sharp conflict at Oxford. When the Prince of Wales was invited to Oxford
to receive his honorary degree of D.C.L., he had, as was the custom,
sent to the Chancellor a list of names of his friends on whom he wished
that the same degree should be conferred at the same time. One of them
was Kingsley, then one of his chaplains. When his name was proposed a
strong protest was made by Dr. Pusey and his friends, no one could
understand why. Dr. Pusey declared distinctly that he did not mean to
contest Kingsley’s orthodoxy, but when asked at last to give his
reasons, he declared that Kingsley’s “Hypatia” was an immoral book. This
was too much for Dr. Stanley, who challenged Pusey to produce one single
passage in “Hypatia” which could be called immoral. On such conditions
Shakespeare could never have received an honorary degree from the
University of Oxford. I still possess the copy of “Hypatia” which
Stanley examined, marking every passage that could possibly be called
immoral. It need hardly be said that there was none. Still Dr. Pusey
threatened to veto the degree in Convocation and to summon his friends
from the country to support him. And what could have been done to
prevent an unseemly scandal on such an occasion as a royal visit to
Oxford? Dr. Stanley and his friends yielded, and Kingsley’s name was
struck out from the Prince’s list, and, what was still worse, it was
never placed again on the list of honorary doctors such as might really
have reflected honour on the University. If ever the secret history of
the degrees conferred _honoris causa_ by the University of Oxford on
truly eminent persons, not members of the University, comes to be
written, the rejection of Kingsley’s name will not be one of the least
interesting chapters.
Kingsley’s death was a severe blow to his country, and his friends knew
that his life might have been prolonged. It was a sad time I spent with
him at Eversley, while his wife lay sick and the doctors gave no hope of
her recovery. He himself also was very ill at the time, but a doctor
whom the Queen had sent to Eversley told him that with proper care there
was no danger for him, that he had the lungs of a horse, but that he
required great care. In spite of that warning he would get up and go
into the sick-room of his wife, which had to be kept at an icy
temperature. He caught cold and died, being fully convinced that his
wife had gone before him. And what a funeral it was! But with all the
honour that was paid to him, all who walked back to the empty rectory
felt that life henceforth was poorer, and that the sun of England would
never be so bright or so cheerful again, now that he was gone. Though I
admired—as who did not?—his poetical power, his brilliant yet most
minute and accurate descriptions of nature, and the lifelike characters
he had created in his novels, what we loved most in him was his
presence, his delightful stammer, his downright honesty, and the perfect
transparency of his moral nature. He was not a child, he was a man, but
unspoiled by the struggles of his youth, unspoiled by the experiences of
his later years. He was an English gentleman, a perfect specimen of
noble English manhood.
Having been particularly attached to his young niece, my wife, he had at
once allowed me a share in his affections, and when other members of her
family shook their heads, he stood by me and bade me be of good cheer
till the day was won, and she became my wife. That was in 1859. Here are
some verses he had addressed to his two nieces, to my wife and to her
sister, afterwards Mrs. Theodore Walrond (died 1872):—
TO G***.
A hasty jest I once let fall—
As jests are wont to be, untrue—
As if the sum of joy to you
Were hunt and picnic, rout and ball.
Your eyes met mine: I did not blame;
You saw it: but I touched too near
Some noble nerve; a silent tear
Spoke soft reproach and lofty shame.
I do not wish those words unsaid.
Unspoilt by praise or pleasure, you
In that one look to woman grew,
While with a child, I thought, I played.
Next to mine own beloved so long!
I have not spent my heart in vain.
I watched the blade; I see the grain;
A woman’s soul, most soft, yet strong.
A FAREWELL.
My fairest child, I have no song to give you;
No lark could pipe to skies so dull and grey:
Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you
For every day.
Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long:
And so make life, death, and that vast for ever
One grand sweet song.
In the original, as written down in her album, there is a third verse
between the two:—
I’ll tell you how to sing a clearer carol
Than lark who hails the dawn on breezy down,
To earn yourself a purer poet’s laurel
Than Shakespeare’s crown.
LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS
III
Knowing both Kingsley and Froude very intimately, I soon came to know
many of their friends, though my residence at Oxford kept me clear from
the vortex of literary society in London. In some respects I regretted
it, but in others I found it a great blessing. It requires not only
mental, but considerable physical strength to stand the wear and tear of
London life, and I confess I never could understand how some of my
friends, Browning, Tyndall, Huxley, M. Arnold, and others, could manage
to do any serious work, and at the same time serve the Moloch of Society
to whom so many men and women in London offer themselves and their
children as willing sacrifices year after year. They had not only to
dine out and lose their evenings, but wherever they went they had to
shine, they had often to make speeches, long speeches, at public
dinners, they came home tired and slept badly, and in the morning they
were interrupted again by letters, by newspapers, by calls, then by
meetings and committees, by the inevitable leaving of cards, and,
lastly, there was with many of them their official work. Society is a
voracious animal, and has deprived the world of much that can only be
the outcome of quiet hours, of continuous thought, and of uninterrupted
labour. These men must have had not only the brain, but the physical
constitution also of giants, to survive this constant social worry.
A quiet dinner with a few friends is pleasant enough, and a certain
amount of social friction may even be useful in keeping us from rusting;
nay, a casual collision with a kindred spirit may sometimes call forth
sparks which can be turned into light and heat. But to dress, to drive a
few miles, then to be set down, possibly, between two strangers who have
little to say and much to ask, and who, if ill-luck will have it, may
not even be beautiful or charming, is a torture to which men like
Browning and M. Arnold ought never to have submitted. An afternoon tea
is a far more rational amusement, because people are not kept chained
for two hours to one chair and two neighbours, but can move about and
pick out some of their friends whom they really wish to talk to. Even a
luncheon is more bearable, for it does not last so long, and one may
find a chance of talking to one’s friends. But dinners are tortures,
survivals of the dark ages for which there is no longer any excuse, and
I believe that more people, and good people too, have fallen victims to
dinners, public or private, than have broken their necks in the hunting
field.
I had hoped at one time that the æsthetic phase through which English
society was passing, would have put an end to, or would at least have
modified, these social gobblings. Surely it is a most unbeautiful sight
to see a number of people, young and old, with or without teeth, filling
their mouths with mutton or beef, chewing, denticating, masticating
their morsels, and then washing them down with wine or water. No doubt
it can be done inoffensively, or even daintily, but is it? Eastern
ladies know how to throw small morsels of food into their open mouths
with their fingers, and Eastern poets describe this performance with
rapture. Chinese poets become eloquent even over chop-sticks as handled
by their fair ones. But for all that, the Hindus seem to me to show
their good taste by retiring while they feed, and reappearing only after
they have washed their hands and face. Why should we be so anxious to
perform this no doubt necessary function before the eyes of our friends?
How often have I seen a beautiful face distorted by the action of the
jaw-bones, the temples forced out, and the cheeks distended by obstinate
morsels. Could not at least the grosser part of feeding be performed in
private, and the social gathering begin at the dessert, or, with men, at
the wine, so as to have a real _Symposion_, not a _Symphagion_? But I am
on dangerous ground, and shall broach no further heresies.
Life at Oxford has many advantages. Of course our London friends tell us
that we are mere provincials, but that is a relative expression, and,
anyhow, we enjoy life in peace. It is true we have not shaken off the
regular society dinners altogether, but no one is offended if his
friends tell him that they are too busy to dine out. And we still have
our pleasant small dinners or luncheons of four, six, at the utmost
eight people, when you can really see and enjoy your friends, and not
only roast beef and port. In former years, when I first came to Oxford,
it was different, but then the evil was chiefly confined to heads of
colleges and halls, and there were even then exceptions, where you dined
to meet a few friends, and not simply to lay in food.
One of my earliest dinners I remember at Oxford was to meet Thackeray.
Thackeray was then writing “Esmond,” and a Mr. Stoddard—a fellow of St.
John’s College—asked me to meet him at dinner. We were only four, and we
were all very much awed by Thackeray’s presence, particularly I, not
being able as yet to express myself freely in English. We sat silent for
some time, no one ventured to make the first remark, the soup was over,
and there was a fine John Doré on the table waiting to be splayed. We
were hoping for some brilliant sally from Thackeray, but nothing came.
At last Thackeray suddenly turned his large spectacled eyes on me and
said: “Are you going to eat your own ancestor?” I stared, everybody else
stared. At last we gave it up, and Thackeray, looking very grave and
learned, said: “Surely you are the son of the Dorian Müller—the Müller
who wrote that awfully learned book on the Dorians; and was not John
Doré the ancestor of all the Dorians?” There was a general, “Oh, oh!”
but the ice was broken, and no one after this horrible pun was afraid of
saying anything. All I could tell Thackeray was that I was not the son
of Otfried Müller, who wrote on the Dorians, but of Wilhelm Müller, the
poet, who wrote “Die Homerische Vorschule,” and “Die Schöne Müllerin,”
and as to John Doré being our ancestor, how could that be? The original
John Doré, so I have been told, was _il Janitore_, that is, St. Peter,
and had no wife, as some people will have it, or at least never
acknowledged her in public, though he was kind to his mother-in-law. All
this did not promise well, yet the rest of our little dinner party was
very successful; it became noisy and even brilliant.
Thackeray from his treasures of wit and sarcasm poured out anecdote
after anecdote; he used plenty of vinegar and cayenne pepper, but there
was always a flavour of kindliness and good-nature, even in his most
cutting remarks. I saw more of him when he came to Oxford to lecture on
the Four Georges, and when he stood for Parliament and was defeated by
Cardwell and Charles Neate. After one of his lectures, when I expressed
my delight with his brilliant success, “Wait, wait,” he said, “the time
will come when you will lecture at Oxford.” At that time my English was
still very crumbly; there was no idea of my staying on in England, still
less of my ever becoming a professor at Oxford.
Thackeray’s novels were a great delight to me then, and some have
remained so for life. Still, there is a fashion in all things, in
literature quite as much as in music, and when lately reading “The
Newcomes” I was surprised at the meagreness of the dialogue, the very
dialogues for which we felt so impatient from month to month when the
book first came out in numbers. Still one always recognises in Thackeray
the powerful artist, who, like a Japanese painter, will with a few lines
place a living man or woman before you, never to be forgotten.
I am sorry I missed seeing and knowing more of Charles Dickens. I met
him in my very early days with a friend of mine at some tavern in the
Strand, but did not see him again till quite at the end of his career,
when he was giving readings from his novels, and knew how to make his
audiences either weep or laugh. Still I am glad to have seen him in the
flesh, both as a young and as an old man. However wide apart our
interests in life might be, no one who had read his novels could look on
Dickens as a stranger. He knew the heart of man to the very core, and
could draw a picture of human suffering with a more loving hand than any
other English writer. He also possessed now and then the grand style,
and even in his pictures of still life the hand of the master can always
be perceived. He must have shed many a tear over the deathbed of poor
Joe; he must have chuckled and shouted over Mr. Winkle and Mr. Tupman
going out partridge shooting. Perhaps to our taste, as it now is, some
of his characters are too sentimental and simpering, but there are few
writers now who could create his child-wife. It always seemed to me very
strange that my friend Stanley, though he received Dickens among the
great ones of Westminster Abbey, could not, as he confessed to me, take
any pleasure in his works.
But though I could not spend much time in London and cultivate my
literary acquaintances there, Oxford itself was not without interesting
poets. After all, whatever talent England possesses is filtered
generally either through Oxford or Cambridge, and those who have eyes to
see may often watch some of the most important chapters in the growth of
poetical genius among the young undergraduates. I watched Clough before
the world knew him, I knew Matthew Arnold during many years of his early
life, and having had the honour of examining Swinburne I was not
surprised at his marvellous performances in later years. He was even
then a true artist, a commander of legions of words, who might become an
imperator at any time. Clough was a most fascinating character,
thoroughly genuine, but so oppressed with the problems of life that it
was difficult ever to get a smile out of him; and if one did, his round
ruddy face with the deep heavy eyes seemed really to suffer from the
contortions of laughter. He took life very seriously, and made greater
sacrifices to his convictions than the world ever suspected. He was
poor, but from conscientious scruples gave up his fellowship, and was
driven at last to go to America to make himself independent without
giving up the independence of his mind. With a little more sunshine
above him and around him he might have grown to a very considerable
height, but there was always a heavy weight on him, that seemed to
render every utterance and every poem a struggle.
His poems are better known and loved in America, I believe, than in
England, but in England also they still have their friends, and in the
history of the religious or rather theological struggles of 1840–50
Clough’s figure will always be recognised as one of the most
characteristic and the most pleasing. I had once the misfortune to give
him great pain. I saw him at Oxford with a young lady, and I was told
that he was engaged to her. Delighted as I was at this prospect of a
happy issue out of all his troubles, I wrote to him to congratulate him,
when a most miserable answer came, telling me that it all was hopeless,
and that I ought not to have noticed what was going on.
However, it came right in the end, only there were some years of patient
struggle to be gone through first; and who is not grateful in the end
for such years passed on Pisgah, if only Jordan is crossed at last?
Another poet whom I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I
watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was
beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and
schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in
them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the
wave of his arm were Jovelike. He grappled with the same problems as
Clough, but they never got the better of him, or rather he never got the
worse of them. Goethe helped him to soar where others toiled and sighed
and were sinking under their self-imposed burdens. Even though his later
life was enough to dishearten a poet, he laughed at his being _Pegasus
im Joche_. Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself surrounded
by his contemporaries, most of them judges, bishops, and ministers, he
would groan over the drudgery he had to go through every day of his life
in examining dirty schoolboys and schoolgirls. But he saw the fun of it,
and laughed. What a pity it was that his friends, and he had many, could
find no better place for him. Most of his contemporaries, many of them
far inferior to him, rose to high positions in Church and State, he
remained to the end an examiner of elementary schools. Of course it may
be said that, like so many of his literary friends, he might have
written novels and thus eked out a living by pot-boilers, as they are
called, of various kinds. But there was something noble and refined in
him which restrained his pen from such work. Whatever he gave to the
world was to be perfect, as perfect as he could make it, and he did not
think that he possessed a talent for novels. His saying “No Arnold can
ever write a novel” is well known, but it has been splendidly falsified
of late by his own niece. He had to go to America on a lecturing tour to
earn some money he stood in need of, though he felt it as a _dira
necessitas_, nay, as a dire indignity. It is true he had good
precedents, but evidently his showman was not the best he could have
chosen, nor was Arnold himself very strong as a lecturer. England has
not got from him all that she had a right to expect, but whatever he has
left has a finish that will long keep it safe from the corrosive wear
and tear of time.
When later in life Arnold took to theological studies, he showed, no
doubt, a very clear insight and a perfect independence of judgment, but
he had only a few spare hours for work which in order to be properly
done would have required a lifetime. Yet what he wrote produced an
effect, in England at least, more lasting than many a learned volume,
and he was allowed to say things that would have given deep offence if
coming from other lips. His famous saying about the three Lord
Shaftesburys has been judged very differently by different writers. As a
mere matter of taste it may seem that Arnold’s illustration of what he
took to be the common conception of the Trinity among his Philistine
friends was objectionable. Let us hope that it was not even true.
But Arnold’s intention was clear enough. He argued chiefly against those
who had called the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Mass “_a degrading
superstition_.” He tells them they ought to discover in it what the
historian alone, or what Arnold means by a man of culture, can discover;
namely, the original intention of the faithful in thus interpreting the
words of Christ (St. John, vii., 53): “Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have
no life in you.” It was in protesting against this narrowness that he
reminded his Protestant friends of the weak joints in their own armour,
particularly their too literal acceptation of the doctrine of the
Trinity.[8] And I doubt whether he was altogether wrong when he charged
them with speaking of the Father as a mere individual, or, as he
expressed it, a sort of infinitely magnified and improved Lord
Shaftesbury with a race of vile offenders to deal with, whom his natural
goodness would incline him to let off, only his sense of justice would
not allow it. And is it not true that many who speak of Christ as the
Son of God take “son” in its common literal sense, or, as Arnold
expressed it, imagine “a younger Lord Shaftesbury, on the scale of his
father and very dear to him, who might live in grandeur and splendour if
he liked, but who preferred to leave his home to go and live among the
race of offenders, and to be put to an ignominious death, on the
condition that his merits should be counted against their demerits, and
that his father’s goodness should be restrained no longer from taking
effect, but any offender should be admitted to the benefit of it, simply
on pleading the satisfaction made by the son”? Finally, when he points
out the extremely vague conception of the Holy Ghost as a person and as
an individual, does he really exaggerate so very much when he says that
He is with many no more than “a third Lord Shaftesbury, still on the
same high scale, who keeps very much in the background and works in a
very occult manner, but very efficaciously nevertheless, and who is busy
in applying everywhere the benefits of the son’s satisfaction and the
father’s goodness?” Nay, even when he goes on to say that this is
precisely the Protestant story of justification, what he wants to
impress on his Protestant readers is surely no more than this, that from
his point of view there is nothing actually degrading in their very
narrow view, as little as in the common Roman Catholic view of the Mass.
What he means is no more than that both views as held by the many are
grotesquely literal and unintelligent.
People who hold such views would be ready to tell you, he says, “the
exact hangings in the Trinity’s council chamber.” But, with all that he
is anxious to show that not only was the original intention both of
Roman and English Catholics good, but that even in its mistaken
application it may help towards righteousness. In trying to impress this
view both on Protestants and Roman Catholics, Arnold certainly used
language which must have pained particularly those who felt that the
picture was not altogether untrue. However, his friends, and among them
many high ecclesiastics, forgave him. Stanley, I know, admired his
theological writings very much. Many of his critics fully agreed with
what Arnold said, only they would have said it in a different way. There
is a kind of cocaine style which is used by many able critics and
reformers. It cuts deep into the flesh, and yet the patient remains
insensible to pain. “You can say anything in English,” Arthur Helps once
said to me, “only you must know how to say it.” Arnold, like Carlyle and
others, preferred the old style of surgery. They thought that pain was
good in certain operations, and helped to accelerate a healthy reaction.
The only fault that one may find with Arnold, is that he did not himself
try to restore the original and true conception of the Trinity to that
clear and intelligible form which he as an historian and a man of
culture could have brought out better than any one else. The original
intention of the Lord’s Supper, or the Mass, can easily be learnt, as
Arnold has shown, from the very words of the Bible (St. Luke, xxii.,
20): “The cup is the new testament in my blood.” But the doctrine of the
Trinity requires a far more searching historical study. As the very name
of Trinity is a later invention, and absent from the New Testament, it
requires a thorough study of Greek, more particularly of Alexandrian
philosophy, to understand its origin, for it is from Greek philosophy
that the idea of the Word, the Logos, was taken by some of the early
Fathers of the Church.
As the Messiah was a Semitic thought which the Jewish disciples of
Christ saw realised in the Son of Man, the Word was an Aryan thought
which the Greek disciples saw fulfilled in the Son of God. The history
of the divine Dyas which preceded the Trias is clear enough, if only we
are acquainted with the antecedents of Greek philosophy. Without that
background it is a mere phantasm, and no wonder that in the minds of
uneducated people it should have become what Arnold describes it,[9]
father, son, and grandson, living together in the same house, or
possibly in the clouds. To make people shrink back from such a
conception is worth something, and Arnold has certainly achieved this,
if only he has caused hundreds and thousands to say to themselves: “We
never were so foolish or so narrow-minded as to believe in three Lord
Shaftesburys.”
For some reason or other, however, the “three Lord Shaftesburys” have
disappeared in the last edition of “Literature and Dogma” and have been
replaced by “a Supernatural Man.” Froude, who was an intimate friend
both of Arnold and of Sir James Stephen, told me that the latter had
warned Arnold that the three Lord Shaftesburys were really actionable,
and if Arnold hated anything it was a _fracas_. In the fifth edition
they still remain, so that the change must have been made later on, when
he prepared the cheap edition of his book. Anyhow, they are gone!