
with a drawing-room ; on the whole a massive, roomy,
sufficient old house, with many curious and queer old

24 RETROSPECTS
presses and shelved closets. We lie safe at a bend of
the river, away from all the great roads, have air and
quiet hardly inferior to Craigenputtock, an outlook from
the back windows into more leafy regions, with here and
there a red high-peaked old roof looking through, and
see nothing of London except by day the summits of
St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and by
night the gleam of the great Babylon, affronting the
peaceful skies.'
I was struck by seeing on the walls of some of the
rooms the portraits, inter alia, of men with whom I
thought Carlyle could have little sympathy, notably that
of Lord Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Beview. I did not
then know the great services which Jeffrey had rendered
to him in the days of his early struggle in Scotland.
Everyone who knew the house has memories of the
drawing-room, in which were a Goethe and a Richter
portrait ; mine are mostly of the small parlour down
stairs. The tea-table in that room would be a choicer
relic for posterity than the one the Wordsworths used
at Rydal Mount. Carlyle would often sit in that small
room, smoking with a friend, for hours. There is a
story told of someone going down to spend the evening ;
and they spent it without a word of speech, smoking
pipe after pipe in meditative reverie. At last the guest
rose to leave, and said, ' We have had a fine evening,
Carlyle.' ' A most delightful one,' said the eulogist of
the phrase that ' speech is silvern, but silence golden.'
At other times his torrent of talk swept everything
before it. It was said of him satirically that he had

THOMAS CARLYLE 25
managed to condense the eternal silence into fifty
volumes of speech. Sometimes when he talked, as al
ready mentioned, the whole vocal firmament gave forth
electric sparks, or rather aurora-borealis coruscations
of genius, which it is now quite impossible to restate.
I think he rather enjoyed the effect he produced,
although he was neither an egotist, nor an egoist, in the
common sense of the terms ; and was always ready to
defer (as Mr. Gladstone was) to anyone who interrupted
the flow of discourse, if what he had to say was to the
point. But woe be to the interrupter if the interjection
was inept, invalid, or irrelevant ! He never got a
chance again. I remember his reference to a chatter
box who had worried him much, whom he called an
' intellectual hurdy-gurdy ' ; and all he said of him
afterwards was, ' The idiot, the idiot.' He certainly used
to lash men, who came under his chastisement, with both
whips and scorpions ; but he entertained no personal
animus against them. His likings and dislikings were
due to the medium through which he got to know
his contemporaries ; and when he met the men
whom he had scorched by criticism, frequently all was
changed. Once at the Athenaeum Club a member said to
another, ' When did you last see the sage ? ' ' Not for
a long time,' was the answer. ' I think I'll go down to
night, and have a talk.' The questioner thought it
would be curious to meet both men next day, and find
out their respective impressions of each other. He first
met the visitor to Cheyne Row, and asked, ' How did

26 RETROSPECTS
you get on last night ? ' ' Well,' he replied, ' he's an
old man. You must make allowance for age. He's
getting garrulous, and just a trifle scatter-brained.'
Later in the day this friend went down to Chelsea, and
said, ' You had  here last night. How did you get
on ? ' ' Get on ! ' was the reply. ' He seemed to me to
think that God A'mighty couldn't make another man
like him, if he were to try ! '
We once talked of the provinces of the True, the
Beautiful, and the Good. Carlyle seemed to agree that
the intermediate region might be helpful to those who
were wandering in the mists of the first and third,
seeking a path and finding none ; and he said, ' Yes ;
correlate them, correlate them ; for all three are one at
the root.'
Again talking about worship he said, ' I don't know
much about the " Gate called Beautiful," but I believe
in the " Temple not made with hands." ' He remained
to the end a Calvinistic necessitarian, as he had been
brought up in his boyhood, fatalistically devout. I
never quite got over my dislike to his scorn for all the
' fools ' of the world, which was due to his appreciation
of power, pure and simple. He had the sternness of the
Puritan soldier in him from first to last, but associated
with this there was such a detestation of unreality, an
abhorrence of pretence and every kind of humbug, that
his sternness was soon forgiven.
My last words of him must be those of unqualified
praise. He habitually rose, or tried to rise, to those
Infinities and Eternities which he never defined (or

THOMAS CARLYLE 27
tried to define) to himself, or others ; but it was the
grandeur of his moral ideal — alike in individual conduct,
for national life, and for the guidance of posterity — that
drew towards him, and kept sympathetically near him,
many whose beliefs differed from his as far as the east
is from the west. Their allegiance to him was not due to
their belonging to the same ' school,' or being of the
same ' set ' or ' coterie ; ' and not to the ' sweet reasonable
ness' of his opinions, or the accuracy of his verdicts.
It arose out of a common love of ' whatsoever things are
true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things
are lovely, and of good report,' out of a camaraderie
strangely based on the harmony of opposites, and
the underlying affinities of excellence wheresoever it
exists. I may add, by way of postscript, a somewhat trivial
detail. In 1851 — the year of the first International
Exhibition — I went up to London with my father and
brother. We stayed with cousins of Mrs. Carlyle, and
were taken by Dr. John Carlyle, the translator of Dante,
to the British Museum. The Assyrian antiquities,
collected by Sir Henry Layard at Nineveh and else
where, had been recently added to our national collec
tion. These, and the more famous Elgin marbles,
sent at an earlier date from Athens, were explained to
us with much courtesy and learning. As we were
leaving the Museum, Carlyle's greater brother called for
some material in reference to Frederick the Great,
which he had just begun. We saw, but did not speak
to him, and were only listeners to the younger, who

28 RETROSPECTS
spent much time with us so kindly ; but I think he was
gratified to find that Scots boys cared more for these
antiquities than for anything that the Knightsbridge
exhibition could show them, even although it included
the famous Koh-i-noor.

29

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE
As with Carlyle, so with Maurice, it was at Linlathen
that I first met him ; afterwards in Edinburgh, London,
and elsewhere. I have a specially vivid remembrance
of the way in which he repeated the paternoster at
Morning Prayer, the slow emphatic cadence of his voice,
which gave separate emphasis to each petition, and
brought out its meaning by the mere solemnity of utter
ance. It was like nothing I ever heard before or since ;
and I certainly never met anyone whose personality, apart
from anything he said, so vividly suggested an habitual
life in that hemisphere which the denizens of earth
only occasionally enter and traverse. You felt that you
were in the presence of a man who lived, in the most
simple, natural, and accustomed manner, in two worlds —
the material and the spiritual — and who ' did not feel it
to be strange.' With the keenest relish for mundane
things, and what they brought him, there was in all his
speech and behaviour,|in what he said and in what he left
unsaid, a detachment from things material. This was
to him the most natural and familiar attitude of mind
and heart. As to the sense-world, you saw at once that
he was ' in it, yet not of it.' And after hearing him
speak even a few sentences it was evident that the

30 RETROSPECTS
essence of what he had to say to his contemporaries was
this : ' The kingdom of heaven is within you. The
way to the blessed life is very simple. You have not to
ascend to any heights (whether speculative or utili
tarian), to go down into any depths (theoretical or
practical). You have simply to apprehend that by
which also you are apprehended, to lay hold of that
which surrounds you — whether you will or no — and
you are in the " present heaven " disclosed in the motto
et teneo et teneor. Eternal life is here, not in the dim
hereafter. You can have it — and know that you have
it — now.'
I think that it was Maurice's habitual vision of the
Unseen, his consciousness of the Infinite as a present
reality, of the Eternal as an all-pervading unity, that
gave him a place so serene amongst his contemporaries,
and an influence which so often magnetised others,
lifting them up to higher levels along with him. In
the sphere of Religion he rose above the Heraclitic
process of becoming, and realised the Eleatic constancy
of being. Perhaps the fundamental note in his teaching from
first to last, through his numerous books and discourses,
was this. The Eternal is for ever revealing Himself to
man, and cannot cease to do so ; and by means of these
disclosures of ' the besetting God ' ' man liveth.' The
way in which he emphasised the self-manifestation of
the Infinite within the finite sphere, the ceaseless
apocalypse of God to man, as the Neoplatonists of
Alexandria put it — although he knew the limitations of

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 31
their philosophy well — led men like Archdeacon Hare to
say, in a strain of hyperbole, that ' no such mind had
been given to the world since Plato's.' That is, of
course, as great an exaggeration as the remark that
there have been only three great theologians since the
time of the Apostles, and that he was one of them.
There is no exaggeration, however, in the statement
that he saw more clearly than his contemporaries the
impossibility of reaching the highest truths by the path
way of the pure reason ; that the mental toil of climbing,
or intellectual system-building, must ultimately be
abandoned ; and that the best way to reach them is to
receive them in ' a wise passiveness,' though not in blind
receptivity. And so he read in all History the self -manifestation
and revelation of God, especially in the history of the
Hebrew race, and the Christian Commonwealth or
Church. I do not refer to his books, or quote from his
writings, in support of this ; although it would be easy
to do so. I refer to the outcome of all his conversa
tion, so far as I am able to memorialise it. With that
conviction radical and all-dominant, he did not find his
faith in the least degree staggered by Bishop Colenso's
questioning the historic literality of the Pentateuch, or
by the discussions and discoveries of scholars as to the
composite character of the earliest Biblical records, and
by the allegoric drapery which their authors, or recorders,
threw around the facts they chronicled. Enough for
him that there were facts within the stories, wheat
within the chaff. He had the profoundest reverence

32 RETROSPECTS
for facts. A fact might be authentic, while the record
of the fact was not infallible ; but even the facts were
of no value if they were not the indices of character,
that is to say the manifestation of what underlay and
transcended them. The highest revelation was the
drawing aside of a veil, or rather of many veils which
hid the character and obscured the ever -evolving pur
pose of the Infinite. And so, while he reverenced facts,
he had a higher reverence for their outcome ; disclosed,
recorded, and chronicled in Institutions. ' Facts,' he
said, ' were angels of the Lord,' but he seemed to believe
that Institutions were his very children. 'If God
reveals his ideas to us,' he said, ' the revelation must be
through facts. I believe that the modern process of
idealising the past tends to destroy both facts and ideas
and to leave nothing but a certain deposit, for which
the sensation-novel is the appropriate sink. Institu
tions are deposits of a totally different kind, a genuine
residuum ; and all historic criticism is good, it seems to
me, so far as it tests facts and interprets Institutions.
It should be carried on not only in the spirit of love for
facts, but in reverence for what the facts contain.'
It seemed to me that it was first the new light it cast
on human nature, and secondly the fresh power it gave to
human character, that were to Maurice the fundamental
witness-bearers to the value of the Bible. That book
was to him the authentic, although not always the
literal, record of a divine conflict with evil ; and of a
determination that evil shall be controlled, minimised
and subdued, if not eliminated by the power of good.

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 33
In recording the Colloquia Peripatetica of Dr. John
Duncan, in 1859, and editing them in 1870, I quoted
one of his sayings about Maurice and his system.
It was to this effect : ' In Maurice's system, the ethicist
devours the lawyer. . . . It is a system of pure illegality.
It will never go down with the lawyers. It upsets their
science entirely. ... I can understand the fact I have
heard that Sir William Hamilton disliked the theology
of Maurice. He was a lawyer, and no lawyer is likely
to fall into a sentimentalism about law.' On receiving
a copy of the Colloquia, Maurice wrote : ' You were
quite right not to omit Dr. Duncan's sentence upon me,
and I hope you will not in any subsequent edition.
You would do something to mar the full understanding
of his mind and character if you suppressed any of his
opinions, because you may not happen to adopt them as
your own. . . .' In a sequel letter he wrote, ' . . . I wish
for an opportunity of expressing publicly, however briefly,
the interest which I felt in that criticism, and in the
book which contains it. This I am about to do in the
preface to a new edition of my lectures on The Con
science. . . . Thank you much for connecting me with
my dear friend, at whose house 1 I had the pleasure of
meeting you. His name must be a bond of union to
everyone who knew him and cared for him. He intro
duced me in 1854 to Sir W. Hamilton, who was paralysed
and whose voice was inarticulate, but whose grand face
and head it was a great satisfaction to look at. I doubt
if he had ever heard my name till Mr. Erskine sent it in
1 Linlathen.
I. D

34 RETROSPECTS
on that occasion, so that I suppose Dr. Duncan would
have done me too much honour in supposing that Sir
William had ever looked into any of my books. . . .'
The following is part of the preface to the second
edition of his lectures on The Conscience. They are a
good illustration of Maurice as a controversialist.
' Since these lectures were published, there has ap
peared an exceedingly interesting volume entitled Col
loquia Peripatetica, by the late John Duncan, D.D.,
Professor of Hebrew in the New College of Edinburgh.
These are reported by . . . His teacher must have been
a man of rare originality, varied culture, great vigour in
expressing thoughts which were worthy to be expressed
and remembered. . . . The reader who shall give him
self the benefit and gratification of studying this little
volume (it will suggest more to him than many ten
times its size) will find that I have not been bribed to
speak well of it by any praise which Dr. Duncan has
bestowed on me. My only excuse for alluding to it is
that it contains the severest censure on my writings
which they have ever incurred ; though they have not
been so unfortunate as to escape censure. If Dr. Dun
can's complaint of them were established, I should own
at once that I was absolutely disqualified for speaking
on Casuistry or Moral Philosophy ; that the less young
men have to do with me, the better it will be for them.
He says that my " system is pure illegality," that law is
by me banished from ethics, or is swallowed up in
ethics. What my system is, or does, I really am not
able to say. I have always professed with great earnest-

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 35
ness that I have never constructed a "system ; " that, if
I did, it would exclude most of the truth which I feel to
be the support of my life, and would include most of the
falsehoods against which I protest. But that I hold
any morality which banishes law to be an inhuman
morality, to be inconsistent with the order of God's
Universe, I think every reader of these lectures and of
those on Social Morality will be constrained to admit,
whatever may be his judgement in other respects of them
or of me.
' It is, unfortunately, impossible to ascertain what
passages in my writings conveyed this impression of my
" illegality " to Dr. Duncan. If I ever meet with them
and find the sense which he perceived in them to be their
natural sense, I shall be more anxious to blot them
out than anyone else can be. Against any ordinary
criticism even a writer who is naturally thin-skinned
becomes by degrees tolerably hardened. One proceeding
from a man of such learning and worth as Dr. Duncan,
I have thought it a duty to notice, less for my own sake
than for the honour of the University which has per
mitted me to be one of its teachers.
' Cambridge : January 1872.'
I used to think Maurice one of the very humblest of
men, almost overburdened by a sense of his failures ; but
far above that, and counteractive of it, was his habitual
sense of the presence of the Infinite within him, and
the direct guidance of the everlasting Will. His con
troversy with Dean Mansel as to the knowableness of
D 2

36 RETROSPECTS
God, and the way in which we know him, brought out
the moral characteristics of the man in a remarkable
manner. Some have thought that there was in him
not only humility, but an exaggerated and almost
morbid self-humiliation. I do not think so ; but he
had a keen sense of two things, first of failure in
reaching his own ideals, and secondly of the extent of
his debt to others, or of what they had to teach him
alike by their thoughts and their achievements. I re
member that when I first read his works half a cen
tury ago, I and many of my fellow-collegians were at
once fascinated by their wisdom, and repelled by their
excess of impartiality. Youthful disputants are easily
irritated by this style of action in an intellectual
athlete, viz. that before attacking an adversary he says
' This man has far more to teach me than I can
ever possibly teach him ! ' So it was with Maurice.
In his extreme fairmindedness and generosity, he
would draw out the several points brought forward to
his own disadvantage by the antagonist whom he was
just about to try to annihilate in argument. But it
must be remembered that this was the intellectual
virtue of chivalry, the old crusader spirit carried over
into the arena of debate. Would that we had more of
it amongst us now.
As a foeman Maurice was never a hot-blooded free
booter, but invariably a modern knight-errant ; not an
angry blind exterminator, but a courteous champion of
what he deemed the rights of others rather than his
own. More than this. His aim was to teach his

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 37
generation that their noblest victories could not be won
by an intellectual cross-examination of problems, but
rather by the opening of the ' inward eye ' upon them.
As an example of his humble gratitude for little things,
the following sentence may be quoted. It was the
acknowledgment of having received a trivial essay
from a comparative stranger. ' I must heartily thank
you for the instruction it has given me, and for the
hints — specially valuable to an old gossip— of the way
in which a series of important facts, specially difficult
to condense, may be brought into a short and reasonable
and most agreeable narrative.'
Maurice was affectionately named by his disciple-
friends ' the prophet of Vere Street,' where he used to
preach. It was his personality, more than any of his
sayings or doings, that impressed these disciples. They
sometimes felt a certain awe in his presence, which
prevented them from saying things or asking questions
which they would fain have said or asked. He was a
man who could never be drawn into conversation, and
he greatly disliked controversial talk. In his letter to
Mrs. Hort, partly reproduced in his Life, will be found
one of the best portraits of the real man.
He was godfather to one of the daughters of Mr.
Blunt, the Rector of Chelsea ; and the baptism-breakfast
at the Rectory afterwards was remarkable for the fact
that Mrs. Carlyle, who was present, afterwards carried off
Maurice to see her husband — a ' reconciliation meeting '
after a long coolness between them, due to the pain
which the chapter on Coleridge in Carlyle's Life of

38 RETROSPECTS
Sterling had caused to Maurice. Sterling's daughters
lived much with the Maurices.1
The list of those who signed the protest against
Maurice's expulsion from King's College shows how large
a number of clergy there were who felt indebted to him
for much in their higher life. It is difficult to place him
within any of the stereotyped parties in the Church,
(broad, or high, or low), and he would have resented
such an attempt ; but his real successors were such men
as Robertson of Brighton, Arthur Stanley, Llewelyn
Davies, and of course Charles Kingsley. They were all
'minor prophets,' side by side with the sage of Vere
Street ; but they perhaps contributed to make their
master more intelligible to the world.
Mr. Blunt wrote to me thus of his revered teacher :
' My first acquaintance with Frederick Maurice was in
1849, when at Cambridge, reading for my degree. We
had formed a small literary society in that year, of
which the late Professor Hort was the most remarkable ;
1 I may add that, while the Sage could not join the breakfast party, he
sent by his wife, on little slips of paper, some delightful sayings and
good wishes for the little girl from his favourite authors, which he had
written out, and which were read aloud to the enjoyment of the guests.
Some were as follows :
(1) ' One sun by day,
By night ten thousand shine.'
(2) ' Tommy Douglas lost his cow,
And couldn't tell where to find her ;
When he had done what man can do,
The cow came home, and her tail behind her.'
(3) ' Be thankful that you are not in Purgatory.' When this
sentence was read, ' Ah ! ' said Maurice, with his quiet smile, ' but that is
just where we are I '

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 39
and as we were all readers of Maurice's works we per
suaded Hort to write a letter to Maurice, asking him
to tell us distinctly his views respecting eternal punish
ment — and one or two other points of doctrine about
which we were in difficulty — as we were all still under
the religious teaching of the old evangelical school. In
due time an answer came, in a long letter ; and I can
never forget the intense interest with which we read it.
It is now to be found in the second volume of Maurice's
Life, p. 15. I think that in many respects that letter
is the fullest and most admirable exposition of Maurice's
views on the question that he ever wrote. Certainly for
three of us — Hort, Ellerton, and myself — it proved to be
a life-long deliverance from an intolerable bondage, and
a clearing-up of what could, or could not, be safely said
on that subject.' Mr. Blunt continues :
' It was not till four or five years after leaving
Cambridge that I first made personal acquaintance
with Maurice. I was then a curate in a country parish
in Shropshire, under Henry de Bunsen. Maurice and
his wife had come down to take the duty in a parish not
far off, and to reside for a time at the rectory. I shall
never forget the thrill of emotion which came over me
when I met him for the first time, walking towards me
in company with my vicar, and evidently in deep
conversation with him. He was a rather short man,
with broad shoulders, a magnificent head, and a face
which bore the expression that Archdeacon Hare once
used of him, viz. as having " the subtlest intellect in
Europe." I think we were always a little overpowered

40 RETROSPECTS
in his company by the overwhelming sense of his
goodness and greatness ; while he seemed equally shy
from genuine humility and modesty, which would have
been almost painful if it had not been so perfectly
sincere. It was quite beyond our skill, or courage, to
" draw " him upon points on which we most longed to
consult him, but upon which he would rarely give any
definite opinion. Still the mere contact with such a
character made us go on our way afterwards wiser and
better men. To hear him read, or rather pray, the
prayers in church was often more efficacious than to
listen to his sermons ; and his answers made in church,
when he stood godfather to my daughter Elaine, still
ring in my ears with a depth of intense devotion and
reality. He was never popular, either as a preacher or
lecturer ; and yet the result of his preaching and
lecturing has been to create a new school in the Church
of England, and to give a far wider and more compre
hensive view of the Kingdom of Christ.'
To have made so many in his time understand the
meaning of Revelation, as the simple uplifting of the
veils that ordinarily hang around those truths, which —
when thus disclosed — attest themselves spontaneously,
was magnificent service. It was all the more valuable
that it now seems as simply obvious to the understanding,
as the law of gravitation evidenced by the fall of the
apple in the orchard. The controversy with Dean
Mansel — now as much forgotten as the strife occasioned
by Bishop Colenso's examination of the Pentateuch —
was much farther reaching. Maurice could not brook

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 41
the surrender of the direct knowableness of God to the
agnostic, whether the assault was delivered within or
without the Christian citadel ; and no one taught his
generation better that the internal truth of things is
independent of our cognition of it. He saw as few
theologians ever did that the withdrawal of all hindrances
(external and internal) to the direct inflowing of the light
made Revelation progressive, and changed its phases,
every one of which was divine. Uniformity in Revelation
destroyed it ; made it not only inept, but unveracious.
We do not turn to him as we resort to Darwin for
light on scientific fact and process; we do not learn
much from his writings as to the historic evolution of
the data of Religion. But we are led by him to what is
beyond and behind phenomenal experience, and yet lies
within each link in the chain of progress. In this lies
the surpassing value of his Moral and Metaphysical
Philosophy, a work which I venture to think is his
greatest achievement. His ' vision of Him who reigns '
was so intense and abiding that the inspection of
the particular things through which he saw it, however
fascinating in detail, had relatively less interest to him.
He once said to me, ' As to any fact, what the better
are you for a knowledge of it ? All that you can say is
evenit, it has happened, it is an occurrence ; but what a
shroud of ignorance surrounds these words ? What is it
to happen, to occur, to come about ? And what is it
that is happening, occurring, or coming about ? Mustn't
we get behind the facts to discern that ? ' ' It is
a very little way we can get.' ' Yes : but it's necessary

42 RETROSPECTS
to proceed by some way to some distance.' 'Perhaps
most of all needful to distinguish the wrappings of facts,
their embroidery, or mere drapery, from their essence.'
' Certainly, we must beware of putting anything either
above or beneath them that does not belong to them.
A superstition may be the placing of something of our
own above facts, but a supposition is the placing of it
under them, which is quite as bad.'
The inevitable changes in opinion and belief which
have occurred throughout the ages, which were a sign of
progress and gradual advance, were also to Maurice an
evidence that it was not by his creeds that man is either
emancipated, or impelled. These, on the contrary,
when they crystallise around him act occasionally as
a fetter, and are a barrier to progress. When our
deference to them becomes a monotonous or languid
assent, our very allegiance instead of enriching may
sterilise us. We are enriched by that which underlies
the creeds — necessary as they are — viz. by the life that
is communicated to us, when our vision is clearest and
our aspirations most intense, when we are most plastic
and amenable, not to every wind that blows, but to
that spirit ' which bloweth where it listeth, although
we cannot tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth.'
Thus thought Maurice.
Mr. Richard Holt Hutton, late editor of The
Spectator, wrote of Maurice in 1896 :
' It is about thirty-five years since the late Walter
Bagehot, who was then a student of Lincoln's Inn, where
he was afterwards called to the Bar, took me to hear one

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 43
of the afternoon sermons of the chaplain of the Inn.
I remember Bagehot's telling me, with his usual caution,
that he would not exactly answer for my being impressed
by the sermon, but that at all events he thought I
should feel that something different went on there from
that which goes on in an ordinary church or chapel
service ; that there was a sense of " something religious "
— the last phrase Maurice himself would have appreciated
— " in the air," which was not to be found elsewhere.
I went, and it is hardly too much to say that the voice
and manner of the preacher — his voice and manner in
the reading-desk, at least as much as in the pulpit —
have lived in my memory ever since, as no other voice
and manner have ever lived in it. The half stern, half
pathetic emphasis with which he gave the words of the
Confession, " And there is no health in us" throwing the
weight of the meaning on to the last word, and the rising
of his voice into a higher plane of hope as he passed
away from the confession of weakness to the invocation
of God's help, struck the one note of his life — the
passionate trust in eternal help — as it had never been
struck hi my hearing before, though I never again saw
or heard him without again hearing it, much as I find
it pervading every page of this striking book.1 No
wonder that, in spite of the singular and voluminous
monotony of the book, for every letter it contains is
written in just the same key, men so eagerly read it to
convince themselves that once at least in our generation
a whole life has been lived, not in the effort to escape
1 Theological Essays (1853).

44 RETROSPECTS
from eternal realities, but in deep dread of losing sight
of them even for a moment. Maurice was a witness, if
in our day we have ever had a witness, to eternal life,
and to eternal life in that sense in which he had learnt
to define it from St. John.'
It would be pleasant to linger over some details in
Maurice's great work, viz. his Moral and Metaphysical
Philosophy, in which his aim was to bring his readers
face to face with the great thinkers and teachers of the
past, to let us into the secrets of their thinking by with
drawing some of the veils which hide it ; but this would
hardly be a ' retrospect.'
I therefore conclude by stating the impression which
intercourse with him left on some who were not his
disciples, but only acquaintances or friends. It was
this. His rare sense of the organic unity of the race,
of his own union with all the other members of it, and
the original and indissoluble tie which unites all of them
to God in virtue of their lineage and ancestry. These
twin convictions underlay the whole of his thought and
teaching. More especially it was his aim to induce his
contemporaries to realise that religion emerges naturally,
and must spring into being, so soon as the organic
relationship between God and man is realised. There
was no escaping from it, no possible evasion of it, if the
Revealer is omnipresent and never silent. There were
oracles everywhere, ' so many voices in the world, and
none of them without signification.' He also saw a
divine order underlying all disorder, a good superior to
evil and destined to crush it. That the infinite incom-

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 45
prehensible One was also knowable as a revealer, and
could be apprehended by man through an incessant
apocalypse, was the very pivot round which Maurice's
life revolved. The Infinite was not to him an abstrac
tion, a stream of tendency, existence in the neuter
gender ; but a living omnipresent reality, ' a presence
that disturbed him with the joy of elevated thoughts ' ;
and no one ever emphasised more consistently and
continuously the maxims, ' the Kingdom of Heaven is
within you,' intra te quaere Deum.

46 RETROSPECTS

ALFRED TENNYSON
In the beginning of May 1890 I spent two days at
Farringford. In the short walk to the house, from
where the Freshwater coach was left, I felt — quite as
much as upon my earliest visit to Stratford-on-Avon, or
when I first went to Grasmere and walked thence to
Rydal — that I was approaching one of the shrines of
England. It recalled days in Edinburgh, thirty-five
years before, when, by the young student of Philosophy
Sir William Hamilton was considered an intellectual
demigod, and conversation with him deemed one of the
highest honours possible.
In the avenue leading to the house, spreading trees
just opening into leaf, with spring flowers around and
beneath — yellow cowslips, and blue forget-me-nots — and
the song of birds in the branches overhead, seemed a
fitting prelude to all that followed. Shortly after I was
seated in the ante-room, the poet's son appeared ; and, as
his father was engaged, he said, ' Come, and see my
mother.' We went into the drawing-room, where the old
lady was reclining on a couch. Immediately the lines
beginning ' Such age, how beautiful ' came into mind.
At the first sight of Lady Tennyson her graciousness,

ALFRED TENNYSON 47
and the radiant though fragile beauty of old age,
were alike conspicuous. Both her eye and her voice
had an inexpressible charm. She inquired with much
interest for the widow of one of my colleagues at the
University,1 who used formerly to live in the island,
close to Farringford, and whose family were friends as
well as near neighbours.
Tennyson soon entered, and at once proposed that
we should go out of doors. After a short stroll on the
lawn under the cedars, we went into what he himself
has called his ' careless-ordered garden,' walked round
it, and then sat down in the small summer-house. It
is a quaint rectangular garden, sloping to the west,
where Nature and Art blend happily ; orchard trees, and
old-fashioned flower-beds, with stately pines around,
giving to it a sense of perfect rest. That garden is
truly 'a haunt of ancient peace.' Left alone with the
bard for some time, it was impossible not to realise
the presence of one of the kings of men. His aged
look impressed me. There was the keen eagle eye ;
and, although the glow of youth was gone, the
strength of age was in its place. The lines of his face
were like the furrows in the stem of a wrinkled oak-
tree ; but his whole bearing disclosed a latent strength
and nobility, a reserve of power, combined with a most
courteous grace of manner. I was also struck by the
neglige" air of the man ; so different from that of
Browning, or Arnold, or Lowell.
He soon threw aside his picturesque cloak, and laid
1 Professor Fischer.

48 RETROSPECTS
down his broad-brimmed hat upon the table. He ques
tioned me about my work at St. Andrews, and, referring
to that of his friend Maurice at Cambridge, asked if I knew
his books. I gave my opinion of them, and, speaking of
his treatment of Medievalism in his Moral and Meta
physical Philosophy, ventured to say it was the best dis
cussion of mediaeval thought which we had in English ;
but added that the man was greater than his philo
sophy. He answered, ' You are right. Maurice was one
of the greatest and best of the men I have ever known.'
I referred to what had struck myself so much, viz. the
uplifting influence of his conversation, and the magnetic
effect of his mere presence — like that of James Martineau
or John Henry Newman, to take two very different
characters. ' Ah ! ' he replied ; ' far greater than
Newman, really more spiritual, and profounder every
way.' We soon talked of the season, and of the poets.
' The Promise of May ' was all around us, and he quoted,
with a rich musical intoning of their words, passages
from Milton, Virgil, and Lord Surrey. I forget the
passages from the two former ; but from Lord Surrey it
was part of his sonnet on Spring : —
The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings ;
The turtle to her mate hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs,
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.
I asked whether he knew the Day Estival, by our

ALFRED TENNYSON 49
cottish poet Alexander Hume, and quoted a stanza
from it on the effect of sunrise : — -
For joy the birds with boulden throats,
Against his visage sheen,
Take up their kindly music-notes
In woods and gardens green.
He said, ' I prefer Lord Surrey's way of putting it —
The Sun, when he hath spread his rays,
And shew'd his face ten thousand ways ;
Ten thousand things do then begin,
To shew the life that they are in.'
We talked much of the sonnet. He said he thought
the best in the language were Milton's, Shakespeare's,
and Wordsworth's ; after these three, those by his own
brother Charles. ' I at least rank my brother's next to
those by the three Olympians.' He added, ' A sonnet
arrests the free sweep of genius, and if poets were to
keep to it, it would cripple them ; but it is a fascinating
kind of verse, and to excel in it is a rare distinction.'
I ventured to refer to the metrical and structural
necessity that its last line should form the climax, both
of thought and expression, in a sonnet ; and that the
whole should be like a wave breaking on the shore. He
said, ' Not only so ; the whole should show a continuous
advance of thought and of movement, like a river fed by
rillets ; as every great poem, and all essays and treatises,
should.' Going back to Milton, he said that he had
caught the spirit of his blank verse from Virgil, the long
sonorous roll, of which he is such a master ; and quoted
passages from each in illustration.
He had no great liking, he said, for arranging the
I. E

50 RETROSPECTS
poets in a hierarchy. He found so much that surpassed
himself in different ways in all the great ones ; but
he thought that Homer, .ZEschylus, Sophocles, Virgil,
Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe — these seven — were
the greatest of the great, up to the year 1800. They
were not all equal in rank ; and, even in the work of that
heptarchy of genius, there were trivial things to be
found. The experimental work of poets was referred to, their
early tentative efforts ; and he spoke of the diseased
craving of many persons to have the trifles of a man of
genius preserved, and of the positive crime of publish
ing what a poet had himself deliberately suppressed.
If all the contents of a poet's waste-basket were taken
out, printed, and issued in a volume, one result would be
that the things which he had disowned would be read
by many, to whom the great things he had written
would be unknown. He said that he himself had
suffered in that way. I told him of a poem which
Wordsworth wrote when he lived at Alfoxden — an
unworthy record of a revolting crime — which he had
the good sense never to publish. I had not seen the
original, only a copy had been given to me, but I threw
it on the fire as soon as I had read it. Tennyson was
greatly pleased, and said, ' It was the kindest thing you
could have done.' l
He then spoke of the folly of fancying that every-
I.His son Hallam, writing in August of that year, said, 'He often
quotes you with great honour for having destroyed an unworthy poem by
Wordsworth.' The original was afterwards transferred to a grandson of
the poet, and is not now likely ever to see the light.

ALFRED TENNYSON 51
thing a poet says in his verses must have some local
meaning, or a personal reference. 'There are some
curious creatures who go about fishing for the people,
and searching for the places, which they fancy must
have given rise to our poems. They don't understand,
or believe, that we have any imagination of our own,
to create the people or the places. Of course we often
describe, but we generally let that be known easily
enough.' In this connection he quoted —
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father's door.
These things, he said, are returned to us ' by the great
artist Memory,' but when critics and commentators
search for subterranean meanings they generally lose
themselves in fancies.
We then went on — I do not remember what the link
of connection was — to talk of Spiritualism, and the
Psychical Society, in which he was much interested,
and also the problem of Theism. He spoke of the great
realm of the Unknown which surrounds us as being
also known, and having Intelligence at the heart of it ;
and told more stories than one of spirit manifesta
tions as authentic emanations from the unknown, and as
proof that out of darkness light could reach us.
At this stage of our talk Mrs. Hallam Tennyson
his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Douglas Freshfield, and her
daughter, came up the garden-walk to the summer-
house. Miss Freshfield wore a hat on which was an
artificial flower, a lilac branch. It at once caught

52 RETROSPECTS
Tennyson's eye. There was a lilac-tree in bloom close
at hand, and he said, ' What is that you are wearing ?
It's a flowery lie, it's a speaking mendacity.' He asked
how she could wear such a thing in the month of May !
We rose from the bower, and all went down the garden-
walk to see the fig-tree at the foot of it, and sundry
other things at the western entrance-door, where Miss
Kate Greenaway was painting. We returned along a
twisting alley under the rich green foliage of elms and
ilexes. He spoke much of the ilex, a tree which he
greatly admired. We heard both the cuckoo and the
nightingale. ' Rosy plumelets ' ' tufted the larch.' He
said the finest larches he had ever seen were at
Inveraray. ' What grand trees you have in Scotland !
It's nonsense to complain, as some do, of the want of
them. Dr. Johnson was either very unfortunate, or
very inaccurate, or incorrectly reported by Boswell on
that point.'
I spoke of the destruction of our pine-forests, and of
other noble trees, in our late gales. He lamented it, for,
he said, ' Your Scotch fir is a magnificent tree, next to
the oak in stateliness ; and how glorious the colour ! '
He said he bewailed the loss of all old things — old trees,
old historic places, the old creatures of the forest and
of the air. ' Aren't your eagles getting scarce ? and I
hear that even the kingfisher is less common than it
was.' I replied that both eagle and kingfisher were
becoming almost extinct.
Walking up the lane outside the grounds at the back
of Farringford, he pointed out the view beyond Fresh-

ALFRED TENNYSON 53
water to the east, where, as he says in a well-known poem,
which he quoted as we walked, using the early version,
the hoary Channel
Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.
This led him to speak of prehistoric things, and of the
wonders which Geology had brought to light. He
referred to the period of the Weald, when there was a
mighty estuary, like that of the Ganges, where we then
stood ; and when gigantic lizards, the iguanodon, &c,
were the chief of living things. As we afterwards
walked to and fro on the lawn under the shade of the
cedars, sheltered by the ' groves of pine ' (to which he
refers in his poem addressed to Maurice), he told me
— without the slightest touch of vanity — that, when he
was between thirteen and fourteen years of age, he
wrote an epic of several thousand lines. His father
was proud of it, and said he thought ' the author would
yet be one of the great in English Literature ' (good
prophet of the future, thought I) ; ' but,' he added, ' I
burned it, when I read the earliest poems of Shelley.
' I don't care a bit for various readings from the
poets, in the volumes I use,' he said, 'although I have
changed my own text a good deal. I like to enjoy the
book I am reading, and foot-notes distract me. I like to
read just straight on.'
' What do you do with the books which are sent to
you ? ' he asked, ' and do you get many ? I have them
nearly every day, chiefly books of poetry or rhyme. I
wish they would rather send me prose. I calculate, by the
number of verses which the books contain, that I get a

54 RETROSPECTS
verse for every three minutes of my life ; and the worst
of it is that nearly all the writers expect me to answer
and acknowledge them ! ' He handed to me Dr.
Kynaston's Latin version of Demeter, a copy of which,
typewritten, he had received that morning. It was
excellent. I remarked on the beauty of the type ; and
he said he thought of getting a typewriting machine, to
answer those correspondents who sent him their verses !
He then spoke of the labour necessary to produce
the best things in poetry, and of the re-casting of verses.
He said he thought that almost every poet did this
habitually. It was very rarely that the simplest song
came into a poet's mind, in a rush of melody, all at once.
He mentioned someone saying to him of a friend, ' Oh !
he didn't revise his verses ; his MSS. are all unblotted.'
' " How do you know ? " I replied. " No one knows what
the poets have done with their verses, as they revise
and re-cast them before they are written down." ' He
added that his chief work was done, not as Wordsworth's
had been, in the open air, but in his library, and in the
evenings. It seemed as if he needed the quiet of the
close of day, and the meditative reverie to which it led,
to start him productively.
As we were going toward the house, a nightingale
was singing loud and ceaselessly. He told me that,
while sitting in a grove on a still evening, one of these
birds was close beside him. ' I was as near it as I am
to you, and it did not cease to sing. We were so close
that I felt the very air move by its wings, and it did
not stop singing, or seem to notice me.'

ALFRED TENNYSON 55
Next day we walked along the ' ridge of the noble
down ' towards the Needles. To begin with, our talk
was chiefly on the problems of Philosophy, and his
conversation on the great questions of belief was quite
as significant as his remarks on poetry, or even his
poems themselves. We spoke of the ' Metaphysical
Society,' of which he was one of the original promoters,
along with Dr. Martineau, Dean Stanley, Huxley, and
Dr. Ward. He said he did not often attend, being
seldom in London, but he thought the meetings very
useful. For himself he did not get much good from
debating problems, especially ultimate ones ; but the
camaraderie, and the exchange of views which took
place in such a society, were good for all its members.
He raised the question, How should Philosophy be
defined ? The ' love of wisdom ' was all very well, but
to love it and seek it, and yet not find it, was mere
vanity and vexation of spirit ; and the question was,
could we find it ? I said that Philosophy was both a
search and a discovery ; at once a process and a product.
' Yes,' he replied ; ' but how is the product produced ?
and I want to know how we are to unite the One with
the Many, and the Many with the All.' I said that was
the great question of the ages, the radical problem of
Metaphysics, and that it was fundamentally an insoluble
one. ' For my part,' he replied, ' if I were an old Greek
I would try to combine the doctrine of Parmenides with
that of Heraclitus. I find that both of them are true
in part ; but does not all metaphysic seek that which
underlies phenomena ? ' ' Yes ; and what it finds it

56 RETROSPECTS
reaches intuitively, and at first-hand. The great beliefs
are not conclusions deduced by logic, but premisses
grasped by intuition. I think it is not analysis, with a
view to fresh induction, that we need nowadays, so much
as a new philosophical synthesis.' 'In any case,' he
said, 'we must get to some height above phenomena.
We must climb up, and we can't ascend a ladder without
rungs. Isn't the ladder of analogy very useful in
metaphysics ? ' 'It is,' I replied, ' but why not dispense
with a ladder altogether ? Its chief use is to enable us
to leap from it, and to reach the Infinite, not by a
tedious process of ascent, but by discerning it everywhere
within the finite.' ' Yes,' he said, ' I agree with that,
and have tried to show something of it in a few of my
poems ; but the outward world, where the ladders and
symbols are, is surely more of a veil which hides the
Infinite than a mirror which reveals it.' I replied,
' Did not Browning put it well —
Some say Creation's meant to show him forth,
I say it's meant to hide him all it can.'
He then spoke of Darwin, and of the great truth in
Evolution ; but it was only one side of a truth that had
two sides. ' All things are double one against another.'
He also spoke of Giordano Bruno, with whom he had
much sympathy, and wondered that so little was written
about him.
From this we passed to the subject of Immortality.
I ventured to say that it was a more pressing problem
in our time than that of Theism, and that agnosticism
had undermined it in many quarters. He said he did

ALFRED TENNYSON 57
not require argumentative proof of a future life, and
referred me to In Memoriam. He had nothing further
to say than what he had already said ; and, although
his faith was not stated dogmatically in that poem, every
one could see that he believed in the survival of the
individual. He did not profess to solve the problem,
but only to lift from us its ' forward pressure.' ' An
nihilation was impossible, and inconceivable. We are
parts of the infinite whole ; and when we die, and our
souls touch the great Anima Mundi, who knows what
new powers may spring to life within us, and old ones
awaken from sleep, all due to that touch ? '
The problem of Free-Will was next talked of, and he
referred to the way in which it had been discussed by
Dr. Ward, in the Dublin Review, and in the columns of
the Spectator. He said he liked the Spectator. He
did not always agree with its literary articles, but its
philosophy was good.
Conversation then turned to the newspaper-press,
and to politics. In politics, as elsewhere, he strove to
shun ' the falsehood of extremes.' I defined my position
as that of a liberal Conservative, and a conservative
Liberal. He said he had written,
He is the true Conservative
Who lops the mouldered branch away.
' But,' he added, ' the branch must be a mouldered one,
before we should venture to lop it off.'
Listening to the wind in the trees, and to the sound
of running water — although it was the very tmiest of
rillets — led us away from Philosophy ; and he talked of

58 RETROSPECTS
Sir Walter Scott, characterising him as the greatest
novelist of all time. He said ' What a gift it was that
Scotland gave to the world in him. And your Burns !
he is supreme amongst your poets.' He 'praised Lock-
hart's Life of Walter Scott, as one of the finest of
biographies ; and my happening to mention an anec
dote of Scott from that book led to our spending the
greater part of the rest of our walk in the telling of
stories. Tennyson was an admirable story-teller. He
asked me for some good Scotch anecdotes, and I gave
him some, but he was able to cap each of them with a
better one of his own — all of which he told with arch
humour and simplicity.
He then told some anecdotes of a visit to Scotland.
After he had left an inn in the island of Skye, the land
lord was asked, ' Did he know who had been staying in
his house ? It was the poet Tennyson.' He replied,
' Lor' — to think o' that ! and sure I thoucht he was a
shentleman ! ' Near Stirling the same remark was
made to the keeper of the hotel where he had stayed.
' Do ye ken who you had wi' ye t'other night ? ' ' Naa ;
but he was a pleesarrt shentleman.' ' It was Tennyson,
the poet.' ' An' wha' may he be?' ' Oh, he is a writer
o' verses, sic as ye see i' the papers.' ' Noo, to think o'
that ! jeest a pooblic writer, an' I gied him ma best
bedroom ! ' Of Mrs. Tennyson, however, the landlord
remarked, ' Oh ! but she was an angel.'
The conversational power of Tennyson struck me
quite as much as his poetry had done for forty years.
To explain this I must compare it with that of some

ALFRED TENNYSON 59
of his contemporaries. It was not like the meteoric
flashes and fireworks of Carlyle's talk, which some
times dazzled as much as they instructed ; and it had
not that torrent-rush in which Carlyle so often in
dulged. It was far more restrained. It had neither the
continuousness nor the dramatic range of Browning's
many-sided conversation ; nor did it possess the charm
and ethereal visionariness of Newman's. It lacked the
fulness and consummate sweep of Ruskin's talk ; it
had neither the historic range and brilliance of Dean
Stanley's speech, nor the fascinating subtlety — eleva
tion and depth combined — of that of Frederick Maurice.
But it was clear as crystal, and calm as well as clear.
It was terse and exact, precise and luminous. Not a
word was wasted, and every phrase was suggestive.
Tennyson did not monopolise conversation. He wished
to know what other people thought, and therefore to
hear them state it, that he might understand their posi
tion and ideas. But in all his talk on great problems
he at once got to their essence, sounding their depths
with ease ; or, to change the illustration, he seized the
kernel, and let the shell and its fragments alone.
There was a wonderful simplicity allied to his clear
vision, and his strength. He was more child-like than
the majority of his contemporaries ; and, along with
this, there was — as already mentioned — a great reserve
of power. His appreciation of other workers belonging
to his time was remarkable. Neither he nor Browning
disparaged their contemporaries, as Carlyle so often did
when he put them in the pillory. From first to last,

60 RETROSPECTS
Tennyson looked sympathetically on all good work ; and
he had a special veneration for the strong silent thinkers
and workers. He was an idealist at heart. Underneath
the realism of his nature, this other feature rose above
it. He was not so much a Platonist as a Berkeleyan ;
but faith in the great Kantian triad — God, Duty, Immor
tality — dominated his life; God being to him both
personal and impersonal, Duty being continuous un
selfish devotion to the good of all, and Immortality the
survival not only of the race, but of all the units in it.
If in In Memoriam the ' wild unrest ' as well as the
* honest doubt ' of our nineteenth century is embodied,
a partial solution of the great enigma is, at the same
time, offered ; and while the intellectual form of his
theism found expression in such lines as
He, they, one, all, within, without,
The Power in darkness which we guess,
its practical outcome was the attitude of trust and
worship. While Tennyson appreciated the work of Darwin and
of Spencer far more than Carlyle did — and many of the
ideas and conclusions of modern Science are to be found
in his poetry — nevertheless he knew the limitations of
Science, and he held that it was the noble office of
Poetry, Philosophy, and Religion combined to supple
ment, and finally transcend it.
Mrs. Fischer, referred to at p. 47, sends me the
following memorandum :
' My recollections of Alfred Tennyson date back to

ALFRED TENNYSON 61
the year 1853, at which time he purchased the estate
of Farringford, and came to settle there. This being
the adjoining property to Afton Manor — my father's
estate — the Tennysons became our nearest neighbours ;
and a special introduction to them from my cousin, Sir
Alexander Grant, led them to be particularly friendly to
us from the first.
' Soon after the Tennysons came to Farringford —
Hallam being then about two years old — their son Lionel
was born. He was a dreamy-looking and delicate boy,
with a far-away and rather troubled look, and was his
mother's pet. She used to give both the boys their
lessons, including some easy gymnastic exercises, in the
sunny morning-room, at the back of the house, looking
out upon the lawn and trees beyond ; and we often found
them at their lessons, when we called in the morning,
as we were privileged to do.
' On other occasions we would find Mrs. Tennyson
alone in the large drawing-room — always writing —
arrayed in a dress of soft grey merino, trimmed with
velvet or fur, and with a long train ; a piece of rich old
lace, worn instead of a cap, drooping over her hair
behind and coming to a point in front. She was
extremely kind in lending us books ; among these I
particularly remember Fichte's philosophical works,
which she admired greatly. Her manner was always
most gracious and dignified — perhaps rather languid,
but this arose chiefly from lack of vitality or physical
strength. ' When Lionel was about five years old, a great comet

62 RETROSPECTS
appeared ; on the child seeing it for the first time,
he exclaimed "Am I dead, Mamma?", the glorious
vision evidently suggesting to his mind the pictures
which his mother had drawn of the other world.
' Hallam was sweet, and more ordinary-looking ; both
were always most picturesquely dressed when little boys,
generally in drab pelisses lined with dark blue, and
white beaver hats.
'I do not remember my first sight of the poet.
Indeed we did not see him very often, for he was shy
and seldom came into the drawing-room when callers
were there ; and on one occasion we caught sight of him
as we came in, disappearing through the large window
which opened nearly to the ground. Then, too, in the
first year of our acquaintance, my sister and I were so
young that our visits to Farringford were only in the
mornings, but after a time we began to be invited
occasionally on an evening, when friends were staying
there. ' One evening, when about fifteen, I was invited, with
my aunt Lady Grant, and a circumstance occurred
which strongly showed the poet's delicate consideration
for others. He had had some religious discussion with
my aunt, in the course of which he expressed his dis
belief in some of her favourite orthodox doctrines ; Mrs.
Tennyson and myself listening to their conversation.
Afterwards he asked my aunt to go out of the room and
speak with him alone ; and I subsequently learnt from
her that he had then expressed his regret that they
had discussed these questions in my presence, as I

ALFRED TENNYSON 63
was so young, and he said he should be very sorry to
unsettle my faith.
' From 1854 to 1860 — when I was married, and left
Freshwater — our intercourse with Farringford was pretty
constant. Among the Tennysons' friends whom we met
during that time were Mr. and Mrs. Coventry Patmore
— "Mr. Patmore, and his Angel in the House," as
Mrs. Tennyson called them — ; Mr. and Mrs. Clough,
he tall and serious, she active and cheerful (she was
described by Mrs. Tennyson as " a woman who walks ") ;
Mr. Edward Lear, the painter, and author of Nonsense
Botany ; Mr., afterwards Sir Francis Palgrave (some
time Professor of Poetry at Oxford) ; Mr. and Mrs.
Frederick Denison Maurice (he quiet, grave, and
kindly, she an invalid) ; Mr. Parker, the publisher ;
Mr. Venables ; Mr. Richard Doyle, who illustrated
Punch ; Professor Jowett ; Mr. and Mrs. Tom Taylor,
and many others.
' Mrs. Tom Taylor sang some of Tennyson's songs
set to music by herself. I remember especially her
charming rendering of The Miller's Daughter. But no
one ever sang Tennyson's songs like Mr. Lear, nor have
I ever heard anything to equal his rendering of " 0 that
'twere possible"— for passion and pathos: — the setting
was his own. I heard Tennyson say to him, " You are
the only person who renders my songs after my own
heart." ' Two evenings among many stand out in memory ;
and, as I write, the scenes come before me vividly. On
these occasions, we went up to Farringford at about

64 RETROSPECTS
8 o'clock, and were shown into the large drawing-room,
where Mrs. Tennyson was sitting, or lying on the sofa,
generally alone ; for they seldom had lady-guests to stay.
The great room — with its handsome oaken mantel-piece
and rich dark furniture— was much in shadow, being
lighted only by a pair of tall wax candles. There was
always a roaring fire, for those evenings were generally
in winter. Tea was spread, and we would have a talk
with Mrs. Tennyson before the gentlemen came in from
the dining-room. As soon as they appeared, Mrs.
Tennyson made the tea herself, putting in a large
quantity and allowing it to stand only a minute. She
used a big comfortable iron kettle, which was always on
the fire ready.
' On the first of the two evenings to which I have
referred, Tennyson read the whole of Maud aloud to us.
When he came to the passage,
" Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,"
They were crying and calling,
he turned suddenly to me and said, " What birds were
those ? " Luckily I answered right ; whereupon he said
that someone, when asked, had replied, " Nightingales ! "
' The second evening imprinted on my memory is
recorded in the Memoir of Tennyson, by a few words
quoted from Mrs. Tennyson's diary. The principal
guests were Mr. Edward Lear, Mr. Franklin Lushing-
ton, and Sir John Simeon.
' After Mr. Lear's singing of " 0 that 'twere possible "
— when all were hushed and subdued, in the dimly lighted
room, — Sir John Simeon walked to the window, drew

ALFRED TENNYSON 65
aside the heavy curtain and let in the moonlight, which
was streaming through the trees and shrubberies upon
the lawn close by, and shining on the distant sea and
rocks. ' The effect was never to be forgotten — the solemn
trance-like feeling, the shadowy room, the subdued
voices, and the pale moon looking down upon us.
' Other evenings I remember, of a more ordinary kind,
but all delightful ; one Christmas Eve we played blind
man's buff, and Tennyson was once the " blind man."
'After 1860, 1 was much less frequently at Farringford ;
but about 1864 I met Longfellow there. A large garden
party had been invited to meet him ; and I well remember
the grave calm American poet, with benevolent face and
grey hair. Mrs. Tennyson led him round the lawn,
introducing him to her guests in turn, with an
appropriate word to each.
' My last visit to Farringford was at the New Year of
1891. The great poet was lying on the sofa in the
drawing-room, near a blazing fire, sipping his tea, which
he sweetened with saccharine. He was particularly kind
and genial.
' Tennyson did not at any time take much part in
parish affairs, and he was not a very popular landlord,
fancying that he was imposed upon by his tenants, which
was probably the case.
' In the great rejoicings on the occasion of the Prince
of Wales's marriage, however, he took a leading part.
There was a huge bonfire on the top of Farringford Down,
and the whole parish trooped up in the darkness to assist
I. F

66 RETROSPECTS
in the ceremony of lighting it. My mother told me
afterwards that Tennyson, marching among them all,
was quite delighted at her calling out " Forward, the
Light Brigade," as they were starting.
'For years Mrs. Tennyson acted as the poet's
amanuensis, herself answering the numerous letters that
poured in upon him from every quarter. Many a
" rhymer " would send his verses to the poet for criticism,
and however useless they might be, she kindly took some
notice of them.
' When we first knew her, and for long afterwards, she
always rose at 7.30 a.m., saying once, " I require a long
day for my wOrk." Indeed, she suffered latterly from
a sort of writer's paralysis of the arm, owing to over
writing, and was obliged to lay aside her pen almost
entirely during the last years of her life.
' The poet's firm belief in the immortality of the soul
has been often referred to — particularly in the Memoir by
his son, and his writings bear frequent testimony to this
belief. I may mention in this connection, that I once
heard him say, " The idea of annihilation would be more
horrible to me than the idea of everlasting torments." '
Since reference has already been made to the
numerous books of rhyme sent to the poet, the following
may be added. On December 27, 1890, he wrote from
Farringford, acknowledging receipt of a volume of
Essays in Philosophy : ' Thanks ! thanks ! for I get a
volume of verse almost every morning, and scarcely
ever a bit of good wholesome prose. . . .'

ALFRED TENNYSON 67
A friend writes to me that Tennyson's sister Matilda
had spent the day before with her, and had regaled her
with stories of Alfred's absentmindedness, to her dire
discomfiture. He loved the soothing influence of a
strong pipe, but he also greatly loved the society of
Matilda, and the seclusion of the Lincolnshire orchard.
There would he wander with his pipe and his sister,
and then would come her daily trial through devotion,
when Alfred forgot something he wanted (usually a
book) ; and, with grave injunctions to Matilda to keep
his pipe alight, would meander back to the house, the
world forgetting but not by his sister forgot, for the
task assigned to her was not easily discharged. She
said to my friend, ' I have never been able to learn that
accomplishment.' I may mention another thing which I owe to Sir
Henry Irving. One evening he was speaking at the
Garrick Club about the difficulty of acting plays which
had not been primarily written for the stage. He said
he thought that most poets who wrote at first without
any intention of having their plays produced on the
boards were afterwards disappointed if they found that
their tragedies — however welcome to the reading public
— were rejected, or pronounced impossible by the stage-
manager. He instanced Tennyson, and told us that
the Laureate had asked him — with eagerness, if not with
intensity — to explain why it was that neither Harold
nor Becket had succeeded. It would be inappropriate
to state our actor's opinion as then given, and the
F 2

68 RETROSPECTS
various reasons advanced by the guests around him.
I only mention the circumstance to show Tennyson's
anxiety to write plays that would, when acted on the
stage, be a delight and an education to his countrymen.
In the case of Maurice a concluding paragraph
described his influence over his contemporaries. A
similar remark may be made as to the impression
left by intercourse with Tennyson. He saw so far into
the heart of the new problems of his age which con
fronted him that their abiding characteristic — ' half-
concealed, yet half -revealed' — came at length to fascinate
him. He gave the unvarying impression that he had
gone down into their depths, and then risen above them,
while he continued to range around them far and wide,
surveying them from opposite points of the compass ;
and depth, height, and width combined are a rare attain
ment in any man. Tennyson's knowledge of science
and criticism, of philosophy and history, of art and
religion was great; and perhaps because of its very
extent and completeness, his resulting creed was very
simple. As already said he held to the elemental
postulates of the Kantian triad, and these satisfied
him. A very large part of his life was lived alone ;
and, although he had many friends, ever since the
death of Arthur Henry Hallam he wrestled with most
problems in solitude.

69

ROBEBT BBOWNING
Of Robert Browning I begin by saying that he was one
of the most delightful of human beings, more so perhaps
than any of his contemporaries. I never heard him utter
a morose word, or assume an unsympathetic attitude
towards other men of genius. He instinctively sought
out the best side of everyone, and all his talk was of
the true, the beautiful, and the good. Once only, when
the poetic work of his wife — and especially Aurora
Leigh — had been vehemently assailed by a contem
porary poet, he rose to the height of a noble and
righteous indignation, and annihilated the detractor by
keen satire and withering sarcasm.
I first knew him through a letter he wrote after the
following sonnet, by a student-friend who was too
modest to send it direct, had been forwarded to his
wife, then too feeble to respond herself. Although
included in the volume Pro Patria et Begina, issued
in 1901, in aid of Queen Alexandra's Fund for Soldiers
and Sailors, it may be reproduced here.
Among God's Prophets of the Beautiful
She stands a-tiptoe, straining ever higher,
With trembling lips and eyes all prayerful,
For greater largesse of poetic fire;

70 RETROSPECTS
Her song is winged with holiest desire,
Sped strongly upward, voiced with subtlest art,
And not less loftily the notes aspire
Though all the world is borne upon her heart.
Thus sing, O poet, till the time is born
When men, God's poems perfected, shall sway
All things with song, and catch divinest bars
Of music from the lyric of the morn,
From all the changing drama of the day,
And the grand epos of the nightly stars.
His reply was most courteous, and he asked myself and
the author of the sonnet to call on him when we were
next in London. I did so. His wife had died in the
interval. No one could ever forget a first interview with
Browning. I remember during my student years in the
early fifties of last century, hearing from a senior — who
had left the University and become a European and
Asiatic wanderer, as well as a brilliant press-correspondent
— that he had been to Florence, and had spent many
evenings with the Brownings at ' Casa Guidi.' I do not
think I ever broke the tenth commandment of the Jewish
Decalogue more flagrantly than by then envying the good
of my neighbour. My friend, however, did not seem to
think very highly of the honour, and his tone led me
at once to think of the poem Memorabilia in which
Browning photographs the man who once met Shelley
and thought nothing of it, but only laughed at his friend
caring much about it ; comparing the incident to his
crossing a desolate moor and there picking up an eagle's
feather, the only thing worth remembering.
When I called at Warwick Crescent I found the poet

ROBERT BROWNING 71
most affable and genial, gracious in manner and radiant
in spirit ; but what most impressed me was the many-
sided fulness of his life, his knowledge, and his sympathy ;
the multitudinousness of the ways in which he touched
and sounded the depths of human experience ; the vast
range of his interests, and the eager throbbing intensity of
his nature. I had but a short interview with him on that
occasion, as Sir Frederic Leighton soon came in to talk
on some Royal Academy business ; but before he arrived
Browning had spoken in a singularly unreserved way,
and in very remarkable terms, about his wife. He said
it had been his lot to know many distinguished women
in his time, variously gifted and rarely good ; but he had
never known any-one like her. Putting aside their
relationship, she was endowed with such qualities of
mind, imagination, and heart that she was, as she
had described Madame Dudevant,
A large-brained woman, and large-hearted man.
' As a poet,' he said, ' she excelled me in many ways.'
A year after I went to be professor at St. Andrews,
some of our students thought of electing Browning as
their Lord Rector. He had been asked in the previous
year (1876) by some of the Glasgow students to allow
himself to be nominated Rector of the Western University,
to which he had replied, ' I feel it very hard to refuse,
however certain I am that my unfittingness for the
honour obliges me to do so. You may not know that
the same jffer was made to me some years ago, six I
believe. I am sure I feel as much gratitude to the

72 RETROSPECTS
students, if not as their goodness and sympathy
deserve, at least as their cordiality will require. . . .
How strange ! I arrived at Glasgow one dark autumn
evening seven years since, passed a few hours of the
next day in seeing the town and its memorable places,
and then left— without making acquaintance of a single
inhabitant ; and now from Glasgow comes all this care
about me ! '
Knowing that I had met the poet, and that he had
declined the honour at Glasgow, some of our under
graduates called to ask whether I could help them to
induce him to come to St. Andrews. I wrote the following
letter to aid them ; but, as there were only a few days
before the election would take place, I advised that a
small deputation should proceed at once to London, and
call on the poet to plead their own cause.
' The University, St. Andrews : Nov. 17, 1877.
' - . . The students of this University have nominated
you as their Lord Rector ; and intend, unanimously I am
told, to elect you to that office on Thursday.
' I believe that hitherto no Rector has been
chosen by the undivided suffrage of any Scottish Uni
versity. They have heard, however, that you are unable
to accept the office ; and your committee, who were
deeply disappointed to learn this afternoon of the way
in which you have been informed of their intentions,
are, I believe, writing to you on the subject. So keen is
their regret that they intend respectfully to wait upon
you on Tuesday morning by deputation, and ask if you

ROBERT BROWNING 73
cannot waive your difficulties in deference to their enthu
siasm, and allow them to proceed with your election.
' Their suffrage may, I think, be regarded as one sign
of how the thoughtful youth of Scotland estimate the
work you have done in the world of letters.
' And permit me to say that while these rectorial
elections in the other Universities have frequently
turned on local questions, or been inspired by political
partisanship, St. Andrews has honourably sought to
choose men distinguished for literary eminence, and to
make election to its Rectorship a tribute at once of
intellectual and moral esteem.
' May I add that when the perfervidum ingenium of
our northern race takes the form, not of youthful hero-
worship, but of loyal admiration and respectful homage,
it is a very genuine affair. In the present instance it
is no mere outburst of young and undisciplined enthu
siasm, but the honest expression of a many-sided debt,
the genuine recognition of those whose lives have been
touched to some new issues by what you have taught
them. They do not presume to speak of, or to estimate,
your place in English Literature. They merely tell
you, by this proffered honour — the highest in their power
to bestow — how they have felt your influence over
them. . . .'
The students failed to induce him to depart from
his resolution not to speak in public ; but they were
received with such urbanity and friendliness that they
returned in a state of intense delight. Before they
left, Browning presented each member of the deputation

74 RETROSPECTS
with one of his books in memory of their visit to
him. The following is what he wrote to me on the
subject : ' London, 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : Nov. 22, 1877.
'I really want words to do any sort of justice to
my feelings ; very mingled as they are, great pleasure
with much pain ; yet in which, after all, the pleasure
predominates ; exquisite pleasure, I will say, at the
evidences of sympathy and kindness which have indeed
taken me by surprise. I shall not trust myself to
stammer where I am clearly unable to speak. The
gentlemen of the deputation will have informed you of
that refusal of the previous offer, made formally to me
nearly a year ago, of the " Independent Club " at
Glasgow : having been forced to decline the same
honour, warmly pressed upon me in that instance, I felt
it impossible to seem to throw a slight upon my friends
and supporters there. I believe I mentioned to them
that the main difficulty in the case was that I had been
compelled to forego the distinction originally put within
my reach by St. Andrews : and now certainly no
academical dignity of a similar nature — if such existed
— should induce me to accept it : quite enough pride, or
something better than it, remain to me that I might
have been, but for circumstances out of my control, the
unanimously chosen Rector of the University !
' May I beg you to interpret — far beyond the letter
— the sense of what I have attempted to say, and to
believe me, for the part yourself have taken in the
matter so generously, yours most gratefully ever.'

ROBERT BROWNING 75
The next letter refers to a request I made to Browning
that he should become a member of our Wordsworth
Society, formed in the year 1880.
' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : May 17, 1880.
' I shall be delighted as well as honoured by the new
distinction you so kindly offer me. I keep fresh as ever
the admiration for Wordsworth which filled me on
becoming acquainted with his poetry in my boyhood :
and the proposed club will contain the name of no more
thorough lover of his memory than,
' Yours very sincerely,
'Robert Browning.'
In the autumn of the same year, after the first meet
ing of the Wordsworth Society at Grasmere under the
presidency of Bishop Charles Wordsworth of St.
Andrews, I was engaged in editing the poet's works,
inserting the variations of text which he had made in
successive editions. The question arose which should be
the textus receptus — to which the changes should be ap
pended in footnotes— the earliest ? or the latest version ?
Many preferred' the final text of the edition of 1849.
Tennyson did so emphatically, while Matthew Arnold
fell back on that of 1832 ; and others, such as the late
Lord Coleridge, thought the text of the first editions
invariably the best. To show the numerous changes
on his original text made by Wordsworth, I printed a few
samples, giving the variations in footnotes, with their
dates appended, and sent them to several contemporary

76 RETROSPECTS
poets and literary critics, asking their opinion. Browning
wrote as follows : 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : July 9, 1880.
' You pay me a compliment in caring for my opinion,
but, such as it is, a very decided one it must be. On
every account, your method of giving the original text,
and subjoining in a note the variations, each with its
proper date, is incontestably preferable to any other. It
would be so, if the variations were even improvements —
there would be pleasure as well as profit in seeing what
was good grow visibly better. But, to confine ourselves
to the single " proof " you have sent me, in every case
the change is sadly for the worse : I am quite troubled
by such spoiling of passage after passage as I should
have chuckled at had I chanced upon them in some
copy, pencil-marked with corrections by Jeffrey or
Gifford; indeed, they are nearly as wretched as the
touchings-up of the Siege of Corinth by the latter.
If ever diabolic agency was caught at tricks with
" apostolic " achievement (see page 9) — and " apostolic,"
with no " profanity " at all, I esteem these poems to be
—surely you may bid it " aroint " " about and all about "
these desecrated stanzas ; each of which however, thanks
to your piety, we may hail I trust with a hearty
Thy long-lost praise thou shalt regain ;
Nor be less dear to future men
Than in old time I
His next letter refers to the following incident. When
staying at Malvern in the autumn of 1880, I found that

ROBERT BROWNING 77
a water-colour artist living in Worcester had taken two
lovely drawings of the old Manor House of Hope End,
near Ledbury, which was Mrs. Browning's (then Eliza
beth Barrett's) residence for many years, where she wrote
The Lost Boiver, and others of her lyrics and sonnets.
I had myself been hunting for ' the Lost Bower ' for
two days amongst the underwood of that delightful
valley, so wonderfully described by her :
Green the land is where my daily
Steps in jocund childhood played,
Dimpled close with hill and valley,
Dappled very close with shade,
Summer snow of apple-blossoms running up from glade to glade.
Hope End I found to be a fine old Moorish structure,
now alas ! converted into stables by one who bought the
property, and erected a modern mansion upon it. I
purchased the water-colour drawings from the Worcester
artist, but felt that I ought not to keep them. I sent
them to Browning, and this was his reply :
' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : December 2, 1880.
' I shall not attempt to say how grateful I am for your
kindness. ' With your generous permission, I retain the two
drawings, as they show the house with its summer
aspect ; the photographs (which I beg your acceptance
of, in separate packet) were taken just before the
destruction of it, and in consequence of its having been
determined upon. They are bare prosaic things, and the
surroundings are wintry enough ; but it is all I thought
to see of Hope End till your present came to help my

78 RETROSPECTS
mind's eye. Believe me — I repeat — very gratefully
yours.' In the year 1882 Lord Coleridge was the president
of the Wordsworth Society. We met in the hall of the
Freemasons' Tavern, London. The Chief Justice was
detained in his Law Court far past the hour at which
we had to commence proceedings, and there were many
important papers to be read. Our committee (including
Browning) were in an ante-room waiting somewhat im
patiently. At last I received a courier message from
our president : ' Detained for half an hour ; begin without
me.' The large audience in the hall expressed unmis
takably their annoyance at our delay. I went up to
Browning and said, ' You must take the chair, and let us
begin.' He replied, ' Impossible ; I never took the chair
at a meeting in my life, nor can I speak in public ;
impossible.' I replied that it was equally impossible for
any other of the committee to take the chair in the
presence of its most distinguished member. He resisted,
but I said, ' Just step into the chair and say, " I am locum
tenens for Lord Coleridge," and I shall manage all the
rest.' He replied, ' I'll do it,' and we walked in ; he took
the chair, and said exactly these words, and I believe
thai; — with the exception of a similar short utterance in
Edinburgh — it was the only sentence he ever spoke in
public. I may say that his delight at some of the papers
read at that meeting was great. In half an hour
Coleridge came in and relieved him from the position
of chairman, to his great satisfaction.

ROBERT BROWNING 79
The next letter refers to a request that he would
honour our Wordsworth Society in 1883 by either con
tributing a paper, or saying something about his great
predecessor at our meeting that year. It gives a
characteristic revelation of one who was considered so
much a man of society (which he certainly was), but was
also most reluctant to be dragged into the light of day.
In the letter to which this is a reply I had mentioned
having found in the autobiography of Haydon the
following reference to the one of his five portraits of
Wordsworth, on which Mrs. Browning wrote the sonnet
beginning, ' Wordsworth upon Helvellyn.'
' October 1842.— He sent ... to Miss E. B. Barrett
. . . the portrait of Wordsworth on Helvellyn painted
this year.' The sonnet followed : and then, on June 18,
1846, just four days before his melancholy end, the
following sentence occurs in his journal : ' I sent . . .
Wordsworth ... to Miss Barrett to protect ; ' while
in his will there is the entry, ' I leave MSS. and my
memoirs in the possession of Miss Barrett.'
I asked whether he knew to what portrait Haydon
referred. Browning replied :
' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. ; July 27, 1882.
' Your very kind letter has been far too long un
answered, really from the repugnance I feel at being
obliged to withhold any absolute promise to contribute
a paper to the Transactions : if I find I can, you shall
know ; I engage so far. " Vain aspiration of an earnest
will ! "

80 RETROSPECTS
' I remember all those sad circumstances connected
with the last doings of poor Haydon. He never saw my
wife, but interchanged letters with her occasionally. On
visiting her the day before the painter's death, I found
her room occupied by a quantity of studies ; sketches
and portraits, which, together with paints, palettes and
brushes, he had chosen to send in apprehension of an
arrest, or at all events an "execution" in his own house.
The letter which apprised her of this step said, in excuse
of it, " they may have a right to my goods ; they can
have none to my mere work-tools and necessaries of
existence," or words to that effect. The next morning
I read the news in the Times, and myself hastened to
break the news at Wimpole Street, but had been an
ticipated. Every article was at once sent back, no
doubt. I do not remember noticing Wordsworth's
portrait. It certainly never belonged to my wife at
any time. She possessed an engraving of the Head —
I suppose a gift from poor Haydon.'
The following explains itself. I tried hard to get
him to abandon his resolution not to read or speak at
our meeting in 1883. He said he would come to the
Abbey, since Matthew Arnold was to preside and Ruskin
would possibly attend, but he could take no public part
in our proceedings. ' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : March 21, 1883.
' I so hate saying " no " to a request from you — the
kinder and more gracious the request, the harder its
evasion or refusal, — that I have let the days go on until,

ROBERT BROWNING 81
being forced to reply to a somewhat similar demand just
made on me, I asked myself whether it would not be a
wiser economy of pain to at once assure you that, for
many reasons, I am quite unable to do even the poor
little service to that great memory of Wordsworth which
you honour me by supposing I might render. I do
increasingly feel (cowardly as seems the avowal) the
need of keeping the quiet corner in the world's van
which I have got used to for so many years. " This
comes too near the explaining of myself " ; and you
will therefore let me begin, and end, by saying with all
sincerity, that I am gratefully and humbly, yours
ever. . . .'
This letter reached me before our meeting took
place : ' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : May 1, 1883.
' I am really thankful for the opportunity of at once
acquainting you with the reason which — to my great
regret — will prevent me from being present to-morrow
at the meeting in the Abbey. I had so counted upon
attending that I refused an invitation to dinner on the
day in question, lest the necessity of returning home
should oblige me to curtail my stay — as was the case
last year. But I am, quite unexpectedly, obliged to go
to Oxford and attend at Balliol. I can only repeat my
assurance that my regret is extreme, and beg you to
believe me yours most truly.'
In 1884 our St. Andrews students made another at
tempt to induce Browning to become their Lord Rector,
the year in which Lord Reay was subsequently chosen.
I. G

82 RETROSPECTS
I had written to tell him of this persistent undergraduate
wish to see him in office here ; and, in the same letter,
I asked him if he could tell me anything about Mr. Ken
yon, the ' cousin ' and ' friend ' to whom Aurora Leigh
is dedicated. This was because a London barrister,
Mr. Hutchings, had kindly sent me some sixteen letters
of Wordsworth's to Mr. Kenyon, that I might make
use of them in my Life of the poet, or in the Trans
actions of the Wordsworth Society. Mr. Hutchings
had suggested that I might ask Browning for a brief
notice of Kenyon, which might serve as a sort of thread
on which the letters might be strung. He had received
the letters in 1880 from Mr. George Booth, son of
Mr. James Booth, C.B., at one time counsel to the
Speaker in the House of Commons, and residuary
legatee to Mr. Kenyon.
Browning replied as follows. [I may be forgiven
for not omitting the P.S., from the way in which it
indicates his view of the Hereafter.]
' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : Jan. 10, 1884.
' All thanks for your letter with the good wishes,
which I heartily reciprocate. The honour of standing
for the Lord Rectorship was, by the same post, proposed
to me as you expected, and very respectfully (in no
conventional sense) declined as on former occasions.
I am glad to see that Lord Reay is again a candidate ; 1
no fitter one could be suggested.
1 This should have been written ' is again proposed.' The Scottish
Lord Eectors do not become candidates, but are selected by the students,
and brought forward by them.

ROBERT BROWNING 83
' With respect to the information you desire about
Mr. Kenyon ; all that I do " know of him better than
anybody," perhaps, is his great goodness to myself;
singularly little respecting his early life came to my
knowledge. He was the cousin of Mr. Barrett ; second
cousin, therefore, of my wife, to whom he was ever
deeply attached. I first met him at a dinner of Serjeant
Talfourd's, after which he drew his chair by mine and
inquired whether my father had been his old school
fellow and friend at Cheshunt : adding that, in a poem
just printed, he had commemorated their playground
fights, armed with sword and shield, as Achilles and
Hector, some half-century before. On telling this to
my father at breakfast next morning, he at once, with
a pencil, sketched me the boy's handsome face — still
distinguishable in the elderly gentleman's I had made
acquaintance with. Mr. Kenyon at once renewed his
own with my father, and became my fast friend : hence
my introduction to Miss Barrett. He was one of the
best of human beings, with a general sympathy for
excellence of every kind. He enjoyed the friendship of
Wordsworth, of Southey, of Landor ; and, in later days,
was intimate with most of my own contemporaries of
eminence. I believe that he was born in the West
Indies, whence his property was derived, as was that
of Mr. Barrett; persistently styled a "merchant" by
biographers who will not take the pains to do more
than copy the blunders of their forerunners in the
business of article-mongery. He was twice married,
but left no family : I should suggest Mr. Scharf (of the

84 RETROSPECTS
National Portrait Gallery) as a far more qualified in
formant on all such matters ; my own concern having
mainly been with his exceeding goodness to me, and
mine : and all you can say in his praise will be
thoroughly warranted, I am sure. ' Ever yours, * *
' P.S. I open the envelope to say— what I had nearly
omitted — that Lord Coleridge proposed, and my humble
self, at his desire, seconded you, last evening, for
admission to the "Athenaeum." I had the less scruple
in offering my services that you will most likely never
see in the offer anything but a record of my respect and
regard, since your election will come on, when I shall
be — dare I hope ? " elect " — in even a higher society !
— R. B.'
In the same year our Wordsworth Society met under
the presidency of Lord Houghton at his sister's house,
and some of the members renewed the request of 1882,
that he should move the customary vote of thanks to
the chairman. This was declined by Browning, and
Mr. James Bryce, M.P., took his place. He afterwards
wrote as follows : ' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : May 9, 1884.
' I seem ungracious and ungrateful, but am neither,
though, now that your festival is over, I wish I could
have overcome my scruples and apprehensions. It is
hard to say — when kind people press one to " just speak
for a minute " — that the business, so easy to almost
anybody; is too bewildering for oneself.'

ROBERT BROWNING 85
In the following year he wrote, enclosing some letters
of his wife's in reference to Wordsworth. He also, in
the same letter, promised to select and send a list of the
poems which struck him ' as those worthiest of the
master.' This was in response to a request made to
him, and to some other members of the Wordsworth
Society, to make selections with a view to publication.
This was his letter : ' 19 Warwick Crescent, W : August 10, 1885.
' Now that I have found the letters — of which all my
knowledge was that they somewhere existed — they
prove to be so unimportant and uncharacteristic of
anything but the writer's good nature, that I can hardly
think you will care to make use of them. This is, however,
your affair ; mine being simply to redeem my promise
of submitting them to you, which is done accordingly.
You will have the goodness to return them in any case.
' I will, as you desire, attempt to pick out the
twenty poems which strike me (and so as to take away
my breath !) as those worthiest of the master. I
deprecate all charges of presumption, but will very
humbly give my poor opinion for what it is worth.
' I was exceedingly sorry to be absent from the meet
ing of the Society, but had an old engagement which
I could not escape.'
It was followed by two other letters later on :
' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : November 30, 1885.
' Your letter of the first was, after some delay, duly
forwarded to me at Venice, whence I have just returned.

86 RETROSPECTS
At Venice — where was a complete edition of Wordsworth
to be found, or even hoped for? and, without such a
necessary assistance, I was unable to comply with your
request and attempt the selection you engage me to
furnish. Pray forgive what has been anything but
neglect on my part. I come home to plenty of matters
claiming prompt attention ; and an off-hand profession
of choice in such a matter would be too foolishly
presumptuous : but, if you will indulge me yet a little
longer, I will do my best — whatever may be its worth —
and submit my preferences to your judgment. The
edition I shall use is that belonging to my wife —
pencil-marked throughout, in which circumstance there
may lie some help to me.
' The letters, I should mention, came safely. — R. B.'
' 19 Warwick Crescent, W : February 24, 1886.
' I have kept you waiting this long while— and for
how shabby a result ! You must listen indulgently while
I attempt to explain why I am forced to disappoint you.
One remembers few more commonplace admonitions to
a poet than that he would wiselier have written but a
quarter of the works which he has laboured at for a life
time ; unless it be this other, often coupled with it :
that such works ought to be addressed to the general
apprehension, not exclusively suited to the requirements
of a (probably quite imaginary) few. Each precept
contradicts the other. Write, on set purpose, for the
many, and you will soon enough be reminded of the old
quot homines and write as conscientiously for the
few — your idealised " double " (it comes to that) — and

ROBERT BROWNING 87
you may soon suit him with the extremely little that Buits
yourself. ' Now, in view of which of these objects should the
maker of a selection of the works of any poet worth
the pains begin his employment ? I have myself
attempted the business, and know something of the
achievements in this kind of my betters. They furnish
a list of the pieces which the selector has found most
delight in : and I found also that others, playing the
selector with apparently as good a right and reason,
were dissatisfied with this unaccountable addition,
that as inexplicable omission ; in short, that the sole
selector was not himself : the only case in which no such
stumbling-block occurs being that obvious one — if it has
ever occurred — when a public wholly unacquainted with
an author is presumed to be accessible to a specimen
of his altogether untried productions ; for, by chance-
medley, a sample of the poetry of Brown and Jones
may pierce the ignorance of somebody, say of Robinson.
' It is quite another matter of interest to know what
Matthew Arnold thinks most worthy in Wordsworth :
but should anybody have curiosity to inquire which " 15
or 20 " of his poems have most thoroughly impressed
such an one as myself, all I can affirm is that I treasure
as precious every poem written during about the first
twenty years 1 of the poet's life : after these, the solution
grows weaker, the crystals gleam more rarely, and the
assiduous stirring-up of the mixture is too apparent and
So it is written, but he meant forty, and afterwards in conversation
put it at thirty-five.

88 RETROSPECTS
obtrusive. To the end, crystals are to be come at ; but
my own experience resembles that of the old man in the
admirable Besolution and Independence :
Once I could meet with them on every side,
But they have dwindled long by slow decay —
Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may ;
that is ; in the poet's whole work, which I should
leave to operate in the world as it may, each recipient
his own selector.
' I only find room to say that I was delighted to
make acquaintance with your daughter, and that should
she feel any desire to make that of my sister we shall
welcome her gladly.'
I afterwards sent him a list of the poems chosen to be
included in this volume of selections. He went over
them with minute care, marking all those which he
specially liked, and adding several which I had omitted.
He then wrote as follows :
' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : March 23, 1887.
' I have seemed to neglect your commission shame
fully enough, but I confess to a sort of repugnance to
classifying the poems as even good and less good,
because in my heart I fear I should do it almost chrono
logically — so immeasurably superior seem to me the
" first sprightly runnings." Your selection would appear
to be excellent, and the partial admittance of the latter
work prevents one from observing the too definitely
distinguishing black line between supremely good and —
well, what is fairly tolerable — from Wordsworth, always

ROBERT BROWNING 89
understand ! I have marked a few of the early poems
not included in your list : I could do no other when my
conscience tells me that I never can be tired of loving
them — while, with the best will in the world, I could
never do more than try hard to like them. You see,
I go wholly upon my individual likings and distastes ;
that other considerations should have their weight with
other people is natural and inevitable.
'Many thanks for the volume just received — that
with the correspondence. I hope that you will restore
the swan-simile so ruthlessly cut away from Dion.'
The following is the list of Wordswona's 'early
poems,' referred to in the preceding letter, marked by
Browning, which he ' never could be tired of loving,'
but ' could never do more than try hard to like ' : The
Beverie of Poor Susan; Goody Blake and Harry
Gill ; The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman ;
The Danish Boy, a Fragment ; Bob Boy's Grave ;
The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale ; Power of Music ;
Stargazers ; Dion ; The Eclipse of the Sun, 1820 ;
A Jewish Family.
Two days later came the following, indicating mis
prints in the volume of the Wordsworth Society Trans
actions for the year :
' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : March 25, 1887.
' Do you observe two noteworthy misprints in the
Transactions ?

90 RETROSPECTS
' Page 139, penultimate line : " the younger critics
require higher reasoning than I can give." Surely,
" seasoning " ? And, worse still, page 182 :
But why be so glad on
His feats or his fall ?
His got his red ribbon
And laughs at us all.
' Read " glib on," meo periculo ! — rhyme, reason, and
grammar demanding the change.
' You got, I hope, my letter with the previous number
of the Transactions.'
This led to some correspondence as to misprints.
I told him of the trouble which many had over
Sordello, because of its errors in punctuation ; and
asked him whether there was not a misprint in the song
in Pippa Passes, beginning,
All service ranks the same with God ;
' than ' being printed, when it should have been ' that.'
Pippa's song is familiar, but may be quoted :
All service ranks the same with God :
If now, as formerly he trod
Paradise, his presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work — God's puppets, best and worst,
Are we ; there is no last nor first.
Say not ' a small event ' ! Why ' small ' ?
Costs it more pain that this, ye call
A ' great event ' should come to pass,
Than that ? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in, or exceed !

ROBERT BROWNING 91
Well, the eighth line is printed ' than this ' instead of
' that this.' The following was his reply :
' 19 Warwick Crescent, W. : April 7, 1887.
' The misprint of " than " for " that " struck me long
ago ; unluckily the present edition is stereotyped, hardly
admitting of a change. On referring to the original
edition, I observe the passage runs
Costs it more pain — the thing ye call &c.
' I shall probably restore this, which seems better
than the alteration.
'My experience of printers' errors is considerable.
Presupposing due care on the corrector's part ; any
subsequent misplacement of the types is readjusted by
the printer as he best can, without the troublesome
reference to the " Reader." Again ; writers of verse
are particularly subject to an accident of less importance
in prose — the dropping out of the stop at the end of the
line ; which, omitted, makes the sense (or nonsense)
run into the following one. This occurs again and again
in my own books, through no fault of mine, and is
never noticed ; so acute are the critics !
' I am glad you are coming here in May, and shall
be happy to see you again.'
Browning once said to me that all the unintelligibility
of Sordello was due to the printers. They would
change his punctuation, and not print his own commas,
semicolons, dashes, and brackets.

92 RETROSPECTS
He wrote :
' 29 De Vere Gardens, W. : May 8, 1888.
' Thank you heartily for your kindest of notes.
I only wish I could have seen you, and assured you by
word of mouth how much I value your friendship and
reciprocate your good wishes.
' We have been somewhat unfortunate in regard to
Miss Knight, who has called here and found nobody ;
will she think it worth while to try again and gratify
us?' In June 1888 Browning wrote thus to a friend. The
opinion expressed is a curious one, but it is reproduced
merely because it was his : ' 29 De Vere Gardens, W.
. . . ' I am delighted to hear that there is a likelihood
of your establishing yourself in London, and illustrating
literature as happily as you have expounded philosophy.
It is certainly the right order of things, philosophy first,
and poetry — which is its highest outcome — afterwards ;
and much harm has been done by reversing the natural
process.' In the beginning of the same month I visited
Florence for the first time, before attending the octo-
centenary of the University of Bologna. I spent a
fortnight in the fair Tuscan city, during which time
George Eliot's Bomola, Ruskin's Mornings in Florence,
and Browning's Poems were to me, as they have been
to so many, instructors and guides. Before leaving

ROBERT BROWNING 93
I went out to the Protestant cemetery and laid a laurel
wreath on the grave of Walter Savage Landor, another
on the last resting-place of Arthur Hugh Clough, and
a large Florentine lily on Mrs. Browning's tomb. On
the same day I wrote to Browning, to tell him of my
visit, and what I owed to him in Florence. As he
kept my letters, and his son has returned them to me,
I may perhaps include this one, along with his reply
to it: ' Florence, June 10, 1888.
' I have been six days in Florence, but they have
been as six years of new experience. It is my first visit
to this fairest of cities, and the hours have passed in
one long apocalypse of beauty and of glory. As it is
to you and Mrs. Browning, along with Ruskin and
George Eliot, that I owed most of my knowledge of
Florence before I came to it, I follow the instinct which
impels me to write to you before I leave the city for
Bologna. ' I have risen each morning at four o'clock, and have
been both to San Miniato and Fiesole at dawn. I have
climbed Giotto's tower, and Brunelleschi's dome at
sunset. I have studied with wondering delight the
frescoes in Santa Croce, the Carmine, and Santa Maria
Novella, revisiting each three times ; and lingered long
in the Uffizi and the Pitti galleries. The Duomo has
fascinated me with the splendour of its architecture and
its music. The Donatellos round San Michele, the
Luea della Robbias everywhere, and the works of three
great Tuscan masters scarcely known to me before —

94 RETROSPECTS
Verrocchio, Rossellino, and Rovezzano — the Bargello,
and the Ghiberti gates, have revealed much ; but the
Giottos, the Botticellis, the Andrea del Sartos, and the
Masaccios, these have magnetised me. I have had
wonderful weather. The nightingales, and fireflies in
the Boboli gardens, have added an element new and
delightful beyond words, while each day I have had
a swim in the waters of the Arno.
' I stood a long time before the house in Casa
Guidi, but did not enter it. To-day, however — almost
my last act before leaving the city — I went out to the
English cemetery, and laid a large white lily on that
tomb which will for generations be a place of reverent
pilgrimage to many ; placing also a laurel branch
on Clough's grave, and another on Walter Savage
Landor's. ' Over and over again, during these days of perpetual
delight and continuous revelation, I have turned to your
and Mrs. Browning's words ; and have found that by
means of them, for me in this place " the fountains of
the great deep were broken up." In no other city is it
so easy as in Florence to go back into the past ; and
during any of these days it would have seemed quite
natural to have met Dante or Giotto on the Ponte
Vecchio, or Savonarola and Michael Angelo at some
street corner. But this too I am constrained to say,
that in no burial-place in the world have the same
emotions of reverence and thanksgiving been felt
by me, except at Stratford-on-Avon and at Grasmere.
Forgive me rof saying so much. , . .'

ROBERT BROWNING 95
To this Browning replied :
' 29 De Vere Gardens, W. : June 19, 1888.
' Many thanks for your exceedingly kind and highly
interesting letter. It was good of you to think so much
of my wife and myself amid the excitement attending
a first visit to the city we loved so well. I should have
much enjoyed talking over the present and past condition
of Florence with you, but I leave this afternoon for
Oxford, where I pass the rest of the week, and can only
regret that I may thereby lose the great pleasure of
seeing you here. Would you have the goodness to
mention to Lord Coleridge that I am obliged to be absent
from the meeting of the Arnold Memorial Committee
appointed for to-morrow — Commemoration Day.'
When I next met him he said, in happy hyperbole,
' Well ! You did as much in Florence in a week as my
wife and I tried to do in a year.' I replied, ' It was all
too crowded, but thanks to you for enabling me to do it.
Your poems, and the other books I mentioned gave me
the key, and opened up the innumerable treasures of the
place.' I have known no one so completely indifferent to fame
as Browning was, while he knew very well the value of
the work he did. He never wrote a line of poetry with
a view to posthumous renown, or thought much of
anything he composed after it was written down, as
Wordsworth and Tennyson did. The imperious call

96 RETROSPECTS
of a commanding genius very soon compelled him to
take up other themes; and that may in part explain
how so many of his poems have their obscurities, and
ragged edges, and what Americans call 'snags.' He
could not, or would not, go back upon them, and take
time to polish them, even although he could have done
it so easily with the diamond dust of his own genius.
He at once forgot them, and was away in other fields of
thought, imagination, and fancy ; but I think it was his
genuine appreciation of the work of others that made
him so callous to contemporary verdicts on himself.
He received many letters from admirers and friends
asking the meaning of obscure passages in his poems ;
he was too courteous to resent inquiry, but he seldom
satisfied the querists. He would sometimes reply, ' Well !
I know the poem had a meaning to me when I wrote it,
but what it was I cannot now say. I have passed from it
long ago.' Childe Boland to the dark tower came, and
Another Way of Love, were two poems in reference to
which he would not give explanations.
I once ventured, after a talk about six of his poems —
Christina, Evelyn Hope, The Last Ride Together,
Prospice, La Saisiaz, and Abt Vogler — to ask him
if he could not give the world a poem bearing still more
explicitly on the survival of the individual. He said
(what I well knew) that he could not write to order. No
poet ever did so ; or, if he did, what he wrote would not
deserve to live, but would be fore-doomed to extinction ;
but that possibly the mood would return to him in which

ROBERT BROWNING 97
that great problem would find new utterance. When,
however, he asked me what it was that I wished, in
addition to what he had already said in the six poems we
had been talking about, I found it difficult to tell him
I only said that while he and Tennyson had helped us
in many ways as to the ultimata of theistic belief, neither
in In Memoriam nor in any of his own poems had we
an articulate poetic statement of the grounds on which
the belief in Immortality rests. I indicated my own
difficulty, and said that if we are warranted in believing
in posthumous existence, might we not also be warranted
in surmising pre-existence ; especially since, if we are to
survive this life, when we do so pre-existence will have
been a fact. He agreed ; and said he would like to take
pre-existence as the subject of a poem ; because, if it
could be proved, it would carry the evidence of immor
tality upbound with it. But, he added, in language very
similar to that of Cardinal Newman, ' As to immortality
I don't need arguments ; I know it by intuition, which is
superior to proof.' He went on to say, ' You know my
wife's lines in Aurora Leigh, on the evidence of in
tuition, and " the Hereafter " ; ' and, taking up a volume
of her poems lying on his desk, he read [and I think he
read his wife's poems better than he read his own] :
I thought so. All this anguish in the thick
Of men's opinions . . press and counterpress,
Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now
Emergent . . all the best of it, perhaps,
But throws you back upon a noble trust
And use of your own instinct, — merely proves
Pure reason stronger than bare inference
I. H

98 RETROSPECTS
At strongest. Try it,— fix against heaven's wall
The scaling-ladders of school logic— mount,
Step by step !— sight goes faster ; that still ray
Which strikes out from you, how you cannot tell,
And why you know not, (did you eliminate,
That such as you indeed should analyse ? )
Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.
The cygnet finds the water, but the man
Is born in ignorance of his element
And feels out blind at first, disorganised
By sin i' the blood,— his spirit-insight dulled,
And crossed by his sensations. Presently
He feels it quicken in the dark sometimes,
When, mark, be reverent, be obedient,
For such dumb motions of imperfect life
Are oracles of vital Deity
Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says,
' The soul's a clean white paper,' rather say
A palimpsest, a prophet's holograph
Defiled, erased and covered by a monk's, —
The Apocalypse by a Longus ! poring on
Which obscene text we may discern perhaps
Some fair, fine trace of what was written once,
Some upstroke of an alpha and omega
Expressing the old scripture.
I once called at Warwick Crescent on Browning's
birthday, but had forgotten the anniversary. The house
was a garden of choicest flowers, a very 'paradise of
dainty devices.' They were in the hall, up the staircase,
in the library, in the drawing-room ; and ' most,' he
said, ' from unknown friends, nearly all from unknown
friends. How strange it is ! ' On that occasion he
asked me, ' Are you any relation of a Mr. Knight, who
used to live at Wimbledon forty years ago ? ' I said,
' No ; I have relatives in and near London, but none at

ROBERT BROWNING 99
Wimbledon.' He went on, however, for nearly ten
minutes to talk of this old friend of his, who must have
been a remarkable man, and then said, ' How strange !
I knew him four decades ago, and I have never once
recalled all these things I have been telling you till
to-day, when they came back to me in a rush of memory
when speaking to you.'
I frequently walked with Browning from his house
at Warwick Crescent across Kensington Gardens to the
residence of Mrs. Procter — the widow of his old friend
Barry Cornwall — at the Albert Mansions. He used to
call there whenever he could manage it. Mrs. Procter
told me that he missed few Sunday afternoons. She
was herself a remarkable woman, a brilliant talker
who never monopolised conversation. She rejoiced to
recall the days when she knew Charles Lamb, Words
worth, Landor, and the rest ; but she was not ambitious
of being herself much ' in evidence.' She was the
daughter of Wordsworth's friend and boy-pupil, Basil
Montagu, and mother of the well-known Catholic hymn-
writer, Adelaide Anne Procter. It was specially interest
ing to hear Browning and Mrs. Procter discuss the days
and the fellowships of old, and to hear him read his own
poems to his friend. His reading was not so musical as
Tennyson's, but it was clearer and crisper, and had
occasionally a torrent rush. With more elan, variety
and fulness of melody, it was suggestive of a richer and
more many-sided life. Its cadences were once described
to me as like the pianoforte-playing of Liszt. H 2

100 RETROSPECTS
As it may be known to few, it is worth mentioning
that the following was written by Browning on the MS.
of his Paracelsus, which is preserved in the South
Kensington Museum : ' To John Forster, Esq. (my only
understander), with true thanks for his generous and
seasonable public confession of faith in me. — R. B.'
Browning could be the most reserved of men, and was
so to those from whom he felt that a moral barrier
separated him ; but he was often the most unreserved
of conversationalists. I sometimes thought that he lost
all sense of the listener, and his wonderful speech was
merely thinking aloud.
In conclusion, something may be said about his
funeral in Westminster Abbey. It was not like a funeral
at all. It was rather like the enthronement of a mighty
potentate — or king in the realm of song — amongst his
peers in the Poets' Corner of the historic Abbey. As the
pall-bearers moved slowly from the entrance door of the
Deanery, through the cloisters, into and along the nave
and choir to the southern transept where he lies, in all
the vast assemblage of representative men and women —
statesmen of both Houses, lawyers, men of letters and
of science, historians, heads of colleges, artists, press
men, musicians, dramatists, literary workers of every
kind, politicians of every school, and clergy of all
denominations — there was no sign of grief. It was
instinctively felt that Browning's work was done,
and had been right nobly done, that he had accom
plished his allotted task, that his life had rounded
itself to a perfect close. Why, therefore, should there

ROBERT BROWNING 101
be any sorrow felt, or mourning possible ? It was the
triumphal procession of a monarch to his throne ; and
a longer stay in this terrene sphere would have been a
loss to posterity rather than a gain. I think I interpret
the thoughts and feelings of the company gathered in the
Abbey on that occasion — one in some respects more inter
esting than were the funerals of Tennyson and of Glad
stone — when I say that its predominant note was one of
gladness and victory, of great work grandly done, of
achievement nobly realised, of happy rest from labour,
while his work followed, as it still does, and, me judice,
will continue to do in saecula sceculorum.

102 RETROSPECTS

JAMES MARTINEAU
In this retrospect I do not try to estimate Martineau's
philosophical and religious position, or to trace the
numerous and varied relations which he sustained to his
contemporaries. His life has been recently written with
great care and notable success, by those selected by his
family and executors to discharge the honourable duty.
A few supplementary ' reminiscences ' and memorabilia
may, however, be given.
I had the privilege of his friendship for forty-three
years, and the letters I received from him amounted
to 109. Copies of 100 of these I sent to his biographers ;
the other nine I issued a few years ago, along with some
of my own to which they were replies, in a volume
entitled Inter Amicos. They were essay-letters on
the questions which lie on the threshold or border
land between the Trinitarian and Unitarian faith.
Martineau was as generous of himself in correspondence
as Ruskin was. While often reserved in speech, when
he took his pen in hand this reserve was abandoned,
and he poured out his thoughts and feelings freely.
My introduction to him was due to the admiration
I felt when a young man for his Endeavours after the
Christian Life. I knew that he was coming for an

JAMES MARTINEAU 103
autumn sojourn to country-quarters in the West of
Scotland, not far from where I would be spending a few
weeks of holiday. I met him on his arrival at Greenock
along with his family, and went with them down
the Clyde, in a six hours' sail to Ardrishaig. During
that voyage he spoke continuously on the chief problems
of philosophical and religious interest, and from the first
I was struck by the rare union in him of great
intellectual insight, and the power of a commanding
character, with humility and the non-assertion of him
self — a unique combination. After that interview
my admiration broadened and deepened, and corre
spondence began. A year afterwards I visited him in
London ; but I pass over these days, when he was so
genial a host, and took me as a fellow guest to many of
his friends' houses in town. I owed much to these intro
ductions. Later on it occurred to me that — as all the Churches
were so much his debtors, I might try in a humble way
to advance the fellowship after which he strove by
addressing his congregation in London, and promoting
unity while not concealing difference. I did so ; but
proceedings were at once taken against me in the Church
to which I then belonged. The controversy was a long
one. Its records fill hundreds of pages of newspaper
reports, but the prosecution failed. Then followed an
article in the Contemporary Review on ' The Ethics of
Creed Subscription,' in which I tried to show that no
creed could be without a flaw ; and that in all of them
the subscriber expresses a general assent to underlying

104 RETROSPECTS
principles rather than adherence to infallible dicta, or
finally established propositions. This led to a second
ecclesiastical arraignment, with the same result. A
third one followed on the controversy as to Prayer, in
which I tried to show in the columns of the same
Review -in reply to Professor Tyndall and others —
that prayer had a valid sphere of its own within the
soul of man, but that it was invalid in the sphere of
physical nature ; and that, if it presumed to request an
alteration of those laws which were the outcome of
Divine adjustment, it was irreverent. This led to much
controversy ; and the Chancellor of our University — the
Duke of Argyll— replied to my paper in the next number
of the Review, in an article entitled ' Prayer : the two
Spheres ; are they two ? ', and I to him in the one follow
ing, 'Prayer: the two Spheres; they are two.' The result
of the controversy was my voluntary abandonment of the
tie which had bound me to the Church of my fathers.
I mention these personalia without further detail,
merely because they explain allusions in Dr. Martineau's
letters, both in Inter Amicos and in the following
pages. He then urged me to come up to London and
succeed him at Little Portland Street, where I would
be absolutely unfettered as a teacher. I explained to
him that it was an impossibility, and he saw it, and
acquiesced. Soon afterwards he resigned his ministerial
position, confining himself to professorial duties, and
afterwards to those of the principalship of Manchester
New College. At this stage I may mention one fact,

JAMES MARTINEAU 105
which shows the width of his nature and the catholicity
of his heart. He said to me, 'I go each Sunday
morning to the dear old chapel in Little Portland Street,
where I worshipped and taught so long, but it is not
enough for me ; and I find that I must go down in the
afternoons to Westminster, where I hear the Anglican
Service, and can sometimes hear the Dean.' I think it
was Stanley's personality, to a certain extent, that drew
him to the Abbey.
After this I saw Martineau chiefly at his summer
retreats in Yorkshire and in Scotland, most of all at the
Polchar in the Rothiemurchus district of Inverness-
shire. Space and time would fail to tell of many
delightful days and evenings there, ascending moun
tains, roaming in the forest-ways, and listening to his
varied talk. A single experience only I may mention.
It was planned one year that during my visit we should
ascend Ben-muich-dhu ; and, as Mr. Seeley (the
historian) and Mr. Oscar Browning were staying near at
hand, that they should join our party. We drove so far
through the pine forest of Rothiemurchus, and there
after had an ascending walk of ten miles to the summit
of the mountain, and a similar descent of ten miles to
the forest. Martineau was approaching eighty years of
age ; but, as a young-old-man, was now in a mood of
inspired soliloquy, now discussing Hegel and Darwin,
again rapt in silent sympathy with Nature, feeling the
' strength of the hills ' around, and the glory of the sky
above him. He was the fleetest of foot amongst us, and
was first at the summit of the mighty ben. Others of

108 RETROSPECTS
' he brought out of his treasury things new and old,' he
certainly spoke ' as one having authority, and not as the
scribes.' If he ' wore his weight of learning lightly like
a flower ' (which he did), and lived out his deepest
thoughts rather than write them down, it was the last
thing anyone could think of him that he was a ' scribe.'
His discourses were crowded with thoughts which tran
scended the commonplaces both of theology and religion,
while he was in closest touch with their essentials. He
dealt with the problems of all time ; but, in setting them
forth, he was never carried away by the torrent of his
own utterance. There was no tumult in his eloquence.
The following extract ' from one of the discourses in
his Endeavours, entitled ' The Besetting God,' is a
sample of the whole of them :
'As if in acknowledgment of the mystery of God,
as if with an instinctive feeling that his being is the
meeting-place of light and shade, and that in approach
ing Him we must stand on the confines between the
seen and the unseen, all nations and all faiths have
chosen the twilight hour, morning and evening, for
their devotion ; and so it has happened that all round
the earth, on the bordering circle between the darkness
and the day, a zone of worshippers has been ever spread,
looking for the Almighty Tenant of space, one half
toward the East brilliant with the dawn, the other into
the hemisphere of night descending in the West. The
veil of shadow as it shifts has glanced upon adoring
souls, and at its touch cast down a fresh multitude to
1 Endeavours after the Christian Life, vol. i. p. 24.

106 RETROSPECTS
the party, though junior, took more frequent rests, and
examined their aneroids, while he was treading the
heather and facing the breeze. The views of Braeriach
and Cairntoul near at hand, of Ben-y-Gloe to the south,
of Ben Aulder and the Ben Nevis range to the west, were
magnificent that day, and he could name the majority
of peaks and tell their heights. He used to delight to
take his friends shorter walks in that Rothiemurchus
district, to the top of Ord Ban (the white hill) which I
ascended with him when he was eighty-five years of age,
round by Loch-an-eilan (the island loch), a favourite
stroll, and one of the very few places in Scotland where
the osprey is still to be seen. At the Polchar our con
versation often turned to his own early life and
education. I now wish that I had written down what
he told me.
When he was my guest at St. Andrews I was greatly
struck with Martineau's power of entering for the time
being, with rare appreciativeness, into the position of
others from whom he stood widely apart in theological
thought, while he held to his own position, and
defended it with firmness, although with unobtrusive
courtesy. He was much interested in meeting our two
Principals, Tulloch and Shairp, and others whom he had
known only as authors.
We frequently talked of the titles of his books,
especially of the one which he called A Study of
Religion, its Sources and Contents. In this connection
one may recall the singular felicity of the titles of many
of his sermons, in the Endeavours after the Christian

JAMES MARTINEAU 107
Life, such, e.g., as ' The Strength of the Lonely,' ' The
Besetting God,' ' Great Hopes for Great Souls,' ' The
Sphere of Silence,' &c. Some think that his best work
was done in these wonderful addresses, sermons esoteric
and exoteric, delivered week by week for many a year,
in the chapel which he made famous ; and, in now
reading these Endeavours, and his subsequent Hours
of Thought one can understand the magnetism which
drew so many from far suburban places to hear him, to
be taught by him, and sent on their way to fruitful
work. Perhaps the most distinctive note of his preach
ing was this. There was nothing set before his hearers
which they must receive ; only a few ' guide-posts ' in
Religion and Ethics were set up, and an indication
given of the way in which the noblest spirits walk. He
was great as a preacher because he was neither a
doctrinaire expositor, nor a critical essayist. The
listeners felt that the speaker lived in a region of
intellectual and religious calm, far above the mists and
miscellaneousness of our modern life, the vicissitudes
and ambitions of the hour ; and that, with his life rooted
in the unseen, he was devoted continuously and un
falteringly to the noblest ends. The only thing that
some felt per contra was the baffling effect produced at
times by his exquisite metaphors, which turned the
hearer aside for a time from the clear-cut path of his
severer thought. His sermons were not so much ad
dresses delivered to a group of listeners as oral
communings with the unseen. He seldom seemed to
realise that he had an audience before him ; and while

JAMES MARTINEAU 109
kneel, and as they have gazed into opposite regions for
their God they have virtually owned his presence
" besetting them behind and before." '
What he quoted from John Smith, the Cambridge
Platonist, so far back as 1836, remained with him a
guiding principle to the end. It was this : ' To seek
our Divinity merely in Books and Writings is to seek
the living amongst the dead. No : intra te quaere
Deum. Seek for God within thy own soul.' More than
once he quoted to me Kepler's great saying, ' My highest
wish is to find within the God whom I find everywhere
without ' ; although I told him I preferred the Neo-
Platonic way of putting it, ' I have been all along trying
to bring the God who is within me into harmony with
the God who is without.' He had the mind of the seer,
the enthusiasm of the mystic, and the heart of the child ;
and it was their wonderful combination that endeared
him to so many. It came out in unexpected places, and
un-anticipated ways. I remember calling at Gordon
Square on a disengaged forenoon, when Mr. Emslie was
painting his portrait. I was asked to sit and talk in
the study while this was going on, as the artist seemed
to think that conversation made his face more animated,
and helped rather than hindered expression : and so I
sat on for two hours, and can never forget the outflowings
of philosophic talk on ancient sages and contemporary
men, the subtle play of imagination and geniality of
heart, then and there disclosed with unconscious ease
and grace.
Perhaps the master-passion of Martineau's life was to

110 RETROSPECTS
vindicate a pure spiritual theism against the materialistic
and agnostic tendencies of our time ; but it is a some
what remarkable thing that he was an old man before
his most distinctive works on Philosophy saw the light
of day. He led a quiet life of strenuous endeavour for
many years, and was known mainly as the author of the
Endeavours, of a Hymn-book, and of several Essays
and Addresses. As already mentioned, the superlative
beauty and truth of the first of these fascinated several
orthodox churchmen, who were more beholden to him
than to many within their own communion ; the great
Anglican preacher — Robertson of Brighton — having
assimilated his thoughts intuitively, and reproduced
many of them, perhaps in clearer fashion. But until
he ceased to preach, and even retired from his Chair, he
had done little or nothing to show to his contemporaries
the range of his philosophical knowledge, or the pene
tration of his speculative insight. He then expanded,
and put into book-form, his class-lectures on Ethics
and the Philosophy of Religion ; his Types of Ethical
Theory being followed by two other books, A Study of
Religion, and The Seat of Authority. In this late
productiveness as a philosophical author he resembled
Immanuel Kant, whose three great Kritiken were not
published till he was relatively an old man. They had
been thought out and developed in younger days, but
were not sent to press till their author's face was
turned ' towards the sunset.'
Something should be also said as to Martineau's
power as a public speaker. His occasional contributions

JAMES MARTINEAU 111
to debate, at the annual congresses of the religious
Community to which he belonged, were remarkable, and
the deference with which his addresses were received
by those in conference assembled was very striking. I
heard several of them, and it was significant that while
speaker after speaker had addressed the meeting and
produced little effect, listlessness and absenteeism per
haps prevailing, when Martineau rose the members came
back — like the senators in the House of Commons filling
the chamber when a great statesman speaks — and there
was the hushed silence of universal honour and respect,
while the decision ultimately come to usually justified
the view he took.
As to the value of his philosophical work, the ques
tion to be answered is not ' Did he solve the problems he
discussed ? ' but ' How far did he stimulate his contem
poraries, by sowing the seeds of fruitful thought and
lofty endeavour ? ' Very few came into close personal
contact with him without finding that ' virtue went forth
from him ' ; only the penetration of his vision, and the
logical force of his reasoning, were sometimes obscured
by the very magic of his style, its consummate finish and
suggestiveness. I would mention another thing, which
was disclosed in his countenance and whole physiognomy,
a rare combination which impressed everyone who
came within the circle of his influence. It was the air
of personal sadness stamped in the lines and furrows of
his face. He showed an abounding and most contagious
joy, when his countenance was relaxed by humour ; but
even when this feature dominated, it did not eclipse

112 RETROSPECTS
what I can only call a certain awe-strickenness before the
mysteries of the universe, while he clung to a philo
sophic faith in the divine order of the world, and its
universal om lipresent Soul.
Associated with this, and very notable, was his firm
belief in a future life, to succeed the present one of disaster
and failure. His unfaltering hope was the continuation
and expansion of what is now and here so incomplete, the
coming realisation of our blasted mundane ideals. He
felt, and often said to me, that any dimness of sight as to
the future was due not to our difficulty in construing it, or
to the want of evidence for it, but to the veils which so
constantly overhang us, and hide the reality from our
eyes. Starting from the moral and spiritual notion of
man as now evolved, he thought that our latent capacities
of attainment warranted belief in a future where attain
ment would be real.
He also used often to say that the belief in Im nortality
was only one part of a larger whole, viz. the spiritual
interpretation of the universe ; and that it could not
only not be proved, but could not be made intelligible,
to those who had no esoteric vision of the unseen.
I think heredity explains much in Martineau's life,
and work, and tendencies. He was descended on one
side from the old French Huguenot stock, and as he
combined the best traditions of that race with an English
Puritan inheritance, their union was significant. This
perhaps led to a farther practical eclecticism, an unhesi
tating acceptance of the best results of German and
Dutch criticism with a reverent clinging to those things

JAMES MARTINEAU 113
' which cannot be shaken, but remain.' He was so con
structive in his thought and teaching, and so anxious to
get through the sand and have his foot upon the rock,
that a reader of his books often forgets to what school
of thought the writer belonged.
I may not retraverse ground which his biographers
have occupied so well. Anything here is by way of
supplement, as in the case of what is said of Carlyle,
Tennyson, Browning, and Ruskin ; and some things, on
which I could fain enlarge but can only mention, are
not much dealt with in the Life and Letters, e.g. his
growing sympathy in later years with the Anglican
National Establishment as a religious safeguard for the
nation, and with the denominational school system ;
his appreciation of the good work done by those who
laboured in spheres into which he could never enter.
This ripened in him, after the practical failure of a
scheme in which he took a deep interest, viz. the
Federation of the Churches. The multitudinous divisions
of Christendom harassed him, and he thought there
might be some practicable method of common action ;
a modus vivendi et agendi, if not a plan of federation.
He described himself as ' all his life a most unwilling
nonconformist,' and wished the old historic Church of
England so widened as to include many shut out by
its formularies, if only they would come in. Received
within the national Establishment and co-ordinated
there, he thought there might be a new amalgamation of
all the scattered fragments of church-life in the country.

114 RETROSPECTS
He maintained, and reiterated over and over again, that
in the depths of the religious life there are possibilities
of fellowship which our ecclesiastical organisations
disown, and which lie beneath the creeds. One of the
most remarkable of his later essays was one which he
described as a contribution to ' a way out of Trinitarian
controversy.' In that essay he admitted a metaphysical
doctrine of the Trinity, while ethically he was — during
his whole career — closely kindred to its disciples. He
taught that ' in what constitutes the pith and kernel of
both faiths ' (i.e. the Trinitarian and the Unitarian) ' the
two are agreed.' Evidence of this will be found in his
letters published in Inter Amicos, and not only in many
of his discourses, but in the hymnals which he edited,
and the prayer-books which he wrote and published.
It is a pleasant retrospect to recall many relatively
minor traits in his character, his scrupulous accuracy
in all details, and the very finished way in which he
wrote the shortest and smallest of notes, answering an
invitation to dinner or to a walk with the same fastidious
carefulness in handwriting as that in which he composed
his most elaborate books for the press. His library was
always in perfect order ; and even the way in which at
the Polchar he cut up the pages of the Times, and
refolded them before he began to read, was a lesson in
orderliness. In what follows I shall give a series of extracts from
a few of his many letters to me. I omit what were

JAMES MARTINEAU 115
perhaps the most interesting of them all — viz. those he
wrote on receipt of the address presented to him on his
eighty-first birthday — because it was published with the
signatures appended to it in Inter Amicos, and also found
a place in the Life and Letters, edited by Messrs.
Drummond and Upton. ' Dalguise House, near Dunkeld : July 11, 1871.
» * * # #
' I am greatly obliged by the opportunity of read
ing your very interesting and searching article in the
British Quarterly. With its constructive part I find
myself in entire accordance ; unless it be that I should
hesitate, as a matter of form, to treat the apprehension
of God as an immediate intuition. Rather does it seem
to me the necessary interpretation of two or three con
fluent intuitions, — of Causality, of Obligation, and of
Beauty — of which it finds the unity and repose. This is
rather a difference of statement, than of thought ; and
I do not know that there is anything to choose between
the two modes of putting the case. But I fancy that the
recognition of a plurality of sources enables one to give
a better account of the broken lights of faith which gleam
upon us in imperfect religions, short of the vision of the
Living God. In the critical part of your paper you
are a little more thorough-going than I am inclined
to be, in your repudiation of the old Natural Theology ;
but most of the qualifications which I should insert in
the critique come in afterwards in the constructive
exposition.' # # # * # I 2

116 RETROSPECTS
' Bryn Yr Afon, Bont Ddu, Dolgelly : August 21, 1872.
' Your Celtic scholarship will enable you to interpret,
pronounce, and remember the queer address which I
have given above, and at which I shall be found for
more than a month to come. It represents a charming
cottage usually occupied by my friends Miss Lloyd and
Miss Cobbe, but vacated by them on our behalf for a
few weeks this summer. The house stands just half
way between Barmouth and Dolgelly, right in front of
Cader Idris, from which it is separated by the fine
estuary that here inserts itself among the mountains
just like the western seas of Scotland.
# # * # #
' I return with thanks the Glasgow correspondence.
It grieves rather than surprises me. The exposure by
" Quisquis " appears to me amply merited ; and the
subsequent letter by . . . justifies the severest of the
previous criticisms, by advancing a new plea quite at
variance with his previous statement. A more humili
ating self-exposure I do not remember. But it is well
for the world that a man who has not conscience to be
true should fail also to have the sense to be consistent.'
* # # # #
' Bryn Yr Afon, Bont Ddu, Dolgelly : September 23, 1872.
' The breaking up of my few weeks' encampment
here must not take place without my reporting the
movement ; though the moment for plucking up the
tent-pegs, and strewing the ground with baggage for the
start, is not favourable for more than a hasty message.

JAMES MARTINEAU 117
' On Monday, the 30th inst., we rush home and into
harness at once ; the College opening at 9 a.m. on Tuesday,
October 1. I am thankful to say we are all fairly ready
for our season of work, and the unremitting circulation
of interests and duties which makes one comparatively
indifferent to the " skyey influences " ; and certainly the
clouds and storms of the last three weeks have done
their best to discipline us into resignation at parting
with a country of soaked soil, and dripping trees, and
shrouded mountains. Nevertheless, we have found
happy intervals for invading the tops, and exploring the
most picturesque valleys.
# # # * *
' In the presence of a saintly Calvinist, my shrinking
from his theology fills me with misgivings of my own
heart. But a . . . sets me firm on my feet again ; and
if I have ever said a strong thing against his system,
I only wish it had been stronger. . . . Your statement
seemed to me to be admirable in its terseness and its
selection of essential points, as well as in its spirit ; and
indeed to have no fault but its extreme and severe
brevity.' # * * # #
' 10 Gordon Street, London, W.C. : October 17, 1872.
' For the better economy of such activities as may
still be entrusted to me, it is necessary for me to
reduce my work ; and, as the chief risk lies in strong
excitement, I have resigned my pulpit, and limited my
self for the future to my College work. It is no light
thing thus suddenly to take leave of what has been to

118 RETROSPECTS
me the chief function of life : but my main anxiety is
the congregation which I am constrained to desert.
Composed of elements without any strong principle of
cohesion, and ranging through the theological scale from
the borders of Positivism to conservative Christian
Supernaturalism, it is exposed to peculiar risks of dis
persion ; and I feel no satisfaction in the prospect of
a considerable detachment moving off to the influence
of * * 's negations and * * 's cosmopolitan Pan
theism. As I muse upon the matter, I come round
again and again to the one only thing which, as I
believe, would hold and save these people, and prevent
the virtual sacrifice of their spiritual life : viz. your
removal to London to take charge of them. It is a
daring, and I fear an impracticable, thought. I see all
the difficulty of such a move after so recent a declara
tion of Trinitarian opinion — though not as identified
with Christianity, but only as an afterthought of philo
sophical speculation. I hear beforehand the outcry of
your opponents, that their suspicions are justified. I
anticipate scruples on the part of my own people.
' Nevertheless, beneath all this, the natural affinities
and realities are on the side of such a solution. And if
my people had the magnanimity to rely on these and
offer you a free pulpit, trusting that adequate theological
sympathy would work itself out ; and if you, on the
strength of this unpledged attitude, felt encouragement
to brave reproach, and take a position involving no
retractation and only the engagement to go whither the
truth of God might lead ; it is my sincere persuasion

JAMES MARTINEAU 119
that a work would open before you here more congenial
and of higher character than any which the Free Kirk
can have in reserve for you. You are appointed, I must
think, to draw upwards those who would otherwise have
less faith than you : and your faculties will never move
with their power unhindered till you have to deal with
such an audience. The minor work, of cutting down
the existing creeds to the limits of credibility, and re
conciling people to a tenable level of religion, may be
left to minds of a different cast — and indeed will go on
of itself in these days. I cannot help confessing to you
these private speculations of my own : for I know they
ought to be realised ; though I can hardly hope that
they will. The impossibilities seem to lie thick upon
the surface : the rightness of the thing is deep below.
*****
' I am sorry to find * * harping upon the old string
of " consistency." Consistency is the most trumpery
of virtues ; a tight dress in which you cannot move
till you make it elastic, or get contact with fresh air till
you tear it to rags. But it is the sort of thing which our
Unitarians inflate, and hang up for worship as an idol.'
* * * * *
' 10 Gordon Street, London, W.C. . March 9, 1873.
' After months of silence on my part, when you have
been daily in my thoughts, your welcome letter has at
last brought me to the writing point. To a slow cor
respondent small things serve as an excuse for procras
tination : much more, such great affairs as have recently
found place in your life — and partly in my own — and

120 RETROSPECTS
have made it impossible to overtake the crowd of
arrears. Of your frightful accident in Glasgow I heard
only when the alarm which it awakened was over : and
I restrained my anxiety to learn the particulars, lest
I should make you write when you ought to be quiet.
Your paper in the Contemporary I should have liked to
discuss with you : but when I found that you were to
be hustled for it by a clerical mob, and pulled about by
the hand of a Duke, I was sure you would have enough
to do, without being troubled with my balance-sheet of
scruples and of assents. The question of immediate
moment is not the speculative one, whether the posi
tions you maintain are philosophically unimpeachable ;
but whether the paper is a genuine, truth-loving, and
reverential contribution to the solution of a momentous
problem : and it is unworthy of the Duke of Argyll to
put forth a polemic article against it, without one word
of protest disclaiming all sympathy with the proceed
ings of the Presbytery. Should I have the opportunity
of any conversation with him at the " Metaphysical " on
Tuesday, I shall not shrink from intimating my regret on
this head, at the risk of incurring a rebuff. And I can
not but hope that, at the meeting of Presbytery, you will
think it right to be a little less reticent and forbearing
than hitherto. It seems to me quite possible, without
transgressing the limits of personal calmness and large
charity which you have so admirably kept, to denounce
as monstrous the reference of the deepest questions of
human thought to the authority of petty tribunals
destitute of special competency to decide them. The

JAMES MARTINEAU 121
pretension implied in such a practice, whether sanc
tioned by Church law or not, is so intolerable that no
man of high conscience and active intellect can submit
to it : to do so would be to renounce the essential con
ditions of any noble or even faithful spiritual life.
'If this be so, why not dispute, in limine, the
jurisdiction of the Presbytery, and refuse to go into
defence of the theory of the paper — as if an error there
would render you properly liable to judgment ? There
cannot be a right to discuss without a right to go
wrong : and to visit error with penal consequences is to
proclaim the reign of obscurantism again. ... I shall
be surprised if this week you do not discover that the
Free Kirk has no hole, round or square, which you can
occupy without splitting the whole framework, or else
suffering torture yourself.
' I have been storing up a few Hymn-book questions,
to be referred to you : and if you can help by answering
them, I shall be greatly obliged. (1) Whence did you
obtain the seventy-ninth of your hymns, and where is
the MS. of the fifteenth century to be found ? (2) What
sort of person is Dr. Bonar of Kelso ? If I write for
permission to use some of his hymns in my new volume,
is he likely to raise difficulties ? and could I approach
him circuitously better than by direct application?
(3) Can you advise me in like manner, with regard to
the following hymn-writers in Scotland ? — Mrs. Jane
Cross Simpson, Edinburgh ; Rev. Dr. Alexander S.
Patterson, Glasgow ; Miss Jane Borthwick (known as
H. L. L.) ; Rev. Dr. William Lindsay Alexander,

122 RETROSPECTS
Edinburgh (Independent) ; of none of these have I the
addresses. Hitherto, everyone has been most obliging :
and I have had no refusal, even when from Anglican
clergymen I have asked permission to change the
address of a hymn from Christ to the Father. But
somehow I am more afraid of the Scottish spirit, and
should like to present my petition in the best way. I
have been applying myself diligently to my compilation,
and the text is now all but ready.'

' 10 Gordon Street, London, W.C. : January 31, 1874.
' I do not in general admire the theological " free
lances," who, like George Dawson and Cranbrook, will
join no army of assault on the powers of darkness, but
roam the field in a desultory skirmish of self-will. The
isolation is hurtful to most natures, and tends to produce
a moral narrowness and eccentricity in the followers if not
in the leader. I know you think me hard on these broad
churchmen. Intellectually, I am at one with them ;
personally, they win me ; but morally, they perplex me.
The riddle was not solved for me by two or three delight
ful days which, with my daughters Gertrude and Edith,
I spent with the Master of Balliol a few weeks ago ; ex
cept indeed that I find the key to his interpretation of all
religious doctrine in a certain Hegelian way of resolving
all " abstractions," so as to take them out of their mutual
contradictions. The misfortune is that the truth which
is thus saved out of old formulas is not the old truth,
but something compatible with what the old truth denied ;

JAMES MARTINEAU 123
and the old formula is a mere husk turned inside out,
the continued and solemn preservation of which appears
to me a mockery. However, be the secret logic of
Jowett's mind what it may, he is one of the wisest and
most attractive of men, and his influence on the young
men of Balliol is in all respects noble and elevating.
He is introducing the practice of personally preaching
in chapel once a month ; rather to the annoyance, I be
lieve, of other Heads of Houses who do not trouble
themselves with any such superfluous duty. It seems
amazing that so natural a means of high influence
should have fallen into utter neglect. This visit to
Oxford made me more aware than ever before of my
privations as a Nonconformist.'
' 10 Gordon Street, London, W.C. : February 2, 1874.
*****
' Mr. Goldwin Smith, who spent a few hours with
me the other day, is much struck, on returning to
this country, with the enormous spread of absolute and
aggressive atheism among the educated English, as
well as the general disintegration of religious belief
throughout a still wider stratum of society less dogma
tically disposed ; and he insists strongly on the impor
tance of presenting the " grounds of Natural Religion "
in a persuasive and reasonable way to the minds of
thoughtful and serious people. The place into which
the Bible was forced — and whence it has fallen — being
vacated, historical religion cannot be appealed to again,
till under it is planted the support of a true spiritual

124 RETROSPECTS
philosophy and a tenable interpretation of Nature.
I wish he would carry out the idea himself. No one
could give it better form.'

'Balnespick House, Kincraig, by Kingussie: July 21, 1876.
*****
' The question whether Infinity and Personality
exclude each other requires that, for comparison, the
contents of the two conceptions be laid bare. Till that is
done, the alleged difficulty of uniting them cannot even be
stated with effect, much less removed. Yet both these
tasks are entered on,1 though the idea of Personality is
first submitted to analysis. Of the idea of the Infinite,
it is true, you give two theories on p. 5. But these are
theories of its psychological origin, by addition of
quantities, and by subtraction of limits ; and I do not
perceive the relevance of these when we want to know,
not how we come by the idea, but what it is when we
have it. As neither theory approves itself to me as
satisfactory, a superfluous reference to them has the
effect of embarrassing your thesis with a questionable
doctrine, which, even if true, contributes no strength to
your position.
' The result of trying to put in the strongest form the
difficulty which you attack, before terms for comparison
have been cleared, seems to show itself in the next
paragraph : where a concession appears to me to be
1 This refers to an article contributed to The Contemporary Review
in October 1875, and republished in Studies in Philosophy and Litera
ture, 1879.

JAMES MARTINEAU 125
made from which the argument can never recover ; viz.
that Personality is "a phase" in the Divine nature
which is deemed " highest " only in virtue of our " poverty
of insight," and which is or may be " transcended " by
the "impersonal." I own that to me Theism has
no meaning, if it be not that in God the personal is
transcendent, and that what seems impersonal (the
realm of Nature) is not only subordinate, but illusory in
its apparent distinctness from the personal. If you
consider this " highest " ranking of the personal as a
"figure" of speech, and "poverty of insight," what
better title can you find for inverting the order and
affirming the personal is " transcended," i.e. is not " the
highest " ? Other than personality there may be in the
universe : and it is not perhaps possible, in the last
resort, to dispense with the conception of some second
datum. But the subjugation of this to Living Mind is
surely the condition of every religious interpretation of
the world.
' If I mistake not, you wrote this passage tacitly
assuming that "finite form " is involved in personality.
Withdraw this concession, and nothing remains to show
that " the vast," " the infinite," cannot readily be
conceived as personal. Had the exact contents of the
conception of Personality been first laid out, I hardly
think you would have granted so much to your
opponent. And so, when you disclaim resort to the
entire constitution of our own nature as interpreter of
the Divine, is not the disclaimer superfluous ? Does
anyone ever dream of such interpretation ? Is not the

126 RETROSPECTS
whole question about the essentials of personality in all
minds? This therefore strikes me as the question in
front : and till we reach that part of the Essay, we are
withheld, in spite of our interest as we read, from the
real business of the discussion.
' My reason for being willing to part with the second
passage is somewhat different. The language of these
paragraphs appears to me to underrate the philosophical
certainty of Theism, and to throw it upon " fugitive "
indications for which it will be difficult to secure the
confidence of intellectual men. Nor can I acknowledge
that the constancy of spiritual light tends to reduce its
ideal value and sacredness. Without for a moment
denying the varying gleams of Divine illumination, yet
I hardly think it wise to give them an important
place in a systematic treatment of a question raised
by the sceptical logic of severe thinkers. On the whole
I felt a certain precariousness in these paragraphs.
' So much for the possible omissions. On other
points I find, that wherever my assent hesitates, it is
that I am a more unflinching Dualist than you are dis
posed to be. For instance, from no " ego," Divine any
more than human, can you get rid, so far as I can see,
of the antithetic " non-ego." Of Personality, in which
the subject is not differentiated from another, I can form
no conception. But then, that from which the thinking
subject is marked off need not be an independent or
separate being, but may be but a part or function of the
subject himself : as a man may say, " I think this, but
my hair does not." So an all-comprehending Mind may

JAMES MARTINEAU 127
have a personal life, though in conscious thought and
act differentiated only from parts of Nature, which are
in relation to the organic whole.
' It is very probable, however, that, in my close and
keen interest in the subject and its writer, I may have
read with too vigilant an eye, and overstrained the
purport of particular phrases ; and that in the broader
view of the whole, when it is before me, all my criti
cisms will vanish. Forgive, therefore, my scruples and
queries.' # # * * *
' 5 Gordon Street, London, W.C. : October 18, 1877.
' Too true it is that the verge of limiting darkneBs
which every personal union is always approaching is
close upon my sight, and no lingering steps can detain
me from it long. . . . We can hardly wish to detain
her ' — the mere prisoner of our watchful cares. Mean
while, our simple and sacred duty is to guide her
descending steps over whatever grass and flowers we
can find, and soothe the last embrace with the inward
calm of trust and love. It is but a brief separation ;
the emigrant ship will soon be sent for me too ; and
higher work — as I firmly hope through all the sadnesses
of experience— be found for us together in another
country, even a heavenly. In the interval of trial and
suspense, no sympathy, and no stimulus to persevere in
my appointed tasks, can be more precious to me than
yours. My earlier congenial friends have dropped off,
and left me almost alone ; and I need the more the
1 His wife.

128 RETROSPECTS
support of comparatively recent friendships, and the help
of younger eyes to see the world and human life in the
truest and the freshest light.
' I am thankful, during thiB trying time, for the
necessity of constant lecture-writing. Difficult as it
often is, the interest of it is a wholesome engagement to
my thoughts ; and, by many a sweet breath of truth,
it dissipates the cloud of gathering sorrow.'

' 5 Gordon Street, London, W.C. : November 18, 1878.
' I have a lovers' quarrel to settle with you : for I have
been upbraiding you for running away with me to the
" English Lake District," 1 when I ought to have screwed
myself down to my desk, and listened only to the
stern Daughter of the voice of God.
However, she would only have squeezed out of me some
stifling metaphysics : while you have poured through
me the very breath of the mountains and
the light that never was on sea or land ;
so that in spite of the formal reproaches of my time-
list, I shall thank you from my heart for my stolen
holiday. Your charming volume will be an insepar
able companion of the poet's works, as well as a literary
guide-book to his district. The exactitude and com
pleteness with which you have both tracked his steps
and exhibited the relation between the real and the
1 Tlie English Lake District, as interpreted in the Poems of Words
worth. (D. Douglas, 1878.)

JAMES MARTINEAU 129
ideal in his local allusions, fill me with admiration.
The only thing I regret in regard to the book is that
anything has been omitted from the Lecture at the
end. I have read no estimate of Wordsworth that
reproduces so entirely my own feeling respecting him as
your concluding pages.
* * a * *
' Your approval of my Lecture l is very comforting
to me. I know well that, in the present temper of
men's minds, its protest is uttered in vain. But
behind the clouds the sun remains, and shines ; and
though the great world may forget it, it is worth while
to keep the hope alive, in some poor shivering souls,
that ere long it will burst forth again in all its glory.'

' The Polchar, "Rothiemurchus, Aviemore : August 25, 1879.
' Though I always shrink from saying the decisive
word, I must not visit my own suspensive moods upon
your undertaking, but must force myself to a resolve,
and brush my hesitations away. I will do my best
with Spinoza, and if my life and powers of work are
prolonged, the task shall be finished within the two
years which you allow me. But you will not forget
the uncertainties of old age. I am surprised that you
venture to encounter them.
' I have now got together most of the books which
I wanted to examine. But I have not done more than
glance at them yet ; wishing to clear off, in the first
Ideal Substitutes for Ood, 1878.
I. E

130 RETROSPECTS
place, another task which pressed for completion.
With September I hope to open the Spinoza literature.'

' 5 Gordon Street, London, W.C. : December 17, 1879.
*****
' Nor did I know, till yesterday, that Frederick
Pollock's articles on Spinoza are but pilot balloons to an
important volume from him on the great Pantheistic
philosopher. The two facts together go far to dash my
zeal and depress my work, and leave me in a mood
anything but favourable to its acceleration. Pollock is
master of the subject, and I ought not to mind being
eclipsed by his completer book : but my smaller task
would have had a better chance of serving a useful end,
had it been differently timed.
' At the present stage of my studies I find it im
possible to give any pledge about completing the volume
within 1880. As I mean to divide the results of my
reading and reflection between the volume and my
Ethical Lectures, I am obliged to get the entire materials
under my eye, for right distribution, before I write a
word : and as the literature of the subject has become
vast, it is this preliminary study which holds back my
hand, and which I find it as yet impossible to measure
by weeks or months. If I could get through my reading
and planning by the end of May, I think I could write
what I have to say during the summer and autumn in
Scotland, health permitting ; but it is too early for me

JAMES MARTINEAU 131
to promise more than an honest effort to bring the work
within these limits.'

' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : December 9, 1880.
*****
' Of the book itself I have not yet written a word.
But, with the exception of Pollock's book— now on my
table — I have read and digested all the related literature
that I wish to consult ; and have reduced my own notes
— themselves more than the volume in bulk — to a
systematic table of contents — on the scale of about
fifty pages — the expansion of which will constitute the
book. To compress adequately will be my difficulty ;
but by copious excision of critical matter I hope to
conform to the limits prescribed.'
***** ' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : Maroh 7, 1881.
' I am very unwilling to add to your editorial troubles ;
but am obliged to submit to you a question which my
Spinoza work renders urgent. In my anxiety to do
my task with thoroughness, I have gathered a large
mass of materials, and by repeated reflections upon
them brought them into a rational order of exposition.
But on writing them out into the full text, I find that I
have been operating on too large a scale, and cannot
possibly bring in what I have to say without exceeding
the prescribed limits. The biography alone (which I
have just completed) will require a hundred pages ; and
I do not see how to cut it down without destroying any
interest it may have. Then, it is impossible to go
K 2

132 RETROSPECTS
straight into Spinoza's metaphysics, without expounding
the logic of his method. There follow his Physics, his
Ethics, his Politics, his relations to Theology, all of
which, instead of being (as they affect to be) mere
deducibles from his metaphysics, involve independent
theories, which must be exhibited. No amount of com
pression can bring all this into a readable volume of
the series, even were there no biography. And yet the
whole forms so organic a system of thought, that
omission becomes mutilation.
' After turning the matter over every way, I have
made up my mind to ask whether I may make two
volumes of Spinoza, instead of one.'
***** ' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : March 24, 1881.
' I have foolishly undertaken an impossible task,
which is not rendered more feasible by the incon
venience of modifying its conditions. It cannot be
denied that the application of one hard-and-fast measure
to the exposition of all philosophies alike, without regard
to their differences in originality and range, is recom
mended by nothing but mechanical and mercantile sim
plicity. The men who, like Locke, Hume, and Berkeley,
are representatives of essentially the same doctrine in
different generations, cannot need the large canvas
required for unique figures — Spinoza, Kant, Hegel —
originators of new moulds of thought and an entire
dialect foreign to common use. . . .

JAMES MARTINEAU 133
'I think it would be a pity to spoil the series
by enforcing an inflexible measure upon variable
material. . . .'
' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : November 23, 1881.
' I have now my Spinoza MS. in readiness, and
only wait for your instructions to forward it. ... I
have exhausted my means of reducing it. So that, if
the publishers decline to take it as it stands, I see
nothing possible to me, except to withdraw the bio
graphy altogether, and bring the volume out as a bare
analysis of doctrine. In that case, I should, on my own
account, add another volume, containing the Life, with
the matter which I have not introduced, viz. the notice
of Spinoza's biblical and historical criticism ; and the
discussion of the supposed sources of his philosophy,
and of its influence on European thought. But I had
much rather not be driven to this, which would impair
seriously the interest of the earlier volume, though
providing (if I live to carry it out) for a much more
complete total at last.'
***** ' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : December 5, 1881.
*****
' The fact of Pollock's book having so recently ap
peared makes it especially undesirable to render the
range of the volume less comprehensive than his, except
in regard to matter extraneous to Spinoza (such as the
prior sources and subsequent workings of his philo
sophy).

134 RETROSPECTS
' Finding that the Wolfenbiittel portrait is really a
fine one, I have obtained permission to have it photo
graphed. . . . Heinemann says that this portrait is the
original of the engraving in the Posthumous Works,
1677, which Pollock has reproduced ; but that engraving,
he says, utterly fails to give the least idea of the beauty
of the original. . . .'

' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : January 30, 1882.
*****
'Messrs. Blackwood do not appear to see that the
appearance of Pollock's book altered essentially the
conditions of my problem after I had undertaken it. It
was impossible to follow so thorough a book with a
brief attempt (necessarily futile) to popularise the most
abstruse of philosophies. The volume would have been
without excuse, unless, by careful treatment, it earned
some character of its own.
' After all, the publishers' objection resolves itself, in
the last resort, into a question of cost. Well then ; why
should not the following proposal relieve their difficulty ?
Let me bear the outlay for compositors' work, press-
work, and paper, for (say) 70 pages (beyond the 250
which they sanctioned) : the amount being deducted
from the sum they would otherwise pay me. If they
did not overestimate this deduction, and agreed with me
beforehand what it should be, I had rather consent to
this than cut the book down. The selling price would
then be the same as that of the other volumes. This

JAMES MARTINEAU 135
would be preferable to offering the public a bale of
damaged goods after an indefinite delay. . . .'

' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : April 17, 1882.
*****
'Green's death is a grave sorrow to me. No
philosophical thinker of our time seemed to me so
thorough and so large, though I could never go with
him into his " Hegelian " formulas. I always hoped that,
working in the line of " Moral " philosophy, he would
emerge from them, especially with the aid of his strong
religious feeling. . . .'
* * * # #
' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : April 2, 1885.
*****
' It is inevitable that, on a book x — which so
variously runs counter to the dominant influences of
the time — batteries should open, and expose the structure
of its doctrine to the severest strain. It is a happy
thing, with these theoretic wounds, that, the more one
is hit, the more is one healed : for, if an error is
knocked out, one is healthier than before.'

' The Polchar, Kothiemurohus, Aviemore : September 19, 1888.
*****
' These Church Subjects, I confess, though always
attracting me, fill me with despondency. The reading
of your good Bishop's Charge, with the Lambeth
Conference proposals of which it treats, sinks me into
1 Referring to his Types of Ethical Theory.

136 RETROSPECTS
despair of all ecclesiastical Christianity : so hopelessly
vast is the gulf between the whole instituted scheme of
thought involved in it, and the real Truth, Beauty, and
Goodness secreted within the Religion of Christ. In the
selection which Authority has made from the mixed
elements inevitable in every historical product, the
Transient seem to have been seized upon for consecra
tion and enforcement, and the Eternal for suppression
and contempt. How any one who has acquaintance with
the present stage reached by Biblical and Historical
criticism, can bear the puerilities and unrealities of
ecclesiastical discussion, I cannot understand. The
nearest to the mind of Christ appear to me to be among
the people who believe the least of these things, and,
were they only swept away, would build in a trice a
spiritual Temple not made with hands. Yet I never
feel thus iconoclastic, except when I read, or hear, the
lucubrations of Church Conferences and Synods. It
was well for me that, from my residence here, I was
unable to attend the London meeting of Nonconformist
Ministers with the Bishops, who were experimenting on
the possibility of union. If I had not met the fate of
Stephen, it would have been only because words are not
stones.' *****
' Gallants Court, East Farleigh, near Maidstone : April 24, 1889.
' In all my budget of friendly greetings that followed
me hither on Monday last, ' there were no good wishes
more precious to me than yours. They are the kind of
1 His birthday

JAMES MARTINEAU 137
treasure which make life still dear to me : and while
they last, old age can never lose its brightness. How
I wish that you could have realised my dream of
having you and yours for our neighbours this summer !
The stimulus of talk on the great topics which are
supreme, is all that I need to help and quicken me in
the work which still engages me ; work, in which I am
apt to flag through self-distrust, and the failure of hope
incident to solitary labour. It is so hard for waning
faculty to detect its own decline, that I am ever in
dread of self-deception, lest I should be going on too
long, and growing garrulous when I should be silent. . . .
'Will it fall in your way, I wonder, to study and
criticise the curious type of vague or semi-theism which
comes out in Nettleship's life of Thomas Hill Green, in
vol. 3 of the collected works? It reveals a state of
mind which I suspect to be very prevalent, but which
can never set into any form of permanent influence. It
is either the last faint streak of a dissolving nebula, or
the first visible undulation of an ethereal medium that
must condense into a central sun.
' I had intended to send you a copy of our protest
against taking Manchester New College to Oxford ; but
I fear it has been forgotten. It has been in vain : but
though the verdict is against us, I will still forward you a
copy, as an evidence that the opposition has not been idle.'
* * * * *
'35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : November 27, 1889.
' I have always regretted that I have twice been
disappointed of an expected opportunity of making

138 RETROSPECTS
personal acquaintance with the Bishop of Ripon ; — once,
when he was prevented by a summons to his diocese
from fulfilling an intention to call upon me, and talk
over the very paper about which you now mquire ; and
again at the late Mrs. Carpenter's. The first of these
occasions arose from my having sent him the paper
to which you refer, and his having written me a letter
on the subject, which was to have a conversational P.S.
' I have written no article in the Contemporary other
than what afterwards appeared in pamphlet form, under
the title of The National Church as a Federal Union.
In case you should wish to refer him to this, I have asked
Mr. Macdonald, Secretary of the National Church Associa
tion, to send you a copy or two. Were it to come from me,
it might seem like a reminder of his omission. I know
how good and interesting a man he is : and it was my
admiration and respect for him that induced me to let
him know of our movement. His brother also, whom
I slightly know, is one of the best of our London clergy.
' I am very glad to hear of the commencement you
have made of a short Morning Service at your Univer
sity.1 With the conditions which you attach to it,— of
its being voluntary, and catholic — it cannot but add a
consecrating character to the corporate bond.'
# * * * #
' The Polchar, Rothiemurchus, Aviemore : Ootober 10, 1890.
'Was ever a poor weak will assailed by such a
shower of killing hits as you direct upon mine ? A
1 The experiment of a daily service, from 8.45 to 9 o'clock, in the
College chapel of St. Salvator's.

JAMES MARTINEAU 139
perfect mitrailleuse of persuasive pleas before which, it
would seem, everything must go down. To be under
your own roof again — to see and hear the " long-desired "
Edward Caird, as well as the other honoured guests
whom you propose to bring together, — what more en
ticing group of privileges could be devised to play upon
me ? And yet I must harden myself against them all,
though well aware that such opportunity can never
occur again. . . . Moreover, though I am not unmindful
of Cicero's advice — " resistendum est senectuti " — I can
not hide from myself that I am but an unworthy intruder
now (perhaps always was, had I known myself as well)
upon the " colloquies of the gods," and am in my proper
place only at home among my people and at my study-
desk. ' Do not think me ungrateful, but lay my refusal on
Anno Domini, not on my will. With heartiest thanks
and regrets, I remain, always.'
***** ' The Polchar, Rothiemurchus, Aviemore : July 13, 1891.
*****
' I am reading with much interest a remarkable
book on the Philosophy of Religion by the French
Professor Sabatier, lent me by Dr. Reith, the Free-
Kirk Professor and Minister at Glasgow. Sabatier is
the Dean of the Faculty of Protestant Theology in the
College de France. His theology is a peculiar mixture
of free -thinking criticism with reverence for the religion
of Christ, as the supreme point as yet reached of human
thought on Divine things. The position indicates a

140 RETROSPECTS
considerable change in French Protestantism since the
time of Guizot.'

' The Polchar, Rothiemurchus, Aviemore : October 30, 1892.
' I had not the privilege, which the Times assigned
to me, of joining in the solemn tribute of honour to
Tennyson in the Abbey. . . . For me, no lapsed life
carries so large a portion of the retreating age away.
' All this summer . . many a time have I turned a
longing eye upon the Larig pass,1 and wondered whether
you were looking down upon our forest roads. The
season has not abounded in tempting opportunities for
so venturesome a walk ; and I am sure that any enter
prise about which you could feel a doubt is better left
untried. ' I half reproach myself for an exceptionally unfruit
ful summer. The week in Dublin was profoundly
interesting to me on all accounts, private and public.
In going through it, I felt as if I were completing my
appointed lot, and winding off its latest thread at the
very point of its first attachment. The visit, however,
to Lord Rosse's and the great telescope was a new, and
most interesting episode.'

' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : November 20, 1893.
' Your benevolent desire to introduce me to Edward
Caird has my warmest thanks,— the more cordial because
1 I was living at Braemar, whence a traok leads across to Aviemore.

JAMES MARTINEAU 141
I am well aware that the privilege and gain must be all
upon my side. And though I do not think I am too old
to learn, I am conscious of having no longer— even if
I ever had — any return to make to a friend that has
patience to bear with me, and teach me. On this side
alone have I any hesitation in giving an eager response
to your suggestion ; for I need not say to you that no
philosophical difference can in the slightest degree chill
my admiration for the nobleness and brilliancy of E. C.'s
personality. But it strikes me that for some time he
will have enough to do in effecting so great a change as
the initiation into the duties of his new office, without
needless accessories. Though Balliol can never again
be to me what it has been in past years, I shall now
and then be in Oxford, and shall most thankfully be
armed with a better title than my personal name-card
to call at the old door on the new Master, if you will let
me send in also a few lines from yourself. . . .'

' 35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. . May 12, 1895.
' It would indeed be pleasant could I, on looking
back over my long years of opportunity, appropriate
even in small measure your far too appreciative estimate.
Rather must I side with the critics who tell me that,
instead of guiding others, I have always been disturbing
them. The mere record of my own personal changes of
theological conviction, and the withdrawal by myself of
certain early publications from reproduction, seem to
make good the charge of instability. The only answer

142 RETROSPECTS
I can make itself includes an acknowledgment of the
impeachment ; viz. that what has been relinquished is
historical tradition, which partially crumbles away under
the skilled search for its foundation ; while what has
been retained is the living and present relation, wit
nessed by consciousness itself, between the human spirit
and the Divine — and when once known there, re-found
and recognised in its perfection — under the unique per
sonality of " Christ, our Head." The substitution, in
short, of Religion at first-hand, straight out of the
immediate interaction between the soul and God, for
Religion at second-hand, fetched, by copying out of
anonymous traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean
eighteen centuries ago, has been the really directing
though hardly conscious aim of my responsible years of
life. So far as it is one-sided, it will doubtless be
corrected, and supplemented by teachers of wider and
deeper vision. I thank God if it has been entrusted to
me with any function serviceable for the needs of its day.'

'35 Gordon Square, London, W.C. : April 25, 1896.
' The lapse of four days does not suffice to render my
heart's thanks for your birthday blessing a single degree
less warm ; nor do I believe that they will receive,
through the delay, a less kindly welcome. I have had
at times some fear of outliving the patience of my friends.
But thus far, even into this tenth decade, I have ex
perienced nothing but their forbearance and supporting
affection. I owe much, I believe, to the happy privilege

JAMES MARTINEAU 143
of having, through nearly eight out of my ten decades,
been — as a teacher — continuously in contact with the
young, and kept in sympathy with the developing
thought and feeling of almost three generations. No
man can have less excuse for falling out of touch with
the living movements, and problems, of his latest time.
It would be nothing less than a heinous sin in me to
become superannuated ! Yet such assuredly I am, in
the eyes of our agnostics and positivists.'

144 RETROSPECTS

ARTHUR STANLEY
I first met Dean Stanley at Mr. Erskine's house,
Linlathen, Forfarshire, in 1869, while I was resident in
Dundee. The contrast and the affinity between host
and guest in that delightful home were alike remarkable.
I have already referred to Mr. Erskine in writing of
Carlyle and of Maurice. Perhaps his characteristics
came out more remarkably when Stanley was his
guest. The Dean had wider sympathy, a broader and
more complex range of view ; Erskine the deeper and
more penetrating vision. Stanley was far more radiant,
versatile, many-sided, humorous ; but in some respects
Erskine was more elevated, calm, and saintly. Their
deep appreciation of each other, with differences
recognised but not accentuated, struck all who heard
them converse together. Mr. Erskine was one of the
most gentle and unassuming of men, while valiant in
proclaiming what he held to be right. In another
volume I have written down a few reminiscences of him,1
and others have done so to greater purpose.2 It was
1 In Some Nineteenth Century Scotsmen (1903), pp. 177-191.
2 See Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, by William Hanna
(1877) ; Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, by Principal Shairp (1886) ;

ARTHUR STANLEY 145
when entertaining his friends in that kindly home in the
North that all the finest features of his character were
disclosed. Latterly there was a strange sadness in his
countenance, the outcome of long pondering on the
' riddle of the painful earth ' and the transitoriness of
life. He seemed to realise increasingly that while ' in
the world '—and with plenty of work to do in it — he was
' not of it ' ; but only a transient visitant in a place into
which he had come for education, rather than enjoyment.
He had to live that each to-morrow
Found him farther than to-day
on the roadway of experience ; while his successive homes
were but caravansaries at which he halted for the night.
The departure of his old friends gave him an increasing
sense of solitude. Even so far back as 1855, long before
I knew him and when he was sixty-seven years of age, he
wrote to Mrs. Russell Gurney : ' My contemporaries are
dead, and the friends I see about me do not remember
what I remember. We have, however, a great common
future, and one common nature.'
These reminiscences of his friend, which have called
me away from Dean Stanley, are justifiable by the
closeness of the tie which united the two men.
In the autumn of 1870, a copy of Dr. Duncan's
Colloquia Peripatetica had been sent to him by a
common friend, which he acknowledged in the following
letter :
Erskine of Linlathen, Selections and Biography, by H. F. Henderson
(1899) ; and Letters of Amelia Russell Gurney (1903).
I. L

146 RETROSPECTS
' Megginch, Errol : August 20, 1870.
' My dear Dr. Watson, — On going into Perth yesterday
I tried to get Colloquia Peripatetica, and found that
the last copy had just been sold. I was therefore doubly
grateful to you for your welcome gift.
' I have read it through with the greatest interest,
and should much like to see the author when he is next
in London. ' It is certainly a very unusual collection of learning
of various sorts and of original remarks ; nothing quite
like it is known to me. Many of the dicta, so tersely
put, embody a rare amount of wisdom ; while the in
cisive judgments on philosophical, religious, and theo
logical, as well as literary problems, are valuable alike
when we agree and when we differ. The presence of
such a man in one of the Scots theological colleges
must have been a real education to the students.
' It is perhaps characteristic that, in spite of the
numerous changes, and the wide sympathies of Dr.
Duncan, there is — as far as I can see — but one passage
expressing the slightest diffidence, or hesitation, as to
the positive certainty of the opinions at which he had
arrived. ' There are two observations which he makes about
the Church of Scotland, which are to me perfectly true :
one, that all Christendom is presbyterian at every ordi
nation ; the other, that the divisions in Scotland are not
of sects, but of parties.
' Who was the V.V. that maintained (not altogether
unsuccessfully) so long an argument with him ?

ARTHUR STANLEY 147
' I trust we shall meet again at Westminster.
' I am glad that my detention here gave me the oppor
tunity of hearing two excellent sermons from Mr. Barclay.
' Yours sincerely, ' A. P. Stanley.'
Dean Stanley had an intense and abiding love for
St. Andrews, for the city and its surroundings, for the
University and its traditions. His historical eye, and
his fondness for parallels, led him to speak of it as the
Oxford of Scotland. When Lord Rector of the University
he delivered two noble addresses to its students, and
preached to them both in the college chapel of St. Sal-
vator's and in the parish church. In his first rectorial
address he described the ruined cathedral thus :
' This temple, as another Minerva, planted as on
another storm-vexed cape of Sunium, this secluded
sanctuary of ancient wisdom — with the foam-flakes of
the Northern Ocean driving through its streets, with the
skeleton of its antique magnificence lifting up its gaunt
arms into the sky — still carries on the traditions of its
first beginnings. Two voices sound through it. One
is of the sea, one of the cathedral — " each a mighty
voice " ; two inner corresponding voices also, which in
any Institution that has endured and deserves to endure,
must be heard in unison, the voice of a potent past, and
the voice of an invigorating future.'
This, and other descriptions in prose by the Dean,
are as fine in their way as is Andrew Lang's Alma
Matres in verse. As a conversationalist, Stanley was
at his very best whenever he spoke of St. Andrews. I 2

148 RETROSPECTS
I remember how Frederick W. Faber's sonnet entitled
' Aged Cities ' was once read in his hearing, and he im
mediately said, 'That thirteenth line applies to your
own St. Andrews. It " carries age so nobly in its look." '
Since his remark connects Oxford with St. Andrews, the
sonnet may be quoted in full :
I have known cities with the strong-armed Ehine
Clasping their mouldered quays in lordly sweep ;
And lingered where the Main's low waters shine
Through Styrian Frankfort ; and been fain to weep
'Mid the green cliffs where pale Mosella laves
That Roman sepulchre, imperial Treves.
Ghent boasts her street, and Bruges her moonlit square ;
And holy Mechlin, Borne of Flanders, stands
Like a queen -mother, on her spacious lands ;
And Antwerp shoots her glowing spire in air.
Yet have I seen no place, by inland brook,
Hill-top, or plain, or trim arcaded bowers,
That carries age so nobly in its look
As Oxford with the sun upon her towers.
The way in which Stanley instinctively seized upon
the genius loci, and read the past history of the Cathedral
and the University while walking in the streets of
The little city old and grey,
was very characteristic. I remember once crossing
Westminster Bridge with him coming from Lambeth,
and remarking on the fascination of the Thames (it was
flood-tide, and the river suggested Mr. Wyllie's picture
of the 'Highway of the Nations'). He replied, 'It's
nothing to what you have in the North, continually
before your eyes.' He did not seem to enjoy any scene
unless when it was lit up to him by the historical imagi-

ARTHUR STANLEY 149
nation, unless some pathos was brought into it from
the distant past, its old incidents made to live again in a
posthumous manner. Strolling with him on the historic
Links, he did not care to watch a game of golf ; and he
would not have appreciated a remark made to me by
Charles Reade, the novelist, when he came to the Club
house and sauntered out to the second hole, ' This is just
"linked sweetness long drawn out." ' When the Dean
walked there, his mind was at once busied with the past,
with what had happened between St. Andrews and
Guard-bridge, or the assassination on Magus Moor.
Nor can one forget his wonderfully gracious tact as a
guide within his own Abbey, the joy it gave him to
pioneer not only earnest students of English history,
but also ignorant or half-instructed crowds of working-
men and women, on holiday-afternoons, through its
sacred precincts. It was an education to accompany
him when he had a few sympathetic friends, or strangers
from other lands, and spoke to them of the life and
work of the wondrous dead who now lie in the abbey of
which he was the official custodian ; but these hours
with the working classes were even more instructive. If
anyone knew the history of England — as recorded in that
monumental shrine— better than he did, certainly no one
ever unfolded it in a more luminous, picturesque, or
graphic manner ; and walks and talks with him in the
aisles, the transepts, the choir of the Abbey remain a
joyous possession to many.
I remember being with him when he was con
ducting the members of the Old Testament Revision

150 RETROSPECTS
Committee one autumn afternoon from Henry VII.'s
Chapel up the stairs behind the choir, while the sunset
streamed through the western window, and lit up the
nave of the Church with a glory peculiarly its own. He
was telling us much of the architecture, when a sudden
shade of light irradiated it ; and, after a brief silence
which was instinctive, the Bishop of Ely, Dr. Harold
Browne, exclaimed : ' This is the finest sight in England ;
and Ely Cathedral is the second.'
Dean Stanley's constant intercourse with so many
minds, both lay and clerical, of every different type — in
Church and State alike — gave him a sympathy with many
whose opinions he could not adopt, that was almost
unrivalled. Theologically and ecclesiastically he was
perhaps the widest-minded man of his age. He was
almost equally attracted by the character and person
ality of the High Anglican and Roman sections of his
contemporaries — Newman, Ward, and Faber — and by
those of his teacher Arnold, Julius Hare, and John
Sterling. He admired and extolled the work done by
illustrious Nonconformists, quite as much as that
accomplished by the divines of the Church by law
established. When he came to Scotland it used often
to be remarked that he knew more about its ecclesiastical
divisions, and minor sects, than any of the divines he met.
But his sympathies ranged out far beyond the Church,
of which he was so illustrious a representative. They
became more and more cosmopolitan as time went on.
They were with the archaic and the modern, with the
classical, the historical, the scientific and artistic, with

ARTHUR STANLEY 151
the political, social, and national. His desire was to
make the Abbey more and more distinguished as the
resting-place of the ashes of the great, in every sphere
of noble action and fruitful achievement ; that it should
be the material counterpart of ' the choir invisible ' of all
who had lived for the true, the beautiful, and the good.
When the memorial statue of Wordsworth was
erected in the Baptistery, he was greatly interested in
the inscription which should be placed beneath it. The
sculpture was the work of Frederick Thrupp. On the
western side of the same enclosure there are busts of
Keble and Dr. Arnold, (which are fairly good), of Maurice
Kingsley and Matthew Arnold, (which are not good), and
there are windows put in by Mrs. Child of Boston, in
memory of George Herbert and William Cowper ; but
the Wordsworth statue is by far the most interesting
memorial in that historic spot. Thinking of the best
inscription to be carved beneath it, Stanley consulted,
amongst others, his friend Principal Shairp. Without
a moment's hesitation Shairp replied, ' Let it be the
poet's own lines,
Blessings be with them and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares,
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays ! '
And these lines are inscribed on the pedestal.
The Dean's Lectures on the History of the Jewish
Church is the book by which, perhaps, he will be longest
known. In connection with it, a small thing may be
mentioned, because of the interest it gave to some guests

152 RETROSPECTS
at Megginch in the autumn of 1877. In the forty-fifth
lecture — which is on Malachi, and the close of the Roman
period — after tracing the relations of the Jewish Church
to the Gentile World, and glancing at Zoroaster Confucius
and Buddha, noting the contact of the first of them and
the aloofness of the other two from the Hebrew World,
the lecturer refers to the coming blank of three centuries
of which in Palestine we know almost nothing. Yet not
the less the hour had come when an influence more
penetrating was about to burst upon the development
of the Jewish Church, and almost contemporary with
the last of the Hebrew seers arose the earliest prophets
of the European world. They had been looking to the
East, and thence receiving light ; but it had ceased to
shine. Was there any hope of its now appearing in the
West ? The Dean quotes the lines of Clough,
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
And the next lecture is devoted to Socrates.
These lectures on the Jewish Church are a triumphant
vindication of the historical method of inquiry in the
domain of Religion, and they have not yet done perhaps
all the service they are destined to do in the re-forma
tion of opinion, advancing with such rapid strides.
Stanley repeatedly and very earnestly asserted the
impossibility of a literal subscription to any articles of
belief. We often talked on this subject. Unless every
mind was identical with every other mind in faculty, in

ARTHUR STANLEY 153
the balance of its powers and methods of apprehension,
similarity in opinion was no more possible than identity
in feeling ; and if opinion and feeling necessarily vary
in each man, woman, and child, how can they put the
same interpretation on the Creeds, or on those Scriptures
from which the former are derived? If identity of
opinion were sought, the Church would be narrowed down
to the individual. He enjoyed the story of the rigidly
orthodox Highland woman, to whom her minister said,
* You'll be thinking that there's naebody soond, and safe,
but you and your gude man,' and who at once replied,
'Ah, but I'm na sae sure o' Geordie.' His supreme
desire was that the Church should be an inclusive — not
an exclusive — society ; that it should embrace and
tolerate within it every genuine type of religious thought,
with all the varied phases of character which were the
product of devout aspiration.
Many admirable things have been written or told of the
Dean's humour, and his appreciation of the humorous
side of life. Two which I heard from him I may repro
duce. Coming once from Methven to Megginch alone,
about the 12th of August, and having to pass through the
station of Perth — at that time of year always crowded
— many were lamenting the loss of luggage. An old
widowed Scots woman in particular was remonstrating,
gesticulating, and abusing the officials. The Dean tried
to console her with the hope that she would recover her
lost property. 'Ey Sir, meenister,' she said (seeing
he was a clergyman), ' I can stand ony pairtins, but
pairtin wi' ma baggage.'

154 RETROSPECTS
On another occasion he was journeying in the same
neighbourhood, when two fellow-passengers in his car
riage, ignorant of who he was, began to abuse the heretical
and latitudinarian Dean, unstinting in their denuncia
tions. When he reached his station, and was about to
walk to a carriage in waiting, he suddenly remembered
that he had left his umbrella in the train and returned
for it, when the passenger who had used so many bad
words about him had taken it up, and found the name
(the Dean of Westminster) on the handle. He apolo
gized profoundly, and said that he did not know who it
was who was travelling with him. ' Never mind,' said
the Dean. ' You have given me a good deal to think
about, and I am much obliged to you.'
Another of the minor but not trivial things worth
recording is that Dean Stanley was never known to lose
his temper with either friend or foe, with disputant
or antagonist, or anyone whose casual acquaintance
he made. The genial radiance of that sunny tempera
ment of his, the brightness of his clear-souled sym
pathetic vision, made loss of temper as impossible to
him as the existence of envy or vanity. He was always,
and to all alike, a ' shining visitant.'
When in Scotland the Dean gave proof of his
catholicity by preaching in many of the Presbyterian
parish churches, in Greyfriars, Edinburgh, Roseneath,
Errol, and Dundee, as well as St. Andrews. In July
1874 I received a letter from him in reply to one
returning a misdirected letter which had reached me
by mistake.

ARTHUR STANLEY 155
' Deanery, Westminster.
'I am very glad that the mistaken address of my
letter took it to you, as it has elicited so interesting a
letter. I have followed your career with unabated atten
tion and pleasure ; and, much as I could have wished
for ourselves that you had cast your lot on this side the
Tweed, I fully appreciate, and entirely commend, your
motives in remaining where you are, and shall certainly
hope to accept your kind invitation to preach in your
Church.' Later on, March 5, 1875, he wrote as follows : —
' Owing to the collision between * * and the Bishop
of London, which you may have seen noticed in the news
papers, they agreed to make an amicable reference of a
joint case for a legal decision on the lawfulness of Church
of England clergy preaching in Nonconformist chapels.
In order to get the whole question put on its widest
basis, the point was also submitted as to our preaching
in the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland. I have
hardly a doubt that, as regards the latter case, the legal
opinion will be favourable : and also, if the opinion is
not yet pronounced I should act as heretofore. But,
ex abundanti cautela, I think it right to say that, should
the opinion be adverse, I will not preach.'
Knowing that he was to be at St. Andrews delivering
an address as Lord Rector, I asked him in January 1875
to come to Dundee, and speak to our newly formed
University Club in that city. He gladly acquiesced ;
and, as the time approached, fixed the 2nd of April for

156 RETROSPECTS
his visit. He afterwards wrote asking for details as to
his audience, and said, ' I think of an old lecture with a
new face, under the title of " The Relations of Theology,
Science, and Literature." '
As the lecture which he gave on this subject is full
of interest, dexterously put, and is not accessible in
print, it will be reproduced at the close of this
chapter ; not unfortunately from the MS., but from the
newspaper report of the hour. He came across from
St. Andrews, and addressed a large audience which filled
the Albert Hall ; spent the night and part of the next
day with friends, and saw what was of interest to him.
Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, and others, came in to meet
him. His host and hostess remember two things : the
gracious manner in which he spoke to little children,
and the way in which he left a benediction — both literal
and figurative — behind him. In the morning of the day
he left, the provost of the city called to try to induce
him to visit a jute factory ! an experience which would
have been most distasteful, and which he politely
declined. Lady Augusta was not with him. She was
too ill to leave London, and when he revisited Dundee
the following year, while on a brief journey in Scotland,
she had died ; and he was accompanied by his friend
Canon Pearson.
When he was writing on Southey, he wrote to me
about the ' Rock of Names ' on the shore of Thirlmere ;
and, as the note indicates his love of accuracy, it may
be quoted. There had been other initials foolishly
carved by egotistical toippers on the historic stone,

ARTHUR STANLEY 157
beside those of the Wordsworth and Coleridge family —
whose meeting-place it used to be — and its very authen
ticity came to be doubted. He wrote from the Deanery,
November 20, 1877, as follows :
' I have been in communication with the Bishop of
Manchester about the Stone of Names. This fragment
contains what, if true, would be fatal to its pretensions.
Let us not be like the Antiquary with A. D. L. L. ; but
I think the informant must be in error. I have not
your book at hand, but I remember S. T. C, and also
S. H., D. W., M. W., which are surely beyond the reach
either of accident or fraud. Tell me what you know
about the matter, and I will press the question. . . .'
The site of the Rock of Names, described in The
Waggoner of Wordsworth, is now sunk beneath the
Manchester Corporation reservoir, and the picturesque-
ness of old Thirlmere is a thing of the past ; but before
its submergence, a few fragments of the ' upright mural
block of stone,' with its initial letters, were removed, and
carried up the flank of Helvellyn, where they are now
built into a small cairn above the present roadway.
On March 31, 1879, Stanley visited Keswick, and gave
a lecture on Southey to the members of the Cumberland
Association for the Advancement of Literature and
Science. It was printed in the Transactions of that
Society, but nowhere else ; and, as it is not alluded to
in the Dean's memoir, some extracts from it may be
given here. He spoke of the poems of Southey as ' his
earliest love.' ' Not even the novels of Sir Walter Scott
had, for me, a keener attraction. The prospect of visit-

158 RETROSPECTS
ing the scenes of any of these poems filled me with
enthusiasm ; and although in later years that enthu
siasm may have cooled down, yet it was only three
years ago that it led me indirectly into making a visit
to the otherwise somewhat uninviting kingdom of
Portugal, that I might see some of the spots hallowed
in my memory by the closing scenes of Roderick.
Even now I sometimes feel as if I could not die happy
until I had explored the locality of the crisis of that
poem, " Covadonga, in the Asturias." ' . . . He admitted
that Southey was ' one of those poets who have now
fallen almost into oblivion in the great outside world.
Here and there you meet with individuals, like myself,
who still cherish the flame he once enkindled. . . . But
they are exceptions, and it is therefore instructive from
time to time to recall the thoughts of this younger
generation to the household gods of their fathers, and
to poems which have retained a more living popularity,
where may be seen traces of Southey's influence. For
example, I doubt whether any single poet has so deeply
coloured the phraseology of Keble's Christian Year as
Southey did. . . .'
' Southey is the genius of Keswick, almost as exclu
sively as Wordsworth is of Grasmere and Rydal, or as
Shakespeare is of Stratford-on-Avon. His grave, his
monument, his house still speak of him. . . . The first
time that I visited the Lakes was when I was staying in
Grasmere with Dr. Arnold ; and rode, or walked over,
from it to Keswick. It was a great disappointment to
me, although highly characteristic of the man, that

ARTHUR STANLEY 159
Dr. Arnold was too shy to give me a letter of introduc
tion to the poet whom of all others in England I should
most have wished to see. I walked, if I remember,
round the outside of Greta Hall ; but that was the
nearest approach I ever made to him in bodily presence.
. . . From the abundant stores that his letters provide,
he remains a shining example of a man whose pleasure
was found in the simplest, kindliest, social intercourse,
and in the most indefatigable intellectual activity.
Such a workman is an example to us all, a workman
who feels pleasure in his work, and his enjoyment in
ministering to the wants of others. He said somewhere,
and herein I quite agree with him, that one of the
greatest of earthly pleasures is the correction of proof-
sheet. An excellent Quaker, who crossed the Atlantic
with me last autumn, told me that Southey had said to
him (he was then sixty-five), " My motto through life
has been 'in labore requies.' " He pointed as he spoke
to the sixth volume of the Acta Sanctorum, through
which he was steadily plodding, and added, " My only
sorrow will be when I have reached the end." . . .
' Thalaba and Kehama have never lost their hold
on those who were once swayed by them. ... He has
himself given the account of their origin.1 Uncon
sciously, perhaps, he was here treading on the threshold
of that immense world of Religious Philosophy, which
the latter part of the nineteenth century has, for the
first time in the world's history, appropriated to itself —
the region of Comparative Theology, or Comparative
1 See his Life and Correspondence, vol. iii. p. 351.

160 RETROSPECTS
Religion — that which in our day has been so powerfully
set forth by Professor Max Miiller. It is a region of
the greatest interest to scholars ; but it is also a region
full of the most precious and useful instruction to
pastors and their flocks in the humblest walks of life,
because it opens to us the consoling belief — taught
indeed by the Apostles, but in the later ages of Chris
tianity almost entirely eclipsed — that the knowledge
and grace of God are not confined to any single church,
or any single race, but may be found wherever the heart
sincerely turns towards whatever there is of the best
and highest in its own experience. ... In Thalaba he
took the one great Mahomedan virtue of resignation,
and worked it out to the full. In doing so, he entered
so completely into the genius of the Arabian world that,
as we read the pages of Thalaba, we seem to be trans
ported altogether beyond the range of European thought
or European scenery. . . .
' This day, for the first time in my life, I have pene
trated into Greta Hall, and into Southey's library. It
was a great satisfaction to think that in a chamber so
long consecrated, and the scene of such indefatigable
work, there should still go on the work of useful and
faithful instruction. Not now are the walls clad with
the books that used to clothe them as with an everlast
ing drapery, but I call to mind one of the most beauti
ful poems — one of the most affecting, because I feel how
every word comes from the poet's heart. He speaks
about his hours in that library, about his hours amongst
the books of the great and good, from whom he learned

ARTHUR STANLEY 161
so much, and from whom he also endeavoured to teach
others.
My days among the dead are passed ;
Around me I behold,
Where'er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old :
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.'
We had once an interesting talk at the Deanery about
the high Alps. I had been climbing a little in 1873, and
someone had told him of it. He said he wished to know
what was the fascination ; because he never climbed,
and could not climb. He wanted to know not so much
about the peaks and passes or the physical exhilaration
and delight (which was easy to understand,) but about
the after-effect of it all on the mind and brain. He
quite realised the pleasure of peril safely over-past, but
what did climbing leave behind it ? I spoke of the
disclosures of Nature's forces and glories ; but the chief
allurement was the way in which all the powers of
muscle, nerve, and brain were educed, the discipline
of endeavour, the education in tact, resourcefulness,
patience, elasticity of spirit, good temper, readiness to
yield and obey, as well as to dare. ' I suppose,' he said,
' that in mountaineering you prove all things, and hold
fast only that which is good.' ' Yes, and the physical
discipline reacts on the mental, and braces you for other
efforts, while the storehouses of memory are grandly
filled.' He said it was a great delight to get sympatheti
cally into the heart of a thing he could not do himself ;
but his great delight had been in travel, both in foreign
I. M

162 RETROSPECTS
lands and in our own. It had done as much for him as
social life, or the reading of books ; but ' how well they
intermingle,' he said.
Some members of the Athenaeum Club associate a
particular room with him. He was, especially in later
years, so overwhelmed by visitors at the Deanery — where
he got scant time to write his sermons — that he was
accustomed to retire for that purpose to the Athenaeum ;
and there is a special table at which he used to
write standing (as was also his practice at home).
It is one of the numerous associations of that gathering-
place of interesting men.
When I went to Geneva in the autumn of 1877,
to spend some two months in the city, Dean Stanley
gave me introductions to many of his own and Lady
Augusta's friends amongst the Genevese ; the De Can-
dolles, Navilles, Favres, Pere Hyacinthe, &c. He said
that both he and his wife used to think that Geneva
circle the most cultivated and delightful in Europe. It
is not for me to characterise it here, but only to say
that the inquiries of one and all of them for their friend
at Westminster Abbey were perfervid, and their remi
niscences of her who had departed were most radiant
and blissful.
The rare refinement of Stanley's face was a sure
and certain index to the refinement of the man. His
intellectual brilliance and rapidity, his conversational
charm, appealed to everyone : but his very countenance
showed him to be ' a child of light.' It is easier far to
delineate him as a religious historian, an essayist with

ARTHUR STANLEY 163
a style that was invariably lit from within, than it is
to describe his character. The picturesqueness of his
conversation can be recorded, but the underlying spring
of his goodness cannot be chronicled. All that his
friends can say is this : He ' walked in the light,' and
he knew the ' fellowship of love below.'
His geniality came out conspicuously in meeting and
conversing with the University students of St. Andrews,
when he was their Lord Rector. On such occasions
everyone ought to be in the best of humours. Unfortun
ately, this has not always been the case, in some of our
Universities ; and perhaps the rarest of successes — rarer
and greater than any achievement in oratory or argu
ment — is the power to compel regard, and respectful
listening, even when counter-demonstrations on the part
of the supporters of a rival candidate for the office are
made. ' Rivals ' had no chance with this most genial
of Lord Rectors, as they had no locus standi when the
election was over.
Other occasions, on which the tact and bonhomie
of the Dean and Lady Augusta were conspicuous, were
at the small receptions in the Deanery after some
distinguished person had discoursed in the nave of the
Abbey, or its chapter-house. When the Master of
Balliol or Principal Tulloch preached in the former, or
Max Miiller spoke in the latter, old friends would gather
in the Deanery for pleasant talk, and the impression
left behind was always radiant and benign.
It is also worth recording, as I know not whether it
has been done or not, that Henry Crabb Robinson wrote
M 2

164 RETROSPECTS
thus from Rydal on January 30, 1842 : ' I learned from
Mrs. Arnold that when Mr. Stanley, the biographer of Dr.
Arnold, took orders in the Church, he delivered into the
hands of his bishop (Bishop Bagot of Oxford) a protest,
declaring his disbelief in the Athanasian Creed, to which
no objection was taken.'
This is interesting in connection with a contro
versy in which the Dean was involved in later years,
when in 1872 the Archbishop of Canterbury introduced
a rubric in Convocation which was intended to explain
away the damnatory clauses of the creed without changmg
them. The Dean opposed the proposal in ever-memorable
words : ' Whoever was the author ' [of this creed], ' he
knew what he meant. He meant, as the Emperor
Charlemagne meant, that anyone who would not accept
these words was everlastingly lost, and should be de
stroyed by sword and fire from the face of Christen
dom. I admire the Emperor Charlemagne, but I cannot
admire those who come with these modern explanations
to draw out the teeth of this old lion, who sits there
in his majesty, and defies any explanation to take out
his fierce and savage fangs.'
While the desire and rooted purpose of his life was
to widen sympathy and to promote peace, he was brought
into much controversy. His championship of Essays
and Reviews — both in Convocation, and in the Edin
burgh Review — was emphatic ; but his defence of Bishop
Colenso was still more noteworthy. The Bishop of
Natal had come to England to try to obtain redress for
wrong done to a Zulu chief ; and, as also a lover of

ARTHUR STANLEY 165
peace, had declined the Dean's offer to him to preach
in the Abbey. At a meeting of the Society for the Pro
pagation of the Gospel, Stanley said boldly : ' The
Bishop of Natal is the one colonial bishop who has
translated the Bible into the language of the natives of
his diocese. He is the one colonial bishop who, when he
believed a native to be wronged, left his diocese, journeyed
to London, and never rested till he had procured the
reversal of that wrong. He is the one colonial bishop
who, as soon as he had done this, returned immediately
to his diocese and his work. For these acts he has
never received any praise, any encouragement, from this
the oldest of our Missionary Societies. For these deeds
he will be remembered when you who censure him are
dead, buried, and forgotten.'
We were speaking one day of libraries, and their
imperishable lessons to us ; of the mania of the
' collectors,' who never read the books they bring
together ; of the foolish prices given for ' first edi
tions ' of books written by great men ; their second
and third editions being much less valuable in the
market, however much improved (as a rule) in substance
and contents ; of the joy of contemplating a long row of
volumes by men who misunderstood each other when
alive, who were perhaps ready to burn the books, if not the
authors whom they tried to tear to pieces by their pens,
now all lying silently together, ready for dispassionate
study, criticism, cross-examination, and the more fair-
minded judgment of posterity. Stanley said it sometimes
affected him almost to tears (if he was in a sympathetic

166 RETROSPECTS
mood), but usually with profound thanksgiving, and a
conviction that the verdict of time was almost invariably
just. He added that there was no place in the world
where one who was open to such teaching could learn
more of his own surpassing ignorance, than in a great
library ; and he told me that he went into a great store
house of mediaeval books in Granada, and another at the
Troitza monastery near Moscow, and found that he did
not previously know one single volume on the shelves !
Was it not humiliating ? And yet the many lessons such
an experience taught were most salutary.
The Dean had no great appreciation of landscape
beauty. It was the historic associations that surrounded
or invested places, the incidents once transacted there,
that appealed to him almost exclusively. And in con
nection with his interest in famous places because of
famous men, and the world of emotion awakened by his
first visit to them, it is easy to understand his indif
ference to a second visit, unless it was to correct some
erroneous impression left by the first. He could not
experience over again his earlier feelings of delight ; and
the later inspection was to satisfy historical curiosity,
not for the reawakening of enthusiasm when the dead
bones of history came to life again. It is not true to
say (as some one has done) ' that he never cared to see
the same place twice ' : but it is quite true that
' although it was a rainy day when he first saw the plain
of Marathon, he preferred to let that visit be his last.'
Dr. Martineau wrote to me, on the 10th of August,
1881 : . . . ' The death of Dean Stanley still weighs

ARTHUR STANLEY 167
heavily on my heart. His departure closes a memorable
chapter in the history of English Religion, and in the
social life of London ; for the system of relations that
centred in him can never be reproduced. A note was
found upon his desk addressed to me, the last that he
wrote, dated July 17, the day before his death. It
referred to Tulloch, about whom he had again written
to Dr. Ramsay.'
Later on Martineau wrote to me :
. . . ' With him the greatest personal power I have
ever known has passed from us. The loss to London in
particular is something quite unique. . . .'
No finer tribute to Arthur Stanley has been borne
than that of his life-long friend, and fellow-labourer for
the true and the good, Matthew Arnold, two stanzas of
whose elegy I may quote in conclusion —
What 1 for a term so scant
Our shining visitant
Cheer'd us, and now is pass'd into the night ?
Could'st thou no better keep, O Abbey old,
The boon thy dedication-sign foretold,
The presence of that gracious inmate, light ?
A child of light appear'd ;
Hither he came, late-born and long-desired,
And to men's hearts this ancient place endear'd
What, is the happy glow so soon expired ?

Yet in this latter time
The promise of the prime
Seem'd to come true at last, O Abbey old !
It seem'd a child of light did bring the dower
Foreshown thee in thy consecration-hour
And in thy courts his shining freight unroll'd;

168 RETROSPECTS
Bright wits and instinct sure,
And goodness warm, and truth without alloy,
And temper sweet, and love of all things pure,
And joy in light, and power to spread the joy.

Dean Stanley in Dundee : Apeil 2, 1875.
He said :
' The subject on which I propose to speak is " The
Mutual Relations of Religion, Science, and Literature."
In dealing with this somewhat abstruse subject I have
thought it best, partly for my own convenience, partly
for your pleasure, to place it before you in a concrete
form. Great ideas and great doctrines, and the mutual
relation of these doctrines, are best understood, or at
any rate best appreciated, when they appear before us
in flesh and blood. I propose, therefore, to select as
examples of Theology, Science, and Literature, three
great men, who were a few years ago accidentally brought
into mutual relationship by the fact that their three
anniversaries were celebrated in their three respective
countries almost at the same time, viz. Calvin, Galileo,
and Shakespeare. There are two advantages in this se
lection, besides the coincidence of their death and birth.
First, that, more perhaps than any other three names
I could take, they have such universal fame that they
need no explanation and no introduction ; secondly, that
they are so far removed from us by time and country
that we can treat of them without involving ourselves in

ARTHUR STANLEY 169
the personal and party feelings which the names of three
contemporaries, or three Scotsmen, however eminent,
could hardly fail to excite.
' It is my intention to speak of these great men as the
representatives of Theology, Science, and Literature,
chiefly with the view of showing the relation in which
all the three stand to the religious and moral
advancement of mankind, which is the one point
that unites together these three great branches of
thought. ' I speak first of Calvin, the French and Swiss
reformer. The death of Calvin occurred on May 27,
1564. As the sun set in the evening over the hills above
Geneva, his friends observed that the great light of their
city set also. It was no wonder. I said at the opening
of this lecture that I selected him as a fitting ex
emplification of theology, but to those who lived in
his own time he was more than this. Whilst he lived,
and for a hundred years after his death, there was no
theologian in Protestant Europe whose name could be
compared with his, for weight and authority. It was
an argument in itself. Far more than Luther, or
Melanchthon, or Zwinglius, he was the theologian of the
Reformation. Geneva is the only city in Europe besides
Rome that has a religious ecclesiastical sound in its
very name. In the library of the aged French historian
M. Guizot there were two great pictures side by side
to which he used to point as representing the two
ecclesiastical centres of Europe. One was Rome, the
other was Geneva.

170 RETROSPECTS
' Whatever theology sprang up in Great Britain at
that time came straight from Calvin. The English
Puritans and Nonconformists, the Presbyterians of
Scotland, whether Established or Free or United, all owe
their existence more or less to Calvin. And not only so,
there was no single person then out of our own country,
hardly within our own country, who had so great an
influence on the teaching of the Church of England,
when it first began its new career. "It is safer," said
Richard Hooker — himself in some respects a far greater
writer than Calvin — " to attack all the saints in heaven
than to say a word against John Calvin."
' The first reflection which this statement of Calvin's
fame suggests is this — that the fame is no longer what
it was. By the time that the tercentenary of Calvin
came to be celebrated, ten years ago, it was evident that
a change had passed over the face both of the world and
of the Church. The work of Erasmus, the great scholar
of his time, is still living in the impulse he gave to the
study of the Bible, and in his large and liberal ideas of
Christianity. Luther's name is still powerful, as that of
a man of commanding genius, and as the mainspring
of the Reformation. But neither in France, of which
Calvin was a most characteristic son as regards logical
directness and clearness of expression, nor in Geneva,
of which he was the father, nor even in Scotland, of
which through Knox he may be said to have been the
spiritual grandfather — and in which the form of his
theology has longest endured — not even in any of these
countries, and still less in Europe generally, has the

ARTHUR STANLEY 171
magic of the great name of Calvin maintained what was
in his lifetime its undisputed pre-eminence. What is
the reason of this change of feeling ? It is that Calvin
threw his whole strength into one particular phase of
Christian belief and of Christian practice. He saw
straight before him, but only in one direction. He was
the most splendid of partisans, but still a partisan.
' He was the founder of a particular school of belief.
He was not the promoter of truth, and goodness, for
their own sake. This is the first lesson which we
draw from Calvin's appearance — and which will be
strengthened as we proceed — the temporary passing
nature of mere party polemics. Think of any mere
political or ecclesiastical leader at the present moment.
He cannot fill your thoughts more than Calvin filled
the minds of English, Scottish, French, and Swiss
Protestants in the sixteenth century. But he has now
stepped into the background. Even in theology — the
greatest of all subjects of human thought — the day of
favourity party leaders will not last for ever. The
controversies which now seem so full of importance will,
three hundred years hence, be laid fast to sleep.
' But it would be doing great injustice to Calvin and
to ourselves, and it would be to miss one main part of
the lesson which his appearance teaches us, if we did not
acknowledge the lasting benefits we owe to him. I am
not now speaking of the great ability, and the candour
and good sense, of his Commentaries ; because these
have been superseded by greater works of the same
kind, and were not peculiar to himself even at that time.

172 RETROSPECTS
I confine myself to two points in which he stands pre
eminent. ' The first which I shall notice is the truth contained
in his doctrines. Nothing is more useful for men who
are educating themselves, nothing more profitable for
theological study, than to endeavour to find out what is
the truth that lies at the bottom of doctrines or opinions
with which, as commonly expressed, we feel ourselves
constrained to disagree. Such is the case with the doc
trine of Predestination, which is at the root of all that
is peculiar to what we call Calvinism. There has been
so much exaggeration, so much folly talked concerning
it, that we are sometimes inclined to think of it as a
thing altogether passed by. But the truth itself which
it was intended to convey is one which will never be
lost to the world. It is this ; that there is an overruling
Providence which guides our steps in life, without our
perceiving it ; that there is a Power greater than our
selves, without which we cannot move or act ; that this
Providence leads us through mysterious paths to our
very highest good ; that whatever is good or excellent,
in ourselves or others, comes from this higher Power.
' This is the true doctrine of Predestination— a doc
trine which may become mere fatalism, but which in
itself is perfectly certain, and most important. We
must add other doctrines to it, to make it wholesome
and useful, but this doctrine must be added to them ;
and the merit of Calvin is, that though he may have
pushed it to excess, yet he helped to preserve it in the
world, and hand it on to us. We may remember that a

ARTHUR STANLEY 173
great writer of our own time — the greatest of living
Scottish authors, but as unlike Calvin as it is possible
to conceive — has recorded solemnly that this doctrine
of Predestination, so understood, is in his judgment
unquestionably and indispensably necessary. Thomas
Carlyle, in his History of Frederick the Great, said
this meant — and at the bottom of his heart Calvin also
meant — to tell us that we are all, and each of us, instru
ments in the hands of the Supreme Good for working
out his will — links in the chain of a long-enduring
Providence — with a work before us to do, for the sake
of doing which each one of us was sent into the world.
' There is a second element in Calvin's teaching which
ought to be considered in connection with any form of
theology that claims to be enduring — viz. what is its moral
and practical result ? I shall not dwell on its results in
the moral life of England, and still less of Scotland,
partly for the reason 1 have already hinted, that I desire
on this occasion to avoid approaching too closely to local
questions ; partly because this was treated at length
some years ago in an address delivered in this neigh
bourhood by a distinguished historian, Mr. Froude.
But the point to which I would call attention — because
it is not so much thought of, and because it is in itself
so clear an evidence of what a great theologian can do
— is this, that Calvin founded in the city and State of
Geneva a habitation of morality and of liberty combined,
which has lasted there even to our own day. Here
again, no doubt, there was excess and exaggeration ;
he was too austere, too rigid, too uncompromising ; but

174 RETROSPECTS
nevertheless he did contrive, by the sole force of his
example and discipline, to create in that little town a
society so pure, and so respectable, that all the nations
of Europe sent their sons there to be educated. Nothing
could be a higher tribute to him and to Geneva than the
fact that Lord Chesterfield chose Geneva for his son in
preference to Paris, or Florence, or any of the fashion
able cities of Europe, because there more than anywhere
else a young man was likely to be brought up without
falling in with the common temptations of youth.
' And, with this good morality, there was also instilled
by Calvin into the people of Geneva an independence, a
freedom of thought, which through all manner of changes
has continued, and has rendered Geneva a refuge for
intelligent and enlightened men from every country,
who could find no other home so congenial or so safe.
Through Calvin's influence many a young man of the
first families of Europe has been saved in a most critical
period of his life ; many a parent has thus been spared
a broken heart. Through Calvin's influence, also, many
a noble spirit has there breathed freely and indepen
dently, who would not have had a place elsewhere on
the Continent open to run for shelter. It is true he
burned Servetus. It is the one blot which is recorded
against the Reformers by many who forget the acts of
the same kind, far more numerous, which tarnish the
fame of the Roman Church in England, Spain, France,
and Italy.
'But it is the glory of Calvin that, in spite of this
miserable act, the general spirit which he infused into

ARTHUR STANLEY 175
Geneva made it — what it has been for the last two
hundred years, and is still — the most intelligent city
in Europe, the shelter of the oppressed, the school of just
and free thought. And, although Calvin could hardly
recognise his own city, were he to come back ; this is
only an instance of the gracious truth that any good
influence which we shed abroad may have its fruits in
ways we cannot conceive beforehand, and which perhaps
did we know, we in our weakness would deprecate.
' This leads me to pass to those other two great men
whose anniversaries were celebrated in Italy and Eng
land, at the same time that Calvin's death was celebrated
at Geneva. When on May 27, 1564, Calvin passed from
the midst of his sorrowing followers, he would have
been surprised at hearing that already there were born
— one sixty, one thirty days before — two men whose fame
would outshine his as far as the skies are above the earth,
and as the whole earth is wider than any single sect or
party. Yet so it was. Calvin, I say, would have been
startled to hear that the time would come when a pro
fessor of Mathematics, or a writer of Plays, should be
thought more of than he, the theologian of half Chris
tendom. Yet even he, if he were true to his own doc
trines, would have acknowledged, or ought to have
acknowledged, in words which no doubt he often quoted,
that every good and perfect gift, everything in propor
tion as it is good or perfect, comes down direct from the
Father of Lights. They all come from the Father of
those innumerable lights which we see in the starry
heaven, and of the innumerable lights which enlighten

176 RETROSPECTS
the minds of men ; which themselves indeed both in
heaven and earth are subject to change, eclipse, and
shadow, but are not the less the good gifts of him " with
whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
' In the most literal sense, the two great men of
whom I am now to speak are exact illustrations of this
very truth. It has been said by one of the greatest of
modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant, " There are two
things of which the more we think of them the more
they fill the soul with awe and wonder ; the starry
heaven above, the moral law within." These are them
selves two of the greatest gifts that the Father of Lights
has given us. They are ever with us ; the lights in the
heaven above, the lights in the human soul. But, like
many other gifts, they have to be studied, in order to
be known, appreciated, enjoyed. They are gifts which
need interpreters to explain their meaning, to draw forth
their beauties, and fix our attention upon them.
' Two such interpreters, each perfect for this special
purpose, were by a singular coincidence born into the
world in that same year of 1564 in which Calvin died ;
one, an interpreter for all future time of the stars of
heaven, Galileo, the father of astronomy, on February 18,
at Pisa ; the other, the interpreter for all future ages
of human nature, our own Shakespeare, on April 23,
at Stratford-on-Avon. Of these two, I will first speak
of Galileo. In his case as in Calvin's I leave on one
side the direct benefits of his scientific discoveries. They
belong either to learned men, or else to the particu
lar professions who have profited by them. I confine

ARTHUR STANLEY 177
myself, as before, to those matters which are common
to all educated men — in other words, the moral and
religious benefits of Galileo's appearance, which bring
Theology into relation with Science, and Science into
relation with Theology.
' Put yourselves back to that time, and ask what has
been the advantage to religious progress that would,
humanly speaking, not have been gained if Galileo had
not lived ? To him, as you know, it is owing that we
have our present knowledge of the stars, of the relations
of this earth to the solar system, of the sizes, the
distances, the motions of those innumerable heavenly
bodies. Now, it is certain that by revealing to us the
vast infinity of space he revealed to us, in a sense ia
which it was never understood before, the infinity of the
Universe, and, therefore, the infinity of God. The
immeasurable nature of God is a doctrine which had, in
a certain sense, been known before, but it received an
enlargement, an extension far beyond conception, when
for the first time mankind was made to feel that the
stars were not mere spangles in the sky, but worlds like
our own, that the distance between them was to be
counted not by thousands, but by millions and millions
of miles. The order, the intelligence, the supreme will
which guides all these vast systems then became known
to man, as they had never been known to him before. But
this scientific knowledge, unlike the special peculiarities
of Calvin's theological system, has never passed away,
but has gone on increasing and fructifying in every
succeeding age. In the same year that Galileo died
I. n

178 RETROSPECTS
Newton was born, and by him the work of scientific truth
was handed on with increasing lustre to our own time.
That is the first point gained by Religion from Galileo.
' The second is the triumph of faith over sight, of
reason over prejudice. Think what a difficulty there
must have been in receiving the truths which Galileo
announced. All the world down to that time had
believed that the earth stood still, that the sun moved
round the earth, that the sun rose up in the heavens
and set behind the earth. All the evidence of our
senses, all the testimony of human language, all the
authority of immemorial tradition, all the belief of every
Church, the letter of the Bible itself, was dead against
the new discovery. On the other side there was but the
opinion of one gifted man appealing to the results of his
researches. But the opinion of that one gifted man,
resting on the certain facts which he had seen, and
which no one else had seen, has prevailed against the
habits and prejudices and traditions of the whole world.
What a lesson of humility does this teach us ! of
humility and deference to the authority of the really
just and true ! What a warning to us to set aside as good
for nothing the Authority which is only external ! What
an example of the power of truth over obstacles which
might have seemed quite insurmountable ! What an
encouragement to those who, whether few or many, are
engaged in the pursuit of truth in any department of
knowledge, human or divine !
' And yet one more benefit Galileo has conferred upon
us by the particular way in which this triumph of his

ARTHUR STANLEY 179
opinion was achieved. When he discovered for the first
time that the common impression of the sun rising and
setting was contrary to fact — when he discovered that it
was the sun which stands still, and the earth which
moves — a thrill of horror ran through Christendom, at
the contradiction of these statements with the letter of
Scripture. All the alarms which have since been raised
against the advance of Science were raised then. All
the efforts which have since been used to maintain the
letter of Scripture at the cost of its spirit were used
then. Most sincere and natural, no doubt, this alarm
was. But we know, thank God, that it was unfounded,
and so have been all like alarms since. In the person
of Galileo the battle was fought, and won. He was put
down for a time, but his system prevailed, and has
become the law of Christendom. The cause of religion
has not lost, but gained by the triumph of the cause of
science. In this way Galileo not only enlarged for us
our ideas of God and the Universe, but also enlarged for
us our idea of the Bible. As he raised our thoughts of
God to a wider range than ever they had reached before,
so he helped to raise the Bible to a higher pinnacle than
it had ever reached before. It was then established
once for all that the Bible was intended to teach us far
higher things than mere physical science. It was then
proved once for all that discoveries in the world of
Nature, however important or contradictory to the letter
of Scripture, however positive, have no connection
whatever with the essence of true religion. It was
acknowledged then by the most distinguished pillars of
N 2

180 RETROSPECTS
the Church that what the Bible teaches was not how
the heavens moved, but how we are to move to heaven.
' The Bible has gained, not lost, by being disencumbered
of the false theory which fastened it to false systems of
philosophy. It has survived the discoveries of Galileo.
It has survived, what is perhaps still more extraordinary,
the follies of those who persecuted Galileo ; and we may
be sure that it will survive all the conclusions of science,
and the blindness of those who resist these conclusions.
Galileo was imprisoned and tortured for his opinions.
His opinion was declared to be heresy. Even one
hundred years later the Jesuits, in their great edition of
Newton's Principia, were obliged to say that they could
not venture to accept his opinion as true, because it had
been solemnly condemned by the Pope. But now even
the Pope and the Jesuits have given way, and one of the
best observatories of Europe, where Galileo's principles
are carried out with the best success, is the observatory
of Father Secchi in the Jesuit College at Rome. We
may be sure that from the gift which God gave to us in
the mind of Galileo, and in the stars whose true nature
Galileo revealed to us, Christianity derives a brighter,
wider, better light ; and as each age rolls on, and each
discovery enlightens our eyes, it becomes more and more
worthy of the Father of Lights, more and more the light
of all mankind.
' One further remark on Galileo's life connects him
directly with our own country, and gives another proof of
the true, though indirect, relation between Science and
Literature. In one of the finest of Milton's prose works

ARTHUR STANLEY 181
— his speech in defence of the Liberty of the Press — he
describes how in his youth he had seen the great
astronomer at Florence : " There it was that I found and
visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner in the
Inquisition for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than
the Franciscans and Dominicans thought." It is one of
the most striking scenes in literary history. The old
blind Italian philosopher, victim to a dark persecution,
received the young English poet, full of hope and
enthusiasm ; himself destined in after years to share
the same calamity, the loss of the gift of eyesight, and
also to be regarded by his contemporaries as an outcast
and a heretic. We know that in those dreary years of
blindness, and of ignominy, he never forgot his visit
to Galileo. In Paradise Lost he dwells on the
wonders which the telescope had revealed from the top
of Fiesole ; and we cannot doubt that this recollection
must have been one of those which gave him courage to
abate no jot of heart or hope, as he trod his lonely path
towards the heights of everlasting fame. I have spoken
of the succession of scientific light from the occurrence of
Newton's birth in the year of Galileo's death. But this
glimpse which the great poet gained into the mind of
the great astronomer by that short visit, this stimulus
which it gave him to become the champion of spiritual
and intellectual freedom, is a yet more direct instance
of the succession of gifted men on the largest scale.
It shows that Science is not so far removed from Poetry,
nor Poetry from Science, as in this scientific age one
is sometimes apt to imagine.

182 RETROSPECTS
' And this leads me to the third illustrious name of
which I have to speak. In the same year as Galileo
died, 1564, was born the greatest of all poets, William
Shakespeare. Again, I do not dwell on the mere
pleasure or instruction we receive from his writings.
I do not enter into a criticism of his several plays.
This you can read, far better than I could expound, in
Dr. Johnson or in Coleridge. What I propose to ask is,
what is the moral value of such a man to his country,
and to the world ? What was the relation of Literature
as represented in this the greatest name of all Litera
ture towards Theology and Religion ? The first benefit
is the fact that he was, as I have already said, the
acknowledged interpreter of human nature. It is for
this that we admire him, that we read him, that we
place him on a height above all other poets of any age
or nation. And if we ask : what is the use of this
thought to us, as reasonable religious human beings ?
the answer is this. It teaches us that the study and
knowledge of human nature are indispensable to our
doing our duty, and fulfilling our appointed work in
this world. It has been sometimes said that there are
large classes of men who by their professions are shut
out from anything but a partial view of human nature ;
that the clergy see the weak side of it, lawyers chiefly
the dark side of it, physicians — it is sometimes said —
see more than any other class. But here, at any rate,
was a man who was endowed with an insight into every
part of it. There is hardly a shade of feeling, hardly a
human thought, scarcely a phase of character, which he

ARTHUR STANLEY 183
has not weighed, and balanced, and represented before
us. Our admiration of such a gift is a testimony to
the vast importance of that highest kind of theology,
which consists of insight into and understanding of the
varieties of human nature. It is a living comment — a
host of comments — on the text : " Judge not, and ye shall
not be judged." It is a thorough working out of the
text : " Judge righteous judgment." It is a carrying out
of the counsel " not to pull up the tares, lest in pulling
up the tares we pull up the wheat also." It is a justi
fication of the divine charity which " bears all things,
believes all things, endures all things." It is an example
of the apostolical wisdom " which becomes all things to
all men." It is a call to toleration, to forbearance, to
compassion, to forgiveness. These are the truly evan
gelical lessons, these are the truly apostolical maxims
which — whether we will or not — the writings of Shake
speare teach us.
' This is the ample, sufficient reason why we, who
have to deal with human nature as it is, should be
thankful for the gift of this wonderful understanding ;
all human nature in the mind of this one man. If in
the Bible we have been rightly taught the value of the
human soul, then ought we greatly to appreciate one
who has so carefully detailed all the workings of the
soul, which in ourselves and in others it is our duty to
elevate. If we are right in our admiration of Shake
speare, then we cannot sufficiently prize the largeness of
heart, and breadth of mind, and keenness of sight, which
give his works their characteristic value. We sometimes

184 RETROSPECTS
hear people speak disparagingly of Theology and theo
logians. Perhaps in the sense in which those words
are commonly used this disparagement is not unjust.
We have already shown in what sense it is true even
of such an eminent theologian as Calvin ; but, if the
word " theologian " is used in its true sense — as one who
sets forth the nature of God, and the duties of man —
then, in that sense, our highest poets have been amongst
our best theologians. He who has described the misery
of jealousy in Othello, the madness of ambition in
Macbeth, the grandeur of mercy in The Merchant of
Venice, the innocence of purity in The Tempest, the
nobleness of patriotism in Henry V., and the per
plexities of the troubled soul in Hamlet, has left to
the world religious lesBons far better than those of
many a preacher ; because he has given them in words
so persuasive, so marvellous, that they are read by
hundreds whom sermons never reach, and whom tracts
will never touch. There is much idle talk in the present
day about secular and religious education. Is there one
who will venture to shut out from any scheme of
education the writings of Milton or Shakespeare ? Is
there one who is able to say that the writings of Milton
or Shakespeare are not in the highest sense religious,
if by religious we mean that which gives a higher
and wider idea of the nature of God, a deeper and
clearer insight into the nature of man ? No !
' In proportion as we are fed by the greatest writers,
we rise above religious difficulty, into the most religious
atmosphere of all. And this leads me to speak of one

ARTHUR STANLEY 185
more general lesson to be derived from the greatness of
Shakespeare amid the imperfections and infirmities with
which doubtless his individual life was compassed. It
is this. We often ask in these days about any remark
able person we meet or hear of, what were his opinions ?
to what religious denomination, to what political party
did he belong ? Would he have voted with us, on this
or that question, political or theological ? What colours
did he wear at the last election, or in chapel ? We ask
this question of ordinary men, and we often get an easy
answer. We can range many of them without difficulty
on one side or the other. We can even aver about
such great men as Calvin or Galileo, that Calvin was
a Protestant of very peculiar opinions, and that Galileo
was a Roman Catholic, and in some respects compro
mised his opinion in order to keep well with his Church.
But we make these inquiries about Shakespeare in vain.
Others abide our questions : He is free. We see that
he had a deep sense of the awfulness and greatness of
God, of the tender and soothing influences of the
Christian faith. We see that the words of the Bible
were most familiar to him — that the sights and sounds
of religious ordinances had a hold upon him. But more
than this we know not. We ask whether he was a
Roman Catholic or a Protestant ? whether he was a
Calvinist or an Arminian? whether he was a Puritan
or a High Churchman ? We ask, but we ask in vain.
Some of his expressions lean to one side, some to
another, but the whole result is that this greatest of
human teachers, the wisest and greatest of human

186 RETROSPECTS
writers, is certainly above and beyond all those party
distinctions ; that he who of all men knew most of
human nature cannot, without manifest absurdity, be
classed with any single religious division of any kind
whatsoever. ' From the fact that he was married and buried in the
parish church of Stratford-on-Avon, we may infer that
he belonged to the National Church of England. It is
one of the excellences of a national Church that a spirit
like Shakespeare can belong to it, without being com
pelled to answer any question or to enrol himself under
any flag. It was in Shakespeare's time a Church which
embraced all Englishmen, and in this best and highest
sense of the word, and in this sense only, he was an
English Churchman. But I repeat that of his particular
opinions this tells us nothing. And the fact that this
is so, and that we notwithstanding bear with him and
admire him, is a standing proof to us that these distinc
tions are not so important as many endeavour to make
them, that the highest ideal of the Church, of a National
Church, is that which takes no heed of them. There
will, we trust, be a time hereafter when they will vanish
away altogether. But there are times even now when,
in the highest and greatest minds, they have vanished
altogether here. Read the lesson which the life and
works of Shakespeare teach, and even to the humblest
amongst us he will have lived to some purpose.
' Study human nature— study, observe, consult it —
in all its various moods of light and shade, of joy and
sorrow, of weakness and strength, of success and failure :

ARTHUR STANLEY 187
study it, bear with it, make allowances for it ; because
only in so doing can you be of service to it in others, or
in yourselves. Study it in all its phases, study it either
in itself or in Shakespeare's works, study it in the tragic
sorrows of King Lear, in the remorse of Macbeth and
Othello, in the deep philosophy of Hamlet, in the
playfulness of the Midsummer Night's Dream, in the
innocent love of Romeo and Juliet, in the calm
religious resignation of As You Like It, in the justice
and mercy of Measure for Measure. He takes you
through many countries. He breathes the keen air of
Denmark in Hamlet, and the majesty of Roman
history in Julius Caesar, the grand sweep of
English history in King John and Richard II.
and Henry V., the sunny atmosphere of Italy in
Romeo and Juliet, and the gay life of Greece in the
Midsummer Night's Dream, the wild life of early
Britain in King Lear, and in the blasted heath, the
fierce chiefs, the haunted houses, and fantastic witch
craft of Scotland in Macbeth. It is from such a large
view of human nature that we all gain common sense,
common charity, and deeper faith. We shall not be
the worse but the better Christians if by this means
we are raised above those artificial boundaries which
divide man from man, nation from nation, party from
party, into a wider region of human sympathy ; if we
can attain that true communion of the wise, in which
every good and perfect gift finds its proper place ; where
the main object is not to level to the ground high
characters or to pull down high Institutions, but to use

188 RETROSPECTS
them, understand them, improve them to the very
utmost.
' We thus come back to the general subject with which
we started, and ask what those great characters have
told us of the mutual relations of the three orders of
knowledge which they respectively represent. The main
result surely is that they form one whole. Theology
still remains the Queen of the Sciences and Arts, as she
was supposed to be in the Middle Ages. But it must be
by welcoming the fact that both science and literature
are themselves essential elements of theology, as theology
is of them. There is a literary side and a scientific side
of theology, to be conducted on scientific principles and
literary principles, as also in all true science and in all
high literature there is a religious side ; for the pursuit
of truth is religious, and so is the appreciation of the
noble and the beautiful. And thus the domain of
religion must be enlarged by every acquisition of
scientific light, and by every ingathering of literary
fruit. There will always be a separate branch of
theological research, a separate branch of scientific
research, and a separate branch of literary labour;
but no less there will always be the need of some
thing to reconcile, combine, and identify these. There
must be the means of passing and repassing across the
boundaries between them. And this neutral ground,
this uniting ground, will be found in such great minds
as those whom I have described, if taken at their best
and their highest, and not at their worst and lowest.
Taken at their lowest, Calvin was but a violent polemic,

ARTHUR STANLEY 189
and Galileo but a timid and half-hearted student, and
Shakespeare but an obscure stage-player ; but taken at
their best, each one of them was a philosopher, poet,
or theologian. ' The other day I saw it stated that at the tercen
tenary of the famous University of Leyden an orator
expressed amongst other things his confident belief that
theology was doomed to rapid extinction — that its fall
was demanded with inexorable rigour, and that none
would lament that fall. I would not disparage anything
that proceeds from a University of such name and fame
as Leyden ; but I confess that so crude a declaration
carries its own confutation with it. Such statements
might fill us with alarm as to the higher and deeper
thoughts of humanity, if we did not see from the terms
of the expressions used by the speakers that they often
mean the very reverse of what they express, that they
mean only the fall of a theology which they dislike, and
the rise in its place of some other theology which they
desire ; and that they believe — rightly, or wrongly — that
Science, Literature, and the State have lights to furnish
of a better kind than that which theologians and churches
have furnished before. In Mr. Lecky's admirable book
on the History of Rationalism you may remember
that there is a chapter called the " Secularisation of
Politics " ; and at first sight it might seem that, like the
Dutch orator, he was intending to prove that politics,
and all that is included in that word, were all to be
removed from the influence of religion ; but when you
find that what he means is simply that the course of

190 RETROSPECTS
European politics has been purged and purified from
the rancour, persecution and inhumanity, perfidy and
cruelty of the Thirty Years' War, and the massacre of
St. Bartholomew ; that commerce has been set free from
the superstitious restrictions on usury ; and social life
delivered from the insane superstitions concerning witch
craft, then we may fairly say that the tendency is not
the secularisation, but the Christianisation of politics.
Therefore, the result of all such harsh and exaggerated
statements as that I have quoted just now is, to any
reflecting and high-minded man, not to endeavour to
divorce science from religion, or the Church from the
State, but to endeavour to infuse into religion whatever
truth there is in science, and to endeavour to infuse into
the Church whatever there is of grandeur and elevation
in the State.
' And I may add that it is in fulfilling these functions
that not only such great men as I have described, but
also ancient and famous Universities, and University
influences such as give a name to your Club, are so
useful ; it is because the Universities of Europe, amidst
whatever imperfections they contain — it is because the
University of Oxford, in which, as you have heard,
I first became acquainted with your excellent chairman,
my dear and early friend, Principal Shairp — it is because
the Universities of Scotland, amid all the distractions
and divisions of this country, have furnished, and do
furnish still, a neutral, central, and elevated ground,
where the different Churches and diverging classes can
be drawn together and aspire towards higher things,

ARTHUR STANLEY 191
that they deserve all the support and all the forbearance
that can be given them. As the poet says,
Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters
That dote upon each other, friends to man,
Living together under the same roof,
And never can be sundered without tears.
'And if for one passing moment I may speak
of what I may now fairly call my own University of
St. Andrews, before you — the generous, energetic, and
aspiring citizens of Dundee— allow me to say that no
better exemplification could be given of the principle
which I have been endeavouring to enforce than the
relation between the two places. They are exemplified,
I might also say visibly, to the outward eye as in a
parable. What is the barrier that divides them ?
Listen to my parable. The first answer is very simple.
It is the river Tay. And what is the means of uniting
them ? It is by the bridge which shall in a few years
turn Fifeshire from an island into the mainland. But
the Tay is not, or was not in the olden time, the only
dividing boundary. When yesterday from the heights
of Magus Moor, from the beautiful grounds of Mount
Melville, I overlooked the plains of Fifeshire and Forfar
shire, I saw two streams parting the towers of St.
Andrews from the smoke of Dundee. One, as I have
said, was the Tay ; and the other was the river Eden.
But in the Middle Ages the smaller gulf, impassable as it
may have seemed, was crossed by the bridge — which was
then the marvel of Scotland — the bridge built by Bishop
Wardlaw, the founder of the University of St. Andrews,

192 RETROSPECTS
' That union which seemed then so difficult ought to
prepare us for the union, which is now not more difficult
in the bridge over the greater gulf which still remains.
What the science of the fifteenth century effected across
the Eden the science of the nineteenth century is to
effect across the Tay. Is not all this a transparent
allegory of the subject of which we have been speaking,
and of some of the questions which naturally have
arisen amongst ourselves ? A bridge, whether over the
Tay or over the Eden, is an emblem of the moral bonds
of union, whether in the great world or in our smaller
world at home ; and in making and increasing these
moral bonds it is surely the privilege of the wisdom
and the charity of the nineteenth century to effect the
combination which the charity and wisdom of the Middle
Ages most imperfectly effected in the fifteenth century,
whether as regards the relations between the academic
community of Dundee, or as regards the larger elements
of Religion, Science, and Literature.'
Since this chapter was written I have — through the
kindness of the present Dean of Westminster — seen and
examined the MS. which his predecessor had with him
in Dundee. It was originally prepared for another
purpose, but I have no knowledge, and now no means
of finding out, to what audience it was first addressed.
As given at Dundee it was recast, and considerably
enlarged.

193

MATTHEW ARNOLD
We, the English men and women of the twentieth
century, are so much indebted to Matthew Arnold —
for his poetry, his literary criticism, and his letters
posthumously published — that we fain would gather up
every fragment of reminiscence that remains of him,
' that none of them may be lost.'
As one of his predecessors in the poetical hierarchy
put it, His very memory is fair and bright,
and there was a charm in his personality that was all
his own, and is singularly radiant still. The deftest
of critics, a chivalrous appraiser of merit, a satirist who
was humorist at heart and who never sent a barbed
arrow from his bow, brave and patient, assiduous in the
discharge of irksome duties, most loyal of friends, and
generous in kindliest deeds.
Insight as keen as frosty star
Was to his charity no bar,
while reverence dominated his nature from first to last.
His reiterated message of ' sweetness and light,' his
constant demand for ' lucidity,' his insistence on ' culture
as the sovereign panacea alike for our ' Philistines, Bar
barians and Populace,' his substitution of the ' stream
I. 0

194 RETROSPECTS
of tendency ' and the ' not -ourselves that makes for
righteousness,' in place of what he thought were the
superannuated terms of ancestral religion — all this
raised a barrier between him and many other men ; but
even they must admit that, in his polemic he aimed
always at the truth of things, and that in all of it he was
constructive. His poems may have taught his generation more
than his prose essays have done, and their appreciation
in America has been signal. They are perhaps more
widely read, and highly valued across the Atlantic than
in England. The few letters from Arnold which follow refer
chiefly to Wordsworth, and to the Wordsworth Society.
We once had a talk about Thyrsis. He said that when
he wrote it, he doubted whether it would be popular,
however genuine it was as an idyllic elegy. It was
less complete as a memorial of Clough than Rugby
Chapel was of his father, or than his lines on Words
worth were of him. It dealt with only one side of
Clough's nature. Some time afterwards, when I was
writing Principal Shairp's Life his widow sent me a
letter from Arnold to her husband, dated April 1866 —
soon after Thyrsis appeared — embodying the same
thought. Arnold was asked to allow himself to be nominated
for the St. Andrews Lord Rectorship in 1877. He
declined on the ground that, in his opinion, his posi
tion as a school-inspector disqualified him for suitably
filling the post. He thought that one who held office

MATTHEW ARNOLD 195
in the public service of the country ought not also to
hold ' that post of high dignity.' He added, ' The
department which I serve has always left me perfect
freedom in my literary publications. In return I
consider myself bound to abstain from all appearances
on the stage of public life ; and your Rector, in making
his address, must certainly be considered as appearing
on the stage.'
We at St. Andrews, professors and students alike,
thought that a mistake on his part. There was nothing
in his official position, any more than in that of a
member of Parliament or a Judge, to prevent his accept
ance of the Rectorship. He would have been received
with enthusiasm, and would certainly have given a
brilliant and luminous address. The loss was to St.
Andrews, and to Scotland.
Arnold's life was uneventful, but perhaps all the
richer on that account. Once, at a dinner of old
Balliol men, he spoke of himself as ' an instance of a
Balliol failure in life.' It need hardly be said that as
poet, critic, essayist, his success had been greater than
that of anyone present, and his own judgment was
disallowed. The failure was only in receiving the due
rewards of authorship. It has been the lot of many of
our greatest writers to have a routine of drudgery to go
through, and it is a lasting tribute to Arnold that he
never grudged it, but discharged the humblest duties of
school-inspector with as much care and assiduity as he
spent upon his literary work.
There was one characteristic of Matthew Arnold
o 2

196 RETROSPECTS
which all who knew him understood and appreciated.
It was his determination to get at the root and truth
of things underneath the shows which are commonly
wrapped around them, and the illusions which are so
constantly mistaken for them. This was in curious
alliance with a dislike for what he considered the dimness
of metaphysic, and indifference to the bald obviousness
of science : but there was coupled with it a still greater
dislike of all irreverence towards the beliefs and the in
stitutions of the past. He wished to rouse his contem
poraries out of facile credence, and contentment with
commonplaces that were the superficial makeshifts of
belief ; but none of them had a more intense feeling of
the seriousness of life, and the grave issues of conduct.
He wished to see them rest in a religion that was based
on fact, not underpropped by conjecture. To attain to
a lucid belief, and one that could be verified, was his con
stant aim ; and yet he would rather leave everything as
he found it, than have religion discarded, or emptied of
all significance, by a criticism that was purely negative
I remember, and can now hear, his musical quotation of
the lines, Leave thou thy sister when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views ;
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
Arnold was not a great speaker, or a good reader ;
but I have been told that when he went to lecture in
America, and was at first almost inaudible beyond the
front-row benches, one of his auditors called on him,
and offered to teach him ' the art of public speaking ' !

MATTHEW ARNOLD 197
He was amused, but took the hint, and submitted to a
few ' lessons,' with the result that he was soon heard
throughout most lecture-halls.
The mention of America recalls his popularity there
as a poet. In Boston I found that many cultivated men
and women ranked him as chief in the modern English
hierarchy of song. It was a group of Americans also
who principally welcomed the reading of part of his
Empedocles on Etna one day within the Graeco-Roman
theatre of Taormina in Sicily.
The following are extracts from a few of his letters
to me. 'Athenseum Club, Pall Mall, S.W. : July 12, 1879.
' - . . There is plenty of room for all of us as recom-
menders of Wordsworth, and it would have been indeed
a pity if you had withheld your book about him, or any
part of it. I hope to return to it, when I am in the
North this autumn. It is a book to be read in Words
worth's own country.
tP yp 7fi 7f? ^
' P.S. — The paper in Macmillan is to serve as preface
to a volume of selections from Wordsworth which I have
in the press. It is not an elaborate criticism of Words
worth's poetry, but the sort of essay which seemed to me
best calculated to introduce, and help, such a volume. You
must read it with this view of its character and design.'
A second time our students at St. Andrews tried to
induce him to become Rector, a new generation of them
endeavouring to secure the honour previously declined.

198 RETROSPECTS
He replied :
' Cobham, Surrey : April 4, 1883.
' . . . I have answered an Edinburgh Association,
as to my being brought forward for the Lord Rectorship
there, but I am resolved not to be a candidate for that
office while I am a school-inspector, or a subordinate
public official of any sort. I have formerly said the
same thing in answer to proposals from St. Andrews,
and you would do me a kindness if you would assure my
friends there that, though I am grateful to them for their
good opinion, my resolution remains quite firm.'
The following has reference to the meeting of the
Wordsworth Society, of which he was President in 1883 :
' Cobham, Surrey : April 28.
' Two papers will be plenty ; a paper from the Pre
sident besides would be too much, and I think the
President should speak, not read. I will try to make
a speech of about a quarter of an hour in length, to open
the proceedings . . . '
He was asked his opinion as to the Stanzas
written in my pocket copy of Thomson's ' Castle of
Indolence ' in which Wordsworth describes Coleridge
and himself ; there being some difference of opinion as
to the relevancy of the ' descriptive sketches ' contained
in them. He replied : ' Cobham, Surrey : May 26.
* When one looks uneasily at a poem it is easy to
fidget oneself further, and neither the Wordsworth nor
the Coleridge of our common notions seems to be hit off

MATTHEW ARNOLD 199
in the Stanzas ; still, I believe that the first described
is Wordsworth, and that the second described is Coleridge.
I have myself heard Wordsworth speak of his prolonged,
exhausting wanderings among the hills. Then Miss
Fenwick's note shows that Coleridge is certainly one of
the two personages of the poem, and there are points in
the description of the second man which suit him very
well. The profound forehead is a touch akin to the
god-like forehead in the mention of Coleridge in a later
poem. ' I have a sort of recollection of having heard some
thing about the " inventions rare," and Coleridge is
certain to have dabbled, at one time or other, in Natural
Philosophy. ' I could have wished, handicapped as I am (I write
this while the Epsom races are going on) with official
work, to keep clear of all literary societies, but it seemed
ungracious to refuse the nomination you speak of, and
it is a long time to next May.'
' Athenasum Club, Pall Mall, S.W. : April 29, 1884.
' I cannot possibly be at the meeting on the 8th, but
I assure you that Lord Coleridge, if you can get him,
will be a far better introducer of Mr. Lowell than I
could be.'

' Fairy Hill, Swansea : September 29, 1884.
' . . . Never to have seen St. Andrews is a real
shortcoming, and I wish I could have accepted your
kind invitation ; I was in Haddingtonshire the other

200 RETROSPECTS
day, and looking across towards your University, but
there was no one there then ! '
' Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall, S.W. : October 6, 1884.
' Your kind invitation reached me in the ends of South
Wales. I at once answered it to say that my days in
Scotland would be few, as my schools here will be wanting
me back, and that I had engaged myself to stay with
Lord Dalhousie during my Dundee visit. I wrote to
Braemar, but put to be forwarded on the letter. I wish
I could come to you, but it is impossible.'
7P 7F Yp 7F Tp
' Cobham, Surrey : November 17, 1886.
' I shall be much interested in seeing your Selection,
but I am not inclined to return to the criticism of our
dear Poet, and I am sure it is better that, in the volume
now in question, I should not.'
# # # # #
' November 19, 1886.
' . . . I am touched by what you tell me of dear old
Shairp. He had come to look upon me as a very lost
sheep, so his fidelity to my verse is the more sweet in
him.' * * * # #
' Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall : July 20, 1887.
' Mrs. Shairp or her son wrote to me some time ago
asking me to give my remembrances of my old friend in
the form of a letter, to be used in his Life ; and I
answered, as I must answer now, and as I have also

MATTHEW ARNOLD 201
answered in the case of a like application concerning
Theodore Walrond, that it does not come natural to me
to speak of my dead friends in this fashion, and that
what one does not do naturally one never does well.
Some day or other, and in some manner, I should like
to say a word or two about both Shairp and Walrond,
for each of whom I had a sincere affection ; but when
I shall feel able to do it, or how, I cannot say.
' I am very glad you are preparing a memoir of Shairp ;
he was not only a lovable man in the time when I
knew him best, but a very stimulative and inspiring one.'
* ^ * # *
' Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, Surrey : November 4, 1887.
' In writing the life of Wordsworth you are filling a
real gap. I looked at his nephew's two volumes again
in the summer ; they are impossible.'
In his conversation, as well as his writings, the eulogy
of Geist came out, and his constant demand for lucidity
as the outcome of insight. He held that intellectual
discernment, purified mental vision, led of necessity to
lucid statement as to the reasons of things ; and the
two together — adequate knowledge, on the one hand, and
its expression ' clare et distincte ' on the other — gave
both strength and quietude, and were the key to progress.
Soon after Matthew Arnold's death a few of his
friends thought that funds should be raised for a
memorial to him in the form of a medallion or bust,
and — if the subscriptions warranted it — the founding
of an Arnold scholarship or lectureship at Oxford.

202 RETROSPECTS
A preliminary meeting — largely attended — was held in
the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey, and a
committee elected to promote the objects aimed at. The
first thing the committee tried was to find out whether
anything could be done, through the Treasury, to obtain a
pension for Mrs. Arnold, in recognition of her husband's
contributions to Literature, and his services to the State
as school-inspector. As this unfortunately failed, Chief
Justice Coleridge, who was chairman of the committee,
convened a meeting in his room at the Law Courts, to
consider what should be done, and afterwards addressed
the following letter to the Times, on June 25, 1888 :
' The Matthew Arnold Memorial.
' Sir, — The many friends and admirers of Mr.
Matthew Arnold have delayed till now taking any active
steps to collect subscriptions, in accordance with the
resolutions passed at the meeting held in the Jerusalem
Chamber. They were desirous first to ascertain whether
any and what recognition of Mr. Arnold's great services
to the State and to English Literature, in the form of a
pension to his widow, would be granted by the First Lord
of the Treasury. The answer to two memorials, signed
without distinction of party by a large number of the
most prominent men in the country, has just been
received, to the effect that Mr. Smith can do nothing.
Such an answer to such memorials — an answer based
chiefly, though not exclusively, on want of precedent — is
somewhat unexpected by those of us whose memories go

MATTHEW ARNOLD 203
back for twenty-five or thirty years, and will not, perhaps,
be altogether satisfying to those who appreciate the very
remarkable qualities of the distinguished man for whose
memory this recognition was requested. It renders, how
ever, prompt action necessary on the part of his friends.
' A meeting, to which all the committee were sum
moned, was accordingly held on Wednesday last, at my
room in the Law Courts — the Earl of Derby in the chair.
The meeting was attended by Lord Lingen, Lord Justice
Bowen, Mr. Lushington, Mr. Cumin, Mr. Fyffe, Mr
Hutton, Professor Knight, Mr. G. Murray Smith, Mr
George Russell (the honorary secretary), and myself.
' The following minute was passed, and will be
advertised and circulated, for the information of those
who may desire to contribute towards keeping alive the
memory of one of the noblest and most interesting
characters of our time. The reply of Mr. Smith makes
it, in our opinion, desirable to postpone — at least for the
present — that part of the scheme shadowed forth in the
Jerusalem Chamber which relates to Oxford.
'I subjoin the minute: "The appropriation of the
funds obtained cannot be absolutely determined at
present, but it is desired by the committee, in the first
instance, to place in Westminster Abbey a Medallion
or Bust, as may be found most convenient ; next, to
make adequate provision for Mrs. Arnold : lastly, after
providing for the foregoing objects (should the funds
obtained be sufficient) to found at Oxford an Arnold
Scholarship or Lectureship, with a view to promote the
study of English Literature. It is estimated that the

204 RETROSPECTS
cost of the Medallion or Bust will not exceed 5001.
including all attendant expenses. ' Coleridge.'
A bust was made by Mr. Bruce Joy, who was chosen
out of several competitors to execute it, and was placed
in the Baptistery of Westminster Abbey. The residue of
the fund — which amounted in all to 6,OO0Z. — was handed
over to Mrs. Arnold, who sent a portion of it to Oxford
for the establishment of a prize, to be called the
' Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize,' the competition to be
open to those who have taken the B.A. degree, and the
subject of the essay to be selected in turn by the Vice-
Chancellor, the Headmaster of Rugby, and the Poet
Laureate. She wrote thus to the Honorary Secretary :
' I must ask you to assure the committee and sub
scribers how deeply I am touched and gratified by the
way in which all, even strangers as well as personal
friends, have testified their affection and admiration for
my husband. He would have been greatly touched by
it, and would have felt as deeply gratified as I do by the
generous kindness shown to me. It is a comfort to me
in my sorrow that the memory of all he was, and of all
he did, will be cherished by so many, and will have a
lasting memorial in the Abbey.'

205

W. E. GLADSTONE
The world has recently received so great a biography
of Mr. Gladstone from a distinguished man of letters,
who was also a political colleague and comrade, that it
may seem useless, if not presumptuous, to add anything
in reference to him. Doubtless, however, many other
critical estimates, and biographic material, will be forth
coming ; and it may not be superfluous for me to give
one or two brief reminiscences.
I recall his address as Lord Rector of the University
of Edinburgh in 1860. The undergraduates, and the
Senatus Academicus, were swayed by it in a remark
able manner. The representatives of both political
parties were at one in their admiration for the
intellectual intensity, the eloquence, and elevation of
the address. Of course, we youths all took sides in
politics. I was then on Mr. Gladstone's side, and re
member sitting beside a fellow student of the opposition,
who came with me intensely prejudiced, but was soon
captivated by the oration, and even magnetised by the
personality of the speaker. One month afterwards
Lord Brougham addressed the University, in the

206 RETROSPECTS
office of Chancellor ; and we all remember the con
trast between the ponderous forensic argumentation of
the great lawyer, and the agile thrusts and persuasive
oratory of Gladstone.
I first made his acquaintance by the publisher's
having sent him a copy of a small volume issued
in the year 1863 — viz. Poems from the Dawn of
English Literature to the Year 1699. It was published
anonymously, and in February 1863 Mr. Gladstone
wrote that, although he did not know whom he was
addressing, he sent his best thanks for the selection
and its introduction. He approved of the contents, and
wished the volume every possible success.
I well remember a dinner-party in London at which
Mr. Gladstone was the principal guest, although there
were many representatives of Literature and Science as
well as Politics present. After dinner the conversation
turned to the number of lines in the great poems of
the world ; and Mr. Gladstone was asked : How many
are there in the Iliad ? He at once replied, and to a
second question gave the number in the Odyssey. ' In
the Divine Comedy ? ' inquired one guest. Instantly
the number in the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the
Paradiso were told. In Hamlet, Paradise Lost,
Faust (I only remember these), the answer came with
out a pause, as if out of a brain in compartments, where
the facts had been stored away, and which now opened
as by a spring. I was asked by our host if I could tell

W. E. GLADSTONE 207
the number in The Excursion and in The Prelude,
and by some one else how many there were in The
White Doe of Bylstone. In each case I had to shake my
head in ignorance. I said it had never occurred to me
to estimate poems by their quantity. ' No,' said Glad
stone, ' none of us do that — the test is a qualitative one
— but literary statistics are always of use.' It seemed
to me, however, as if the instinct of the Chancellor of
the Exchequer had been at work in the brain of the
Premier in reference to the great poems of the world,
and that the chambers of memory were full to over
flowing. On telling this afterwards at St. Andrews to
his old Oxford tutor — Bishop Charles Wordsworth — he
said that Gladstone's memory was superlative. ' I re
member sending him, to the country house in which he
was then residing, a Latin version which I had just
written of one of the hymns in the Christian Year. He
replied at once, and quoted in his letter another excel
lent rendering of the same hymn in Latin, made long
ago by a friend of his, which he said was still as vivid
to him as if he had received it yesterday.'
When writing Wordsworth's Life, I asked Mr. Glad
stone whether he had any letters from the poet which
he cared to show me, as I knew that he had been instru
mental in aiding him in various ways, obtaining his
pension from the Civil List, &c. He kindly sent me
seven letters, and some memoranda as to his circum
stances supplied by Wordsworth, for use in the biography

208 RETROSPECTS
which he was glad to hear was in hand, wishing all
success to ' the deeply interesting work.'
Four of these letters are published in volume iii. of
my Life of Wordsworth, pp. 328, 340, 426, and 427 ;
and a letter from Mr. Gladstone to Wordsworth on the
Copyright Bill will be found on p. 339. The following
reached me a few days after I received them :
' Hawarden : January 17, 1887.
' I thank you for the very prompt return of the
Wordsworth letters. I have no objection to the publica
tion, as you recommend it, but see below. You are
aware that I cannot give you an affirmative title to
publish. My advice is that nothing should be published
about Lord Monteagle's relation to the Premier. It is
better, I think, passed over.
' Nor, if I denounced anyone for Schism, should I wish
this to be published as a fragment, though I should
have no objection if it were coupled with what I have
written since.
' I was an eager supporter of Serjeant Talfourd, but
have long since altered my view ; and am of opinion
that a more free system of copyright than the present
one is possible, and would be more advantageous to
the author, the trade, and the public.
' With regard to Wordsworth's circumstances I
conclude you would print nothing, in the way of par
ticulars, except with the approval of his nearest repre
sentative. ' As Minister I have always held that Civil List

W. E. GLADSTONE 209
pensions cannot be given to literary men on the score of
need, and I never asked proof of need. . . .'
When I asked Mr. Gladstone's permission to publish
his letters to Wordsworth, he granted it cordially as
proposed, and they will be found in the poet's Life.
He also wrote about Henry Taylor, Miss Fenwick,
the subject of Copyright, on which he thought the method
of Talfourd and the present law faulty, and in regard to
Schism wished me to state, on his behalf, that after
fifty intervening years he could not now express him
self as he had done. He mentioned that in 1838 he
was a fervent student of the great Italian poet Dante,
and should have remembered that it is upon the
authorship of schism that he bestows malediction.
The only other letter from which I need make an
extract refers to a book which I wrote on The Philo
sophy of the Beautiful, and it is quoted merely because
it indicates Mr. Gladstone's belief on the subject :
' Hawarden : October 30, 1891.
' I thank you very much for the work you have kindly
sent me. I have at once commenced it. . . . A strong
and old believer in Beauty as an ultimate reality, not
less than Truth or than Goodness, I am, I hope, well
prepared to profit by your instructions. . . .'
In the course of one conversation Mr. Gladstone said
i. p

210 RETROSPECTS
to me : ' People talk of a change in opinion as if it were
a disgrace. To me it is a sign of life. If you are alive,
you must change. It is only the dead who remain the
same ; and of all charges brought against a man, or a
party, that of inconsistency because of changed opinion,
leading to a change of front, is the most inept. As
trumped up against a political opponent it is usually a
mere party trick. I have changed my point of view on
a score of subjects, and my convictions as to very many
of them.' Some-one present said this might be carried so far as
to subvert our Institutions, or endanger their stability.
Gladstone replied, he was not afraid of it ; and that he
had advocated, and would still advocate, many changes
that cut deep down, and might seem at first to be de
structive, but were afterwards proved to be salutary.
In reference to what had not been tried, he said, for
example, he wished that the Prince of Wales had more
to do in connection with the affairs of the realm before
he came to the throne. ' I have sometimes thought it
might be a salutary thing if our constitution allowed the
monarch to admit his successor to a limited share in the
duties of office. It would accustom him to the coming
weight of responsibility.'
He spoke with enthusiasm of the good which her
Majesty had done to Scotland, to Scottish sentiment and
loyalty, by her summer and autumn visits to the North ;
and said that he often wished it could have been the
same with reference to the sister isle. I ventured to
say that had there been a royal residence in Ireland,

W. E. GLADSTONE 211
and an annual visit to it, there might have been no Irish
grievance. Mr. Gladstone replied : ' At least we should
not have heard so much about it. The Irish are at
heart a loyal race, and quick to respond to kindness of
every sort.'

p 2

212 RETROSPECTS

WILLIAM DAVIES
To Dora Greenwell of Durham — of whom I hope to
write in a subsequent volume — I owe my knowledge of
two remarkable men of original character, and rare
ideality, viz. William Davies and James Smetham.
The former was a friend of hers, and of her brother Alan.
I visited him at Warrington in the sixties, and at Chester
in the nineties, of last century ; and corresponded with
him a good deal. He edited many interesting and
original letters by our friend Smetham ; but his own,
now reproduced in part, seem to me more remarkable
still. Before quoting from them, I should mention one
or two facts about his life. He was born at Warrington
and educated in its Grammar School. Destined for a
mercantile career, he began life in a bank, where he
remained for some years. During these years he also
studied painting, and was more interested in Art than in
business, helping to establish the Warrington School of
Art. All along he felt the uncongenial strain of a
mercantile life, and — as will be abundantly seen in his
letters — he longed to secure a modest competence, and
retire from business. At length he was able to do so,
and went during each summer to the Continent, to study

WILLIAM DAVIES 213
in the art-galleries, and to sketch the surrounding
scenery, usually spending his winters in London. He
wrote occasional articles at this time in the Quarterly
Beview, and made many close friendships ; his know
ledge of Dante Gabriel Rossetti having perhaps the most
determining influence on his future. Delicacy of health
at last induced him to leave England altogether, and,
following the advice of Rossetti, he settled in Rome.
There he led a varied and highly intellectual life,
unambitious, and unselfish. In 1869 he finished his
first book, which he called, Songs of a Wayfarer, a work
full of poetic insight and melody. It was followed in
1873 by the Pilgrimage of the Tiber — beginning at
Ostia, and ending at the river's source — illustrated by
drawings of his own, and others supplied by friends, a
most delightful book of art-travel. At the source of the
historic river an old guide led him to a little rill from
which it flows, and leaning on his staff pointed to the
water and said ' E questo si chiama il Tevere a Roma ! '
('And this they call the Tiber at Rome !') In the same
year, 1873, The Shepherd's Garden was published ;
which was followed, in 1875, by A fine old English
Gentleman. The Letters of James Smetham were issued by
him in 1891, with a singularly interesting memorial
notice of his friend prefixed to them. His last work
was entitled The Pilgrim of the Infinite, published in
1894. As will be seen from his letters, he had a stroke
of paralysis at Rome in 1892, from which he recovered
so far as to be able to settle in Cheshire, first at

214 RETROSPECTS
Baycliffe, Lymm, and afterwards in the city of Chester.
There he carried on his studies in Italian, founding a
small society for the reading of Dante ; and pursued
with much ardour his examination of the ' Sacred Books
of the East,' especially the Vedas and Upanishads. He
was also devoted to the English poets (more particularly
those of the sixteenth century) till the end of his life,
which occurred in May 1897. He was a modern Christian
mystic, steeped in the thoughts and aspirations of the
East. In a printed but unpublished paper on The Wisdom
of the Upanishads, written at Rome, in 1886, he had
been enlarging on the value of the Vedas as ' instructive
in the region of the higher life,' to which he said ' there
is no parallel in Literature outside the teaching of
Christ as found in the New Testament ' ; and he con
tinued as follows : ' Not here indeed, nor anywhere, do
we find the warm, loving, active religion of the Author
of Christianity in its sweetness, its tenderness, its rich
humanities, its general applicability to the societies of
men. But the human soul is an entity of many facets.
He who would learn the great lesson of life will not be
content to fix his attention on one. Life, the world, are
but points in infinite space. He who is wise, standing
on these points, will look around. He will not close his
eyes upon one ray, and say this is all. If the soul of
man is a spark from the being of God, he who has this
lofty fathership will know and feel that by virtue of his
origin he may take the wings of the morning, and visit
the place of the birth of souls, of the life that never dies.

WILLIAM DAVIES 215
To him the wealth of the world, its honours, and the
objects of its desire, will be less than little. He will see
the noble beyond the mean, the permanent beyond the
changeable. Satisfied, stable, helpful to others, restful
within himself, he will look upon life as an education,
time as his instructor, the world as his school. This is
the teaching of the Vedas, as it is of the noblest religion,
the highest philosophy.'
In 1862 I was preparing the first book I ventured
to issue, entitled Poems from the Dawn of English
Literature to the Year 1699. As I had met Mr.
Davies before that year, and knew his wide acquaintance
with English Literature, I corresponded with him on
the subject of the proposed extracts. He wrote to me :
' Sankey Street, Warrington : June 23, 1862.
v ¦* ¦# ^ vfr
' I have often thought a very excellent volume of
devotional poetry might be selected from secular writers
alone. As a curiosity it would be valuable, to say the
least of it ; but I am not quite sure whether certain
sections of our modern religious world would find any
value in it beyond that. What, e.g., could be finer than
the hymn entitled "Resignation," by the wild boy Chat-
terton ? Yet I never saw it brought into the Churches.
It begins : O God whose thunder shakes the sky,
Whose eye this atom globe surveys.
I suppose this writer is out of your limits, but I believe he
has several noble things of this sort not often printed.

216 RETROSPECTS
' Do you know it strikes me that any of the old
dramatists will as little bear selecting from as Shake
speare or Milton. The same speech in a character
elaborated through a certain series of influences may
sound vastly different in one developed through quite
another series. It is rather in the broad characters of
noble or degraded, selfish or liberal actualisms, than in
definite assertion of principles, that the forte of the
" old dramatist " lies ; not that the latter are altogether
absent from their writings ; but they form no array
of well-rounded actuating principles, to be culled out
and placed on another page to fair advantage. I am
not quite sure, however, whether isolated lines and
fragmentary passages would agree with your plan.
' Amongst the older dramatic writers who are the
least read may be mentioned John Marston, whose
muscular grasp of language often verges upon the
uncouth. Disfigured by the broadest and coarsest
possible passages, there may yet be found in his plays
passages of surpassing beauty and fine moral force. For
instance, in his Antonio and Mellida, 1st part, 4th act,
beginning :
'Tis not the bared pate, the bended knees,
Gilt tipstaves, Tyrian purple, chairs of state,
Troops of pied butterflies, that flutter still
In greatness' summer, that confirme a prince,
and so on for half a page. This can scarcely be called
religious poetry ; though it is moral, of a high order.
There are many fine lines and expressions to be found
in this writer, but not one lyric piece to serve your

WILLIAM DAVIES 217
purpose. . . . From Marlowe, Ford, Webster, Ben Jon-
son, Beaumont and Fletcher, I can point out scores of
passages of exquisite poetic beauty ; but I am afraid
not very much to serve your end. . . . There is a selec
tion of Beaumont and Fletcher by Leigh Hunt, pub
lished by Bohn, which is as good as a thing of that sort
can be. . . . Our old Bishop Ken, who wrote the com
mon morning and evening hymns — the first of which he
used to sing every morning at four o'clock to his lute —
published a volume of religious poetry, out of which
I have no doubt two or three things might be taken,
although on the whole they are rather poor. . . .
' In selecting from Donne, I would specially mention
A Hymn to God the Father, beginning
Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I began ?
There are others too, not generally known, to be found
in his published volume. The omission of such poems
as Herbert's Pulley, Flower, Dialogue, &c, is a
loss to any collection of religious poetry ; but you must
stop somewhere, and if you begin with Herbert, the
limit is not easily assignable. It is needless to mention
such well-known things as Chaucer's Good Counsel,
and other short didactic or devotional pieces, though
you should not forget a beautiful little stanza :
If it befall that God thee list visite
With any torment or adversite
Thanke first the Lorde, and then thyself to quite
Upon sufferaunce and humilite
Founde thou thy quaril, what ere that it be,
Make thy defence, and thou shalt have no losse,
The remembraunce of Christ and of his Crosse.

218 RETROSPECTS
' Of Spenser, too, I need say as little — his passage of
the watchfulness of the angels in the Faerie Queene,
And is there care in heaven,
the noble sermon of Artegale,
Of things unseen how canst thou deeme aright,
and others of his minor poems. Doubtless Sir Henry
Wotton will not be forgotten. His
Farewell, ye gilded follies,
quoted in Walton's Complete Angler, is a gem of the
first water. All the best lyrics of the older dramatists
are to be found in Bell's Songs of the Dramatists —
a delicious collection of that kind of poetry. I may
mention Idleness, by Heywood, at p. 29 ; Sweet Content,
p. 189 ; A Dirge, "Glories, pleasures, pomps," &c, p. 211;
"Victorious men of Earth," p. 226; "The glories of
our birth," p. 227, as possibly suitable for your pur
pose. Have you seen Joshua Sylvester's translation of
Du Bartas, and others of his works ? Andrew Marvell
and George Wither might furnish you with something.
' Our old stores of serious poetry have been thoroughly
ransacked, and, being very limited in comparison with
other kinds, have, I fancy, all the more diligently been
brought before modern readers ; so that one has no right
to expect very much that is quite new to the generality
of readers. . . .'
In the same year he wrote — ' Warrington : August 6, 1862.
' Unfortunately, much excellent poetry of to-day lacks

WILLIAM DAVIES 219
readers. Good poetry is positively common. One
meets with a conciseness of diction, mellifluousness of
versification, high powers of imagination displayed very
generally ; but that it has little hold on the popular
mind is quite as true. One reason is this. Poetry is
an aesthetic thing, and just as we turn to a fine statue,
or painting, or noble strain of music over and over
again, with renewed pleasure and a better appreciation,
so it is with the best kinds of Poetry. Prose is a mirror
of the age, an incarnation of the present ; Poetry is a
thing for all time, and appeals to every age alike. So,
if I wish the kind of influence Poetry gives, instead of
buying the last new volume of verses, I turn up my
Chaucer or Keats, my Fletcher or Shakespeare, and defy
any age or time or man to give me more pleasure. Not
that I would try to stem the tide of poetical production,
but I would doubly strain, and sift well, all poetical
writing. . . .'
* # * # *
The following are extracts from letters written
afterwards : ' Warrington : November 22, 1862.
'. . . I had a vague sort of presentiment that you
might turn up. Indeed, passing the station about the
time that your train was due, I turned in to meet you
in case the destinies had been kinder than they proved ;
and tried to console myself for your non-appearance by
persuading myself I had not expected you ! I have
sacrificed and do sacrifice so much in life that is con-

220 RETROSPECTS
sistently unattainable, that I feel that it is difficult to
assign limits to the amount of sacrifice made necessary
in the whole length of it. Whilst it is possible, it is by
no means certain that we shall be thrown together fre
quently ; I think, however, that neither of us would have
the greatest and best gift for friendship if we did not
feel the relationship to be a very deep and solemn one,
fostered only through mutual joy and sorrow, and pro
found experience of life, not through mere concord of
opinion, or a similarity of tastes and pursuits alone. . . .

' If my holidays were not limited to once a year — or
the north and south lay nearer to each other — I should
visit you in Scotland. I recollect with a sense of their
incompleteness my lonely rambles in the Highlands, of
bygone years ; through desolate valleys whose stony
silence was oppressive, by twisting rivers whose appeal
ing tones seemed to ask for an overflow of human emo
tion to render them intelligible, through gorgeous sun
sets whose glowing radiance — as it lingered about the
bald mountain-tops — required " the still sad music of
humanity " to explain its true significance. All these
were felt and enjoyed intensely by me ; but with what
an added glory and significance might they have spoken
in the company of one breathing the freshness of the
morning with joy, and welcoming the restful evening
with gladness.
' Perhaps we are taught self-dependence, and a higher
trust, by being left alone ; but the heart is gregarious,

WILLIAM DAVIES 221
and we all love companionship. I may never see your
noble-hearted friend, but I should like to persuade my
self that we may meet sometime under the changeless
circumstances of an unfettered state of being.
' I do not know whether I explained to you my views
of life ; or at all accounted for them, if I did. I am
here at an occupation far from congenial to me, although
I perform its duties, I hope, sufficiently well. Severed
from Art, from Nature, from many elevating and en
nobling influences which I am fitted to receive, in a
climate irritating to my physique, with only one thing
— which I am afraid is almost everything, after all ! —
to leave with deep regret. The latter is my circle of
kind, good, and noble friends, who will never be replaced
to me ; nor, if absent, be entirely separated from me.
I shall never find another circle so congenial and
sympathetic. *****
' Probably in somewhat less than two years I may
take up my residence for a while in the art cities of
Italy. *****
' Do you think I may place it amongst my dreams
that we shall stand under the dome of St. Peter's
together, or walk round the Coliseum under a bluer
sky? *****
' I have no wish to be idle in life : the reverse of it :
but I wish to be occupied by the use of those faculties
that God has gifted me withal, and not have to smother

222 RETROSPECTS
the better half of my being for the exercise of its
inferior part. If I live I hope my final field of labour
may lie chiefly or wholly in London, with artistic or
literary occupation such as I love.
*****
' I am in the middle of Dora Greenwell's book.1 I
like it even better than its predecessors. I feel little
inclined to play the critic over a good work well done.
In its circle it is all that can be desired ; but one must
not forget that it is written in a circle — wide enough,
I daresay, for most of us, but with discernible limits.
The great want of nearly every literary person is a
thorough acquaintance with the general principles of
Science. The acts and laws of God, in regard to
what He has made, are surely worth studying ; and I
often perceive in a discourse upon abstract matters how
a knowledge of this or that fact or law of the external
world would have considerably modified, or altogether
altered, opinions stated in the most unconditional
manner. For instance, theologians almost always speak
of the soul as an isolated and perfectly different
existence from anything else in the universe. It is
not so. The vitality of a leaf, in an infinitely inferior
degree, is the vitality of the soul ; they are both the
breath of God. The circulation of the blood is a repro
duction in a lower form of memory and the continuity
of thought. I mean to say the same laws that control
the external world in another form govern the human
1 Two Friends.

WILLIAM DAVIES 223
soul in its courses. It must be so. God has only one
law fundamentally, which must be right and true,
whether exercised in the circulation of water in the
ocean, or of blood in human veins ; and the same is
reproduced in the highest forms of existence. This is
not pantheism, nor leads to it ; nor materialism, though
it look like it. God is enough for himself, for his
creation, and for his creatures ; and deals himself out
to all, according to their several needs. All Science is
a kind of Religion ; and the dangers of worshipping
Religion, and not God, are just as great as — and more
than — the dangers of worshipping Science, or the
results to which it leads.
' Before concluding, however, let me answer your
questions about the etchings. They are done by Mr.
James Smetham, 1 Park Lane, Paradise Row, Stoke
Newington, London N., and published by him. If you
have ever nothing better to do, and write him a line to
let him know what you think of his works, he would,
I know, be much gratified ; and, if he was in the mood
for writing, you might get a letter back, which you
would like to receive. Do not, however, request him to
send you the etchings: the series of which, I believe,
will shortly be completed by a dozen ; as, if I go up to
London in the spring, I should like to obtain them for
you myself, and see to their safe transmission.

' I notice, as a rule in life, that hot correspondence
falls almost always away ; but the occasional interchange

224 RETROSPECTS
of letters, which does not interfere with the business
of life, is useful and good. I shall put no definite
time or conditions on hearing from you, neither must
you claim the same from me ; but I hope we shall hear
from each other, when occasion serves. "For as iron
sharpeneth iron, so a man's countenance doth that
of his friend " ; and I consider a letter the next best
thing to the countenance, though a very imperfect and
to some extent unsatisfactory mode of communi
cation.' * * * # *
' Warrington : 19 January, 1863.
*****
' I thank you greatly for your book,1 which is
much more valuable to me than if I had bought it. I
am quite determined, however, not to exhaust the
pleasure of reading it at once ; but rather to let it lie
on my table, open it at a blank moment, and find every
time a choice diamond in fittest setting of right
words. I do not think you ought quite to exclude the
four names mentioned in your preface. Because they
have written much that is good is scarcely a reason
that we should have none. Two or three from George
Herbert — say The Flower and The Pulley — one or
two from Shakespeare, a sonnet or fragment not quoted
quite every day, and a passage from Comus, would be
no more familiar than Shirley's " The glories of our
birth and state," and Herrick's " Fair Daffodils." The
1 The Poems from the Dawn.

WILLIAM DAVIES 225
very names would add fragrance to the volume, and
completeness, I think.
' The binding, I think, bears very much the character
of the Jones, Morris, and Rossetti society who are trying
to get at the simplicity in design of the Middle Ages.
The motto is just the thing ; but I think the vignette
might have been better. Still it will do.
*****
' I received also a copy of Mr. Wilson's lecture
delivered at West Hurlet,1 which is a really noble pro
duction, full of deep and earnest truth. When you see
him, please convey to him my very cordial sympathies
and very best thanks. With one thing in his pamphlet
I do not agree. He thinks thought ought not to be
bought, but given. The labourer, however, must live
by his occupation. Nay more, I do not see why thought
should be given, any more than that bread should
be given, which is a necessity before and beyond
thought. ft ^ % $£ Jfc
' I shall be very glad to hear of your being fixed in a
congenial sphere. Not idleness, freedom from definite
duty, a perfectly sympathetic moral and intellectual
atmosphere, constitute the most desirable blessings ;
but rather a field of labour in harmony with the highest
powers of work and influence within us. This is man's
noblest destmy, to work in such a field with all his
powers and energies, and not to work in vain.
' We shall be glad, indeed, to see you for as long a
1 On Work and Money.
I. Q

226 RETROSPECTS
time as you can make stay, when you come south on
your Wordsworthian pilgrimage. It is now many years
since I stood at his grave. Indeed, it was very shortly
after his death. Whilst yet a boy I spent a fortnight
amongst the English Lakes alone. It was the first time
I had ever been so long companionless, but I cannot tell
you how much more impressive everything became on
that account. I think I learnt more of the mystery,
glory, and lofty teaching of Nature, in that short fort
night, than I have ever learnt since. Like a gnome or
earth-spirit, I seemed to be part and parcel of all that
was around me, whether my vision soared over the
undulating spread of mountain, lake, and valley, or
whether I sat hour-long by the side of running waters,
or read their marvellous lessons from flower and leaf.
' Have you ever read Wordsworth's Prelude ? I
need scarcely ask you. There are some very noble
passages in it, in deeper sympathy — nay, absolute unity
— with Nature than is to be found in all Literature.
But, do you know, I do not frequently turn to Words
worth as my expositor of Nature. He always seems to
me as if he made it a business to be poetical. Keats,
for instance — although he knew no more of the meaning
of Nature than a butterfly — often places me nearer its
essence than Wordsworth does. But perhaps those really
understand Nature the best — or at least in the best way
— who come as men from amongst men ; not scholars,
philosophers, and dreamers, but those who come from
the occupations, activities, littlenesses, and greatnesses,
as they exist now on Mart and Change, in City, Town

WILLIAM DAVIES 227
and village — who come from the regions in which
men talk of corn and beef, politics and railway shares.
I refer to such as Burns, Milton, Shakespeare, and
even Tennyson ; who, writing the most exquisite and
accomplished aesthetic poetry, do not seem to limit
themselves to the mere vocation of poet, and whose
works bear internal evidence of their being men whose
vigour shoots out (or might shoot out) in many and
various directions. It is Wordsworth's oneness, in fact,
which gives somewhat the aspect of photographs to his
pictures— pictures done by a brain-machine, rather than
by the living hand of a glowing soul, alive to beauty,
glory, and loveliness in every direction. I really don't
know whether I am stating mere prejudice or idiosyn
crasy, and not broad and general truth ; but of this you
must form your own conclusion.'

' Warrington : June 20, 1863.
*****
' Mr. Smetham accompanied me to the Isle of Wight,
where a little sketching, sea-bathing, and fresh air
brought some tone back to my relaxed physique, and
closed my brief sojourn. Believe me, there is nothmg I
should like more than to accompany you, on your sacred
pilgrimage ' ; but I cannot. I confess to you that I do
not like to think of how much that is ennobling, and
soothing, I miss ; if I do, I strive to console myself with
1 To the Wordsworth country. Q.2

228 RETROSPECTS
the fact that something must always be missed, and that
this is only another unit to that something :
There's somewhat flows to us in life,
But more is taken quite away.
A strange consolation, that a man should console
himself for the loss of the cupful with the thought of
the fact that he cannot reach the fountain ! and yet that
is the only one available to me.
' I think I told you that it was Wordsworth who first
ushered me into the realm of the poetry of Nature when
I was a mere boy. To him I am deeply indebted ; so that
in all my generalisations concerning him I reserve the
respect and reverence which belongs to everything he
did and said. I fully believe the critic's art is detri
mental to all true enjoyment, and this makes me very
careful of forming merely critical opinions on what is
truly excellent and noble. If you go into Cumberland you
will understand Wordsworth much better. Find out the
lonely hill tarns, the nooks and corners which are only
voiceful in solitude, and I think you need scarcely miss
a companion. 'The dramatic power, quiet in its vastness and
easy in its intensity, possessed by Robert Browning is
something wonderful. It is many years since I read
his poems. Some of those you mention, however,
I recollect as being particular favourites, from which
I wrote extracts at the time of reading them. S agree
with you that he is finer as a lyrist, or in his pictur
esque abstractions, than as a writer of well-rounded and

WILLIAM DAVIES 229
complete drama, but that is due in a great measure to
his power in the latter direction, which yet lacks the
outwardness to make him a Shakespeare.
' Whilst I enter fully into the importance of your work,
its necessity and its results, let me beg of you not to
devote yourself too closely to mental labour. Surely
God wishes the whole man nourished, physical, moral,
intellectual. The loss of health I consider to be a very
serious misfortune, and one which we should by all
means avoid, if only as a matter of policy.
' I should be glad to see your letters on Colenso,1 if
you have them in compact form, which you might either
bring when you come, or send and I would return them.
I really do not think it is worth your while to enter into
the controversy at all, or even to allude to it, or think of
it. I have found these rules save me from much useless
trouble and perplexity. I advise my friends, who confer
with me about the book, to go on, just as if it had not
been written.
' I have received copies of my portrait from Silvy,
for whom I stood when in London. I consider him to
be by far the best photographer of all those whose work
I have yet seen. His portraits are pictures, and valu
able even on that account. I send you prints of the
two positions in which I stood, in order that you may
keep the one you think most characteristic. . . .
*****
* In returning from London, I made the acquaintance
1 A series contributed to TJie Dundee Advertiser, in 1863.

230 RETROSPECTS
of some truly noble and excellent young ladies, living
in Warwickshire — which could scarcely be called
acquaintanceship before, as I had only seen one of them
for an hour three years ago. She called at our house
here one evening, with one of my friends. Accident
led us into correspondence, which has been maintained
more or less fitfully ever since. In response to frequent
invitations I called and spent a night last Wednesday,
found an intelligent and characteristic circle of a widow
and three daughters, living at a manorial farm-house,
hushed and silent in trees and pastures. One of them
had been with Mr. Davis, in his recent explorations of
ancient Carthage ; one, who was married, sang with the
skill and feeling of an Albani or a Patti (nay, certainly
transcended the latter), whilst the third, who confessed
herself to be without a single " accomplishment," kept
the house alive with a force of character scarcely less
original and energetic than that of Shirley, who, indeed,
appeared no fiction beside her. Good and noble women
(young) are so rare that to find such in a natural
atmosphere, where friendship may be entered into and
fully enjoyed without difficulty or misunderstanding, is
a registered event in life, the importance of which can
hardly be overrated. Of Dora Greenwell I hear or see
nothing, except now and then a fragment in Good
Words. No doubt she is active enough in some un
known mine, whence she will eventually rise to give her
friends greeting and good-bye.'

WILLIAM DAVIES 231
' Warrington : Maroh 25, 1864.
*****
' There is no possible " Church " into which you
can enter in which you will not have to concede a good
deal of personal views and feelings, if you wish to be of
any use in that vocation. I am quite convinced for my
self that the Christian religion is a progressive one,
that the true follower of Christ must act as He would
have acted now ; not merely following the line and
letter of eighteen hundred years ago ; and if you ask
me how you are to know under these circumstances what
is the right course of action, I cannot say one word
more than this, that being Christian you ought to know ;
or for what earthly, or super-earthly, purpose was that
large " spirit of truth " promised and bestowed ? The
Church of England is a large and enlightened Institu
tion ; and, partly through indifference, and partly on
account of the number of the best educated — therefore
most tolerant — men and women who are in it, is
extremely liberal in its religious sentiment. Neverthe
less, to a " yearning spirit " that is vivified and vitalised
from within, and drinks continually of the wide and
deep sea of Truth, feeling the Divine Fire glowing and
scintillating around, as he progresses step by step, it
may not be wide enough. I fear that almost none of
the Churches recognise the Truth unless it be clothed
in the old conventionalisms, and sometimes brought
down to the level of pagan capacities, hung about with
the old phylacteries, Urim and Thummim.
' But one must recollect that in Religion we are not

232 RETROSPECTS
called upon to live the life, and work out the views and
sentiments, of a hundred years hence ; any more than
we are to live civilly and socially as under a system of
laws which the world is not yet advanced enough to
understand. To be of use in his generation a man
must submit to the religious and social forms of his
time, i.e. if they are not erroneous, but only fall short of
the most complete and extended truth. He must accept
these, live in them, and work under them, making the
best use he can of the material at his command.
*****
' But I do not think it is easy to live the right kind
of religious life in the broad sense of a teacher, unless
there is some certainty as to worldly competence.
*****
' I cannot tell you, as one of my friends, with how
much weariness I have laboured at an occupation per
fectly uncongenial to me for so many years of my life,
keeping steadily in view (unless I had married, which
would have consecrated and redeemed it perhaps) a final
severance from it. The moment has now come when I
feel myself perfectly free to choose my occupations,
though wealth has been denied me. I have already
made arrangements to leave here at midsummer, the
beginning of July. I shall probably then spend a few
weeks in London, Switzerland, &c, and endeavour to
reach Italy before the ensuing winter. I can hardly
believe in the near prospect of the object of all my
earthly longings : Liberty, Sunshine, Art, Nature, and
the power to labour at such Work as I love, without

WILLIAM DAVIES 233
domination of the external in any way whatsoever. My
prospects, however, take a somewhat sober interest from
the uncertainty of all human plans, and the unseen
shoals that lie along the sea of life. That I have
acted, and am acting, rightly in my plans I have not
the least shadow of a doubt ; and I believe I never shall
have, whether they are fully carried out or not.
#-**#*
' I ought, perhaps, to say to you that I do not con
template a perpetual banishment from England ; as I
always think, if life lasts, I shall ultimately reside in
London, which is the most eclectic place in the world.
*****
' Blake's illustrations to Blair's Grave are quite
wonderful in their power and originality. Some of his
works exhibit the surpassing grasp and magnificence of
Michael Angelo. . . .
' Though his drawings are frequently inadequate, his
conceptions and the strange weird force with which they
are portrayed are almost as far out of the reach of
praise as they are of criticism. His illustrations to
The Book of Job, and to the Prophetic Books, you
ought to see. By the way, some of his poems in the
Songs of Innocence, and Songs of Experience, are just
as remarkable as his designs. Woolner's My Beautiful
Lady is a very exquisite poem. I have just finished
reading it. There is a passage in it that I have appro
priated as mine prospectively :
A world of beauty
Where love moves ever hand in hand with duty,
And life, a long aspiring pilgrimage,
Makes labour but a pastime of delight.

234 RETROSPECTS
' I often think the experience of the old Israelites is
a type exactly true of the ordmary course of that life
which acknowledges the superior guidance and power of
the highest laws (or God). Bondage, Struggle, Freedom.
All of these, though sometimes failing altogether, are
true in the broad, though I have not yet succeeded in
establishing a perfect Philosophy of Life in the abstract.
Goethe says that " Whatever a man wishes in youth he
shall have enough of in old age " ; and this is a saying
that tends in the same way, having a broad basis of
truth, though by no means universally true. May you
and I at least find it true to us.
' Thanks for your two papers. I have not heard from
Dora Greenwell for many a day. She is one of the most
fitful persons I ever knew.
*****
' If you can get a sight of Gustave Dore's Illustra
tions to Dante's Inferno, do so ; as, though some of
them are meretricious and of doubtful art, there is great
graphic and picturesque power in them as a whole.'
Nearly thirty years later, after many vicissitudes on
both sides, the following letters reached me :
' Baycliffe, Lymm, Cheshire : September 13, 1892.
' I reached this place more than a month ago, after
a tedious journey, from which, however, I suffered no
thing worse than fatigue.
'All I can do is to school myself day by day to
submit to the teaching and discipline of life, and in this
I have a large faith, though it is difficult to keep such

WILLIAM DAVIES 235
faith unobscured. Surely there must be something for
the soul, so high in its instincts, so far-seeing in its
perceptions, beyond the reach and uses of the body, the
burden of which at present oppresses me so sorely. If
we are born into this world to get rid of the slavery
of sense, and all that pertains to the mortal condition,
as some creeds direct us to believe, surely it can be no
sin to wish and long for that period when we shall lay
all wants down, and rest— even if it imply the relin
quishing of personality — in larger being. I, for one,
fully recognise and accept the Vedantic position that this
life is but the gate to Infinite Being, an evolution from
the lower to the higher.
*****
'With your Wordsworth devotion I warmly sym
pathise. I read him again last winter with increased
respect, and love for his fine intuition, his keen spiritual
perceptions and elevated wisdom.
*****
• By the way, you might think from my allusion to
the " Vedantic position " that I am anti-Christian. That
is not so. I am Christian indeed, but with a much
wider interpretation than is given to Christianity by
the " Churches." It — Christianity — is a Divine and
Eternal Voice, but not the only one spoken. That has
never been silent in the world's history.'
***** ' Lymm, Cheshire : October 21, 1892.
*****
' The worst that I have had to endure during my ill-

236 RETROSPECTS
ness has been a restless nervousness, coming upon me
at intervals, which I have not been able to control. It
attacks resolution itself at the citadel, so that the power
to resist it is crushed.
*****
' An illness like mine reveals many things to the
soul. One is the vast difference between theoretic or
unpractised Religion and Philosophy, and experimental.
My conclusion is that we learn nothing from theory,
and that is the reason why life is so hard a school.
Everything of value to us must be a suffered experience ;
otherwise, little or nothing is acquired. All evolution is
through suffering, and there is no other mode of advance
ment and progress. That is my discovery. It explains
many things. Perhaps, if we only knew the value of our
pains, we should not wish to have them removed ; so
much as to receive the full benefit and advantage of
them.' ip % % % ^
' Baycliffe, Lymm, Cheshire : January 31, 1893.
*****
' I have been accustomed to the life of cities for
many years, so that I find the country somewhat dull.
There is nobody here who is at all interested in my own
pursuits, and I confess I feel intellectually lost. The
nearest city is the county town, Chester. It is an
interesting old place, and I have some idea of re
moving thither. It would at least give me the chance
of wider interests, and possibly of some usefulness. The

WILLIAM DAVIES 237
truth is, I am spoiled for an indifferent and common
place life. I was the centre of an intellectual circle of
remarkable people of high intelligence and attainments
in Rome. My illness was marked by a display of warm
kindness from the colony of foreigners there, which was
one of the most beautiful things in my life. It is one
of the mysteries of existence that I should have been
flung out of what seemed so exactly my position and
vocation, to be cast into a spiritual desert. In my
present condition I cannot return. I can only wait,
wait, wait.' ***** ' Lymm, Cheshire : February 7, 1893.
*****
' I thought of going to Chester from an inward lead
ing. I cannot but think I have been brought from Italy
for some ulterior reason not yet apparent. I am longing
to be of some use or help to somebody in this world, and
had thought that in such a city as Chester I might find
something of a vocation. I am pretty well acquainted
with Italian literature throughout, and am sufficiently
well up in my Dante. I thought I might perhaps gather
about me a few studious folks who would be glad to
have readings with me in an informal way, either in
that or some other direction within my reach. Possibly
your promise of an introduction — for which I heartily
thank you anyway — to Mrs. Sandford might give me just
such an opening as I am wishing for.'

238 RETROSPECTS
' 78 Watergate Street, Chester : April 24, 1893.
*****
' I have only read Wordsworth's prose works occa
sionally and incidentally. It is either my fault, or his,
that they have never taken much hold of me. It has
always appeared strange to me that form should be, in
so many cases, so important an element with many
writers. Some time ago Ruskin's poems were sent to
me. I was quite disappointed with them. Not a single
line impressed itself on my mind. This is altogether
unaccountable to me, when the vivid grace and colouring
of his prose are remembered, I always feel the same
relatively in regard to Wordsworth's prose, compared
with his verse.
*****
' Your interest in the Vedanta scheme pleases
me. I should very much like to inaugurate something
from the scientific not " theosophic " (that much abused
word !) point of view, and I shall try. My attitude in
regard to these writings is that they reveal the primary
and fundamental principle of all Religion, that this is
and always has been the same, and that by penetrating
the depths of the soul we find a response to its appeal
to-day as clear and distinct as ever it was ; and that this
response is the Truth.'

' Chester : January 3, 1895.
*****
' I am deeply glad that you have found anything

WILLIAM DAVIES 239
congenial in my little book.1 It contains things I have
long wished to say, and I hope it may be helpful to
others. ' The Buddhist says you are to make the path you
travel, and perhaps that is the reason that we walk so
much alone, in order that we may be as self-dependent
as possible. Still one misses companionship ; for, as
Solomon says, " As iron sharpeneth iron, so the face of
a man his friend ! "
' As to your exposition of " Indian Philosophy," I feel
if I were well we might possibly accomplish it together.2
I grasp the Oriental essential principles so closely that
they are perfectly luminous to me on the whole. But
my knowledge of them is not academic ; and I do not
know Sanscrit, or any Oriental tongue, excepting scraps
and words necessary for precision of comprehension.

'One of my articles in the Atlantic Monthly was
on the " Tao " of the Chinese. A former missionary in
China for seventeen years, a lecturer on Chinese Religion
and Philosophy, wrote to say that I had given the best
exposition of the essential principles of Taoism he had
ever seen ; which was flattering and perhaps true, as
there are so few who look upon the Religions and
Philosophies of the old world as other than curiosities —
1 The Pilgrim of the Infinite.
2 This referred to a series of books on ' Philosophy in its National
Developments,' which will be referred to in a later volume of Retrospects,
on Max Miiller and others. I had asked Mr. Davies to co-operate.

240 RETROSPECTS
a mistake, for the best of them contain something more
than the nucleus of the highest religious conception.
' I am obliged, however, to confess that I do not
think the present age has any special interest in
Religion, as such — and cares even too little for the one
it professes to follow — to have a vital interest in the
wonderful revelations of the past. In your proposed
examination of Hindu religions, I imagine the only
point of interest to the public will be an historic or
academic one. Max Miiller is the only man known to
me who is able to write it. Although I feel I have gained
more from the study of his labours than he has himself
acquired. Perhaps that is pure conceit, but still it is a
humble conceit ; for I am most grateful for, and appre
ciative of, all I have learned.
' Excuse my garrulous wanderings. I think that you
are sitting by my fire in veritable presence, and enjoying
an unconventional chat.'
***** ' Chester : June 27, 1895.
*****
' Your prospectus of proposed Philosophical Publica
tions ' is very interesting to me. It is, to my mind, just
what is wanted ; but I must confess that I have looked
in vain for a public for such a scheme. It seems to me
that modern Philosophy will have nothing of the old —
may I say worn-out — lines revivified, and hates every
light but that of its own kindling ; whereas the true
1 See the last note.

WILLIAM DAVIES 241
light often lies without the limits of accepted systems.
I think Max Miiller has shown this very clearly in his
exposition of Oriental modes of thought, and some of
their conclusions. Max Miiller is our best exponent of
the Vedantic systems, and Rhys Davids of the Buddhist
ones. The lectures entitled Theosophy, or Psychologi
cal Beligion, of the former give the best resume of
Oriental philosophical, or religio-philosophical, thought
that I know. Though Ancient India had a distinct
school (or schools) of philosophy pure and simple, that of
Kapila was probably the most remarkable, or perhaps
I ought to say, wonderful. I fear Europe is not yet
ready to receive these advanced philosophies, though
I feel assured that their day has come. Max Miiller
will tell you that their logical power, and penetrative
insight, far exceed our own. They certainly do so to
me. Your effort " to make the esoteric of the Schools
exoteric to the many " is a very noble one, but of its
result I dare not prophesy. " There are two classes of
men," says an Oriental sage, " who are difficult to teach,
the very wise, and the very ignorant." He is right, and
I think one may reach the latter almost more readily
than the former with a new thing, a thing off the old
lines. Whatever you do, may it prosper !
• If you would like my Songs, a card will bring them
after a little time, as I do not know exactly where to
find them ; but I know they are somewhere in the solar
system ! and I will institute a search.'

242 RETROSPECTS
' Chester : August 12, 1895.
*****
' I know your life must be often overcrowded. . . .
If I interpret your proclivities aright, they would lead
you to that condition of " learned leisure " which loves
to work without the pressure of haste, leaving you
hours of easeful reflection and the orderly adjustment of
things. I wish I had such a commodity of desiderata
to bestow. I would immediately make out to you a
sufficiently large grant of the same !
' I forward you my little book of verses of the Long
Ago.1 It is immature in a sense, and there is much in
it I should now exclude. Still, I feel its basis is mainly
right in principle, and though I would exclude a moiety
of what I have written, it is not because I would depre
cate the records of a developing age. I have expanded,
I hope indefinitely in many directions, since those lines
were written ; but I feel that it is in a great degree
upon foundations there indicated that I have found my
bases, and grown. Therefore, as regards myself, I say
let it stand. I often think one's early writings should
be looked upon in the manner of Novalis. He says :
' " I treat my writings as a mental education. They
teach me to reflect, and work out my own ideas. That
is all I expect from them."
'This is very much the case with myself. It is
certainly compensatory for the missing of every other
mark.' 1 His Songs of a Wayfarer.

WILLIAM DAVIES 243
' Chester : December 11, 1895.
*****
' I do not regret the lapse of time which brings me
nearer to the next stage of being, for I often get heartily
weary and tired of this. Yet I try to subdue impatience
as far as I am able. " Life is a mystery," says an Italian
poet, " which is only explained at its close." I see this,
and accept life as educational in the largest sense of the
term, and I await its explication. Placed beyond the
boundary, the activities and energies of material life,
many aspects are revealed to me, which remove me
from this sphere, and give me a wider outlook. Such
elevated views, or points of view, men for the most part
do not gain, or want to gain: but they are there for
those whose way leads them thither. Some of them
I have found.'
*****
I think that in William Davies' Songs of a Way
farer there will be found some of the most remark
able minor poems of the nineteenth century. His
Rules of a Right Life, his poem entitled May, his
Goodly Days of Old, and his sonnets on Santa Maria
dal Fiore at Florence and on A Fountain in the
Campagna of Rome, are noteworthy products of a
genius that instinctively divined what was beautiful
and right.
During his later years, and his retirement at
Chester, he was able to a certain extent to revive the
work he did so beneficially at Rome, during his prime.
He fostered the study of Dante, in a small circle of
B 2

244 RETROSPECTS
devoted persons ; and, with still more delightful
results, he founded a small select society for the
study of the philosophy of India. Mrs. Sandford, the
author of Thomas Poole and his Friends, and Judge
Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days, were
then living in Chester ; and both of them were deeply
interested in William Davies, and his work. Mrs.
Sandford in particular attended his weekly readings and
expositions of the Vedas and Upanishads. It was noble
work done in comparative obscurity, for one of his
practical mottoes was ' in quietness and confidence shall
be your strength.'

245

JAMES SMETHAM
James Smetham— an original and distinctive artist,
a poet, and a remarkable letter-writer — was born at
Pateley Bridge, Yorkshire, in 1821. He was a man of
singularly beautiful character, touched with the rarest
idealism, and was a friend of Ruskin and of Dante
Rossetti. Many of his letters were collected, and edited
with a prefatory memoir by William Davies — to whom
the previous chapter of this book is devoted — in 1892.
Those which are issued now have not before been
published. In 1854 Mr. Ruskin asked him to write
down some particulars of his early years. From this
paper I made some extracts. ' I have a distinct
remembrance,' he wrote, 'of the ecstasy with which,
when at the age of two years, I regarded the distant
blueness of the hills, and saw the laurels shake in the
wind, and felt it lift my hair.' At the age of fifteen he
was articled to Mr. E. J. Willson, Lincoln, who wrote
the literary part of Pugin's Examples of Gothic
Architecture. ' He set me to draw all the figures about
the Minster. I spent a grand solitary year at this work.
With a key to myself I poked about every corner at all
hours, and twice a day heard the organ-music and the
choristers' singing roll about among the arches. I sat

246 RETROSPECTS
on the warm leads of the roof, and looked over the Fens,
and dreamed and mused hours away there, and then
came down over the arches of the choir, and drew the
angels drumming and fiddling in the spandrels. . . . But
I fretted my soul, because I wanted to be a painter.' At
the end of three years his indentures as architect's
clerk were cancelled. ' I was thus thrown on the world
by my own act and deed, and with very little practice
announced myself in Shropshire as a portrait-painter,
getting employment at once; working when I wanted
money, strolling to Buildwas and Wenlock and Haigh-
mond Abbeys, scrambling to the top of the Wrekin, and
wandering in lane, meadow, and woodland.' At the age
of twenty-two he went to London, and entered as a
probationer to the Royal Academy, was helped by John
Philip and Edward Burne- Jones, who ' told him not to
be anxious, for in or out of the Academy he would
succeed.' The death of a brother greatly unhinged him.
' My spirit followed him. I perceived that to attain to
him was not a matter of fancy or speculation, and " the
commandment " came to me. A complete upheaval and
chaos of my inward life followed, and I fell into the
" Slough of Despond." The beauty of Nature mocked me,
my fancies became ghosts. I felt my discordances with
the spiritual truisms, and it was not till my father also
died ' (he was a Wesleyan minister) ' that my soul was
stilled, and set in order.' . . . ' A salutary fear shut me up
in a happy seclusion, and I could not precipitate myself
into the battle of life ; so I went on painting portraits,
and interspersing them with fancy pictures, gaining

JAMES SMETHAM 247
money enough to keep me, and then snatching a month
or two for study ; now in a large town, now hi a little
one, now in a remote farm painting the farmer and his
family, roaming in his fields and by the edge of his
plantations ; then in London.'
Smetham not only practised the art of painting, but
carried on a study of the poets, especially of Tennyson,
and made many delightful marginal illustrations on
the edition which he used — that of 1843. This effort
to combine the study of Literature with devotion to
practical philanthropy, and artistic labour, gave an
ethereality and ideality to his work ; but it did not lead
to conventional success, or * getting on ' in his vocation.
However, in 1861 he wrote :
' In my own secret heart I look on myself as one who
has got on, and got to his goal, as one who has got some
thing a thousand times better than a fortune, more real,
more inward, less in the power of others, less variable,
more immortal, more eternal ; as one whose feet are on
a rock, his goings established, with a new song in his
mouth, and joy on his head.'
It was eleven years before this, in 1851, when he
settled in London, that he became teacher of drawing to
the students of the (Methodist) Normal College, West
minster. This afforded him a frugal livelihood, but
it was necessary to add to it ; and, as he did not
succeed in the sale of larger pictures, he formed the plan
of etching his smaller designs, and 'issuing them
quarterly to subscribers.' Six hundred subscribed ; but

248 RETROSPECTS
he altered his plan, issuing instead a small oil or water-
colour sketch annually to each member of a circle of
forty, for which he charged only three guineas at first ;
afterwards, when the size was greater and the work
more elaborate, nine guineas. As allegorical sketches
these were admirable, felicitous in design, often brilliant
in colour, and some of them symbolic of his own life.
Many won the praise of Ruskin, of G. F. Watts, and
of Dante Rossetti. With the last he formed a strong
friendship, spending every Wednesday in his studio, paint
ing during the day, seeing friends in the evening, and
remaining till next morning. After his death, Rossetti
wrote of his pictures to his widow They ' have delighted
and astonished me by their extreme beauty. Indeed
they are, in colour, sentiment, and nobility of thought,
only to be classed with the very flower of modern art.'
Mr. Davies' brief Memoir of his friend must be
consulted for a singularly just estimate of his character
with its ' intellectual beauty strangely attractive,' his
conversational powers, the literary endowments of one
to whom books were
a substantial world, both pure and good,
the ' atmosphere of subtle intellectualism ' in which he
breathed, and his life-long devotion to the good of others.
I transcribe parts of six letters to me, belonging to
the years 1863, 1864, and 1865 :
1 1 Park Lane, Stoke Newington : September 6, 1863.
¦iSfc vfc v ¦9P ¦#¦
' It gives me great satisfaction to find that there are

JAMES SMETHAM 249
elements in my volume of Etchings which give you, and
your friends, any pleasure or profit. They were pub
lished among a circle, on the whole, not quite what
I could have desired, but they have in some instances
found their way a little outside that circle into a few
hands in which I would wish them to be placed. I tried
to express in the preface some idea of their aim, as
compared with completer works ; but, when it is
necessary to do this, it is often also futile. Since their
publication I have found (as I think) an agent for
pictorial expression much more complete, and certainly
much less laborious. I cannot do better than enclose a
circular which, so far as I have had time to send it out
has been successful in its object.
*****
' The " Studies " named in it bear the same relation
to designs that etchings do, with the very important
addition of the element of colour; and, as they are
produced in a twentieth of the time, they afford a much
more ample field for the expression of what Blake used
to call " Inventions."
*****
' It is seldom that I find enough genuine interest in
Art to provoke expression ; and it is a joy to meet
with anyone who, being drawn to it by mental fitness,
has also right views of its moral relations. On the
whole I have lived in a lonely land, in regard to what
Art has been to me, and what I think it ought to be to
man. Mr. Davies may have told you that I am a
Methodist, and I can tell you that I am well content to be

250 RETROSPECTS
one ; but I have to deplore that to be at once artist and
methodist is a puzzling position in the Universe, which
it would take much palaver to explain with sufficient
clearness and pathos.'

' 1 Park Lane, Stoke Newington, N. : March 9, 1864.
'Within the last few weeks I have been able to
resume the cherished scheme of which I sent you an
account ; and the more I think of it, and carry it out,
the more sure I am that I have at last discovered my
vocation, a point of the utmost importance to have settled
in any man's life, and bringing great comfort when it is
found. I finished my large picture about Christmas,
and shall be in no hurry to do any more such work,
considering that in the same time I might have embodied
fifty separate ideas able to be dispersed to fifty different
centres of influence.
' I wish that you could look over what I have done.
A good many are already sold, but for a few days I shall
have about twenty by me, framed and ready ; and it is
important that a variety of them should be seen to
catch the right idea of what I am setting before me.
' However, you can't jump from Dundee into my
studio ; so I must be content to inform you that I have
two or three scriptural subjects among them, which I
fancy you would like.'
[It is impossible adequately to reproduce the drawings
which followed. The letter-press description can be
given and rough outline sketches.]

JAMES SMETHAM

251

NO. 1. — EZEKIEL BY CHEBAR.

Sort of prismatic _
wheel, with
shooting rays

"Willow with lamp
hung on it Dark river

Dark sky streaked
with red
Four oaptives

Ezekiel— young, face
lifted up, white
dress, a roll in his
hand

No. 2. — After the Earthquake, a Fire.
Star

Black robe, whirled by  £
wind

Branch of tree by whic
Elijah holds on

•Sort of flame-flower

'ailing stone over dark
torrent

Rolling clouds
Ledge of rock

Tongue of flame issuing in steam

Line of breaking
light

Large stones of
brook

No. 3. — Jabbok.
Lurid clouds

Stem bent by wind

Boulder

Jacob Angel in dim white

252

EETEOSPECTS

No. 4. — The Husbandman hath long patience.
Rooks

Mist hiding bill-
shoulder

Rain-clouds with
gleam on horizon

Dim champaign

Lines of faint
springing blades

Man in smockfrock ; light catches on edge of figure

No. 5. — Men will praise thee when thou
DOEST WELL TO THYSELF.

Clouds to vignette
the subject

Young man of fortune, in blue robe, in the costume of no country, and illumined
by ' the light that never was on sea or land,' with bagB of money

No. 6.—

Title *

r

i p?ffig

L _=z_j

 -. li

Gold flap
JAMES SMETHAM 253
' 1 Park Lane, Stoke Newington, N. : April 1, 1864.
' I have been from home a good deal, endeavouring
to put store into the storehouse ; either by taking my
sketch-book, and rambling by farms and gardens, and in
lanes and fields ; or in note-making at a most important
exhibition now open of all the works of Mulready.
Many of his pictures are the property of the nation ;
these I can study at any time ; but many of his best
works are not likely to be brought together again in a
hurry, and it is desirable to work hard at them with
this recollection in view. One room is devoted to his
paintings ; not numerous, but unspeakably elaborate,
and perfect in execution. Another room is full of the
sketches and drawings made for them. These, to a
professor of the art, are enchanting. I suppose it is not
possible to share the delight it gives to have before you,
at one view, the key to a man's mental processes in a
department where you yourself are a worker. " How
ever did the man do this ? " is the natural exclamation
on the sight of a work finished such as his are. Here
the veil is drawn aside, and you see that, like
all the Muse's heavenly lays,
With toil of spirit it is dearly bought.
' The first hesitating notes are struck with pen and
ink, in a sketch two inches long, on an old envelope
scrap. This is taken up in a higher mood on another
larger scrap, and has a touch of shading in it. Then it
is enlarged to six inches, and a vague general effect of
composition and posture is realised, and you feel that

254 EETEOSPECTS
the man has hold of his idea. He proceeds to do a
coloured sketch in oil, or water-colour ; and at this
stage he abandons fancy, and turns to Nature, drawing
each part — hand, foot, elbow, knee — direct from life,
with unwearied care; sometimes resuming all these
studies in one large black-and-red chalk drawing, as a
Cartoon. Then he steals touch by touch on his
canvas, or panel, into the life of the finished subject.
It would be well if the youth of eighteen, who is so im
patient of toil, could see these heavy discounts which have
to be paid before the riches of the palette are realised.
' There is no touch of mere " cleverness " about
these strong men. If you examine any of these pen-
and-ink drawings you find them composed of five or six
separate pieces of paper — pasted or inserted — where the
"relish" of the subject has been lost; and a bit the
size of a sixpence is pasted where a head has not
"come," as it ought to do. So you have no wasted
labour. Your tyro, if he make a blunder, gives all up
in despair, burns his paper, gives himself the trouble to
begin again, and tires with failure. Your generalissimo
says, " How much of this will do ? Where is the
blunder ? Let me repair just that, and no more. Life is
too precious to afford to throw a touch away." It is not
on a superficial observation that you see evidence of
these re-considerations. The sketch looks happy and
free. You think he " hit it off," but he didn't.
' I am much obliged by the photograph, which will be
prized by me, and put into an album where I intend to
have my " forty " enshrined, so that I may consider

JAMES SMETHAM 255
them in detail. As most of them are personal friends,
it is a pleasant thing to look forward to a more regular
correspondence with them. I have drawn them all in
groups where they live in the neighbouring circles. You
are in a square by yourself. This is for the sake of seeing
them all at a glance. They are mere figures an inch long
scribbled in squares, but it is surprising how individual
they become, after you have retouched them a little.
Scale is not a very important element in distinct impres
sion. In the background of Mulready's " Convalescent
from Waterloo," there is a house at a great distance, by
the house a garden, in the garden a gardener and a lady.'
[Here he draws a copy of the picture.]
'These figures are larger than the figures in the
picture; yet, after getting acquainted with it, they
become your friends, and you know what they are talk
ing about. Small as he is, you see his braces crossed.'
[Another drawing of soldiers running.]
' These are figures still smaller. The bugle at the
barracks has sounded, and soldiers as small as this are
hastening down. This is how you see things in Nature
constantly. Sometimes you are near enough to see a
man wink, but not always. Yet he is an individual to
you all the same.
# # # # #
' The demand for publicity in the arena has always
been most distasteful to me, and yet, unless on some
such principle as this scheme of regular clients, it is
impossible to shrink from the vexations and turmoils of
the arena.' if tF ^ TP ^

256 EETEOSPECTS
' 1 Park Lane, Stoke Newington, N. : June 30, 1864.
*****
' We ' [i.e. himself and family] ' are going in an hour
or two to spend a month in a little true village in Kent,
Green- Street- Green, near Dartford. . . . The thought
of the country comes very delightfully after a year's toil.
Where we go there are open commons, and lanes
bordered wide with grass, and open ploughed fields with
very slow horses, and ploughmen trailing across them, in
order to teach tranquillity to the beholder. There are
very few houses, and one shop. The geese have it all
their own way among the furze and dry grass, and it is
altogether a " pleasing land of drowsyhead," 1 enough to
make you go to sleep to think of it.
'There is only one place where we could get
lodgings, and these were prepared for a curate who has
left the place, probably driven off by sheer silence. He
has left two hymns in large type on the bedroom wall,
which we are sure to have off by heart before we leave.'
***** ' 1 Park Lane : January 2, 1865.
TP TF tF 7fi 7T»
* The delight of it ' [the scheme of Studies] ' is won
derful ; and it has, as I hoped, a power of development
beyond itself. For example, a subscriber having re
ceived two Studies offered me seventy guineas to paint
him two larger subjects, and I expect this to be the case
here and there. I can hardly afford the wear and tear
of producing subjects, with much thinking in them,
1 See Thomson's Castle of Indolence, canto 1 stanza 6.

JAMES SMETHAM

257

for three guineas each. To remedy this I have tried
the following plan :
' 1. Spend a week or two in thinking out a subject
elaborately in water-colours for the portfolio.
' 2. When say half a dozen subjects are ready, trace
or sketch, or show them (which is best of all); and out of
this half-dozen let all the subscribers make their choice.
Only the same subject should not, if possible, be repeated
more than six times, and should be distributed, so as
not to clash in the same circle of friends or neighbours.
In each replica there would be some slight variation of
the theme, making it entirely original. In this way
each subscriber would be sure of something of the best
quality possible in the circumstances.
' 3. Use the subject on a larger canvas as a picture,
if need be.
* The subjects I have thought of I will describe to
you. No. 1. — Peter said, ' I go a fishing.'
Peter, reddish hair, russet dress

Shore

Rusty net

Rock

Cork float Hand Extended White edges Disciples
I. on loins arm of waves

No. 2. — The Husbandman and the Stork (55 sop).
Light blue promontory Red Phrygian cap
Blue sty

White cloud -

Grove

Two classic-looking Ripe Deep blue Two dead
figures reaping cornfield dress cranes

No. 3. — Lear, Cordelia, Clown.
Dark curtains of tent

Tangled silver hair,-
face white and sad

Golden hair, falling-

over Lear's arm

Light white dress-
in lamplight

-Two attendants
-Golden sky

-Clown calling him
1 Nuncle ' and
looking queer
Green dress

Two hands Face in Cordelia's Hands demonstrating
clasped profile hands against
looking Lear's face
at Clown

No. 4 — Eventide.

Rolling twilight clouds

Purple hill

Golden gleam/

Pine stems catching light

Boat at rocky Heron flying Pibry Monk Dead
landing-place over rooty medi- leaves
bank tating

Light catching
on dead, leaves

JAMES SMETHAM 259
" Or by the light thy words disclose
Watch Time's full river as it flows,
Scanning thy gracious Providence
Where not too deep for mortal sense."
Keble's Evening Hymn.
(Colour deep and sombre, with points of bright light on stems,
roots, creepers, &c. May be a scene in a primitive forest, and the
monk may be St. Francis Xavier.)
' On the whole I am inclined to suggest that No. 4
would be most likely to suit you best. I look upon it as
one of the most thorough things I have designed, and I
have spent much thought upon it. I fancy there is an
amount of soothing quieting influence about the general
tone of it, that would serve your turn as well as anything
I could send you, though if it does not take your fancy
I have plenty of other material.

' I think your views as to remaining in your own
Church are likely to be correct.1 "As a bird that
wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth
from his place." And unless there be very vital
differences of opinion it is unwise to enter on new
associations either of business or religion. It is only by
very slow degrees that the best influences take root.
A man's influence depends so much on protracted good
example, and this not only requires time, but time before
the same audience. A man may suddenly shoot down
an alley, and be lost to view out of the thoroughfare
1 This referred to a proposal to take Anglican orders, then being
considered. s 2

260 EETEOSPECTS
where he is known and recognised. Then again in any
Church the individual finds much that is not to his
taste, has to put up with a good deal, and it takes years
to lose the vexatious sense of antagonism. I believe also
that in cases of change there is antagonism two ways.
Unless the new comer is very quiet, his peculiarities vex
the community he enters. Even if he is quiet, he says
" sibbolet " instead of " shibboleth," and he is rather sus
pected. Very different is the case of a convert from the
world to the Church. The Church is glad to teach him,
and he has everything to learn, and usually leans to the
Church that was made the instrument of his conversion.
' Still there are cases where change has been made
without detriment, possibly with advantage. I know
Methodists who have become Dissenters, and Dissenters
who have become Methodists, and Methodists who have
become Churchmen, and some Church people who have
become Methodists. For myself, I don't much believe
in Evangelical Alliances. True Christians can't but
love one another, while for the work of life a little
clannishness gives zest and pungency. I find very
Catholic people wanting in practical intensity ; and,
considering that the days of our years are only three
score and ten, and that there is much to be done, and
that we are not as a rule Admirable Criehtons, it is
probably best for each man and Church to find his (and
its) own " line of things ready to hand," and then do it
with might.
' The most useful men I know are those who work
away in one direction, and have a touch of dislike for

JAMES SMETHAM 261
those who think differently. The rule is surely this,
that each man should "be himself," should take up the
point or points in which he is unquestionably strong,
and make the most of those points ; going on, and never
minding what other people think about what he does, so
long as he does not offend against laws applicable to all.
With all the good wishes of the season when " no planet
strikes, no witch hath power to harm," yours &c.'
***** ' 1 Park Lane, Stoke Newington, N. : May 23, 1865.
*****
' It is one of my great regrets that all very serious
Art is dreadfully dependent on money, and that with
the best will in the world a man can't boast much of the
perfection of work at three guineas. Still I am most
thankful that, as studies, this medium of utterance is
open to me ; and that, in a profession extremely hard to
make a source of support, they wonderfully simplify the
question of finance, and pave the way to better things.
Nay, I should be well content myself to do plenty of
studies themselves — believing as I do that suggestion,
and not mere imitation, is one of the highest functions of
Art — if there were sufficient intelligence in the public to
make them generally acceptable ; which I fear there is
not, as the history of William Blake shows.'
*****
As in the case of his friend William Davies, James
Smetham had a place among the minor poets of England.
He did not write much verse, but the majority who

262 EETEOSPECTS
read his Betrospection, his Oblivion, and The Single
Wish, will desire that he had written more. I quote
a sonnet, a copy of which I received soon after it was
written, entitled An Antidote to Care :
Think that the grass upon thy grave is green ;
Think that thou seest thine own empty chair,
The empty garments thou wast wont to wear,
The empty room where long thy haunt hath been.
Think that the lane, the meadow, and the wood
And mountain summit feel thy foot no more,
Nor the loud thoroughfares, nor sounding shore ;
All mere blank space where thou thyself hast stood.
And 'mid the thought-created silence say
To thy stripped soul, What am I now ? and where ?
Then turn, and face the petty narrowing care
That hath been burdening thee for many a day,
And it will die, as dies a wailing breeze
Lost in the solemn roar of boundless seas.

263

WHIT WELL ELWIN
The Bev. Whitwell Elwin was for fifty years the rector
of Booton in Norfolk, and editor of the Quarterly
Beview from 1854 to 1867. He was the friend of
many notable literary Englishmen, including Brougham,
Lockhart, Croker, Macaulay, Thackeray, and John Forster ;
and his reminiscences of them were extremely interesting
to his friends. Few men were more intimately acquainted
with the literature of the eighteenth century (as his
articles on Cowper, Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith, and
Johnson show) ; but he knew the nineteenth century
nearly as well, particularly Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Scott. His knowledge of Science, History, and Art was
also wide. He had a remarkable memory of all that he
ever got to know. His edition of Pope is well known ;
and — with his introductions to the Poems, the Essay on
Criticism, the Bape of the Lock, and the Essay on
Man — it is the standard one. Croker had begun it, but
accomplished little. Elwin edited five volumes, and then
gave it up, Mr. Courthope concluding it. Elwin also
wrote a life of John Forster. He seldom left Booton
except to go up to Town, when editor of the Quarterly.
He was devoted to his parish, where his genial ways,

264 EETEOSPECTS
his constant kindness to parishioners, his humour and
urbanity, made him a favourite with everyone.
There is an interesting sketch of him by Thackeray,
in one of his ' Boundabout Papers.' He laboured for many
years at the restoration and beautifying of his Church,
declining every offer made him to accept a more valuable
living. Booton Church is now one of the most perfect
specimens of Perpendicular Gothic in the county of
Norfolk. It has two towers, admirable stained glass
windows, and carved oaken seats : the flints in the face of
the outside walls, with delicate stone pilasters running
across, are most picturesque; the bosses on the roof
represent angels, with lamps hanging from them ; and
all is Mr. Elwin's reconstruction. It is a memorial of
twenty years' work, work regularly paid for by him as it
proceeded, so that from first to last no debt was incurred.
Not far off is a school, built of bricks made and burnt
close at hand, all under the direction of the rector.
Mr. Elwin's conversation was most picturesque and
varied. We talked much of Wordsworth ; and he once
recited to me, with as richly musical a voice and as deep
a pathos as I ever heard, the Abbotsford sonnet on the
departure of Sir Walter for Naples, dwelling especially
on the lines, the might
Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes ;
Blessings and prayers, in nobler retinue
Than sceptered king or laurelled conqueror knows,
Follow this wondrous Potentate.
He died as he was dressing, on new-year's day morning,
1900. As Wordsworth says, of the Grasmere pastor,

WHITWELL ELWIN 265
like a shadow thrown
Softly and lightly from a passing cloud,
Death fell on him ;
or, as Samuel Johnson put it, in lines which Elwin
often quoted : Then with no throb of fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.
The following are extracts from Mr. Elwin's letters
to me: ' Booton Kectory, Norwich : January 1, 1894.
' I was not acquainted with either Wordsworth or
Coleridge ; and much as I have heard about them from
others, I am sorry that I can do little to satisfy any
expectations our friend may have raised in you. Here,
however, is an extract from a letter written by Lockhart to
myself, which I think may be of use to you :
1 " November 22, 1852.
' " One of the last nights I met W. W. was at Miss
Eogers's, close by me here. In the evening she had a
bevy of young beauties, and both he and Sam were a
little excited. As the girls, and one especially, were
retiring, the two poets, Sydney Smith, and I, observed
them from the fireside of the outer room. ' Ah,' said
Sam, ' what an advantage we have ! In a few years all
these fair creatures will be withered, and their youth —
which is the worth of their sex — gone ; whereas we are
to the last almost as good as we ever were.' W. W.
surveyed him from top to toe, and bowing to the ground,

266 EETEOSPECTS
said in a whisper not to be forgotten, ' Speak for your
self, bard of Memory.' Grand was Sydney's roar, and
the banker slunk away visibly demolished.
' " I think it was the very day after that, being quite
accidentally at Highgate with a friend, it occurred to
me to go into the Church, and see what monument had
been raised to Coleridge. Behold ! W. W. and his wife
were in the church for the same purpose. My friend
took Mrs. Wordsworth into his carriage, and W. W. and
I walked across the fields to this park,1 he lodging at
Miss Eogers's, next door to me. He had on a former
occasion told me many painful stories about Coleridge.
* # * * *
' " But now his strain was very different. He spoke
with profound admiration, respect, and regret, and
seemed to consider him as having passed his latter
years in pious penitence that should obliterate all
errors." ' With reference to the anecdote in the first of these
two paragraphs it may be needful, if you print it, to
remind a new generation, who never saw Eogers, that
rather early in life he had a strong resemblance to a
corpse, a theme for numerous jests, and grew more
ghastly in advanced age. It was this that gave point to
Wordsworth's preliminary survey of him from top to toe,
followed by the burlesque bow, and the ironical " Speak
for yourself," in mockery of the Bard's vaunt, when his
outward appearance was in such ludicrous contradiction
to it. . . . All the accounts I got of Coleridge from
' To Sussex Place, in the Begent's Park.

WHITWELL ELWIN 267
those who knew him before his final asylum with
Gillman agreed in this — that he was destitute of self-
control, and that on the slightest incentive he gave
himself up to self-indulgence. . . . With his profligacies,
his reckless improvidence, his utter want of considera
tion for everyone but himself, there must have been
seasons when, having exhausted the endurance of his
staunchest friends, they must have kept him at a
distance, and treated him with coldness. You may be
sure that Wordsworth, as well as Southey, had his share
in the trial, and it shows, it seems to me, his nobility of
feeling that when the scene was closed he should have
passed over the whole of Coleridge's criminal aberra
tions — for they were nothing less — and dwelt solely
upon his great gifts, his high principles, often as they
had broken down in practice, and his final repentance
and reformation.' *****
' In the Quarterly Beview, vol. xcii. No. 184, p. 227,
there is a paragraph commencing "Wordsworth was
about five feet ten inches in height," and ending " widely
as his name." The article was not written by Lockhart,
but I have his authority for stating that the whole of
this paragraph was from his editorial pen. It appears
to me a concise and vivid summary of Wordsworth's
appearance, manners, and style of conversation, and the
value of the portrait is greatly increased when it is
known to come from an eminent and shrewd observer,
who had seen Wordsworth under varied circumstances —
at Abbotsford, at Eydal Mount, in London society — and

268 EETEOSPECTS
who had the faculty of setting down traits with the same
precision that he noted them. Nor can the character be
suspected of partiality, for while Lockhart could not but
do homage to Wordsworth's genius, and enter into the
spirit and power of much of his poetry, he was not
among the number of his uncompromising admirers.'
*****
' Glancing over Lockhart's letters I find this passage :
< « "w, w. recited verse in a sonorous style almost like
song. So did Coleridge and Wilson. Who began it
I cannot say — probably S. T. C, who did it far the best,
having a finer ear for music of every sort."
' In allusion to Wordsworth's alleged fondness for re
peating his own poetry, Lockhart says that he has no
recollection of his having obtruded it ; but in another
letter (July 9, 1852) he gives an instance of Words
worth's preference for listening — amidst a wealth of
books — to what he himself had written :
' " I remember once, perhaps thirty years ago, W. W.
at Abbotsford pleaded his weak eyes as a reason for not
joining Sir Walter Scott, and others, in some ride, and
remained at home with only Miss Wordsworth, his
daughter. On returning after four or five hours, we
found him in the same attitude we had left him at the
fireside in the library, and the lady reading to him The
Excursion ! "
'When De Quincey resided at the Lakes, Words
worth was friendly with him, and Lockhart says it was
" merely to be near Wordsworth that Wilson bought his
pretty little estate on Windermere." It was Lockhart's

WHITWELL ELWIN 269
impression that, while both Wilson and De Quincey
retained their admiration of the poet, both ended by
disliking the man. The fault was probably with them
selves. I have a letter of Lockhart's giving a sketch
of De Quincey's career, and from this it is evident that
his habits for many years of his middle life must have
compelled Wordsworth to drop him ; as it did Lockhart
himself, which sufficiently explains De Quincey's sour
ness. Wilson's change of feeling may be suspected to
have proceeded in like manner from Wordsworth's dis
taste for some tricks he played upon him, which may have
passed with Wilson for jests, but to Wordsworth seemed
insults. ' You will observe that Lockhart, in his characterisa
tion of Wordsworth, speaks of the vivacity of his con
versation, and of his ability to cope in wit with the
greatest masters in the art, among whom he mentioned
to me Sydney Smith and Eogers. I fancy this trait
has been a good deal overlooked by most of those who
have written of him. His playful rebuke to Eogers's
personal vanity is itself a specimen of the vein of fun
there was in him. I have seen it remarked that there
was no humour in Wordsworth's verse ; which, if it were
true, would be no evidence that it was not in the man ;
but I myself think that there is both humour and poetry
in The Idiot Boy.
*****
'I am a recluse, and live out of the way of new
publications, so that I am behindhand in my knowledge
of some subjects, in which my interest is greatest.

270 EETEOSPECTS
I shall endeavour to repair my backwardness in respect
to Wordsworth, and send you a supplement to this letter.'
***** 1 Booton Bectory, Norwich : February, 1894.
' I am delighted to hear that you will be coming our
way in summer. A mere call will be no good. Unless
you bring your portmanteau and stay, you will not be
welcome. . . . We shall have plenty to talk about.
' Dyce, the editor of Shakespeare, saw much of
Wordsworth in his visits to London. He was accus
tomed to Boswellise, and he took down fragments of
Wordsworth's conversation, most of which he published
in the notes to his Table Talk of Samuel Bogers. He
intended that the remainder should be published also,
but some are trivial, and I have copied the few that
seem worth preserving on a separate sheet of paper.
So far as I know they have never been printed. John
Forster, the author of the Life of Oliver Goldsmith,
Life of Dickens, &c, was Dyce's literary executor, and
I was one of Forster's ; and it is in this way that Dyce's
manuscript has come into my hands.
*****
' Dyce was a very exact man, and he says he can
vouch for the accuracy of his report of Wordsworth's
talk. It was Dyce's chief defect that he was apt to
concentrate his attention on petty details. He had a
refined taste in poetry, but seldom got beyond verbal
criticism.'

WHITWELL ELWIN 271
1 Booton Beotory, Norwich : December 7, 1894.
' The widow of John Forster, who wrote the Life of
Goldsmith, died a few months ago, and the whole of his
papers have passed into the hands of his executors, of
whom I am one. In going over his voluminous corre
spondence, I have just come upon a letter to him from
Mrs. Gaskell, the novelist, dated Ambleside, October 28,
1852, and I transcribe from it the passage which
follows :
' " We dined quietly and early with Mrs. Wordsworth
on Monday. She is charming. She told us some
homely tender details of her early married days, how
Miss Wordsworth made the bread, and got dinner ready,
and Mrs. W. nursed all the morning, and, leaving the
servant to wash up after dinner, the three set out on
their long walks, carrying all the babes amongst them ;
and certain spots are memorial places to Mrs. W. in
her old age, because there she sat, and nursed this or
that darling. The walks they took were something
surprising to our degenerate minds. To get news of the
French Eevolution they used to walk up the Eaise x for
miles, in stormy winter evenings to meet the mail. One
day when they were living at Grasmere (no post-office
there) Wordsworth walked over to Ambleside (more than
four miles) to post some poem that was to be included
in a volume just being printed. After dinner as he sat
meditating, he became dissatisfied with one line, and
grew so restless over the thought that towards bedtime
he declared he must go to Ambleside and alter it ; for
1 Dunmail Baise.

272 EETEOSPECTS
* in those days postage was very heavy, and we were
obliged to be very prudent.' So he and Miss Words
worth set off after nine o'clock, walked to Ambleside,
knocked up the post-office people, asked for a candle, got
the letter out of the box, sent the good people to bed
again, and sat in the little parlour, ' puzzling and
puzzling till they got the line right ' ; when they re
placed the letter, put out the candle, and softly stole
forth, and walked home in the winter midnight.
' " It is curious the loving reverence she retains for
Coleridge, in spite of his rousing the house about one in
the morning, after her confinement, when quiet was
particularly enjoined, to ask for eggs and bacon ! and
similar vagaries."
"7F TfC T& 7P Tp
' I do not remember that this incident of the night-
walk, to alter the defective line, has been told in print.
It is a good example of the enormous pains Wordsworth
took with his poetry. Nor do I recollect that the long
walks of the poet, his wife, and sister, carrying the
nursery with them, have ever appeared in this precise
form, as an instance of the passionate love of all
three for out-door life, and for scenery.'
yF ^F ~fF ^F W
The following are extracts from Dyce's fragments of
Wordsworth's conversation, still in MS., given me by
Mr. Elwin :
'"I should like very well to reside in London during
several months of the year, but I cannot say that I relish
the short visits I pay to it ; during which I live in a

WHITWELL ELWIN 273
constant bustle, breakfasting and dining out every day,
and keeping much later hours than suit my habits. I
delight in the walks about London, to which no one — no
poet at least — has done justice. How charming is the
walk along the Serpentine ! There is no nobler view in
London than that of Cheapside, and the rise of Ludgate
Hill. To me the streets present objects of great pic-
turesqueness. Even a butcher's shop by candlelight, with
its varieties of colour, light and shade, is very striking." '
' " The pleasure I derive from Architecture, Sculpture,
and Painting, which I have perhaps vainly endeavoured
to express in parts of my poetry, is only second to the
pleasure which I derive from Nature." '
' " When I compose a poem, I generally begin with
the most striking and prominent part ; and if I feel
pleased with my execution of that, I then proceed to fill
up the other parts." '
' " In writing poetical descriptions of natural objects,
it is better not to write them on the spot ; because, if
you do, ydu will enter into a great deal of unnecessary
detail. You should write just after the object is removed
from your sight, and then its great features only will
remain impressed upon your mind." '
'I may add that in talking with Aubrey de Vere,
Wordsworth blamed Walter Scott for adopting the
opposite method.
' In Dr. Wordsworth's Memoirs of his uncle there are
two letters from Wordsworth to Dyce, in which he

274 EETEOSPECTS
speaks of his wish to publish a selection from Thom
son's poems. In the second of them (see Memoirs, vol. ii.
p. 219) he hesitates, from a doubt whether it is becom
ing for one poet to dismember the works of another.
His final decision appears in Dyce's fragments of his
talk, and it may be worth while to print the passage
in a note to the letter. He said, in conversation with
Mr. Dyce :
' " I have given up my intention of publishing a selec
tion from Thomson's works (poems and plays) because
I think I ought not to treat so distinguished a poet in
that manner. I have the most ardent admiration, and
profound respect, for Thomson. I doubt if any poet
since Milton has shown so much poetic feeling. Parts
of The Castle of Indolence are divine. I say nothing of
his taste, and Burns had more passion." '
' I copy a passage from Dyce's MS. touching Dora
Wordsworth's marriage with Quillinan : " Dora, the
darling of her parents, married the late Mr. Edward
Quillinan, a gentleman who published sundry clever
things, both in verse and prose.1 In spite of his high
esteem for Quillinan, who looked up to him with all the
reverence of a votary, Wordsworth had long objected to
this marriage with great earnestness, firstly because
Quillinan was a widower with two daughters ; secondly,
because he was a Eoman Catholic ; and thirdly, because
1 See Poems by Edward Quillinan. With a Memoir by William
Johnston. ' I knew Quillinan well, and it was in his house in Bryanston
Street that I first saw Wordsworth.' (Dyce.)

WHITWELL ELWIN 275
he was poor, and had incurred the most serious liabilities
in consequence of his connection with the Brydges
family, his first wife having been a daughter of Sir
Egerton Brydges. Wordsworth, however, at last ceased
to oppose the marriage, which took place in 1841, nor
could there possibly have been a happier union." '

276 EETEOSPECTS

ANNA SWANWICK
Miss Swanwick's memoir has recently been written by
her niece, Miss Mary Bruce. The following chapter is
meant to be a supplement, although most of it was
written before her biography appeared. Throughout
her long life the dominant notes, from first to last, were
consistently those of graciousness, ideality, radiance,
and unselfish versatility. There have been few women
in the nineteenth century from whom flowed such an
uninterrupted stream of elevating influence. From
every interview with that indomitable spirit in its fragile
body one came away much clearer in insight, greatly
widened in sympathy, and fuller of hope for the future
of mankind. From her early childhood in Liverpool Miss Swan
wick's interest in Literature, and in every kind of
educational and social movement, was great. She
often spoke of her introduction to Literature by her
mother. At the age of four she could repeat long
passages of L' Allegro. The education of girls was then
very meagre and formal ; and Anna Swanwick, fighting
her own way upward, was one of the noble pioneers of
their higher education. At the age of eighteen she

ANNA SWANWICK 277
received a great impetus through an initiation into
Philosophy and Mathematics by Dr. Martineau. She
visited the Lake District of England, where she saw
Wordsworth, and began the study of Greek and German.
Intensely eager to learn, and unable to gratify her
desire in England, she went to Berlin ; where she lived
with the scholar Zumpt. In his house, and at classes,
she commenced the study of Hebrew, as well as of Greek
through the medium of German. In six months she
acquired a complete knowledge of German, and was
studying Kant, Fichte, and Schleiermacher ; while she
had mastered Greek, so far as to read Plato with
delight. The record of these six months is a wonderful
disclosure both of character and capacity ; as her letters,
then written, show.
On her return to England she made some masterly
translations from Goethe and Schiller, the firstfruits
being Iphigenia, with parts of Torquato Tasso, which
were published in 1843. Her translation of Schiller's
Jungfrau von Orleans was issued in 1847, and Goethe's
Egmont in 1850. After the Iphigenia appeared, she
was asked by Mr. Bohn to translate Faust into Eng
lish ; the first part of which was published in 1851, but
the second not till 1879. I think I may venture to say
that this ranks as one of the best translations of Goethe's
great poem in any language ; and it at once made her
widely known in the literary world. So highly did Baron
Bunsen esteem it that he begged her to turn her thoughts,
for a similar purpose, to the Greek tragedians. She did
so ; and, after much thought, determined to undertake the

278 EETEOSPECTS
translation of the dramas of iEschylus. To this work
she devoted the best years of her life, It brought her
reputation, and her society was sought by men and
women famous in the realms of Literature, Art, and
Politics ; but it was her remarkable personality that
attracted them, and made them friends.
A near relative, Mrs. Eussell Swanwick, has sent me
the following memorandum : x 'In looking back on her
long and noble life one is more and more struck by the
roundness and richness of her nature. She was full of
interests, all of which blended ; no one part of her
suffering from the cultivation of another. A striking
feature in her character was her intense power of con
centration. Gifted with a mind of rare quality, it was
masculine in its power of grappling with intellectual
difficulty. She brought to the work of translation an
almost religious enthusiasm. To render the dramas of
the master poet (as she felt him to be) into equivalent
English was for the time being the absorbing work of
her life. Both word and spirit had to be reproduced in
the most perfect way. So scrupulous was she that
sometimes a phrase, or a sentence, would be pondered
for a week till what she considered the right rendering
was found. She could not brook second-rate work, and
this spirit animated her to the last. When eighty
years of age she revised her translations, not only of
the .ZEschylean Trilogy, but also of the two parts of
1 Many of these memoranda are included in the Memoir com
piled by Miss Bruce ; but there they have a different setting from the
form they took when they were written down for me, at an earlier date.

ANNA SWANWICK 279
Faust, a task which few would have had the courage
to undertake. In each case she found improvement
possible. Whatever its literary merit, and that is great,
there never was more truly honest work.
" Her power of concentration enabled her to grasp the
leading points in any book, article in a review, or the
news of the day, with remarkable rapidity and exactness.
By some alembic of her own she managed to extract the
ore. She never read in a careless or desultory fashion,
but made everything her own as she went along. This
gave richness to her mind, and precision to her speech ;
and what she acquired she never forgot. As her
interests were very wide, her sympathy was overflowing ;
and she always felt that it was more blessed to give
than to receive. It was these things that made her so
unique, and gave such a charm to her society. Then
her absence of self-consciousness, the sincerity and
winning graciousness of her manner, drew out an
assuring sincerity from all who met her. Superficiality
dropped away, and the conversation in her drawing-
room or at her dinner-table was wholly different from
ordmary " society talk." Her trained and polished
intellect met the man of letters, the man of science, and
the politician, each on his own ground, as an equal ; and
she generally led the conversation, which could be as
deep and earnest as it was at other times brilliant and
witty, flashes of fun and repartee alternating with
grave discussions.
' Poetry was a part of her being, which vibrated in
harmony with all that was true and good ; but hers was

280 EETEOSPECTS
no sentimental appreciation, her poetical judgment being
always virile and strong. As in Philosophy she was
never carried away by the mere beauty of a system, in
poetry she was quick to detect every piece which had a
falsetto note, and to put it aside. Then, united with
her gentle nature was the most manly love of freedom,
of liberty and independence, and a profound hatred of
all oppression tyranny and wrong. Her eye would
flash with indignation at the recital of any tale of un
righteousness or cruelty. Of a deeply religious nature,
she was the pupil, and life-long friend, of Dr. Martineau.
With him she faced the great questions of the ages, and
probing philosophic doubt came back with a humble
faith, very simple, and most catholic ; while the dis
coveries of Science were a revelation to her not only
of eternal law, but of the law of the Eternal.'
Men and women have been grouped as ' Light Givers,'
' Light Eeflectors,' and ' Light Absorbers.' It is a good
classification. The first are the rarest, and amongst
them was Anna Swanwick.
Miss Swanwick often spoke of her great love through
out life for wild flowers. She had more joy in them,
she said to me, than in those reared in garden ground ;
and a sort of friendship, or at least a subtle sympathy and
affinity, with them. Her father used to call her ' Flora '
because of this. ' But,' said she, ' however much we
may love them when young, we can only really appreciate
them when we are old. In youth so much draws our
attention away from what we love, we are in such haste

ANNA SWANWICK 281
to be doing things ; but when, instead of this, we are
either compelled, or induced, to look quietly on Nature,
we get away from ourselves, and the beauty of the flowers
grows upon us, whether we see them by the wayside or
in the " crannied wall." ' She could spend much time in
absolute solitude, if only she had flowers around her. She
referred to Keats's love for them in his last days, and
quoted his words, ' I feel the flowers growing over me,'
and then Browning's
Roses shall bloom, nor want beholders,
Sprung from the ground where our own flesh moulders.
She was always ready to speak of her work amongst
the poor, and unbef riended ; her classes for girls
employed in shops, &c. Once when she was trying to
interest these girls in Milton, someone suggested that in
struction in Arithmetic would be more useful, considering
their work, and their future. She thought not, but said
she would leave it to themselves to decide. So, at their
next meeting she put the question to them, ' which do
you prefer, instruction in the poets, or in book-keeping?'
and, not to hasten their decision, left them to discuss it
amongst themselves, telling them that she would come
back for their answer. When she returned she found that
only two of the girls were in favour of what bore upon
their ordinary work; all the rest wished what would
take them away from it, or lift them above it. Years
afterwards, when all teaching was given up, on account
of age and illness, her maid announced that a woman
wished to see her, but could not come into the house, as

282 EETEOSPECTS
she had an infant in a perambulator. On going to the
door Miss Swanwick found an ex-pupil come to thank
her for having been ' taught to see the Beautiful, for now
she was teaching the same to her child.'
She often referred to the innate courtesy, kindliness,
and good taste of some of the very poorest women
she had known. ' Befriend them,' she said ' and their
gratitude will flow to you, like water from a well.' She
mentioned a poor cripple whose sole joy was a print of
one of Eaphael's Madonnas she had given him, which
consoled him during many a sad and lonely day. ' He
thanked me,' she said,' for my words and my smiles.'
Turning back to her literary work, she often spoke to
me of the difficulties which every conscientious translator
felt in getting the fittest equivalent term in another lan
guage to express not only the meaning of particular words
and phrases, but the drift or tendency, and above all the
literary flavour and charm, of the original. The literal
translation of language was impossible, because no two
phrases, even in the same language, were synonymous ;
and what was needed by one who knew no language but his
or her own was not bald literality, but equivalence, which
was another thing. She said to me (what her niece has
emphasised) that when engaged in the translation of
Faust and ^Eschylus, she was sometimes occupied for
days in the search for the best equivalent English word,
and an expression satisfactory to herself. Vague re
semblance was not enough, nor a general verisimilitude.
We must make as near an approach as possible to identity

ANNA SWANWICK 283
of phrase. And yet, she said, such is the harmony of
speech — and the solidarity of thought — that a trans
lation has sometimes been better than the original
which gave rise to it. If that cannot be said of her own
version of iEschylus, it may perhaps be affirmed that
she has done more than anyone else to popularise the
Greek poet to many of his readers in England.
Her conversation almost always came round to the
great poets and thinkers, living or dead. Her reminis
cences of those she had known were most varied, and
singularly vivid. To meet them round her table was
specially interesting. Before she knew him so well as
in after -years, she sat next to Brownmg somewhere at
dinner ; and told me that, after having kept everyone
present in constant merriment by his brilliant wit, he
turned to her during a storm of laughter, and said in an
undertone, ' Do you like lizards ? ' She went on laugh
ing, not at the sallies which had convulsed the company,
but at this new question. Browning continued, ' I love
them for the changefulness of their colours, and their
being able to return again to what they were ! It is a
protective arrangement, but they must surely have a
sense of humour in it all.'
She once said to me, ' I have had a very blessed life.
I only wish it had been fuller of blessing to others. It's
no use people telling me what I have done for them,
when I've done almost nothing worth doing. But, as I
have given up long ago thinking of the many gracious
" might-have-beens " for myself, I don't dwell on the

284 EETEOSPECTS
" lost possibilities " for others. What good does it do to
think of these things in our old age, when there are
millions of new possibilities for others ripening all
around us, while we are talking of our failures ! I like
to get up, and work ; rather than sit still, and dream.
Don't you think the habit of brooding over losses, and
even of lamenting unrealised ideals, may put a drag on
our energy in work ? But I do not despise these lamenta
tions of good people, who have been both thinkers and
workers. A sad retrospect may sometimes be a sign
of the greatness of human nature, and of its coming
destmy. You know what our dear poet says :
There shall never be one lost good ;
and I like that splendid phrase,
What is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days ?
Someone has said that there is a harmony of
opposites in what Browning teaches, and I think it is
true. I like to be, with him, a
Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye
In gracious twilights where his chosen he ;
and yet I think I know
Each sting that bids not sit nor stand, but go.
Don't you think that a magnificent stanza ?
He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest :
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

ANNA SWANWICK 285
Her numerous friendships with eminent contempo
raries were well-known facts, and many persons saw
their influence. The versatility of her accomplishments
was both a cause, and an effect, of these friendships.
Distinguished classical scholars, such as Sir Bichard
Jebb, the Master of Trinity, Professor Newman, and
others have written in high praise of her Mschylus ;
others, such as Sir Theodore Martin and Professor
Dowden, in equal terms of her Faust. Tennyson and
Browning appreciated her, so did Mr. Gladstone, Max
Miiller, Colenso, and Dean Stanley. She had met
Carlyle, Kingsley, Maurice, Crabb Eobinson, and W. B.
Carpenter. George Macdonald, Frances Power Cobbe,
Lady Martin, Mrs. Pfeiffer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the
late Marquis of Bute, and Mr. Lecky were amongst her
friends. Perhaps her most characteristic book was one evolved
from a lecture. It was published in 1892, and called
Poets the Interpreters of their Age; but I need not
tarry to describe it. Time would fail me to tell of her
varied travels, her joyous humour, and the story-telling
powers of this ever bright cheery and indomitable
spirit. Her intellect was as nimble-witted, as her heart
was gracious and gay. Her varied enthusiasms were
contagious, and her alert unpretending tactful ways as a
hostess were the delight of all her friends. She knew
' when to keep silence and when to speak.' She was an
excellent talker, and an admirable listener ; her refine
ment was so placid, and her reverence had a spring
within it which lifted others up.

286 EETEOSPECTS
Her work in the cause of women's education was that
of a noble and undaunted pioneer. She was one of the
founders of Bedford College, in London ; and one of
her last public acts was to attend, and preside at, its
Jubilee. Two characteristic things I must mention in con
clusion. One is as follows. All her acquaintances knew
her immense appreciation of Milton, and her delight
in Comus ; but her friend Mr. Wicksteed tells us he
was present at a conversation in which Professor
Newman and she took part. Her old friend and in
structor ' pointed out what he thought was a drawback
to the moral efficiency of the poem. Miss Swanwick's
eye flashed, and she assumed the air of one defending
the impeached honour of a dear friend. Passage after
passage from Comus rushed to her lips, and a defiant
challenge was thrown in from time to time, till her
hearers were fairly carried away by the sweep and
torrent of her vindication.' And her protagonist was
no less a scholar and thinker than Francis W.
Newman. Another relates to her first and last speech in
public. Her first was when she was sixty years of
age, at a meeting in London on behalf of women's
suffrage. It was thus reported at the time : ' The speech
of the evening was delivered by Miss Swanwick, who
had never spoken on a platform before, and never made
a public speech in her life. It was admirably reasoned,
and delivered with a tender, touching, womanly grace

ANNA SWANWICK 287
which kept the audience silent while she spoke, but
brought thunders of applause when she sat down. She
concluded with these words : " On the battlefield of life,
where the powers of evil and of good are arrayed for
mortal combat, the forces which are needed are not
physical but spiritual, not stalwart limbs but strong
hearts and powerful brains ; and in these women are
not deficient. Give them a sound practical education,
remove their social and political disabilities ; and in their
energy and sympathy, their conscientiousness and tender
ness, we shall, I believe, have a reservoir of power,
which will lift this great nation to a higher level of
social and political life." ' No nobler words have been
ever spoken on the subject of the education of women.
Her last speech was at the unveiling of the portrait
of a friend. In the course of her remarks, she said :
' I cannot but regard poetry as the highest gift of
Heaven to man, giving as it does permanent expression
to the loftiest emotions of which we are capable ; while
its ideal creations, transmitted from generation to
generation, bear witness to the continuity of humanity,
and foster the sentiments of brotherhood. The desire to
read the mysteries of the human heart, as revealed
through poetry, is common to all, high and low, rich and
poor ; and thus it may become an invaluable means of
bridging over the wide interval that separates them in
life. Having had large classes both of working-men and
working-women, I can speak from experience of their
having found no subject so acceptable as poetry ; the
works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and many other

288 EETEOSPECTS
master-minds, having been thoroughly appreciated by
them. ' The poet, moreover, besides revealing the mysteries
of the human heart, transports us, by the power of ima
gination, into the presence of Nature, and interprets for
us the mystic characters therein inscribed. This, in my
judgment, was the special function of Wordsworth, who,
in the varied aspects of Nature, recognised a " Presence
that disturbed him with the joy of elevated thoughts,"
in other words the presence of that God who, through
the marvellous beauty of the universe, is for ever draw
ing us to Himself. I remember hearing the late Lord
Selborne say that, with the exception of the Bible, he
knew none but the poets, who from Homer to Browning
had been, to such an extent as they, the spiritual
teachers of humanity.'
That bright, elastic, indomitable spirit of hers — its
wonderful grace mingled with its verve, its reticence
associated with an unconquerable elan — is gone. Her
fragile body was almost too slight and delicate a shell
for the ever-burning spirit to live in. We shall not see
her any more, but her memory lives, and her works do
follow her.
The following are a few of Miss Swanwick's letters.
I had sent her the copy of a translation of Goethe's
lines descriptive of the poet's function, and, having
forgotten the context, asked her where in Torquato

ANNA SWANWICK 289
Tasso I (as I thought) it was. The lines were as
follows :
Wherewith subdues he human spirits ?
Wherewith makes he the elements obey ?
Is't not the stream of song that out his bosom springs,
And to his heart the world back-coiling brings ?
She replied, in two letters, thus :
' 9 St. James's Square, Bath : November 17, 1892.
* * * # #
' The original of the passage to which you refer is
not from Goethe's Torquato Tasso, but from his Faust,
and is to be found in The Prologue for the Theatre ; it
forms part of the poet's beautiful description of the god
like power wielded by the bard, which he characterises
as " Man's loftiest right, kind Nature's high bequest."
' The following is my translation of the lines in
question, which, however unworthy of the original, is
certainly less objectionable than that which you quote,
and which I regret to hear has been attributed to me :
Whence comes his mastery o'er the human breast ?
Whence o'er the elements his sway ?
But from the harmony that, gushing from his soul,
Draws back into his heart the wondrous whole ? '

' St. James's Square, Bath : November 21, 1892.
*****
' I am at present engaged in revising my translation
of Faust, which was originally published upwards of
forty years ago.
'The entire passage, setting forth the function of
i. u

290 EETEOSPECTS
the poet, to a portion of which you alluded in your last
letter, is so beautiful that, as heralding my little
volume on Poets and Poetry, I feel tempted to send
you my translation of it, which I accordingly tran
scribe.' 1
^ flfr *¦ tF tF
When engaged in the work of examining and
writing about the portraits of Wordsworth and his house
hold, I called on Mrs. Gertrude Lewis, introduced
to her by Miss Swanwick, to see a small portrait in
oil of Mrs. Wordsworth, said to be by Miss Gillies who
painted the poet so often. This portrait, which is now
in Dove Cottage, Grasmere, hung in Miss Gillies' studio
at Hampstead for many years. She always spoke of it
as that of ' old Mrs. Wordsworth,' and on the back of
it is an inscription evidently put on by her when send
ing it to the Eoyal Academy : ' No. 1. Portrait of Mrs.
Wordsworth.' Mrs. Lewis allowed me to have this
miniature etched for one of my volumes of Wordsworth,
and afterwards gave the original for preservation in the
poet's cottage at Grasmere. A question arose as to the
identity of the portrait, but this need not now be dis
cussed, and it is only mentioned to explain allusions in
Miss Swanwick's letter.
w TF # ^F #
• 23 Cumberland Terrace : December 12, 1893.
* * # # #
'Mrs. Lewis is quite willing that her portrait of
Mrs. Wordsworth should be etched for the forthcoming
It is too long to quote here in full, but will be found in her Faust.

ANNA SWANWICK 291
edition of the poet's works ; her doubt is whether the
lady whom it represents is the poet's wife. I was so
fearful lest I should not accurately represent her views
that I requested her to write to you herself, which she
promised to do. [Mrs. Lewis at once wrote on the
subject.] ' The countenance of Mrs. Wordsworth as portrayed
by Miss Gillies is so interesting that it may well
represent in advanced life the charming creature to
whom the poet addressed his lines, " She was a phantom
of delight," &c. I hope you may feel satisfied that such
is the case.
' Though in bygone years I have seen Wordsworth,
I was never introduced to him ; and my friends, who
had the privilege of knowing him, have now passed
away. I fear, therefore, that I cannot add anything by
way of reminiscence. I am tempted, however, to men
tion one circumstance, related to me by my old friend
Mr. Crabb Bobinson — a devoted disciple and admirer —
which is interesting as indicating how genuinely he
appreciated and admired in the poetry of another the
qualities characteristic of his own genius.
'Wordsworth was accustomed, as told me by Mr.
Bobinson, to walk up and down the room, with his hands
behind his back, muttering his own verses. What more
natural when he was revising his text ? One day Mr.
Bobinson heard him repeating, in the same low tone,
Mrs. Barbauld's well-known lines upon Life, a copy of
which I will enclose. When he came to the end he
muttered : " I should like to have written that. I should
v 2

292 EETEOSPECTS
like to have written that." He could not have paid
Mrs. Barbauld a greater compliment.1
' I am delighted to hear of the proposed new
edition of Wordsworth's works, in poetry and prose ;
as indicating the deeper hold which they are gaining
on the public mind, with their elevating influence.'

' 23 Cumberland Terrace : February 12, 1894.
*****
' I was much interested to learn from Mrs. G. Lewis
that during Wordsworth's walks with Miss Gillies, when
she was his guest, he was in the habit of reciting —
evidently with great enjoyment — passages from the
Greek poets. His poems I confess — even when, like
Laodamia, founded upon classical subjects — do not
appear to me to be imbued with the classical spirit.
I was therefore surprised — and the feeling would, I think,
be shared by others of the poet's admirers — to learn that
1 The lines are as follows :
' Life ! I know not what thou art,
But know that thou and I must part ;
And when, or how, or where we met,
I own to me's a secret yet.
Life ! we have been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather ;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear,
Perhaps 'twill oost a sigh, or tear ;
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time,
Say not Good-Night, but in some brighter olime
Bid me Good- Morning.'

ANNA SWANWICK 293
his love for the poetry of Hellas found such unequivocal
expression as its recitation for his own enjoyment
during his daily walks.
' I was reminded of my last visit to Aldworth, when,
while walking through his grounds with Tennyson, after
expatiating upon the magnificent roll of the Greek verse,
he recited — in illustration of his remark, and with the
greatest enthusiasm — a long passage from Homer.
' It is interesting to consider this bond of sympathy
between two of our great poets of the nineteenth
century.'

294 EETEOSPECTS

J. HENBY SHOBTHOUSE
A memoib of the author of John Inglesant is being
written by his widow, but Mrs. Shorthouse has allowed
me to include in this book any of his letters which seem
illustrative of opinion and character.
In December 1880 I happened to be lecturing on
Spinoza, to the Birmingham and Midland Institute, and
met Mr. Shorthouse at the residence of my host.
Our talk was mainly on Plato, Spinoza, and Words
worth ; and a good deal of our subsequent corre
spondence referred to these three great writers. He
had joined our ' Wordsworth Society ' at its formation,
and I suggested to him the preparation of a paper on
' The Platonism of Wordsworth,' specially apropos of
the two books of The Excursion — ' Despondency ' and
' Despondency Corrected '—and the great Ode, Intima
tions of Immortality . He liked the idea, and gradually
wrought it out. As he could not read it to the Society,
it was published in Birmingham, first privately in
quarto form, and afterwards in octavo for the public.
It was subsequently included in our Transactions.
When the Society held its third meeting in London,
the year in which Lord Coleridge was President, the

J. HENEY SHOETHOUSE 295
Chief Justice invited the members to an evening recep
tion at Sussex Square. Mr. Shorthouse was one of an
interesting company who were present. John Inglesant
had by this time — partly through Mr. Gladstone's
eulogy of it, mainly from its intrinsic merit— become
famous. It was 'the book of the hour,' universally
talked of ; and everyone wished to meet, or be introduced
to, its author. It was a rather trying ordeal that had
to be gone through ; as, although Mr. Shorthouse had a
picturesque countenance and a highly intellectual ex
pression, he had a stammer. There is a kind of stam
mering which detracts from the significance of speech,
and mars it. There is another which enhances it, gives
it charm and piquancy, and makes it even more distinc
tive than the even onward flow of talk. The latter was
Mr. Shorthouse's. His face irradiated by a smile or lit up
by laughter, his slender right hand drawn gracefully
down his beard ; his whole frame quickly responsive to
the thought or feeling in the sentences he uttered,
no one could ever wish that the peculiarity, which is
generally a defect, should in his case cease. But, at
a great reception, when a crowd of people surround
or stand near a distmguished man, all wishing to be
introduced, and the sentence spoken to one not being
finished before another requests the favour of presenta
tion, it soon became a trial of endurance. Mrs. Pfeiffer
spoke to him of Greece, Mrs. Eastlake of Florence, and
Lord Houghton of Keats ; till he said to me, ' I cannot
talk any more ; I see Mr. Arnold has gone, and I must
follow.'

296 EETEOSPECTS
But it was in his own home — Lansdowne, at Edg-
baston — that his conversation was richest, most varied,
and stimulating. Whether in his library, or walking in
the terraced garden he loved so well, its range was wide,
its perspective singularly clear, and its outlook prescient.
He never dogmatised ; but by light strokes of a steel
which was always within reach he struck out many a
spark of light from the dry flint of other people's talk.
In those days, and for years afterwards, I never passed
through Birmingham without calling at two places, the
Oratory and Lansdowne ; and the one was as interesting
as the other.
John Inglesant rapidly attracted the attention, and
won the regard, of the thoughtful readers of romance.
The photograph of Mr. Gladstone asleep in a bower
at Hawarden, with the book which he had been reading
for hours resting on his knee, was much in demand.
The real cause of the book's success — and it won what
was far better than popularity — was both its subject-
matter, and the manner of its treatment. It attracted
reflective readers, who were interested in the questions
of Philosophy and Beligion, as well as in the analysis of
character, in historic incident, and in descriptions of
scenery. As it dealt, not with passing phases of thought
and feeling, but with permanent problems — the questions
of the ages — it came in to stay ; and it remains a poss
ession to many thoughtful men and women, in England
and America.
In its descriptive passages realism and idealism are
finely blended. Many persons think of Little Gidding

J. HENEY SHOETHOUSE 297
as a place which they have known and visited, although
they have never been there ; and the descriptions of
Florence, though not so realistic as those in Bomola,
are certainly quite as remarkable, having been written
by one who never visited it, and — so far as I know — was
never out of England. The inner affinity between the
aim of Mr. Shorthouse in John Inglesant, and the life
long endeavour of Matthew Arnold, comes out in a
sentence in one of the following letters : ' The main
intent of my book is to exalt culture against fanaticism
of every kind.'
I remember his intense interest in a small English
book, written by a German workman and printed in
Germany, called The Textuary of the Pine-Wood. It
had reached him from the Continent in a mass of
packing around some goods ; and though written by one
who was only learning the English language, it was full
of the quaintest and daintiest phrases, natural, archaic,
and fresh as the woods it described.
The quiet beauty of the life at Edgbaston will be
told in the Memoir which is being written. Those who
have been his guests, and know the house and its
garden-ground, can never forget the host who was so
unostentatious, and quite unspoiled by success. The city
of Birmingham may well be proud that such a man was
born and worked within it, and that he combined a
business career with a life devoted to culture. His name,
in the capital city of the Midlands, will be associated with
those of Priestley, Darwin, Dawson, Naden, and others
who have given distinction to it.

298 EETEOSPECTS
The following are a selection from his letters received
by me. Others have been sent to Mrs. Shorthouse.
'Lansdowne, Edgbaston: December 1, 1880.
' The very pleasant evening I spent in your company
on Monday last has made me wish to request your
acceptance of a volume of Philosophical Bomance, of
which work I have printed a few copies, mostly for
private circulation. I enclose a review which has
appeared in the A thenaeum, by which you will see that
the reviewer was rather oppressed by the work (a single
copy was sent out by the provincial bookseller with no
introduction), and my only hesitation in sending it to
you arises from the knowledge I have that your time
must be so fully occupied that I doubt whether the book
is of sufficient interest to justify the spending of time
over it. *****
' I purchased the first edition of The Excursion you
told me of. It is a nice clean copy in the original
boards. Are the lines in the preface part of the
unpublished MS. which exists of The Becluse ? If there
are more like them, the sooner the MS. is given to the
world the better.
' If I can at any future time get any ideas put upon
paper concerning Wordsworth's Platonism I will do so,
but it is no child's play. It will be necessary to con
centrate the essence of Wordsworth's teaching (in the
whole of his works), as regards the effect of material law
(Nature) upon intellectual Existence, by which it appears

J. HENEY SHOETHOUSE 299
he conceived of absolute Being, but which as a system
he has, I think, left somewhat vague ; and, on the other
hand, it will be necessary to formulate Platonism, which
has never yet been satisfactorily done, and the requisites
of which Jowett has utterly failed even to perceive. And
Grote, as it seems to me, was — as an interpreter of Plato —
like a blind man writing upon colour ; but admirable so
far as his perceptions went. Shall I present a copy of
my book to your Library, and then no one need read
more than he likes ? '

' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : December 7, 1880.
*****
' I have forwarded the book to you by rail to-day.
You will find many misprints in it, as I revised all the
proofs myself. Indeed I consider this edition in the
light of a proof itself. I am reading Pollock's Spinoza
with great interest, and thank you for introducing me
to the book. I have not got far in the philosophical
part, but what I have read is very lucid and charming.
I shall look out for your book eagerly.
' Your suggestion with regard to an essay on Words
worth's Platonism is a very tempting one, but I cannot
think myself equal to such an undertaking. I will see
what I can do ; and, if I find myself getting on at all,
I will let you know.
*****
' The main intent of my book is to exalt culture
against fanaticism of every kind. But I flatter myself

300 EETEOSPECTS
I have not unduly intruded the moral, as few readers
have perceived it, without my pointing it out.'

' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : February 8, 1881.
' I send by this post a paper upon Wordsworth's
Platonism for you to look at. I do not know whether it
is anything like what you think the subject requires. . . .
It would be easy, of course, to say much more upon
Platonism, but this does not seem to me to be what is
wanted. If more could be said upon the subject as seen
by Wordsworth, it would be much more desirable. It
might be possible to trace somewhat of Platonic mean
ing in the lyrical poems, but the success would, I think,
be rather that of ingenuity than of reality. The
question, " Was Wordsworth a Christian ? " will perhaps
some day be asked, and answered, with useful results ;
at present, and at least before the " Wordsworth
Society," it would not be a suitable inquiry.
' The unexpected attack he makes upon Voltaire has
always struck me as worth notice. It can scarcely be
explained by considering it as merely in accordance with
the Wanderer's character. Apropos of Mr. Frederick
Pollock's suggestion of traces of Spinoza's influence, I
should suggest some of the last lines I quote as a motto
for Spinoza : Unswerving shall we move as if impelled
By strict necessity along the path
Of order and of good.'

J. HENEY SHOETHOUSE 301
' June 1, 1881.

*

' You are perfectly at liberty to make any use of my
paper you like, to read it at the meeting, or take any
other course you think most likely to promote what
alone we all have at heart, viz. the study and apprecia
tion of the greatest poet-philosopher of any age or
literature.' ***** ' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : August 5, 1881.
*****
' I have been thinking a good deal upon the subject
of my paper, as I have commenced my annual study of
The Excursion, and I am more and more impressed
with the possibilities which a perfect analysis of the
poem would open in the direction of Platonic Thought.
I sincerely think little of my paper, which in fact
consists mostly of quotation, but the least thing may set
people thinking upon a subject, and I should be very
pleased to elicit the opinion of competent thinkers on
the lines laid down in the paper on the synthesis of
matter and thought as each was suggested to Words
worth's mind.
*****
' P.S. The suggestion of the subject in your own
book makes it the more fit that you should take it up.'
***** ' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : September 24, 1881.
•The paper Miss Beale alludes to is one called
An Apologue, in the July number of the Nineteenth

302 EETEOSPECTS
Century. It is a little jeu d'esprit, which I think
contains the germ of a good deal of stiff writing.
*****
' I asked Mrs. Owen why she omitted from her essay
the last verse (on Death) in the Elegiac Stanzas ad
dressed to Sir George Beaumont, upon the death of his
Sister-in-law. This has led to an interesting question
as to the meaning of the verse, whether the hope relates
to a future state, or to the result of Death upon our own
feelings.' ' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : December 6, 1881.
' I have to thank you very much for your letter, and
for your kindness in telling me so much of the way
John Inglesant has been received among your friends.
It is, as you well say, delightful to learn that anything
that you have written has been a help to such as you
describe. I can only suppose that it is that I have been
so happy as to become, for a moment, the mouthpiece of
one or other of those eternal truths, of that icaXrjs- <b$f)s,
that sweet song, which, coming down through the
generations, as Plato says, from the harp of divine love,
is caught up now and again, by one and another, who is
but the string upon which the notes are played. It is
enough surely, for any man, to have carried on even
for an instant and in the feeblest way such wonderful
song. One of the most pleasing things about the book
is, I think, the way it seems to have appealed to such
different conditions of mind : the persons of whom
you speak, Mr. Gladstone, Professor Huxley, and Mr.

J. HENEY SHOETHOUSE 303
Frederick Pollock on the one hand, and on the other
boys of no hitherto suspected taste for Literature, who
have read the book with an eagerness which has sur
prised their friends.
*****
' Anything I can do x is indeed little compared with
the unspeakable benefit and delight I have for many
years found in the poet's works.'
***** ' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : March 27, 1882.
' I am very sorry to hear that you cannot find the
book.2 I know how miserable it makes me, when I am
in a similar trouble. Very often they turn up in a won
derful manner, so that you cannot imagine where they
can have been ; sometimes, however, they never turn
up ! Then, the only consolation is that you have been
over all your books, refreshed your memory of them,
found out where they all are, and perhaps discovered
something that may be of use immediately, which
otherwise you would have missed. This is the only
consolation I can offer ; I never lend certain books
under any pretence.
' I do not think that I agree with your plan of keep
ing the Church collects separate from the others.3
I think the combination gives life and interest; and,
if the others are good, does not jar.'
yfc ifc 3p ifr 3p
1 This refers to his paper on The Platonism of Wordsworth, for the
Society's Transactions.
2 It was The Textuary of the Pine- Wood.
3 In Home Prayers (Blackwood, 1881).

304 EETEOSPECTS
' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : January 25, 1885.
' Many thanks for your lecture.1 We have read it,
both aloud and to ourselves (my wife and I), and are
delighted with it. It is so exactly what is wanted for
the girls (and boys too for that matter) of the modern
education. I wish that you could read it here, in some
of our " high schools."
'Your lecture seems to me to be a link in the
Lampadephoria of the old faith, passed on to the new
generation, without which the new learning and systems
will be nothing but ignes fatui.
' I was very much pleased with the new Wordsworth
numbers, and proud to find myself in such good company.
I was particularly delighted with Eawnsley's paper ; it
seems to me to be a distinct effort of genius, and to give
us a real and new insight into Wordsworth's personality.'
***** ' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : November 23, 1886.
' I cannot tell you how grateful I am for the remark
able unbroken unanimity of kindly and generous sym
pathy and appreciation which I received from Scotland.
This was the case from the very first, and now day after
day brings me papers from every part of Scotland full
of the same sympathy. All these reviews have the
impress of the literary excellence for which Scotland has
always been famous. One from Dundee this morning,
for instance, speaks of the " quaint fervour " of Simeon,
a most perfect epithet.'
***** 1 On ' The Higher Education of Women.'

J. HENEY SHOETHOUSE 305
' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : December 17, 1888.
' I feel as though I ought to write you a line to con
gratulate you and to thank you for having given us The
Recluse, which I have just read, and re-read. I think
that you once told me that you had often urged its
publication without success. I think it is much to be
regretted that it was not published before ; but this
only makes the debt we owe you the greater. It seems
to me purely and perfectly Wordsworthian from the first
word to the last : that is, we have all that we expect of
Wordsworth at his best ; but more than this even, it
seems to me to be Wordsworth himself, in a sense more
revealed and unveiled than in any other lines of his.
How completely self -revealing and how true, for instance,
are the (to me) most touching lines (pp. 44-5)
Yet to me I feel
That an internal brightness is vouchsafed
That must not die, that must not pass away ;
and Possessions have I that are solely mine,
Something within which yet is shared by none,
Something which power and effort may impart.
'We seem to see here the officina, the Poet being
made ; and we thank God, and — under God — Dorothy
Wordsworth, that, unlike others of his age and circle, he
was enabled to rise above the delightful indolence of
sweet thought and dreams, by "power" and "effort,"
aided — and how loyally none will ever fully know in this
world — by his sister.
A voice shall speak, and what will be the theme ?
I would impart it, I would spread it wide ;
Immortal in the world which is to come.
I. X

306 EETEOSPECTS
' We have in this poem an answer to what many
have questioned, how Wordsworth really regarded the
peasantry around him ; and his lines on his sister,
read in connection with those on Tintern Abbey,
would alone make this poem indispensable.
' I think he never wrote more beautiful ones than
those at p. 48.
But me hath Nature tamed, and bade to seek
Far other agitations, or be calm ;
Hath dealt with me as with a turbulent stream,
Some nursling of the mountains which she leads
Through quiet meadows, after he has learnt
His strength, and had his triumph and his joy,
His desperate course of tumult and of glee.
That which in stealth by Nature was performed
Hath Beason sanctioned ; her deliberate Voice
Hath said; be mild and cleave to gentle things
Thy glory and thy happiness be there.
Nor fear, though thou confide in me, a want
Of aspirations that have been — of foes
To wrestle with, and victory to complete,
Bounds to be leapt, darkness to be explored ;
All that inflamed thy infant heart, the love,
The longing, the contempt, the undaunted quest,
All shall survive, though changed their office, all
Shall live, it is not in their power to die.
' The whole poem, indeed, tempts one to quote. The
description of the valley at the beginning seems to
surpass those in The Excursion. It is fresher and
more brilliant, also what is said of the flight of birds
(p. 14). ' Some lines I can fancy Charles Lamb noticing, of
that weird kind that he always liked, and which is a

J. HENEY SHOETHOUSE 307
distinct feature not perhaps always noticed in Words
worth : Like a hound
Single at chase among the lonely woods
His yell repeating ;
(p. 22) ; or (p. 23) :
That very voice, which, in some timid mood
Of superstitious fancy, might have seemed
Awful as ever stray demoniac uttered,
His steps to govern in the wilderness.
' I hope I have not wearied you out of measure, but
I felt that something must be said to thank you for
your share in this, as it seems to me, most important
epoch-marking publication in our Wordsworth life.'

' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : June 4, 1890.
*****
' I have never felt the slightest interest in such
places as Shakespeare's and Wordsworth's houses, &C1
The interest in, and the places to study a writer, seem
to me to be his books. . . . The surroundings of such
homes and places necessarily change so much that
nothing of the original tone and feeling remains.'
***** ' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : November 15, 1891.
' I am very much obliged to you for your book, which
I found here on our return from Devonshire, where we
have been spending a month.
1 See Mr. Buskin's remarks on this subject, in the Second Series of
these Betrospects.

308 EETEOSPECTS
'I have only been able at present to read your
preface and introduction ; they both interest me ex
ceedingly. In fact no subject has been for years a
matter of deeper puzzle to me than the nature of The
Beautiful, and I shall follow your historical account of
the inquiry with very great interest. I see with great
satisfaction that you promise us a " constructive theory "
to follow by-and-by. I am particularly struck by the
pertinence of your remarks, on pp. ix and x of the
preface, on the positive (or creative) theory rather than
that of the negative. Your words seem to me extremely
valuable, and I should be most glad to see them carried
forward, as they no doubt will be, in your further work.
' I am also very much struck with a remark on p. 24
with reference to Plato, in whose writings there is a
great deal of detached and very stimulating thought
about Beauty, although no consistent theory of it is
reached. ' I have been reading a good deal of Plato lately, and
this sentence strikes me as being marvellously true of
his method and attainment as a whole.
'P.S. Since I wrote this I have read some more
pages, with an astonishing increase of delight.'

' Lansdowne, Edgbaston : January 10, 1893.
' . . . I now hardly ever attend lectures. They are
mostly quasi-scientific or illustrated lectures, with lime
light photographs and other attractions to a very large

J. HENEY SHOETHOUSE 309
audience. The literary lectures of our youth seem to be
either scarce or not popular.'
It is difficult to state in a few sentences in what the
charm of John Inglesant consists. It is not an ordinary
tale, not a society sketch ; nor is it an historical novel,
or a philosophical romance. Perhaps its uniqueness lies
in this. It is the record of a grave and solemn quest
for that in which the heart of man may find repose, and
may experience it with superabounding evidence of its
reality ; not merely seek for it, but obtain it as well.
He does not find it in Books, or Institutions — much as
these are valued, and utilised — but, in the fellowship
of a life that endures, while the former may change.
To represent it as written to embody any special
truth, or teaching, is nearly as great a mistake as
to imagine that Shakespeare wrote his plays with an
ethical purpose primarily in view. So many great
works have been described — and accurately described —
as a search for the summum bonum, or the ' way to the
blessed life,' while the paths taken and the guide-posts
set up have been very various, that it may not be the
most exact method of characterising any of them ; but
I may hazard the following, by way of comparison.
I once asked a somewhat famous artist, successfully
devoted both to landscape and figure painting, and who
had spent most of his time in Holland, what was his
ideal of landscape beauty. ' Ah,' said he, ' I am an
amateur of the Bepose ! It is the Bepose I like to paint.'
Certainly Mr. Shorthouse, in John Inglesant, was ' an

310 EETEOSPECTS
amateur of the Bepose,' in the sense in which my artist-
friend defined it. With him, as with the poet whom he
knew and loved so well, it was most true that
The moving accident was not his trade,
To freeze the blood he had no ready arts,
and it is the very subject-matter of his chief romance
that gives it its distinctive character. It is so great, so
elevated, so enduring that the goodly company of varied
characters to whom we are introduced raises its ' high
argument ' sometimes to a level with, and sometimes
above, that of Scott ; however far the literary art, and
charm, may fall below those of Sir Walter.

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