My father's letters were seldom without a dash of playfulness or
humour somewhere; a thing always fresh and spontaneous, unlike the
calculated or laboured playfulness sometimes to be observed in the
epistolary touch of literary folk. A capital example is a note to
Matthew Arnold, at whose house he had left his umbrella. Arnold, it
may be added, had recently been critically engaged upon the works of
Bishop Wilson:--
Look at Bishop Wilson on the sin of covetousness, and then
inspect your umbrella stand. You will there see a beautiful
brown smooth-handled umbrella which is _not_ your property.
Think of what the excellent prelate would have advised, and
bring it with you next time you come to the Club. The porter
will take care of it for me.
Sometimes the words will come trippingly from the pen as if they were
flung out in a brilliant flash of talk, like the following sketch of
human character:--
Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of
horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice--with
an angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple in the
posset--and when they can do exactly as they please they are
very hard to drive.
As to his conversation, that, wrote the late Wilfrid Ward,
was singularly finished and (if I may so express it)
clean cut; never long-winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid
illustrations. He was an excellent _raconteur_, and his
stories had a stamp of their own which would have made them
always and everywhere acceptable. His sense of humour and
economy of words would have made it impossible, had he lived
to ninety, that they should ever have been disparaged as
symptoms of what has been called "anecdotage."
Some fragments of his talk have been preserved by the same hand.
Speaking of Tennyson's conversation, he said: "Doric beauty is its
characteristic--perfect simplicity, without any ornament or anything
artificial."
Telling how he had been to a meeting of the British Museum Trustees,
he said: "After the meeting Archbishop Benson helped me on with
my greatcoat. I was _quite overcome_ by this species of spiritual
investiture. 'Thank you, Archbishop,' I said; 'I feel as if I were
receiving the pallium.'"
On another occasion he drew a distinction between two writers, with
neither of whom he sympathized. "Don't mistake me. One is a thinker
and man of letters, the other is only a literary man. Erasmus was a
man of letters; Gigadibs a literary man. A.B. is the incarnation of
Gigadibs. I should call him _Gigadibsius Optimus Maximus_."
Of his quickness in rising to the occasion Professor Howes tells a
story. Staying after a lecture to answer questions, he turned to a
student and said: "Well, I hope you understood it all." "All, sir, but
one part, during which you stood between me and the blackboard," was
the reply; the rejoinder: "I did my best to make myself clear, but
could not render myself transparent."
From among my own recollections I give the following:--"It is one of
the most saddening things that, try as we may, we can never be certain
of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain
of making them unhappy." Of the attitude towards Spiritualism of a
certain member of the Society for Psychical Research:--"He doesn't
believe in it, yet lends it the cover of his name. He is one of those
people who talk of the 'possibility' of the thing, who think the
difficulties of disproving a thing as good as direct evidence in its
favour."
Again:--"It is very strange how most men will do anything to evade
responsibility." Later, we were talking of the contrast between
Hellene and Hebrew. "The real chosen people," he said, "were the
Greeks. One of the most remarkable things about them is not only
the smallness but the late rise of Attica, whereas Magna
Graecia flourished in the eighth century. The Greeks were doing
everything--piracy, trade, fighting, expelling the Persians. Never was
there so large a number of self-governing communities.
"They fell short of the Jews in morality. How curious is the tolerant
attitude of Socrates, like a modern man of the world talking to a
young fellow who runs after the girls. The Jew, however he fell short
in other respects, set himself a certain standard in cleanliness of
life, and would not fall below it. The more creditable to him, because
these vices were the offspring of the Semitic races among whom the Jew
lived.
"There is a curious similarity between the position of the Jew in
ancient times and what it is now. They were procurers and usurers
among the Gentiles, yet many of them were singularly high-minded and
pure. All, too, with an intense clannishness, the secret of their
success, and a sense of superiority to the Gentile which would prevent
the meanest Jew from sitting at table with a pro-consul.
"The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe
for eighteen centuries his own superstitions--his ideas of the
supernatural. Jahveh was no more than Zeus or Milcom; yet the Jew got
established the belief in the inspiration of his Bible and his law.
If I were a Jew, I should have the same contempt as he has for the
Christian who acted in this way towards me, who took my ideas and
scorned me for clinging to them."
Here may be quoted a passage from a letter to Professor George
Romanes:--
I have a great respect for the Nazarenism of Jesus--very
little for later "Christianity." But the only religion that
appeals to me is prophetic Judaism. Add to it something from
the best Stoics and something from Spinoza and something from
Goethe, and there is a religion for men. Some of these days I
think I will make a cento out of the works of these people.
This cento, however, he never made. Had he done so, he would assuredly
have illustrated his saying to Charles Kingsley:--
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves
to fact; not to try and make facts harmonize with my
aspirations--
a notion expanded thus:--
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest
manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian
conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down
before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
pre-conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever
abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only
begun to learn content and peace of mind since I resolved at
all costs to do this.