THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW
It remains for me now to say something of those friends of Fox How and
my father whose influence, or whose living presence, made the atmosphere
in which the second generation of children who loved Fox How grew up.
Wordsworth died in 1850, the year before I was born. He and my
grandfather were much attached to each other--"old Coleridge," says my
grandfather, "inoculated a little knot of us with the love of
Wordsworth"--though their politics were widely different, and the poet
sometimes found it hard to put up with the reforming views of the
younger man. In a letter printed in Stanley's _Life_ my grandfather
mentions "a good fight" with Wordsworth over the Reform Bill of 1832, on
a walk to Greenhead Ghyll. And there is a story told of a girl friend of
the family who, once when Wordsworth had been paying a visit at Fox How,
accompanied him and the Doctor part of the way home to Rydal Mount.
Something was inadvertently said to stir the old man's Toryism, and he
broke out in indignant denunciation of some views expressed by Arnold.
The storm lasted all the way to Pelter Bridge, and the girl on Arnold's
left stole various alarmed glances at him to see how he was taking it.
He said little or nothing, and at Pelter Bridge they all parted,
Wordsworth going on to Rydal Mount, and the other two turning back
toward Fox How. Arnold paced along, his hands behind his back, his eyes
on the ground, and his companion watched him, till he suddenly threw
back his head with a laugh of enjoyment.--"What _beautiful_ English the
old man talks!"
The poet complained sometimes--as I find from an amusing passage in the
letter to Mr. Howson quoted below, that he could not see enough of his
neighbor, the Doctor, on a mountain walk, because Arnold was always so
surrounded with children and pupils, "like little dogs" running round
and after him. But no differences, great or small, interfered with his
constant friendship to Fox How. The garden there was largely planned by
him during the family absences at Rugby; the round chimneys of the house
are said to be of his design; and it was for Fox How, which still
possesses the MS., that the fine sonnet was written, beginning--
Wansfell, this household has a favored lot
Living with liberty on thee to gaze--
a sonnet which contains, surely, two or three of the most magical lines
that Wordsworth ever wrote.
It is of course no purpose of these notes to give any fresh account of
Wordsworth at Rydal, or any exhaustive record of the relations between
the Wordsworths and Fox How, especially after the recent publication of
Professor Harper's fresh, interesting, though debatable biography. But
from the letters in my hands I glean a few things worth recording. Here,
for instance, is a passing picture of Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth in
the Fox How drawing-room together, in January, 1848, which I find in a
letter from my grandmother to my father:
Matt has been very much pleased, I think, by what he has seen of dear
old Wordsworth since he has been at home, and certainly he manages to
draw him out very well. The old man was here yesterday, and as he sat
on the stool in the corner beside the fire which you knew so well,
he talked of various subjects of interest, of Italian poetry, of
Coleridge, etc., etc.; and he looked and spoke with more vigor than
he has often done lately.
But the poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 had
hit him terribly hard, and his sister's state--the helpless though
gentle insanity of the unique, the beloved Dorothy--weighed heavily on
his weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in the
unpublished letter referred to on a previous page, written in this very
year--1848--to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil, the
late Duke of Argyll, the distinguished author of _The Reign of
Law_--which Dean Howson's son and the Duke's grandson allow me to print.
The Rev. J.S. Howson, afterward Dean of Chester, married a sister of the
John Cropper who married Susan Arnold, and was thus a few years later
brought into connection with the Arnolds and Fox How. The Duke and
Duchess had set out to visit both the Lakes and the Lakes
"celebrities," advised, evidently, as to their tour, by the Duke's old
tutor, who was already familiar with the valleys and some of their
inmates. Their visit to Fox How is only briefly mentioned, but of
Wordsworth and Rydal Mount the Duke gives a long account. The picture,
first, of drooping health and spirits, and then of the flaming out of
the old poetic fire, will, I think, interest any true Wordsworthian.
On Saturday [writes the Duke] we reached Ambleside and soon after
drove to Rydal Mount. We found the Poet seated at his fireside,
and a little languid in manner. He became less so as he talked.
... He talked incessantly, but not generally interestingly.... I
looked at him often and asked myself if that was the man who had
stamped the impress of his own mind so decidedly on a great part
of the literature of his age! He took us to see a waterfall near
his house, and talked and chattered, but said nothing remarkable
or even thoughtful. Yet I could see that all this was only that
we were on the surface, and did not indicate any decay of mental
powers. [Still] we went away with no other impression than the
vaguest of having seen the man, whose writings we knew so well--
and with no feeling that we had seen anything of the mind which
spoke through them.
On the following day, Sunday, the Duke with a friend walked over to
Rydal, but found no one at the Mount but an invalid lady, very old, and
apparently paralyzed, "drawn in a bath chair by a servant." They did not
realize that the poor sufferer, with her wandering speech and looks, was
Dorothy Wordsworth, whose share in her great brother's fame will never
be forgotten while literature lasts.
In the evening, however--
... after visiting Mrs. Arnold we drove together to bid Wordsworth
good-by, as we were to go next morning. We found the old man as
before, seated by the fireside and languid and sleepy in manner.
Again he awakened as conversation went on, and, a stranger coming
in, we rose to go away. He seemed unwilling that we should go so
soon, and said he would walk out with us. We went to the mound in
front, and the Duchess then asked if he would repeat some of his own
lines to us. He said he hardly thought he could do that, but that he
would have been glad to read some to us. We stood looking at the
view for some time, when Mrs. Wordsworth came out and asked us back
to the house to take some tea. This was just what we wanted. We sat
for about half an hour at tea, during which I tried to direct the
conversation to interesting subjects--Coleridge, Southey, etc. He
gave a very different impression from the preceding evening. His
memory seemed clear and unclouded--his remarks forcible and
decided--with some tendency to run off to irrelevant anecdote.
When tea was over, we renewed our request that he should read to us.
He said, "Oh dear, that is terrible!" but consented, asking what we
chose. He jumped at "Tintern Abbey" in preference to any part of the
"Excursion."
He told us he had written "Tintern Abbey" in 1798, taking four days
to compose it; the last twenty lines or so being composed as he
walked down the hill from Clifton to Bristol. It was curious to feel
that we were to hear a Poet read his own verses composed fifty years
before.
He read the introductory lines descriptive of the scenery in a low,
clear voice. But when he came to the thoughtful and reflective
lines, his tones deepened and he poured them forth with a fervor and
almost passion of delivery which was very striking and beautiful. I
observed that Mrs. Wordsworth was strongly affected during the
reading. The strong emphasis that he put on the words addressed to
the person to whom the poem is written struck me as almost unnatural
at the time. "My DEAR, DEAR friend!"--and on the words, "In thy wild
eyes." It was not till after the reading was over that we found out
that the poor paralytic invalid we had seen in the morning was the
_sister_ to whom "Tintern Abbey" was addressed, and her condition,
now, accounted for the fervor with which the old Poet read lines
which reminded him of their better days. But it was melancholy to
think that the vacant gaze we had seen in the morning was from the
"wild eyes" of 1798.
... We could not have had a better opportunity of bringing out in
his reading the source of the inspiration of his poetry, which it
was impossible not to feel was the poetry of the heart. Mrs.
Wordsworth told me it was the first time he had read since his
daughter's death, and that she was thankful to us for having made
him do it, as he was apt to fall into a listless, languid state. We
asked him to come to Inverary. He said he had not courage; as he had
last gone through that country with his daughter, and he feared it
would be too much for him.
Less than two years after this visit, on April 23, 1850, the deathday of
Shakespeare and Cervantes, Arnold's youngest daughter, now Miss Arnold
of Fox How, was walking with her sister Susan on the side of Loughrigg
which overlooks Rydal Mount. They knew that the last hour of a great
poet was near--to my aunts, not only a great poet, but the familiar
friend of their dead father and all their kindred. They moved through
the April day, along the mountainside, under the shadow of death; and,
suddenly, as they looked at the old house opposite, unseen hands drew
down the blinds; and by the darkened windows they knew that the life of
Wordsworth had gone out.
Henceforward, in the family letters to my father, it is Mrs. Wordsworth
who comes into the foreground. The old age prophesied for her by her
poet bridegroom in the early Grasmere days was about her for the nine
years of her widowhood, "lovely as a Lapland night"; or rather like one
of her own Rydal evenings when the sky is clear over the perfect little
lake, and the reflections of island and wood and fell go down and down,
unearthly far into the quiet depths, and Wansfell still "parleys with
the setting sun." My grandmother writes of her--of "her sweet grace and
dignity," and the little friendly acts she is always doing for this
person and that, gentle or simple, in the valley--with a tender
enthusiasm. She is "dear Mrs. Wordsworth" always, for them all. And it
is my joy that in the year 1856 or 1857 my grandmother took me to Rydal
Mount, and that I can vividly recollect sitting on a footstool at Mrs.
Wordsworth's feet. I see still the little room, with its plain
furniture, the chair beside the fire, and the old lady in it. I can
still recall the childish feeling that this was no common visit, and the
house no common house--that a presence still haunted it. Instinctively
the childish mind said to itself, "Remember!"--and I have always
remembered.
A few years later I was again, as a child of eight, in Rydal Mount. Mrs.
Wordsworth was dead, and there was a sale in the house. From far and
near the neighbors came, very curious, very full of real regret, and a
little awe-stricken. They streamed through the rooms where the furniture
was arranged in lots. I wandered about by myself, and presently came
upon something which absorbed me so that I forgot everything else--a
store of Easter eggs, with wonderful drawings and devices, made by
"James," the Rydal Mount factotum, in the poet's day. I recollect
sitting down with them in a nearly empty room, dreaming over them in a
kind of ecstasy, because of their pretty, strange colors and pictures.
Fifty-two years passed, and I found myself, in September, 1911, the
tenant of a renovated and rebuilt Rydal Mount, for a few autumn weeks.
The house was occupied then, and is still occupied by Wordsworth's
great-granddaughter and her husband--Mr. and Mrs. Fisher Wordsworth. My
eldest daughter was with me, and a strange thing happened to us. I
arrived at the Mount before my husband and daughter. She joined me there
on September 13th. I remember how eagerly I showed her the many
Wordsworthiana in the house, collected by the piety of its mistress--the
Haydon portrait on the stairs, and the books, in the small low-ceiled
room to the right of the hall, which is still just as it was in
Wordsworth's day; the garden, too, and the poet's walk. All my own early
recollections were alive; we chattered long and late. And now let the
account of what happened afterward be given in my daughter's words as
she wrote it down for me the following morning.
RYDAL MOUNT, _September 14, 1911._
Last night, my first at Rydal Mount, I slept in the corner room,
over the small sitting-room. I had drawn up the blind about half-way
up the window before going to bed, and had drawn the curtain aside,
over the back of a wooden arm-chair that stood against the window.
The window, a casement, was wide open. I slept soundly, but woke
quite suddenly, at what hour I do not know, and found myself sitting
bolt upright in bed, looking toward the window. Very bright
moonlight was shining into the room and I could just see the corner
of Loughrigg out in the distance. My first impression was of bright
moonlight, but then I became strongly conscious of the moonlight
striking on something, and I saw perfectly clearly the figure of an
old man sitting in the arm-chair by the window. I said to myself,
"That's Wordsworth!" He was sitting with either hand resting on the
arms of the chair, leaning back, his head rather bent, and he seemed
to be looking down straight in front of him with a rapt expression.
He was not looking at me, nor out of the window. The moonlight lit
up the top of his head and the silvery hair and I noticed that the
hair was very thin. The whole impression was of something solemn and
beautiful, and I was not in the very least frightened. As I looked--
I cannot say, when I looked again, for I have no recollection of
ceasing to look, or looking away--the figure disappeared and I
became aware of the empty chair.--I lay back again, and thought for
a moment in a pleased and contented way, "That was Wordsworth." And
almost immediately I must have fallen asleep again. I had not, to my
knowledge, been dreaming about Wordsworth before I awoke; but I had
been reading Hutton's essay on "Wordsworth's Two Styles" out of
Knight's _Wordsworthiana_, before I fell asleep.
I should add that I had a distinct impression of the high collar and
stock, the same as in the picture on the stairs in this house.
Neither the seer of this striking vision--unique in her experience--nor
I, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to a
supernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of the
influence of mind and association on the visualizing power of the brain.
A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporary
record, classified it as "a visual hallucination," and I don't know that
there is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidence
remains still to be noted--we did not know it till afterward--that the
seer of the vision was sleeping in Dorothy Wordsworth's room, where
Dorothy spent so many sad years of death-in-life; and that in that very
corner by the window Wordsworth must have sat, day after day, when he
came to visit what remained to him of that creature of fire and dew,
that child of genius, who had been the inspiration and support of his
poetic youth.
In these rapid sketches of the surroundings and personal influences amid
which my own childhood was passed I have already said something of my
father's intimate friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough was, of course, a
Rugbeian, and one of Arnold's ablest and most devoted pupils. He was
about three years older than my father, and was already a Fellow of
Oriel when Thomas Arnold, the younger, was reading for his First. But
the difference of age made no difference to the friendship which grew up
between them in Oxford, a friendship only less enduring and close than
that between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been "eternized," to
use a word of Fulke Greville's, by the noble dirge of "Thyrsis." Not
many years before his own death, in 1895, my father wrote of the friend
of his youth:
I loved him, oh, so well: and also respected him more profoundly
than any man, anywhere near my own age, whom I ever met. His pure
soul was without stain: he seemed incapable of being inflamed by
wrath, or tempted to vice, or enslaved by any unworthy passion of
any sort. As to "Philip," something that he saw in me helped to
suggest the character--that was all. There is much in Philip that is
Clough himself, and there is a dialectic force in him that certainly
was never in me. A great yearning for possessing one's soul in
freedom--for trampling on ceremony and palaver, for trying
experiments in equality, being common to me and Philip, sent me out
to New Zealand; and in the two years before I sailed (December,
1847) Clough and I were a great deal together.
It was partly also the visit paid by my father and his friend, John
Campbell Shairp, afterward Principal Shairp of St. Andrew's, to Clough's
reading party at Drumnadrochit in 1845, and their report of incidents
which had happened to them on their way along the shores of Loch Ericht,
which suggested the scheme of the "Bothie." One of the half-dozen short
poems of Clough which have entered permanently into literature--_Qui
laborat oral_--was found by my father one morning on the table of his
bachelor rooms in Mount Street, after Clough had spent the night on a
shake-up in his sitting-room, and on his early departure had left the
poem behind him as payment for his night's lodging. In one of Clough's
letters to New Zealand I find, "Say not the struggle nought
availeth"--another of the half-dozen--written out by him; and the
original copy--_tibi primo confisum_, of the pretty, though unequal
verses, "A London Idyll." The little volume of miscellaneous poems,
called _Ambarvalia,_ and the "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuo-lich" were sent out
to New Zealand by Clough, at the same moment that Matt was sending his
brother the _Poems by A_.
Clough writes from Liverpool in February, 1849--having just received
Matt's volume:
At last our own Matt's book! Read mine first, my child, if our
volumes go forth together. Otherwise you won't read
mine--_Ambarvalia_, at any rate--at all. Froude also has published a
new book of religious biography, auto or otherwise (_The Nemesis of
Faith_), and therewithal resigns his Fellowship. But the Rector (of
Exeter) talks of not accepting the resignation, but having an
expulsion--fire and fagot fashion. _Quo usque_?
But when the books arrive, my father writes to his sister with
affectionate welcome indeed of the _Poems by A_, but with enthusiasm of
the "Bothie."
It greatly surpasses my expectations! It is on the whole a noble
poem, well held together, clear, full of purpose, and full of
promise. With joy I see the old fellow bestiring himself, "awakening
like a strong man out of sleep and shaking his invincible locks";
and if he remains true and works, I think there is nothing too high
or too great to be expected from him.
"True," and a worker, Clough remained to the last hours of his short
life. But in spite of a happy marriage, the burden and perplexity of
philosophic thought, together with the strain of failing health,
checked, before long, the strong poetic impulse shown in the "Bothie,"
its buoyant delight in natural beauty, and in the simplicities of human
feeling and passion. The "music" of his "rustic flute".
Kept not for long its happy, country tone;
Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
Of men contention-tost, of men who groan.
The poet of the "Bothie" becomes the poet of "Dipsychus," "Easter Day,"
and the "Amours de Voyage"; and the young republican who writes in
triumph--all humorous joy and animation--to my father, from the Paris of
1848, which has just seen the overthrow of Louis Philippe, says, a year
later--February 24, 1849:
To-day, my dear brother republican, is the glorious anniversary of
'48, whereof what shall I now say? Put not your trust in republics,
nor in any constitution of man! God be praised for the downfall of
Louis Philippe. This with a faint feeble echo of that loud last
year's scream of "_À bas Guizot_!" seems to be the sum total. Or are
we to salute the rising sun, with "_Vive l'Empereur!"_ and the green
liveries? President for life I think they'll make him, and then
begin to tire of him. Meanwhile the Great Powers are to restore the
Pope and crush the renascent Roman Republic, of which Joseph Mazzini
has just been declared a citizen!
A few months later, the writer--at Rome--"was in at the death" of this
same Roman Republic, listening to the French bombardment in bitterness
of soul.
I saw the French enter [he writes to my father]. Unto this has come
our grand Lib. Eq. and Frat. revolution! And then I went to Naples--
and home. I am full of admiration for Mazzini.... But on the
whole--"Farewell Politics!" utterly!--What can I do? Study is much
more to the purpose.
So in disillusion and disappointment, "Citizen Clough," leaving Oxford
and politics behind him, settled down to educational work in London,
married, and became the happy father of children, wrote much that was
remarkable, and will be long read--whether it be poetry or no--by those
who find perennial attraction in the lesser-known ways of literature and
thought, and at last closed his short life at Florence in 1862, at the
age of forty-one, leaving an indelible memory in the hearts of those who
had talked and lived with him.
To a boon southern country he is fled, And now in happier air,
Wandering with the Great Mother's train divine (And purer or more
subtle soul than thee, I trow the mighty Mother doth not see) Within
a folding of the Apennine,
Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!--
But I remember him, in an English setting, and on the slopes of English
hills. In the year 1858, as a child of seven, I was an inmate of a
little school kept at Ambleside, by Miss Anne Clough, the poet's sister,
afterward the well-known head of Newnham College, Cambridge, and wisest
leader in the cause of women. It was a small day-school for Ambleside
children of all ranks, and I was one of two boarders, spending my
Sundays often at Fox How. I can recall one or two golden days, at long
intervals, when my father came for me, with "Mr. Clough," and the two
old friends, who, after nine years' separation, had recently met again,
walked up the Sweden Bridge lane into the heart of Scandale Fell, while
I, paying no more attention to them than they--after a first ten
minutes--did to me, went wandering and skipping and dreaming by myself.
In those days every rock along the mountain lane, every boggy patch,
every stretch of silken, flower-sown grass, every bend of the wild
stream, and all its sounds, whether it chattered gently over stony
shallows or leaped full-throated into deep pools, swimming with foam--
were to me the never-ending joys of a "land of pure delight." Should I
find a ripe wild strawberry in a patch under a particular rock I knew by
heart?--or the first Grass of Parnassus, or the big auricula, or
streaming cotton-plant, amid a stretch of wet moss ahead? I might quite
safely explore these enchanted spots under male eyes, since they took no
account, mercifully, of a child's boots and stockings--male tongues,
besides, being safely busy with books and politics. Was that a dipper,
rising and falling along the stream, or--positively--a fat brown trout
in hiding under that shady bank?--or that a buzzard, hovering overhead.
Such hopes and doubts kept a child's heart and eyes as quick and busy as
the "beck" itself. It was a point of honor with me to get to Sweden
Bridge--a rough crossing for the shepherds and sheep, near the head of
the valley--before my companions; and I would sit dangling my feet over
the unprotected edge of its grass-grown arch, blissfully conscious on a
summer day of the warm stretches of golden fell folding in the stream,
the sheep, the hovering hawks, the stony path that wound up and up to
regions beyond the ken of thought; and of myself, queening it there on
the weather-worn keystone of the bridge, dissolved in the mere physical
joy of each contented sense--the sun on my cotton dress, the scents from
grass and moss, the marvelous rush of cloud-shadow along the hills, the
brilliant browns and blues in the water, the little white stones on its
tiny beaches, or the purples of the bigger rocks, whether in the stream
or on the mountain-side. How did they come there--those big rocks? I
puzzled my head about them a good deal, especially as my father, in the
walks we had to ourselves, would sometimes try and teach me a little
geology.
I have used the words "physical joy," because, although such passionate
pleasure in natural things as has been my constant Helper (in the sense
of the Greek [Greek: epikouros]) through life, has connected itself, no
doubt, in process of time, with various intimate beliefs, philosophic or
religious, as to the Beauty which is Truth, and therewith the only
conceivable key to man's experience, yet I could not myself indorse the
famous contrast in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," between the "haunting
passion" of youth's delight in Nature, and the more complex feeling of
later years when Nature takes an aspect colored by our own moods and
memories, when our sorrows and reflections enter so much into what we
feel about the "bright and intricate device" of earth and her seasons,
that "in our life alone doth Nature live." No one can answer for the
changing moods that the future, long or short, may bring with it. But so
far, I am inclined to think of this quick, intense pleasure in natural
things, which I notice in myself and others, as something involuntary
and inbred; independent--often selfishly independent--of the real human
experience. I have been sometimes ashamed--pricked even with self-
contempt--to remember how in the course of some tragic or sorrowful
hours, concerning myself, or others of great account to me, I could not
help observing some change in the clouds, some effect of color in the
garden, some picture on the wall, which pleased me--even for the
moment--intensely. The impression would be gone, perhaps, as soon as
felt, rebuked by something like a flash of remorse. But it was not in my
power to prevent its recurrence. And the delight in natural things--
colors, forms, scents--when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it,
has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and
consciousness seemed suspended--"as though of hemlock one had drunk."
Wordsworth has of course expressed it constantly, though increasingly,
as life went on, in combination with his pantheistic philosophy. But it
is my belief that it survived in him in its primitive form, almost to
the end.
The best and noblest people I have known have been, on the whole--except
in first youth--without this correspondence between some constant
pleasure-sense in the mind, and natural beauty. It cannot, therefore, be
anything to be proud of. But it is certainly something to be glad
of--"amid the chances and changes of this mortal life"; it is one of the
joys "in widest commonalty spread"--and that may last longest. It is
therefore surely to be encouraged both in oneself and in children; and
that, although I have often felt that there is something inhuman, or
infrahuman, in it, as though the earth-gods in us all--Pan, or Demeter--
laid ghostly hands again, for a space, upon the soul and sense that
nobler or sadder faiths have ravished from them.
In these Westmorland walks, however, my father had sometimes another
companion--a frequent visitor at Fox How, where he was almost another
son to my grandmother, and an elder brother to her children. How shall
one ever make the later generation understand the charm of Arthur
Stanley? There are many--very many--still living, in whom the sense of
it leaps up, at the very mention of his name. But for those who never
saw him, who are still in their twenties and thirties, what shall I say?
That he was the son of a Bishop of Norwich and a member of the old
Cheshire family of the Stanleys of Alderley; that he was a Rugby boy and
a devoted pupil of Arnold, whose _Life_ he wrote, so that it stands out
among the biographies of the century, not only for its literary merit,
but for its wide and varied influence on feeling and opinion; that he
was an Oxford tutor and Professor all through the great struggle of
Liberal thought against the reactionary influences let loose by Newman
and the Tractarian movement; that, as Regius Professor at Oxford, and
Canon of Canterbury, if he added little to learning, or research, he at
least kept alive--by his power of turning all he knew into image and
color--that great "art" of history which the Dryasdusts so willingly let
die; that as Dean of Westminster, he was still the life and soul of all
the Liberalism in the Church, still the same generous friend and
champion of all the spiritually oppressed that he had ever been? None of
the old "causes" beloved of his youth could ever have said of him, as of
so many others:
Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a ribbon to stick in
his coat--
He was, no doubt, the friend of kings and princes, and keenly conscious,
always, of things long-descended, with picturesque or heroic
associations. But it was he who invited Colenso to preach in the Abbey,
after his excommunication by the fanatical and now forgotten Bishop of
Cape Town; it was he who brought about that famous Communion of the
Revisers in the Abbey, where the Unitarian received the Sacrament of
Christ's death beside the Wesleyan and the Anglican, and who bore with
unflinching courage the idle tumult which followed; it was he, too, who
first took special pains to open the historical Abbey to working-men,
and to give them an insight into the meaning of its treasures. He was
not a social reformer in the modern sense; that was not his business.
But his unfailing power of seeing and pouncing upon the _interesting_--
the _dramatic_--in any human lot, soon brought him into relation with
men of callings and types the most different from his own; and for the
rest he fulfilled to perfection that hard duty--"the duty to our
equals"--on which Mr. Jowett once preached a caustic and suggestive
sermon. But for him John Richard Green would have abandoned history, and
student after student, heretic after heretic, found in him the man who
eagerly understood them and chivalrously fought for them.
And then, what a joy he was to the eye! His small spare figure,
miraculously light, his delicate face of tinted ivory--only that ivory
is not sensitive and subtle, and incredibly expressive, as were the
features of the little Dean; the eager, thin-lipped mouth, varying with
every shade of feeling in the innocent great soul behind it; the clear
eyes of china blue; the glistening white hair, still with the wave and
spring of youth in it; the slender legs, and Dean's dress, which becomes
all but the portly, with, on festal occasions, the red ribbon of the
Bath crossing the mercurial frame: there are still a few pictures and
photographs by which these characteristics are dimly recalled to those
at least who knew the living man. To my father, who called him "Arthur,"
and to all the Fox How circle, he was the most faithful of friends,
though no doubt my father's conversion to Catholicism to some extent, in
later years, separated him from Stanley. In the letter I have printed on
a former page, written on the night before my father left England for
New Zealand in 1847, and cherished by its recipient all his life, there
is a yearning, personal note, which was, perhaps, sometimes lacking in
the much-surrounded, much-courted Dean of later life. It was not that
Arthur Stanley, any more than Matthew Arnold, ever became a worldling in
the ordinary sense. But "the world" asks too much of such men as
Stanley. It heaps all its honors and all its tasks upon them, and
without some slight stiffening of its substance the exquisite instrument
cannot meet the strain.
Mr. Hughes always strongly denied that the George Arthur of _Tom Brown's
Schooldays_ had anything whatever to do with Arthur Stanley. But I
should like to believe that some anecdote of Stanley's schooldays had
entered at least into the well-known scene where Arthur, in class,
breaks down in construing the last address of Helen to the dead Hector.
Stanley's memory, indeed, was alive with the great things or the
picturesque detail of literature and history, no less than with the
humorous or striking things of contemporary life. I remember an amusing
instance of it at my own wedding breakfast. Stanley married us, and a
few days before he had buried Frederick Denison Maurice. His historical
sense was pleased by the juxtaposition of the two names Maurice and
Arnold, suggested by the funeral of Maurice and the marriage of Arnold's
granddaughter. The consequence was that his speech at the wedding
breakfast was quite as much concerned with "graves and worms and
epitaphs" as with things hymeneal. But from "the little Dean" all things
were welcome.
My personal memory of him goes back to much earlier days. As a child at
Fox How, he roused in me a mingled fascination and terror. To listen to
him quoting Shakspeare or Scott or Macaulay was fascination; to find his
eye fixed on one, and his slender finger darting toward one, as he asked
a sudden historical question--"Where did Edward the First die?"--"Where
was the Black Prince buried?"--was terror, lest, at seven years old, one
should not be able to play up. I remember a particular visit of his to
Fox How, when the dates and places of these royal deaths and burials
kept us--myself in particular--in a perpetual ferment. It must, I think,
have been when he was still at Canterbury, investigating, almost with
the zest and passion of the explorer of Troy or Mycenae, what bones lie
hid, and where, under the Cathedral floor, what sands--"fallen from the
ruined sides of Kings"--that this passion of deaths and dates was upon
him. I can see myself as a child of seven or eight, standing outside the
drawing-room door at Fox How, bracing myself in a mixture of delight and
fear, as to what "Doctor Stanley" might ask me when the door was opened;
then the opening, and the sudden sharp turn of the slight figure,
writing letters at the middle table, at the sight of "little Mary"--and
the expected thunderbolt:
"_Where did Henry the Fourth die_?"
Confusion--and blank ignorance!
But memory leaps forward to a day four or five years later, when my
father and I invaded the dark high room in the old Deanery, and the
little Dean standing at his reading-desk. He looks round--sees "Tom,"
and the child with him. His charming face breaks into a broad smile; he
remembers instantly, though it is some years since he and "little Mary"
met. He holds out both his hands to the little girl--
"Come and see the place where Henry the Fourth died!"
And off we ran together to the Jerusalem Chamber.