Upon one incident in my long friendship with Stone I look back with
pain and sorrow. He came in late one night, just as the last post had
brought me the news--I would not write of such things here except in
so far as it bears upon my friend--that the whole edition of my first
little book had been sold out.
To-day the writing of a book, if only because it may be the means
of bringing influence to bear upon others, is, I am of opinion, an
occupation to be followed diligently, conscientiously, and with
pleasurable zest. None the less, as compared with what some men
are doing in the way of direct personal service to God, to their
King, their country and their fellow creatures, it seems to me an
occupation too inactive to afford cause for congratulation that one
is thus employed. But in those days I desired nothing more than to be
a successful author, little imagining that success in authorship does
not necessarily mean the making either of literature or of a man.
When Stone came in that night, so full was I of the great news, as
I held it to be, about my book, that I must needs rush at him, as
volubly and importantly to pour it all out, as if the fate of empires
hung upon the issue. He had a genius for friendship, and heard me
out patiently and gently to the end, to say: “I am so glad, so very
glad, dear fellow, and congratulate you with all my heart,” or words
to that effect. Then he broached the subject of his call, a matter of
infinitely more importance than any news of mine. It did not concern
himself, or I should, I hope, have acted differently, but a member
of his congregation, unknown to me, whom Stone was trying to assist
in a time of trouble and anxiety. So far as I remember I hastily
promised the assistance for which he asked, but, when he essayed to
speak further of the matter, I interrupted him rudely, once again and
boastfully to speak of my book.
Stone so habitually suppressed it, that few suspected how great was
his gift of satire. When he chose, or rather had he so chosen, he
could so wing his satiric shaft as to pierce the thickest hide, and
never was he more tempted to employ this “devil’s weapon” as he held
it to be, than when irritated by vulgar boastfulness.
Looking back long years after upon this incident, I know that to
no one could what happened that night be more irritating, and even
objectionable, than to Stone. On the part of a friend, it was an
affront to everything by which he held in our social code, a wound to
his own pride of breeding and good manners. How sorely I must have
tempted and irritated him, I now fully realise, yet his affection
for the offender held back the stinging word, and neither then,
nor at any other time in our long friendship, did I ever hear from
him one reproachful or ungentle word. I recall his forbearance to
me--a very young man when he was becoming middle-aged, and so might
reasonably have spoken--on this particular occasion, an occasion
which even now I cannot recall without shame. I recall a score of
times when I grieved him by my apathy upon some question upon which
he felt intensely, for Stone’s convictions were so positively held
that he would readily have gone to the stake in defence of them, and
that those he loved, and to whom he looked for sympathy, could be
apathetic upon matters which he held to be of vital consequence, was
to him a positive pain. I recall all these, and many other things in
which I failed or wounded him by some indifference, some thoughtless
act, or unconsidered word, and remembering that never once did he
fail me by sympathy, interest, help or love withheld--I sicken at my
own unworthiness, and at the thought of the sorry return I made for
all his love and forbearance.
It is with relief that I turn to another incident in the early days
of our friendship.
One night, in the eighties, when I was dining with Stone and his
and my kind old friend, the Rev. Frederick Arnold, at St. Paul’s
Vicarage, Haggerston, a maid brought in the last post. Stone asked
permission to run through his letters, in case there was anything
requiring an immediate answer. Over one he uttered an exclamation of
glad and grateful surprise.
“Good news?” one of us asked.
“Very good,” said Stone, flushed and radiant. He hesitated a moment.
Then, handing Mr. Arnold the letter, he said, “There is no reason why
you two, one an old, and the other a young, but both true and dear
friends of mine, should not see it.”
It was from the Bishop of London--I think Bishop Jackson, but of this
I am not quite sure. In any case it was a very gracious letter. Upon
Stone, the Bishop said, the mantle of John Keble had by virtue of his
hymns, admittedly fallen. Thus far Stone had for some fifteen years
given all his time, energies, and abilities to working among poor and
uneducated folk in an East End parish, where practically the whole of
the small stipend was swallowed up in church work and charities, and
where Stone had no time or opportunity to do justice to his gifts as
a writer. The Bishop was aware, he said, that Stone was fast wearing
himself out, and could not go on much longer. Hence he had pleasure
in putting before Stone the offer of preferment to a West End parish,
where he would have an educated, intellectual, and appreciative
congregation, as well as the leisure and the opportunity to devote
his great gifts as poet and hymn-writer for the benefit of the church
and the world.
It was a tempting offer, for much as Stone loved sport and travel he
had hitherto had neither the time nor the money for anything more
extended than a few weeks in Switzerland or in “God’s Infirmary” (as
quoting George MacDonald he often called the country), generally on a
visit to his old friend the Rev. Donald Carr, of Woolstaston Rectory,
Salop. Moreover, though Stone grudged no service given to God or to
his own congregation, he grieved sometimes that he had so little time
to devote to hymn-writing and to literature, concerning which he had
many projects. In a letter dated June 15, 1892, he had written to me,
“I am up to my ears in work and behindhand because, if you please, I
am in the thick of writing a religious novel. I am not really joking!”
But grateful as he was for the Bishop’s kind and fatherly offer,
Stone declined it as, later on, he declined similar offers, including
a Colonial Bishopric.
“I am not and I do not expect to be the man I was,” he said to Mr.
Arnold and me that night, “but I ought to be, and am, thankful that,
nervously constituted as I am, I have gone through fifteen years in
the East End, out of twenty-three in the Ministry. When health and
strength give out, when for my people’s sake I must let the work pass
into younger and stronger hands, I will go. Till then, in Haggerston,
where my heart is, and where the people whom I love are living, I
must remain.”
And in Haggerston he remained working early in the morning and late
in the night until 1890, when the collapse, alike of nerve and
physical strength, came, and he had to resign--to be appointed by
the Lord Chancellor to the comparatively easy living of All Hallows,
London Wall.
But Stone was not the man to spare himself in his new sphere of
labour. What the wrench of parting and the strain necessitated by
sweeping aside the cobwebs, and by trying to warm into life the dry
bones, as he put it, of a long-neglected City church cost him, may be
gathered from the one and only sad letter I ever had from him. It is
written from the house of his sister, Mrs. Boyd.
WOODSIDE LODGE,
SOUTH NORWOOD HILL, S.E.,
_Nov. 28, 1891_.