be encouraged deliberately to lay their plans as if life ended at
thirty. But I believe that schools should aim at producing a type that
should develop naturally and equably with the years. What we want to
produce is an unselfish, tranquil, contented type, full of generous
visions; neither prematurely serious nor incurably frivolous, nor
afraid of responsibility, nor morbidly desirous of influence; neither
shunning nor courting publicity, but natural, wholesome, truthful, and
happy; not afraid of difficulties nor sadly oppressed with a sense of
responsibility; fond of activity and yet capable of using and enjoying
leisure; not narrow-minded, not viewing everything from the standpoint
of a particular town or parish, but patriotic and yet not insular,
modern-spirited and yet not despising the past, practical and yet with a
sense of spiritual realities.
I think that what is saddest is that the theoretical perfection screens
the practical inutility of the thing. If it seems good to the collective
wisdom of the country to let education go, and to make a public-school
a kind of healthy barrack-life for the physical training of the body,
with a certain amount of mental occupation to fill the vacant hours that
might otherwise be mischievous—pleasure with a hem of duty—let it be
frankly admitted that it is so; but that the education received by boys
at our public-schools is now, except in intention, literary—that is the
position which I entirely deny.
Personally I had a certain feeble taste for literature. I read in a
slipshod way a good deal of English poetry, memoirs, literary history,
and essays, but my reading was utterly amateurish and unguided. I even
had some slight preferences in style, but I could not have given a reason
for my preference; I could not write an English essay—I had no idea
of arrangement. I had never been told to “let the bones show;” I had
no sense of proportion, and considered that anything which I happened
to have in my own mind was relevant to any subject about which I was
writing. I had never learnt to see the point or to insist upon the
essential.
[Sidenote: THE CLASSICS]
Neither do I think that I can claim to have had any particular love for
the classics; but I was blest with a pictorial mind, and though much
of my classical reading was a mere weariness to me, I was cheered at
intervals by a sudden romantic glimpse of some scene or other that
seized me with a vivid reality. The Odyssey and the Æneid were rich
in these surprises; for the talk of Gods, indeed, I had nothing but
bewildered contempt; but such a scene as that of Laertes in his patched
gaiters, fumbling with a young tree on his upland farm, at once seized
tyrannically upon my fancy. Catullus, Horace, even Martial, gave me
occasional food for the imagination; and all at once it seemed worth
while to traverse the arid leagues, or to wade, as Tennyson said, in a
sea of glue, for these divine moments.
One such scene that affected my fancy I will describe in greater detail;
and let it stand as a specimen. It was in the third Æneid; we were
sitting in a dusty class-room, the gas flaring. The lesson proceeded
slowly and wearily, with a thin trickle of exposition from the desk,
emanating from a master who was evidently as sick of the whole business
as ourselves.
Andromache, widow of Hector, after a forced union with Neoptolemus,
becomes the bride of Helenus, Hector’s brother. Helenus on the death of
Pyrrhus becomes his successor in the chieftainship, and Andromache is
once more a queen. She builds a rustic altar, an excuse for lamentation,
and there bewails the memory of her first lord. I was reflecting that she
must have made but a dreary wife for Helenus, when in a moment the scene
was changed. Æneas, it will be remembered, comes on her in her orisons,
with his troop of warriors behind him, and is greeted by the terrified
queen, who believes him to be an apparition, with a wild and artless
question ending a burst of passionate grief: “If you come from the world
of spirits,” she says, “Hector ubi est?” It is one of those sudden turns
that show the ineffable genius of Virgil.
I saw in a moment a clearing in a wood of beeches; one great tree stood
out from the rest. Half hidden in the foliage stood a tall stone pillar,
supporting a mouldering urn. Close beside this was a stone alcove, with
a little altar beneath it. In the alcove stood a silent listening statue
with downcast head. From the altar went up a little smoke; the queen
herself, a slender figure, clad in black, with pale worn face and fragile
hands, bent in prayer. By her side were two maidens, also in the deepest
black, a priest in stiff vestments, and a boy bearing a box of incense.
[Sidenote: VIRGIL]
A slight noise falls on the ear of Andromache; she turns, and there
at the edge of a green forest path, lit by the red light of a low
smouldering sun, stands the figure of a warrior, his arms rusty and dark,
his mailed feet sunk in the turf, leaning on his spear. His face is pale
and heavily lined, worn with ungentle experience, and lit by a strange
light of recognition. His pale forked beard falls on his breast; behind
him a mist of spears.
This was the scene; very rococo, no doubt, and romantic, but so intensely
real, so glowing, that I could see the pale-stemmed beeches; and below,
through a gap, low fantastic hills and a wan river winding in the plain.
I could see the white set face of Æneas, the dark-eyed glance of the
queen, the frightened silence of the worshippers.
8
At Cambridge things were not very different. I was starved intellectually
by the meagre academical system. I took up the Classical Tripos, and
read, with translations, in the loosest style imaginable, great masses
of classical literature, caring little about the subject matter,
seldom reading the notes, with no knowledge of history, archæology, or
philosophy, and even strangely ignorant of idiom. I received no guidance
in these matters; my attendance at lectures was not insisted upon; and
the composition lecturers, though conscientious, were not inspiring men.
My tutor did, it must be confessed, make some attempt to influence my
reading, urging me to lay down a regular plan, and even recommending
books and editions. But I was too dilatory to carry it out; and though I
find that in one Long Vacation I read through the Odyssey, the Æneid, and
the whole of Aristotle’s Ethics, yet they left little or no impression
on my mind. I did indeed drift into a First Class, but this was merely
due to familiarity with, rather than knowledge of, the Classics; and my
ignorance of the commonest classical rules was phenomenal.
[Sidenote: CAMBRIDGE LIFE]
But I did derive immense intellectual stimulus from my Cambridge life,
though little from the prescribed course of study; for I belonged to a
little society that met weekly, and read papers on literary and ethical
subjects, prolonging a serious, if fitful, discussion late into the
night. I read a great deal of English in a sketchy way, and even wrote
both poetry and fiction; but I left Cambridge a thoroughly uneducated
man, without an idea of literary method, and contemning accuracy and
precision in favour of brilliant and heady writing. The initial impulse
to interest in literature was certainly instinctive in me; but I maintain
that not only did that interest never receive encouragement from the
professed educators under whose influence I passed, but that I was not
even professionally trained in the matter; that solidity and accuracy
were never insisted upon; and that the definiteness, which at least
education is capable of communicating, was either never imparted by
mental processes, or that I successfully resisted the imparting of
it—indeed, never knew that any attempt was being made to teach me the
value or necessity of it.
9
I had a religious bringing-up. I was made familiar with the Bible and
the offices of religion; only the natural piety was wanting. I am quite
certain I had no sense of religion as a child—I do not think I had any
morality. Like many children, I was ruled by associations rather than by
principles. I was sensitive to disapproval; and being timid by nature,
I was averse to being found out; being moreover lacking in vitality,
I seldom experienced the sensation of being brought face to face with
temptation—rebellion, anger, and sensual impulse were unknown to me; but
while I was innocent, I was unconscientious and deceitful, not so much
deliberately as instinctively.
The sense of religion I take to be, in its simplest definition, the
consciousness of the presence of the Divine Being, and the practice of
religion to be the maintenance of conscious union or communion with
the Divine. These were entirely lacking to me. I accepted the fact of
God’s existence as I accepted the facts of history and geography. But
my conception of God, if I may speak plainly and without profanity, was
derived from the Old Testament, and was destitute of attractiveness. I
conceived of Him as old, vindictive, unmerciful, occupied in tedious
matters, hostile to all gaiety and juvenility; totally uninterested in
the human race, except in so far that He regarded their transgressions
with morbid asperity and a kind of gloomy satisfaction, as giving Him an
opportunity of exercising coercive discipline. He was never represented
to me as the Giver of the simple joys of life—of light and warmth, of
food and sleep, as the Creator of curious and sweet-smelling flowers,
of aromatic shrubs, of waving trees, of horned animals and extravagant
insects. Considering how entirely creatures of sense children are, it has
seemed to me since that it would be well if their simplest pleasures,
the material surroundings of their lives, were connected with the idea
of God—if they felt that what they enjoyed was sent by Him; if it were
said of a toy that “God sends you this;” or of some domestic festivity
that “God hopes that you will be happy to-day,”—it appears to me that we
should have less of that dreary philosophy which connects “God’s will”
only with moments of bereavement and suffering. If we could only feel
with Job, that God, who sends us so much that is sweet and wholesome,
has equally the right to send us what is evil, we could early grow to
recognise that, when the greater part of our lives is made up of what
is desirable or interesting, and when we cling to life and the hope of
happiness with so unerring an instinct, it is probable, nay, certain,
that our afflictions must be ultimately intended to minister to the
fulness of joy.
[Sidenote: RELIGION]
Certainly religious practices, though I enjoyed them in many ways, had no
effect on conduct; indeed, I never thought of them as having any concern
with conduct. Religious services never seemed to me in childhood to be
solemnities designed for the hallowing of life, or indeed as having
any power to do so, but merely as part of the framework of duty, as
ceremonies out of which it was possible to derive a certain amount of
interest and satisfaction.
Church was always a pleasure to me; I liked the _mise-en-scène_, the
timbered roof, the fallen day, the stained glass, the stone pillars, the
comfortable pew, the rubricated prayer-book, the music, the movements of
the minister—these all had a definite æsthetic effect upon me; moreover,
it was a pleasure to note, with the unshrinking gaze of childhood, the
various delightful peculiarities of members of the congregation: the
old man with apple-red cheeks, in his smock-frock, who came with rigid,
creaking boots to his place; the sexton, with his goat-like beard; the
solicitor, who emitted sounds in the hymns like the lowing of a cow; the
throaty tenor, who had but one vowel for all; the dowager in purple silk,
who sat through the Psalms and inspected her prayer-book through a gold
eye-glass as though she were examining some natural curiosity. All these
were, in childish parlance, “so funny.” And Church was thus a place to
which I went willingly and joyfully; the activity of my observation saved
me from the tedium with which so many children regard it.
[Sidenote: RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT]
This vacuous æstheticism in the region of religion continued with me
through my school days. Of purpose and principle there was no trace. I
do indeed remember one matter in which I had recourse to prayer. At my
private school, a big suburban establishment, I was thrust into a large
dormitory, a shrinking and bewildered atom, fresh from the privacies and
loving attentions of the nursery, and required to undress and go to bed
before the eyes of fifty boys. It was a rude introduction to the world,
and it is strange to reflect upon the helpless despair with which a
little soul can be filled under circumstances which to maturer thoughts
appear almost idyllic. But while I crouched miserably upon my bed, as
I prepared to slip between the sheets—of which the hard texture alone
dismayed me—I was struck by a shoe, mischievously, but not brutally
thrown by a bigger boy some yards away. Is it amusing or pathetic to
reflect that night after night I prayed that this might not be repeated,
using a suffrage of the Litany about our persecutors and slanderers,
which seemed to me dismally appropriate?
At the public school to which I was shortly transferred, where I enjoyed
a tranquil and uneventful existence, religion was still a sentiment.
Being one of the older foundations we had a paid choir, and the musical
service was a real delight to me. I loved the dark roof and the thunders
of the organ; even now I can recollect the thrill with which I looked
day after day at the pure lines of the Tudor building, the innumerable
clustered shafts that ran from pavement to roof. I cared little for the
archæology and history of the place, but the grace of antiquity, the
walls of mellow brick, the stone-crop that dripped in purple tufts among
the mouldering stones of the buttress, the very dust that clung to the
rafters of the ancient refectory—all these I noted with secret thrills of
delight.
Still no sense of reality touched me; life was but a moving pageant,
in which I played as slight a part as I could contrive to play. I was
inoffensive; my work was easy to me. I had some congenial friends, and
dreamed away the weeks in a gentle indolence set in a framework of
unengrossing duties.
[Sidenote: PLEASURES OF RITUAL]
About my sixteenth year I made friends with a high-church curate whom
I met in the holidays, who was indeed distantly related to me; he was
attached to a large London church, which existed mainly for ornate
services, and I used to go up from school occasionally to see him,
and even spent a few days in his house at the beginning or end of the
holidays. Looking back, he seems to me now to have been a somewhat
inert and sentimental person, but I acquired from him a real love of
liturgical things, wrote out with my own hand a book of Hours, carefully
rubricated—though I do not recollect that I often used it—and became
more ceremonial than ever. I had long settled that I was to take Orders,
and I well recollect the thrill with which on one of these visits I
saw my friend ascend the high stone pulpit of the tall church, with
flaring lights, in a hood of a strange pattern, which he assured me was
the antique shape. The sermon was, I even now recollect, deplorable
both in language and thought, but that seemed to me a matter of entire
indifference; the central fact was that he stood there vested with due
solemnity, and made rhetorical motions with an easy grace.
[Sidenote: A BENEDICTION]
At this time, too, at school, I took to frequenting the service of the
cathedral in the town whenever I was able, and became a familiar figure
to vergers and clergy. I have no doubt that were I to be made a bishop,
this fact would be cited as an instance of early piety, but the truth
was that it was, so to speak, a mere amusement. I can honestly say that
it had no sort of effect on my life, which ran indolently on, side by
side with the ritual preoccupation, unaffected by it, and indeed totally
distinct from it. My confirmation came in the middle of these diversions;
the solid and careful preparation that I received I looked upon as so
much tedious lecturing to be decorously borne, and beside a dim pleasure
in the ceremony, I do not think it had any influence of a practical kind.
Once, indeed, there did pass a breath of vital truth over my placid and
self-satisfied life, like a breeze over still water. There came to stay
with us in the holidays an elderly clergyman, a friend of my mother’s,
a London rector, whose whole life was sincerely given to helping souls
to the light, and who had escaped by some exquisite lucidity of soul
the self-consciousness—too often, alas, the outcome of the adulation
which is the shadow of holy influence. He had the gift of talking simply
and sweetly about spiritual things—indeed nothing else interested him;
conversation about books or politics he listened to with a gentle
urbanity of tolerance; yet when he talked himself, he never dogmatised,
but appealed with a wistful smile to his hearers to confirm the
experiences which he related. Me, though an awkward boy, he treated with
the most winning deference, and on the morning of his departure asked
me with delightful grace to accompany him on a short walk, and opened
to me the thought of the hallowing presence of Christ in daily life. It
seems to me now that he was inviting my confidence, but I had none to
give him; so with a memorable solemnity he bade me, if I ever needed
help in spiritual things, to come freely to him; I remember that he did
so without any sense of patronage, but as an older disciple, wrestling
with the same difficulties, and only a little further ahead in the vale
of life. Lastly he took me to his room, knelt down beside me, and prayed
with exquisite simplicity and affection that I might be enriched with the
knowledge of Christ, and then laid his hand upon my head with a loving
benediction. For days and even weeks that talk and that benediction dwelt
with me; but the time had not come, and I was to be led through darker
waters; and though I prayed for many days intensely that some revelation
of truth might come to me, yet the seed had fallen on shallow soil, and
was soon scorched up again by the genial current of my daily life.
I think, though I say this with sadness, that he represented religion as
too much a withdrawal from life for one so young, and did not make it
clear to me that my merriment, my joys, my interests, and my ambitions
might be hallowed and invigorated. He had himself subordinated life and
character so completely to one end, and thrown aside (if he had ever
possessed them) the dear prejudices and fiery interests of individuality,
that I doubt if he could have thrown his imagination swiftly enough
back into all the energetic hopes, the engrossing beckonings of opening
manhood.
10
The rest of my school life passed without any important change of view. I
became successful in games, popular, active-minded. I won a scholarship
at Cambridge with disastrous ease.
Then Cambridge life opened before me. I speak elsewhere of my
intellectual and social life there, and will pass on to the next event of
importance in my religious development.
My life had become almost purely selfish. I was not very ambitious of
academical honours, though I meant to secure a modest first-class; but
I was intensely eager for both social and literary distinction, and
submitted myself to the full to the dreamful beauty of my surroundings,
and the delicious thrill of artistic pleasures.
I have often thought how strangely and secretly the crucial moment, the
most agonising crisis of my life drifted upon me. I say deliberately
that, looking back over my forty years of life, no day was so fraught
for me with fate, no hour so big with doomful issues, as that day which
dawned so simply and sped past with such familiar ease to the destined
hour—that moment which waved me, led by sociable curiosity, into the
darkness of suffering and agony. A new birth indeed! The current of my
days fell, as it were, with suddenness, unexpected, unguessed at, into
the weltering gulf of despair; that hour turned me in an instant from a
careless boy into a troubled man. And yet how easily it might have been
otherwise—no, I dare not say that.
[Sidenote: THE EVANGELIST]
It had been like any other day. I had been to the dreary morning
service, read huskily by a few shivering mortals in the chilly chapel;
I had worked, walked in the afternoon with a friend, and we had talked
of our plans—all we meant to do and be. After hall, I went to have
some coffee in the rooms of a mild and amiable youth, now a church
dignitary in the Colonies. I sat, I remember, on a deep sofa, which I
afterwards bought and still possess. Our host carelessly said that a
great Revivalist was to address a meeting that night. Some one suggested
that we should go. I laughingly assented. The meeting was held in a
hall in a side street; we went smiling and talking, and took our places
in a crowded room. The first item was the appearance of an assistant,
who accompanied the evangelist as a sort of precentor—an immense
bilious man, with black hair, and eyes surrounded by flaccid, pendent,
baggy wrinkles—who came forward with an unctuous gesture, and took his
place at a small harmonium, placed so near the front of the platform
that it looked as if both player and instrument must inevitably topple
over; it was inexpressibly ludicrous to behold. Rolling his eyes in an
affected manner, he touched a few simple cords, and then a marvellous
transformation came over the room. In a sweet, powerful voice, with an
exquisite simplicity combined with irresistible emotion, he sang “There
were Ninety-and-Nine.” The man was transfigured. A deathly hush came over
the room, and I felt my eyes fill with tears; his physical repulsiveness
slipped from him, and left a sincere impulsive Christian, whose simple
music spoke straight to the heart.
Then the preacher himself—a heavy-looking, commonplace man, with a sturdy
figure and no grace of look or gesture—stepped forward. I have no
recollection how he began, but he had not spoken half-a-dozen sentences
before I felt as though he and I were alone in the world. The details of
that speech have gone from me. After a scathing and indignant invective
on sin, he turned to draw a picture of the hollow, drifting life, with
feeble, mundane ambitions—utterly selfish, giving no service, making
no sacrifice, tasting the moment, gliding feebly down the stream of
time to the roaring cataract of death. Every word he said burnt into my
soul. He seemed to me to probe the secrets of my innermost heart; to
be analysing, as it were, before the Judge of the world, the arid and
pitiful constituents of my most secret thought. I did not think I could
have heard him out ... his words fell on me like the stabs of a knife.
Then he made a sudden pause, and in a peroration of incredible dignity
and pathos he drew us to the feet of the crucified Saviour, showed us the
bleeding hand and the dimmed eye, and the infinite heart behind. “Just
_accept_ Him,” he cried; “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, you
may be His—nestling in His arms—with the burden of sin and selfishness
resting at His feet.”
[Sidenote: WOUNDED DEEP]
Even as he spoke, pierced as I was to the heart by contrition and
anguish, I knew that this was not for me.... He invited all who would be
Christ’s to wait and plead with him. Many men—even, I was surprised to
see, a careless, cynical companion of my own—crowded to the platform, but
I went out into the night, like one dizzied with a sudden blow. I was
joined, I remember, by a tutor of my college, who praised the eloquence
of the address, and was surprised to find me so little responsive; but my
only idea was to escape and be alone: I felt like a wounded creature, who
must crawl into solitude. I went to my room, and after long and agonising
prayers for light, an intolerable weariness fell on me, and I slept.