FOR eight or nine years, while my sons were at school, I lived at
Rickmansworth. Unfortunately the Leweses had just left it. Moor Park
belonged to Lord Ebury, my wife’s uncle, and the beauties of its
magnificent park and the amenities of its charming house were at all
times open to us, and freely taken advantage of. During those nine years
I lived the life of a student, and wrote and published the book I have
elsewhere spoken of, the ‘Creeds of the Day.’
Of the visitors of note whose acquaintance I made while I was staying at
Moor Park, by far the most illustrious was Froude. He was too reserved a
man to lavish his intimacy when taken unawares; and if he suspected, as
he might have done by my probing, that one wanted to draw him out, he was
much too shrewd to commit himself to definite expressions of any kind
until he knew something of his interviewer. Reticence of this kind, on
the part of such a man, is both prudent and commendable. But is not this
habit of cautiousness sometimes carried to the extent of ambiguity in his
‘Short Studies on Great Subjects’? The careful reader is left in no sort
of doubt as to Froude’s own views upon Biblical criticism, as to his
theological dogmas, or his speculative opinions. But the conviction is
only reached by comparing him with himself in different moods, by
collating essay with essay, and one part of an essay with another part of
the same essay. Sometimes we have an astute defence of doctrines worthy
at least of a temperate apologist, and a few pages further on we wonder
whether the writer was not masking his disdain for the credulity which he
now exposes and laughs at. Neither excessive caution nor timidity are
implied by his editing of the Carlyle papers; and he may have failed—who
that has done so much has not?—in keeping his balance on the swaying
slack-rope between the judicious and the injudicious. In his own line,
however, he is, to my taste, the most scholarly, the most refined, and
the most suggestive, of our recent essayists. The man himself in manner
and in appearance was in perfect keeping with these attractive qualities.
While speaking of Moor Park and its kind owner I may avail myself of this
opportunity to mention an early reminiscence of Lord Ebury’s concerning
the Grosvenor estate in London.
Mr. Gladstone was wont to amuse himself with speculations as to the
future dimensions of London; what had been its growth within his memory;
what causes might arise to cheek its increase. After listening to his
remarks on the subject one day at dinner, I observed that I had heard
Lord Ebury talk of shooting over ground which is now Eaton Square. Mr.
Gladstone of course did not doubt it; but some of the young men smiled
incredulously. I afterwards wrote to Lord Ebury to make sure that I had
not erred. Here is his reply:
‘Moor Park, Rickmansworth: January 9, 1883.
‘My dear Henry,—What you said I had told you about snipe-shooting is
quite true, though I think I ought to have mentioned a space rather
nearer the river than Eaton Square. In the year 1815, when the
battle of Waterloo was fought, there was nothing behind Grosvenor
Place but the (—?) fields—so called, a place something like the
Scrubbs, where the household troops drilled. That part of Grosvenor
Place where the Grosvenor Place houses now stand was occupied by the
Lock Hospital and Chapel, and it ended where the small houses are now
to be found. A little farther, a somewhat tortuous lane called the
King’s Road led to Chelsea, and, I think, where now St. Peter’s,
Pimlico, was afterwards built. I remember going to a breakfast at a
villa belonging to Lady Buckinghamshire. The Chelsea Waterworks
Company had a sort of marshy place with canals and osier beds, now, I
suppose, Ebury Street, and here it was that I was permitted to go and
try my hand at snipe-shooting, a special privilege given to the son
of the freeholder.
‘The successful fox-hunt terminating in either Bedford or Russell
Square is very strange, but quite appropriate, commemorated, I
suppose, by the statue {342} there erected.
Yours affectionately,
‘E.’
The successful ‘fox-hunt’ was an event of which I told Lord Ebury as even
more remarkable than his snipe-shooting in Belgravia. As it is still
more indicative of the growth of London in recent times it may be here
recorded.
In connection with Mr. Gladstone’s forecasts, I had written to the last
Lord Digby, who was a grandson of my father’s, stating that I had
heard—whether from my father or not I could not say—that he had killed a
fox where now is Bedford Square, with his own hounds.
Lord Digby replied:
‘Minterne, Dorset: January 7, 1883.
‘My dear Henry,—My grandfather killed a fox with his hounds either in
Bedford or Russell Square. Old Jones, the huntsman, who died at
Holkham when you were a child, was my informant. I asked my
grandfather if it was correct. He said “Yes”—he had kennels at
Epping Place, and hunted the roodings of Essex, which, he said, was
the best scenting-ground in England.
‘Yours affectionately,
‘DIGBY.’
(My father was born in 1754.)
* * * * *
Mr. W. S. Gilbert had been a much valued friend of ours before we lived
at Rickmansworth. We had been his guests for the ‘first night’ of almost
every one of his plays—plays that may have a thousand imitators, but the
speciality of whose excellence will remain unrivalled and inimitable.
His visits to us introduced him, I think, to the picturesque country
which he has now made his home. When Mr. Gilbert built his house in
Harrington Gardens he easily persuaded us to build next door to him.
This led to my acquaintance with his neighbour on the other side, Mr.
Walter Cassels, now well known as the author of ‘Supernatural Religion.’
When first published in 1874, this learned work, summarising and
elaborately examining the higher criticism of the four Gospels up to
date, created a sensation throughout the theological world, which was not
a little intensified by the anonymity of its author. The virulence with
which it was attacked by Dr. Lightfoot, the most erudite bishop on the
bench, at once demonstrated its weighty significance and its destructive
force; while Mr. Morley’s high commendation of its literary merits and
the scrupulous equity of its tone, placed it far above the level of
controversial diatribes.
In my ‘Creeds of the Day’ I had made frequent references to the anonymous
book; and soon after my introduction to Mr. Cassels spoke to him of its
importance, and asked him whether he had read it. He hesitated for a
moment, then said:
‘We are very much of the same way of thinking on these subjects. I will
tell you a secret which I kept for some time even from my publishers—I am
the author of “Supernatural Religion.”’
From that time forth, we became the closest of allies. I know no man
whose tastes and opinions and interests are more completely in accord
with my own than those of Mr. Walter Cassels. It is one of my greatest
pleasures to meet him every summer at the beautiful place of our mutual
and sympathetic friend, Mrs. Robertson, on the skirts of the Ashtead
forest, in Surrey.
The winter of 1888 I spent at Cairo under the roof of General Sir
Frederick Stephenson, then commanding the English forces in Egypt. I had
known Sir Frederick as an ensign in the Guards. He was adjutant of his
regiment at the Alma, and at Inkerman. He is now Colonel of the
Coldstreams and Governor of the Tower. He has often been given a still
higher title, that of ‘the most popular man in the army.’
Everybody in these days has seen the Pyramids, and has been up the Nile.
There is only one name I have to mention here, and that is one of the
best-known in the world. Mr. Thomas Cook was the son of the original
inventor of the ‘Globe-trotter.’ But it was the extraordinary energy and
powers of organisation of the son that enabled him to develop to its
present efficiency the initial scheme of the father.
Shortly before the General’s term expired, he invited Mr. Cook to dinner.
The Nile share of the Gordon Relief Expedition had been handed over to
Cook. The boats, the provisioning of them, and the river transport
service up to Wady Halfa, were contracted for and undertaken by Cook.
A most entertaining account he gave of the whole affair. He told us how
the Mudir of Dongola, who was by way of rendering every possible
assistance, had offered him an enormous bribe to wreck the most valuable
cargoes on their passage through the Cataracts.
Before Mr. Cook took leave of the General, he expressed the regret felt
by the British residents in Cairo at the termination of Sir Frederick’s
command; and wound up a pretty little speech by a sincere request that he
might be allowed to furnish Sir Frederick _gratis_ with all the means at
his disposal for a tour through the Holy Land. The liberal and highly
complimentary offer was gratefully acknowledged, but at once emphatically
declined. The old soldier, (at least, this was my guess,) brave in all
else, had not the courage to face the tourists’ profanation of such
sacred scenes.
Dr. Bird told me a nice story, a pendant to this, of Mr. Thomas Cook’s
liberality. One day, before the Gordon Expedition, which was then in the
air, Dr. Bird was smoking his cigarette on the terrace in front of
Shepherd’s Hotel, in company with four or five other men, strangers to
him and to one another. A discussion arose as to the best means of
relieving Gordon. Each had his own favourite general. Presently the
doctor exclaimed: ‘Why don’t they put the thing into the hands of Cook?
I’ll be bound to say he would undertake it, and do the job better than
anyone else.’
‘Do you know Cook, sir?’ asked one of the smokers who had hitherto been
silent.
‘No, I never saw him, but everybody knows he has a genius for
organisation; and I don’t believe there is a general in the British Army
to match him.’
When the company broke up, the silent stranger asked the doctor his name
and address, and introduced himself as Thomas Cook. The following winter
Dr. Bird received a letter enclosing tickets for himself and Miss Bird
for a trip to Egypt and back, free of expense, ‘in return for his good
opinion and good wishes.’
After my General’s departure, and a month up the Nile, I—already
disillusioned, alas!—rode through Syria, following the beaten track from
Jerusalem to Damascus. On my way from Alexandria to Jaffa I had the good
fortune to make the acquaintance of an agreeable fellow-traveller, Mr.
Henry Lopes, afterwards member for Northampton, also bound for Palestine.
We went to Constantinople and to the Crimea together, then through
Greece, and only parted at Charing Cross.
It was easy to understand Sir Frederick Stephenson’s (supposed)
unwillingness to visit Jerusalem. It was probably far from being what it
is now, or even what it was when Pierre Loti saw it, for there was no
railway from Jaffa in our time. Still, what Loti pathetically describes
as ‘une banalité de banlieue parisienne,’ was even then too painfully
casting its vulgar shadows before it. And it was rather with the forlorn
eyes of the sentimental Frenchman than with the veneration of Dean
Stanley, that we wandered about the ever-sacred Aceldama of mortally
wounded and dying Christianity.
One dares not, one could never, speak irreverently of Jerusalem. One
cannot think heartlessly of a disappointed love. One cannot tear out
creeds interwoven with the tenderest fibres of one’s heart. It is better
to be silent. Yet is it a place for unwept tears, for the deep sadness
and hard resignation borne in upon us by the eternal loss of something
dearer once than life. All we who are weary and heavy laden, in whom now
shall we seek the rest which is not nothingness?
My story is told, but I fain would take my leave with words less
sorrowful. If a man has no better legacy to bequeath than bid his
fellow-beings despair, he had better take it with him to his grave.
We know all this, we know!
But it is in what we do not know that our hope and our religion lies.
Thrice blessed are we in the certainty that here our range is infinite.
This infinite that makes our brains reel, that begets the feeling that
makes us ‘shrink,’ is perhaps the most portentous argument in the logic
of the sceptic. Since the days of Laplace, we have been haunted in some
form or other with the ghost of the _Mécanique Céleste_. Take one or two
commonplaces from the text-books of astronomy:
Every half-hour we are about ten thousand miles nearer to the
constellation of Lyra. ‘The sun and his system must travel at his
present rate for far more than a million years (divide this into
half-hours) before we have crossed the abyss between our present position
and the frontiers of Lyra’ (Ball’s ‘Story of the Heavens’).
‘Sirius is about one million times as far from us as the sun. If we take
the distance of Sirius from the earth and subdivide it into one million
equal parts, each of these parts would be long enough to span the great
distance of 92,700,000 miles from the earth to the sun,’ yet Sirius is
one of the _nearest_ of the stars to us.
The velocity with which light traverses space is 186,300 miles a second,
at which rate it has taken the rays from Sirius which we may see
to-night, nine years to reach us. The proper motion of Sirius through
space is about one thousand miles a minute. Yet ‘careful alignment of
the eye would hardly detect that Sirius was moving, in . . . even three
or four centuries.’
‘There may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen
stepping into the Ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or
that older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind
them, when the Baltic was an open sea’ (Froude’s ‘Science of History’).
Facts and figures such as these simply stupefy us. They vaguely convey
the idea of something immeasurably great, but nothing further. They have
no more effect upon us than words addressed to some poor ‘bewildered
creature, stunned and paralysed by awe; no more than the sentence of
death to the terror-stricken wretch at the bar. Indeed, it is in this
sense that the sceptic uses them for our warning.
‘Seit Kopernikus,’ says Schopenhauer, ‘kommen die Theologen mit dem
lieben Gott in Verlegenheit.’ ‘No one,’ he adds, ‘has so damaged Theism
as Copernicus.’ As if limitation and imperfection in the celestial
mechanism would make for the belief in God; or, as if immortality were
incompatible with dependence. Des Cartes, for one, (and he counts for
many,) held just the opposite opinion.
Our sun and all the millions upon millions of suns whose light will never
reach us are but the aggregation of atoms drawn together by the same
force that governs their orbit, and which makes the apple fall. When
their heat, however generated, is expended, they die to frozen cinders;
possibly to be again diffused as nebulæ, to begin again the eternal round
of change.
What is life amidst this change? ‘When I consider the work of Thy
fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man
that Thou art mindful of him?’
But is He mindful of us? That is what the sceptic asks. Is He mindful
of life here or anywhere in all this boundless space? We have no ground
for supposing (so we are told) that life, if it exists at all elsewhere,
in the solar system at least, is any better than it is here? ‘Analogy
compels us to think,’ says M. France, one of the most thoughtful of
living writers, ‘that our entire solar system is a gehenna where the
animal is born for suffering. . . . This alone would suffice to disgust
me with the universe.’ But M. France is too deep a thinker to abide by
such a verdict. There must be something ‘behind the veil.’ ‘Je sens que
ces immensités ne sont rien, et qu’enfin, s’il y a quelque chose, ce
quelque chose n’est pas ce que nous voyons.’ That is it. All these
immensities are not ‘rien,’ but they are assuredly not what we take them
to be. They are the veil of the Infinite, behind which we are not
permitted to see.
It were the seeing Him, no flesh shall dare.
The very greatness proves our impotence to grasp it, proves the futility
of our speculations, and should help us best of all though outwardly so
appalling, to stand calm while the snake of unbelief writhes beneath our
feet. The unutterable insignificance of man and his little world
connotes the infinity which leaves his possibilities as limitless as
itself.
Spectrology informs us that the chemical elements of matter are
everywhere the same; and in a boundless universe where such unity is
manifested there must be conditions similar to those which support life
here. It is impossible to doubt, on these grounds alone, that life does
exist elsewhere. Were we rashly to assume from scientific data that no
form of animal life could obtain except under conditions similar to our
own, would not reason rebel at such an inference, on the mere ground that
to assume that there is no conscious being in the universe save man, is
incomparably more unwarrantable, and in itself incredible?
Admitting, then, the hypothesis of the universal distribution of life,
has anyone the hardihood to believe that this is either the best or worst
of worlds? Must we not suppose that life exists in every stage of
progress, in every state of imperfection, and, conversely, of
advancement? Have we still the audacity to believe with the ancient
Israelites, or as the Church of Rome believed only three centuries ago,
that the universe was made for us, and we its centre? Or must we not
believe that—infinity given—the stages and degrees of life are infinite
as their conditions? And where is this to stop? There is no halting
place for imagination till we reach the _Anima Mundi_, the infinite and
eternal Spirit from which all Being emanates.
The materialist and the sceptic have forcible arguments on their side.
They appeal to experience and to common sense, and ask pathetically, yet
triumphantly, whether aspiration, however fervid, is a pledge for its
validity, ‘or does being weary prove that he hath where to rest?’ They
smile at the flights of poetry and imagination, and love to repeat:
Fools! that so often here
Happiness mocked our prayer,
I think might make us fear
A like event elsewhere;
Make us not fly to dreams, but moderate desire.
But then, if the other view is true, the Elsewhere is not the Here, nor
is there any conceivable likeness between the two. It is not mere
repugnance to truths, or speculations rather, which we dread, that makes
us shrink from a creed so shallow, so palpably inept, as atheism. There
are many sides to our nature, and I see not that reason, doubtless our
trustiest guide, has one syllable to utter against our loftiest hopes.
Our higher instincts are just as much a part of us as any that we listen
to; and reason, to the end, can never dogmatise with what it is not
conversant.
FOOTNOTES
{342} Alluding to the statue of Fox.