BISHOP CREIGHTON
When Mandell Creighton was Bishop of London it fell to him to admonish
an earnest High Church Vicar, working in the East End, on the subject of
incense. The Vicar, pleading hard for his point, appealed to his record
as a parish priest. “Dr. Creighton,” he said solemnly, “for twenty-five
years I have held here a cure of souls, and——” Before he could finish the
sentence Creighton cut in with a joke. “Cure them, certainly,” he said,
“but surely you need not smoke them.”
The jest was quite in Creighton’s way. It was easy. It was flippant.
It was made at the expense of a rather humourless sincerity. It was
impolitic; in fact, widely repeated, it caused much offence. But it
came into the Bishop’s head, and it had to come out. Creighton might
possess self-restraint in other ways, but the sacrifice of a good thing
was beyond him. Moreover, while ready to make the largest allowances
for great errors and even great crimes, he was incapable of respecting
what he considered mere faddism in religious matters. He had, it seems
certain, religious beliefs of his own, but no religious fancies, and he
was contemptuous of fancies in others, still more contemptuous of fancies
that were rather more than fancies. The priest in the present case was
clearly a fool; who but a fool would remain a priest in Bethnal Green
for twenty-five years? Why not, then, tell him so, if it could be done
with due urbanity and wit? It was the sort of thing Creighton would have
said as an undergraduate at Merton, and to a rather unusual degree he
retained the undergraduate mind throughout life. In full maturity both
his earnestness and his flippancy were less those of manhood than of
very intelligent youth; at sixty he was mentally as fresh as at twenty,
and (it may perhaps be said) as foppish. The foppishness was the more
real because it was unconscious, like the undergraduate’s; Creighton
disclaimed “superiority” in himself, and strongly resented it in others,
but he never lost that combined simper and swagger of the mind which
we are so often persuaded to call Oxford. There could have been no
greater contrast to Temple. Temple said what he had to say, and cared
very little what people thought as to the thing said or the manner of
its saying. Creighton had always some of the eagerness and wistfulness
of the clever young man who feels it incumbent on him to sparkle, and
is troubled with just a doubt whether he has quite “come off.” His
paradoxes are often strongly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s; they are
not so witty, but have much the same superficial smartness, essential
untruth, and light contempt of average humanity. Wilde would have given a
more dexterous turn to “No people do so much harm as those who go about
doing good,” but the spirit of the thing is quite his, and he might
actually have described an Extension lecture as “a mission to enlightened
greengrocers.” This, of course, was only one side of Creighton’s
character; in other moods he said many wise things, and did things still
more wise. Whether he was a fundamentally wise man is another question.
Wise men have a habit of ceasing to be clever, and especially of ceasing
to be exceptionally educated. Creighton could not help being always a
wit and always a don. As a Christian he was always ready to admit the
equality of men before God. He even erred on the side of minimising the
moral differences between man and man, as in that very unphilosophical
generalisation that “all are so infinitely far from the perfection of God
that little differences do not matter,” which is equivalent to saying
that the light of a lamp is so infinitely less than the light of the sun
that it does not matter whether we have a smoky lamp or not. In this
way, as a Christian, Creighton was fond of showing his indifference to
externals. But as an Oxford scholar he did incline to think too much of
certain small things and too little of certain big things.
There were no two subjects on which he was more prone to witty
depreciation than the clerical mind and the national mind. Yet he was
himself very English, and very Church-of-English. Only in England would
such a man find himself in holy orders; only in England, especially,
would such a man find himself a Bishop. The whole tone of his mind was
secular and humanist; on indifferent things he spoke as an unembarrassed
pagan; when, like an ecclesiastical Wegg, he “dropped” into theology,
the effect was a little awkward. There was no suspicion of insincerity
in Creighton talking about “keeping open the way to Jesus,” and “growing
nearer to God,” but there was (to some at least) a sense of incongruity.
It gave the sort of shock one would feel if Mr. Chesterton went out
dressed like the Rev. R. J. Campbell, or if Mr. Massingham went to a
fancy dress ball in a colourable imitation of a Field-Marshal’s uniform.
One was prepared for everything moral, kindly, and sensible from
Creighton. But to find this very clever man—“for sheer cleverness
Creighton beats any man I know,” said Temple once—really did regard
himself first and foremost as a “pastor of souls,” and was so despite
the neat epigrams, the equally neat gold cigarette case, and the
social _àplomb_, was not a little staggering. His countrymen, stupid
as Creighton always loved to represent them, might at least partially
understand him. It is safe to say no intelligent Italian or Frenchman
would have done so. Such a foreigner would understand well enough a great
Prince of the Church, who might or might not be a Christian. He would
understand a poor saint. He would understand a humanist unbeliever full
of noble sentiment. What he would hardly understand was how a man so very
“broad” managed to confine himself in a “distinct branch of the Catholic
Church.” Still less would he be able to comprehend how a scholar with a
life-long ambition to write a great historical work should be the victim,
in his own words, of a “conspiracy to prevent him from doing so.” But to
the English, and also to Creighton, who loved to satirise the English,
it seemed not unnatural that a man who cared little about any points
of ritual should be constantly adjudicating between the Kensitites on
the one hand and the extreme High Churchmen on the other, or that a man
eminently qualified to write great history in which he was intensely
interested should be set to compose small squabbles in which he was not
interested at all.
Why Creighton took orders was much of a mystery to his set at Merton.
The whole intellectual tendency of the day was towards agnosticism,
and Creighton was very intellectual indeed. But, though Creighton had
little sympathy with “external and mechanical orthodoxy,” and, in the
words of his eulogist, “did not wear his spiritual heart on his sleeve,”
but “reverted to paradox to conceal differences on which he did not
care to insist,” he seems to have remained a convinced Churchman, and
indeed considerably more of a High and less of a Broad Churchman than
he afterwards became. His ambition to be a clergyman dated from early
boyhood; but it would probably not be unjust to suggest that he was
first attracted to the Church less by a spiritual urging than by the
thought that the clerical career would afford him an opportunity for
study and literary work. Creighton’s love for things of the mind was
more Scottish than English; his family was a Scottish family, though
settled in Cumberland; his father, trained as a joiner, had a furnishing
and decorating business; on his mother’s side, he came of yeoman farmer
stock. Healthy but short-sighted, the lad had no recreation but taking
long walks—a habit which persisted and developed in later life (he once
walked from Oxford to Durham in three days)—and his naturally studious
bent was accentuated by this aloofness from the sports of his companions.
The severity of the born student, however, was softened from a very early
age by the taste of the born æsthete; Creighton’s rooms at Oxford, the
moment he got a little money, were beautifully set out with choice little
pieces of old furniture, blue and white china, and flowers arranged on
the most correct principles of the newest school of taste. After his
marriage with Miss Louise von Glehn (who first attracted him by her
youth, her yellow sash, and her interest in his lectures) he removed from
his pleasant rooms to a house in Oxford equally charming in its way, and
the centre of much quiet intellectual junketing. But, though he delighted
in Oxford, he began, as years went on, to think of University as “like
living in a house with the workmen always about,” and the pressure of
his tutorial duties made him long for some less arduous environment in
which to carry out his design of a History of the Papacy. An opportunity
presented itself at the end of 1874. The richest and oldest living within
the gift of Merton, that of Embleton, forty miles north of Newcastle,
became vacant; Creighton made it known that he would be willing to
accept, and the offer was made him. At Embleton, lying on a desolate
part of the Northumbrian coast, Creighton made himself comfortable in the
old fortified vicarage which used to afford shelter to the parishioners
and their cattle during Scottish moss-trooper raids; and here, in the
intervals of attending to not too arduous parish duties, he brought out
the first two volumes of his history. The work at once placed him in
the front rank of serious writers of the day; and the praise lavished
on it was not undeserved. For though the effort to be impartial where
impartiality is impossible gave coldness to the narrative, these volumes,
as well as those which succeeded, showed great learning, a brilliant
power of analysis and exposition, and a rare faculty of imaginative
sympathy. It is a curious testimony to Creighton’s fairness to find Lord
Acton at a later date accusing him of too much tenderness for certain
Popes, while Protestants were complaining that Luther was treated with an
undue lack of reverence.
By this time parochial duties, increasing with the years, began to irk
Creighton as much as the pressure of his tutorial duties had done,
and he was anxious for a change. In 1884 he accepted the offer of the
appointment of Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge; shortly
after he took from Mr. Gladstone a Canonry at Worcester; and in 1890
Lord Salisbury offered him the vacant See of Peterborough. Nearly ten
years before he had been asked if he would like to be a Bishop. “No, I
should not,” he replied, “but if I were offered a Bishopric I should no
doubt take it, because I have got into the habit of doing what is asked
of me.” He was anxious to get on with his history; to become a Bishop
meant the definite sacrifice of further literary ambitions. But though
he thought it “a terrible nuisance,” and his “natural self” abhorred it,
and he considered himself “an object of compassion,” it is probable that
the promotion was not quite so unpleasant as he represented it to many
friends and probably himself believed it to be. For both his worldly and
other-worldly sides the appointment had some compensations. He really did
enjoy society, and he really did feel (singular as it might seem in a man
of his temperament) his mission as a Christian priest. The sense was not
strong enough to make him seek great activities, but it was strong enough
to make him feel it an act of cowardice and self-indulgence to refuse a
call when it came. But it was in the nature of the man to mix up almost
comically his various feelings. At one time we find him lamenting that
living in a Palace will be bad for his children, at another he speaks
of regarding his individual life as simply an opportunity of offering
himself to God, and then we have the following very characteristic
remark: “A good lady said to me the other day, ‘After all, men are more
interesting than books.’ Doubtless this is true, but you can choose your
own books, and you must take your men as you find them.” “My peace of
mind,” he said in the same letter, “is gone; my books will be shut up; my
mind will go to seed; I shall utter nothing but platitudes for the rest
of my life, and everybody will write letters in the newspapers about my
iniquities.” The picture of such a man hesitating between a certain set
of tastes and the call of conscience is perhaps best illustrated in a
story which may or may not be new. One of Creighton’s children was asked
what he was going to do. The reply was, “Father is still praying for
guidance, but mother is packing our boxes.”
Whatever his real qualms, they seem to have been excessive. Once settled
down to his new work, Creighton quite enjoyed himself at Peterborough,
and certainly, by all reasonable standards of episcopal efficiency, was
a success. But his translation to London in 1896 was the occasion of
more complaints in the same key. London was “inhuman”; it required all
his efforts to remain human in such a spot. There were not so many human
beings in London as in Peterborough. He was in “the very centre of all
that was worldly.” He was “exposed to the most deteriorating influences.”
It was “a great nuisance” that he never saw anybody intimately. “Every
ass was at liberty to bray in his study.” He never seemed to be free from
interviewing candidates for ordination. There was no one to be “kind”
to him. But as he became more used to the new conditions the complaints
became less frequent. He felt himself making some impression, not only
on his vast work, but on the vast town. The newspapers recognised the
richness of his personality. The gossips retailed his good things. He
began to feel at home, and within a year of his promotion we find him
confessing that London is “immensely interesting” with its “abundant
life,” which, however, “raises the question—Where is it going?”
If he found London bewildering as well as interesting, London—or that
fraction that troubled about such matters—was also a little puzzled, as
well as interested, in him. There was, indeed, something of the Sphinx
about this long, gaunt figure, with the bearded, spectacled face, harsh
in feature as only northern English faces can be, intrinsically stern,
but generally lightened by a smile half genial and half quizzical.
Rapidly becoming one of the best-known of public men, he was never quite
understood. The man killed himself by hard work; a constitution good
enough to have taken him to fourscore was worn out at less than sixty
by too conscientious efforts to keep pace with the enormous demands
made on his energies. His sermons and addresses breathed much of the
purest spirit of Christian faith, as well as the very soul of Christian
charity. Yet he who laboured so faithfully, and preached so admirably,
often talked nonsense—sometimes good nonsense and sometimes bad—and
showed a quality (some called it playfulness and others flippancy) which
perturbed equally the faithful and the infidel. For orthodox people
could not understand this levity in a serious man, and unorthodox people
seemed to think that a man of his mentality and temperament had no right
to be orthodox. There was in his very toleration something insulting to
enthusiasts. To people who held strong views on some question he felt
to be trivial he could not emit judicious platitudes; his judgment was
generally barbed with a wit that rankled with both sides. One reference
to incense has already been quoted; another was, “Personally I should
say, if they want to make a smell, let them.” That sort of thing does not
satisfy either those who would kindle the fires of Smithfield or those
who would revive the sullen reign of the saints.
The Bishop’s attitude was held very generally to denote the kind of
breadth which is so easy where there is no strong conviction. But this
view was quite erroneous. Creighton’s contempt might be too lightly
expressed, but it was not lightly entertained. He had a reason for
every dislike, and even behind every prejudice. He managed somehow to
reconcile the Catholic view of the English Church with pure Erastianism.
In one place one finds him ridiculing the notion that truth varies with
longitude and latitude; in another he holds that “the general trend of
the Church must be regulated by their (the people’s) wishes,” and that
“the Church cannot go too far from the main ideas of the people”—who
might conceivably, of course, become polygamists and fire-worshippers
fifty years hence. In truth, this great historian often thought as
cloudily and locally as a country curate, and, far more than he was
aware, was influenced by the insularity he so often derided. Where he
did not take the English view he took the German, being soaked, like
most Victorians, in Teutonism; and he really objected to “religious
observances of an exotic kind” less because they were exotic than because
they were Latin.
“The Church of Rome,” he said once, “is the Church of decadent peoples.”
On another occasion he observed that the Roman communion is “a small
body in England, which stands in no relation to the religious life of
the nation.... To join that Church is simply to stand on one side and
cut yourself off from your part in striving to do your duty for the
religious future of your country.” I am not concerned in the sectarian
question involved; I only quote the passages to show that Creighton, with
all his learning and cleverness, could talk solemn nonsense as well as
the lighter kind. Yet he would have been quick to see the logical lapse
of some old barbarian who condemned Christianity as the religion of
under-sized people, or of the Roman governor under Nero who sent saints
to the lions because this new faith of “Chrestus” stood in no relation to
the religious life of a polytheistic Empire, so that for a Roman citizen
to join it was to “cut himself off from his past in striving to do his
duty for the religious future of his country.”
The truth is, of course, that Creighton, disliking Rome and despising the
“dying nations” in her communion, wished to say something nasty without
too much trouble—a natural and perhaps commendable desire. The Ulster
man, when he wants to gratify it, says simply, “To Hell with the Pope”;
Creighton, instead of rising to bad language, sank to bad argument,
and gave the weight of his personality to the once popular doctrine
that a creed is to be honoured in proportion to the wealth and material
prosperity of its professors. Yet on all indifferent matters he would
have been the first to hold that truth is truth if only one man (and he
a scrofulous cripple) believes it, and error error, even though approved
by everybody as tall as Creighton and endowed with the particular code of
good manners which he approved.