would include an account of St. Francis preaching to the birds. The
Pets of History would no doubt involve some reference to the Bruce's
spider and Sir Isaac Newton's Diamond and the Duc D'Enghien's spaniel;
and, if so belittling a title as "pet" may be applied to so majestic an
animal as the horse, we should trace a long line of equine celebrities
from Bucephalus and Sorrel to Marengo and Copenhagen. The Pets of
Literature are, of course, a boundless host--chargers like White
Surrey, and coursers like Roland; hounds like Keeldar and falcons like
Cheviot--to say nothing of Mrs. Merdle's parrot, or Miss Tox's canary,
or Mr. Kipling's appalling monkey, who murdered his owner's wife.
Wordsworth alone is responsible for a whole menagerie of pets--for a
White Doe, for a greyhound called Dart, for "Prince," "Swallow," and
"Little Music," let alone the anonymous dog who was lost with his
master on Helvellyn. The gentle Cowper had his disgusting hares and
his murderous spaniel Beau. Byron's only friend was a Newfoundland dog
called Boatswain. The horses of fiction are a splendid stud. Ruksh
leads the procession in poetry, and Rosinante in prose. A true lover
of Scott can enumerate twenty different horses, of strongly marked
individuality and appropriate names. Whoso knows not Widderin and his
gallop from the bushrangers has yet to read one of the most thrilling
scenes in fiction; and I think that to this imaginary stud may be
fairly added the Arabian mare which Lord Beaconsfield thought he
had ridden for thirty miles across country in the strongly-enclosed
neighbourhood of Southend.
Among the Pets of Real Life an honourable place belongs to Sir Walter
Scott's deerhounds--were not their names Bran and Maida?--and to Lord
Shaftesbury's donkey Coster. Loved in life and honoured in death were
Matthew Arnold's dachshunds Geist and Max, his retriever Rover, his
cat Atossa, and, above all, his canary Matthias, commemorated in one
of the most beautiful of elegiac poems. With Bismarck--not, one would
have thought, a natural lover of pets--is historically associated a
Boarhound, or "Great Dane." Lord Beaconsfield characteristically loved
a peacock. The evening of Mr. Gladstone's days was cheered by the
companionship of a small black Pomeranian. Sir Henry Hawkins was not
better known to the criminal classes than his fox-terrier Jack; and all
who passed Lady Burdett-Coutts's house saw hanging in the dining-room
window a china cockatoo-the image or simulacrum of a departed bird
which lived to a prodigious age and used to ask the most inconvenient
questions.
The greatest patroness of Pets in Real Life was Queen Victoria, and her
books have secured for these favourites a permanent place. Noble, the
collie, will be remembered as long as "Leaves from the Journal of our
Life in the Highlands" is read; and I can myself recall the excitement
which fluttered the highest circles when a black terrier, called, I
think, Sharp, killed a rat which had climbed up the ivy into the window
of the Queen's sitting-room at Windsor.
There are certain pets, or families of pets, which stand on their own
traditional dignity rather than on associations with individuals. All
Cheshire knows the Mastiffs of Lyme, tall as donkeys and peaceable as
sheep. The Clumber Spaniels and the Gordon Setters are at least as
famous as the dukes who own them. Perhaps the most fascinating pet in
the canine world is associated with the great victory of Blenheim; and
the Willoughby Pug preserves from oblivion a name which has been merged
in the Earldom of Ancaster.
In the days of my youth one was constantly hearing--and especially in
the Whiggish circles where I was reared--two names which may easily
puzzle posterior critics. These were "Bear Ellis" and "Poodle Byng."
They were pre-eminently unsentimental persons. "Bear" Ellis (1781-1863)
was so called because he was Chairman of the Hudson's Bay Company, and
"Poodle" Byng (1784-1871) because his hair, while yet he boasted such
an appendage, had been crisply curled. But the Dryasdust of the future,
pondering over the social and political records of Queen Victoria's
earlier reign, will undoubtedly connect these prefixes with pet-keeping
tendencies, and will praise the humane influence of an animal-loving
Court which induced hardened men of the world to join the ranks of "Our
Dumb Friends' League."
XXXIX
PURPLE AND FINE LINEN
Dean _versus_ Bishop--it is an antinomy as old as the history of
Cathedral institutions. The Dean, with a good house and a thousand
a year, has always murmured against the Bishop, with a better house
and five times that income; and, as he is generally master of his
Cathedral, he has before now contrived to make his murmurs sensible
as well as audible. Of late years these spiritual strifes (which
beautifully link the post-Reformation to the pre-Reformation Church)
have been voted disedifying, and, if they continue to exist, they
operate surreptitiously and out of public view. But, though Deans have
ceased from clamouring, they retain their right to criticize, and the
Dean of Norwich has just been exercising that right with a good deal of
vivacity. I cull the following extract from a secular newspaper:--
SIMPLE LIFE FOR BISHOPS
"Dean Lefroy at a meeting of the General Diocesan Committee to make
arrangements for the Church Congress at Great Yarmouth in October ...
commented on the inordinate expense of founding bishoprics, and said
that episcopacy in Canterbury Province cost £142,000 per annum, and
in York £44,000. He believed that £2000 a year and a residence would
be welcome to most bishops. The upkeep of large palaces swallowed
up the bishops' incomes. Preserve the palaces, but give bishops the
opportunity of living more simply. The surplus might go to poor and
starving clergy."
One can picture the tempered gratitude with which the Bishops, and the
ladies of the Episcopal household, and the Domestic Chaplains--those
"amiable young gentlemen who make themselves agreeable in the
drawing-rooms of the Mitre"--must regard this obliging invitation
to "live more simply." There is a good deal of human nature even in
apostolic bosoms, and a man who has enjoyed an official income of
£5000 a year does not as a rule regard with enthusiasm a reduction to
£2000. The Bishop in "Little Dorrit," when the guests at Mr. Merdle's
banquet were extolling their host's opulence, "tried to look as if
he was rather poor himself"; and his successors at the present day
take great pains to assure the public that they are not overpaid.
The _locus classicus_ on the subject of episcopal incomes is to be
found in the Rev. Hubert Handley's book called "The Fatal Opulence
of Bishops," and was originally supplied by the artless candour of
the present Bishop of London, who in the year 1893 published in the
_Oxford House Chronicle_ a statistical statement by an unnamed Bishop.
This prelate had only a beggarly income of £4200, and must therefore
be the occupant of one of those comparatively cheap and humble Sees
which the exigencies of the Church have lately called into being. Out
of this pittance he had to pay £1950 for a removal, furniture, and
repairs to the episcopal residence. This, to the lay mind, seems a good
deal. Hospitality he sets down as costing £2000 a year; but somehow one
feels as if one could give luncheon to the country clergy, and satisfy
even the craving appetites of ordinands, at a less cost. "Stables,"
says the good Bishop, "are almost a necessity, and in some respects
a saving;" but here the haughty disregard of details makes criticism
difficult. "Robes, £100." This item is plain enough and absurd enough.
The perverted ingenuity of fallen man has never devised a costume
more hideous or less expressive than the episcopal "magpie"; and I am
confident that Mrs. Bishop's maid could have stitched together the
necessary amounts of lawn and black satin at a less cost than £100. But
this exactly illustrates the plan on which these episcopal incomes are
always defended by their apologists. We are told precisely what the
Bishop expends on each item of charge. But we are not told, and are
quite unable to divine, why each of those items should cost so much,
or why some of them should ever be incurred. The Bishop of London (then
Mr. Winnington-Ingram) thus summed up the statement of his episcopal
friend in the background: "It amounts to this--a bishop's income is
a trust-fund for the diocese which head ministers. It would make no
difference to him personally if three-quarters of it were taken away,
so long as three-quarters of his liabilities were taken away too; and
it is quite arguable that this would be a better arrangement."
Certainly it is "quite arguable"; but is it equally certain that the
change "would make no difference to the Bishop personally"? I doubt it.
Married men, men with large families and plenty of servants, naturally
prefer large houses to small, provided that there is an income to
maintain them. Men who enjoy the comforts and prettinesses of life
prefer an income which enables them to repair and furnish and beautify
their houses to an income which involves faded wallpaper and battered
paint. Men of hospitable instincts are happier in a system which
enables them to spend £2000 a year on entertaining than they would be
if they were compelled to think twice of the butcher's bill and thrice
of the wine-merchant's. Men who like horses--and few Englishmen do
not--naturally incline to regard "stables as a necessity," and even
as "in some respects"--what respects?--"a saving." If their income
were reduced to the figure suggested by Dean Lefroy, they would find
themselves under the bitter constraint (as Milton calls it) of doing
without a "necessity," and must even forgo an outlay which is "in some
respects a saving."
Again, the anonymous Bishop returned his outlay in subscriptions at a
fraction over £400 a year. I do not presume to say whether this is much
or little out of an income of £4000. At any rate it is a Tithe, and
that is a respectable proportion. But, supposing that our Bishop is a
man of generous disposition, who loves to relieve distress and feels
impelled to give a lift to every good cause which asks his aid, he is
of necessity a happier man while he draws £4000 a year than he would be
if cut down by reforming Deans to £2000.
I venture, then, with immense deference to that admirable divine who
is now Bishop of London, to dissent emphatically from his judgment,
recorded in 1895, that the diminution of episcopal incomes, if
accompanied by a corresponding diminution of episcopal charges, would
"make no difference to the Bishop personally." I conceive that it would
make a great deal of difference, and that, though spiritually salutary,
it would be, as regards temporal concerns, one of those experiments
which one would rather try on one's neighbour than on oneself.
An ingenious clergyman who shared Dean Lefroy's and Mr. Handley's views
on episcopal incomes, and had an inconvenient love of statistics,
made a study at the Probate Office of the personalty left by English
Bishops who died between 1855 and 1885. The average was £54,000, and
the total personalty something more than two millions sterling. "This
was exclusive of any real estate they may have possessed, and exclusive
of any sums invested in policies of life-assurance or otherwise settled
for the benefit of their families." Myself no lover of statistics or
of the extraordinarily ill-ventilated Will-room at Somerset House,
I am unable to say how far the episcopal accumulations of the last
twenty years may have affected the total and the average. It is only
fair to remember that several of the Bishops who died between 1855 and
1885 dated from the happy days before the Ecclesiastical Commission
curtailed episcopal incomes, and may have had ten, or fifteen, or
twenty thousand a year. On the other hand, it is to be borne in mind
that, since Sir William Harcourt's Budget, the habit of "dodging the
death-duties" has enormously increased, and has made it difficult to
know what a testator, episcopal or other, really possessed. But it
is scarcely possible to doubt that, if the public were permitted to
examine all the episcopal pass-books, we should find that, in spite
of the exactions of upholsterers and furniture-removers, butchers and
bakers, robe-makers and horse-dealers, the pecuniary lot of an English
Bishop is, to borrow a phrase of Miss Edgeworth's, "vastly put-up-able
with."
Just after Mr. Bright had been admitted to the Cabinet, and when the
more timid and more plausible members of his party hoped that he
would begin to curb his adventurous tongue, he attended a banquet
of the Fishmongers' Company at which the Archbishops and Bishops
were entertained. The Archbishop of York (Dr. Thomson) said in an
after-dinner speech that the Bishops were the most liberal element
in the House of Lords, seeing that they were the only peers created
for life. This statement Mr. Bright, speaking later in the evening,
characterized as an excess of hilarity; "though," he added, "it is
possible that, with a Bishop's income, I might have been as merry
as any of them, with an inexhaustible source of rejoicing in the
generosity, if not in the credulity, of my countrymen." To this
outrageous sally the assembled prelates could, of course, only reply
by looking as dignified (and as poor) as they could; and no doubt the
general opinion of the Episcopal Bench is that they are an overworked
and ill-remunerated set of men.
Yet there have been Apostles, and successors of the Apostles, who
worked quite as hard and were paid considerably less, and yet succeeded
in winning and retaining the affectionate reverence of their own and of
succeeding generations. Bishop Wilson of Sodor and Man lived, we are
told, on an income which "did not exceed £300 a year." By far the most
dignified ecclesiastic with whom I was ever brought in contact--a true
"Prince of the Church" if ever there was one--was Cardinal Manning, and
his official income was bounded by a figure which even the reforming
spirit of Dean Lefroy would reject as miserably insufficient. "It is
pleasant," wrote Sydney Smith, "to loll and roll and accumulate--to
be a purple-and-fine-linen man, and to be called by some of those
nicknames which frail and ephemeral beings are so fond of heaping upon
each other,--but the best thing of all is to live like honest men, and
to add something to the cause of liberality, justice, and truth." It
is no longer easy for a Bishop to "loll and roll"--the bicycle and the
motor-car are enemies to tranquil ease--and, if Dean Lefroy's precept
and Bishop Gore's example are heeded, he will find it equally difficult
to "accumulate."
XL
PRELACY AND PALACES
That delicious prelate whom I have already quoted, but whose name
and See are unkindly withheld from us by the Bishop of London, thus
justified his expenditure on hospitality: "_Palace_, I am told, is from
_Palatium_, 'the open house,' and there is almost daily entertainment
of clergy and laity from a distance." I will not presume to question
the episcopal etymology; for, whether it be sound or unsound, the
practical result is equally good. We have apostolic authority for
holding that Bishops should be given to hospitality, and it is
satisfactory to know that the travel-worn clergy and laity of the
anonymous diocese are not sent empty away. But would not the boiled
beef and rice pudding be equally acceptable and equally sustaining
if eaten in some apartment less majestic than the banqueting-hall of
a Palace? Would not the Ecclesiastical Commissioners be doing a good
stroke of business for the Church if they sold every Episcopal Palace
in England and provided the evicted Bishops with moderate-sized and
commodious houses?
These are questions which often present themselves to the lay mind,
and the answer usually returned to them involves some very circuitous
reasoning. The Bishops, say their henchmen, must have large incomes
because they have to live in Palaces; and they must live in Palaces--I
hardly know why, but apparently because they have large incomes. Such
reasoning does not always convince the reformer's mind, though it is
repeated in each succeeding generation with apparent confidence in
its validity. After all, there is nothing very revolutionary in the
suggestion that Episcopal palaces should be, in the strictest sense
of the word, confiscated. Sixty-four years ago Dr. Hook, who was not
exactly an iconoclast, wrote thus to his friend Samuel Wilberforce:
"I really do not see how the Church can fairly ask the State to give
it money for the purpose of giving a Church education, when the money
is to be supplied by Dissenters and infidels and all classes of the
people, who, according to the principles of the Constitution, have a
right to control the expenditure. The State can only, if consistent,
give an infidel education; it cannot employ public money to give
a Church education, because of the Dissenters; nor a Protestant
education, because of the Papists; and have not Jews, Turks, and
infidels as much a right as heretics to demand that the education
should not be Christian?" This strikes me as very wholesome doctrine,
and, though enounced in 1843, necessary for these times. And, when he
turns to ways and means, Dr. Hook is equally explicit: "If we are to
educate the people in Church principles, the education must be out of
Church funds. We want not proud Lords, haughty Spiritual Peers, to be
our Bishops. Offer four thousand out of their five thousand a year for
the education of the people. Let Farnham Castle and Winchester House
and Ripon Palace be sold, and we shall have funds to establish other
Bishoprics.... You see I am almost a Radical, for I do not see why our
Bishops should not become as poor as Ambrose or Augustine, that they
may make the people really rich." It is not surprising that Samuel
Wilberforce, who had already climbed up several rungs of the ladder of
promotion, and as he himself tells us, "had often talked" of further
elevation, met Dr. Hook's suggestions with solemn repudiation. "I _do_
think that we want Spiritual Peers." "I see no reason why the Bishops'
Palaces should be sold, which would not apply equally to the halls of
our squires and the palaces of our princes." "To impoverish our Bishops
and sell their Palaces would only be the hopeless career of revolution."
The real reason for selling the Episcopal Palaces is that, in plain
terms, they are too big and too costly for their present uses. They
afford a plausible excuse for paying the Bishops more highly than they
ought to be paid; and yet the Bishops turn round and say that even the
comfortable incomes which the Ecclesiastical Commission has assigned
them are unequal to the burden of maintaining the Palaces. The late
Bishop Thorold, who was both a wealthy and a liberal man, thus bemoaned
his hard fate in having to live at Farnham Castle: "It will give some
idea of what the furnishing of this house from top to bottom meant if
I mention that the stairs, with the felt beneath, took just a mile and
100 yards of carpet, with 260 brass stair-rods; and that, independently
of the carpet in the great hall, the carpets used elsewhere absorbed
1414 yards--a good deal over three-quarters of a mile. As to the entire
amount of roof, which in an old house requires constant watching,
independently of other parts of the building, it is found to be, on
measurement, 32,000 superficial feet, or one acre and one-fifth." What
is true of Farnham is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of Bishopthorpe with
its hundred rooms, and Auckland Castle with its park, and Rose Castle
with its woodlands, and Lambeth with its tower and guard-room and
galleries and gardens. Even the smaller Palaces, such as the "Moated
Grange" of Wells, are not maintained for nothing. "My income goes in
pelargoniums," growled Bishop Stubbs, as he surveyed the conservatories
of Cuddesdon. "It takes ten chaps to keep this place in order,"
ejaculated a younger prelate as he skipped across his tennis-ground.
Of course the root of the mischief is that these Palaces were built
and enlarged in the days when each See had its own income, and when
the incomes of such Sees as Durham and Winchester ran to twenty or
thirty thousand a year. The poor Sees--and some were very poor--had
Palaces proportioned to their incomes, and very unpalatial they were.
"But now," as Bertie Stanhope said to the Bishop of Barchester at Mrs.
Proudie's evening party, "they've cut them all down to pretty nearly
the same figure," and such buildings as suitably accommodated the
princely retinues of Archbishop Harcourt (who kept one valet on purpose
to dress his wigs) and Bishop Sumner (who never went from Farnham
Castle to the Parish Church except in a coach-and-four) are "a world
too wide for the shrunk shanks" of their present occupants.
In the Palace of Ely there is a magnificent gallery, which once was
the scene of a memorable entertainment. When Bishop Sparke secured
a Residentiary Canonry of Ely for his eldest son, the event was so
completely in the ordinary course of things that it passed without
special notice. But, when he planted his second son in a second
Canonry, he was, and rightly, so elated by the achievement that he
entertained the whole county of Cambridge at a ball in his gallery. But
in those days Ely was worth £11,000 a year, and we are not likely to
see a similar festival. Until recent years the Archbishop of Canterbury
had a suburban retreat from the cares of Lambeth, at Addington, near
Croydon, where one of the ugliest mansions in Christendom stood in one
of the prettiest parks. Archbishop Temple, who was a genuine reformer,
determined to get rid of this second Palace and take a modest house
near his Cathedral. When he asked the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to
sanction this arrangement, they demurred. "Do you think," they asked,
"that your successors will wish to live at Canterbury?" "No, _I don't_"
replied the Archbishop, with indescribable emphasis, "_and so I'm
determined they shall_."
If every Bishop who is saddled with an inconveniently large house were
in earnest about getting rid of it, the Ecclesiastical Commission could
soon help him out of his difficulty. Palaces of no architectural or
historical interest could be thrown into the market, and follow the
fate of Riseholme, once the abode of the Bishops of Lincoln. Those
Palaces which are interesting or beautiful, or in any special sense
heirlooms of the Church, could be converted into Diocesan Colleges,
Training Colleges, Homes for Invalid Clergymen, or Houses of Rest for
such as are overworked and broken down. By this arrangement the Church
would be no loser, and the Bishops, according to their own showing,
would be greatly the gainers. £5000 a year, or even a beggarly four,
will go a long way in a villa at Edgbaston or a red-brick house in
Kennington Park; and, as the Bishops will no longer have Palaces to
maintain, they will no doubt gladly accept still further reductions at
the hands of reformers like Dean Lefroy.
It would be a sad pity if these contemplated reductions closed the
_Palatium_ or "open house" against the hungry flock; but, if they only
check the more mundane proclivities of Prelacy, no harm will be done.
One of the most spendidly hospitable prelates who ever adorned the
Bench was Archbishop Thomson of York, and this is Bishop Wilberforce's
comment on what he saw and heard under the Archiepiscopal roof: "Dinner
at Archbishop of York's. A good many Bishops, both of England and
Ireland, and not one word said which _implied_ we were apostles."
Perhaps it will be easier to keep that fact in remembrance, when to
apostolic succession is added the grace of apostolic poverty.
XLI
HORRORS