_EDITH SICHEL_
This notice is more suitably headed with a name than with a title.
Edith Sichel was greater than anything she wrote, and the main
interest of the book before us[*] is the character which it reveals.
Among Miss Sichel's many activities was that of reviewing, and Mr.
Bradley tells that "her first object was to let the reader know
what kind of matter he might expect to find in the book, and, if
necessary, from what point of view it is treated there." Following
this excellent example, let us say that in _New and Old_ the reader
will find an appreciative but not quite adequate "Introduction";
some extracts from letters; some "thoughts" or aphorisms; some
poems; and thirty-two miscellaneous pieces of varying interest-and
merit. This is what we "find in the book," and the "point of view"
is developed as we read.
[Footnote *: _New and Old_. By Edith Sichel. With an Introduction
by A. C. Bradley. London: Constable and Co.]
To say that the Introduction is not quite adequate is no aspersion
on Mr. Bradley. He tells us that he only knew Miss Sichel "towards
the close of her life" (she was born in 1862 and died in 1914), and
in her case pre-eminently the child was mother of the woman. Her
blood was purely Jewish, and the Jewish characteristic of precocity
was conspicuous in her from the first. At ten she had the intellectual
alertness of sixteen, and at sixteen she could have held her own
with ordinary people of thirty. To converse with her even casually
always reminded me of Matthew Arnold's exclamation: "What women
these Jewesses are! with a _force_ which seems to triple that of
the women of our Western and Northern races."
From the days of early womanhood to the end, Edith Sichel led a
double life, though in a sense very different from that in which
this ambiguous phrase is generally employed. "She was known to the
reading public as a writer of books and of papers in magazines....
Her principal books were warmly praised by judges competent to estimate
their value as contributions to French biography and history;" and
her various writings, belonging to very different orders and ranging
over a wide variety of topics, were always marked by vigour and
originality. Her versatility was marvellous; and, "though she had
not in youth the severe training that makes for perfect accuracy,"
she had by nature the instinct which avoids the commonplace, and
which touches even hackneyed themes with light and fire. Her humour
was exuberant, unforced, untrammelled; it played freely round every
object which met her mental gaze--sometimes too freely when she was
dealing with things traditionally held sacred. But her flippancy
was of speech rather than of thought, for her fundamental view of
life was serious. "Life, in her view, brings much that is pure
and unsought joy, more, perhaps, that needs transforming effort,
little or nothing that cannot be made to contribute to an inward
and abiding happiness."
Some more detailed account of her literary work may be given later
on; at this point I must turn to the other side of her double life.
She was only twenty-two when she began her career of practical
benevolence among the poor girls of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and
Shadwell. She established in the country Homes for the girl-children
of an East End work-house, and maintained them till she died. For
twenty-two years she was treasurer of a Boys' Home. She was a manager
of Elementary Schools in London. She held a class for female prisoners
at Holloway. She was deeply impressed by the importance of starting
young people in suitable employment, and threw all her energies
into the work, "in case of need, supplying the money required for
apprenticeship." In this and in all her other enterprises she was
generous to a fault, always being ready to give away half her
income--and yet not "to a fault," for her strong administrative
and financial instinct restrained her from foolish or mischievous
expenditure. All this work, of body and mind, was done in spite
of fragile health and frequent suffering; yet she never seemed
overburdened, or fussed, or flurried, and those who enjoyed her
graceful hospitality in Onslow Gardens would never have suspected
either that her day had been spent in what she called "the picturesque
mire of Wapping," or that she had been sitting up late at night,
immersed in _Human Documents from the Four Centuries preceding
the Reformation_.
We have spoken of her humour. Those who would see a sample of it
are referred to her description of the Eisteddfod on p. 22; and
this piece of pungent fun may be profitably read in contrast with
her grim story of _Gladys Leonora Pratt_. In that story some of
the writer's saddest experiences in the East End are told with an
unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in
it. Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly disgusting.
"It might," she said, "be well for the modern realist to remember
that literalness is not the same as truth, nor curiosity as courage."
She was best known as a writer of books about the French Renaissance,
on which she became an acknowledged authority. She was less well
known, but not less effective, as a reviewer--no one ever dissected
Charlotte Yonge so justly--and she excelled in personal description.
Her accounts of her friends Miss Emily Lawless, Miss Mary Coleridge,
and Joseph Joachim, are masterpieces of characterization. All her
literary work was based on a wide and strong foundation of generous
culture. German was to her a second mother-tongue, and she lectured
delightfully on _Faust_. Though she spoke of herself as talking
"fluent and incomprehensible bad French," she was steeped in French
scholarship. She had read Plato and Sophocles under the stimulating
guidance of William Cory, and her love of Italy had taught her a
great deal of Italian. The authors whom she enjoyed and quoted
were a motley crowd--Dante and Rabelais, Pascal and Montaigne,
George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, Tolstoi and George Borrow, "Mark
Rutherford" and Samuel Butler, Fénelon and Renan and Anatole France.
Her vein of poetic feeling was strong and genuine. In addressing some
young girls she said: "We all think a great deal of the importance
of opening our windows and airing our rooms. I wish we thought
as much of airing our imaginations. To me poetry is quite like
that. It is like opening the window daily, and looking out and
letting in the air and the sunlight into an otherwise stuffy little
room; and if I cannot read some poetry in the day I feel more
uncomfortable than I can tell you." She might have put the case
more strongly; for poetry, and music, and painting, and indeed all
art at its highest level, made a great part of her religion. Her
family had long ago conformed to the Church of England, in which
she was brought up; but she never shook off her essential Judaism.
She had no sympathy with rites or ordinances, creeds or dogmas,
and therefore outward conformity to the faith of her forefathers
would have been impossible to her; but she looked with reverent
pride on the tombs in the Jewish cemetery at Prague. "It gave me
a strange feeling to stand at the tombstone of our tribe--900 A.D.
The oldest scholar's grave is 600 A.D., and Heaven knows how many
great old Rabbis lie there, memorable and forgotten. The wind and
the rain were sobbing all round the place, and all the melancholy
of my race seemed to rise up and answer them." Though she was a
Churchwoman by practice, her own religion was a kind of undefined
Unitarianism. "The Immanence of God and the life of Christ are my
treasures." "I am a heretic, you know, and it seems to me that
all who call Christ Master with adoration of that life are of the
same band." Her favourite theologians were James Martineau, Alfred
Ainger (whose Life she wrote admirably), and Samuel Barnett, whom
she elevated into a mystic and a prophet. The ways of the Church
of England did not please her. She had nothing but scorn for "a
joyless curate prating of Easter joy with limpest lips," or for "the
Athanasian Creed sung in the highest of spirits in a prosperous church"
filled with "sealskin-jacketed mammas and blowsy old gentlemen." But
the conclusion of the whole matter was more comfortable--"All the
clergymen in the world cannot make one disbelieve in God."
X
_"WILL" GLADSTONE_
"He bequeathed to his children the perilous inheritance of a name
which the Christian world venerates." The words were originally
used by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce with reference to his father,
the emancipator of the negro. I venture to apply them to the great
man who, in days gone by, was my political leader, and I do so the
more confidently because I hold that Gladstone will be remembered
quite apart from politics, and, as Bishop Westcott said, "rather
for what he was than for what he did." He was, in Lord Salisbury's
words, "an example, to which history hardly furnishes a parallel,
of a great Christian, Statesman." It was no light matter for a
boy of thirteen to inherit a name which had been so nobly borne
for close on ninety years, and to acquire, as soon as he came of
age, the possession of a large and difficult property, and all
the local influence which such ownership implies. Yet this was
the burden which was imposed on "Will" Gladstone by his father's
untimely death. After an honourable career at Eton and Oxford, and
some instructive journeyings in the East and in America (where he
was an attaché at the British Embassy), he entered Parliament as
Member for the Kilmarnock Boroughs. His Parliamentary career was
not destined to be long, but it was in many respects remarkable.
In some ways he was an ideal candidate. He was very tall, with a
fair complexion and a singular nobility of feature and bearing.
To the most casual observer it was palpable that he walked the
world
"With conscious step of purity and pride."
People interested in heredity tried to trace in him some resemblance
to his famous grandfather; but, alike in appearance and in character,
the two were utterly dissimilar. In only one respect they resembled
each other, and that was the highest. Both were earnest and practical
Christians, walking by a faith which no doubts ever disturbed,
and serving God in the spirit and by the methods of the English
Church. And here we see alike Will Gladstone's qualifications and
his drawbacks as a candidate for a Scottish constituency. His name
and his political convictions commended him to the electors; his
ecclesiastial opinions they could not share. His uprightness of
character and nobility of aspect commanded respect; his innate
dislike of popularity-hunting and men-pleasing made him seem for so
young a man--he was only twenty-seven--austere and aloof. Everyone
could feel the intensity of his convictions on the points on which
he had made up his mind; some were unreasonably distressed when
he gave expression to that intensity by speech and vote. He was
chosen to second the Address at the opening of the Session of 1912,
and acquitted himself, as always, creditably; but it was in the
debates on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill that he first definitely
made his mark. "He strongly supported the principle, holding that it
had been fully justified by the results of the Irish Disestablishment
Act on the Irish Church. But, as in that case, generosity should
characterize legislation; disendowment should be clearly limited to
tithes. Accordingly, in Committee, he took an independent course.
His chief speech on this subject captivated the House. For a very
young Member to oppose his own party without causing irritation,
and to receive the cheers of the Opposition without being led to
seek in them solace for the silence of his own side, and to win
general admiration by transparent sincerity and clear, balanced
statement of reason, was a rare and notable performance."
When Will Gladstone struck twenty-nine, there were few young men in
England who occupied a more enviable position. He had a beautiful
home; sufficient, but not overwhelming, wealth; a property which
gave full scope for all the gifts of management and administration
which he might possess; the devoted love of his family, and the
goodwill even of those who did not politically agree with him.
His health, delicate in childhood, had improved with years. "While
he never neglected his public duties, his natural, keen, healthy
love of nature, sport, fun, humour, company, broke out abundantly.
In these matters he was still a boy"--but a boy who, as it seemed,
had already crossed the threshold of a memorable manhood. Such was
Will Gladstone on his last birthday--the 12th of July, 1914. A
month later the "Great Tribulation" had burst upon the unthinking
world, and all dreams of happiness were shattered. Dreams of happiness,
yes; but not dreams of duty. Duty might assume a new, a terrible,
and an unlooked-for form; but its essential and spiritual part--the
conviction of what a man owes to God, to his fellow-men, and to
himself--became only more imperious when the call to arms was heard:
_Christus ad arma vocat_.
Will Gladstone loved peace, and hated war with his whole heart.
He was by conviction opposed to intervention in the quarrels of
other nations. "His health was still delicate; he possessed neither
the training nor instincts of a soldier; war and fighting were
repugnant to his whole moral and physical fibre." No one, in short,
could have been by nature less disposed for the duty which now
became urgent. "The invasion of Belgium shattered his hopes and
his ideals." He now realized the stern truth that England must
fight, and, if England must fight, he must bear his part in the
fighting. He had been made, when only twenty-six, Lord-Lieutenant
of Flintshire, and as such President of the Territorial Force
Association. It was his official duty to "make personal appeals
for the enlistment of young men. But how could he urge others to
join the Army while he, a young man not disqualified for military
service, remained at home in safety? It was his duty to lead, and
his best discharge of it lay in personal example." His decision
was quickly and quietly made. "He was the only son of his mother,
and what it meant to her he knew full well;" but there was no
hesitation, no repining, no looking back. He took a commission in
the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and on the 15th
of March, 1915, he started with a draft for France. On the 12th
of April he was killed. "It is not"--he had just written to his
mother--"the length of existence, that counts, but what is achieved
during that existence, however short." These words of his form
his worthiest epitaph.