In the fact that Stone was at heart intensely human lay the secret
of his hold upon the hearts of others. I have claimed high place for
him and have called him by high name, but a “saint” at least I have
never called him nor claimed him to be. We have been told that it
is impossible to be heroic in a high hat, nor is it easy to picture
a “saint” in a very pepper of a temper (to say nothing of a boating
sweater) at loggerheads, and more than half minded to knock down, a
foul-mouthed bargee. Stone’s Homeric laughter would not have accorded
ill with some Valhalla of the gods, but his rollicking sense of fun,
his schoolboy high spirits, still remembered affectionately and
joyfully as they are by some who were with him, first as a boy, and
thereafter as more than a middle-aged man at Charterhouse, suggest
neither a nimbus nor the Saints’ Calendar.
In later life, when the endless calls upon his time barred him from
following, other than rarely, the field sports that he so loved,
and even from the exercise which was so necessary for a man of his
physique, Stone not only put on weight, as happens always with
athletes out of training, but developed a tendency to stoutness--not,
I gather, from some study of the Old Masters, in keeping with the
character of Saints, who as a class do not appear to run to flesh.
Neither in looks nor in his life was there anything about Stone of
the ascetic who, living aloof and apart, tells over to himself--the
beads, as it were, in a rosary of self-mortification--the list of
pleasures denied, until in the contemplation of his self-denials he
comes at last to find a melancholy pleasure. Stone, on the contrary,
was the most natural and normal of men, with a healthy appetite for
the good things of this world. If he fasted, as was the case during
such a season as Holy Week, none knew of it except himself. He held
that the season, in which the Church bids us look back in awe and
worship upon the agony of our Lord’s Passion, is not a time for
bodily indulgence by Christ’s minister. But fasting in a monkish
sense, or as followed by the Roman Catholic Church, he neither
followed himself nor enjoined others to follow, and such fasting as
he practised was more in the way of salutary discipline than anything
else, and he imposed no fasting upon others.
None the less, though Stone was, as I have said, no saint, I doubt
whether any saint who was ever canonised had half so child-pure a
heart or lived half so stainless a life. His was not the negative
purity of the cold-blooded, the anæmic, or the passionless, to
whom the temptations of the flesh made small appeal. He was a
full-blooded, healthy and whole-natured man, a splendid “animal,”
by whom the animal (which by God’s wisdom and grace is in us all)
was not done violence to, stamped down, crushed out, and unnaturally
suppressed, to his own physical and spiritual detriment and even
danger. That is the unwisest of all courses to pursue. By mutilating
and maiming the beautiful work and image of God in us, which since
He made it must in itself be innocent and beautiful, we sin against
our own human nature and against God. Human nature is like a tree.
It must have space in which to fulfil the purpose for which it was
intended, and in which to grow. Crush down, and seek to crush out,
its natural expansion, and it takes distorted shapes (crippled
limbs, as it were, on the tree of life) and hideous fungus-like
boles and excrescences appear on what would otherwise have been a
fair, straight, and shapely young growth. In Stone (to return to my
original metaphor) the animal, which is in us all, was not a beast
to be bludgeoned down, or to drag us to earth, but a beautiful wild
and winged creature which brings strength and gladness to human
life, and, wisely guided and controlled, may even bear us aloft and
afar. In Stone it was so dominated by an iron will, so sublimated
by knightly and noble ideals, and by his innate purity of soul, as
to make impossible what was gross, sensual or base. And may I add,
perhaps wickedly, that the animal in him was sometimes a joy as
when by sheer brute force, if you like so to call it, he fell upon
(so I was once told) three blackguards who, late one dark night,
were foully assaulting a poor girl in what was then a lonely part
of London Fields. Stone heard her screams, rushed to her help, and
knocked out his first man with one blow. Then he closed with number
two, and trouncing him so soundly that the fellow howled for mercy,
flung him to the ground, and made off after number three, who had
taken to his heels.
I can well imagine Stone’s sportsmanlike joy and the flash of his
eyes when, as I am informed, he said, “Thank heaven I learned to use
my fists at Charterhouse! and thank heaven for what rowing did for my
biceps at Oxford. I think I’ve given those two scoundrels a lesson.”
He shook his head reminiscently and mournfully. “I’d have given five
pounds to have got my fists on that third rascal’s hide. Honestly,
I’ve enjoyed pommelling those other two scoundrels more than anything
that has happened since I came to Haggerston.”
Then, seeing, perhaps, a whimsical look in his companion’s eye, and
perhaps already asking himself whether “taking on” three blackguards
at fisticuffs, and badly punishing two out of the three in a fair
fight, would by every one be considered decorous or becoming in
a clergyman, he broke into infectious laughter that was directed
entirely against himself.
No, apart from the question whether this story (I tell it as it was
told me long ago) be true or not true, I do not claim for S. J.
Stone that he was a saint. To some men the consciousness of what
Stevenson called “a healthy dash of the brute” necessitates an ever
watchful “on guard” lest one day the brute spring out to overpower
the angel. To Stone--so wholly had he made honour, purity, and truth
the very habit of his life--a lapse into anything false, impure,
or dishonourable, into thinking or speaking, or even into allowing
others, in his presence, to speak what was evil or slanderous, had
become impossible. Had the proofs, or what seemed like the proofs,
of some base act on Stone’s part been brought to the knowledge of
any friend who knew him, as I knew him, that friend would not have
stooped to examine them. His reply would have been, “I know this
man, and though I am aware that he can be prejudiced, stubborn,
overbearing, irritable, and that faults of temper, errors of
judgment, and the like, may be laid to his charge, I know him well
enough to be sure that of what is base he is incapable. Were all the
facts before me, they would do no more than reveal him, possibly in a
quixotic, but at least in a nobly chivalrous light.”
For all his quixotism, chivalry, and hot-headedness, Stone held so
strongly that, as Christ’s minister, a clergyman must in certain
matters be so entirely beyond even a shadow of reproach, that he was
singularly wise and guarded in his dealings with the other sex. The
foolish girls or women who go simpering to a clergyman, especially if
a bachelor as Stone was, to ask advice on love-affairs and the like,
he instantly if considerately dismissed to seek the advice of their
mother or of some good woman known to him; and at all times, and upon
all questions, he avoided seeing women-callers alone--not because he
feared evil in them or in himself, but because he felt he owed it to
his sacred office to avoid even the appearance of anything upon which
evil-thinking folk might choose to put an evil construction.
He was not without experiences--what clergyman is?--of, in other
respects, worthy and well-meaning women who, even in connection with
Church work, contrive to set people by the ears, or otherwise to
cause dissension and trouble. With these he was impatient. He did not
hesitate to deal summarily with them, nor firmly, if considerately,
to speak his mind; but Womanhood, I might almost say every woman, he
held, if only for his own mother’s sake, if only because of a woman
the Saviour of the world was born, in a reverence that no folly or
sin could altogether break down. I have heard him speak to the poor
harlot of the street--his “Sister” as he would not have hesitated to
call her--with sorrowful courtliness, and with the pitifulness, the
gentleness, and the consideration, which one uses to (as indeed not a
few of such unhappy women are) an erring and ignorant child.
I remember, on another and very different occasion, a girl of the
soft and silly type coming to the vicarage one day when I was with
Stone--I think she came about a Confirmation Class. She had a certain
innocence in her face; not the challenging, starry purity that one
sees in some faces, but a negative, babyish innocence, which was
pretty enough, and appealing in its way, but that meant no more,
probably, than that the girl had not yet had to make choice for
herself between good and evil.
“Did you notice the flower-like beauty of that child’s face?” Stone
asked me, when she had gone. “In the presence of such exquisite
purity and innocence,” he went on gravely, and with intense reverence
in his voice, “one feels convicted of sin, as it were. One is so
conscious of one’s own coarseness, grossness, and impurity as to feel
unworthy to stand in such presence!”
And all the time, the white armour of purity in which he was clad,
the armour and purity of his own soul’s--a strong man’s--forging,
was compared with hers, as is the purity of fine gold tried in the
furnace to metal mixed with base earth and newly brought all untested
from a mine.