THE LAST ACT
“Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, Thou!”
TENNYSON.
WE have reached the last stage, which is also the most critical one, of
our inquiry. It is upon the accounts which we have of Christ’s Agony
that the scornful denials of his manliness mainly rest. How, it is
asked, can you Christians recognise as perfect man, as the head and
representative of humanity, one who showed such signs of physical fear
and weakness as Christ, by your own confession, showed in the garden of
Gethsemane? Even without going to the roll of saints and martyrs,
hundreds of men and women can be named who have looked a cruel death in
the face without flinching, and endured tortures at least as painful as
His with a constancy which was wanting in Him.
It was, indeed, a speech of this kind, in which the death of the
Abolitionist leader, John Brown, was contrasted with that of Christ, as
one so far superior in manliness that it ought to be enough of itself to
shame Christians out of their superstition, which confirmed me in
proposing this inquiry to you, as the most necessary and useful one we
could engage in.
Now I freely admit that there is no recorded end of a life that I know
of more entirely brave and manly than this one of Captain John Brown, of
which we know every minutest detail, as it happened in the full glare of
our modern life not twenty years ago. About that I think there would
scarcely be disagreement anywhere. The very men who allowed him to lie
in his bloody clothes till the day of his execution, and then hanged
him, recognised this. “You are a game man, Captain Brown,” the southern
sheriff said in the waggon. “Yes,” he answered, “I was so brought up. It
was one of my mother’s lessons. From infancy I have not suffered from
physical fear. I have suffered a thousand times more from bashfulness”;
and then he kissed a negro child in its mother’s arms, and walked
cheerfully on to the scaffold, thankful that he was “allowed to die for
a cause, and not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must.”
There is no simpler or nobler record in the Book of Martyrs, and in
passing I would only remind you, that he at least was ready to
acknowledge from whence came his strength. “Christ, the great Captain of
liberty as well as of salvation,” he wrote just before his death, “saw
fit to take from me the sword of steel after I had carried it for a
time. But He has put another in my hand, the sword of the Spirit, and I
pray God to make me a faithful soldier wherever He may send me.” And to
a friend who left him with the words, “If you can be true to yourself to
the end how glad we shall be,” he answered, “I cannot say, but I do not
think I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.” The old
Abolitionist would have been as amazed as any man at such a comparison
as we are dealing with, and would have reminded us that, so far from
treading the wine-press alone, he was upheld by the sympathy and
enthusiasm of all of his own nation, and of the world outside his own
nation, for whom he cared.
No such support had Christ. He knew too well that even the strongest of
the little band which came with Him to the garden would deny Him before
the light dawned over Olivet. And that sense of utter loneliness it was,
more probably than all the rest of the burthen which He was carrying,
that wrung from Him the prayer of agony, recalled almost before it was
uttered, that the cup might pass from Him, and caused the sweat as it
were great drops of blood to fall from His brow as He knelt and prayed.
How the tradition of that agony and bloody sweat has come to us is hard
to say, as the nearest witnesses were asleep; but no Christian doubts
that it is a true one, or that the passion of human weakness which then
passed over His soul was a genuine shrinking from the unutterable
anguish which was weighing it down to the dust.
But even admitting frankly all that is recorded of the agony and bloody
sweat, such admission can only enhance the sublime courage of all that
follows. It is his action when the danger comes, not when he is in
solitary preparation for it, which marks the man of courage.
Let us just glance at this action. As Judas with his torchmen draws near
He gathers Himself together, rouses His sleepy followers, and meets His
enemy in the gate. There could have been no quailing in the glance
before which the armed crowd of priests’ retainers went backward and
fell to the ground.
Follow Him through that long night: to the Sanhedrim chamber, where He
Himself furnishes the evidence which the chief priest sought for in vain
while He was silent—to the court of the palace, where He bore the
ribaldry and dastard tortures and insults of the low Jewish crowd till
morning, turning in the midst of them with the reminding look to Peter,
which sent His last friend, broken down by the consciousness of his own
cowardice, weeping into the night—to the judgment-seat of Pilate, and
the scourgings of the Roman soldiers—to Herod’s hall and the insults of
the base Galilean court—back again to the judgment-seat of the
representative of the divine Tiberius, and so to the final brutalities
in the prætorium while the cross is preparing, and the blood which is
dripping from the crown of thorns on His brow, mingles with that which
flows from the wounds of His scourgings—and find, if you can, one
momentary sign of terror or of weakness.
In all the world’s annals there is nothing which approaches, in the
sublimity of its courage, that last conversation between the peasant
prisoner, by this time a mass of filth and blood, and the Roman
procurator, before Pilate led Him forth for the last time, and pleaded
scornfully with His nation for the life of their King. The canon from
which we started must guide us to the end. There must be no flaw or spot
on Christ’s courage, any more than on His wisdom, and tenderness, and
sympathy. And for the last time I repeat, the more unflinchingly we
apply the test, the more clear and sure will the response come back to
us.
We have been told recently, by more than one of those who profess to
have weighed and measured Christianity and found it wanting, that
religion must rest on reason, based on phenomena of this visible
tangible world in which we are living.
Be it so. There is no need for a Christian to object. He can meet this
challenge as well as any other. We need never be careful about choosing
our own battle-field. Looking, then, at that world as we see it,
labouring heavily along in our own time—as we hear of it through the
records of the ages—I must repeat that there is no phenomenon in it
comparable for a moment to this of Christ’s life and work. The more we
canvass and sift and weigh and balance the materials, the more clearly
and grandly does His figure rise before us, as the true Head of
humanity, the perfect Ideal not only of wisdom and tenderness and love,
but of courage also, because He was and is the simple Truth of God—the
expression, at last, in flesh and blood, of what He who created us means
each one of our race to be.
* * * * *
We have now finished our endeavour to look at the life of Christ from
one point of view, and in special connection with one human quality. I
trust it may prove to be only the first step for many of you in a study
which will last your lives. At any rate it is one which the reverence
which is felt by every member of this College for our founder ought to
commend to us above all others.
He, as you all know, was never weary of impressing on us, term after
term, year after year, that the aim of this place is to make good
citizens, and that this can only be done by keeping vividly before
ourselves, in all our work here, that common humanity which binds us all
together by the ties of family, of neighbourhood, of country. What that
common humanity means and implies, he taught us, can only be understood
by reference to a Son of man, and Son of God, in whom we have all a
common interest, through whom we have all a common spiritual
relationship to His and our Father.
To bring this home to us all, as the central truth of our own lives, as
the master-key of the confusions and perplexities in our own hearts, and
in the world around us, was the crowning work of his life, and I trust
we have been true to his principle and his method in our attempt to
realise the life of this Son of Man, and Son of God, on this earth,
which is so mysteriously at strife with the will of its Creator and
Redeemer.
Into the heart of the mystery of that strife the wisest and best of us
cannot penetrate, but the wayfaring man cannot help seeing that it is
precisely around this life of the Son of Man, and Son of God, that the
fiercest controversies of our time are raging. Is it not also becoming
clearer every day that they will continue to rage more and more
fiercely—that there can be no rest or peace possible for mankind—until
all things are subdued to Him, and brought into harmony with His life?
It is to this work that all Churches and Sects, Catholic and Protestant,
that all the leading nations of the world, known collectively as
Christendom, are pledged: and the time for redeeming that pledge is
running out rapidly, as the distress and perplexity, the threatening
disruption and anarchy, of Christendom too clearly show. It is to this
work too that you and I, every man and woman of us, are also called; and
if we would go about it with any hope and courage, it can only be by
keeping the life of Christ vividly before us day by day, and turning to
it as to a fountain in the desert, as to the shadow of a great rock in a
weary land.
From behind the shadow the still small voice—more awful than tempest or
earthquake—more sure and persistent than day and night—is always
sounding, full of hope and strength to the weariest of us all, “Be of
good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
πορεύου καὶ σὺ ποίει ὁμοίως.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONCLUSION[2]
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT CLIFTON COLLEGE, SUNDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 1879.
“They crowd upon us in this shade,
The youth who own the coming years—
Be never God or land betrayed
By any son our Harvard rears!”
THE REV. R. LOWELL.
WHAT is it in such societies as yours that gives them so strong a hold
on, so unique an attraction for, those who have been for years engaged
in the rough work of life? That the fact is so I think no one will deny,
explain it how they will. I at least cannot remember to have met with
any man who will not own that a visit to one of our great schools moves
and touches him on a side of his nature which for the most part lies
quiet, almost dormant, but which he feels it is good for him should be
stirred. He may go back to his work without an effort to explain to
himself why these unwonted sensations have visited him, but not without
a consciousness that he has had a change of air which has done him
good—that he has been in a bracing atmosphere, like that at the top of
some high mountain pass, where the morning sun strikes earlier and more
brightly than in the valleys where his daily task must be done.
To him who cares to pursue the inquiry, I think the conviction will
come, that to a stranger there is something at once inspiring and
pathetic in such societies as this, standing apart as they do from, and
yet so intimately connected with, the great outside world.
Inspiring, because he finds himself once again amongst those before whom
the golden gates of active life are about to open, for good or evil—each
one of whom holds in his hands the keys of those gates, the keys of
light or of darkness, amongst whom faith is strong, hope bright, and
ideals, untainted as yet by the world’s slow stain, still count for a
great power.
Pathetic, because he knows but too well how hard the path is to find,
how steep to climb, on the further side of those golden gates—how often
in the journey since he himself passed out from under them, his own
faith and hope have burned dimly, and his ideal has faded away as he
toiled on, or sat by the wayside, looking wistfully after it; till in
the dust and jar, the heat and strain of the mighty highway, he has been
again and again tempted to doubt whether it was indeed anything more
than a phantom exhalation, which had taken shape in the glorious morning
light, only to vanish when the work-day sun had risen fairly above the
horizon, and dispersed the coloured mists.
He may well be pardoned if, at such times, the remembrance of the actual
world in which he is living, and of the generation which moved into line
on the great battle-field when he himself shouldered musket and
knapsack, and passed into action out of the golden gates, should for a
moment or two bring the pathetic side of the picture into strongest
relief. “Where are they now who represented genius, valour,
self-sacrifice, the invisible heavenly world, to these? Are they dead?
Has the high ideal died out of them? Will it be better with the new
generation?”[3]
Such thoughts, such doubts, will force themselves at times on us all, to
be met as best we may. Happy the man who is able, not at all times and
in all places, but on the whole, to hold them resolutely at arm’s
length, and to follow straight on, though often wearily and painfully,
in the tracks of the divine visitor who stood by his side in his youth,
though sadly conscious of weary lengths of way, of gulfs and chasms,
which since those days have come to stretch and yawn between him and his
ideal—of the difference between the man God meant him to be—of the
manhood he thought he saw so clearly in those early days—and the man he
and the world have together managed to make of himself.
I say, happy is that man. I had almost said that no other than he is
happy in any true or noble sense, even in this hard materialist
nineteenth century, when the faith that the weak must to the wall, that
the strong alone are to survive, prevails as it never did before—which
on the surface seems specially to be organised for the destruction of
ideals and the quenching of enthusiasms. I feel deeply the
responsibility of making _any_ assertion on so moot a point to such an
audience in such a place as this; nevertheless, even in our materialist
age I must urge you all, as you would do good work in the world, to take
your stand resolutely and once for all, at school and all your lives
through, on the side of the idealists.
In doing so I trust and believe I shall not be running counter to the
teaching you are accustomed to hear in this place. I know that I
_should_ be running counter to it if anything I may say were to give the
least encouragement to dreaminess or dawdling. Let me say then at once
and emphatically, that nothing can be farther from my wish, or thought.
The only idealism I plead for is not only compatible with sustained and
vigorous work: it cannot be maintained without it.
The gospel of work is a true gospel, though not the only one, or the
highest, and has been preached in our day by great teachers. And I do
not deny that the advice I have just been giving you may seem at first
sight to conflict with the work-gospel. Listen, for instance, to the
ring of it in the rugged and incisive words of one of our strongest
poets.
“That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it.
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundreds soon hit.
This high man aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.”
This sounds like a deliberate attack on the idealist, a direct
preference of low to high aims and standards, of the seen to the unseen.
It is in reality only a wholesome warning against aiming at any ideal by
wrong methods, though the use of the words “low” and “high” is no doubt
likely to mislead. The true idealist has no quarrel with the lesson of
these lines; indeed he would be glad to see them written on one of the
door-posts of every great school, if only they were ballasted on the
other by George Herbert’s quaint and deeper wisdom,
“Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high,
So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be.
Sink not in spirit: who aimeth at the sky,
Shoots higher much than he that means a tree.”
Both sayings are true, and worth carrying in your minds as part of their
permanent furniture, and you will find that they will live there very
peaceably side by side.
There is in truth no real antagonism between them. The seeming paradox,
like so many others, disappears in the working world. In the stress of
the great battle of life it will trouble no soldier who keeps a single
eye in his head, and a sound heart in his bosom. For he who has the
clearest and intensest vision of what is at issue in that battle, and
who quits himself in it most manfully, will be the first to acknowledge
that for him there has been no approach to victory except by the
faithful doing day by day of the work which lay at his own threshold.
On the other hand the universal experience of mankind—the dreary
confession of those who have merely sought a “low thing,” and “gone on
adding one to one,” making that the aim and object of their lives—unite
in warning us that on these lines no true victory can be had, either for
the man himself or for the cause he was sent into the world to maintain.
No, there is no victory possible for boy or man without humility and
magnanimity; and no humility or magnanimity possible without an ideal. I
have been pleading with you boys to take sides with the idealists at
once and through life. I have told you unless you do so you can neither
be truly humble nor truly magnanimous. You may reply, “Well, that advice
may be good or bad, we cannot tell, until you tell us _how_ we are to
side with them, and what you mean by an idealist.” Such a reply would be
only reasonable, and I will try to answer the demand it makes, or at any
rate to give you a few hints which will enable you to work out the
question for yourselves.
There is not one amongst you all, I care not how young he may be, who
has not heard or felt the call in his own heart, to put aside all evil
habits, and to live a brave, simple, truthful life in this school. It
may have come to you while listening in chapel or elsewhere to religious
teaching, or in the play fields or dormitories; when you have been alone
or in company, at work or at play; but that it has come, at some time,
in some place, there is not a boy in this chapel who will deny. It is no
modern, no Christian, experience this. The choice of Hercules, and
numberless other Pagan stories, the witness of nearly all histories and
all literatures, attest that it is an experience common to all our race.
It is of it that the poet is thinking in those fine lines of Emerson
which are written up in the Hall of Marlborough College:—
“So close is glory to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can.’”
It does not wait for the reasoning powers to be developed, but comes
right in upon the boy himself, appealing to him to listen and follow.
It is this whisper, this call, which is the ground of what I have, for
want of a better name, been speaking of as idealism. Just in so far as
the boy listens to and welcomes it, he is becoming an idealist—one who
is rising out of himself, and into direct contact and communion with
spiritual influences, which, even when he shrinks from them, and tries
to put them aside, he feels and knows to be as real (and will live I
hope to acknowledge to be more real) than all influences coming to him
from the outside world—one who is bent on bringing himself and the world
into obedience to these spiritual influences. If he turns to meet the
call and answers ever so feebly and hesitatingly, it becomes clearer and
stronger. He will feel next, that just in so far as he is loyal to it he
is becoming loyal to his brethren: that he must not only build his own
life up in conformity with its teaching, must not only find or cut his
own way straight to what is fair and true and noble, but must help on
those who are around him and will come after him, and make the path
easier and plainer for them also.
I have indicated in outline, in a few sentences, a process which takes a
lifetime to work out. You all know too, alas! even those who have
already listened most earnestly to the voice, and followed most
faithfully, how many influences there are about you and within you which
stand across the first steps in the path, and bar your progress; which
are for ever dwarfing and distorting the ideal you are painfully
struggling after, and appealing to the cowardice, and laziness, and
impurity, which are in every one of us, to thwart obedience to the call.
But here, as elsewhere, it is the first step which costs, and tells. He
who has once taken that, consciously and resolutely, has gained a
vantage ground for all his life. That first step, remember, ought to be
taken by English boys at our English schools.
And here let me turn aside for a moment to note for you what seems to
me, looking from outside, the ideal for which you English boys should
just now be specially striving. The strength and weakness of the nation
of which you are a part will always be reflected powerfully in these
miniature Englands, and there is a national weakness which is alarming
all thoughtful Englishmen at this time. Our race on both sides of the
Atlantic has, for generations, got and spent money faster than any
other, and this spendthrift habit has had a baleful effect on English
life. It has made it more and more feverish and unsatisfying. The
standard of expenditure has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and
demoralising trade, society, every industry and every profession, until
a false ideal has established itself, and the aim of life is too
commonly to get, not to be, while men are valued more and more for what
they have, not for what they are.
The reaction has, I trust, set in. A period of depression, such as has
not been known for half a century, has come, happily in time to show us
how unreal and transitory is all such material prosperity, that a
nation’s life cannot stand any more than a man’s in the things which it
possesses. But the reign of Mammon will be hard to put down, and all
wholesome influences which can be brought to bear upon that evil
stronghold will be sorely needed.
Amongst these none should be more potent than that of our great schools.
It is probably too late for the present generation of grown men to
restore a sounder tone, and set up a higher ideal. Those by whom it must
be done, if it be done at all, are now growing up in such schools as
this. There can be, I fear, no question that the outside world has been
reflected in our schools. I hear on all sides stories of increased
expenditure of all kinds. There must be fancy dresses for all games, and
boys are made to feel uncomfortable who do not conform to the fashion,
or who practise such useful and often necessary economies as wearing old
clothes or travelling third-class. You know whether such things are true
here. If they are, they are sapping true manliness, and tainting our
national life at its roots. But the stain, I believe, has not sunk so
deep, and the reaction may be swifter and deeper than elsewhere in
societies bound together in so close an intimacy as must exist in such
schools as this.
In no other portions of English society can public opinion be modified
so swiftly and so radically as in a public school. One generation of
brave boys may do it, and a school generation is only a short four or
five years. I say then deliberately, that no man can gauge the value in
English life, at this present critical time, of a steady stream of young
men, flowing into all professions and all industries from our public
schools, who have learnt resolutely to use those words so hard to speak
in a society such as ours, “I can’t afford”; who have been trained to
have few wants and to serve these themselves, so that they may have
always something to spare, of power and of means, to help others; who
are “careless of the comfits and cushions of life,” and content to leave
them to the valets of all ranks. Many of us have hopes, from all we hear
and know of this and other such schools, that such a stream of free and
helpful young men may be looked for. Will you, boys, and above all you
elder boys, who can give a tone to the standards and ideals of to-day
here, which may last for many years, see that, so far at any rate as
Clifton is concerned, such hopes shall not be disappointed?
And take my word for it, while you will be doing a great work for your
country, and restoring an ideal which has all but faded out, you will be
taking the surest road to all such success as becomes honest men to
achieve, in whatever walk of life you may choose for yourselves. The
outlook is by no means cheerful even for those who have learnt to live
simply, and to estimate “comfits and cushions” at their true value,
either in England or elsewhere. The following of false ideals has, I
fear, thrown heavy odds for many years to come against the chances in
our modern life of those who will not bow down to them.
It is more than thirty years since the wisest of American writers, and
one of the best of American gentlemen, speaking to the young men of New
England, made much the same sad confession as I am making to you to-day.
“The young man,” he says, “on entering life finds the way to lucrative
employment blocked by abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the
borders of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders)
of fraud. The employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a
man, or less genial to his faculties; but these are now in their general
course so vitiated by derelictions and abuses, at which all connive,
that it requires more vigour and resources than can be expected of every
young man to right himself in them. Has he genius and virtue? the less
does he find them fit for him to grow in, and if he would thrive in them
he must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of boyhood and youth; he must
forget the prayers of his childhood, and must take on him the harness of
routine and obsequiousness.... I do not charge the merchant or
manufacturer. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no
individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Everybody partakes,
everybody confesses—with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet
none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse, he cannot
alter it.... It happens, therefore, that all such ingenuous souls as
feel in themselves the irrepressible strivings of a noble aim, who by
the law of their nature must act simply, find these ways of trade unfit
for them, and they come forth from it. Such cases are becoming more
common every day. But by coming out of trade you have not cleared
yourselves—the trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative
professions and practices of men. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a
very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success.” And so
further on he adds—“Considerations of this kind have turned the
attention of many philanthropists and intelligent persons to the claims
of manual labour as part of the education of every young man. If the
accumulated wealth of the past generation is thus tainted—no matter how
much of it is offered to us—we must begin to consider if it were not the
nobler part to renounce it, and to put ourselves into primary relations
with the soil and nature, and, abstaining from whatever is dishonest and
unclean, to take each of us bravely his part with his own hands in the
manual labour of the world.”
It is a sad confession that our modern society has come to such a pass,
but one which I fear holds as true for England as for America. That it
will continue so, no one who has faith in a righteous government of the
world can believe. There seem to me signs on all sides that it is coming
to an end, and that a new industrial world is already forming under the
wreck of the old. But the time of change must be one of sore trial, and
your generation will have to bear the strain of it. In such a time as
this they only will be able to help their country in her need who have
learnt in early life the great lessons of simplicity and self-denial,
and I don’t hesitate to say, that the worst education which teaches
simplicity and self-denial is better than the best which teaches all
else but this.
The first aim then for your time and your generation should be, to
foster, each in yourselves, and each in your school, a simple and
self-denying life—your ideal to be a true and useful one must have these
two characteristics before all others. Of course purity, courage,
truthfulness are as absolutely necessary as ever, without them there can
be no ideal at all. But as each age and each country has its own special
needs and weaknesses, so the best mind of its youth should be bent on
serving where the need is sorest, and bringing strength to the weak
places. There will be always crowds ready to fall in with the dapper
pliant ways which lead most readily to success in every community.
Society has been said to be “always and everywhere in conspiracy against
the true manhood of every one of its members”; and the saying, though
bitter, contains a sad truth. So the faithful idealist will have to
learn, without arrogance and with perfect good temper, to treat society
as a child, and never to allow it to dictate. So treated, society will
surely come round to those who have a high ideal before them, and
therefore firm ground under their feet.
“Coy Hebe flies from those that woo,
And shuns the hand would seize upon her;
Live thou thy life, and she will sue,
To pour for thee the cup of honour.”
Let me say a word or two more on this business of success. Is it not,
after all, the test of true and faithful work? Must it not be the
touchstone of the humble and magnanimous, as well as of the
self-asserting and ambitious? Undoubtedly; but here again we have to
note that what passes with society for success, and is so labelled by
public opinion, may well be, as often as not actually is, a bad kind of
failure.
Public opinion in our day has for instance been jubilant over the
success of those who have started in life penniless, and have made large
fortunes. Indeed this particular class of self-made men is the one which
we have been of late invited to honour. Before doing so, however, we
shall have to ask with some care, and bearing in mind Emerson’s
warnings, by what methods the fortune has been made. The rapid
accumulation of national wealth in England can scarcely be called a
success by any one who studies the methods by which it has been made,
and its effects on the national character. It may be otherwise with this
or that millionaire, but each case must be judged on its own merits.
I remember hearing, years ago, of an old merchant who on his death-bed
divided the results of long years of labour, some few hundreds in all,
amongst his sons. “It is little enough, my boys,” were almost his last
words, “but there isn’t a dirty shilling in the whole of it.” He had
been a successful man too, though not in the “self-made” sense. For his
ideal had been, not to make money, but to keep clean hands. And he had
been faithful to it.
In reading the stories of these last persons whom the English nation is
invited to honour, I am generally struck with the predominance of the
personal element. The key-note seems generally some resolve taken in
early youth connected with their own temporal advancement. This one will
be Lord Mayor; this other Prime Minister; a third determines to own a
fine estate near the place of his birth; a fourth to become head of the
business in which he started as an errand-boy. They did indeed achieve
their ends, were faithful to the idea they had set before themselves as
boys; but I doubt if we can put them anywhere but in the lower school of
idealists. For the predominant motive being self-assertion, their
idealism seems never to have got past the personal stage, which at best
is but a poor business as compared with the true thing. Try the case by
a test every one of you can apply directly and easily. One boy here
resolves—I will win this scholarship; I will be head of the school; I
will be captain of the eleven; and does it. Another resolves—this school
shall be purer in tone, simpler in habits, braver and stronger in
temper, for my presence here; does his best, but doubts after all
whether he has succeeded. I need not say that the latter is the best
idealist; but which is the most successful Clifton boy?
I must bring these remarks to an end, and yet have only been able to
touch, and that very lightly, the fringe of a great subject. I am sure
many of you have felt this; and I shall be surprised if some amongst you
are not already listening to me with a shade of jealousy in your minds,
which might formulate itself somehow perhaps thus:—“Is this talk about
idealism quite straightforward? Haven’t we heard all this
before?—Self-denial, simplicity of life, courage, and the rest, are they
not the first fruits of Christianity as we have been taught it? And we
have been told, too, that this call of which you have been talking is
the voice of Christ’s spirit speaking to ours. Can any good come of
swaddling these truths in other clothes which will scarcely fit them
better, or make them more easy, or more acceptable?”
To which I am glad to reply from my heart—Truly; so it is. _Rem acu
tetigisti._ Christ is, indeed, the great idealist. “Be ye perfect, as
your Father in heaven is perfect,” is the ideal He sets before us—the
only one which is permanent and all-sufficing. His own spirit communing
with ours _is_ that call which comes to every human being. But my object
has been to get you to-night to look at the facts of your own
experience—and, as I have said already, the youngest has _some_
experience in these deep matters—without connecting them for the moment
with any form of religion.
Supposing the whole Bible, every trace of Christendom, to disappear
to-morrow, the same thing would, nevertheless, be occurring to you, and
me, and every man. We should each of us still be conscious of a
presence, which we are quite sure is not ourself, in the deepest
recesses of our own heart, communing with us there and calling us to
take up our twofold birthright as man—the mastery over visible things,
and above all the mastery over our own bodies, actions, thoughts—and the
power, always growing, of this mysterious communion with the invisible.
It is therefore that I have abstained from the use of religious
phraseology, believing that, apart altogether from the Christian
revelation, the idealist will and must always remain nearest to the
invisible world, and therefore most powerful in this visible one.
I think this method is worth using now and then, because no doubt the
popular verdict of this time is against idealism. If you have not
already felt it, you will assuredly feel as soon as you leave these
walls, that your lot is cast in a world which longs for nothing so much
as to succeed in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot be
tested by the senses, and gauged and measured by the intellect, as the
trappings of a worn-out superstition.
Men have been trying, so runs the new gospel, to live by faith, and not
by sight, ever since there is any record at all of their lives; and so
they have had to manufacture for themselves the faiths they were to live
by. What is called the life of the soul or spirit, and the life of the
understanding, have been in conflict all this time, and the one has
always been gaining on the other. Stronghold after stronghold has
fallen, till it is clear almost to demonstration that there will soon be
no place left for that which was once deemed all-powerful. The spiritual
life can no longer be led honestly. Man has no knowledge of the
invisible upon which he can build. Let him own the truth and turn to
that upon which he _can_ build safely—the world of matter, his knowledge
of which is always growing; and be content with the things he can see
and taste and handle. Those who are telling you still in this time that
your life can and ought to be lived in daily communion with the
unseen—that so only you can loyally control the visible—are either
wilfully deceiving you, or are dreamers and visionaries.
So the high priests of the new gospel teach, and their teaching echoes
through our literature, and colours the life of the streets and markets
in a thousand ways; and a Mammon-ridden generation longing to be rid of
what they hope are only certain old and clumsy superstitions—which they
_try_ to believe injurious to others, and are quite sure make them
uneasy in their own efforts to eat, drink, and be merry—applauds as
openly as it dare, and hopes soon to see the millennium of the
flesh-pots publicly declared and recognised.
Against which, wherever you may encounter them, that you young
Englishmen may be ready and able to stand fast, is the hope and prayer
of many anxious hearts; in a time, charged on every side with signs of
the passing away of old things, such as have not been seen above the
horizon in Christendom since Luther nailed his protest on the church
door of a German village.
-----
Footnote 2:
Printed by request. T. H.
Footnote 3:
Emerson.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
DELIVERED ON 8TH FEBRUARY 1891, IN THE COURSE OF LAYMEN’S SUNDAY
EVENING ADDRESSES AT RUGBY.
JUST fifty years ago, in February 1841, I was a Rugby boy, sitting where
you sit now. That half-year was my last at school. It was Dr. Arnold’s
last year. He died in June 1842. I had been at the school for eight
years, and had gone through it from the third to the sixth, in the
School House. It had been a notable eight years in Rugby’s history.
Stanley and Vaughan were sixth form boys in their last year when I was a
new boy. I was Clough’s study fag. Matthew Arnold, the present Dean of
Westminster, and Franklin Lushington were my contemporaries. Theodore
Walrond was head of the school when I left, with Conington next, or next
but one, to him. I need not name a score of others
“fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cleanthum”
who have done good work for England in Church and State, in India and
the Colonies, in this eventful half-century. I only name those who occur
to me as the typical Rugbeians of those years. You can fill up the list
yourselves if you like from the school register. You will find it a
noteworthy roll-call.
When I was a new boy, Christmas 1833, the tide of religious and
political bigotry, which would surely have drowned a weaker man, was in
full flood against our headmaster. He was forbidden to preach the sermon
on the installation of Arthur Stanley’s father to the Bishopric of
Norwich. Many of his oldest and dearest Oxford friends were openly
alienated from him, and bitterly opposed to his teaching. Even those who
remained staunch were seriously alarmed at many of the doings and
sayings of this new type of headmaster.
When I left, the tide had turned. Even the (so-called) religious
newspapers were silenced. He had been made Queen’s Chaplain, and, what
he valued most, Professor of Modern History at his old university. In my
undergraduate year I attended his inaugural lecture and his first course
on Modern History, and witnessed the noble amends which Oxford then made
to one whom she now recognised as amongst her noblest and most attached
sons.
You may well believe then what a power Rugby has been in my life, and so
far as I can judge, in the life of most of my schoolfellows. For, though
there may be exceptions to the rule, it is undoubtedly true, that the
years from ten till eighteen or nineteen are those in which the seed is
sown and the bent given which determine the after-life of men. I passed
all those years under the spell of this place and Arnold, and for half a
century have never ceased to thank God for it.
My first duty then to-day is to confess this in the fullest and frankest
words. So far I have felt my course clear, but no further. From
circumstances to which I need not refer, my connection with Rugby has
been less close than with other schools. When my own boys were old
enough, I had to look round and choose the school which answered best to
the Rugby of my day. Happily for me—happily too for England—my choice
was ample. Three of my old schoolfellows were headmasters,—Vaughan of
Harrow, Bradley of Marlborough (where Bishop Cotton, my old private
tutor here, had preceded him), Bradby of Haileybury (in succession to
Arthur Butler, another distinguished Rugbeian). So my eldest son went to
Marlborough, and the younger ones to Haileybury, and I have thus seen
more of these daughters, as I may call them, of the old Rugby, than of
my own old school.
For attendance at Rugby dinners and flying visits on Speech days and
other special occasions, however pleasant, are not enough to keep one in
touch with the place—to know how far the old lines have been kept, the
old traditions cherished—what are the new tendencies and temptations
which have arisen as the years rolled by. And yet without such knowledge
how could I hope to respond to any good purpose to the desire of your
headmaster that I should deliver this address? A question which I own I
found it difficult to answer to my own satisfaction; but in such cases
one has no right to rely on one’s own judgment. Obedience to the man at
the helm is the only true rule; and so in deference to his wish I am
here to-night to do my best to justify his choice.
After thinking the matter over with some care, I resolved that I cannot
do better than give you my view of what it was that the average boy
carried away from our Rugby of half a century ago which stood him in the
best stead—was of the highest value to him in after-life. By the average
boy I mean, one who entered into the life and caught some of the spirit
of the place, without distinguishing himself as a scholar, or coming
under the direct personal teaching and influence of the man of genius
who was our headmaster. Indirectly, no boy could help being more or less
under that influence, for the air of the whole place was full of it.
I have been in some doubt as to what to put first, and am by no means
sure that the few who are left of my old schoolfellows would agree with
me; but, speaking for myself, I think this was our most marked
characteristic, the feeling that in school and close we were in training
for a big fight—were in fact already engaged in it—a fight which would
last all our lives, and try all our powers, physical, intellectual, and
moral, to the utmost. I need not say that this fight was the world-old
one of good with evil, of light and truth against darkness and lies, of
Christ against the devil.
Of course all education worthy of the name teaches this lesson
indirectly, but to have it vividly and directly brought home to us, as
it was here fifty years ago, was a boon beyond price. I have always
thought that it was his recognition of this in the Rugby boys of that
time which drew that well-known testimony from Dr. Moberly, then an
Oxford tutor, afterwards headmaster of Winchester, and one of the
greatest educators of our time,—“Arnold’s pupils,” he wrote, “brought up
to Oxford a quite different character from what we knew elsewhere. They
were thoughtful, manly-minded, conscious of duty and obligation when
they first came up; and we looked on him as exercising an influence for
good which (for how many years I know not) had been absolutely unknown
to our public schools.” But this testimony I believe could never have
been given had Arnold’s teaching stopped here. What gave, I think, the
character Dr. Moberly recognised to Rugby boys, was, not the mere
conviction that we were soldiers in a war, but that we were soldiers who
were absolutely sure to win if only we were true to our Captain,—that He
was actually present with every one of us, and would surely give the
battle to our hands if we would loyally surrender our wills to Him. Let
me express what I want to say in the noble words of Arnold’s most famous
pupil. You all, I hope, know A. Stanley’s hymn for Ascension Day. One
verse runs:
“He is gone, towards their goal
World and Church must onward roll.
Far behind we leave the past,
Forwards are our glances cast.
Still His words before us range
Through the ages as they change;
Wheresoe’er the Truth shall lead
He will give whate’er we need.”
The youngest boy here, we were taught in no faltering speech, has an
utterly trustworthy guide in his own heart and conscience, if he will
only listen to Him and trust Him—if he will only follow the Truth and go
forward boldly. “It is a lying spirit,” was one of Arnold’s most
emphatic sayings, “that says, ‘Look backwards.’”
There was an inspiring ring in such teaching as this; and for my part,
with half-a-century’s experience behind me, I hold it to-day to be
simply and absolutely true, in spite of oft-repeated criticisms as to
Arnold’s methods in teaching and ruling. It is written of the most
self-willed of American Presidents:
“He couldn’t see but jest one side;
Ef his ’twas God’s, and that was plenty:
And so his ‘forrard’ multiplied
An army’s fighting power by twenty.”
And I have heard the words applied to Arnold. His habit of ignoring the
other side of questions, it has been urged, combined with his
masterfulness of character, when brought to bear on young minds,
exercised an influence on them, which, though undoubtedly powerful, was
by no means free from serious drawbacks; and often had the effect of
making his pupils dogmatists, or of weakening their hold on truth in
after years, when they came to know the difficulties which surround all
the serious problems of our complicated and rudderless time.
Were that criticism true it would be undoubtedly damaging; but, is it
true? In preparing this address I once more read through his lectures on
Modern History and Stanley’s Life, and rose from them with my own old
memories and belief confirmed, that never was there a teacher who took
more conscientious pains to understand himself, and make his pupils see
all sides of, the political and social problems which met them in their
reading. But, while scrupulously fair in weighing both sides, there was
no faltering or counting the cost in his own verdicts—no “patting the
devil on the back and calling him poor mistaken angel.” And I am
inclined to think (though by no means sure at this distance of time that
it is not a mere afterthought) that this vigour and directness may have
made some of his pupils, though not those who had profited most by his
teaching, more ready to take sides, and more sure of their own
judgments, than young men on entering life ought to be. In my own case,
at any rate—the only one in which a man can really speak with
confidence—I think on looking back I can detect a readiness to take
sides before I had qualified myself to judge which was right and which
wrong. And perhaps this was more or less characteristic of a good many
Rugbeians of that day, of whom it might be said in the words of Hosea
Biglow—
“Nothin’ from Adam’s fall to Huldy’s bonnet
That we warn’t full cocked with our judgment on it.”
But we paid for our haste. For one of the results of this characteristic
was that old Rugby friends of that time were apt to find themselves,
both at the universities and in active life, not only in opposite camps,
but in sharp antagonism. There were burning questions then as now which
divided men sharply, such as the Tractarian movement and the People’s
Charter; and like Home Rule to-day were of a kind which tried
friendships to the breaking-point. If you boys know A. Clough’s poems as
you ought, you must remember those lines in which this pathetic side of
the after-life of many of Arnold’s pupils, as it had been of his own
life, is touched so vividly and tenderly:—
“Qua cursum ventus.
As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day
Are scarce long leagues apart descried;
When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side:
E’en so—but why the tale reveal
Of those, whom year by year unchanged,
Brief absence joined anew to feel,
Astounded, soul from soul estranged?
At dead of night their sails were filled,
And onward each rejoicing steered—
Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,
Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!
To veer, how vain! On, onward strain,
Brave barks! In light, in darkness too,
Through winds and tides one compass guides—
To that, and your own selves, be true.
But O blithe breeze; and O great seas,
Though ne’er, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last.
One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose hold where’er they fare,—
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas!
At last, at last, unite them there!”
So far I have been able to speak with confidence, but I cannot do so on
the next point. For I cannot be sure now whether it was while at school
or after I had left, though I am quite sure it was from Arnold’s
teaching, that I learnt the invaluable lesson in early life, that there
are subjects—such as the origin of evil, and the co-existence of man’s
free will and God’s omnipotence and omniscience—which lie beyond the
range of the human intellect; and before which, if we are in a healthy
moral state, we shall be content to sit down patiently and quietly,
without attempting to solve problems which lie at depths which no lead
or line of man’s invention can ever sound. Let me enforce this lesson in
his own words—“It should always be remembered that there are
difficulties in the way of all religion which can never be solved by
human powers. Intellectually, we can point out the greater difficulties
of Atheism and Scepticism. Practically, they yield to faith sought in
God’s way by doing His will.” “Living thus by faith, a man finds that
his course is one of perfect light: the moral result is so certain that
he is sure he has truth on his side.”
I have tried to indicate the main lines of the education we got here
fifty years ago (apart, of course, from our school studies). It was
undoubtedly before all things training for a big fight—or rather for
_the_ big fight to which we had all been pledged at our baptism,
“manfully to fight under Christ’s banner against sin, the world, and the
devil, and to continue His faithful soldiers and servants unto our
life’s end.”
And has not this, my young schoolfellows, been the aim of all education
in England worthy of the name since Alfred, a thousand years ago, caused
to be written up on the walls of his schools,
“With all thy might
Stand by the right,
And be thou strong
Against the wrong.”
It was probably brought more vividly before Rugby boys in Arnold’s time
than has often been the case in our schools, as he was himself so
essentially a fighting man—“one,” to use his own words, “whose spirit of
pugnacity would rejoice in fighting out this battle in a saw-pit.” But
the more you think of it, and the longer you live, the more firmly will
you get to hold the truth, that you _must_ be fighting men if you would
keep your self-respect, or do any stroke of work worth doing in this
tough old world. If you learn here to make pleasure or comfort or
success your aim, or to turn aside to any siren call from the steady
summons of duty, depend upon it, even if you attain them, you will find
long before you reach my age, that they have turned into ashes in your
mouth, and are like Dead Sea apples, fair to look on, but only fit for
the dust-heap.
There will always be plenty of men in all times, especially in old and
rich countries, who take no side on great questions, having enough work
and enjoyment to satisfy all their own wants, like Isaak Walton and his
friends in our great civil war. Of them Arnold said, “I know not how the
peaceableness of such persons can be either admirable or amiable”;
contrasting them with Lord Falkland and others, who left the popular
side when it was triumphing, and joined the opposite ranks without
changing their principles or becoming renegades. Such men, he taught us,
are amongst the noblest characters in history; but they change their
sides not to conquer but to die—uncheered by sympathy, and therefore the
purest of martyrs. These were the models he set before Rugby boys in my
time, and lived up to himself. Our spokesman of that time, the most
typical poet that Rugby has bred, sang of such—
“So thou but strive, thou soon shalt see
Defeat itself is victory.”
Or, if that saying seem to you mere paradox, take this expansion of it
in one of the noblest of his later poems—
“Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.”
Well, my boys, I can fancy that by this time some of you are thinking
that I might as well turn to the Rugby of to-day, if I have anything to
say about it, instead of dwelling all the time on the old Rugby of
half-a-century ago. And so I will turn, for the few minutes that are
left to me, to the present and the future. But after all, the times
differ much less, in this place at any rate, than would appear
superficially. It is still the old fight you are training for as we
were, and must be fought under the old banner and with the old weapons.
No doubt some of the old pitfalls have been filled up, and new ones
opened by the enemy, who is always alert and on the watch for the
laggards and the half-hearted. And, judging from my general
experience—for as I have confessed already my special experience here is
scarcely more than that of a stranger—I think that one of the sides on
which the attack presses more than of old lies in the temptation and
tendency to careless expense; and to a taking it for granted that the
world is to be made easy for you; that you have all a sort of
prescriptive right to enjoyments and advantages: or, as the Americans
say, “to a good time,” without any special effort or vigilance of your
own. Depend upon it, all such notions are lies, and come from the father
of lies. The more you train yourselves here to do everything for
yourselves—even in your games—to look for no good thing for which you
have not strenuously striven yourselves—the better and happier men will
you be in after-life. Happy is the man, has been most truly said, who
can help himself, for he shall be waited upon. The most pitiable man in
these, or indeed in any, times, is he who has only learned to ring a
bell. And as to carelessness in expense, no doubt England is immensely
richer than it was fifty years ago, and so probably you come mostly from
richer homes than we did. But for all that, I am quite sure that there
must be many boys here who are only kept here by friends to whom the
cost is a serious consideration. To all such I would say that there is
no discipline of more value than to learn to say frankly and positively,
and to act on the words, “I can’t afford it.”
And now my time is up, and I have only to wish our noble old school and
you of this generation who belong to it, God’s speed.
It is allowed to few men to revisit their old boyish haunts, and revive
old school memories, after fifty years, and to come in touch with one
company of that great host in whose hands the future of our England
rests for good or ill, who are even now buckling on the armour which we
are laying down.
If ever one of you should chance to come back here in 1940 to speak to
the Rugby boys who will then be sitting on those benches, he will know
how pathetic an experience it is: he will be able to appreciate the
solemn but yet hopeful thoughts which crowd on me to-night—solemn
indeed, but yet full of hope. For I will never believe that the living
faith which was breathed into this school fifty years ago will ever be
allowed to fade out while the world stands: the faith which made the
Rugby of my time a missionary school, from which the whole higher
education of England drew a new inspiration, and a new life: the faith,
once more to quote Arnold’s own words, “which is the opposite of all
idolatry, the doctrine of the person of Christ, not His church, not His
sacraments, not His teaching: not even the truths about Him, or the
virtues He most enforced, but Himself—the only object which bars
fanaticism and idolatry on the one hand and gives life and power to all
morality on the other.”
Keep Him alive in your hearts, my boys, and go forward bravely, you
“Who stand before us in this shade,
The youth who own the coming years:
Be never God or land betrayed
By any son our Rugby rears.”[4]
-----
Footnote 4:
It is not “Rugby” but “Harvard” in the original, which is taken from
the Commemoration hymn written by the Rev. J. R. Lowell.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED ON 12TH JUNE 1892, THE ANNIVERSARY OF DR.
ARNOLD’S DEATH.
WE are gathered here on this great Christian festival to keep what I
may, with our preacher of this afternoon, call our second founder’s day.
I am sure that every good Rugbeian is proud of Queen Elizabeth’s sturdy
and loyal grocer, who bore testimony to his “gracious lady and mistress”
before Bishop Bonner and the other commissioners of her sister, at the
risk of being burnt as a heretic in Smithfield. Lawrence Sheriff’s day,
20th October, will never be forgotten or neglected in this place. But,
as the United States do wisely and well to recognise Abraham Lincoln as
the second father and founder of their Republic, so may we rightly
honour Thomas Arnold as the second father and founder of Rugby School,
and set apart this 12th of June, the day on which he passed away here
fifty years ago, as one to be kept sacred to his memory.
This Saint’s day then I hope and believe will be kept while Rugby
stands, for in so keeping it we are carrying out his own wish, that the
English Church might learn in the new time to restore, amongst other
practices she has abandoned, “Commemorations of holy men of all times
and all countries.”
This 12th of June is then the 50th anniversary of the death of our
second founder, who was taken in the fulness of his strength, and in the
hour of his triumph, when his long battle was really won, and his old
university, and his country, were vying with one another to honour the
man, who it was at last recognised had raised the true standard of
education again in England, and had inspired it with a soul and a
purpose which it had wanted since Elizabeth’s day.
I am here to-night to tell you what I can from my own experience of this
great life’s work. First, however, let me give it you in the words of
his poet son, from the lines on Rugby Chapel, which I hope are well
known to most of you:
“O strong soul, by what shore
Tarriest thou now? For that force,
Surely, has not been left vain!
Somewhere, surely, afar,
In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being, is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm!
Yes, in some far-shining sphere,
Conscious or not of the past,
Still thou performest the word
Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live—
Prompt, unwearied, as here!
Still thou upraisest with zeal
The humble good from the ground,
Sternly repressest the bad!
Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse
Those who with half-open eyes
Tread the border-land dim,
’Twixt vice and virtue; reviv’st,
Succourest!—this was thy work,
This was thy life upon earth.”
And surely such is the work still of such as he, the born leaders of
men; and in the darkest hour, again and again will such as they come to
our minds when our need is sorest.
“Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, reinspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.”
Such prosaic details of personal experience as I can give you, my boys,
will fall flat enough after a trumpet call like this; but they are what
I am come here to give you, and I will try to give them as simply and
truthfully as I can.
Nearly forty years ago, when I first came across, in Stanley’s _Life of
Arnold_, a passage in one of his letters to a friend as to the treatment
of unpromising pupils, describing it as “very often like kicking a
football up hill,” the truth as well as the humour of the saying came
home to me very vividly—“You kick it onwards,” he says, “twenty yards,
and it rolls back nineteen: still you have gained one yard, and thus in
a good many kicks you make some progress.”
Now I don’t believe that any boy had more reason than I to be thankful
for this kicking-up process, and for the Doctor’s patient use of it. As
long as you didn’t roll back _more_ than the nineteen yards he stuck to
you, and used whatever germ he could detect of intellectual activity in
you to rouse you, and hinder the fatal rolling back over the twentieth
yard of the descent.
I will illustrate this by my own case. I went up to Rugby at ten from a
preparatory school for Winchester, where a different grammar from the
Rugby one was in use, and we were taught a different pronunciation of
Greek. Partly owing to discouragement at first from this cause, but more
to my inaptitude for languages and excessive fondness for games, I soon
lost any real interest in the form work, and only did just enough to get
my yearly remove. On the other hand I was fond of reading history and
current literature, and knew more of both than most of my form-fellows.
So for three years I was kicked slowly up the school hill, in no small
danger all the time of rolling back over the twentieth yard, and so
ending my school career. However, I managed to arrive safely in the
Shell, though I fear with the character of a boy who took little
interest in his work, and never did more than he could help.
In those days the Doctor used to come round once a month and examine
each form in some book they had been reading, an ordeal which all but
the brightest and best boys looked forward to with no little uneasiness.
I was very low in the Shell when he came round to examine us in the
first book of Horace’s Odes, and towards the end of the terrible hour
asked the head of the form, who was construing the 11th Ode, what made
the Romans so especially grateful to Augustus in his dealings with the
Parthians. He and some other boys made shots, but the Doctor shook his
head, and the question came slowly down past some thirty boys to me,
when I timidly ventured “the recovery of the eagles and standards taken
from Crassus.” “Quite right! Go up!” the Doctor said, evidently pleased;
and I marched up for the first time to the top of my form. My stay in
that exalted region was short, but from that time I felt his manner to
me changed. He may have noticed, too, that I had taken a volume of Sir
W. Raleigh’s _History of the World_ out of the school library, and found
out that I was familiar with Scott’s poetry and novels. At any rate,
from that time I used to fancy he always gave me an easy piece to
construe, and instead of horrid questions on grammar and scholarship,
would ask for some illustration of the passage from an English classic.
I will give the last instance I remember of this method in the Doctor’s
teaching. It was in my last half at school when I had reached the lower
bench of the sixth. We were reading the second book of Aristotle’s
_Rhetorica_, and had come to the chapter on old men, whom that
disagreeable philosopher describes as μικρόψυχοι—“small-souled”—caring
about nothing great, but only what tends to the ease of their own lives.
“Do you remember a striking illustration of this in one of Scott’s
novels?” the Doctor asked the head of the school, Theodore Walrond.—No
answer, and the question came all round the form,—when it came to me he
paused for several seconds and seemed disappointed (so at least I
thought) when he had to pass on. I shall remember the pang of
self-reproach which shot through me to the last day of my life. No one
answered, so he referred us to the end of the Abbot, where in her flight
after the defeat of Langside, Queen Mary with her small band of devoted
followers pause at the convent garden on the Border, where the old monk
is digging. He leans on his spade watching them, as they ride off, and
mutters, “I could pity this poor Queen and these men. But what are these
things to a man of fourscore? and it’s a fine dropping morning for the
young kale wort.”
As I have just told you, I shall always remember the sore feeling at
having disappointed him whom of all men I most wished to please, when
that question passed me. But this after all was only an intellectual
failure. I wish I could stop here, but as I have come to make a clean
breast to you my young schoolfellows, I have a further confession to
make which I hope may be of use as a warning to some of you. I was
captain of Big-Side in my last year, which, as you all know, involves
the practical control of the Cricket and Football Funds. Now there was a
custom in those days to have a School House supper on the last day
before the Christmas holidays, the cost of which was paid out of the
Big-Side fund. The Doctor’s leave had to be asked, but it was looked
upon as a matter of course, and so, great and sore was the surprise and
indignation, when on the eve of the Christmas holidays 1841, a message
came from the Doctor that there was to be no house supper. There can be
no doubt he was perfectly in the right, as “Big-Side fund” belonged to
the whole school, and it was a misappropriation of trust funds to spend
any part of it for the benefit of a single house. But this objection I
don’t think occurred to any one, and the indignant athletes determined,
as there could be no house supper, there should be a smaller one of
select men for which no leave should be asked. The necessary funds could
not have been reached except with my consent, and this I gave without
thought, as I rather sympathised with the rebels; and I not only let
them have the money but went to the supper. As old Thomas would of
course give out no beer, several bottles of wine and spirits were
smuggled into the house, with the result that some half-dozen of the
wilder spirits got uproariously drunk, and besides destroying some of
the Library books, made a serious row in the bed-rooms and damaged some
of the furniture. I went off by an early train next morning, but was so
thoroughly ashamed that I wrote, on reaching home, to the Doctor to tell
him I had been at the party. I transcribe a part of his answer from the
old yellow sheet which I have kept religiously from that day.
“FOX HOWE, Dec. 18, 1840.
“MY DEAR HUGHES—I did not know nor should I probably ever
have known of your share in the business of Friday last had
it not been for your own letter. Officially, therefore, I do
not know it now—for of course it would be utterly out of the
question to use your own letter as evidence against you. The
matter therefore being set at rest so far as any public
notice of your conduct is concerned, I have the less
difficulty in writing to you fully and plainly, not as
master of Rugby school, but as an old acquaintance of your
father’s, and as a man who feels very sincerely interested
about yourself. I cannot deny that your letter gave me a
very great and unexpected shock; for I had no notion that
you or any one else in the sixth form was concerned with the
party. I have been so accustomed on these points to feel
confidence in the sixth form, that I really am apt to have
no suspicion whatever of them in such matters; and I am
quite sure that if I am obliged to resign this confidence
the school must speedily go to ruin. Farther, I think that
according to my school recollections, good and steady
fellows at Winchester would have taken no part in such a
business, and it would grieve me very much to think that at
Rugby such characters could not equally be depended
upon—that companionship or any other motives might lead into
mischief those on whom I ought to be able to rely.”
I will not quote further from this and another later letter; but, though
no eye but mine has seen them till to-day, I felt that I could not
honestly speak to you to-night without alluding to this matter. Perhaps
some of you may have noticed in the anonymous dedication of _Tom Brown’s
Schooldays_ to Mrs. Arnold, the words “who owes more than he can ever
acknowledge or repay to her and her’s.” You will now perhaps understand
them. It may also, perhaps, encourage some one here or there to take
heart again, on seeing how a moral breakdown in early life, if wisely
handled by a master like Arnold, may become a source of strength in
later years.
These few memories of Arnold as headmaster may fitly close with his
parting words to a favourite pupil, “Whatever profession you choose
doesn’t much matter if you follow steadily our great common profession,
Christ’s service.” I believe that our loyalty to his memory in this
place would be as genuine if his work had begun and ended here, as our
great Headmaster and second founder; but a crowd of the foremost of
living Englishmen would not be going to meet in the Jerusalem Chamber
to-morrow, to arrange for a worthy memorial to him in the Abbey, fifty
years after his death, if he had not been a great benefactor to England
outside these walls.
Let me in conclusion, then, glance shortly at his work for the nation.
As an historian I believe there is not one of the brilliant group of
writers of history in the last half-century but would acknowledge their
debt to his example and his method; but I am not an expert, and so will
say no more on this point. To some extent, however, I can speak as an
expert as to the movement which has revolutionised the social and
industrial life of England in the last fifty years; and with the
exceptions, perhaps, of Mr. Maurice’s and Lord Shaftesbury’s, I know of
no name which can be put before Dr. Arnold’s amongst those who, in the
first rank, have helped to tide our country over the dangerous time of
that crisis, which came to a head in Europe in 1848, and is still trying
and proving every nation in Christendom.
After watching for years the condition into which the Corn Laws on the
one hand, and the orthodox dogma of the Economists of that day (of
salvation by _laissez-faire_—or by buying in the cheapest and selling in
the dearest markets)—he was convinced in 1831, to put it in his own
words, that a time was at hand “when the devil will fight his best in
good earnest.” In the October of that year he wrote to a friend, after
describing his field of wholesome and happy labour in his family and the
school, “but my sense of the evils of the times, and to what prospects I
am bringing up my children, is overwhelmingly bitter. All in the moral
and physical world appears so exactly to announce the coming of the
“great day of the Lord,” _i.e._ a period of fearful visitation to
terminate the existing state of things—whether to terminate the whole
existence of the human race neither man nor angel knows—that no
entireness of private happiness can possibly close my mind against the
sense of it.”
And so, as he could not close his eyes to the danger but was haunted by
it, he set to work to combat “the two great opposite forms of human
wickedness”—priestcraft and Benthamism—or, as he called them, “white and
red Jacobinism”—and went into the fight with all the thoroughness and
independence which made him such a power in whatever he undertook. He
could find no place in which he could speak out in the Press, and so
started a weekly journal of his own, _The Englishman’s Register_,
without any illusion as to its prospects. “Every selfish motive,” he
writes, “would deter me from the _Register_: it will be a pecuniary
loss, it will bring me no credit, but much trouble and probably abuse,
and some of my dearest friends look on it not only coldly, but with
aversion. But I _do_ think it a most solemn duty to make the attempt.”
He put his nephew, Mr. Ward, in as editor, writing the principal leaders
himself and giving a general supervision. “The difficulty of the
undertaking,” he soon found, “is indeed most serious. All the Tories
turn from me as a Liberal, whilst the strong Reformers think me timid
and half corrupt.” And again, “If I had two necks I should think I had a
good chance of being hanged by both sides, as I think I shall by the one
that gets the better if it comes to a fight; there is not a man in
England who is less a party man than I am, for in fact no party would
own me.” A year later he writes, “_Experto crede_, it is expensive work
to push an infant journal up hill.”
The life of the _Register_ was short, but it did good work, and by
introducing him to the _Sheffield Courant_ gave him the opening he
wanted for the future. He was, I think, scarcely prepared for the flood
of angry and scurrilous abuse and ridicule which the _Register_ drew on
him (notably from Theodore Hook in the _John Bull_), but he was
splendidly indifferent to it all. “It is an immense blessing,” was his
answer to indignant friends, “to be perfectly callous to ridicule, or,
which comes to the same thing, to be thoroughly conscious that what we
have in us of noble and delicate is not ridiculous to any but fools, and
that, if fools will laugh, wise men will do well to let them.” And
again, “I have lived for many years in entire indifference to the
opinion of people, unless I have reason to think them good and wise; and
I wish my friends would share this indifference as far as I am
concerned.”
It would be out of place here to go into any detail as to these
political writings, or to do more than glance at his long struggle on
the council of the London University for the necessity of maintaining a
Christian character in national education. With astonishing patience he
tried again and again to find a common ground with his colleagues, and
only left them when convinced that it was hopeless, thereby drawing on
himself more suspicion and attacks from quite a different quarter.
“Better go on as we are than set up national education on any but a
Christian basis,” was his final decision; for “the moment you enter on
moral subjects—history or philosophy—you must be Christian or
Antichristian.” And again, “What is the impartiality talked of? That a
man shall be neither a Christian, nor yet not a Christian? The fact is,
that religious veneration is inconsistent with what is called
impartiality, which means that you see some good and some evil on both
sides, and so identify yourselves with neither, and can judge of both.
That is true of all persons and things human; not of what is divine. If
Christ was no more than Socrates, I can speak of Him impartially: can
judge Him: but if I believe in Him, I am not His judge, but His servant
and creature. He claims the devotion of my whole nature, for He is
identical with goodness, wisdom, holiness.”
And thus I come naturally to the last part of our subject, the influence
of Arnold on the spiritual or religious life of England. In his last
years the time of a great revival had come, which would cast that life,
as it were, in a new mould—into what mould was the vital question. The
decisive crisis was in its most acute phase when he passed away fifty
years ago. How well I remember it, for I was at its very centre from
1842 to 1845, at Oriel, Arnold’s own college, and that of the foremost
men in the Tractarian movement—of Newman, Keble, and Hurrell Froude, of
Pusey, and Marriott, and Church—when Tract Ninety was dividing Oxford
common-rooms into hostile camps, and its author was spending the last
sad years at Littlemore before leaving the church of his fathers, and
dragging with or after him some of the brightest and best of my
contemporaries. It was a time of sore rebuke and distress to our church,
and to none of its sons sorer than to Arnold, scores of whose pupils
were in residence.
At Oxford in those years, Bishop Cotton, my last tutor here, had given
me, when I left school, the volume of _Sermons on Christian Life_,
published in 1841, and I had read the famous introduction again and
again in the Christmas holidays before I went up to Oriel. The pathos of
that appeal came right home to me, and I think, even if my reason and
conscience had remained unconvinced, I could not have resisted it. “Mr.
Newman’s system,” he wrote, “is now at its flood; it is daily making
converts; it is daily swelled by many of those who neither love it nor
understand it, but who hope to make it serve their purpose, or like to
swim with the stream. A strong profession therefore of an opposite faith
at the present moment must expect to meet with little favour; nor indeed
have I any hope of turning the tide, which will flow for its appointed
season, and its ebb does not seem to be at hand. But whilst the
hurricane rages, those exposed to it may well encourage one another to
hold fast their own foundations against it; and many are exposed to it
in whose welfare I naturally have the deepest interest, and in whom old
impressions may be supposed to have still so much force that I may claim
for them, at least, a patient hearing.” But far from remaining
unconvinced, both my reason and conscience went frankly and cordially
with him when he urged, “Christ’s church is absolutely without a human
earthly priesthood, for it has the eternal priesthood of Christ which
leaves no place for any other; there is no priesthood without mediation,
and we have one mediator, the man Christ Jesus. Do we want the priest
for sacrifice? Nay, there is no place for him at all; for our one
atoning sacrifice has been once offered, and by its virtue we are
enabled to offer daily our spiritual sacrifices of ourselves, which no
other man can offer for us. Do we want him for intercession? Nay, there
is one who ever liveth to make intercession for us, through whom we have
access to the Father, and for whose sake Paul, Apollos and Peter, and
things present and things to come, are ours already.”
And so I and many others passed through that time unscathed, and all the
more easily because he had also taught us that all there is of good, or
noble, or self-denying, in this system is altogether independent of the
doctrine of the priesthood—that there are many good practices in the
Romish Church which it would be most desirable to restore among
ourselves, such as “daily church services, frequent communions,
memorials of our Christian calling continually presented to our notice,
in crosses and wayside oratories, commemorations of holy men of all
times and all countries; the doctrine of the communion of saints
practically taught; religious orders, especially of women, of different
kinds, and under different rules, delivered only from the snare and sin
of perpetual vows.” So he pleaded in 1841. Half a century has gone by
since those words were written. The movement which was to remould the
Church, and human society through the Church, is still with us; several
of the good practices which Arnold approved have established themselves
already, the rest seem to be on the way. But how stands the crucial
question of the priesthood? Is the Church Arnold loved so well and
served so faithfully destined to lose all truly courageous faith, and to
teach her children cowardly to crave for some man, as liable to sin as
themselves, to stand between them and Christ, who has redeemed them, and
bidden them to come straight to Him? Upon the answer which your
generation will give to that question depends, I believe, more than upon
anything else, the future of England. May it be that for which Arnold
pleaded half a century ago, and which the brave old Poet Laureate has
voiced for us of this generation who are passing away, in his latest
words,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WILLIAM COTTON OSWELL
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT RUGBY SCHOOL ON 24TH JUNE 1894
I HOPE you boys in this last decade of the century are as great
hero-worshippers as we were in the fourth. Speech-day, 1834, was the
first I was at, as I had come as a new boy in February of that year,
just sixty years ago. It was held at Easter then, in the middle of the
long half-year, which lasted for five months with only a break of three
days. That year, 1834, was a famous one for Rugby. At Oxford, Arthur
Stanley had got a Balliol, and at Cambridge, Dean Vaughan a Trinity
scholarship, while still sixth-form boys, and the reputation of the
school was going up by leaps and bounds at the universities and in the
country. But though we small boys were proud in a way of Stanley and
Vaughan, of Clough and Burbidge, and other scholars and poets, we looked
on them more as providential providers of extra half-holidays than with
the enthusiasm of hero-worship. This we reserved for the kings of the
Close, round whom clustered legends of personal encounters with drovers
at the monthly cattle-fairs (which were then held in High Street, and
came right up to the school gates, tempting curious yokels to trespass
on the sacred precincts), or the navvies who were laying down the first
line of the London and North-Western Railway, or the gamekeepers of a
neighbouring squire with whom the school was in a state of open war over
the right of fishing in the Avon.
I did not myself share this rather indiscriminate enthusiasm; for the
kings of the Close were, as a rule, a rough and hard set of taskmasters,
who fagged us for whole afternoons, and were much too ready with the
cane. But for this very reason I had all the more to bestow on the one
who, to my boyish imagination, stood out from the rest as Hector from
the ruck of the Trojan princes; and this hero was William Cotton Oswell,
whose portrait took its honoured place yesterday on the walls of our
Rugby Valhalla. It was not from any personal knowledge of or contact
with him, for we were at different boarding-houses and at opposite ends
of the school; and I doubt whether he ever spoke to me in his life,
though I often shared his kindly nod and smile when we met in the Close
or quadrangle. It was the rare mixture of kindliness and gentleness with
marvellous strength, activity, and fearlessness, which made him _facile
princeps_ among his contemporaries. I don’t believe he ever struck a
small boy here, or even spoke to one, in anger.
And so there was no drawback to the enthusiasm with which one watched
him leading a charge at football, or bowling in a Big-Side match, or
jumping two or three pegs higher on the gallows than any other boy. He
cleared eighteen feet nine inches of water in Clifton brook, which
means, as you know, at least twenty-one feet from take-off to landing.
No doubt his good looks added to the fascination. You can see from the
portrait what a noble face his must have been even in boyhood, and his
figure was quite as striking. He stood six feet in his stockings when he
left school at eighteen, but did not look his height from the perfection
of his figure; broad in shoulder, thin in flank, and so well developed
that he was called “the Muscleman.” I must not dwell on that time, so
will give you one instance only of his early prowess in athletics. I
don’t know what the record has been in late years, but in my time Parr
was the only man who was ever known to have thrown a cricket-ball a
hundred yards both ways. No record was kept here, but this I saw Oswell
do. From a group of boys at a wicket on Little-Side ground, as it then
was, he threw a cricket-ball, over as I believe, or at any rate through,
the great elms (which were then standing in a close row at right angles
to the school buildings) into the Doctor’s garden, for there it was
picked up. Measure it how you will, that throw must have been
considerably over a hundred yards.
He left a great blank in the school life in 1836. We heard he had gone
to Haileybury for a year on his way to India, where he had got an
appointment as writer. In those days there was no telegraph, no cheap
post, no overland passage, and no penny papers to spread every scrap of
news, true or false, over the whole kingdom. No one thought of a
pleasure trip to India for a month or two in the winter to look up
friends or young relations, for the voyage round the Cape even in the
Company’s finest ships took from three to four months. The two worlds
were wide apart, and the young subaltern or civilian was lucky who
managed to get a run home once in ten years. So a curtain fell between
Oswell and his old schoolfellows, which was not lifted, for me at any
rate, for more than a generation. Now and again, at long intervals,
thinking over schooldays, his figure would rise up as attractive as
ever, and I would wonder what had become of him, and that no heroic
rumour of him had floated back from the other side of the world.
You may fancy, then, the shock of joy which I felt when the lift came at
last. I, like every one else, had rushed to get Livingstone’s first book
on South Africa, and was deep in the second chapter, in which he details
the drought at his station, the threats of the Boers, and the rumours of
a lake and rivers and a rich country to the north that had determined
him to attempt the crossing of the Kalahari desert which lay between,
when I came on this passage: “I communicated my intention to an African
traveller, Colonel Steele, and he made it known to another gentleman, a
Mr. Oswell. He undertook to defray the entire expense of guides, and
fully executed his generous intention.” Surely, thought I, that must be
“the Muscleman,” or “handsome Oswell,” as we used sometimes to call him;
that’s just what he would have done. I was not long in doubt; it was my
boyhood’s hero sure enough. “Oswell was one of Arnold’s Rugby boys,”
Livingstone wrote; “one could see his training in always doing what was
brave, and true, and right.” Now let us see how it was that he managed
to turn up in Africa at this critical moment.
In India he spent ten years, rising rapidly to the post of collector and
judge. His station was thirty miles from the nearest English doctor, so
he added the study of medicine to his regular work. This was heavy
enough, but did not hinder him from joining any young Englishman who
came to hunt. In one of these hunts he saved the life of the then Lord
Gifford, shooting a tiger which his lordship, who was short-sighted, had
not noticed, and which was in the act of springing. On another of these
excursions the party encamped on ground full of malaria, and were struck
with jungle fever, of which several died. Oswell, thanks to his splendid
constitution, struggled through, after being insensible for several
days. No sooner had he recovered consciousness than he set to work on a
pile of his district papers—complaints from villages, reports of
gang-robberies, etc.—with a wet towel round his head. He cleared his
table at the cost of a dangerous relapse, the effects of which he could
not shake off; so he was sent to the Cape on sick-leave, those who saw
him embark doubting if he would ever reach the Cape alive.
Once landed, however, the dry warm air revived him, and in a few months
he was away to the north, exploring and elephant-shooting, in which
pursuits he came across Dr. Moffat, the great missionary Livingstone’s
father-in-law, and Captain Steele, the hunter of big game, who directed
him to Livingstone’s station, Kolabeng, two hundred miles to the north
on the borders of the Kalahari desert. He had with him a brother
sportsman, Mr. Murray, and they at once joined eagerly in Livingstone’s
project to attempt to cross the Kalahari desert. “Mr. Oswell,” to repeat
his words, “at once undertook to defray the whole cost of guides, and
fully executed his generous intention.” They started on the 1st of June
1849, and reached Lake Ngami in two months, on the 1st of August, the
first white men who had ever seen it. The story of their journey has
been told both by Livingstone in his first book, and by Oswell in the
chapter he wrote for the Badminton volume on _Big Game Shooting_,
published after his death in 1893. I know no reading of more absorbing
interest, but you should all read it for yourselves. And when you are
reading, remember that the whole of Central Africa was a blank then on
our school atlases, while every lake and river and mountain range is now
laid down, right away to the Red Sea, the South Atlantic, and the
Mediterranean. Here I can only give you the estimate that Livingstone
formed of his companion before they got back to Kolabeng. “When my men
wished to flatter me,” he wrote, “they would say, ‘If you were not a
missionary you would be just like Oswell; you would not hunt with dogs.’
They declare he is the greatest hunter that ever came into the country.”
His method was to get within twenty or thirty yards of his game—lion,
elephant, or rhinoceros—whereas most men fired at fifty or sixty. Of
course this doubled the danger while it made surer work, and his
marvellous escapes were frequent. One I will content myself with on this
journey, an encounter with a rhinoceros, which he killed at last, but
which had tossed him and torn the scalp of his head almost off. Murray
went to look for him, and told Livingstone, “I found that beggar Oswell
sitting under a bush and holding on his head.” He had in fact adjusted
his scalp, and the blood was streaming through his fingers. Let me here
cite another witness or two as to his character as a hunter. Mr. Horace
Waller, of the Oxford Mission, writes: “Livingstone, who knew no fear
himself, spoke of Oswell’s desperate courage in hunting as quite
wonderful; not but what he suffered from it to the day of his death, the
result of an engagement with a rhinoceros. Oswell would, for instance,
ride up alongside of a hyæna, and, unloosing his stirrup leather while
at full gallop, brain the beast with the heavy stirrup.” Again, Sir
Samuel Baker says: “His extreme gentleness, utter recklessness of
danger, and complete unselfishness, made him friends everywhere, but
attracted the native mind to a degree of adoration. He was the Nimrod of
South Africa, without a rival and without an enemy, the greatest hunter
ever known in modern times, the truest friend and most thorough example
of an English gentleman.”
In April 1851 Livingstone started again from Kolabeng, this time with
his wife and children, on the invitation of Sebituane, the great chief
of the Makololo, who offered him a settlement wherever he might choose.
Oswell was again with him, and went ahead of the waggons to dig wells
and provide water; but even with this precaution the party, which
included Mrs. Livingstone and the children, were at one point four days
without it, and nearly perishing. Leaving Mrs. Livingstone and the
children as the guests of Sebituane, Livingstone and Oswell explored
north and east, and discovered the Zambesi River, and the great Victoria
Falls from which it becomes navigable for ships to the Indian Ocean. For
this he was voted the gold medal of the French Geographical Society. On
their return Sebituane was attacked by inflammation of the lungs, and
died in a few days. His death altered all Livingstone’s plans, and
probably the subsequent history of the continent; for now Livingstone
resolved to send his family home, and return alone the next year to find
a way either to the west or east coast. He had already drawn his whole
salary for 1852 and half that for 1853, and so would have been quite
unable to start on the career which opened Africa and gained him a tomb
in Westminster Abbey, but for Oswell; but _he_ proved the friend who
“sticketh closer than a brother.” He accompanied them to Cape Town, and
in Livingstone’s words “made all comfortable,” giving the children who
were in rags a new outfit which cost £200, and enabling Livingstone to
start once more for the north. He answered all remonstrances by
laughingly protesting that it all came from ivory, and that the Doctor
and his wife had as good a right as he to the money drawn from the
preserves on their estates.
Before leaving his African career I must give shortly a characteristic
story which was told incidentally by him in “South Africa Fifty Years
ago,” and unconsciously, as though he were quite unaware of what I
cannot but call its beauty and pathos. It is of his relations with an
Africander who bore the (to us rather comic) name of John Thomas, one of
the men he hired at the Cape to accompany him and Livingstone on their
first expedition. The contract was that these men should be bound to go
as far as the Lake Ngami, but no farther. When therefore Oswell and
Livingstone determined to go on to the north, they called the men
together and told them they need not go any farther, but could choose
between waiting for their return or accompanying them. At first the men
hesitated, and seemed likely to refuse to go farther, when Bono Johnny
(as he was called by this time) jumped up, and in Dutch, which he spoke
when excited, said, “What you eat I can eat, where you sleep I can
sleep, where you go I will go; I will come with you.” The others paused
for a moment or two, and then chorused, “We will go.” “Do you think
after that,” Oswell writes, “it was much matter to us whether our
brother was black or white?” Johnny stayed with him through four years,
at the end of which Oswell wrote of him, “as a grand specimen of
manhood, good nature, faithfulness, and cheerful endurance I have never
met his equal, white or black.” Johnny at the last moment begged his
master to take him over to see England, which he did, and got him a
temporary place as coachman to his brother, a country parson. A few
weeks later Oswell met Johnny in the village with the cook on one arm
and the lady’s maid on the other, and found that they were going on with
his education, which Oswell had begun in the bush, the cook undertaking
his reading and the lady’s maid his writing. At the end of six months
Johnny had to return to Africa, and Oswell lost sight of him. It was
eighteen months before they met again. Oswell, who had volunteered on
the outbreak of the war with Russia, was carrying secret service money
for Government in the East, and came across the camp of the Sixtieth
Rifles. He was talking to an officer from horseback, when he felt a hand
laid on his off stirrup, and looking round found Johnny there, who had
become messman to the regiment and was in high favour. He jumped down,
and they had a long African talk, and from that time till Johnny’s death
Oswell kept his eye on him, and got him at last a place as butler to a
friend in England, where, as everywhere else, he made himself
indispensable by cheerful and faithful service. There Johnny was struck
by a fatal illness, and died in a few hours. “I heard of his illness,”
Oswell writes, “too late to see him on earth; but I trust master and man
may yet meet as brothers in heaven.”
The modesty and self-depreciation of his character were strong to the
end. Looking back at his relations with Livingstone, he writes in “South
Africa Fifty Years ago”: “He could talk to the Kaffir ears and hearts,
we only to their stomachs; but I would fain believe his grand work was
made a little smoother by our guns.” I should rather think it was. Thus,
when a tribe in Livingstone’s district was on the point of starvation
from the long drought, and the people reduced to mere walking skeletons,
he and Murray took more than six hundred men, women, and children with
them, fed them for several months till they were “all fat and shining,”
and sent them back with a store of dried meat enough to last for months,
without one missing, sick, or feeble.
How one wishes that England were still represented by Oswells in South
and Central Africa! Happily Rugby again has sent one such in Mr. Selous,
who has sustained the high type set by Oswell in early days. But I much
question whether the ordinary type of African sportsman of to-day will
benefit Africa, or raise the native enthusiasm or admiration for
Englishmen. A few days ago I was reading a review of the last book
published by two of them on African sport. They would seem to have taken
with them a staff of trained servants, and horses and donkeys loaded
with supplies sufficient to have made the adventure at any rate quite
comfortable. Small blame to them for that, you will say, if they could
afford it; and I agree. But what shall we say as to their method of
shooting lions? It seems to have been, to tether an unfortunate donkey
in a clearing, and leave him there for hours till a lion sprang on the
poor shuddering jackass and had taken a good suck at his blood, and then
to shoot him from a neighbouring place of safety. Well, we will say at
any rate that Oswell would probably have as soon thought of tethering
his black brother Bono Johnny for bait to a lion as a poor jackass.
To go back to our story. After sending off Mrs. Livingstone and the
children, Oswell followed to England for family reasons, and was at home
when the Crimean War broke out a year later. He at once volunteered, as
I have already told you, went out to Constantinople, and was employed by
Lord Raglan to carry despatches and secret service money to Sir Lintorn
Simmons at Shumla, and on other missions. On the fall of Sebastopol he
returned to England, and at once, without waiting for the shower of
titles and decorations which came when peace was made, the old longing
for wandering and adventure being still strong, sailed for South
America, in November 1855. On board the mail-steamer he met his future
wife, who was going out to her sister, Lady Lees, the wife of the Chief
Justice of the Bahamas. After wandering through Chili, the West Indies,
and the United States, he came home, renewed his acquaintance with Miss
Agnes Rivaz, who had also returned, and they were married. From that
time he settled down to the quiet life of an English country gentleman,
built himself a house at Groombridge, near Tunbridge Wells, which he
filled with his African trophies, and found a sphere for his energy in
his parish and neighbourhood. Every neighbour who needed him became his
special care. To the poor he was not a mere benefactor, but each man’s
and woman’s and child’s personal friend. His Indian experience here came
into play. Every little ailment or accident was a certain summons to
“the Master,” as he was generally called; and if remonstrated with he
would smile and say, “there was something in being able to send for a
doctor whom they had not to pay.” He was an enthusiastic gardener, and
the whole neighbourhood was stocked with plants and flowers from
Hillside. His great strength remained to the end. One day calling at an
old friend’s he found him very ill, and his wife and son consulting how
he could be moved. In a moment he was in Oswell’s arms, carried and
placed gently in the place they had prepared for him. The Paris
Geographical Society, as has been said, had sent him their gold medal,
and he was made a Fellow of the English Society; but, writes Francis
Galton, another African explorer and admirer of Oswell, “he was too shy
and modest, and could not be induced to take that prominent share in
those stirring times of the Geographical Society which was his right,
and which he was often urged to take.” In the same way, though an
excellent recounter to friends of his exploring and sporting
experiences, he steadily resisted the offers of publishers and the
persuasion of friends to take the public into his confidence in print.
It was only in the last year of his life that he was induced to put pen
to paper as to his hunting and exploring work. Happily the editor of the
Badminton Library persuaded him to write in the volume on _Big Game
Shooting_. The result was the chapters on “South Africa Fifty Years ago”
in that volume, which in my judgment stand quite foremost in our
sporting literature. Read them, and, while the interest is absorbing,
you will not find a trace of that delight in and relish for mere
slaughter which is so offensive in most books of sport. Here is a short
characteristic quotation, which will give you the mood in which the
mighty hunter looked back on his own exploits. “I am sorry now for all
the fine old beasts I have killed: but I was young then; there was
excitement in the work; I had large numbers of men to feed, and every
animal _except three elephants_ was eaten by man, and so put to good
use.[5] I filled their stomachs, and thus in some mysterious way, as
they assured me, made their hearts white.”
On the other hand, the zest for the old desert life of his early manhood
comes back even as he writes: “There is a fascination to me in the
remembrance of the free life, the self-dependence, the feeling as you
lay under your kaross that you were looking at the stars from a point on
the earth whence no other European eye had ever seen them; these are
with me still, and were I not a married man, with children and
grandchildren, I believe I should head back to Africa again and end my
days in the open air. Take the word of one who has tried both; there is
a charm in the wild life; the ever-increasing never-satisfied needs of
the tame my soul cannot away with.”
I could call a dozen well-known witnesses to confirm everything I have
said as to the charm of a character to which Lamartine’s saying, “Rien
n’est si doux que ce qui est fort,” applies more truly than to any one I
can remember. I will cite one only whose testimony will, I know, be of
special interest here, as it comes from an intimate friend of Oswell,
but not a Rugbeian, Lord Rendel. “He carried, as well as deepened, the
stamp of Rugby at its best; fearless of soul and body, yet tender,
kindly, gay; wise with a large experience, but utterly unworldly, I
would, as an Etonian, give all the mere gentlemen Eton could breed for a
handful of such men as Oswell. Manliness without coarseness, polish
without complacency, nobility without caste! May Rugby keep the mould,
and multiply the type!” Amen!
-----
Footnote 5:
These three elephants, which he regrets were not eaten by man, were
shot by him away from camp in order to send the valuable ivory to an
Englishman who was shooting in the neighbourhood, to buy a supply of
lead, Oswell having run short, and the nearest store at which he could
buy being fourteen hundred miles away to the south. Mr. Webb, of
Newstead Abbey, the sportsman in question, sent the ivory back to
Oswell with a liberal gift of bars of lead, and they became intimate
friends.
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.
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