student, almost in despair at the failure of his hopes as a travelling
tutor, in Orgagna's _loggia_ at Florence, had risen, in spite of real
difficulties and opposition, to a brilliant position in active
political life; and the remarkable point is that, whether he was
ambitious or not of this kind of advancement--and it would perhaps
have been as well on his part to have implied less frequently that he
was not--he was all along, above everything, the student and the
theologian. What is even more remarkable is that, plunged into the
whirl of London public life and society, he continued still to be, more
even than the diplomatist, the student and theologian. The Prussian
Embassy during the years that he occupied it, from 1841 to 1854, was
not an idle place, and Bunsen was not a man to leave important State
business to other hands. The French Revolution, the German Revolution,
the Frankfort Assembly, the question of the revival of the Empire, the
beginnings of the Danish quarrel and of the Crimean war, all fell
within that time, and gave the Prussian Minister in such a centre as
London plenty to think of, to do, and to write about. Yet all this time
was a time of intense and unceasing activity in that field of
theological controversy in which Bunsen took such delight. The
diplomatist entrusted with the gravest affairs of a great Power in the
most critical and difficult times, and fully alive to the interest and
responsibility of his charge, also worked harder than most Professors,
and was as positive and fiery in his religious theories and antipathies
as the keenest and most dogmatic of scholastic disputants, he was busy
about Egyptian chronology, about cuneiform writing, about comparative
philology; he plunged with characteristic eagerness into English
theological war; and such books as his _Church of the Future_, and his
writings on Ignatius and Hippolytus, were not the least important of
the works which marked the progress of the struggle of opinions here.
But they represented only a very small part of the unceasing labour
that was going on in the early morning hours in Carlton House Terrace.
All this time the foundations were being laid and the materials
gathered for books of wider scope and more permanent aim, too vast for
him to accomplish even in his later years of leisure. It is an original
and instructive picture; for though we boast statesmen who still carry
on the great traditions of scholarship, and give room in their minds
for the deeper and more solemn problems of religion and philosophy,
they are not supposed to be able to carry on simultaneously their
public business and their classical or scientific studies, and at any
rate they do not attack the latter with the devouring zeal with which
Bunsen taxed the efforts of hard-driven secretaries and readers to keep
pace with his inexhaustible demands for more and more of the most
abstruse materials of knowledge.
The end of his London diplomatic career was, like the end of his Roman
one, clouded with something like disgrace; and, like the Roman one, is
left here unexplained. But it was for his happiness, probably, that his
residence in England came to a close. He had found the poetry of his
early notions about England, political and theological at least,
gradually changing into prose. He found less and less to like, in what
at first most attracted him, in the English Church; he and it, besides
knowing one another better, were also changing. He probably increased
his sympathies for England, and returned in a measure to his old
kindness for it, by looking at it only from a distance. The labour of
his later days, as vast and indefatigable as that of his earlier days,
was devoted to his great work, which was, as it were, to popularise the
Bible and revive interest in it by a change in the method of presenting
it and commenting on it. To the last the Bible was the central point of
his philosophical as well as his religious thoughts, as it had been in
his first beginnings as a student at Gottingen and Rome. After a life
of many trials, but of unusual prosperity and enjoyment, he died in the
end of 1860. The account of his last days is a very touching one.
We do not pretend to think Bunsen the great and consummate man that,
naturally enough, he appears to his friends. We doubt whether he can be
classed as a man in the first rank at all. We doubt whether he fully
understood his age, and yet it is certain that he was confident and
positive that he did understand it better than most men; and an undue
confidence of this kind implies considerable defects both of intellect
and character. He wanted the patient, cautious, judicial self-distrust
which his studies eminently demanded, and of which he might have seen
some examples in England. No one can read these volumes without seeing
the disproportionate power which first impressions had with him; he was
always ready to say that something, which had just happened or come
before him, was the greatest or the most complete thing of its kind.
Wonderfully active, wonderfully quick and receptive, full of
imagination and of the power of combining and constructing, and never
wearied out or dispirited, his mind took in large and grand ideas, and
developed them with enthusiasm and success, and with all the resources
of wide and varied knowledge; but the affluence and ingenuity of his
thoughts indisposed him, as it indisposes many other able men, to the
prosaic and uninteresting work of calling these thoughts into question,
and cross-examining himself upon their grounds and tenableness. He
tried too much; the multiplicity of his intellectual interests was too
much for him, and he often thought that he was explaining when he was
but weaving a wordy tissue, and "darkening counsel" as much as any of
the theological sciolists whom he denounced. People, for instance,
must, it seems to us, be very easily satisfied who find any fresh light
in the attempt, not unfrequent in his letters, to adapt the Lutheran
watchword of Justification by faith to modern ideas. He was very rapid,
and this rapidity made him hasty and precipitate; it also made him apt
to despise other men, and, what was of more consequence, the
difficulties of the subject likewise. Others did not always find it
easy to understand him; and it may fairly be questioned if he always
sufficiently asked whether he understood himself. He was generous and
large-spirited in intention, though not always so in fact.
Doubtless so much knowledge, so much honest and unsparing toil, such
freshness and quickness of thought, have not been wasted; there will
always be much to learn from Bunsen's writings. But his main service
has been the moral one of his example; of his ardent and high-souled
industry, of his fearlessness in accepting the conclusions of his
inquiries, of his untiring faith through many changes and some
disappointments that there is a way to reconcile all the truths that
interest men--those of religion, and those of nature and history. The
sincerity and earnestness with which he attempted this are a lesson to
everybody; his success is more difficult to recognise, and it may
perhaps be allowable to wish that he had taken more exactly the measure
of the great task which he set to himself. His ambition was a high one.
He aspired to be the Luther of the new 1517 which he so often dwelt
upon, and to construct a theology which, without breaking with the
past, should show what Christianity really is, and command the faith
and fill the opening thought of the present. It can hardly be said that
he succeeded. The Church of the Future still waits its interpreter, to
make good its pretensions to throw the ignorant and mistaken Church of
the Past into the shade.
XVII
COLERIDGE'S MEMOIR OF KEBLE[20]
[20]
_A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble_. By the Right Hon. Sir J.T.
Coleridge. _Saturday Review_, 20th March 1860.
Mr. Keble has been fortunate in his biographer. There have been since
his death various attempts to appreciate a character manifestly of such
depth and interest, yet about which outsiders could find so little to
say. Professor Shairp, of St. Andrews, two or three years ago gave a
charming little sketch, full of heart and insight, and full too of
noble modesty and reverence, which deserves to be rescued from the
danger of being forgotten into which sketches are apt to fall, both on
account of its direct subject, and also for the contemporary evidence
which it contains of the impressions made on a perfectly impartial and
intelligent observer by the early events of the Oxford movement. The
brilliant Dean of Westminster, in _Macmillan's Magazine_, has
attempted, with his usual grace and kindliness, to do justice to
Keble's character, and has shown how hard he found the task. The paper
on Keble forms a pendant to a recent paper on Dean Milman. The two
papers show conspicuously the measure and range of Dr. Stanley's power;
what he can comprehend and appreciate in religious earnestness and
height, and what he cannot; in what shapes, as in Dean Milman, he can
thoroughly sympathise with it and grasp it, and where its phenomena, as
in Mr. Keble, simply perplex and baffle him, and carry him out of his
depth.
Sir John Coleridge knew Keble probably as long and as intimately as any
one; and on the whole, he had the most entire sympathy with his
friend's spirit, even where he disagreed with his opinions. He
thoroughly understood and valued the real and living unity of a
character which mostly revealed itself to the outer world by what
seemed jerks and discordant traits. From early youth, through manhood
to old age, he had watched and tested and loved that varied play and
harmony of soul and mind, which was sometimes tender, sometimes stern,
sometimes playful, sometimes eager; abounding with flashes of real
genius, and yet always inclining by instinctive preference to things
homely and humble; but which was always sound and unselfish and
thorough, endeavouring to subject itself to the truth and will of God.
To Sir John Coleridge all this was before him habitually as a whole; he
could take it in, not by putting piece by piece together, but because
he saw it. And besides being an old and affectionate and intelligent
friend, he was also a discriminating one. In his circumstances he was
as opposite to Keble as any one could be; he was a lawyer and man of
the world, whose busy life at Westminster had little in common with the
studies or pursuits of the divine and the country parson.
Such an informant presents a picture entirely different in kind from
the comments and criticisms of those who can judge only from Mr.
Keble's writings and religious line, or from the rare occasions in
which he took a public part. These appearances, to many who willingly
acknowledge the charm which has drawn to him the admiration and
affection of numbers externally most widely at variance with him, do
not always agree together. People delight in his poetry who hate his
theology. They cannot say too much of the tenderness, the depth, the
truth, the quick and delicate spirit of love and purity, which have
made his verses the best interpreters and soothers of modern religious
feeling; yet, in the religious system from which his poetry springs,
they find nothing but what seems to them dry, harsh, narrow, and
antiquated. He attracts and he repels; and the attraction and repulsion
are equally strong. They see one side, and he is irresistible in his
simplicity, humbleness, unworldliness, and ever considerate charity,
combined with so much keenness and freshness of thought, and such sure
and unfailing truth of feeling. They see another, and he seems to them
full of strange unreality, strained, exaggerated, morbid, bristling
with a forced yet inflexible intolerance. At one moment he seems the
very ideal of a Christian teacher, made to win the sympathy of all
hearts; the next moment a barrier rises in the shape of some unpopular
doctrine or some display of zealous severity, seeming to be a strange
contrast to all that was before, which utterly astonishes and
disappoints. Mr. Keble was very little known to the public in general,
less so even than others whose names are associated with his; and it is
evident that to the public in general he presented a strange assemblage
of incoherent and seemingly irreconcilable qualities. His mind seemed
to work and act in different directions; and the results at the end
seemed to be with wide breaks and interruptions between them. But a
book like this enables us to trace back these diverging lines to the
centre from which they spring. What seemed to be in such sharp
contradiction at the outside is seen to flow naturally from the
perfectly homogeneous and consistent character within. Many people will
of course except to the character. It is not the type likely to find
favour in an age of activity, doubt, and change. But, as it was
realised in Mr. Keble, there it is in Sir John Coleridge's pages,
perfectly real, perfectly natural, perfectly whole and uniform, with
nothing double or incongruous in it, though it unfolded itself in
various and opposite ways. And its ideal was simply that which has been
consecrated as the saintly character in the Christian Church since the
days of St. John--the deepest and most genuine love of all that was
good; the deepest and most genuine hatred of all that was believed to
be evil.
The picture which Sir John Coleridge puts before us, though deficient
in what is striking and brilliant, is a sufficiently remarkable and
uncommon one. It is the picture of a man of high cultivation and
intellect, in whom religion was not merely something flavouring and
elevating life, not merely a great element and object of spiritual
activity, but really and unaffectedly the one absorbing interest, and
the spring of every thought and purpose. Whether people like such a
character or not, and whether or not they may think the religion wrong,
or distorted and imperfect, if they would fairly understand the writer
of the _Christian Year_ they must start from this point. He was a man
who, without a particle of the religious cant of any school, without
any self-consciousness or pretension or unnatural strain, literally
passed his clays under the quick and pervading influence, for restraint
and for stimulus, of the will and presence of God. With this his whole
soul was possessed; its power over him had not to be invoked and
stirred up; it acted spontaneously and unnoticed in him; it was
dominant in all his activity; it quenched in him aims, and even, it may
be, faculties; it continually hampered the free play of his powers and
gifts, and made him often seem, to those who had not the key, awkward,
unequal, and unintelligible. But for this awful sense of truth and
reality unseen, which dwarfed to him all personal thoughts and all
present things, he might have been a more finished writer, a more
attractive preacher, a less indifferent foster-father to his own works.
But it seemed to him a shame, in the presence of all that his thoughts
habitually dwelt with, to think of the ordinary objects of authorship,
of studying anything of this world for its own sake, of perfecting
works of art, of cultivating the subtle forces and spells of language
to give attractiveness to his writings. Abruptness, inadequacy, and
obscurity of expression were light matters, and gave him little
concern, compared with the haunting fear of unreal words. This "seeking
first the kingdom of God and His righteousness," as he understood it,
was the basis of all that he was; it was really and unaffectedly his
governing principle, the root of his affections and his antipathies,
just as to other men is the passion for scientific discovery or
political life.
But within these limits, and jealously restrained by these conditions,
a strongly marked character, exuberant with power and life, and the
play of individual qualities, displayed itself. There were two
intellectual sides to his mind--one which made him a poet, quickness
and delicacy of observation and sympathetic interpretation, the
realising and anticipating power of deep feeling and penetrative
imagination; the other, at first sight, little related to poetry, a
hard-headed, ingenious, prosaic shrewdness and directness of common
sense, dealing practically with things as they are and on the whole,
very little curious about scientific questions and precision,
argumentative in a fashion modelled on Bishop Butler, and full of
logical resource, good and, often it must be owned, bad. It was a mind
which unfolded first under the plain, manly discipline of an
old-fashioned English country parsonage, where the unshowy piety and
strong morality and modest theology of the middle age of Anglicanism,
the school of Pearson, Bull, and Wilson, were supreme. And from this it
came under the new influences of bold and independent thought which
were beginning to stir at Oxford; influences which were at first
represented by such men as Davison, Copleston, and, above all, Whately;
influences which repelled Keble by what he saw of hardness,
shallowness, and arrogance, and still more of self-sufficiency and
intellectual display and conceit in the prevailing tone of speculation,
but which nevertheless powerfully affected him, and of which he showed
the traces to the last Sir John Coleridge is disappointing as to the
amount of light which he throws on the process which was going on in
Keble's mind during the fifteen years or so between his degree and the
_Christian Year_; but there is one touch which refers to this period.
Speaking in 1838 of Alexander Knox, and expressing dislike of his
position, "as on the top of a high hill, seeing which way different
schools tend," and "exercising a royal right of eclecticism over all,"
he adds:--
I speak the more feelingly because I know I was myself inclined to
eclecticism at one time; and if it had not been for my father and
my brother, where I should have been now, who can say?
But he was a man who, with a very vigorous and keen intellect, capable
of making him a formidable disputant if he had been so minded, may be
said not to have cared for his intellect. He used it at need, but he
distrusted and undervalued it as an instrument and help. Goodness was
to him the one object of desire and reverence; it was really his own
measure of what he respected and valued; and where he recognised it,
and in whatever shape, grave or gay, he cared not about seeming
consistent in somehow or other paying it homage. People who knew him
remember how, in this austere judge of heresy, burdened by the
ever-pressing conviction of the "decay" of the Church and the distress
of a time of change, tenderness, playfulness, considerateness, the
restraint of a modesty which could not but judge, yet mistrusted its
fitness, marked his ordinary intercourse. Overflowing with affection to
his friends, and showing it in all kinds of unconventional and
unexpected instances, keeping to the last a kind of youthful freshness
as if he had never yet realised that he was not a boy, and shrunk from
the formality and donnishness of grown-up life, he was the most refined
and thoughtful of gentlemen, and in the midst of the fierce party
battles of his day, with all his strong feeling of the tremendous
significance of the strife, always a courteous and considerate
opponent. Strong words he used, and used deliberately. But those were
the days when the weapons of sarcasm and personal attack were freely
handled. The leaders of the High Church movement were held up to
detestation as the Oxford Malignants, and they certainly showed
themselves fully able to give their assailants as good as they brought;
yet Mr. Keble, involved in more than one trying personal controversy,
feeling as sternly and keenly as any one about public questions, and
tried by disappointment and the break up of the strongest ties, never
lost his evenness of temper, never appeared in the arena of personal
recrimination. In all the prominent part which he took, and in the
resolute and sometimes wrathful tone in which he defended what seemed
harsh measures, he may have dropped words which to opponents seemed
severe ones, but never any which even they could call a scornful one or
a sneer.
It was in keeping with all that he was--a mark of imperfection it may
be, yet part of the nobleness and love of reality in a man who felt so
deeply the weakness and ignorance of man--that he cared so little about
the appearances of consistency. Thus, bound as he was by principle to
show condemnation when he thought that a sacred cause was invaded, he
was always inclining to conciliate his wrath with his affectionateness,
and his severity with his consideration of circumstances and his own
mistrust of himself. He was, of all men holding strong opinions, one of
the most curiously and unexpectedly tolerant, wherever he could
contrive to invent an excuse for tolerance, or where long habitual
confidence was weighed against disturbing appearances. Sir John
Coleridge touches this in the following extract, which is
characteristic:--
On questions of this kind especially [University Reform], his
principles were uncompromising; if a measure offended against what
he thought honest, or violated what he thought sacred, good motives
in the framers he would not admit as palliation, nor would he
be comforted by an opinion of mine that measures mischievous
in their logical consequences were never in the result so
mischievous, or beneficial measures so beneficial, as had been
foretold. So he writes playfully to me at an earlier time:--
"Hurrell Froude and I took into consideration your opinion
that 'there are good men of all parties,' and agreed that it
is a bad doctrine for these days; the time being come in
which, according to John Miller, 'scoundrels must be called
scoundrels'; and, moreover, we have stigmatised the said
opinion by the name of the Coleridge Heresy. So hold it any
longer at your peril."
I think it fair to set down these which were, in truth, formed
opinions, and not random sayings; but it would be most unfair if
one concluded from them, written and spoken in the freedom of
friendly intercourse, that there was anything sour in his spirit,
or harsh and narrow in his practice; when you discussed any of
these things with him, the discussion was pretty sure to end, not
indeed with any insincere concession of what he thought right and
true, but in consideration for individuals and depreciation of
himself.
And the same thing comes out in the interesting letter in which the
Solicitor-General describes his last recollections of Keble:--
There was, I am sure, no trace of failing then to be discerned in
his apprehension, or judgment, or discourse. He was an old man who
had been very ill, who was still physically weak, and who needed
care; but he was the same Mr. Keble I had always known, and whom,
for aught that appeared, I might hope still to know for many years
to come. Little bits of his tenderness, flashes of his fun,
glimpses of his austerer side, I seem to recall, but I cannot put
them upon paper.... Once I remember walking with him just the same
short walk, from his house to Sir William's, and our conversation
fell upon Charles I., with regard to whose truth and honour I had
used some expressions in a review, which had, as I heard,
displeased him. I referred to this, and he said it was true. I
replied that I was very sorry to displease him by anything I said
or thought; but that if the Naseby letters were genuine, I could
not think that what I said was at all too strong, and that a man
could but do his best to form an honest opinion upon historical
evidence, and, if he had to speak, to express that opinion. On
this he said, with a tenderness and humility not only most
touching, but to me most embarrassing, that "It might be so; what
was he to judge of other men; he was old, and things were now
looked at very differently; that he knew he had many things to
unlearn and learn afresh; and that I must not mind what he had
said, for that in truth belief in the heroes of his youth had
become part of him." I am afraid these are my words, and not his;
and I cannot give his way of speaking, which to any one with a
heart, I think, would have been as overcoming as it was to me.