his pupils and friends called William Cory in remembrance of old times.
He was from 1845 to 1872 the most brilliant tutor at Eton: an
astonishing number of eminent men passed through his hands, and retained
through life the influence of his teaching. After leaving Eton, he
changed his name from Johnson to Cory, and established himself on the
top of the hill at Hampstead, where he freely imparted the treasures of
his exquisite scholarship to all who cared to seek them, and not least
willingly to young ladies. He was a man of absolutely original mind;
paradoxical, prejudiced, and intellectually independent to the point of
eccentricity. His range was wide, his taste infallible, and his love of
the beautiful a passion. He lived, from boyhood to old age, the life of
the Intellect; and yet posterity will know him only as having written
one thin book of delightful verse;[53] a fragmentary History of England;
and some of the most fascinating letters in the language.
A friend and brother-Scholar of mine at Oxford was "Willy" Arnold, son
of Mr. Thomas Arnold, and nephew of Matthew. After taking his degree, he
joined the staff of the _Manchester Guardian_, and before long became
one of the first journalists of his time. He was not merely a
journalist, but also a publicist, and could have made his mark in public
life by his exceptional knowledge of European politics. We had not seen
one another for a good many years, when we met casually at dinner in the
summer of 1887. To that chance meeting I owed my introduction to the
_Manchester Guardian_. My first contribution to it was a description of
the Jubilee Garden-Party at Buckingham Palace on the 29th of June,
1887; so I can reckon almost a quarter of a century of association with
what I am bold to call (defying all allusion to the fabled Tanner) the
best newspaper in Great Britain.
But journalism, though now practised on a more dignified level, was only
a continuation and development of a life-long habit; whereas, though I
had been scribbling ever since I was a boy, I had never written a book.
In 1890 Messrs. Sampson Low started a series of _The Queen's Prime
Ministers_. Froude led off, brilliantly, with Lord Beaconsfield; and the
editor[54] asked me to follow with Mr. Gladstone. Before acceding to
this proposal, I thought it right to ask whether Gladstone had any
objection; and, supposing that he had not, whether he would give me any
help. His reply was eminently characteristic,--
"When someone proposed to write a book about Harry Phillpotts, Bishop of
Exeter, the Bishop procured an Injunction in Chancery to stop him. I
shall not seek an Injunction against you--but that is all the help I can
give you."
Thus encouraged, or rather, I should say, not discouraged, I addressed
myself to the task, and the book came out in July, 1891. I was told
that Gladstone did not read it, and this assurance was in many respects
a relief. But someone told him that I had stated, on the authority of
one of his school-fellows, that he played no games at Eton. The next
time I met him, he referred to this point; declared that I had been
misinformed; and affirmed that he played both cricket and football, and
"was in the Second Eleven at Cricket." In obedience to his request, I
made the necessary correction in the Second Edition; but _a priori_ I
should not have been inclined to suspect my venerated leader of having
been a cricketer.
It is no part of my plan to narrate my own extremely humble performances
in the way of authorship. The heading of the chapter speaks not of
Book-making, but of Literature; and for a man to say that he has
contributed to Literature would indeed be to invite rebuff. I am
thinking now, not of what I have done, but of what I have received; and
my debt to Literature is great indeed. I do not know the sensation of
dulness, but, like most human beings, I know the sensation of sorrow;
and with a grateful heart I record the fact that the darkest hours of my
life have been made endurable by the Companionship of Books.
FOOTNOTES:
[49] To Mr. Watson I owed my introduction to Matthew Arnold's _Essays in
Criticism_--a real event in one's mental life.
[50] By Sir Walter Strickland; whose poem on William Tyndale was justly
admired.
[51] Richard Monckton Milnes was created Lord Houghton, August 20, 1863.
[52] It is only fair to observe that those "Letters" were written in the
strictest confidence.
[53] Ionica.
[54] Mr. Stuart J. Reid.
XIV
SERVICE
May He "in knowledge of Whom standeth our eternal life, Whose
service is perfect freedom"--_Quem nosse vivere, Cui servire
regnare est_--teach us the rules and laws of that eternal service,
which is now beginning on the scene of time.
R. W. CHURCH, _Human Life and its Conditions_.
It was my happiness to be born and brought up in a home where Religion
habitually expressed itself in Social Service. I cannot remember a time
when those nearest to me were not actively engaged in ministering to the
poor, the sick, the underfed, and the miserable. The motive of all this
incessant ministration was the Christian Faith, and its motto was
_Charitas Christi urget nos_. The religion in which the children of an
Evangelical home were reared was an intensely vivid and energetic
principle, passionate on its emotional side, definite in its theory,
imperious in its demands, practical, visible, and tangible in its
effects. If a boy's heart--
"Were less insensible than sodden clay
In a sea-river's bed at ebb of tide,"
it could scarcely fail to carry with it into the world outside the
impressions stamped by such a training. I can remember quite clearly
that, even in my Harrow days, the idea of Life as Service was always
present to my mind: and it was constantly enforced by the preaching of
such men as Butler, Westcott, and Farrar.
"Here you are being educated either for life or for fashion. Which is
it? What is your ambition? Is it to continue, with fewer restrictions,
the amusements which have engrossed you here? Is it to be favourite or
brilliant members of a society which keeps want and misery at a
distance? Would this content you? Is this your idea of life? Or may we
not hope that you will have a nobler conception of what a Christian
manhood may be made in a country so rich in opportunities as our own now
presents?"[55]
In Dr. Butler's sermons our thoughts were directed to such subjects as
the Housing of the Working Classes, Popular Education, and the contrast
between the lot of the rich and the lot of the poor. "May God never
allow us to grow proud, or to grow indolent, or to be deaf to the cry of
human suffering." "Pray that God may count you worthy to be foremost in
the truly holy and heroic work of bringing purity to the homes of the
labouring classes, and so hastening the coming of the day when the
longing of our common Lord shall be accomplished." "Forget not the
complaints, and the yet more fatal silence, of the poor, and pray that
the ennobling of your own life, and the gratification of your own
happiness, may be linked hereafter with some public Christian labour."
Thus the influences of school co-operated with the influences of home to
give one, at the most impressionable age, a lively interest in Social
Service; and that interest found a practical outlet at Oxford. When
young men first attempt good works, they always begin with teaching; and
a Sunday School at Cowley and a Night School at St. Frideswide's were
the scenes of my (very unsuccessful) attempts in that direction. Through
my devotion to St. Barnabas', I became acquainted with the homes and
lives of the poor in the then squalid district of "Jericho"; and the
experience thus acquired was a valuable complement to the knowledge of
the agricultural poor which I had gained at home. It was at this time
that I first read _Yeast_ and _Alton Locke_. The living voice of Ruskin
taught us the sanctity of work for others. A fascinating but awful book
called _Modern Christianity a Civilized Heathenism_ laid compelling
hands on some young hearts; and in 1875 Dr. Pusey made that book the
subject of a sermon before the University, in which he pleaded the cause
of the poor with an unforgettable solemnity.[56]
For two or three years, illness and decrepitude interfered with my
active service, but the ideal was still enthroned in my heart; and, as
health returned, the shame of doing nothing for others became
intolerable. Return to activity was a very gradual process, and, if one
had ever "despised the day of small things," one now learned to value
it. When I came up to London, two or three of us, who had been
undergraduate friends at Oxford, formed a little party for
workhouse-visiting. One of the party has since been a Conservative
Minister, one a Liberal Minister, and one a high official of the Central
Conservative Association. Sisters joined their brothers, and we used to
jog off together on Saturday afternoons to the Holborn Workhouse,
which, if I remember right, stood in a poetically-named but
prosaic-looking street called "Shepherdess Walk." The girls visited the
women, and we the men. We used to take oranges and flowers to the wards,
give short readings from amusing books, and gossip with the bedridden
about the outside world. We always had the kindest of welcomes from our
old friends; and great was their enthusiasm when they learned that two
of their visitors had been returned to Parliament at the General
Election of 1880. As one of the two was a Conservative and one a
Liberal, the political susceptibilities of the ward were not offended,
and we both received congratulations from all alike. One quaint incident
is connected with these memories. Just outside the Workhouse was a sort
of booth, or "lean-to," where a very respectable woman sold daffodils
and wall-flowers, which we used to buy for our friends inside. One day,
when one of the girls of our party was making her purchase, the
flower-seller said, "Would your Ladyship like to go to the Lady
Mayoress's Fancy Dress Ball? If so, I can send you and your brother
tickets. You have been good customers to me, and I should be very glad
if you would accept them." The explanation was that the flower-seller
was sister to the Lady Mayoress, whom the Lord Mayor had married when he
was in a humbler station. The tickets were gratefully accepted; and,
when we asked the giver if she was going to the Ball, she replied, with
excellent sense and taste, "Oh, no. My sister, in her position, is
obliged to give these grand parties, but I should be quite out of place
there. You must tell me all about it next time you come to the
Workhouse."
Meanwhile, during this "day of small things" a quiet but momentous
revolution had been going on all round us, in the spheres of thought and
conscience; and the earlier idea of individual service had been, not
swamped by, but expanded into, the nobler conception of corporate
endeavour.
It had been a work of time. The Christian Socialism of 1848--one of the
finest episodes in our moral history--had been trampled underfoot by the
wickedness of the Crimean War. To all appearance, it fell into the
ground and died. After two years of aimless bloodshed, peace was
restored in 1856, and a spell of national prosperity succeeded. The
Repeal of the Corn Laws had done its work; food was cheaper; times were
better; the revenue advanced "by leaps and bounds." But commercialism
was rampant. It was the heyday of the Ten Pound Householder and the
Middle Class Franchise. Mr. Podsnap and Mr. Gradgrind enounced the
social law. Bright and Cobden dominated political thinking. The
Universities were fast bound in the misery and iron of Mill and Bain.
Everywhere the same grim idols were worshipped--unrestricted
competition, the survival of the fittest, and universal selfishness
enthroned in the place which belonged to universal love. "The Devil take
the hindermost" was the motto of industrial life. "In the huge and
hideous cities, the awful problem of Industry lay like a bad dream; but
Political Economy warned us off that ground. We were assured that the
free play of competitive forces was bound to discover the true
equipoise. No intervention could really affect the inevitable outcome.
It could only hinder and disturb."[57] The Church, whose pride it had
been in remoter ages to be the Handmaid of the Poor, was bidden to leave
the Social Problem severely alone; and so ten years rolled by, while the
social pressure on labour became daily more grievous to be borne. But
meanwhile the change was proceeding underground, or at least out of
sight. Forces were working side by side which knew nothing of each
other, but which were all tending to the same result. The Church, boldly
casting aside the trammels which had bound her to wealth and culture,
went down into the slums; brought the beauty and romance of Worship to
the poorest and the most depraved, and compelled them to come in.
Whenever such a Church as St. Alban's, Holborn, or St. Barnabas, Oxford,
was established in the slums of a populous city, it became a centre not
only of religious influence, but of social, physical, and educational
reform. Ruskin's many-coloured wisdom, long recognized in the domain of
Art, began to win its way through economic darkness, and charged
cheerfully against the dismal strongholds of Supply and Demand. _Unto
this Last_ became a handbook for Social Reformers. The teaching of
Maurice filtered, through all sorts of unsuspected channels, into
literature and politics and churchmanship. In the intellectual world,
Huxley transformed "the Survival of the Fittest," by bidding us devote
ourselves to the task of fitting as many as possible to survive. At
Oxford, the "home" not of "lost" but of victorious "causes," T. H.
Green, wielding a spiritual influence which reached farther than that of
many bishops, taught that Freedom of Contract, if it is to be anything
but a callous fraud, implies conditions in which men are really free to
contract or to refuse; and insisted that all wholesome competition
implies "adequate equipment for the competitors."
It is impossible to say exactly how all these influences intertwined and
co-operated. One man was swayed by one force; another by another; and,
after long years of subterranean working, a moment came, as it comes to
the germinating seed deep-hidden in the furrow, when it must pierce the
superincumbent mass, and show its tiny point of life above ground.[58]
The General Election of 1880, by dethroning Lord Beaconsfield and
putting Gladstone in power, had fulfilled the strictly political objects
which during the preceding three years my friends and I had been trying
to attain. So we, who entered Parliament at that Election, were set
free, at the very outset of our public career, to work for the Social
Reform which we had at heart. We earnestly desired to make the lives of
our fellow-men healthier, sweeter, brighter, and more humane; and it was
an ennobling and invigorating ambition, lifting the pursuit of politics,
out of the vulgar dust of office-seeking and wire-pulling, into the
purer air of unselfish endeavour. To some of us it was much more; for it
meant the application of the Gospel of Christ to the practical business
of modern life. But the difficulties were enormous. The Liberal party
still clung to its miserable old mumpsimus of _Laissez-faire_, and
steadily refused to learn the new and nobler language of Social Service.
Alone among our leading men, Mr. Chamberlain seemed to apprehend the
truth that political reform is related to social reform as the means to
the end, and that Politics, in its widest sense, is the science of human
happiness.
But, in spite of all discouragements, we clung to "a Social Philosophy
which, however materialistic some of its tendencies might have become,
had been allied with the spiritual Hegelianism with which we had been
touched. It took its scientific shape in the hands of Karl Marx, but it
also floated to us, in dreams and visions, using our own Christian
language, and invoking the unity of the Social Body, as the Law of
Love, and the Solidarity of Humanity."[59]
At the sound of these voices the old idols fell--_Laissez-faire_ and
_Laissez-aller_, Individualism and Self-content, Unrestricted
Competition and the Survival of the Fittest. They all went down with a
crash, like so many dishonoured Dagons; and, before their startled
worshippers had time to reinstate them, yet another voice of warning
broke upon our ears. _The Bitter Cry of Outcast London_, describing the
enormous amount of preventable misery caused by over-crowding, startled
men into recognizing the duty of the State to cope with the evil. Then
came Henry George with his _Progress and Poverty_, and, as Dr. Holland
says, he "forced us on to new thinking." That "new thinking" took
something of this form--"Here are the urgent and grinding facts of human
misery. The Political Economy of such blind guides as Ricardo and
Bastiat and Fawcett has signally failed to cure or even mitigate them.
Now comes a new prophet with his gospel of the Single Tax. He may, or
may not, have found the remedy, but at any rate he has shown us more
clearly than ever the immensity of the evil, and our responsibility for
suffering it to continue. We profess and call ourselves Christians. Is
it not about time that, casting aside all human teachings, whether
Economic or Socialistic, we tried to see what the Gospel says about the
subject, and about our duty in regard to it?"
Out of this stress of mind and heart arose "The Christian Social Union."
It was founded in Lent, 1889, and it set forth its objects in the
following statement--
"This Union consists of Churchmen who have the following objects at
heart:--
(i) To claim for the Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule
social practice.
(ii) To study in common how to apply the moral truths and
principles of Christianity to the social and economic difficulties
of the present time.
(iii) To present CHRIST in practical life as the Living Master and
King, the enemy of wrong and selfishness, the power of
righteousness and love."
The Christian Social Union, originating with some Oxford men in London,
was soon reinforced from Cambridge, which had fallen under the inspiring
though impalpable influence of Westcott's teaching. Westcott was, in
some sense, the continuator of Mauricianism; and so, when Westcott
joined the Union, the two streams, of Mauricianism and of the Oxford
Movement, fused. Let Dr. Holland, with whom the work began, tell the
rest of the story--"We founded the C. S. U. under Westcott's
presidentship, leaving to the Guild of St. Matthew their old work of
justifying God to the People, while we devoted ourselves to converting
and impregnating the solid, stolid, flock of our own church folk within
the fold.... We had our work cut out for us in dislodging the horrible
cast-iron formulæ, which were indeed wholly obsolete, but which seemed
for that very reason to take tighter possession of their last refuge in
the bulk of the Church's laity."
"Let no man think that sudden in a minute
All is accomplished and the work is done;--
Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it,
Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun."[60]
The spirit which created the Christian Social Union found, in the same
year, an unexpected outlet in the secular sphere. In the Session of
1888, the Conservative Ministry, noting the general disgust which had
been aroused by the corrupt misgovernment of Greater London, passed the
"Local Government Act," which, among other provisions, made London into
a County, gave it a "County Council," and endowed that Council with
far-reaching powers. To social reformers this was a tremendous event.
For forty years they had been labouring to procure something of the
sort, and now it dropped down from the skies, and seemed at first almost
too good to be true. Under the shock of the surprise, London suddenly
awoke to the consciousness of a corporate life. On every side men were
stirred by an honest impulse to give the experiment a good start; to
work the new machine for all it was worth; and to make the
administration of Greater London a model for all lesser municipalities.
The Divisions of London, for the purposes of its new Council, were the
same as its Parliamentary Divisions, but each constituency returned two
members, and the City four. Every seat (except those for St. George's,
Hanover Square) was contested, and there were often as many as six or
seven candidates for one division. It was said at the time that "the
uncertainty of the issues, the multitude of candidates, and the
vagueness of parties made it impossible to tabulate the results with the
same accuracy and completeness which are possible in the case of the
House of Commons." Some candidates stood professedly as Liberals, and
others as Conservatives. The majority, however, declared themselves to
be "strictly non-political." Some leading objects, such as Better
Housing of the Poor, Sanitary Reform, and the abolition of jobbery and
corruption, were professed by all alike; and the main issues in dispute
were the control of the Police by the Council, the reform of the
Corporation of London and of the City Guilds, the abolition of dues on
coal coming into the Port of London, and the taxation of ground-rents.
In such projects as these it was easy to discern the working of the new
spirit. Men were trying, earnestly though amid much confusion, to
translate the doctrines of Social Reform into fact. "Practicable
Socialism" became the ideal of the reforming party, who styled
themselves "Progressives." Their opponents got the unfortunate name of
"Moderates"; and between the ideas roughly indicated by those two names
the battle was fought. The Election took place in January, 1889. The
result was that 71 candidates labelled "Progressive" were returned, and
47 "Moderates." The Act empowered the Council to complete its number by
electing 19 Aldermen. Of these, 18 were Progressives, and one was a
Moderate; so the total result was a "Progressive" majority of 41.
By the time of which I write I had become, by habitual residence, a
Londoner; and I hope I was as keen on Social Reform as anyone in London,
or outside it. But, after what I said in an earlier chapter, it will
surprise no one that I declined to be a candidate for the London County
Council. My dislike of electioneering is so intense that nothing on
earth except the prospect of a seat in Parliament would tempt me to
undertake it; so to all suggestions that I should stand in the
Progressive interest I turned a resolutely deaf ear. But, when the
election was over and the Progressive majority had to choose a list of
Aldermen, I saw my opportunity and volunteered my services. By the
goodwill of my friends on the Council, I was placed on the "Progressive
List," and on the 5th of February I was elected an Alderman for six
years. Among my colleagues were Lord Meath, Lord Lingen, Lord Hobhouse,
Mr. Quintin Hogg, Sir Thomas Farrer, and Mr. Frederic Harrison. Lord
Meath was accepted by the Progressive party, in recognition of his
devoted services to the cause of social amelioration, especially in the
matter of Public Gardens and Open Spaces; but, with this sole
exception, the list was frankly partisan. The Progressives had got a
majority on the new "Parliament of London," and had no notion of
watering it down.