"'^ PRINCETON, N. J. <J*
BX 5199 .S8 B7 1883 Bradley, George Granville,
1821-1903. Recollections of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley.^.. ..late dean
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015
https://archive.org/details/recollectionsofaOObrad
EECOLLECTIONS
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY
LATE DEAN OF WESTMINSTEB
turret Hectures
DELIVERED IN EDINBURGH IN NOVEMBER 1882
BY
GEORGE GRANVILLE BRADLEY D.D,
DEAN OF WESTMINSTER HONORARY FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OXFORD
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1883
PEIHCETOIT >^
,R£C. iViAH I
INTRODUCTION.
The following pages are the result of an attempt to comply with a request made on behalf of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh. The Directors did me the honour of expressing a wish that I should open their winter session by delivering two lectures on my much lamented friend and predecessor, the late Dean of West- minster. I could not refuse to avail myself of such an opportunity for placing on record my recollections of one to whose intimacy I had been admitted in early youth, and whose friendship I had been privileged to enjoy for more than forty years. I felt it, however, due alike to the memory of my friend, and to the legitimate claims of those whom I was to address, to bring before them something more than mere personal reminiscences of one who had filled so large a space in the literary and theological history of the whole period during which I had known
vi
INTRODUCTION.
him. I thought it right, therefore, to prepare myself for the task by a careful re-perusal of his published works, especially of the numerous lec- tures, pamphlets, articles, essays, and occasional sermons which, even more markedly than his longer and more elaborate works, bear the true impress of his mind and character. Not a few of these which had escaped my memory or notice were placed at my disposal by various friends ; and in addition to all that I had preserved of my own correspondence, I was permitted to avail myself of letters, and notes of personal recollec- tions, entrusted to me by the kindness of some who had been bound to him by the closest ties of enduring friendship. It soon became apparent that the materials placed in my hands, though insignificant in comparison with those which were being gradually collected with a view to more detailed memoirs, could scarcely be adequately dealt with in the compass of two evening lec- tures, even before so kind and forbearing an audience as I was prepared to find in the city of Edinburgh. Arrangements were very kindly made for the delivery of a third lecture — let me thank my friends there for its cordial reception — at Fettes College ; and thus with some neces- sary curtailment the greater portion of the fol-
INTBODUCTION.
lowing pages was spoken as printed. I have not thought it necessary to indicate the paragraphs which, out of consideration for the time and patience of singularly attentive and sympathetic listeners, were omitted in the actual delivery of the lectures. As, however, the greater portion of the matter devoted to Dean Stanley's earlier life, at Alderley, Rugby, and Oxford, formed the subject not of the fii'st but of the second lecture, that which was given at Fettes College, I have thought it better to arrange what is now printed in three consecutive chapters. I have thus pre- served the order in which all that I had prepared was actually written, as well as that which will be most convenient to the general reader. But I have retained thi'oughout the form, and, with a few necessary corrections, the actual words of the lectures as actually delivered. They were delivered, it will be remembered, in Scotland, and before a Scottish audience ; and I therefore felt myself warranted in dwelling with a not unreasonable emphasis on the singularly close ties which united him of whom I spoke to the sympathies and affections of those whom I was addressing.
I need hardly add that the subject on which I spoke was one of exceeding interest to myself.
viii
INTRODUCTION.
Those who are at the pains of glancing at the following pages will see that I disclaimed from the very first any attempt to speak of Arthur Stanley otherwise than as a deeply attached and grateful friend, and as one who largely sympa- thised with his views. Had I not done so I should have written differently, or not at all. I trust, however, that I have not allowed my warm affection for one who was, for many years of his life, engaged in almost ceaseless controversies, to cause me to give needless pain to those whose difference of views on some most important sub- jects made them unable to share the feelings with which he was regarded by those who were more or less in sympathy with him. I should regret any want of fairness on my own part as in itself blamable. I should regret it the more, as some of those who were necessarily brought in the course of many controversies into the most direct collision with my dear friend, have spoken with generous warmth and tenderness of one, the beauty of whose character they could recognise without undervaluing their disagree- ment with his opinions, sentiments, or language.
I feel, however, that in saying even this, I am attaching an undue importance to the pub- lication of what can have no claim to more
INTRODUCTION.
ix
than a passing and fugitive interest. Nothing could be further from my purpose than to offer this most imperfect sketch as in any way a sub- stitute for, or even an instalment of, a biography of Arthur Stanley. Great as was the kindness of his literary executors and personal friends, it was impossible for me to avail myself of more than a small fraction of the documents and papers which, owning to his own habits and the prescient care of so many to whom he was dear, are assuming proportions of almost unexampled abundance. Yet I venture to hope that the publication even of the short summary of his life and work which is comprised in these three chapters, may be not unwelcome to some at least among the many who, beyond the limits of those to whom they were dhectly addressed, had yet felt the spell of his character, or had been attracted or instructed by his writings.
I may conclude with a warm expression of my gratitude to those of his friends who have kindly allowed me the use in some cases of their own correspondence, in others of their notes of personal reminiscences. I ought especially to name Dr. Greenhill, Professor Max Miiller, Rev. W. B. Philpot, Rev. H. H. Montgomery, Mr. Victor Williamson, and Mr. John Hodgkin ;
X
INTRODUCTION.
above all my thanks are due to his two surviv- ing Uterary executors, ^Ir. Theodore Walrond and Mr. George Grove, not only for their ready acquiescence in the present publication, but for the invaluable assistance which in various forms I received from each of them.
Deanery, Westminster, December 31, 1882.
THEOLOGU
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. (From his birth in 1815 to 1840.) ALDERLEY — RUGBY — OXFORD.
PAGE
IxTRODUCTiox — Seven distinct stages in Arthur Stanley's life
— Limited aim of these Lectures 1
Special ties to Scotland 4
Date and place of Arthur Stanley's birth (1815) .... 9
The Stanley family 10
Alderley : Mr. Hare's description 11
His father, Edward Stanley, Rector of Alderley ... 12
— Bishop of Norwich 13
His mother 16
Brothers and sisters 17
Clerical homes 18
CHrLDHOOD OF ARTHUR STANLEY — School at Scaforth . . 18
Early poems 20
Tour in the South of France, 1828 — his journal . . . .21
E>t:ers Rugby School, 1829 — early life at Rugby . . 22
Letters to his former schoolmaster — impressions of Dr. Arnold 25
Life as a Rugby School boy 27
The poet Gray and Mr. Gladstone 31
Election as scholar of Balliol (1833) 31
Exhibitioner of Rugby School (1834) 32
Parting with Dr. Arnold 33
Visit to the English lakes 34
A glance forwards to Arnold's death in 1842 .... 35
Truthfulness of Stanley's picture of Arnold .... 35
"What was the effect of Arnold on himself ? . . . . 36
xi
xii CONTENTS.
PAGE
Lite as an Oxford Undergraduate : prize poem, " The
Gipsies " 40
Elected to a Fellowship at University College, ordained (1839) 44
Family history : removal to Norwich (1837) ; return of his eld- est brother from the Arctic expedition .... 46
A personal reminiscence 47
CHAPTER II. (From 1840 to 1863.) OXFORD - CANTERBURY — OXFORD. FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, 1840-50.
Tour in Greece, 1840-41 49
Remarks on the spirit in which he studied nature ... 50
Scenery always subordinate to historical or other associations . 51
His intense interest in such associations 52
His remarks on the effect of the first visit to places of interest . 54
His meeting with Hugh Pearson at Naples .... 54
Return to Oxford, 1841, and life as College tutor .... 55
College life at Oxford 56
Effect of his lectures on History and Divinity .... 57
His intercourse with undergraduates 58
Literary and other work 60
Influence over the young 61
Secretary to the first Oxford Commission 62
Public events : Sir Robert Peel — the year 1848 ... 63
Position towards Church parties 64
Removal from Oxford to Canterbury (1851) .... 67 Retrospect of family history : death of his father and two
brothers (1849-50) 67
CANON OF CANTERBURY, 1851-1858.
Advice given by Thomas Carlyle 69
Value to him of his life at Canterbury 69
Memorials of Canterbury' 71
Travels in the East : Sinai and Palestine 71
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Tour in Russia 74
Home and social life at Canterbury 75
Family and public events : examining Chaplain to the Bishop
of London (Dr. Tait) 1856 76
LIFE AT OXTORD AS REGIUS PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, 1858-1863.
Appointed Professor 77
Inaugural and other lectures 78
Relation towards undergraduates 82
Social life at Oxford 83
Controversies — Greek Professorship ; " Essays and Reviews " . 84 Second \-isit to Egypt and Palestine with the Prince of Wales ;
sermons on the East ; his mother's death (1862) ... 86
Return to England — Death of General Bruce .... 89
Theological controversies at Oxford and elsewhere ... 91
Letter to Bishop of London on terms of subscription . . 91
CHAPTER m.
(From 1863 to 1881.) WESTMINSTER.
Marriage 94
Farewell Sermon at Oxford 94
Feelings with which his appointment was regarded ... 96
Manifold aspects of his life as Dean 97
I. J/amecZ Xz/e — Lady Augusta Stanley .... 99
11. Social Life 100
III. Controversial Life : Vestment and other controversies ; Athanasian Creed ; Convocation ; hostility which he provoked — attempt to exclude him from the Univer- sity pulpit 102
Defence of the Bishop of Natal — three occasions . . 107 rV. Official Life as Dean : Memorials of Westminster ; monu- ments ; Chapter-house 110
xiv
CONTENTS.
PAGE
V. Sermons 113
VI. Theological position.
Dislike to party ties — Liberal theology .... 115 Quotation from Archbishop of Canterbury ; Rev. W. R.
W. Stephens ; his favourite topics .... 116 Stress laid on the spiritual and moral elements of Chris- tianity 118
Hopes and fears for the future 119
His attitude towards Science 120
towards other Denominations and Churches 121
John "Wesley ; Zwinglius ; Baxter 123
Impression made on different minds by his teaching . 124 YII. His Sympathy with the Working Classes : their feelings
towards him 125
VIII. His Personal and Domestic Life 130
Lady Augusta Stanley's illness — her death in 1875 . . 132
His life as a widower ; visit to America (1878) . . . 135
Reminiscences of his closing days 136
Literary activity ; sermons ; his sister's death . . . 137
Proposed monument to the Prince Imperial .... 138
Illness and death 140
KECOLLECTIONS
OP
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY
EECOLLECTIONS
OF
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
CHAPTER I.
(From Ms Birth in 1815 to 1840.) ALDERLEY - RUGBY - OXFORD.
TOUR directors have called on me to undertake a very interesting, but b}' no means an easy task. Some months have passed since they requested me to speak to you here of one whose face and voice will long be remembered among you, my own dear friend — may I not say yours also ? — the late Dean of West- minster. Flattering as I felt their proposal to be, I shrank with unfeigned reluctance from accepting it. In default of leisure, and in the absence, the compara- tive absence, of necessary materials and documents, I despaired of doing any adequate justice to his mem- ory, or of satisfying the claims which a Philosophical Society in — I use his own words — "this great and historic centre of Scottish life," might justly make in behalf of one of such rare and surpassing gifts, whose life was so closely bound up with the religious and literary history of the last forty years. But I was
2
BECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. I.
encouraged to believe that I might look for a sympa- thetic and forbearing audience ; and I was given to understand that there was a general wish that he who should attempt to recall him to you should be none other than his successor in the post to which his own genius had added so much exceptional significance. To that wish I deferred, and am here to-day to fulfil my engagement, or to attempt to do so to the utmost of my powers.
Let me say at once that I would gladly have brought before you a sketch of each of what I may venture to call the seven distinct and marked stages of his life. They are, first, his childhood in his home at Alderley; next, his boyhood at Rugby, where he grew up under the influence of his great teacher, Dr. Arnold. Then follows his brilliant career as a scholar of Balliol. Then, fourthly, the many impor- tant years that he passed as a resident Member of the University of Oxford, and as an active and influential Tutor, no longer of Balliol, but of Univer- sity College. After this come the seven quiet years of his Canonry at Canterbury ; then his work as Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford ; and, finally, the closing and culminating stage of all, his life and death as Dean of Westminster.
It would, however, be obviously impossible to bring before you in any detail all these chapters in his life, though each has a peculiar character and a special interest of its own. Nor can anything be more remote from my present purpose than any attempt
CHAP. I.] AETHUR PENBHYN STANLEY.
3
to forestall his future biographer ; and I shall pass over without notice many of the most important passages in his career, only attempting any fulness of detail, where my own recollections, or the special circumstances of those whom I address, or other sufficient reasons, guide me to do so. If I have made a wrong choice in my selection, you will forgive me. I must take comfort in the hope that you have come here not so much to criticise the literary merits or the judgment of your Lecturer, as to renew your acquaintance with his friend.
To that friend I stand too near in affection — I am bound to him too closely by enduring ties of sympathy and gratitude — to play the part of a censor or a critic. I cannot stand aside, and look at him, or speak of him, as a stranger would. This you will not expect or wish. But I can promise that I will not willingly misrepresent him by a hair's breadth, or paint him for one moment other than he was ; other than I have known him in constant intercourse since I won his friendship as I passed from boyhood. In life ''he feared no man's rebuke ; " and we, his friends — I, for one — feel no need to speak of him with bated breath, or in apologetic accents. I will simply try to do in short compass what his biographer will do, we all trust, on a larger scale; to set before you Arthur Stanley as he lived and as he died ; himself, and no other — his real character, his real self; and, if I venture to add something as to his views on the most important of all subjects, I will leave him, so far as
4
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. I.
possible, to speak for himself. Great as was his con- sideration for others, unbounded as was his tolerance, large and tender as were his sympathies, there never breathed a more outspoken, a more fearless soul, or a more transparent expounder of all that lay next his heart.
And I assure myself that I may do this with an especial trustfulness before a Scottish audience. You knew the man, and he you. Nowhere did he more freely open all the secrets of that seething brain, and that ardent temperament — that perfervidum inge- nium which is no monopoly of the countrymen of Buchanan. To Scotsmen here, to Scotsmen at St. Andrews, he spoke in his later years with a fulness of confidence not exceeded in his letters to his dearest friends, or by all that he uttered wheii his soul was stirred within him by that long delayed visit to the new England beyond the seas. Reared and educated in England, he was unknown among you till some few years after the publication of his " Life of Arnold " had lifted his name above the level of a merely academical reputation. I have mislaid, alas ! but I well remember, the letter in which, 34 years ago, on his first visit to the Scottish home of Principal Shairp, the present Professor of Poetry in my own University, with the recollection of his winter in Greece still unfaded in his memory, he spoke of Edinburgh as an Athens — as (forgive me the quotation) a "coarser Athens" — and described the kindness with which he was everywhere received as the Biographer of Arnold, the interest
CHAP. I.] ARTHUB PENBHTN STANLEY.
5
evinced in one in whom Scotsmen saw, and the words on his lips had a deep significance, ElisJia the son of Shaphat^ who poured water 07i the hands of Elijah, A year passed, and he came to Scotland on a sadder errand — to close his father's eyes ; even as, twice later, he came to lay in their ancestral grave the two brothers of her whom he married. But long before his marriage had bound him by a closer tie to these northern regions, Scotland had laid upon him the spell which she maintained to the very end. In repeated snatches of autumnal leisure as Tutor at Oxford, as Canon of Canterbury, he had visited, often under the guidance of the friend whom I have already named, one after another of the scenes, rich in legendary or poetic or religious or historic interest, with which Scotland abounds. As time went on, it is not too much to say that no native of Scotland could be more imbued, more saturated, with all the manifold as- sociations of Scottish story or history, "the most romantic," as he would vehemently assert, " by far of all European histories," than one who never drew a breath of Scottish air till he had become famous by writing the life of one of the most typical of Eng- lishmen.
Thus on the very first occasion that he opened his lips to lecture on Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, years before family ties had made him almost a coun- tryman of 3'our own, in urging on his future pupils the importance of including among the original rec- ords of history "monuments, and grave-stones, and
6
HECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
epitaphs on the very spots where they lie ; " the mountain, and the stream, and the shapeless stone, that has survived even history and tradition," he chose the first of two examples from " the caves, the moors, and moss-bogs of the Western Lowlands ; " from "the rude grave-stones," with their savage rhymes and texts and names that are to be found from shore to shore of the Scottish kingdom. And he placed these side by side with " the faded paint- ings, the broken sculptures, the rude epitaphs, that lie underground in the Roman catacombs."
It is rarely that he attempts to describe Scottish scenery as scenery; Nature, indeed, as Nature, he seldom, I might say never, allowed himself to paint. But he loved to dwell on his enjoyment of the scenery of St. Andrews ; " the roar and expanse of the sea on one side, the shattered relics of the Cathedral on the other" — the "two voices," as he would call them, " each a mighty voice." Of all the great names of lit- erature none was so dear to him as that of Walter Scott, that " second Shakespeare of your own," the " spell and glamour " of whose " wizard notes " he felt at threescore as strongly as he had felt them in boyhood ; of whom he delighted to speak not in Scotland only, but alike on the sacred soil of Palestine and in his own Abbey, now as the greatest and purest writer of fiction, now as " one of the greatest religious teachers of Scottish Christendom." Later in life he could no more visit Tours without reading and re-reading for the fiftieth time, as he said, " Quentin Durward," than
CHAP. I.] ABTHUE PENRHYN STANLEY.
7
he could have made, a pilgrimage to the graves of the Covenanters without once more renewing his ac- quaintance with " Old Mortality." Behind " all the wretchedness of life, and all the levity of language " which marred the genius of " the prodigal son of the Scottish Church," he could find in Robert Burns not "the poet only, but the prophet;" in that "wise humour, that sagacious penetration, that tender pa- thos," he could find at times fragments of a teaching that breathes the spu-it, " not of this or that Confes- sion, but of the Sermon on the Mount." On his undying interest in the religious history of Scotland I need hardly dwell, or remind you how keenl}^ he appreciated not only the more romantic and attrac- tive features of its earlier chapters, but "the defi- ant self-reliance and dogged resistance to superior power," " the force of unyielding conviction," " the indomitable native vigour," " the marvellous energy," which, with whatever drawbacks — drawbacks on which he spoke to you with entire and characteristic frankness — marked its later developments. How gal- lantl}' did he meet the charges brought against the clergy of Scotland, at one time by Samuel Johnson, at a more recent period by ^Ir. Buckle. Even Mil- ton's sneer at Rutherford he meets by the one method which he was never tired of commending to others, of practising himself — by bringing out the equally true, the more touching, the more Christian side of the stern yet affectionate Pastor of Anwoth. With what delight did he dwell "on the divine fire of
8
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
Scotland's Burning Bush that lies hid beneath the rough husk " of logical subtleties and stubborn pro- tests, of testimonies and confessions. You know how his soul yearned over the combination of deep reli- gious sentiment, " of a sanctity equal to that of the strictest Covenanter or the strictest Episcopalian," with " a just and philosophic moderation," the crown- ing instance of which he found in Robert Leighton, " the most apostolical," as he deliberately called him, " of all protestant Scotsmen ; " who held a place in his affection and veneration side by side with, if not even above, that held by Richard Baxter in the South. You may have smiled as he rebuked in his own man- ner the eccentricities or the shortcomings or the ex- cesses of this or that form of Scottish Christianity ; for you knew that your Church and people had no more devoted or more earnest champion ; that all that was great and noble and inspiring in its past or present history was as dear to him as it was to you. Some of you can remember the delight with which (not here only, but in Oxford) he called up from the recollections of his earlier days his one interview, the first and last, " ending in front of the academic church at Oxford," with the " wise and good " Dr. Chalmers. With what fervour did he recite, not here only, but at Westminster, the burning words in which Thomas Carlyle poured out his angry but noble grief over the open grave of your Edward Irving. How he rejoiced heart and soul in the society of Nor- man M'Leod; how in Erskine of Linlathen he found
CHAP. I.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
9
one " to hold brief converse with whom was to have his conversation in heaven." The very last literary work on w^hich that brain, active to the last, was ever engaged, was a paper on the Westminster Confession, the proofs actually corrected in that fatal illness which took him away from the great work that he was doing, beneath the very roof where that "venerable document," as he loved to call it, first saw the light.
I say nothing of Scottish friends and companions and fellow workers who gathered round him from Oxford days to the day on which he breathed his last; nothing of that Scottish lady whose name will be in- separably connected with his own, in whose grave he lies. I have said enough to remind j^ou, were it needed, that he of whom I am to speak was one towards whom Scotland may feel as the almost adopted son of her own soil, almost bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh.
Let me pass at once to the story of his life.
He was born on December 13, in the eventful year 1815. The place of his birth was Alderley, in Che- shire, of which his father was rector, a place which for many centuries had formed part of the ancestral estates of the great house of Stanley. Of a branch of that house, not ennobled till the next generation, his uncle, Sir John Stanley, who lived at the Park hard by, was the representative and head.
On the position which the family of Stanley has held in English history, whether in the Tudor or Stuart reigns, or later on, it is not necessary to en-
10
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
large. The thoughts of a resident in Westminster will naturally turn to the Stanley who on the field of Bosworth placed on the head of the first Tudor king, his own stepson, the crown that is so often reproduced, sometimes with the bush on which it was found hanging, in the stately chapel of Henry VII. It is possible that the memory of those to whom he speaks may travel rather to the fatal field of Flodden, where the sword of a Stanley of the next generation drank so deeply of the best blood of Scotland. Scots- men and Englishmen will alike be interested to note the one and only passage in which one scion of that race cared publicly to recall his lineage. It is that in which, after describing the marvellous promise of Alexander Stuart, the shortlived son of James IV., the pupil of Erasmus, of " gentle manners, playful humour, keen as a hound in the pursuit of knowl- edge " — Ah! you see why I dwell on the words — "the young Marcellus," as he calls him, "of the Scot- tish Church," "if," he goes on to say, "he fell in the memorable charge of my namesake on that fatal day, may he accept, thus late, the lament which a kinsman of his foe would fain pour over his untimely bier."
For a charming picture of the home of Arthur Stanley's infancy and boyhood, his friends owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Augustus Hare. "Few country places," he says, " in England possess such a singular charm as Alderley : " and he goes on, in an article in Macmillan's Magazine for September in last year, to describe the spot " where the flat pasture
CHAP. I.] ARTHUE PENBUYN STANLEY.
11
lands of Cheshire rise suddenly into the rocky ridge of Alderley Edge, with the Holy Well under an overhanging cliff; its gnarled pine trees, its storm- beaten beacon tower, ready to give notice of an inva- sion, and looking far over the green plain to the smoke which indicates in the horizon the presence of great manufacturing towns." He tells us how the beautiful beech woods, which clothe the western side of that upheaving ridge, feather down over mossy lawns to the lake or "mere " beneath. I wish that time allowed me to read to you a description of the scene written by Arthur Stanley's mother at the age of eighteen, in the first few months of her married life. You will find it in the Memorials of his two parents published by himself on the anniversary of her death, in 1879. You would agree with me that for clearness and deli- cacy of touch, that gifted son could hardly have sur- passed it in the full maturity of his powers. The Kectory itself cannot be described better than in Mr. Hare's words. " A low house, with a veranda forming a wide balcony for the upper storey, where bird-cages hung among the roses; its rooms and passages filled with pictures, books, and old carved oak furniture." His fa- ther, in his " Familiar Historj' of British Birds," speaks of watching the starlings "on a well-mown, short- grassed lawn, within a stone's throw of which stands an ivy-mantled parish church, with its massy grey tower, from the turreted pinnacle of which rises a tall flagstaff, crowned by a weather-cock." You will, I think, forgive me for entering into these details in speaking of one to whom all such associations were so peculiarly dear.
12
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. I.
Of his father he has himself left us a picture in his Memoirs of Bishop Stanley, and in the work which I have just mentioned. His personal character and his position in the Church of England were so peculiar and so striking, and their bearing on his son's career, however difficult to estimate precisely, were so unde- niable, that, quite apart from their intrinsic interest, I must not pass them by. His educational advantages in early life were scanty. He did his best to compen- sate for their absence by untiring industry at Cam- bridge. He attained considerable proficiency and academic honours in mathematics, a study in which his son was so unversed, that at least after the close of his school life, an arithmetical sum was to him an almost insoluble problem.* Active on foot, and one of the very first forerunners of modern Alpine climb- ers, as much at home in the saddle as his son was the reverse, he never hunted or joined in field sports. But the people of Alderley long remembered the courage with which, while all his respectable parishioners stood aghast at his temerity, that true son of a gallant house darted on his little black horse into the midst of a riotous crowd, and by his mere appearance stopped a desperate prize fight. As keen an observer of outward nature as his son's friend, Charles Kingsley, he was the author of a " Familiar History of Birds," which, thanks to its accurate and careful studies of animal life, may outlive many graver scientific works. But the father
* " Were I," he once said late in life, " a citizen of this (American) State," — it was one in which an^ educational test was enforced, — " I should never enjoy the franchise."
•. I.] ABTHUB PENRHYN STANLEY.
13
of Arthur Stanley was far more than this. He was not only a liberal clergyman at a time when to hold liberal views was, at all events so far as the rural clergy were concerned, almost to court social isolation : he was an indefatigable and apostolic priest at a time when and in a district where the standard of clerical work was still deplorably low. In moral courage he was not surpassed by his fearless son. He was almost the first parochial clergyman of the Church of England to do his utmost to advocate and to promote the spread of general as well as of religious instruction among the neglected agricultural population. He was almost if not quite the first parochial clergyman who ventured to lecture before a Mechanics' Institute on the then young and suspected science of Geology. In the midst of the alarm and panic of 1829 he attempted to tln-ow oil on the troubled waters by publishing "A Few Words in behalf of our Catholic Brethren." In the crisis of the Reform Agitation in 1831, when the very word Reform " was a sound of terror to the mass of the clergy, he had won sufficient influence to persuade a group of clergymen in his diocese to join him in a petition to Parliament for the removal of some of the most undeniable of the abuses then existing in the English Church — a petition which the excellent Bishop of his diocese at once declined to present.
Removed in 1837 to the see of Norwich, he was grudgingly received in his new sphere, a diocese in which the clergy were perhaps even more than else- where indisposed to welcome a Whig Bishop, the
14
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
nominee of a Whig Premier, who had vainly urged on a cautious Primate the name of Thomas Arnold as the preacher at his consecration. In his very first sermon he raised a whirlwind of opposition by speaking of the duty of forbearance towards Dissent, and of the im- portance of imparting secular as well as religious edu- cation in parochial schools. But this was only the first of a series of shocks which, in the midst of entire and absolute devotion to the spiritual and moral welfare of his huge diocese, he inflicted on the public opinion of his own clergy, and of wider circles. Both as a Clergyman and as a Bishop he was emphatically be- fore his time. As we look back at his career we see him now standing on a platform at Norwich side by side with an Irish Catholic priest, Father Mathew, the Apostle in the sister island of the cause of tem- perance ; now advocating in the National Society such modifications of school teaching as would open the school-doors to the cliildren of Non-conformists ; now addressing a reluctant House of Lords and two indignant Archbishops in favour of relaxing the terms of subscription then enforced on the English clergy ; now, in a sermon which was at once characterised as the boldest ever preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, disavowing in the presence of the Metropolitan Clergy and their Bishop, the doctrine as usually understood of the Apostolical succession ; now, strange and almost incredible as it may sound to you, censured by a cer- tain section of the religious public for welcoming to the hearth and to the heart of his episcopal home one so
I.] ABTHUR PEXRHYy ST Ay LEY.
15
honoured in all circles as the gifted lady who then bore the name of Jenny Lind. If he was the first English Bishop of his day to throw himself heart and soul, in conjunction with the present Earl of Shaftesbury, into the movement for the establishment of Ragged Schools, he was, no doubt, the very first of Enghsh Bishops to preach in his own Cathedral a funeral sermon in honour of a saintly Quaker. We live in an age of transition. It is already difficult to understand, still more to make due allowance for, the storms of obloquy and clamour which one after another of such proceedings awoke in large and influential circles. They at times even exceeded those which his son encountered years after with hereditary fearlessness. But if they did much to embitter the life and impair the usefulness of one of the most devoted of God's servants who ever held the high office of an English Bishop, it is encouraging to remem- ber how steadily and increasingly he won his way to the respect and affection of those who most differed from him, of some of those who had expressed that difference most strongly. When, during a rare visit to Scotland at the close of twelve years of unwearied episcopal work, he was called away after a short illness under the hospitable roof of Brahan Castle, there was a general and frank recognition of what was lost, and a genuine burst of sorrow throughout all East Anglia. Clergy and Laity, Churchmen and Dissenters, adults and children, mourned alike for one who " had found his diocese a wilderness and left it in comparison a culti- vated field," whose "good grey hairs and elastic step,
16
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
and open countenance, with its stoiking profile and quick searching glances," are still affectionately remembered among Norfolk parsonages and in poor men's dwellings. His funeral at Norwich drew togeth- er a concourse like in numbers and in the diversity of its elements to that which gathered last year round another grave in the Abbey of Westminster. At that sight " there came across me," said his son, " as it had never come before, the high ideal and the great oppor- tunities of the life of an English Bishop." And if there was much in the son which he did not inherit from his father, and if some of the father's gifts were not transmitted to his son, yet I feel that the son would have forbidden me to speak to you of himself without reminding you of what he owed to a father whom he never mentioned without honour and reverence.
Of his mother also he has drawn his own portrait. But he knew well that no words could describe the debt he owed to her. She was indeed the ideal mother for such a son. Quiet, calm, thoughtful, dignified even in early womanhood (she became a wife at eighteen) : dee|)ly religious, " with a spiritual insight which be- longed to that larger sphere of religion which is above and beyond the passing controversies of the day ; " observant, and somewhat reticent, yet full of sympa- thy to those whom she loved, she possessed in girlhood and retained to the end " a rare delicacy of intelli- gence," which Sydney Smith happily characterised as " a porcelain under standing together with a literary taste and power of expression of which few but her
CHAP. I.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
17
cliiklren were aware till the publication of her Me- morials. She watched with trembling and aided with wisdom the early development of the gifted nature of her second son, whose rare genius she quickly rec- ognized, and whose delicate frame and unformed con- stitution she did her best, with a mother's devotion, to consolidate and strengthen. And the son, as he grew up, repaid that devotion, so far as such debts can be repaid, sevenfold into her bosom. Every year of her long life she became increasingly dear to him ; every year her -'firm faith, calm wisdom, and tender sympathy, speaking the truth in love, counselled, encouraged, and comforted " him who inscribed these words upon her tombstone. When death had taken from her almost at a stroke the husband of her youth, and two sons whose bones " lie severed far and wide," the one survivor drew her more and more closely to his filial and loving heart.
It was in such a home, and w^th such parents, that five children passed their childhood and opening life : Owen, who inherited his father's taste for the sea, and chose it for his calling ; Mary, whose active life spent in works of beneficence at Norwich, among the soldiers on the Bosphorus, and in Westminster, will not lightly be forgotton; Arthur, of whom I am speaking; Charles, the future Royal Engineer and Secretary to the Governor of Van Diemen's Land ; and the one sister who still survives to bear, as the wife of the Master of the Temple and Dean of Llandaff, a name honoured greatly in the English Church.
18
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
The future biographer may supplement Mr. Hare's picture of that home ; he can hardly improve upon it. It is interesting to dwell on it as one of the very highest types of that large class of cultivated, modest, and well-ordered" family circles, which have so often grown up under the quiet roof of English parsonages and Scottish manses, and which have made the sons of the clergy so important an element in our own, and, indeed, in all Protestant countries ; and I cannot help reminding you how, towards the very close of his life, in a sermon preached at Glasgow, after enlarging " on the sacred and beneficent institution of a married clergy," Arthur Stanley spoke of his own memory of " a happy and peaceful childhood spent under the shade of the tower of a parish church, and under the roof of a parish parsonage, still," he said, " after all the vicis- situdes of a chequered life, familiar, dear, and sacred beyond any other spot on the surface of the earth."
I shall follow Mr. Hare's guidance for a short time longer. The mother's letters bring before us her sec- ond boy as frail and delicate, yet beginning, when in- fancy was over, "to expand as one of the spring flowers in Alderley May time," and, again, as " talk- ing incessantly, full of pretty speeches, repartees, and intelligence ; " " like his elder brother," the gallant sailor that was to be, " but softer and more affection- ate ; " sorely divided between fear and curiosity (that curiosity which never died) at the entrance of the enchanted cave of the neighbourhood ; revelling in all the legends of the countryside ; at five years old de-
CHAP. I.] ABTUUR PEXBUYN STANLEY.
19
vouring Miss Eclgeworth's "Frank," and translating its lessons into practical life ; living already in a little world of books and poetry of his own.
At eight years old a growing shyness and silence alarmed his parents, who were wise enough greatly to dread too exclusive an activity of brain and nerve, and it was resolved to try the effect of a transference to a small and homelike school near the seaside. There we are allowed to see "the little sylph," as his aunt calls him, happ}^ in his own way, proud, like other lit- tle boys, of hearing himself called by his surname of Stanle}", prouder of bringing home a prize-book — the first of many — for history, devouring " Madoc " and " Thalaba," and forming a love which he was always eager to avow for Southey's now much forgotten poetry ; laying the foundation of his wonderful faculty for letter writing by writing home long histories of school life, describing his drill sergeant " as telling him to put on a bold, swaggering air, and not to look sheepish; " astonishing every one when he came home by his memor}^ and his quickness in picking up knowl- edge ; 3'et disquieting his mother more than ever, when his twelfth birthday was passed, by having no other pursuits, nor anj'thing he cares for, except reading; " often," she says, " I am sure, very unhappy, with a laudable desire to be with other boys, yet when with them finding his incapacity to enter into their pleas- ures." "Ah ! " she says, with a cry almost of despair, "it is so difficult to manage Arthur. Yet after all I suspect," she adds, with rare sagacity and prophetic
20
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
instinct, "I suspect that this is Arthur's worst time, and that he will be a happier man than he is a boy." Yet even she hardly foresaw the unrevealed wealth of social gifts, of unbounded cheerfulness and merri- ment, of power of adapting himself to the most varied circles, above all, the inexhaustible capacity for tender friendship, that lay latent under that pass- ing cloud of boyish shyness and reserve.
It is rarely that the general public need be called on to pore over the faded records of the childhood of distinguished men. But there is a oneness in the development of Arthur Stanley's mind that gives a singular interest to even his boyish, to even his child- ish, effusions. No doubt that young brain was at this time abnormally active. There lay before me, as I wrote what I now say, a small MS. volume, written, from beginning to end, in a boyish but, strange as it may seem to those who knew him later, a singu- larly clear hand. On the title-page are inscribed the words, " The Poetical Works of Arthur Penrhyn Stan- ley, Vol. II.," and underneath is a drawing, his own handiwork, of Neptune in his Chariot, with Amphi- trite and the sea nymphs sporting around. The vol- ume contains 13 or 14 poems in various metres, and on various subjects ; not only odes to the Humming- bird, to the Owl, to the Stork, but to such abstract ideas as Superstition, to Time, to Forgiveness, to Death, to Sleep, to Justice. It includes a poem on the Destruction of the Druids, written in a tripping dactylic metre, and a ballad on a strange legend of
CHAP. I.] ABTHun PExnirry staxley.
21
King Harold. This, remember, is Vol. II., and the poems, which are carefully dated, were written in the years 1826-27, when the 3'oung poet was of the age of 10 and 11. They seem to me (I will not trouble you with specimens) to show more marked originality than almost any, that I have seen, of his English verses written much later at Rugby. His little study there soon gained the nickname of " Poet's Corner," and from time to time he gained much credit by his school com- positions in English verse, especially for a prize poem, composed at the age of 18, on Charles MarteFs victory near Tours, " the more than ^Marathon of France,'' as he happily calls it in his final line. Yet I suspect that, quite apart from the effect of public-school life on a boy of poetic temperament, his Rugby life developed mainly other sides of that imaginative and active brain. He was intent there rather on absorbing ideas and knowl- edge than on giving out his own impressions. Certainly in my own day it was not so much to him as to Arthur Hugh Clough — the gifted author of much besides, known perhaps to some here through that charming description of a Long Vacation spent by Oxford undergraduates at the Bothie with the name un- pronounceable to Southern lips — that we Rugby schoolboys looked back as the true poet among our distinguished predecessors.
The year 1828 was an eventful epoch in Arthur Stanley's life. It was the year marked by the first foreign tour of one who was afterwards to be a traveller of travellers. Mr. Hare has told us how when first he
22
BECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
saw the great Pic du Midi rise above a mass of clouds, he could find no words to express his ecstasy but " What shall I do ? what shall I do ? " And his jour- nal written at the time was worthy of the future author of "Sinai and Palestine." I have been favoured with words written in November of the same year by a dis- cerning lady, an absolute stranger to the Stanley fam- ily, in which she speaks of herself as having been —
"Much pleased and still more surprised by the perusal of a journal duiing a tour in the Pyrenees made in the last summer by an English family. The writer is a boy of twelve years old, who, if he attains manhood, and keeps the promise he has hitherto given, will, I do not doubt, hereafter be classed amongst the distinguished literary characters of this country. His mind appears to have been open to all the beauty and wonders he saw, which he describes in language always good, and often poetical. The account he gives of their expedition to the ' Maladetta ' is one of the very best I ever read of similar excursions in any book of travels."
Such prophecies may have been often made. It is seldom that they meet with such entire fulfilment !
It was in the same year that, after much consulta- tion, his parents resolved to remove their boy to Rugby, and place him under the care of Dr. Arnold, who was just entering on a career which, in the prophetic language of the letter to which he owed his election, was to " change the face of education all through the public schools of England." *
It was a momentous decision, and one that must have required all the encouragement that so keen-
* The words are those used by Dr. Hawkins, late Provost of Oriel, who has passed away while these pages were passing through the press.
CHAP. I.] ABTnUR PENEHYN STANLEY.
23
sighted a friend as the elder Augustus Hare, who was about to marry Mrs. Stanley's sister and who was taken into counsel, could venture to give. English public schools in those da3^s were but rough homes for sensitive boys. At all times there is much in their life especially trying to boys of exceptional genius; to all in fact who are out of sympathy — out of touch, so to speak — with the average tendencies and tastes of boyhood. Rugby was, if a staunch Rugbeian may be allowed to say so, of small repute outside the circle of a few Midland counties till the advent of Arnold. The innumerable readers of "Tom Brown" will find in it a faithful picture of the rougher side of school life as it presented itself in the earlier days of our great Head Master. Arthur Stanley joined the school from which he was to receive, and to which he was to give, so much, in January, 1829. Whatever his suf- ferings in that new life, he yet with the courage that lay behind a timid exterior, put a brave face on the matter. In letters to his former schoolmaster, towards whom he cherished a loyal affection, the new boy de- scribes himself as domiciled for the time at a small boarding-house of fourteen boys — the larger house, of which he was soon to be a more permanent inmate, be- ing not yet completed — each of the fourteen having a small study to himself, " which," he says, " is a very great advantage." He goes on to give a characteristic sketch of those now world-famous school buildings : the " towers and turrets," looking, to his boyish fancy, "like those of some stately castle;" "the Close, with
24
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
its many tall trees " — on his return, years after, from Greece, he rejoiced once more over those ancient elms — " and its small chapel," — where a monument to himself will soon be added to that of Arnold, — of the surrounding country, where his eye already marked in those sluggish brooks " the numerous branches of the Avon " — the Avon of Wycliffe and of Shake- speare — " winding through extensive mej^dows." He appears to wish to amuse his former instructor, he certainly astounds his later friends, by announcing that " he has been chosen to write out one of the Prae- postor's prize-essays, on account of tvriting such a good hand'' — carefully underlining the now almost incred- ible statement. He tells him how the school now numbers 167 boys, but is rapidly increasing with Dr. Arnold's fame ; " he drops, poor boy ! the remark "that he has not yet fixed on anyone whom he should like as a friend." Doubtless, for a time, he suffered acutely from something worse than isolation and want of sympathy. But those who have had boys at school will understand his silence on the subject. Years later, when all such trials were over, on the eve of competing for the Balliol scholarship, he wrote to a friend already at Oxford, " I recollect when I first came here, and was much bullied at my first house, that I one day walked disconsolately up to the
school, where I met , who took me round the
Close, and asked me how I liked the place ? I, being too broken-spirited to enter into a detail of my griev- ances, said, in the very bitterness of my heart, that
CHAP. I.] ARTHUB PENBHTN STANLEY.
25
I liked it very much." How many disconsolate schoolboys have made the same answer ! But those days soon ended. He rose rapidly in the school, thanks, he tells his old friend, to his careful teaching; how could it have been otherwise ? He attained, if not robustness of constitution, yet an entire immu- nity from conscious ill-health; "my health," he tells his former teacher, "is almost perfect. From one half- year to another I pass with scarcely a day's sickness." He was able once more to indulge in comparative freedom his taste for reading, "keen as a hound" — I borrow his own words, which I have already quoted — " keen as a hound in the pursuit of knowledge." He writes of himself as "reading to myself, chiefly history. I have got through all Mitford and all Gib- bon, and several smaller ones, with greater success than I could have expected." " I don't know," he says, still writing to his old schoolmaster, " whether you have heard much of Dr. Arnold, or conceived bad opin- ions of him. It is possible that you may have heard him abused in every way. He has been branded with the names of Sabbath-breaker and Infidel. But seeing so much of him as I do, I may safely say that he is as thorough a Christian as you can anywhere find. His sermons are certainly the most beautiful that I ever heard, and rendered doubly impressive by his delivery. He has reformed the school in every possible way, introducing History, Mathematics, Modern Lan- guages, Examinations, Prizes, &c." My younger hear- ers will be startled at hearing that such now established
26
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
branches of a school curriculum were then looked on as revolutionary innovations. "I am afraid," he adds, " that you would not find many in the school to give him as good a character as this, as perhaps he has got a little more than the usual odium attached to a Head Master, but I think there are few who would ques- tion his talents or his sermons. I am, as you may perceive, thoroughly prejudiced in his favour. The common report is that he will be a Bishop. I hope it will not be before my departure." It is fair to add that, in a conversation held years after with an Ox- ford undergraduate, he confessed that, though at first charmed with his Head Master, there was yet a time in his schoolboy life in which he looked on him as " fierce and alarming " : and thought that what he used to hear of him at home was somewhat exaggerated, and that there was some truth in what the boys used to say about his harshness. " It was after my getting into the fifth form, and during my three and a-half years under him in the sixth, that I began to feel what Arnold really was. During all the time that he was being publicly abused, and while nobody befriended him, I was perfectly satisfied in my own mind that I was in intercourse with one of the most remarkable men of the age. What anxiety there was among some of us to hear him preach! When Sunday came round — when he went from his seat up to the pulpit, and we saw that he was going to preach — I and Vaughan used to nudge each other with delight. When I came back from the examination at Balliol, we posted home late at night, in order to avoid missing his sermon."
I.] AETUUB PEXRHYN STAXLEY.
27
Rugby, in fact, soon became to liim, as to how many others since, when the first troubles of his early days were at an end, I will not say a second home, but a place invested with a dearness and a sacredness of its own, not inferior to, though different from, that which attached to such homes as the Rectory at Alderley. School distinctions, of course, fell to his lot one after another. He records in one of his letters how, by winning the prizes for a Greek poem and a Latin essay, he had succeeded at last in carrying off the five great school distinctions then existing— a feat in which he was only rivalled once in the history of Arnoldian Rugby, by A. H. Clough, whose name, dear to all Rugby men, I have already mentioned. Indeed, the most definite school tradition that I, as a schoolboy there myself, found attached to his name was, that on handing to him the very last of these five prizes, his master and ours broke for the first time the profound, the almost grim silence which, strange as it may sound to modern ears, he invariably maintained on the annual " Speech-Day," to utter the expressive words, " Thank you, Stanley ; we have nothing more to give you."
Meantime his literary instincts were finding their full satisfaction, not only in the work done at the feet of his renowned master, but in his own insatiable reading, as partly described above. Kow, too, it was that he developed the first germs of that marvellous capacity for forming warm and lasting friendships which was to the very end of his life one of his most marked characteristics. It is touching even now to read how
28
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
the boy, so shy and reserved in his beloved home, so forlorn and solitary in his first year or two of Rugby life, whose incapacity for entering into intimacy with other boys had once so gravely alarmed a mother's heart, was already realising her hopes that the cloud that isolated him was only transient. A letter exists, written at the close of his schooldays to an older friend,* then an undergraduate, in which, after speaking of his soon leaving Rugby, the place where I have spent five happy years, learned knowledge human and divine, as probably I shall never learn it again," he speaks also of Rugby as " the place, too, of my several friendships (forgive me," he inserts, " for the word several} to last, I hope, none lessened by the existence of others, to the latest hour of my life." How many there are still living, how many who have passed away, whom the young writer of these words was to inspire with feelings which even the sacred word friendship seems only inadequately to express ! What a genius for friendship, in the very highest and noblest conception of its mean- ing, was he to develope ! How he loved his friends, how steadfastly did he stand by them ; to how many did he open his heart and how many hearts did he win — win and raise and ennoble — by his friendship, without stir- ring the slightest sense of jealousy or rivalry in the men of all ages and of all classes who delighted in the sense of each other's affection for him ! How they, how we, rejoiced to bring our friends into the charmed circle
* Dr. Greenhill, who has kindly allowed me to read many of these early letters.
CHAP. I.] ARTHUE PENliHYN STANLEY.
29
of his companionship and love. How prophetic, seen now, to those who saw the circle of his friends re- cruited year after year, the youthful words, " my sev- eral friendships, to last, I hope, none lessened by the existence of the others, to the latest hour of my life ! "
On the other hand, it is not to be supposed that, happy and cheerful as he was at school, he ever became a genuine specimen of what is now ordinarily under-' stood by a " public-school boy." He ranged freely over the countr}", not very interesting in itself, round Rugby; but he never acquired any taste for the ordinary games and amusements which now-a-days fill the foreground in the popular conception of young Rugby life. In- deed the taste for such games, far less organised than they are now, was less widely diffused than it has since become, and the distinction between the many who played or idled, and the few who worked, greatly effaced since, was in the earlier and rougher period of Arnold's time still strongly marked. There is a short paper in the old " Rugby Magazine," which it was not till the last time I saw him, within less than four weeks of his death, that, while talking of this very subject, I learned to be his. He speaks there of himself and his young co-editors as turning out with heated brains for a ten minutes' walk in the Close before " locking up," and meeting the other, the more numerous and athletic, portion of the school coming in from their summer afternoon spent in cricket. It is a paper which could scarcel}^ have been written at the present day : the state of things which it describes — the division of the School
30
BECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
into two classes — is one which, for good or evil, for good and evil, mainly I trust for good, has passed away. Once at a Rugby dinner he described, with the humour of which he was a master, how, " as I sat in that study read- ing Mitford, a stone thrown at me by a schoolfellow came through the window, struck me on the forehead here," striking his forehead as he spoke, " and left an almost indelible scar." The story is characteristic of the involuntary disgust with which the sight of a schoolfellow sitting at home to read, otherwise than under compulsion, would have inspired nine out of ten of the schoolboys of the day. And the result of tliis state of things was that his direct influence on the School was probably confined to the circle of those who were more or less like-minded. " The young barbari- ans all at play " cared little, though they learned to look on him with a certain awe, for their gifted schoolfellow, the quiet, kindly, studious, high-bred Prsepostor. " Not being marked out from others in any game," writes one who, as a very young boy, was with him in the same house, and rose years after to the headship of the School — " not even to the extent of Clough's prowess as goal keeper at football, his name passed away very quickly at his house, save for the holidays which he won for us at Oxford." Such was, I doubt not, the case with these outer barbarians. But I am bound to say, in defence of my old school, that coming to it as I did at an unusu- ally late age, and being admitted at once to the society of my older schoolfellows, I found his name, after the lapse of three years from his leaving Rugby, sur-
p. I.] ARTHUR PEyRHYN STANLEY.
31
rounded b}^ the halo of departed genius ; and I may add that I for one could say by heart most of his Oxford prize poem before I had ever seen its author.
Do I fatigue you with these boyish reminiscences ? Let me add one. In a letter written towards the end of his time at Rugby he speaks of rumours coming from Oxford of the rising reputation of "William Gladstone," who had been a pupil for a time of Stanley's first teacher. In later life he recounted the story of his first meeting the present Prime Minister and member for Mid-Lothian — then a boy of fifteen, himself a few years younger — at the house of Mr. Gladstone's father. "Have you ever read Gray's jDoems?" said the future statesman. "No," replied his younger acquaintance. " Then do so at once," said the elder vehemently, and produced the volume. It was taken home, read at once, and en- joyed ; and to the end of his life it was difficult for him to speak of the scenery of Greece, or to go round the tombs of the earlier kings in the Abbey, without the appropriate quotation from Gray rising to his lips. For myself, I shall always think of the poet as asso- ciated not least of all with the veteran statesman and the friend whom he will, I trust, long survive.
The end of his schoolboy days drew near. You will find a graphic account in Mr. Hare's paper of the eventful week in which he won, the first of many Rugby boys who have followed in his steps, the first of the two vacant scholarships at Balliol. The tumult of joy which such marked success raised in his own
32
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. I.
heart, in the large circle of Ragby men at Oxford, at .Rugby, and not least at Alderley, is more easy perhaps for Rugbeians and Oxonians to realise than for those to whom the details of Oxford competitions are a matter, if not of absolute yet of comparative indifference. " It is a great triumph," he says, in a letter to that old schoolmaster to whom in that hour of triumph he was still loyal, " a great triumph to us, for Rugby has hitherto been kept rather in the back- ground by other schools, who this year were entirely defeated." In the same letter he once more, with characteristic chivalry, returns to the charge in be- half of Dr. Arnold. But I will not repeat to you the emphatic words in which he asserts his unaltered adherence to his former opinion.
In the following June he left Rugby. There is a humorous and graphic account in one of his letters of the final school examination, conducted on behalf of Oxford by the present Bishop of Salisbury, then tutor of Balliol, and soon to become Head Master of Winchester, and on behalf of Cambridge by Dr. Wordsworth, now well known as the venerable Bishop of Lincoln. After recounting how his own name was proclaimed first in the anxiously expected list, and immediately explaining that this was merely because he was senior in the school, and that Vaughan, his dear friend and future brother-in-law, was really bracketed as his equal, he expresses the hope that his friend " will not think it affected in him to say that he could not possibly have wished it better." " There is all,"
CHAP. I.] AETHUB PEyHHTN STANLEY. 66
he writes, " that was necessary to gratify every indi- vidual feeling of vanity ; all to make me happy for Vaughan, to whom I should not at all have grudged the first place ; all to make me happy for the School."
For now," he adds, with a dash of public spirit which every public-school boy or man will appreciate, " let no one say of me, whether in my successes or my failures at Oxford, that I was the first at Rugby, and therefore must be taken as a specimen for better or worse of the School. The answer is ready in black and white — that there was and is another equal, who would, had it not been for his long illness before the examination, have most probably been before me."
I may venture to say that there is no true son of Rugby living who does not rejoice in a "bracket" which linked together those two friends, a due esti- mate of whose widely different gifts must have sorely puzzled the most discriminating of examiners.
The hour came at which he bade goodby to his school life. I have been allowed to read a letter in which he describes the scene in which one who has been called the hero-schoolmaster had to part with one who has been felicitously called the hero-pupil.* " I saw him," he writes, " but for a few minutes, but those few minutes were worth much ; " and after describing their brief conversation, the promises of introduction to his old pupil, the late Bishop of Salisbury, and to a newer friend, the present Lord Chancellor of Eng-
* In the touching sermon preached in the Alibey by the Dean of Llandaff on the Sunday after the death of his brother-in-law.
34 RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
land, and then the parting words, the very tones of the twice repeated " God bless you, Stanley ; " he goes on, " and so we parted, and so that constant and delight- ful and blessed intercourse I have had with him for three years closed for ever. My comfort is that I shall see him now, when I do see him, with greater ease ; but even that may and must be soon broken off, by his becoming, what every year makes more inevitable, a Bishop. I see I have said for ever. God grant not for ever literally, though it may be so on earth."
There is something, you will say, overstrained in all this. He himself so far agreed with you that he spoke at the end of his life of a certain exaggeration of tone in his youthful letters, not on this subject specially, but on all. Yet which of us would wish to rob youth of its special gift of a generous enthusiasm ? Who of us would not rejoice to see our sons fired with a like ardour for another Arnold ?
Before many weeks were over he had the delight of visiting his beloved master in his home among the Westmoreland lakes — not where some of his later pu- pils of the same age were privileged to see him, at Fox How, which was then in the builder's hands — but at Allan Bank, overlooking Grasmere, which had been the temporary home of the poet Wordsworth. Space and time warn me to leave to his biographer his short but delightful notices of Arnold in his home ; of Words- worth, to seeing whom he had looked forward with all the interest of a schoolboy admirer ; of Hartley Cole- ridge ; of Captain Hamilton, author of " Cyiil Thorn-
CHAP. I.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY,
35
ton," and "Men and Manners in America," "still lame," saj^s the youthful student of Napier's History, " from a wound received at Albuera ; " or his humorous account of the expedition to Keswick, and the vain watching like a cat outside Greta Bank in hopes of seing Southey, of one who to the end of his days upheld against all comers the poetic merits of " Thalaba " and " Kehama."
The visit was paid in 1834. Less than eight years later, on the 12th of June, 1842, the master to whom he still looked with a no less ardent if less boyish devotion was taken from the work which he was car- Tjing on with unclouded success at Rugby. Arnold was still comparatively a young man — he wanted three years of fifty ; to all appearance unusually strong and vigorous, growing every j^ear in intellectual grasp, and dying at the very moment when the combination of that Christian faith which sustained him in the swift and painful passage from life to death with an ardent and inextinguishable love of truth, might have opened for him a fresh field of untold influence in the religious life of England. He had outlived much of the odium with which his position as a religious teacher, a church reformer, and an outspoken opponent of the rising Oxford movement had at one time covered him. His Oxford pupils still recall the rapid revulsion from fierce aversion to warm admiration produced at the University by the delivery of his historical lectures in the spring of that fatal year. The shock that ran through England at the news of his death few here may remember. It remains in the memory of his pupils
36
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
as something almost or quite unparalleled. " To me," said Stanley, who had hurried to Rugby on receiving the dreadful news in London from the present Dean of Durham, " to me," he said, in the first letter that one who was then his pupil and is now his successor ever received from him, " it seems as though the solid earth had passed away beneath my feet." He preached the funeral sermon at that saddest of gatherings in Eugby Chapel ; stood by the grave side by side with his father and his friends, and immediately volunteered to write his Biography ; " a work," he said, " which from first to last I thoroughly enjoyed." And well he might ! When was such a tribute paid in English literature by a pupil to his teacher ? Let me add that no 12th of June ever passed without his writing to Mrs. Arnold, or, when she had passed away, to her daughter at Fox How ; few on which one or other of his own Rugby pupils failed to write to himself.
Two questions at once arise. How far is Arnold's reputation due to his biographer, rather than to his own merits ? And what was the effect of Arnold's influence on Stanley ? The first is a question of fact, the other one of inference and conjecture. Some of us have heard it said, in answer to the former question, not merely that Arnold's work and character were brought home to thousands, to whom otherwise they would have remained unknown, by that matchless Biography, but that the man himself was transfigured by the genius and devotion of the biographer — that the por- trait is, in fact, an ideal picture. Nay, it has been
CHAP. I.] ARTHUR PE^^RHYy STANLEY.
37
more than whispered in these latter days, that the Arnold of the biographer is a legendary being, a mythical personage, created by the picturesque, but unfaithful, fancy of Arthur Stanley.
It is encouraging to feel how baseless sometimes are the final results of an over-restless scepticism even in the hands of those who w^ould have no words too strong for their condemnation of a "negative criticism" on the part of others. We, his pupils, are fast passing away. Let one of those who still remain record his emphatic protest against these extravagances of in- credulitj^ this entire misreading of the character of two such men. It is impossible, alas ! that the biog- raphy of Stanley can be written by one so gifted and furnished for the task as he was for his; but it will be much if it be written by one equally unsparing of pains to verify every touch and every line, as deter- mined to check every impression of his own mind by careful comparison with that made on others ; above all, content to let the subject of his work speak for himself, in his own words, and almost in his own tones, as Arnold speaks in his letters and journals, and to keep his own impressions, his own views, as carefully in the background as Stanley keeps his in that memorable Biography.
But what was the effect of Arnold on himself? Did the influence of so commanding and overpowering a character dwarf his own genius, de-individualise — if I ma}' coin the word — the individual Stanley, or unduly affect and modify his course and character ?
38
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
Should we, but for Arnold, have had something other, something perhaps better, something perhaps worse, but something different to what we had in Stanley ?
Similar questions may occur as to all lives. Like analogous questions in the history of nations, they are always hard to answer. The influence, no doubt, of his teacher was enormous over his mind in youth. He was quite conscious of it then and afterwards. " Ar- nold at Rugby," he said, late in life, was my idol and oracle, both in one. Afterwards, well — he was not exactly my oracle, but I reverenced him wholly to the end — I have never felt such reverence for any one since." In that most moving of sermons, preached near Stanley's open grave, the Vaughan of whom he spoke with such chivalrous affection nearly fifty years before, recalled his friend's rapt countenance as he listened to his master's sermons — his entire absorp- tion, as he went straight from the chapel to his study to transcribe his impressions of those memorable dis- courses. Speaking at Baltimore in 1878, "the lapse of years," he said, "has only served to deepen in me the conviction that no gift can be more valuable than the recollection and the inspiration of a great character working on our own. I hope that you may all experi- ence this at some time of your life as I have done." And he was quite alive to it while it was in full force. " What a wonderful influence," he says, in a letter written while still at Rugb}^, " that man has over me ! I certainly feel that I have hardly a free will of my own on any subject on which he has written or spoken.
I.] ARTHUB PENRHYN STANLEY.
39
It is, I suppose," lie goes on to say, " a weak and un- natural state to be in ; for," he adds, with instinctive insight, " I do not at all consider mj^self to be naturally of the same frame as he is;" and, curiously enough, a great part of a long letter to the same correspondent is filled with a remarkably bold and searching criticism of a striking hymn, written by his great teacher, of which he had obtained possession. Indeed, no two men could have been in many points more unlike each other. In stature, in manners, in appearance, in voice, in conversational powers, in much of their general tone of mind, the difference between them amounted almost to contrast; and however strong were the bonds of sympathy and agreement on the most important subjects, however undying the effects of that contact with so vigorous and impressive a teacher in the most impressible stage of the pupil's life, yet those who knew them both are not very careful to answer otherwise than with a smile of incredulity the suggestion that Stanley was in any way the crea- tion of his teacher. What difference might have been made by the subtraction, so to speak, of the Arnoldian element from the Stanley whom they knew, they can- not say. But they feel quite sure that he had a genius all his own, and an individuality, and an independence and a power of marking out his own course, not infe- rior to that of his master. And considering his early training and home influences, and still more the whole temperament and constitution of his mind, they will greatly question whether, after whatever periods of
40
JRECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
temporary oscillation, the ultimate bent and direction of the forces which marked his genius and character, would have been very different to what they were, even had his father shrunk from entrusting him to the then untried world of that Warwickshire Grammar School, and placed him in the more familiar atmos- phere of " Commoners " at Winchester.
In all this I am puprosely anticipating. Let me now return to the narrative of his life.
In 1834 he was fairly launched on his undergradu- ate career. It was an eventful time at Oxford. The dominant religious influences of the place were be- coming every year more antagonistic to those under ■ which his boyhood had been passed. The watchwords of "Church Authority," "Apostolical Succession," "The Primitive Church," " Sacramental Grace," were to be heard on all sides. The views w^hich they repre- sented Avere being urged in sermons, in tracts, in conver- sation, above all from the pulpit, by the most persua- sive of lips and the purest of lives. Their effect on the life of Oxford has been described, hi a manner which I shall not attempt to emulate, by Principal Shairp,* himself somewhat later a member of the same Col- lege as Arthur Stanley. Their influence on the reli- gious history of the nation has yet to be fully estimated. How far the theological atmosphere in which he now lived temporarily affected him, one who was a school- boy at the time will hardly venture to say; but among his most intimate friends were more than
* In a paper on Keble in " Studies on Poetry and Philosophy.'*
CHAP. I.] AETHUR PENBHTX STAXLEY.
41
one of those who afterwards became the leaders of a niovemeut iii which he certainly never joined ; and there is no doubt that, while still an undergraduate, he felt the keenest interest in the defence of Dr., afterwards Bishop, Hampden, whose appointment to the Regius chair of Theology provoked a storm, the first of a long series that later on convulsed the English Church. He was actually, there is reason to believe, privately consulted by Lord ^Melbourne himself, whose short but characteristic encomium on his young adviser need not be repeated. Doubtless even his active mind and indomitable power of work were largely absorbed by his necessary reading. In a letter to his eldest brother, written while reading at Oxford during his last summer vacation, he speaks of " looking forward to November to free me at once and for ever from the great burden which has been hanging over me for the last three years." He was by no means what is called a heaven-born scholar, in the technical sense of the word. In Greek and Latin composition he had been always easily distanced at Rugby by his friend Yaughan, and for the more abstract branches of mental philosoph}^ so congenial to the Scottish mind, he had no special turn. He used to amuse his Oxford pupils by recounting his laborious efforts to attain sufficient excellence in Latin verse-writing, in which he never greatly excelled, to allow him to obtain, as he did at last by the excellence of other work, the Ireland Scholarship — the highest distinction offered by the University for Greek and Latin scholarship ; and he
42
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. I.
would enlarge on the debt which he owed to the pres- ent Bishop of St. Albans, who, as his private tutor, assisted him greatly to overcome this special deficiency.
The most interesting achievement of his under- graduate days was a poem for which in 1837 he won the Newdigate prize. Its subject was " The Gipsies," and it seems to me to be separated by a marked and distinct line from all his earlier literary efforts (set- ting aside passages in private letter or journals) which I have yet seen, and to bear the true stamp of the mature Stanley, such as his later friends and the world at large have known him. It is not only that it is something far more than an unusually meritorious prize poem, and contains touches of description drawn from natural scenery, such as a true poet would gladly claim to have written at his age. Such lines, for instance, as —
" The changeful smiles, the living face of light, The steady gaze of the still solemn night; Bright lakes, the glistening eyes of solitude, Girt with grey cliflfs and folds of mighty wood,"
though possibly within the reach of one who, without high poetic gifts, had saturated himself with the works of first-class poets, are something more than the patch- work phrases of a skilled versifier. Nor is it only that when, with a reference in a footnote to Lamar- tine's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he speaks of —
" The meteor light Of Syrian skies by Zion's towery height,"
he foreshadows his own more fruitful visits to that
CHAP. I.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY,
43
sacred soil. But wlien those who are familiar with his later writings read his description of the —
" Dark and troublous time — The Heaven all gloom, the wearied Earth all crime,"
that ushered in the fifteenth century ; or the coup- lets that follow, beginning with —
A stranger people, 'mid that murky gloom, Knocked at the gates of awe-struck Christendom; "
we feel that " the boy " has already become " father of the man." So again, after breathing the very spirit of romance and poetry into the various legends that hung round the origin of that strange people, as for instance, in the words —
" Heard ye the nations heave their long last groans Amidst the crash of Asia's thousand thrones,"
he lingers over the tradition, destitute as it is of all historical value, of their representing the old Egyp- tian race, and thus living as degraded wanderers by the side of their ancient Hebrew bondservants, in such lines as —
" Remnant of ages, from thy glory cast, Dread link between the present and the past —
One only race amid thy dread compeers Still moves with thee along this vale of tears; Long since ye parted by the Red Sea's strand, Now face to face ye meet in every land. Alone amid a new-born world ye dwell — Egypt's lorn people, outcast Israel! "
As we read such passages, we feel that we are at once transported into the very centre of the familiar
44
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
thoughts and imagery of the Stanley that was to be : that if the voice is the voice of the young under- graduate, still toiling for his degree, the words and the ideas are those of the writer who was one day almost to re-create large fields of sacred and ecclesiastical history by clothing them with a fresh glow of life and colour.
It is interesting to add that the poem as it stands bears traces, as we know from the writer, of correc- tions introduced by the author of the " Christian Year," who then held the Professorship of Poetry; it contains also a reference, perhaps the earliest that appeared in print, to a line from an early poem of the present Poet Laureate, whose name, however, was not given, and which the poet Keble supposed to be a quotation from Shakespeare.
His career as an undergraduate of Balliol was now at an end ; his First Class obtained, his degree taken. The burden was lifted from his shoulders, and with character consolidated, and many warm and lasting friendships formed, he stood on the threshold of mature manhood.
A Fellowship at his own College would have seemed the natural sequel iu the academical life of one of the most distinguished of her sons ; one whose character was as spotless as his career had been exceptionally brilliant. But it will hardly be believed in Edinburgh, it will scarcely be credited in modern Oxford, that so strong was the feeling among the older and ruling members of that society against admitting to their cir- cle the son of such a Bishop as Bishop Stanley, and the sympathizing pupil of Thomas Arnold, that he was
I.] ARTHUR PEXRHTN STANLEY.
45
privately given to understand that his chance of elec- tion at his own College was too small to warrant him in exposing himself to a repulse. The moment was seized by the keen-sighted dexterity of one still living, then an active and influential tutor of University College — let me once more thank him here I — and in the year 1839 Arthur Stanley was elected Fellow of that Col- lege ; an event I do not hesitate to say of far greater importance to the welfare of that ancient society, which claims King Alfred for its founder, than any that had befallen it for at least a century. In the same year his dear and life-long Balliol friend, Benjamin Jowett, now the Master of Balliol, was elected, while still an undergraduate, to a Fellowship in his own Col- lege ; and before it closed, Arthur Stanley had, after a period of some perplexity and hesitation, taken a step to which he had steadily looked forward from his Rug- by days, and which he never for a moment regretted, and had been ordained deacon by the Bishop of Oxford.
He had now fully resolved to give his life, for the present at least, to the work of a College Tutor at Ox- ford. But before plunging into educational work, he resided for a time as junior Fellow, occupying himself in study, in learning the elements of Hebrew, attend- ing with great interest Dr. Pusey's lectures, and in writing an Essay, which obtained the Chancellor's Prize, on a congenial historical subject. It is a com- position which almost deserves to be placed beside his prize poem. Would that time allowed me to quote to you the eloquent and most characteristic page with
46
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. I.
which it closes. Meantime, important changes had taken place in his family circle. His father and family had removed to Norwich, and were established in their new home in the Bishop's Palace. His sailor-brother Owen had accompanied Captain Back as scientific offi- cer on his adventurous voyage in the Terror to the Arctic seas, and struggling back with a scurvy-stricken crew, in a battered ship onl}^ kept from going to pieces by under-girding her with iron chains, had reached at last the wild but friendly shores of Lough S willy on the night of the 3rd of September, 1837. There, for the first time, the young officer heard to his great dismay that the Alderley home was broken up. The removal had already taken place. While it was in contempla- tion Arthur Stanley, still an undergraduate, had stolen two days in term time to visit his father in London. " It was," he writes, " a most trying time. I should hardly have known my father's face, so worn as he was with the anxiety of the week before in making up his mind to the decision." '^But," he writes, after a visit paid in September to Norwich, I do not repent of it now; he seems much freer and liappier than he ever did before." In the same letter, addressed to his brother on board H.M.S. Terror^ he gives a character- istic account of their new home, contrasting the ugli- ness of the Palace with the surpassing beauty of the Cathedral that overshadows it. The former is," says the yet untravelled traveller, " among houses what Moscow is, I should think, among cities. Rooms which one may really call very fine side by side with the
CHAP. I.] ABTHUB PEyBHYN STANLEY.
47
meanest of passages and staircases. By the riverside," he characteristically writes, "is a ruin where a Bishop once killed a wolf ; over the river, a road down which another Bishop marched with 6000 men at arms ; " and he assures his brother that he is highly flattered by his having carried the remembrance of the Hamp- den controversy with him through the Arctic winter. " That storm," he says, " is laid ; in fact, its place is taken in the newspapers b}' the installation sermon of the Bishop of Norwich." The letter is dated Sep- tember 22, 1837, and concludes with a fear that "these full particulars of Norwich life may give you the idea, which they say at home is the case, that I am the only one paffed up by the accession of dignity."
i\Iay I be allowed to insert here what is to myself something more than a slight personal reminiscence? It was after his migration from Balliol, that it became the duty of the new Fellow of University, early in the year 1840, to take part in the annual Scholarship Examination, which ended in the election of a Rugby schoolboy, the first of many whom his rising fame drew not from Rugby only, to a College which had so wisely added to its teaching^ staff so attractive and ma^rnetic an influence. ]More than two-and-forty years have passed since on that bright March afternoon the loud con- gratulations of old friends and schoolfellows were hushed for a moment as the young Examiner stepped into the quadrangle and turned to greet the new scholar. How well does he recall that kindly greet- ing— the hearty grasp of the friendly hand that seemed
48
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. i.
to carry the heart in it — the bright expressive coun- tenance of the young tutor, so full of all that might win and charm a somewhat imaginative schoolboy, which shines still out of the distance in all its first youthful beauty " as the face of an angel." He at once invited the newly elected scholar to take a walk with him on his return from a formal visit to the Master of the College, and that dull road that led out by the then implanted, unreclaimed, Oxford Parks, is still lit in the memory of him who trod it by his side, wit] I something fairer than the bright March sun which shone across it, " We are walking," he said, " towards Rugby," and at once placed his companion at his ease by questions about his friends there, and about the Master who was the object of as enthusi- astic a devotion to the younger as to the older Rug- beian. How little did it occur to either, as they parted, how strangely near their lives were to be drawn to each other ! The younger might have listened to a soothsayer who had said, " You have won to-day something that you will soon count far more precious than the scholarship in which you are exulting:" but how contemptuousl}^ would he have turned from the predictioji that he would years after be called from the headship of the College of which he was that day enrolled as the youngest member, to succeed, in his new friend, not the least illustrious and the most lamented of the Deans of Westminster. It is in virtue of the friendship of which that day was the birthda}^ that 1 have stood before you this evening.
CHAP, n.] ABTUUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
49
CHAPTER II.
(From 1840 to 1863.)
OXFORD — C ANTERBUEY — OXFORD.
N the autumn of the same year Arthur Stanley left
England for a tour in Greece and Italy. The tour was so far memorable that it encouraged and con- firmed the taste for foreign travel, implanted first of all by that early visit to the South of France, which he never lost. He suffered, as travellers at that time were sure to suffer, from occasional personal discom- forts. " At Athens," he said in later life, I felt the cold of winter more than I ever did ; at St. Petei^- burg least of all." But he had already mastered the art of extracting a fund of amusement from such pass- ing trials, and his companion, the present Dean of Norwich, was a man of most kindly heart and unfail- ing humour. In spite therefore of all drawbacks, he drank deep of the delights of moving about from day to day among the scenes of Greek history and poetry, and he became conscious in himself and revealed more fully to his friends a power of bringing before the minds of others such pictures of scenes which most
60
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. II.
interested him as, when their number and their variety are taken into account, have rarely, if ever, been sur- passed in English literature. A long letter which he wrote to Dr. Arnold, in which he dwells on some of the main characteristics of Greek scenery, deserves to be placed side by side with the most striking of the descriptive passages in his later writings.
It is possible that a few words on that which forms so marked an element in all his writings, his attitude as regards natural scenery, may be of interest here as a contribution to a right estimate alike of his literary position and of the pervading tone and col- our of his mind.
Scenery in and for itself, the aspects of Nature as viewed in their own light and for their own sakes, he never, I think I am right in saying, never once at- tempts to describe. In one of his letters to an old pupil, written at Canterbury in 1854, there is a pas- sage which gives the key alike to the excellences and the deficiencies of this great painter of Nature. " I can- not think," he says, "that mere effusions of emotion at the transient blushes of Nature deserve an ever- lasting record. I feel about such effusions, almost as I feel about my present, oftentimes ineffectual, la- bours at reproducing scenes of my travels " (he was then at work at " Sinai and Palestine"), "that they are not worth publishing, except as a framework to events or ideas of greater magnitude." Of Nature, as studied for her own sake, in the spirit of Wordsworth, or so many true poets in all ages, or of Mr. Ruskin
CHAP. II.] ARTHUB PENEHYN STANLEY.
51
among modern prose writers, there will be found, I venture to say, no trace in his published writings or in his letters since he grew to manhood. Whenever he becomes enthusiastic on the beauties of nature, we may feel sure that there is always at work a motive other than that of the artist — that behind nature lies some human or historical interest. " How mysterious," he says, in a letter to a younger friend, then at Rome, " the Alban lake ! How beautiful Nemi ! how roman- tic Subiaco I how solemn Ostia ! how desolate Gabii ! " What could be better ? you will say. Yes ; but behind all these, there lay on his mental retina the background of the history of Rome — " the one only place," he goes on to say, " in the whole world, that is absolutely in- exhaustible ! " It is quite true that occasionally, in some three, or four, or five remarkable passages, oc- curring especially, and for an obvious reason, in his American addresses, he introduces pictures of some natural phenomena, quite apart from any direct his- torical association. Such is the splendid picture of the Falls of Niagara ; the graceful and touching image, a true sonnet in prose, drawn from two trees, the grace- ful maple and the gnarled and twisted oak, growing side by side ; the description of the course of the St. Lawrence as contrasted with that of the Nile ; of sun- rise, as seen from the summit of the Righi. But in each of these apparent exceptions to his ordinary habit, he seizes on some aspect of external nature, not for its own sake, but as the symbol of some idea — some truth, that he wishes to enforce or interpret. As a general
62
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. II.
rule, he looks on nature not as a poetical interpreter of nature — not, we may fairly say, as a poet in the truest sense — but as one who seems never to feel that he has thoroughly mastered any event, or chain of events, in human or sacred history, till he has seen the spot, and breathed the air which gives to each occur- rence its peculiar and local colouring. And with what an eye he sees it ! with what a power of insight and discrimination he reproduces the exact points in which nature and history meet and blend with, and mutually influence, each other ! " We go," he said in his Ser- mons in the East, "to the Jerusalem where Christ died and rose again. To see that Holy City, even though the exact spots of His death and resurrection are un- known, is to give a new force to the sound of the Name^ whenever afterwards we hear it in Church, or read it in the Bible." The words apply in their first sense to the most sacred of all lands, and of all scenes. But the feeling that dictated them is the key to something else, to the unwearied, the insatiable avidity — I can call it nothing less — with which he would fatigue the most indefatigable of fellow travellers or hosts, by visiting any and every spot, however apparently insignificant, which was connected, directly or indirectly, with any historical event or person, or with any scene in the works of the great masters of poetry or fiction, or even with any important legend that had ever influenced the human mind. At Lindisfarne," says one who vis- ited it with him, " his mind was, I am sure, quite as much occupied with the immurement of Constance,
CH.^. II.] ABTEUR PEXBHTN STANLEY.
53
as with the memory of St. Aiclan and St. Cuthbert." Tours was to hhn quite as much associated with Quentin Durward as with St. ^lartin, or with Hil de- garde, or Louis XL, or Henry IL His persistence in dragging a fellow traveller to call on the Archbishop of Granada was based quite as much on his being the lineal successor of the master of Gil Bias, as on his being the occupant of that historic see. And the keen eye for detecting resemblances and points of agreement under superficial or real differences, that gave such a character to his whole treatment of history and of theology, followed him also in his visits to historic places. As he saw an analogy to the yet un visited Moscow in his new home in Xorwich, so he delighted to point out the seven hills of Rome in the same city. He was not content with recognising in this your famous capital the resemblance — the modified resem- blance, which I have already quoted — to Athens; he found in the relation of the new to the old town something which reminded him of a place so unlike Edinburgh as Prague.
Let me add that in the same spirit in which before his tour to the Holy Land he read through and through all that he could find worth reading on Pal- estine, so he would visit no place, not even in the suburbs of London, or a railway junction in Scotland, without learning all that he could of its history or associations. A curious feature of his travelling mind — if I may so speak — was that for many years of his life he did not care, indeed rather objected, to
54
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. II.
see the same scene twice. " When once," he said, " I have seen a remarkable sight, I do not care to see it again, unless it is one with which fond or happy associations are connected." " The second sight of Prague quite revolted me," he added, with comic energy; ''and though I saw Marathon on a rainy day, yet I refused three or four opportunities of see- ing it again. On the first sight of scenes of this sort a whole new world opens before me ; floods of thought come in, which are indelible, and there is nothing new in a second visit."
And now let me return to his personal history. At the conclusion of his tour in Greece, he wrote the let- ter to Dr. Arnold to which I have already referred, in solitude, or worse than solitude. His fellow suf- ferers under the miseries of a Maltese quarantine, were some young men, whose loose talk revolted him, and who had not the good sense to discover that beneath the mask of that averted countenance and those silent lips, was one, to enjoy whose society and conversation many wiser than themselves would have gladly faced the horrors of that tedious imprisonment. Released at last, he arrived alone at Naples, depressed, home- sick, and yearning for some congenial society. In the Museum he met an English acquaintance, who said, "Of course you have seen Hugh Pearson?" mention- ing the name of one of his closest Balliol friends. " Hugh Pearson ! " he exclaimed ; " where is he ? " and darted in search of him. He found him in front of a well-known statue, rushed up to him, and, over-
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
55
come with joy and emotion, fell into his friend's arms with a burst of uncontrollable tears. I mention the incident, not merely as illustrative of his tender and affectionate nature, which never lost a spark of its j^outhful warmth till the hand relaxed its clasp, and the heart had ceased to beat, but because the com- panion whom he then found, and with whom he com- pleted his homeward journejs became from that time the very closest and most inseparable of all his friends.
When sorrowing mourners gathered in April last round the grave of that friend, from whom death had severed him for a time, there was one feeling in many hearts — that they had lost one who, beyond any liv- ing person, was in full possession of the whole soul of him to whom death had re-united him — that the most trustworthy, the most intimate, the most con- tinuous of the authorities for the history of Arthur Stanley, had passed into the world beyond the grave, in the person of his friend Hugh Pearson.
He returned to Oxford in the autumn of 1841, and soon after became Lecturer, and in due time Tutor and Dean of his new College, where he resided con- tinuously, or nearly so, till his removal to Canterbury.
This perhaps is the place to speak of his life as an Oxford tutor, the capacity in which I, and many others of his most devoted friends, first knew him. Yet, in speaking to an audience north of the Tweed, there maybe some difficulty in bringing before jou what that life really was. But you are perhaps aware that until quite lately every Oxford student — though the word
66
EECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. n.
" student " in this technical sense is unknown on the banks of the Isis — passed three years of his academ- ical life within the walls of one of about a score of Col- leges. Of these Colleges — each contained within a separate, more or less imposing, block of stone-built buildings, with its own chapel, its own dining-hall, its own library, its own lecture rooms — the University practically consisted. Each College was under the separate government of its own head — Master, War- den, Provost, Principal, President, as the case might be — and its own fellows and tutors ; and each contained its own group of undergraduate students. The Uni- versity, by which all degrees were conferred, was represented by disciplinary and other authorities, by examiners, and by professors. But at the time of which I speak, professorial lectures had, with few exceptions, fallen into almost entire abeyance ; and the instruction which undergraduates received was given within the walls of their own College, supplemented often by pri- vate tuition from teachers whom they selected at their will and remunerated from their own resources.
The position, therefore, of a College tutor, living in rooms among his pupils, waited on by the same ser- vants, attending daily the same chapel services, dining at the same hour in the same hall, was — may I not say still is? — one singularly fitted to open a field for use- fulness to those who have the rare gift of influencing young men. Into the duties and opportunities of this position Stanley threw himself with all the ardour of his nature, and the impression that he made and the
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PEyRHTy STAXLET.
57
work whicli he achieved was, at the time, unexampled. It can only be understood by those who are familiar with the influence gained by the almost life-long labours of his own almost life-long friend, Prof essor Jowett, no w Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, at a Col- lege better kno\\ni in Edinburgh than that to which the scholar of Balliol had migrated. As compared with that friend, Stanley had no doubt some drawbacks as a tutor. I am no moral philosopher or metaphysician," he said of himself later. His interest in the minuter shades of philological scholarship was never very keen. No man knew better his own weak points. But the page of History, ancient, modern, or sacred, was to him, in the truest sense of the words, "rich with the spoils of time ; " and he knew how to make that page glow with the light of wisdom and of poetry, and to aid his pupils to regard those spoils as verj' treasures. How well two or three of us must remember that well-marked Herodotus which he freely lent us. It had its special marks in coloured lines to indicate, first, passages noteworthy for the Greek ; secondly, passages bearing on Greek history, or on the time of Herodotus ; thirdly, passages containing truths for all time. He was already giving himself to the study of the Old and Xew Testaments with an enthusiasm which never left him, and which he was able to communicate to one after another of those who came under his influence. Even now there are those who, in East-end parishes, in country villages, in far-off Missionary stations, as well as in what are called the high places of the Church, feel the impulse
58
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. n.
which they then received from him. So keen was the interest inspired by his Divinity lectures, that not only did we, his pupils, continue to attend them in the very crisis and agony of our final work for our degrees, but little by little we obtained permission to introduce our friends ; and the first germ of those inter-Collegiate lectures which have revolutionised Oxford teaching, and gave your new professor of Greek a field to display his masterly gifts as a teacher, is to be found in those close-packed chairs that crowded the still damp ground-floor rooms in the then New Buildings, as they are still called, on the top- most story of which our lecturer had his rooms. He was — need I say it? — a singularly attractive and inspiring teacher; but in saying this I feel that I have said little. It is impossible for me to describe to you, it is difficult for me to analyse to myself, the feelings which he inspired in a circle, small at first, but with every fresh term widening and extending. The fasci- nation, the charm, the spell, were simply irresistible ; the face, the voice, the manner; the ready sympathy, the geniality, the freshness, the warmth, the poe- try, the refinement, the humour, the mirthfulness and merriment, the fund of knowledge, the inexhaustible store of anecdotes and stories, told so vividly, so dramatically, — I shall not easily enumerate the gifts which drew us to him with a singular, some of us with quite a passionate devotion. Arnold, before and after his death ; Arnold, to us Rugby men — well ! he was Arnold still. We never dreamed of a rival to him. I
CHAP. II.] ABTHUB PEXRHYN STANLEY.
59
am sure that in those days we never thought of weigh- ing Stanley against him. They dwelt apart in our minds ; apart, yet coupled in a sense together. Living or dead, the Elijah of that day was wrapped to our young souls in a certain cloud of awe. Stanley him- self never quite lost the feeling. But the Elisha on whom his mantle fell was near and dear to us. That sympathetic touch that won him to the end of his life fresh friends at every breath he drew, had already come to one who as a child had lived much alone, un- companionable and undemonstrative to a fault, writing his bojdsh poems, and hidden in the light of ideas and knowledge which he was hourly absorbing. It is felt by some of us, as a thing that coloured our whole lives from that day to this. We walked with him, some- times took our meals with him — frugal meals, for he was at the mercy of an unappreciative college "scout," who was not above taking advantage of his master's helplessness in arranging for a meal, and his indiffer- ence to an}^ article of diet other than brown bread and butter ; we talked with him over that bread and butter with entire freedom, opened our hearts to him ; while his perfect simplicity, no less than his high-bred refinement, made it impossible to dream that any one in his sober senses could presume upon his kindness. He was steeped in work. For two years he was de- voting himself to the immortal biography of his master. Afterwards he was continually studying, devouring books, entering more and more keenly into the theological and other controversies of the next few
EECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. II.
years, deeply and absorbingly interested, I need hardly say, in the crisis through which the University and the Church were passing in the years between 1841 and 1845. He was surrounded more and more by friends and associates of his own age, or older ; he was be- coming more and more conspicuous in literary as well as in theological circles. He was busied in writing such sermons as those on the Apostolic Age, in which he first made his mark as an academical preacher and — I use the word in its widest and truest sense — as a theologian. He was full of schemes, full of hopes, for the reorganisation and enlargement of the University, as ultimately effected by the Commission of which, in the closing part of this chapter of his life, he was the indefatigable Secretary. remember how, soon after I had ceased to be his pupil, and had reached the dignity of a junior Fellowship, on our return from a walk, in which he had discussed the question of a royal or parliamentary Commission — a question which could not have been mentioned in ordinary Oxford society without causing scandal — he paused for a moment oppo- site one of the most wealthy, not perhaps the most educa- tional of Colleges, and whispered, "The only drawback to such reforms is that this institution must at once flourish on the ruins of Balliol." Reform has come, and Balliol still holds its own ! But in spite of all these interests and all these employments, and in spite of a correspondence that grew with the growing number of his friendships, and in spite of the weeks which he almost yearly gave to travel, the amount of his time
CHAP, n.] ARTHUB PEXBHTy STANLEY.
61
and of his best self which he gave to his 3'ounger friends was something almost incredible. Some of us can recall the half-amusing, half-touching, efforts which he made to become acquainted with, and win the con- fidence of, a class of men least likely to be impressible to one like himself; the missionary spirit, if I may use the phrase, in which he regarded his relation to the undergraduates of his College ; a College which steadily continued — owdng mainly to his own reputation — to attract to it an unusual portion of the elite of the best schools in England. Many must still remember his introducing what had long been abandoned in that ancient College — I am not sure that he had not to go back as far as the times of the Commonwealth for a precedent — the preaching of occasional sermons in the College chapel. They will recall his xeiy voice, and accent, and look, and manner, and gesture. But it was not his preaching, nor his teaching, it was himself most of all which impressed us. We always knew — and it was the secret of his winning to the end of his days the hearts of the young, and, let me add, of the humble and working classes of his countrymen — we always knew that he treated us and felt to us as a friend ; cared for us, sympathised with us, gave us his heart, and not his heart only, but his best gifts ; that we did not sit below the salt, but partook with him of all that he had to give ; and what he gave us was just that which was most calculated to win and attract, as well as to inspire and stimulate. There still live in my own memory the vivid recollections; there have been
62
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. ii.
placed in my hands the still existing evidences of his active kindness and beneficence to present or former pupils ; the letters, long or short, of sympathy in trouble, advice in doubt or difficulty ; the pecuniary aid given so freely and so delicately whenever he saw an opening to do so with good results.
I have said perhaps, out of the abundance of my own recollections, with the written testimonies of others by my side, more than you will have cared to hear on this chapter of his life ; yet it is one which may have a special interest in the close vicinity of a great northern University. Let me end by repeating once more what I have already said, that the impres- sion which he made upon many at least of his Oxford pupils was one which it is impossible to convey fully to those outside that circle ; it will be intelligible in some degree to all who have enjoyed his society. You could not, I may almost say, think of evil in his presence. The atmosphere round him was as pure and elevating as it was rich in interest. It was indeed full of " whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report."
I must pass over the effective part that he bore, towards the close of his residence in Oxford, in intro- ducing, as Secretary to the first University Commis- sion, many changes of the most important and vital nature in the constitution of the University. To reform an ancient institution, to breathe new life into venerable forms, was a work exactly suited to one as averse from a merely obstructive conservatism
CHAP. II.] ARTHUB PEyRHYy STAXLET.
63
as he was impatient of the spirit that seeks only to destroy. It is enough for one who was a member of a Commission but lately appointed to follow mainly in the lines then laid down, to say that the reforms established were chiefly directed to two objects ; first, to widen the influence of the University by the re- moval of restrictions, local, professional, or theologi- cal, which kept more than half closed the admission to its emoluments and its distinctions ; and secondly, to revivify an almost dormant Professoriate.
I must pass over, also, the intense interest which then, as always, he took in the contemporary history of his own country and of the Continent. Two instances only let me give. Some here will recall the now distant fall of Sir R. Peel's Ministry in the summer of 1846, after the full establishment of free trade by that great Minister. On that occasion the 5'oung tutor of University wrote as follows : — " Peel's speech is, to me, the most affecting public event which I ever remember : no return of Cicero from exile, no triumphal procession up to the temple of Capitoline Jove, no Appius Claudius in the Roman Senate, no Chatham dying in the House of Lords, could have been a truly grander sight than that great Minister retiring from office, giving to the whole world free trade with one hand, and universal peace with the other, and casting under foot," he adds, " the misera- ble factions which had dethroned him —
' E'en at the base of Pompey's statue, Which all the while ran blood, great Csesar fell.*
64
BECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. ii.
So I write, the metaphor being suggested by an eye- witness, who told me that it was Mark Antony's speech over Caesar's body, but spoken by (Caesar) himself."
Again the shock that passed through Europe in 1848 moved him profoundly. I have no doubt that his journals will be found to contain a perfect magazine of anecdotes of Guizot, Lamartine, Louis Philippe, and the Parisian mob, " Here I am," he writes from London in J uly of that year, " working hard at 1. Corinthians, and seeing no one of importance except Guizot, and two or three more eye- or ear- witnesses of Feb. 24 or June 24, whose accounts I treasure up for my grand-nephews, when they come in 1894, on the outbreak of the Fourth French Revo- lution and the formation of the Sclavonic Empire, to hear the traditions of the great days of 1848 " (July 29th, '49).
Meantime, if the circle of his personal friends, and of his private and public interests, was extending year by year, his public position was becoming every year more prominent and less acceptable to a large portion of the religious world in England, and, I may perhaps add, in Scotland also. Great as was the impression made by the life of Arnold, there was an instinctive feeling that even Arnold's unquestionable hold on the essential truths of Christianity represented another form of re- ligious belief to that on which the views and principles either of the High Church or of the Evangelical party were moulded ; and both these parties agreed in regard- ing his biographer with somewhat of a growing distrust
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
65
and suspicion. It did not win him the support of the High Church clergy that he had devoted himself heart and soul to prevent the condemnation in the Oxford Convocation of Mr. Ward, who had succeeded Dr. New- man as their acknowledged leader in 1845, or had done his utmost to defeat the formal censure of the cele- brated tract No. 90 by the same assembly. They knew well that he had no sympathy with their most cherished views, and the divergence might have been read between the lines of all that he had as yet pub- lished, even if he had not met their somewhat exclusive claims to represent the "Church Party" by the asser- tion that the Church of England was, " by the very conditions of its being, not High, or Low, but Broad."
On the other hand, the leaders of the Evangelical section of English Churchmen were not won to him, but the reverse, by the language in which in 1850 he hailed the then famous "Gorham judgment," the Magna Charta of their continued existence in the Church, in the earliest, but not the least telling or brilliant, of his theological contributions to the "Edinburgh Review." When he spoke of " the inestimable advantage" of that decision as consisting in the fact that "it retained within the pale of the Establishment botli the rival schools of Theology," and went on to add that " the Church of England was meant to include, and alwaj^s had included, opposite and contradictory opinions not only on the point now in dispute, but on other points as important, or more important than this," he seemed to many of those whose cause he was pleading to be
66
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. ir.
shaking the very basis of the Christian faith. They would scarcely have been conciliated had they been told, as they were told twenty years later, that the main substance of that very Article had been written, though not published, several years earlier, "in the hope of averting the catastrophe which drove out from the Church of England such men as Dr. Newman and his friends." They felt also that, averse as he might be to impress upon others ideas of a purely negative and unsettling character, though he had deprecated the day of inevitable trial, " when the works of Ger- man Biblical criticism would be read indiscriminately by all the men, women, and children in England," yet his views on Scriptural Inspiration, and on other important subjects, differed widely from their own.
I may have an opportunity further on of saying something of his theological position. But do not let me for a moment disguise the fact that however strong his personal piety, however deep his own religious convictions, he stood from first to last quite apart from both the two great parties in the English Church; that his theological views squared with neither. I do not know that he himself ever disguised the fact that he looked on each, even as he said much later of the sepa- rate Churches of Christendom, "as having something which the other had not," and recognised "the human, imperfect, mixed character" of each. The natural result was that from first to last he was an object of almost equal suspicion, an object, theologically speak- ing, I might almost say, of almost equal antipathy to both.
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PEN BUY N STANLEY.
67
When however the time came, in 1851, for him to leave Oxford and accept the Canonry of Canterburj^, the reception which he met with in his new home was cordial, and the dissatisfaction, doubtless felt in some quarters, was expressed in undertones. The change was well timed. His friends had begun to feel that the position which he had gained as a student and as a writer had long merited public recognition. They felt also that it was time that he should be removed from the many wearisome details of a College Tutor's life ; and his father's death and his consequent entering into a moderate amount of landed property had, under then existing regulations, made the retention of his Fellowship impossible. Heavy blows indeed had fallen on that happy family circle. In September of 1849 he had reached Brahan Castle just in time to see his father lying unconscious, and passing away from a life of unwearied labour. In a short time came the news that in the month previous the youngest son, who had reached the rank of a captain in the Royal Engineers, had succumbed to a sudden attack of fever in Van Diemen's Land. As his young widow entered the harbour-of Sydney in hopes of receiving the support and consolation of a welcome from her husband's brother, Captain Owen Stanley, she found that he too had lived only long enough to hear that both his brother and his father had gone before. Worn out with the incessant toil entailed by his survey, in com- mand of the sailing frigate Rattlesnake^ of the perilous Coral Sea, and by the intense anxiety attendant on a
68
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. ti.
lengthened cruise "amongst a mass of shoals and reefs, where the lead gives' no warning, and the look- out from the masthead is often useless from the col- our of the coral," the gallant sailor, " after twenty- three years of arduous service in every clime," died in iMarch, 1850, at the age of thirty-eight.*
His father's death struck him to the quick. " The crash, the gloom, the uprooting and the void," he wrote between his father's death and funeral, "is at times overwhelming, but of him even more than of Arnold I believe that I shall soon feel that I would not have him back again for all that a restored home could give." And those who knew him well may recognise the occasional reference in later sermons and addresses to that circle of brothers and sisters, each so rich in different gifts, which time and death had so greatly broken up ; or knew how vivid was the recollection of the first accumulation of family sorrows on that affectionate heart.
You will not expect me to enter into the details of his life as a Canon of Canterbury. You have heard perhaps of his famous interview, immediately after his nomination, Avith your great countryman, 'Thomas Carlyle, and of the answer which he received at last to the twice-repeated question, " What is the advice
* Few, perhaps, who saw the remarkable gathering of men of science at the funeral of Arthur Stanley remembered that it was not the least eminent among them, Professor Huxley, who had been his eldest brother's companion in that distant voyage, and who, in the pages of the " Westminster Review," paid a tribute to the memory of his lost friend and* commander after his return to England.
CHAP, u.] ARTHUR PENRnYy STAXLEY.
69
which you would give to a Canon of Canterbuiy ? " " Dearly beloved Roger " (the answer began in jest, but ended in earnest), Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do^ do it ivith all thy might ; " and with all his might lie strove, there and elsewhere, to find the right work, and to do it with his might — strove to realise in himself a thought he often expressed, not without a tacit reference -to his father's experience as well as to his own ; High offices in Church and State may fill even ordinary men with a force beyond themselves ; " and again, "Every position in life, great or small, can be made almost as great or as little as we desire to make it."
It was, I need not say, delightful for him, in spite of much natural regret at leaving Oxford friends, not only to " have leisure for a few tranquil years of independent research or studious leisure " (I quote his own words, used later), "where he need contend with no pre- judices, entangle himself with no party, travel far and wide over the earth with nothing to check the constant increase of knowledge which such experience brings ; " but to be placed at once in connection (to use once more his own words) " with the cradle of English Christianity, the seat of the English Primacy," " his own proud Cathedral," as he learnt to call it, " the Metropolitan Church of Canterbury."
There can be no doubt that his seven years at Can- terbury were seven years of exceeding value to him. Here it was that he brought to full ripeness and maturity his wonderful gift of throwing a fresh and
70
HECOLLECTIONS of [chap. II.
human interest, one which reaches even the most unlettered of his hearers or readers, into great his- toric scenes or great historic monuments. It was at Canterbury that he at once undertook to impress upon his new fellow citizens the great advantages which they enjoj^ed by living under the shadow of that stately fabric. It was not at Westminster but at Canterbury that he found his earliest opportunity for uttering the characteristic words, " It is not too much to say that if anyone were to go through the various spots of interest in or around our great Cathedral, and ask, What happened here ? Who was the man whose tomb we see ? Why was he buried here ? What effect did his life and death have upon the world ? a real knowledge of the history of England is to be gained, such as the mere reading of books or lectures would utterly fail to supply." * It was not at Westminster but at Canterbury that he spoke of " what may seem to be mere stones or bare walls becoming so many chapters of English history." None who ever went through that grand Cathedral with him will forget the vividness with which each successive incident in the tragic story of the murder of Becket was re-enacted, as it were, on the very spot where each occurred. In his " Memorials of Canterbury," dedi- cated to a venerable brother Canon who still resides — may he long do so! — in his delightful home in those beautiful precincts, and written, as he says in the Introduction, " in intervals of leisure, taken from ♦ Memorials of Canterbury, p. 99.
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PE^^RHYy STANLEY.
71
subjects of greater importance," lie gave to the world a more than sufficient justification for his removal to that fair city. But the advantages of his life at Canter- bury were not limited to literary work, whether in im- mediate connection with that life or on other subjects, such as his " Commentary on the Epistles to the Cor- inthians," written mostly at Oxford but completed there. It was here that the freedom which he enjoyed for gratifying his instinctive love for travel was so fully indulged, and with such great results. Already, as we have seen, he had taken every opportunity of "enlarg- ing his mental vision," of seeking a fresh and complete influx of new ideas, by visiting far and wide scenes and places of historic interest. Spain, German}', including Bohemia, France, and Italy, he had already traversed. Scotland also, as I have already said, had begun to exer- cise over him the fascination which became afterwards so much deeper and stronger. But now he took a wider flight. After a visit to Italy and Rome with his mother and two sisters, and after returning to England with hot haste in time to be present at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, he started, at the close of 1852, for the tour in Egypt and the Holy Land, which resulted in the publication of, next to the "Life of Arnold," the most widely popular of all his works, " Sinai and Palestine." Of the wonderful light which that work throws on sacred history I shall not now say one word. I will only say that the greater part of it is but a reproduction of letters written to his friends. As Professor Goldwin Smith wrote to him on his return, " You have nothing
72
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. n.
to do but to piece together your letters, cut off their heads and tails, and the book is done." But something I may say of his journey which was not recorded in the pages of " Sinai and Palestine." Two of the party of four were Scotsmen. One of these, from his justice, gooa temper, and power of command, received from their Eastern attendants the name of " the Governor " ; but Stanley was invariably "the Sheik," the holy man. He gained this title partly from his knowledge of the localities which they visited, and his familiarity with and interest in all the strange outgrowth of Arab legends ; but he gained it also by the pure and beauti- ful, and, in their unsophisticated eyes, unversed in the bitter controversies of the Christian world, by the saintly character of one whom they watched and lived with day and night for weeks. Well can we who knew the man understand the story, how Mohammed, the faithful dragoman, after the last farewell was over, crept down into the cabin, knelt and seized his hand, and then rushed away with an outburst of passionate grief at parting with one whom he would never see again, and whom, in spite of the difference of creed, he reverenced as a saint. The journey was, notwith- standing inevitable occasional discomforts, a source to him of the deepest delight. " Those glorious days," he said of them, " which can now never be taken away." At Cairo and on the Nile he re-read the " Arabian Nights ; " and, what seemed to him, destitute as he was of his father's taste for birds or beetles, " the infinite, endless, boundless, monotony " of the voyage up the
CHAP, n.] ARTEUB PENBHYN STANLEY.
73
Nile was beguiled by reading all the parts of the Bible that referred to Egypt in the original Hebrew. In the same spirit he prepared himself for a careful s-urvey of the sacred soil of Palestine, by toiling through every word of Robinson's elaborate four volumes. " I read them," he said, "now riding on the back of a camel in the desert, now travelling on horseback* through the hills of Palestine, now under the shadow of my tent when I came in weary from the day's journey. They are among the very few books of modern literature of which I may truly say that I have read every word." Those who had the privilege of visiting him at Canterbury on his return, and found him overflow- ing with the recollections of his journey, as well as with the intense interest inspired by the Cathedral and its neighbourhood, will well understand his closing a letter of invitation to Professor Max Miiller with the words, " I consider I was never so well worth a visit."
It was from Canterbury, also, towards the end of his tenure of office there, that he made the visit to the Baltic, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, the result of which he embodied in his volume on the Greek Church. " I have been deeply interested," he says in a letter written in a Baltic steamer on Sept. 29th, 1857, to one who was becoming every year more closely united to him by friendship and by sympathy, Mr., or,
* He vras probably one of the worst horsemen in Europe, Asia, or Africa, from the -day when liis first visit to Norwich was marred by a fall from what he called " the episcopal pony," to the day when his life was all but lost on his second visit to Egypt with the Prince of "Wales, and a donkey was henceforth found for him.
74
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. ii.
as here he should be called, for it is to Scotland that he owes the title, Dr. George Grove, " I have been deeply interested in Norway and Sweden, more in St. Peters- burg, most of all in Moscow. Russia fully answered my expectations, in the flood of light which I derived from my sight of those two great cities. If you wished to bring out the dramatic effect of Russian history, it could not be better done than by the contrast between Moscow and Petersburg. The great Eastern nation striving to become Western, or, rather, the nation half Eastern, half Western, dragged against its will by one gigantic genius, literally dragged by the heels and kicked 'by the boots of the Giant Peter, into contact with the European world." I dare not read more, though the opening passage is barely a fair sample of a letter every line of which is full of picturesque effects, as he enumerates the points of Oriental character in the Russian people — " some great," he says, " some small, but all delightful to me, as making me feel once more in the ancient East." Of that ancient East he wrote on his first visit that he now understood the then Mr. Disraeli's language, who speaks of it in " Tancred " as being, to a traveller from Europe, another planet."
If his residence in Canterbury was not only a delightful pause in his always busy life, and fruitful as giving him leisure for such journeys as these, and for such literary work as his " Memorials of Canter- bury," " Sinai and Palestine," and his " Canterbury Sermons," it was not less delightful or less useful in developing another and a different side of his character.
CKAF. II.] ABTHUE PEXRHTN STANLEY.
75
It was now that for the first time he exchanged his bachelor's rooms at Oxford for a house and home of his own. It is needless to say how often that home was cheered by the presence of his mother, dearer now to him, if possible, than ever, or of his sisters, one of whom had been for some time the wife of his early friend, Charles Vaughan, then Head Master of Harrow.
Rarely has that ancient city of Southern England had such a centre of social life within its fair Cathedral precincts. Citizens and officers, residents in the neigh- bourhood, visitors from afar, old friends and new acquaintances, met in that most delightful of homes, and there it was that the once self-contained and re- tiring youth, the child shy to the verge of moodiness, developed those social gifts which made him to the end of his days not only the coveted guest of every circle in England — I might almost say in Europe — but the very best and most delightful of hosts. What those social gifts were, some here have the happiness of knowing. Their charm lay in their perfect simpli- city and naturalness, in their use being so obviously based on the kind heart that was bent on one purpose — to cheer, to amuse, to instruct others, not on self- display. There come back to the memory of one here, perhaps of many, times when the most delightful, the most dramatic and picturesque of his stories were told with all the charm of his voice and manner — the voice that became, as has so well been said, ^' resonant and full " when he recited a quotation from poetry, or a saying of interest — not to charm a listening circle of
76
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. ii.
men or women of mark or rank, but to amuse a weary and silent friend, or to enliven a tedious drive through country lanes. I will only add that he himself greatly enjoyed this first entry into the position of a house- holder. At the close of his Canterbury life, in a letter written on the sudden bereavement, by his young wife's death, of one of his Oxford pupils, he writes with some- thing of a prophetic instinct, " But yet on the whole I feel sure that even with such dreadful contingencies in store it is better to have had a home and wife than never to have had either. To have had even a home as I have had at Canterbury has been, I am convinced, an immense step in life — much more would the other have been."
The great public and national events which marked this period can only be noticed here so far as they most closely affected his personal history. It will be enough to mention his sister's mission to the hospitals of the Crimea, or rather of Scutari, in the Crimean war; and in connection with this mission, his own first visit to the Court of England and to the Queen and Royal family; his delight in the appointment of his dear friend, Archibald Campbell Tait, his own tutor at Balliol, and Arnold's successor at Rugby, to the see of London (1856). " He will give," he said of the present revered Primate of England,* " he will, in my humble judg- ment, give the Church of England a great lift. Scot-
* The words, as well as those on the next page, are printed as spoken in November. It was on the 3rd of the following month that the Archbishop died.
CHAP, n.] ARTHUR PENRHTN STANLEY.
11
land," he adds, " as you may suppose, claps her hands and sings for joy at his elevation." And well might Scotland do so I One of the first acts of the new Bishop of London was to appoint Arthur Stanley as his examining chaplain, an office which he retained till his appointment to the Deanery of Westminster, and in which he was succeeded by the present Bishop of Durham. Almost greater still was his satisfaction — greater even than that with which he hailed the ap- pointment to Rugby of Dr. Temple — at the elevation to the Bishopric of Calcutta of one of whom he once spoke, " as on the whole the very best Bishop whom he had ever known," the then Master of Marlborough College, Dr. Cotton. It is to this dear, friend of his that 3'our countryman and our Primate bore so lately, from that sick bed which is the centre of so many praj'erful thoughts in England and in Scotland, his testimony that "he wielded among the civilians of India a power unknown to any of the great men who have ever occupied the see."
The year 1858 saw the close of the calm and fruitful stage in his life's progress, of which Canterbury was the scene. He was now to enter on a work for the duties of which his whole life mio^ht well have seemed one long^ preparation, that of the Professorship of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford. The appointment is vested in the Crown, and it may be well to remind you that each of the three important offices which Arthur Stanley held in succession came to him from the same source, and were due to the impression wliich his genius
78
BECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. u.
and character had made, not on the Church in its narrowest sense, nor again on the Crown in the per- sonal sense of the term, but on the Church and nation at large as represented in the " kingly commonwealth of Great Britain," by the Sovereign and her responsible Ministers. Which of these three offices he would have ever held, had the a2)pointment rested in other hands, was a question which his friends would sometimes ask with amused perplexity, and answer with much relief and thankfulness that things were as they were ; that the selection in these cases lay with the First Minister of the Crown, who was free to give due weight to claims which were, in the general opinion, unrivalled. " There is one and one only possible candidate, and that is Arthur Stanley," were the words of his dis- tinguished friend, the historian Milman, then Dean of St. Paul's, when consulted on the subject by an influential Churchman.
I do not suppose that there are many here who have ever read the three inaugural lectures which he deliv- ered before crowded audiences beneath what I venture to call the august roof of the Sheldonian Theatre at Ox- ford. That Theatre had been the scene, one-and-twenty years before, of his own early distinction as the reciter of the Prize Poem which to the discerning critic might at once have revealed the unmistakeable stamp of true genius. Five years later, in the spring of 1842, it had been thronged again by crowds, the great majority of whom came to see, for the first and for the last time, the striking face and listen to the powerful
CHAP, n.] ABTRUB PENBHYN STANLEY.
79
voice of one who bore the name, suggestive to many only of aversion and dread, of Thomas Arnold. And now, in the place where Arnold, to the joy and exulta- tion of his devoted pupils, in the last spring given him on earth, had, by his simple and manly eloquence, won back the heart of an alienated University, the most distinguished of those pupils poured forth his accumu- lated treasures of study, travel, thought, and imagina- tion. The opening words of his first lecture were eminently characteristic. Years before he had been struck by a passage in the " Pilgrim's Progress," in which the pilgrim Christian was cheered and solaced on his way by the sight of the treasures and records of the palace of which the name was " Beautiful." He had promised himself at the time that, should he ever address an Oxford audience on ecclesiastical history, he would begin his lecture with the quotation. And he kept his promise. The first words which he uttered in his capacity of Professor of Ecclesiastical History were taken from the great work of the devout non- conformist tinker of Midland England, whom sixteen years later, when Scotland and Scottish associations had filled so large a part of the background of that vivid imagination, he startled a Bedfordshire audience by speaking of as " the Robert Burns of England." He closed the last of the three lectures with a quota- tion from the same author.
Read these Lectures even now, in the light of his later works and his later letters, and you will see that they embody his whole views, his whole life, his whole
80
BECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. ii.
self. Listen to his characteristic determination to begin his treatment of his subject, not with the era of the Reformation, not with the rise of the Papacy, not with the age of the earlier Fathers, but to start from " the first dawn of the history of the Church, when in Ur of the Chaldees the first figure in the long succession that has never since been broken, the first Father of the Universal Church, started on that great spiritual migra- tion which from the day that Abraham turned his face away from the rising of the sun has been stepping steadily Westward." Read his earnest protest against the "narrowing and vulgarising process by which the original sense of great theological terms becomes de- faced and marred and clipped by the base currency of the world, till the Christian Church comes to signify, not the whole congregation of faithful men dispersed throughout the world, but a priestly caste, a monastic order, a little sect, or a handful of opinions ; till the word " ecclesiastical " has come down to signify, not the moral, not even the social or political interests of the whole community,but the very opposite of these — such questions as the retention or abolition of a vestment, its merely outward, accidental, ceremonial machinery." Read his estimate of the position of great laymen, such as St. Louis in France, Dante in mediaeval Italy, "the half heretic half Puritan" Milton in England, as "the true interpreters, the true guides of the thoughts and feelings of their respective ages." Read his descrip- tion, drawn from the happy experience of his own past, and foreshadowing that of his future life, of the effect
CHAP. II.] ARTHUE PEyRUYX ST AXLE Y.
81
of " meeting face to face an opponent whom we have known only by report. He is different from what we ex- pected ; we cannot resist the pressure of his hand, the glance of his eye." Read above all the words in which he pours out his whole soul on that which lay so near his heart, " the endless vigour and vitality of the words of Holy Scripture." Read, if you wish to grasp the key to, I had almost said, his whole lifelong position as a theologian, the energetic expression which he gives to what to some may seem an idle dream, but which was to him the mainstay of his life, the conviction " that in that virgin mine, the insufficiently explored records, original records, of Christianity, there are still materi- als for a new epoch; that another and a different esti- mate of the points on which Scripture lays the most emphatic stress warrants the hope that the existing materials, principles, doctrines of the Christian religion are far greater than have ever yet been employed, and that the Christian Church, if it ever be permitted or enabled to use them, has a long lease of new life and new hope before it." I quote the words, because, uttered in 1858, they contain the very gist of that which, wheth- er 3'ou or I, this person or that person, agree or disagree, was his belief, his hope, his aspiration, now bright, now sadly clouded, till his dying day. Approve or disap- prove, call him a dreamer, blame him, condemn him, if you will, but recognise the fact that in this faith and this hope — that of a new and greater future for the Church of Christ — Arthur Stanley lived and died. The interest which was awakened by the opening lee-
82
BECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. n.
tures of the new Professor was sustained throughout by the more regular courses which they inaugurated. Those who are familiar with the two first volumes of his " Jewish Church " will readily understand the at- traction which they must have had, as spoken lectures, for the young students of theology, to the majority of whom they came almost as a new revelation of the wealth of historical and other teaching that was to be gathered from the records of Jewish History. There were those among them whose subsequent theological position and tenets differed widely from those of their gifted teacher ; but not the least emphatic testimony to the value and the permanent effect on their own minds of the light thrown by him on the pages of the Old Testament would be borne by those who could not possibly be claimed as his theological adherents.
And the mere preparation and delivery of those in- spiring and instructive Lectures formed but a small part of the duties which he set himself to perform. His old love for the society of the young was rekin- dled at the sight of the hundreds of undergraduates swarming in the streets of Oxford. " My heart leaps up," he would say, repeating a parody suggested by his friend Clough, "when I behold an undergraduate;" and it may well be said that to the very end of his days his years were " bound each to each by the natural piety " of affection for friends of every age, from early youth to the latest stage of human life. It was not only to the younger members of Christ Church, or to those who attended his own lectures, that his house
CHAP. II.] AETHUB PEXEHTN STANLEY,
83
was open. More than one or two of the masters of great English schools were encouraged to introduce to him their pupils on their entrance at the University, and, among those who still mourn his loss most keenly, are some whose long and close friendship began in this way.
But his social position at Oxford was one as peculiar and unparalleled as was his own personality. Never I suppose before, and certainly never since, has there been a house in which the representatives of the most opposite views and parties, accustomed to regard each other as almost belonging to different worlds, could be won to meet in such free and social inter- course. It was his delight to place side by side at his table, and to unite in friendl}^ conversation, men who had hitherto met each other, if at all, only in sharp, and sometimes acrimonious, debate. And his own unrivalled social gifts, his humour, his vivacity, his endless store of anecdotes connected with places and persons visited in his travels, gave a charm to his soci- ety which few, either then or later on at Westminster, could wholly resist. " What an element," says Bishop Cotton, in a letter written from Oxford, "of peace and goodwill is Stanley ! so heterogeneous a dinner ! yet all most humorous and cheerful ! Stanley's sto- ries about Becket's brains, and Louis XVI.'s blood, assume a positively sacred colour when they bind
together in friendly union the latitudinarian
and the stiff-necked As every year added to
the circle of his friends and acquaintances at a dis- tance, Oxford society was continually enlivened and
84
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. ii.
diversified by the visits of distinguished foreigners, or persons eminent elsewhere in the fields of litera- ture or science. Whatever storms might rage in academical society, the future guardian of the " great temple of reconciliation and peace " made it his aim to make his own house a place at the threshold of which the demon of controversial bitterness must be exchanged for a more Christian spirit.
Yet the air around him was charged with contro- versy. One that raged through a great part of his Oxford residence was the question of providing a higher salary than £40 a year for his attached and early friend, the eminent scholar who held, and still adorns, the post of Professor of Greek at that wealthy University. Those whom I am addressing may find it difficult to realise the animosity with which so obvious an act of policy as well as of justice was defeated, time after time, by the votes of theological opponents, or the almost "judicial blindness" by which the seeds of a bitter and rankling sense of injustice, fruitful, alas ! of evil to come, were sown broadcast, in the name of a religion of righteousness and peace, among the future leaders of academical life. But it will not be difficult for you to understand or to recall the whirlwind which was raised by the publica- tion, or rather by the attacks and discussion which fol- lowed in due time the publication, in 1860, of the famous volume of " Essays and Reviews." It is not my pur- pose to enter into the details of that long and bitter controversy which for a time convulsed the English
CHAP, n.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
85
Church, and which was not finally laid to sleep till after at least three years of clamorous agitation. Stanley's position was characteristic. He objected most strongly to the whole scheme and form of the work. " In a com- posite publication " he recognised from the very first " a decided blunder." But this was not all. While admitting that almost the whole of the first, and much in the last, of the seven Essays, was eminently con- servative, he censured strongly the generally negative character of the volume. " Xo book," he said, " which treats of religious questions can hope to make its way to the heart of the English nation, unless it gives at the same time that it takes away, builds up at the same time that it destroys." And in addition to this, he thought that one at least of the Essays might be fairly charged with "needlessly throwing before the English public, which had never heard of them, conclusions arrived at by the lifelong labours of a great German theologian, without any argument to support or recommend them. We do not," he said, " defend the madness of the bull, but we must bestow some of our indignation on the man who shakes the red flag in his face." But this felt and said, he flung himself with all his own generosit}' and ardour into the defence of writers who represented, with whatever drawbacks, the sacred cause, as he held it, of liberty of thought among the English clergy, the cause which in the judicial suits which followed he believed " to be pleading for its very life." Nowhere has he written with greater force, vivacity,
86
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. n.
and energy than in the appeals which he made to the educated public through the pages of the Edinburgh Review, in articles written on this question — one when the storm was at its height, two others when the danger was past. For he felt himself to be pleading for a cause which he believed to involve the whole fu- ture of the National Church, "the learning of the most learned, the freedom of the freest, the reason of the most rational Church in the world." And he dreaded above all things a breach between the higher intelli- gence of the rising generation and the tenets of that Church, which would not only "have dealt a heavy blow to all biblical study, but have gone far to reduce it to the level of an illiterate sect or of a mere satellite of the Church of Rome." By this controversy the combative side of his nature, which was no less real if less strongly marked than its peaceful and social side, was called into full activity, never again to be allowed an entire repose — I might almost say for the rest of his life, whether at Oxford or at Westminster.
It was during his residence as Professor at Oxford that in pursuance of the wish of the lamented Prince Consort, and at the express desire of the Queen, he ac- companied the heir to the throne, in the spring of 1862, on a second visit to Egypt and Palestine. His old and curious objection to re-visiting scenes of former travel had become greatly modified, as that ardent traveller found that he would soon have to sigh for new worlds to conquer; and he accepted without hesitation, and discharged with much real enjoyment, the important
CHAP. II.] ARTHUB PI:NRHYN STANLEY.
87
trust committed to him by the Crown. For any sac- rifices which it involved he had a rich reward in the ad- ditional facilities which he enjoyed, in virtue of the respect paid to his Royal companion, for visiting at last such an object of interest as the Mosque at Hebron. He was repaid still more by the warm feelings which he inspired during those memorable four months in the new circle in which he travelled, alike in the youthful Prince, and in one who bore a name dear to every Scotsman, in General Bruce, the Prince's faithful friend and counsellor, the brother of her who was ere long to be the solace of his life. Sunday, too, after Sunday he was enabled — now on the Nile itself, now in the great hall of the temple at Karnak, " in the grandest building," as he called it, " which the old world ever raised for worship;" now on shipboard at the ancient Joppa, now under canvas above Shechem, or by the springs of Xazareth, or on an Easter morning by the Sea of Tiberias, or " on the way to Damas- cus," or under the shadow of the temple of Baalbec, or of the cedars of Lebanon, or off the shore of Patmos, to give utterance to the thoughts which such scenes awoke within him. Those short sermons, perhaps more than anything which he ever wrote, reproduce his very inmost feelings on life and death, and on the relation of the human soul to duty and to God.
On one such occasion an event which cast a deep shadow over that otherwise happy journey gave an ad- ditional pathos and impressiveness to his words. The news of his mother's death, on Ash Wednesday, 1862,
88
BECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. n.
reached him when on the Nile, between Alexandria and Cairo. He preached on the following Sunday, in the neighbourhood of Memphis, a sermon on the lesson for the day, the story of the re-union of Joseph and his brethren in Egypt; a sermon which, for the pathetic eloquence in which it dwells on the sacredness of home, and for the suppressed tenderness and emotion with which its sentences seem to thrill and tremble, has hardly been surpassed in the English language. There is not a word of direct allusion to his own loss, and I have heard that his voice, though deej)er than usual, never faltered throughout. But it must have been hard to have listened unmoved to a fellow traveller who had already endeared himself to all his companions in that memorable journey, as he spoke in the presence of the young heir to the throne, still in mourning for his father, of the " ties that link those who have passed into the world beyond the grave, with those to whom their wishes are now commands, their lightest desires sacred wishes, the very mention and thought of whose names draws us upward and homeward," or to the concluding words in which he spoke of "that last best home where Jacob and his sons, Rachel and her children, shall meet to part no more." *
* Till another, and even sadder Ash Wednesday, came to end twelve j^ears of married happiness, he alwaj'^s spoke of his mother's death as the great sorrow of his life, of his mother's character as the best human manifestation to him of the Christian life. He joins the two days together in lines written shortly before his own end. They begin with the words :
" O day of ashes, twice for me
Thy mournful title thou hast earned;
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
89
Those who have ever glanced at, still more those to whom it has been a work of sadness dashed with delight, to read, after his death, those "Sermons in the East," will understand his words written after his return : " My sermons were to me an immense relief, and it was a great satisfaction to feel that by the end of the time I had said almost everytliing that I could have wished to say." Later on, speaking to one of his many friends and helpers in Westminster, he said that his fullest and deepest convictions were, he thought, to be found in the pages of that volume.
His return to a home now vacant of the mother who for years had been more than a mother to that loving son, was necessarily a time of sadness and trial. By the kind forethought of Her in whose service he had been absent "o'er seas and deserts far apart," when the blow fell, and who from that time counted, we may well believe, his loyal friendship as among the best jewels in her crown, his first meeting with the sister who so keenly shared his sorrow took place neither in their London nor their Oxford home, but under the Royal roof of Windsor. But the wound was very deep. He felt in his own words that the " guardian genius " had "passed awa}^ that nursed his very mind and heart." Twelve months later, in thanking a much- valued friend for well-deserved words of praise, " You
For twice my life of life by thee Has been to dust and ashes turned."
They end with the words:
*' The secret of a better life Read by my mother and my wife."
90
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. ii.
know," he said, "how what you have said would have delighted one who is not here to read it. When I think of this the tears fill my eyes ; " and those to whom his happiness was dear began to ask each other whether there was any hope of the vacant place being filled by a wife worthy of such a husband. Meantime another loss had saddened him. His new friend and fellow traveller, General Bruce, the one among the group to whom he had opened freely all his feelings on his mother's loss, was taken away after a short illness. Arthur Stanley was with him when he died, and went to Scotland to lay him in his grave at Dunfermline. The friend who saw him on his return will never forget the conversation. "It was," said Stanley, "the very first time that I had seen a human soul pass with full consciousness from this world to the world beyond." He spoke of the " identity of char- acter remaining to the very last ; thoughtfulness for the absent, consideration and courtesy for others — no mere outward mask, but shown in his very dying moments, when the last prayer had been breathed, to the nurse who attended him. His last farewell seemed waved to me from the invisible world."
But he had much to call away his mind from private troubles. The storm raised by " Essays and Reviews " was still at its fiercest. So also was the controversy as to the Greek Professorship, of which I have already spoken. The second volume of Bishop Colenso's startling work appeared in the same year. The posi- tion of one whom he so loved and reverenced as the
CHAP, n.] ARTHUR PENRHTN STANLEY.
91
saintly Frederick Maurice, was being rendered almost intolerable by the assaults of those who have, let us hope, long since repented of the course they took. Oxford society was divided as it had not been for many years by bitter controversy. Even his own rare sweet- ness and gentle charm could not allay all feuds. Even in the circle of his friends there had been some passing coolness, and before he quitted Oxford the feelings and language of some of his theological opponents had become exceedingly embittered; "so entirely," he wrote of one of them, " is he, in this respect, bereft of reason as to render charity comparatively easy." Yet he disclaimed all wish to leave Oxford. " I earnestly desire," he said, " a few months of leisure to consider the events of this last year."
Earl}^ however, in 1863 he took up his pen. En- couraged by an Episcopal Charge delivered to his clergy by the Bishop of London, his chaplain ad- dressed to him a letter on the terms of Subscrip- tion enforced at the Universities and on the clergy. Nothing can be more telling than the arguments in which he advocates a careful re-consideration of the whole question. He points out that the stringent form then required could only be subscribed as in- volving a general, not a particular assent ; that so un- derstood, there was no section of the English Church, lay or clerical, which might not innocently accept it. But he saw also that it was in the power of any "malignant or narrow-minded partisan" to "rattle up," as he said, " the sleeping lions, heedless of the
92
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. n.
reflection that when aroused, they will devour with equal indiscrimination on the right hand, and on the left, and so add to the general evils of controversy the great and peculiar aggravations of constant im- putations of dishonesty and bad faith." He pressed above all on the notice of a Prelate who lived to be recognised as the wisest and most statesmanlike of our English Archbishops, that in this direction was to be sought not the sole, but one, remedy for ''the greatest of all calamities to the Church of England, the gradual falling off in the supply of the intelli- gent, thoughtful, and highly educated young men, who twenty and thirty years ago were to be found at every Ordination." I must not attempt to carry the attention of a Scottish audience through a narra- tive of all that followed; though the results were great, and the whole question is one of interest not confined to the Church of England. It is enough to say that in 1865, after a stout resistance on the part of those who declared at one time that no re- laxations were necessary, and at another that any relaxation would be an act of treason, an Act of Parliament, following the recommendations of a Royal Commission, abolished the elaborate subscriptions of " Assent and Consent to all and everything contained in the Prayer Book and Articles," and substituted a simple assent to them, and to the doctrine therein contained, and a pledge to use these Formularies, and none other, without lawful authority. The change was effected with an ease that forms a marked con-
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
93
trast to tlie keen opposition which a movement in the same direction encountered in the House of Lords exactly twenty-five years earlier. Then a petition from forty clergymen and laymen in behalf of some modification of the terms of subscription, presented almost with apologies by Archbishop Whately, and gallantly supported by Bishop Stanley, had been almost spurned from the door of the same House, in which a healing measure was now passed without opposition, and almost without comment.
94
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. III.
CHAPTER III.
(From 1863 to 1881.)
WESTMINSTER.
ATE in the autumn of 1863 came the removal
-LJ of Arthur Stanley from Oxford and his appoint- ment to the Deanery of Westminster. At the end of the same year, postponed somewhat by the un- easiness caused by Lord Elgin's failing health, came the great event of his life, his marriage with her who once more brought sunshine into his heart.
He bade farewell to the University in a sermon preached in the month of November in the Cathedral of Christ Church. Nine years were to pass before that eloquent voice was to be heard again in the University pulpit. His text was the verse in the Gospel of St. Luke which describes our Lord as pausing on the ridge of the Mount of Olives, " the one absolutely authentic spot in Palestine where we can say with entire certainty that His presence passed," to utter, with weeping, the memorable words, " Jf thou hadst known^ even tliou at least in tJiis thy day^ the things which belong unto thy peace.^^ He
CHAP, ra.] ABTHUB PENBHTN STANLEY.
95
threw his whole soul into his parting words. As he spoke of " the grief, the emotion, which stirs our inmost souls at the thought of passing from a great institution of which we have formed a part, with which some of our happiest days have been interwoven," all felt how genuine was that grief, how deep that emotion. But from the beginning to the end there is scarcely a sentence, scarcely a line which does not " thrill and tingle " with warnings and encouragements, aspira- tions and regrets, rebukes and appeals. The very inmost history of past and recent academical progress and controversies can be read between its lines; the whole history also of the hopes and fears that divided his own breast as he put before his hearers, many of whom he was addressing for the last time, now the possibility of reading in the future "nothing but a dreary winter of unbelief, which is to be the beginning of the end, and to shrivel up every particle of spiritual life ; " now, " the danger to the Church of England of losing for ever the noble ambition that faith and freedom, truth and goodness may yet be reconciled ; " now, " the glorious prospect to be spoken of — if never hereafter in this place, yet in other spheres, if God so please, and before other hearers so long as life and strength shall last — the glorious pros- pect to be found in the conviction that in the religion of Christ, better and better understood, in the mind and words and work of Christ, more and more fully perceived, lies the best security. . . . for the things which belong, not to our peace only, but to the peace of
96
BECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. in.
universal Christendom." It would be impossible here to give any adequate idea of a sermon whose special interest was, after all, academical. Had any passing visitor from Scotland found a seat in that crowded cathedral, he might have recognised an allusion to Lord Elgin's illness, the news of which had reached his future brother-in-law on the evening before ; he would have been struck by the recital of some re- markable words of Dr. Chalmers, spoken twenty years earlier in the High Street of Oxford ; he would certainly have found many to agree with him in thinking that the most touching passage in that elo- quent sermon was the tribute paid to the "blame- less holy life " of a young Scottish tutor of Christ Church, who had passed from the Edinburgh Academy through the University of Glasgow to Balliol, the news of whose untimely death had reached the preacher " through yet darker shadows far, far away," almost by the same post that had brought the tidings of his mother's death.
In due time he and Lady Augusta were established in. their home at Westminster. In the prominent yet absolutely independent position which he had now reached, many of his friends saw the post most calcu- lated to give to such powers and such a character as his their full development and influence. It would be ungracious to recall the public protest raised against his appointment by one of the most respected and most learned of the Canons of Westminster, now a Bishop of apostolic zeal and saintly character, were it
CHAP, m.] ABTHUB PENUHYN STANLEY.
97
not for the sake of adding that the new Dean at once showed, as again and again to the end of his days, that he was filled with that Christian grace that "thinketh no evil, is not easily provoked," and that he succeeded ere long in establishing a personal rela- tionship of cordial and friendly intercourse between himself and his protesting Canon. But, I may add that there were some few among his friends who, on quite other grounds, felt misgivings at his exchange of an academic office for the wear and tear of the social and political life of London. Some also, in the spirit of a saying of Cardinal JS'ewman's — " Univer- sities are the natural centres of intellectual move- ments," — doubted whether the extended influence which he was sure to gain over a larger circle would compensate for the loss of that growing hold on the minds of the future clergy which his post at Oxford was yearly ensuring him. The second question is one that may even now be raised and discussed by those interested in the life of the University and of the English Church : to the first, his life at West- minster, so rich in fruitful work and marked results, is the best reply.
I come now to a difficult question. How can I best describe that period in his life which extends from the beginning of 1864 — he was installed on the 9th of January — to the sad day in July, 1881, when he was taken from us ? Shall I speak to you of his social life ? or of his work as Dean ? or of his literary work ? or speak of him as preacher, or lecturer, or speaker?
98
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. m.
or as plunged in controversy, as the leader in every movement to promote, in the language of the ancient instrument to which he declared his assent on his in- stallation, " the enlargement of the Christian Church " ? or, not less, as the champion of all and every one whom he looked on as the victims of intolerance or persecution ? Or shall I speak to you of his personal history, his domestic life, its sacred joys and sacred sorrows ? or of his happy autumns spent in your own country, his frequent visits to this very city ? or of his many sojourns in foreign countries, his extended ac- quaintance with the most eminent men in Europe ? or of his ever growing circle of devoted friends ? or of the place he held in the affection of the working classes ? — in the more than regard of his Sovereign and her Family ?
As we think of all these things, we think once more of the irreparable gap which his loss has made, and of the impossibility of doing adequate justice to such a subject under close limitations of space or time. If a few scattered observations can be read or listened to with attention, what will be the surpassing interest of the biography of one in whose character his friends may proudly feel that there is nothing to soften, nothing to keep back, when all that wealth of mate- rials, of which I have scarcely laid my hand upon a hundredth part, has been brought before us by a bi- ographer worthy of the task ?
For his social life, then, using the term in its widest sense, let me speak first of the new feature in that life —
CHAP, m.] ARTHUR PENRHTN STANLEY.
99
his marriage, and all that it brought to him. If there was any apprehension among his earlier friends that his union with one whom he had met in the circle of a Court, and who was herself rich in a wealth of friend- ships, would in any way close the door of his house or his heart to those to whom they had hitherto stood open, the fear was soon dissipated. In that gracious and graceful lady they found a new friend, who gave no mere lip-welcome to his and her new home. They rejoiced to see her seated with her own papers and correspondence in the lofty library, looking westward into Dean's Yard, which will so long be associated in many minds with their united memorj". It cheered her to receive on her death-bed twelve years later the assurance of their gratitude ; it rejoiced him as he sat by her coffin side with one who had shared those first misgivings, to hear the assurance once more repeated.
Her usual seat was at a table where, after her death, stood her bust in marble, a few feet from where her husband stood at his desk, plying his daily task of Jewish history, or sermon, or lecture, or article, or letters, yet ever ready to turn aside for a few moments' conversation or rest, and then to resume his work where he had left it. His old pupils marked with an amused delight her tender care for the health and comfort of one curiously incapable of taking care of himself, even in the most essential points of food and dress. And she not only shared his friendships, but went with him heart and soul in all his work and all his aspira-
100
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. iii.
tions, " in every joy and every struggle," * and her companionship developed in him to the utmost that capacity for social life in its highest aspect, on which I have already touched. The Deanery soon became a social centre as unique of its kind as was its master. Church dignitaries — not seldom some who half an hour before, in the presence of Convocation sitting within ten yards of the room and beneath the same roof, had denounced their host in terms which have long been banished from all language but that of theo- logical controversy — felt the spell of those cordial in- vitations and that genial welcome, and returned from that plain luncheon-table softened in heart,if not wholly reconciled to their entertainer. There the Noncon- formist minister found that full social recognition, the absence of which has done much to widen the gulf between the Church and the Nonconformist world. There the pioneers of Science found a listener always appreciative, always eager for information, " keen as a hound in the pursuit of knowledge," " possessed by what the French called la grande curiosite,'^ full him- self to overflowing of a knowledge other than their own, never depreciating studies which were alien to the bent of his own genius, never afraid of Truth, al- ways ready to welcome all who sought for her. There the leaders of literature met on equal terms with a master of their craft. There too, that high-born chiv- alry which marked his inmost nature, threw open the
* The words used by himself in his dedication to her memory of "Vol. 3 of bis Lectures on the Jewish Church..
CHAP, m.] ABTHUR PEyRnTX STAXLEY.
101
doors of that coveted resort to men from whom others in his position might have withheld a welcome : to the conscientious, if mistaken, sufferer from theological bitterness, or to the most eloquent of French priests who, in the supreme moment when others withdrew their protest, had dared to beard the Vatican, to ques- tion Papal Infallibility, and to assert the right of a minister of the Catholic Church to Christian matri- mony. Foreign ecclesiastics. Archimandrites, Bishops of the Greek Church, met there the representatives of the American Churches or of Indian ^Missions. There too, above all, the class who lived b}^ daily and weekly wages found a welcome, not merely to the Abbey monuments, round which he delighted to conduct them on their Saturda}^ half-holidays, but to what must have seemed to them the spacious rooms of the quaint and interesting abode of the Abbots and Deans of West- minster that was now his home. His social gifts, his stores of anecdotes, his quick perception alike of the serious and of the ridiculous, his ready sympathy, his power of apt quotation, are as impossible to describe as the marvellousl}' expressive countenance, " the eye now beaming with sympathy " — I quote a Scotsman's eloquent words — "now twinkling with humour, the mobile mouth with its patrician curves, and the deli- cately sensitive face." The remembrance is a posses- sion which those who have enjoyed will never lose, but which they cannot impart to others. I lighted just now by chance on a page in the memoir of a lady once well known here, who in extreme old age received from him
102
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. iii.
a visit in her retirement among the English lakes : " There is no one like Arthur Stanley," wrote Mrs. Fletcher ; " there is no one like Arthur Stanley " is the echo that might have passed from lip to lip through Scotland as through England. And it was not merely that he amused, entertained or instructed. He won hearts. Some of those who would almost have given their own lives to prolong his, had never seen him till he had reached threescore years, and fresh friends clustered round him to the last, ready to toil for him in all good works, not least in the service of the Ab- bey which he loved.
And yet it must also be stated that he lived in an atmosphere, if on one side of peace, on another of con- tention and struggle, and that something of the bit- terness which, as he sadly said on leaving Oxford, "poisoned the upper springs of academical life," was to be found even in the freer and larger world of London.
It was scarcely to be wondered at. His aims were distinct and clear ; and they were not those which were palatable either to the religious world at large or, above all, to his clerical brethren. And he never, as you in Scotland well know, concealed his views, or hesitated, whether among friends or foes, to plead the cause which he had most at heart — " the enlargement," in his own favourite words, " of the Church, and the triumph of all Truth." Every attempt to repress free- dom of inquiry within the Church, or to vilify scientific inquiries outside its borders, or to assert the claims of the clergy to resist or to evade the supremacy of law,
CHAP. III.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
103
found in him the most uncompromising of opponents. Every effort to widen the borders of the Church, whether by relaxing a stringent subscription, or by admitting those whom he called "the nonconform- ing members of the Church," to every privilege that the widest interpretation of the law permitted, found in him a never-failing advocate. His own intense belief in the paramount importance of the spiritual and the moral side alike of Christianity and of human nature, made him somewhat impatient of what he called " the materialism of the Altar and the Sacristy." His avowed sympathy with the " far-sighted reformer of Zurich " in his teaching that " the significance of sacred rites consists not in the perishable accidents of their outward token, or in the precise forms of their ministra- tion, but in the souls and spirits of their receivers," was perhaps less shocking to those who looked on Zwinglius as a heretic than his characterising, before the clergy assembled in Convocation, the vestment controversy, then and still convulsing many congregations, as a mere question of " Clergymen's clothes." If it is quite true that — I quote once more Scottish testimony — *'he stood higher in the respect and affection of a larger and more varied circle of members of many churches than any ecclesiastic in the world," it is equally true that, within his own Church, he shocked and pained some whom he would fain have won, and was more fiercel}^ vituperated, and regarded with greater aver- sion than perhaps any living clergyman, by others whose partisanship, or sensitiveness to theological dif-
104
BECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. III.
ferences, was too strong for their charity. Of his de- fence of the- writers of " Essays and Reviews " I have already spoken. The strife became even hotter after his removal to London. After judgment had been given by the highest court in favour of the side which he had espoused, he dashed with one final charge into the fray to do battle with the Memorial signed by eleven thou- sand of the clergy against the acquittal which had been won. In Convocation, that is, in the assembly of the Clergy of the Province of Canterbury held at Westminster, he developed powers of debate the existence of which neither friends nor foes, nor he himself had ever suspected. And those powers he used freely. The year 1872 introduced a fresh sub- ject of religious controversy. An attempt was made to alter a word in the Rubric that heads the Atha- nasian Creed, the result of which would have been to make the reading of that Creed and of the so-called " damnatory clauses " which it includes, optional in- stead of obligatory. The course indicated was sup- ported not merely by its actual leader and inaugurator the Dean of Westminster, but also by many sober and influential churchmen. I am not, I hope, wronging our venerable Primate in expressing a belief that his judg- ment, together with that of a considerable portion of the bench of Bishops — was not wholly unfavourable to the proposal. But the strife was perhaps hotter and keener than any one of the many controversies in which our friend was involved. Already he had been fiercely impugned for including Dissenters from the
[.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
Clnirch of England, and among those dissenters a Uni- tarian, in an invitation to a Celebration of the Holy Communion to be held in Westminster Abbey, which was sent to all the revisers of the Old and New Testa- ment Version. He was looked on as sharing in some way the responsibility incurred by the Primate and the other English Bishops who declined to use the occasion of the meeting of the Pan- Anglican synod for the pur- pose of confirming the sentence passed by the Bishop of Cape Town on the Bishop of Natal. It is perhaps, therefore, not surprising that his speech in Convoca- tion on the Athanasian Creed was received with some approach to clamorous interruption. Archdeacon after archdeacon rose to protest. One, himself but lately the defendant in an ecclesiastical trial, after a vain ap- peal to the Prolocutor to silence the audacious speaker, left the meeting in disgust. The words " Great inter- ruption," cries of "No! no" occur thickly in the re- port of the proceedings. Hostile pamphlets, printed sermons, fell in showers upon him. His conduct was stigmatised by one church dignitary, whose kindliness of heart is often behed by his unmeasured words, in pages dedicated "by his afflicted servant and much injured son in Christ" to the Archbishop of Canter- bury (himseK addressed in that dedication with thinly veiled reproaches), as scarcely reconcilable with the most fundamental principles of morality. He and his supporters were warned that "had they conducted themselves in the service of an earthly sovereign with like profligacy, they would inevitably have been tried
106
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. m.
by court-martial and shot." They were called upon, and the call included a host of the most faithful and de- voted of the middle party among English Churchmen, " to go out instantly from the Church of which such men proclaim themselves disaffected and disloyal min- isters." If one of his opponents ended a printed let- ter with a grateful acknowledgment of " that reverent love for the Bible which you taught me at Oxford ; " others had recourse to such phrases as "moral de- pravity," " immoral priests," " traitors in the camp." He was publicly taunted with committing a graver offence than " the tutor who corrupts his pupil's mind, or the trustee who robs the widow and the orphan of their property." And his opponents were not content to beat the air with harmless clamour. Such clamour never ruffled him. But a blow was aimed by once friendly hands which, had it struck its mark, would have wounded him to the quick. An organised effort was made to employ a dormant power of the Convocation of Oxford for the purpose of erasing his name from the list of University Preachers in which it had at last, nine years after his last sermon preached there, been inserted by the Board charged with the duty of selection. But so studied an insult to one so widely honoured was resented by many who were little accustomed to take part in University controversies. Even the leaders of the dominant religious party, though they took no overt step to restrain their fol- lowers, declined to aid them with their votes ; and the only result of the threatened stigma was to effect
[.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
107
what all but tlie blindest leaders of the blind might have easily foreseen, to win him hearty sympathy and tenfold attention from all that was generous in youthful Oxford.
I only revive these unpleasing memories in order to make it clear that he was to the very end of his life engaged not merely in peaceful study, or in such calm statements of his views as were embodied in his utterances here and elsewhere, north of the Tweed or south, on this side of the Atlantic or the other, but in a succession of conflicts — that he was the ob- ject, not merely of devoted affection and widespread sympathy, but of exceedingly bitter and undisguised hostility.
Let me give an instance, or rather three instances of the manner in which, with a courage and promptitude of which his early youth gave little promise, but which was developed in him more and more as life went on, he was every year more eager to spring to the rescue of the solitary or the unfriended — more ready to stand face to face before an excited and hostile majority. All three shall be taken from his defence of Bishop Colenso, who had been condemned of heresy by his Metropolitan the Bishop of Capetown. I choose this controversy not because it will be a specially wel- come or acceptable topic to those whom I address. It is perhaps the one in which he stood, I will not say alone, but with less sympathy and less following than in any other — he never looked behind to see who followed him. But I choose it because it is most
108
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. m.
illustrative of his chivalry and fearlessness, and throws most light on the hostility which he provoked.
I choose it also because he felt and expressed not only a want of sympathy with, but an actual aversion for, the special mode in which the Old Testament was treated in some at least of Bishop Colenso's writings. The object of much of those works was, it seemed, to break down a supposed belief in the literal inspiration of every word of Holy Scripture by invalidating the accuracy of the details of the Old Testament narrative. The aim of Stanley was entirely different — always and invariably to bring out the treasures of the Bible, his- torical, poetical, moral, spiritual. But though he felt no sympathy with the form which Dr. Colenso's work took, he felt entire sympathy with him as a real and honest searcher after truth; he earnestly desired to protect the Colonial clergy from being "judged by irresponsible Metropolitans by other laws than those of England ; " and he strove, in the interests as he believed of truth and freedom, to avert the severance of the Colonial Churches from the State of England.
On the first occasion, so early as 1866, he felt called on at a moment's notice to oppose a resolution brought forward in Convocation, which virtually treated the See of Natal as vacant. After going seriatim through the various points on which Bishop Colenso had been found guilty of heresy by his Metropolitan, and point- ing out that in each separate case the condemnation must be shared, sometimes " by sainted Fathers of the Church," sometimes "by English divines and Bishops
CHAP. III.] ABTHUR PENBHYN STANLEY.
109
of unquestioned orthodoxy," sometimes by "hundreds, nay thousands of the English clergy," he ended by challenging, in a very striking passage, those whom he addressed, to institute proceedings against one who, "though on some of these awful and mysterious ques- tions he has expressed no opinion, yet holds the same principles as those which have been condemned by the Bishop of Capetown. That individual is the one who now addresses you. Judge," he said, " righteous judgment." It is needless to say that the challenge was not taken up.
Years after, on an occasion when the death of the Bishop of Capetown was calling forth well merited expressions of sorrow on the part of the Clergy assem- bled in Convocation, the Dean of Westminster rose and read an extract from a sermon of the Bishop of Natal containing a dignified and affectionate tribute to his work and character. "For myself," Dean Stan- ley went on to say, " I do not profess to express full agreement with the Bishop's words. To some here they may appear too highly coloured by the recollec- tions of early friendship. But they are a testimony, alike to the Bishop of Capetown, who could inspire such sentiments, and to the Bishop of Xatal who could give utterance to them. When the first Missionary Bishop of Africa who translated the Bible into the language of the natives, shall be called to his rest, I trust that there will be found some Prelate presiding over the See of Capetown just and generous enough to render the like homage to the Bishop of Natal."
110
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. m.
Lastly, in the midst of a stormy and almost tumultu- ous scene at a meeting of the venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, in the early part of the year before that in which he died, he once more stood forth as the solitary and undaunted champion of one for whom he had pleaded years before as "absent, friendless, unpopular," " as attacked by every epithet which the English language has been able to furnish against him." "The Bishop of Natal," he said, "is the one Colonial Bishop who has translated the Bible into the language of the natives of his diocese. He is the one Colonial Bishop who, when he believed a native to be wronged, left his diocese, journeyed to London, and never rested till he had procured the re- versal of that wrong. He is the one Colonial Bishop who, as soon as he had done this, returned immedi- ately to his diocese and his v/ork. For these acts he has never received any praise, any encouragement from this the oldest of our Missionary Societies. For these deeds he will be remembered when you who censure him are dead, buried, and forgotten."
It was surely not without reason that one of your own foremost Divines spoke of him as " the champion of the vilified name, the lost cause."
Let me pass on now to his official life as Dean of Westminster. How deep, how intense was his interest in the venerable fabric committed to his care, I need not say. Within three years of his appointment he had completed, incredible as it may appear, his "Me- morials of Westminster Abbey." To that thick volume,
CHAP. III.] ARTHUB PENBHYN STANLEY. Ill
crowded with information of every kind, men of slower powers of work might have devoted half their lives. It is a full guide to all the treasures of that vast his- torical museum. It is deficient only on the architectu- ral side, for of architecture he would sometimes plead as entire ignorance as of music. But with all the ac- cumulated knowledge ready for him in existing works, and Avith all the help gladly given him by friendly hands and heads, it is a really prodigious work. He himself spoke lightly of it. Its very diffuseness of aim, and its encyclopaedic character wearied him, and, as he said to his friend. Max Miiller, it carried him too far away from the vital questions of the age."
But in scarcely one of these vital questions " was he more interested than in the Abbey itself. To commend its treasures to the public, to interest in its monuments and walls, and services, every class of his countrymen, soon became to him one of the most vital of all questions. There is hardly a corner in the Abbey on which he did not throw some new light: now pene- trating underground till he had tracked the coffin of the first Scottish King of England to its forgotten home in the vault of Henry VII. ; now placing in her hus- band's chantry the neglected remains of Catherine of Valois; now carefully and reverently replacing the recovered fragments of the desecrated tomb of the young Protestant King, Edward VI. His hand and spirit may be traced in the brightly tinted leaves of an American autumn, that speak a message of recon- ciliation over the bones of Andre ; in the monument,
112
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. m.
with its characteristic inscription, erected to the two Wesleys; in the faint reproduction of the sun shining on Boston Harbour, which forms part of the memo- rial window which he raised to the memory of his lost wife. It was his delight to take eminent strangers — now a king, now a general, now a literary man, now a party of children, now a listening friend, from tomb to tomb ; to answer their questions and pour out his knowledge. Rarely did a Saturday pass in spring or summer without his accompanying a party of work- ing-men from end to end, through Jerusalem Cham- ber, Chapter-House, and Abbey ; often ending the fatiguing task by giving them a simple meal, and occasionally showing them the curiosities of the Dean- ery. In that ancient house of the Abbots of West- minster and earlier Deans he took the profoundest interest. His malediction will fall, I am sure, on the first of his successors who shall substitute modern apartments for those antique gables and not wholly commodious bed-rooms. The restoration of the Chap- ter-House, the cradle of English Parliamentary life, inaugurated under his predecessor, was vigorously urged on the Government and completed at last, all but the windows. Every detail of the design for these last was arranged by himself, and will be com- pleted, in great part at least, as a fitting monument to his memory. Had he never preached a sermon, never published a line, never made a single speech, never appeared in public on any general question, he would have made his mark in those ancient precincts as a memorable Dean.
CHAP, m.] ARTHUB PEXRHYy STAXLEY.
113
For preaching too, and that from the most inspiring, to him, of all pulpits, he had now the ample scope that was grudged him at the University, and he was able to fulfil the promise which he had made in his parting sermon at Oxford. If to preach was, strictly speaking, his proper and official duty on three Sundays only in the year, yet the special circumstances of the Chapter gave him abundant opportunities; and Sun- day after Sunday men and women, including many whom few preachers would have drawn to worship, crowded to hear him. If there were times, as must needs have been the case in one who preached so often and so readily, when the quality of his sermons fell in some respects below what had been looked for, yet the voice, the manner, the face, the tones, were some- thing that could be found nowhere else, and at his best — in, for instance, such occasional sermons as he himself chose for publication, or such as are contained in a volume published since his death — he had for striking and moving eloquence few rivals in any English-speaking community of Christians. Read his funeral sermon on Charles Kingsley, on Sir John Herschel, on your own countryman Carlyle, or that preached on the Siege of Paris. Who else in the United Kingdom could have preached them ? Read, indeed, any of his published sermons. We may say as Dr. Johnson said of Baxter's, " Read any ; they are all good." Read any, we may add, for they are all characteristic, all stamped with his own impress. No one else in the world could have written them. I have
114
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. hi.
heard it said that it was worth a considerable journey to hear him read in the Abbey certain lessons from the New and even more from the Old Testament. He had a wonderful genius for finding in the services of the day a happy and felicitous guide for the subject of his serm on. On a Sunday when the Shah of Persia was in London, he had to preach to a regiment of volunteers. His text was drawn from the Book of Esther, which had formed for some days past the daily lessons. The greatest personage in that book was " the very last King of Persia who from that time to the present had visited Europe," and the text was taken from words of devoted patriotism — a very motto and watch- word for citizen soldiers — uttered by Esther herself.
I have already spoken of his preaching on the re- gathering of the brethren of Joseph which formed the morning lesson on the Sunday after his hearing of his mother's death; the text Abraham went down to Egypt to sojourn tliere^^ he drew from the same source for his first sermon in Egypt. The same dexterous readiness in catching analogies and simi larities which gave such a charm to his conversa tion, stood him also in good stead on very different occasions. In preaching, for instance, to the men employed at the great Agricultural Show at Isling- ton, he was able to find ennobling memories even for the drovers of swine, if not in the associations of Holy Scripture, yet in the faithful Gurth of Walter Scott, and in the even more faithful Eumseus of the " Odyssey."
CHAP, m.] ARTHUB PENEHYN STANLEY, 115
i
But you in Scotland have heard him preach, and need no eulogies of mine.
You will now, perhaps, expect his successor to say something at greater length than he has 3'et said of his theological position. Yet what I have already said is the key to all that I could say. He stood aloof, abso- lutely aloof, from all parties in the Church. " I can- not," he said, in a letter to one of his dearest friends, " go out to battle in Saul's armour : I must fight with m}' own sling and stone or not at all. I have never been able to reconcile myself to these unreasoning, "undiscriminating war-cries : whatever power I have been able to exert has been mainly derived from this abstinence."
Towards the close of his life, after quoting a famous passage on i:)arty spirit from Robert Hall, that opens with " Whatever retards a spirit of inquiry is favour- able to error, whatever promotes it is favourable to truth," he added one of his favourite remarks : " This spirit of combination for party purposes, and this alone, is what the Xew Testament calls heresy^ and this," he added, " constitutes the leading danger of synods and of councils."
Yet he was never ashamed of the title of "liberal theologian," not even " if he were to be the last who was to bear the name," and he was the first to give currency to the much used term " Broad Church." Liberal theology, he spoke of, in one of the very latest of his addresses, as being " the backbone of the Church of England," and he claimed for it an " or-
116
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. hi.
thodoxy, a biblical, evangelical, Catholic character which its opponents have never reached."
What, 3^ou will ask, did he mean by this? I can give you no better answer than in words of his own ; his theological views are repeated over and over again with a monotony which is never monotonous in all that ever came from his lips or pen.
Let me say first, that he was not, as you all know, a lover of dogma. His dear friend, your countryman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said of him that " no true believer in Christianity was ever more abhorrent of dogmatism," and adds that " he was almost bigoted against bigotry, and almost intolerant of intolerance." But though this is quite true, I feel inclined to quote some wise and discriminating words used by a much respected writer in reference to his dear friend Hugh Pearson, whose death soon followed his own, and who, as I have already said, for over forty years had shared every thought and feeling as none other of his friends: —
" There will probably always be two schools of opinion respecting the true relations between Chris- tian doctrine or dogma and Christian morals ; the one of those who think that the true spirit of the Gospel has been fettered, if not perverted, by being too much tied to doctrine, the other of those who believe that in the careful custody of the faith, in every particular, out of which Christian ethics sprang, is to be found the only security for their permanent vitality and power. The Vicar of Sonning " (let me substitute the name of the Dean of Westminster) " unquestiona-
CHAP. III.] ARTIIUB PENBIITN STANLEY.
117
bly belonged to the former school. He had a devout faith in the power and love of God, a profound rever- ence and love for Jesus Christ, and an absolute con- viction that the truest wisdom and highest happiness of man were to be found in the study and the imita- tion of that holy, lovely, and beautiful life. This was the sum and substance of his religion, this was really the kej'-note of all his sermons. To this he turned from doctrinal questions with something like con- tempt, and some might think with too little consid- eration or perception of the bearing of such questions upon the practical life. The whole condition of his mind on this subject might be summed up in the verses of Charles Wesley on Catholic Love : —
' Weary of all this wordy strife, These notions, forms, and modes and names,
To Thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life, Whose love my simple heart inflames —
Divinely taught at last I fly, With Thee and Thine to live and die.' "
He was never, as you know, weary of repeating, 1st, " that the essential superiority of Christianity to all other religions in the world, lay in its resting on a Divine life, a life that was the image of God, because he who lived it was all goodness and truth " ; 2ndl3^, " that its essential object was to produce characters which in truthfulness, in independence, in mercy, in purity, in charity, may recall something of the mind that was in Christ " ; 3rdly, " that what makes a man a Christian is to have the character of Christ," " a Mas-
118
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[crap. III.
ter worth living for, worth dying for, whose spirit was to be the regenerating power of the whole world."
It is in the light of this intense feeling for goodness and for truth as revealed in Christ, and presenting to mankind a standard which system after system of theology had only dimly realised — "as having far, far more in it," as he delighted to say of the Bible, ''than has ever been taken out of it," — that we must view his dissatisfaction with the imperfections of the past, "the old theological Adam striving in each successive gen- eration to maintain his own against the new Christian spiritual Adam." Hence his reiterated claim to place "all that was ceremonial, all that was dogmatic, even all that was miraculous, on a lower level among the essential elements of Christianity than what was moral or spiritual." Hence his bold assertion "that the greatest of all miracles is the character of Christ." Hence his urgent advice to his American friends "to feel truly the littleness of what is little, as well as the greatness of what is great ; to distinguish what is out- ward from what is inward, what is accidental from what is essential, what is temporary from what is eternal." Hence his fondness for the story of the French pastor asking on his death-bed his friends " to pray for him that he might have the elementary graces ; " or of the old Scottish Methodist, laying aside in his dying mo- ments the narrow sympathies of his earlier years in the words " if power were given me I would preach purity of life more and purity of doctrine less." On the realisation of this idea of a wider Christianity, "if
CHAP. III.] ARTHUR PENRHYy STAyLEY.
119
not in this century," as he said in America, "yet in the next or in the next but one," " even if he were to be the last not to despair of his religion and his Church," " even if a partial eclipse were at hand," — on this he rested all his hopes of the triumph of faith over un- belief. At times, no doubt, his heart seemed to fail him. " Those younger than himself might live," he said, " to see a brighter and happier day than that which seems to overcloud the minds, and oppress the hopes, of those who live in the latter part of this nine- teenth century." " The immediate future " seemed to him " sometimes darkened by an eclipse of faith, sometimes by an eclipse of reason." But he never seriously relinquished the hope — call it, if you will, an idle dream — that he expressed, as elsewhere, so in Scotland, " that, in spite of cynical indifference or growing superstition, it would yet be shown that Christianity — a Catholic, comprehensive, all-embra- cing Christianity — was not dead or dying, but in- stinct with immortal life" — "that Christianity in its wider aspect may yet overcome the world." It was to this indestructible faith in the real vitality of what he held to be "the essentials of Christianity," that we may refer his impatience under all stringent subscrip- tions to church formularies and confessions of faith as tending to alienate Christian from Christian, Church from Church, and to retard the progress for which he sighed. " All confessions and similar documents are," he said, "if taken as final expressions of absolute truth, misleading," and he speaks of a church " whose glory it is to be always advancing to perfection."
120
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. m.
Truth he was ready to welcome from any quarter. It was in the firm conviction that " Truth was to be sought above all things for itself and not for any ulterior object," that he refused to be appalled at any discoveries, real or supposed, of physical science, but was ready to welcome all as elements of a larger sys- tem. " However far," he said, " we may trace back the material parts of man, from whatever earlier forms of existence it may be possible to derive the bodily frame which we possess in common with other parts of creation, no one can go further back or deeper down than St. Paul or the Book of Genesis have alreaidy led us. ' The first man is of the earth earthy says St. Paul ; ' The Lord God made man of the dust of the earthy'' says the Book of Genesis. In neither the biblical nor the scientific account, can the descrip- tion affect or destroy our knowledge, our certainty of what he is now. What would be fatal to our hopes, would be to be told, that because our first man was of the earth, earthy, therefore all our higher and nobler desires and hopes and affections are also of the earth, earthy. This would indeed make us, as St. Paul says, ' of all creatures the most miserable.'' " And he protests against "driving into the devil's camp " all the leaders in such inquiries, just as he protests elsewhere against using, by way of disparage- ment, such words as deist " or " theist," on the ground that "where this belief remains, the true supernatural, the true ideal, immaterial ground is not abandoned." Scotsmen know well how eager he was to find points
CHAP. III.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
121
of agreement and similarity in dissident churches, and the reproach of a late venerable Oxford Pro fessor that " he had an eye for resemblances but not for differences," he welcomed as the highest praise. " Make the most," he said, in a sermon preached in Old Grey Friars' Church, " of what there is of good in institutions, in opinions, in communities, in indi- yiduals." He had, as you know, an avowed, a warm, an almost passionate preference for the much decried principle of an " Established Church," for the union, wherever possible, of Church and State. He would dwell, to the astonishment no doubt of conscientious dissenters, " on the enlarging and elevating influence infused into a religious institution by its contact, however slight, with so magnificent an ordinance as the British Commonwealth, by its having for its aim the highest welfare of the whole community." " That connection which Chalmers had vindicated in the interest of Christian philanthropy, had," he said, " in these latter days more and more commended itself in the interest of Christian liberty." And he was never tired of enlarging on the " soothing, moderat- ing, comprehensive spirit of the Church of England."
Yet not the less he could thank the Baptists for having "almost alone in the Western Church pre- served intact one singular and interesting relic of prim- itive and apostolic times which we have," he adds, "at least in our practice, wisely discarded." He could point to their Bunyan, Robert Hall, and Have- lock, as men who taught us that " there was a ground
122
BECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. in.
of communion which no difference of external rites coukl ever efface." He coiikl thank Quakerism for " having unfurled before the eyes of Christendom not the flag of war but of peace ; " for dwelling even with exaggerated force on the insignificance of all forms, of all authority, as compared with the inward light of conscience." The work of dissenting churches is," he said in Scotland, " to keep alive that peculiar force of devotion and warmth which is apt to die out in the light of reason, and in the breath of free inquiry." " We cannot safely dispense," he said in America, after a sermon full of wisdom on the char- acteristics of the Roman, the Eastern, the Lutheran, and the Calvinistic systems, " even with the churches which we most dislike, and which in other respects have wrought most evil." If he felt that the absolute and corporate re-union of Churches was in some cases undesirable, in others impracticable, he did all that lay in his power to advocate and to promote a friendly inter-communion. You know how gladly he preached in the pulpits of the Scottish Establishment, how joyfully he would have opened to your own clergy the pulpit of an Abbey which he loved to call " the consecrated temple of reconciled ecclesiastical enmities," how in the absence of freedom fully to effect this, he rejoiced to hear, if not in the pulpit, yet beneath the roof of that Abbey, the voice of a layman like Max Miiller, of Scotsmen such as Prin- cipals Caird and Tulloch, of such an English Noncon- formist as Dr. Stoughton. How gladly did he dwell on
CHAP. III.] ARTHUB PENRHYN STANLEY.
123
the manner in which men like Milton or John Bunyan, or Thomas A'Kempis or Keble, or the writers of great hymns, rise unconsciously above their own peculiar views, " above the limits that divide denominations, into the higher region of a common Christianity." How he delighted in the words of your own Dr. Chalmers, " who cares about any Church except as an instrument of doing good?" or of Dr. Duncan, the Free Church sage, who was " first a Christian, then a Catholic, then a Calvinist, then a Paedo-Baptist, and fifthly a Presbyterian," who avowed " that there was a progress in all things and therefore in religion ; " who, though a staunch Protestant and disliker of image worship, could never banish the touching mem- ory of a rude image of his Saviour which he had seen cut on a granite cross in Hungary. How he rejoiced in the conviction of John Wesley's dearest friend that " the main, fundamental, overpowering principle of his life was not the promotion of any particular doc- trine, but the elevation of the whole Christian world in the great principles of Christian holiness and moral- ity." How often has he quoted the words of Zwingli- us, " of the meeting in the presence of God of every blessed spirit, every holy character, every faithful soul that has existed from the beginning of the world even to the consummation thereof." His own words, as applied to Richard Baxter, sum up all that under this head can be said of himself : "In a stormy and divided age he advocated unity and comprehension. Many oth- er thoughts abounded in that teeming brain, but they
124
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. in.
were more or less secondary. Other messages of divine or human truth were delivered with more force and consistency by others of his time, but in the solemn proclamation of this message he stood pre-eminent."
You can imagine, or you know in part, how fierce a spirit of opposition all this — and I have read you only some fair specimens of his habitual teaching — must have provoked in some minds. As those whose duty it is to do so, read the fierce invectives, the malignant insinuations which were launched against that noble spirit, so full of the hunger and thirst after righteous- ness, so glowing with an all-embracing charity towards every human soul, it is easy to repress what might seem a natural, a righteous resentment. So clear is it, if not on which side lies the victory in argument, or the hope of immediate success, yet on which side is the spirit of Christ. Let me give you, if you wish for criticism — you will have none from me — some- thing more worthy of himself. A lecture which he once delivered is thus described by a member of the Society of Friends, one who did not wholly share his views, yet deeply sympathised with and greatly reverenced him. " The subject was, ' The points in the Christian creed which are held by all Christians.' It was full of his own wonderful and all-embracing charity, and he seemed to lift his whole audience into a higher sphere as he spoke. The soul was soothed and cheered by listening to him. Perhaps the intellect was not altogether satisfied. If any man could have succeeded in finding and describing the common stand-
CHAP, m.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
125
ing ground of Roman Catliolic and Unitarian, it would have been he. But I think that one or two of us felt that not even he had quite succeeded in finding that common formula." Ah I how different this thoughtful language to the taunts of some of his own communion.
" He spoke after his lecture," the same observer adds, " of the manner in which ' Ecce Homo ' had been re- ceived by the different sections of the Christian Church. Each one had found something in the book which har- monised with its own special views. This seemed to him an illustration of the wonderful manifoldness of our Lord's character, 'that character,' he said, 'which is the foundation of the Church.' " His host adds an interesting reminiscence of his speaking of the Found- er of Buddliism. " I remember," said Stanley, " the time when the name of Gautama was scarcely known, except to a few scholars, and not always well spoken of by those who knew it, and now — he stands second'' " There was something," we are told, " very impres- sive in the way in which he said this — with hands and eyes uplifted, leaving the name of the First un- spoken." Those who knew him will easily fill up the outlines of the picture.
You would wish me, I think, to say something of the position which he held towards the working classes in London, and in the nation generally. This also was unique of its kind, and difficult at first sight to define or account for. Other men have devoted themselves far more exclusively and more assiduously to promoting their welfare. Other men have spoken,
126
RECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. III.
preached, and written in a style far more directly adapted to their opinions and tastes. He had little, at least in early life, of his father's frank, ready, sailor-like power of at once placing himself on a level with less educated strangers. He had never toiled and laboured like his sister, Mary Stanley, in the details of hospital life, or of organising industrial and other means of relieving distress and encouraging self dependence. It was not till he was established at Westminster that he came into any specially close or permanent contact with what are called the working classes. While still at Oxford he had been deeply interested in efforts made by his warm friends, Mr. Thomas Hughes and the Rev. Septimus Hansard, under the inspiration of Mr. Frederic Maurice, in conjunction with the late Mr. Kingsley and others, to raise the condition of the London operatives ; and it is needless to say that, with Lady Augusta by his side, he gave the aid of his presence and his sympathy to various move- ments that tended to promote their welfare. Very soon he won his way to their hearts, and was a welcome visitor at their meetings. There remains at the Dean- ery an address presented to him by the working-men of Westminster on his reaching his 60th birthday ; a cheering memorial of their good wishes as the shadows of life began to darken round him. He early formed the habit, which he never laid aside, of conducting Saturday parties of working-men round the Abbey, explaining, as no one else could, the principal monu- ments, and endeavouring to interest them in the past
CHAP, m.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 127
greatness of their common country, by trjdng, in lan- guage used by himself at his Installation sermon, " to draw out the marvellous tale that lies imprisoned in those dead stones, and make each sepulchre give up again to life its illustrious dead." I have been favoured with more than one description of such afternoons, written b}^ working-men who had been admitted to a privilege which the most exalted personages delighted to enjoy. In such tours of the Abbey or in the visits to the Deanery that occasionally followed them were laid, at times, the seeds of future intimacy with indi- viduals. Yet I feel that these details throw but a faint light on his relation to the men of whom I speak. It is not the thing done — that is in the reach, if not of any one yet of man}" — it is in the manner in which he did it that the charm lay. I might easily enumerate other claims to gratitude : his promotion of coffee-houses and libraries, his hearty sympathy with the Working-Men's Club and Institute Union, of which he was elected President, his care to have every monument in the Abbey carefully lettered and described ; but I feel that no list of such services will, in itself, account for the place he held in the affections of his countrymen. The truth was that the same S3'mpathetic fibre, the same indescribable gift for winning hearts, which was con- stantly binding to him new friends among his own class, and which made his death felt, in America as in England, as a personal loss by multitudes who had never seen him, told with no less force on a class not often interested in the life and death of an ecclesiasti-
128
BECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. in.
cal dignitary. Its effect was clearly marked when he was laid in his grave. It was not only that the Abbey and its approaches were thronged to the very full by humble worshippers, or that in the meanest streets in the neighbourhood there was scarcely a shop or a public-house that was not partially closed as for a death in the family, or that — as was said at the time by one familiar with the purlieus of Westminster — " the hard- est roughs seemed softened by his name." This might have been in a measure due to years of ready benefi- cence and well-tried sympathy on the part of Lady Augusta, his sister, and himself. But the feeling ex- tended far beyond the vicinity of the Abbey. In a great northern seat of industry, one who was coming up from the Yorkshire Moors to bear his part in that sad funeral, heard a working-man, as he put his son into the train, bid him, in Yorkshire dialect, " tak care of himself at the burying," and a few moments' conver- sation startled him by the interest shown in the loss which was saddening his own heart. The same trav- eller spent the next two months in a Midland town, where he made the acquaintance of some of the leading operatives ; and there, to his astonishment, he found the name of Stanley, introduced in conversation by men who were not aware that the new comer was his friend, act at once as a passport to their confidence. How was it ? I must leave those who have felt the spell of his presence, of his face, his voice, his greet- ing, to add to these his reputation for chivalry and courage and eloquence, and sympathy with all who
CHAP, iii.l ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
129
needed sympathy, and the wide-spread sense that he was the same man m the atmosphere of a court as at a meeting of working-men; that to use once more words quoted by himself but applied to another, " he feared no man's displeasure, and hoped for no man's preferment," and so to find a key to the un- doubted hold which that scion of an ancient family had won on the affection of the best representatives of our toiling millions.
I need not remind you how deeply, how univer- sally he was mourned. " He was borne to his grave," it was truly said, on the shoulders of the nation." It may be no less truly said that the feelings which he inspired were a real force in breaking down, or at least softening, that alienation of classes which is the most formidable of all dangers to existing institu- tions. When the foremost men in England, the leaders in Parliament, in society, in science and literature, in church and state, met in the Chapter House of Westminster to do honour to his memory, no testimony was more impressive than that borne by one who represented neither high rank, nor political office, nor ecclesiastical dignity, but the working-men who mourned the loss not so much of a benefactor as of a friend. And they were not mistaken. If years before he had spoken in the distant East, in the pres- ence of a circle far removed from their own, of God's love "to the poor, the humble classes, the neglected classes, the dangerous classes, the friendless, the op- pressed, the unthought for, the uncared for ; " if he
130
BECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. in.
had plended for Christianity "as the only religion addressed, not to the religious, but to the irreligious, the non-religious," his friends know well that this was no rhetorical utterance of idle breath, but a deep con- viction on which his own life and his own religion were based and moulded.
The many volumes of his collected works will have to face the verdict which it is yet too early to pronounce as to their enduring character. His theological position may be questioned, challenged, attacked, and defend- ed ; it may be maintained or abandoned by those who survive him. But those who have had the privilege — the inestimable privilege — of enjoying his society or of sharing his friendship, will feel that behind the genius and behind the theology there was something more precious, more attractive, more inspiring than either; the man himself — the Arthur Stanley — who in youth, in manhood, in maturer age, drew to him more and more the hearts of men, and has made the skies seem less bright, earth less habitable, life itself less interesting since he ceased to be.
I would gladly end with these words : but some- thing I ought to say of his domestic, his personal history. You will not expect me to anticipate his biography by saying much.
His life was exceedingly busy and laborious. He speaks frequently in letters written on his first coming to London of "the terrible whirl," of "my time being broken to pieces in useless, trivial labour." His suc- cessor can enter into his dismay. Yet the amount of
CHAP, m.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 131
work — work of the most various kinds — which he contrived to do seems almost incredible. And he did it in the main joyously. No controversialist's abuse ever seemed to ruffle him for a moment ; the fiercest invectives left no sting behind. His health, without being strong, was good, and his autumnal tours in Scotland, or on the Continent, he enjoyed to the last with indefatigable activity. The loss of friends he felt sorely. Kingsley's death struck him to the ground. So wide was his circle that such blows came often as life went on. "I am thankful now," he said, "if a month passes without a death I" Yet he had wonderful elas- ticity and a hopeful temperament. I remember his telling us how, near the time of his sixtieth birthday, a little German boy with whom, with his usual love of children, he had made acquaintance (I think it was on a Rhine steamer), asked him his age; on hearing it, he said, "Why, all your life is over!" "No," he replied, "the best time is yet to come." He took a keen inter- est in public affairs, and was deeply moved by the war between France and Germany. His letters express the strongest indignation against the French Emperor as the wanton disturber of the peace of Europe. But the bombardment of Strasburg and the siege of Paris were to him " dreadful calamities, even if needed to secure the world against the recurrence of such evils." And in his sermon on the Distress of Paris you will find the most moving of laments over the city which he knew so well. But I must hasten on.
It was after his visit to Russia in 1874 that his wife's
132
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. hi.
health began to show signs of failure, and that sadness began to darken that once bright home in the Deanery. In the next year it was necessary to pass the spring and summer in seclusion, and to forego their usual visit to Scotland. He writes of his " suffering wife and her widowed sister as cheering each other and cheering me." " I resign myself," he says, " to six months of this stranded existence. If at the end of that time my dear wife is anything like what she was before in activity and strength, I shall be satisfied. Like what she was in wisdom and goodness she is and has been throughout, and will be, I have no doubt, to the end." (To M. M., Feb. 8, 1875.) He spent the autumn at Norwood near London, busying himself, seated by her couch-side, at his third volume of the Jewish Church, in alternations of hope and despondency. He returned to London in October. But the months went by, and no change for the better came. " I know not," he writes to the same friend, " what report to give. So very weak, so suffering, and yet such unconquerable cheer- fulness and vivacity." And he speaks of the invaluable presence of her cousin, that most faithful of friends, who is even now devoting herself to the sacred task of deciphering and arranging a vast mass of his letters, papers, and journals. " All the world is changed for me," he adds; "yet I find it best, and she also desired, that I should fill up the time, not filled by my thoughts and works for her, with work of my own, and so I struggled on." And through that sad winter, ever ready to forget his own trouble if he could aid a friend or
CHAP, m.] ABTHUR PEyRHYN STANLEY.
183
further any good cause, he worked day by day at that concluding volume. By February she could only just rouse herself to express her joy that her husband and Oxford were not to lose the presence of so dear a friend as Professor Max Miiller. Still he worked on by her side, placing, when speech had failed her, some simple hymn, some Christian text, within her sight. ''Last night," he writes at last to his old pupil and present successor, "she pronounced my name for the last time ; this morning, for the last time, in answer to my urgent appeal, she opened those dear eyes upon me." On the 1st of March she passed away. The last visitor to look upon her as she lay in the calm of unconscious slumber was the Sovereign's youngest son, the young Prince dear to Scotland for other reasons than the Scottish title that he bears, whose recovery from dangerous illness twelve months before he had made the subject of some touching lines, under the title of " The Untravelled Traveller," which some here may have read.* It was Ash-Wednesday — the same day of the ecclesiastical year as that on which he had lost his mother fourteen j-ears before. Something of his feelings towards both he embodied in stanzas of characteristic and mournful beauty to which I have already referred.f
He was, indeed, " in the very ashes and embers." Yet the sympathy of his friends, the letters that poured in upon him from every quarter of the world, cheered him greatly. "The knowledge," he wrote once more, ♦ Macmillan's Magazine, March 1875. f See note to page 89.
134
EECOLLECTIONS OF
[chap. m.
"that my friends, my dear unfailing friends, knew what she was and is, must be my enduring solace." " Do not pity me for Thursday " (the day fixed for the funeral). "What could be more sustaining and in- spiring than such a tribute rendered to the life of my life, the heart of my heart ? " Some here may possibly have been present at that vast gathering — second only in impressiveness to another that we have since seen moving towards the same tomb — which walked behind him to her grave. How anxiously, during the long roll of a music into whose secrets he could not enter, men watched his face as he stood sustained and calm behind the coffin. With what courage, what almost majesty, he himself, before he returned to his darkened home, dismissed with the final blessing that vast multitude, awed, thrilled, and touched by the strange power and resonance of that unfaltering voice — a multitude that included every class, from the Queen who loved her to the poor workers for their daily bread whose lives she had helped to cheer.
But the blow had been struck from which he was never wholly to recover. He often loved to speak of lives which great affliction had strengthened and ele- vated. He would point with admiration to that sorely- tried friend the Primate of England, who had gathered strength and rene wed usefulness from crushing sorrows. There is an exquisite passage in one of his latest ser- mons in which, after speaking of "the blank desolation of sorrow with which we look on the lonely work that lies before us when the voice that cheered us is silent,
CHAP, m.] AETHUB PENTtHYN STANLEY.
135
and the hand that upheld us is cold in the grave," he speaks also of "the cloud of blessing that comes out of that tender memory, and of the feeling that the very solitude in which we are left calls for new energies."
Two months after his bereavement he laments that it is not so with himself. " Sorrow has not yet brought," he writes, " strength and energy. I still hope that it will." And his hope was not wholly in vain. Care was taken that his home should be never wholly desolate. He lived, as you know, for five years longer. Old friends rallied round him ; new friendships were still to be formed. One v/ho for those last few years saw him almost daily, and who repaid his warm affection by a devoted and almost filial attachment, had never known him in his married life. He recovered his full interest in public events, in the questions which agi- tated the Church. He worked on at the same desk in the library, with his wife's bust hard by on the table by which she had sat. Much of his old elasticity and vivacity returned ; his keen sense of humour never left him. He was as ready as ever to take the field in defence of any victim of theological prejudice or ran- cour. His interest in his humbler fellow-countrymen grew deeper and wider. There lies before me at this moment a letter from one of the mourners who filled the Abbey at his funeral. It is written by a London lighter- man, i.e., a navigator of barges on the Thames, whom he had accidentally encountered in front of the monu- ment to John Wesley on the Easter Monday of the year before he died. Their chance conversation had led
136
RECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. m.
to two or three friendly visits paid by invitation to the Deanery. The humbler friend recalls not only his own remark, in reference to the Dean's visits to Palestine, that it must " have been beautiful to have been able to walk where the Saviour had walked," but the answer and " the heavenly look " that came with it, " Yes, beautiful to walk in the steps of the Saviour." And his visitor and others like him learned to look on him with the same love that we his old familiar friends bore to him. Of work he had no lack, and he never rested from work except in such rest as travel brought him. He seemed to find a new lease of life, for a time at least, in his visit made to America with two dear friends in 1878. There he renewed many friendships, formed fresh ties, and drank in with delight the throng of new ideas which pressed upon him in his first visit to that untrodden region. If the volume of "Ad- dresses and Sermons in America " were the only relic left of his literary labours, if all else from the Biog- raphy of Arnold to the "Christian Institutions" were swept away, you might find in that one volume almost everything characteristic of the man, and some gems of a kind not to be found in his earlier writings. To these I have referred elsewhere.
At the meeting which was held to take steps to commemorate him in the Chapter House of West- minster, the Archbishop of Canterbury told a touch- ing story of a poor old widow at Lambeth whose face brightened up on hearing his name. " Frail and trembling," she said, " I was trying to make my way
CHAP, m.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 137
across "Westminster Bridge among the carriages, and afraid that I should be trodden down, when a man stepped up to me and gave me his help, and piloted me safely through the crowd. I asked him to whom I was indebted ; he merely pointed to the great Ab- bey, ' You know that place,' he said ; ' I am its Dean.' "
Let me add another characteristic anecdote. In his absence from home for some weeks, a much respected servant of the Abbey, a man of humble position, but rich in health and strength, and vigour and stature, had become permanently and hopelessly blind. My informant, his one surviving sister — none but herself could have told the tale so touchingly — found him seated by the side of the blind man, his own eyes streaming with tears, which he whom he was trying to comfort could not see, endeavouring by every possible word and topic to inspire hope and courage into the heart of one who was visited with what would have been to himself the most terrible of afflictions. No wonder that the sufferer found his burden lightened by the aid of such a friend, and was encouraged to take the first and hardest steps towards leading, in spite of that great loss, a cheerful and useful life.
From America he returned to his work refreshed and strengthened for a time. But there was a sense among those who knew him best that his hold on life was slackening. Yet his busy brain never rested, nor did the warm heart grow cold. It was only shortly before his death that he published the volume on Christian Institutions," which embodies his latest views on the
138
BECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. hi.
whole field of Theology. The exquisite lines on " Death the Reuniter," were written not long before death did its kindly work. His sermon on Thomas Carlyle was preached in the February before the preacher died ; that on Lord Beaconsfield so late as the 1st of May. Within a few weeks of the end he wrote for The Times a paper which appeared after his death on the revised version of the New Testament ; an article on the Westminster Confession he corrected for the Press, on what proved to be his death-bed. In the year but one before he died he had greatly enjoyed a visit to Northern Italy and Venice in company with his sister, Mary Stanley, and a young London physician, whom he greatly loved, and who had been one of liis two companions in America. It was followed, in No- vember, by that sister's death, coming, if it must needs have come, even as they would both have wished it, yet for all that a sore trial. The last but one gone of that bright circle ! Father, mother, brothers, sister, gone before him !
Shall I remind you of the one storm of popular, as opposed to clerical, opposition that he ever en- countered? His own words will recall it. " When," he said, "I assented to a monument in the Abbey to the Prince Imperial, I expected, after the sym- pathy shewn at the time of the funeral at Chisle- hurst, nothing but universal approval. I did it with- out consulting or hearing from any one, and I still believe that a few years hence it would have been amongst the most generally interesting and attractive
CHAP, m.] ABTHUR PENBRYy STANLEY. 139
of the Abbey monuments." Yet he was no Xapoleon- ist, and had little sympathy for either the First or the Second Empire. His intended inscription for the proposed monument, was the untranslatable line of Virgil,-
"Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt."
He asked a friend to suggest a corresponding English quotation. He demurred to Wordsworth's lines,
*' Men are we, and must grieve when e'en the shade Of that which once was great has passed away,"
as expressing a certain excess of homage to what had fallen, and seemed more ready to acquiesce in the vaguer words of the same poet,
" Yet tears to human sufferings are due."
The result of a debate in the House of Commons seemed to him sufficient grounds for abandoning the projected memorial ; but he never changed his opin- ion, or was for a moment dismayed by the storm that arose. " He feared no man's displeasure."
Let me hasten onwards. In the year before his death, his friends had been made uneasy by occasional failures in strength; but he seemed in the last few months to have recovered in no small degree his wonted tone, and preached, if often with less than the usual vigour, yet at times with all his old force and fire. But the lamp of life was burning low. " I shall never go again," he said, after his return from the triennial dinner of Old Rugbeians ; " I do not mean that I shall not live, but I feel that I am losing interest in these
140
BECOLLECTIONS OF [chap. m.
special and youthful meetings." Something of the same kind he had whispered on his last return from Oxford. This was within a fortnight of the commencement of his last illness. The next day, however, he shewed the keenest interest in an account given him by a young Scottish friend of the feelings and language of a London mob who were met together in support of Mr. Brad- laugh. So anxious was he to the very last — it was the last time I saw him — to find, if possible, some germ of good in what most revolted the educated and religious classes. A few days later he attended for some hours the annual gathering within the Abbey precincts of the Westminster Window Garden Exhibition, presided over by the venerable Lord Shaftesbury, a meeting in which he had for many years taken the deepest inter- est.
But the end was at hand. On the following Sat- urday he closed the afternoon service with a short sermon, one of a course which he was delivering weekly on the Beatitudes. Before the Psalms of the day were ended he had left the Abbey, feeling ill ; he returned exhausted with violent sickness, and preached his last sermon with an effort which few but himself would have faced. For the first time in his life at Westminster he was compelled to disap- point a party — I believe of young sailors — who were expecting his guidance round the Abbey.
He retired to bed on his return to the Deanery, and except for a short time on the following Wednesday never left it till, after two or three days of graver ill-
CH-^. m.] ABTHUR PENRHYX STANLEY.
141
ness, he passed away towards midnight on Monday, the 18th of July.
You will not ask me to enter further into these sad details. Some of those closest and dearest to him were far away, unaware of his danger till all was over. But his dear friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, came to his bedside, and took from him, before he left, his dying words; his one remaining sister and her husband, his wife's sister, his two fellow-travellers in America, — both exceedingly dear to him, — and his friend and neighbour Canon Farrar, were with him to the end, and all received, before utterance failed him, his parting blessing.
Shall I do wrong in passing from that solemn scene to language used not long before b}' himself, when speaking of the wrestling of Jacob with his mysterious visitor as the likeness and type of all spiritual struggles?
It describes also the last struggle of all, it may be in the extreme of age or of weakness, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There the soul finds itself alone on the mountain ridge overlooking the unknown future ; ' our company before is gone,' the kinsfolk and friends of many years are passed over the dark river, and we are left alone with God. We know not in the shadow of the night who it is that touches us — we feel only that the Everlasting arms are closing us in : the twilight of the morning breaks, we are bid to depart in peace, for by a strength not our own we have pre- vailed, and the path is made clear before us."
Let me only add the closing lines of the same paper,
142 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. [chap. hi.
" When the struggle is drawing to its end, when the da}^ breaks and the sun rises, there will have been some who in that struggle have seen the Face of God."
To him the night was past, and the daybreak had dawned.
ATTTHOBIZEn AMERICAN EDITION,
O^ristian InsHktions:
ESSAYS ON ECCLESIASTICAL SUBJECTS. By A. P. STANLEY, D.D.,
Late Dean of Westminsier.
One vol., crown 8vo, Library Edition, $2.50 ; Students' Edition, 75o.
* The work includes chapters upon Baptism , the Eucharist, the Euchar- ist in the Early Church, Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Real Presence, the Body and Blood of Christ, Absolution, Ecclesiastical Vestments, Basilicas, the Pope, the Litany, and the Belief of the Early Christians,
*' They have all an antiquarian, historical, and practical interest, and are treated in a very liberal and very attractive style. Dean Stanley is a genius as well as a scholar, and has a rare power of word-painting. His History of the yewish Church and of the Eastern Church are as inter- esting and entertaining as a novel. He always seizes on the most salient points, and gives them an artistic finish. He avoids all pedantry of learn- ing, and all tedious details. " — Dr. Schaff in The Critic.
DEAN STANLEY'S OTHER WORKS.
THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH Church. With maps and plans.
Vol. I. FROM ABRAHAM TO Samuel. Crown Svo, §2.50.
Vol. II FROM SAMUEL TO THE Captivity. Crown Svo, $2.50.
Vol. III. FROM THE CAPTIVITY to the Christian Era. With maps. Crown Svo, §2.50.
THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH
of Scotland, Svo, $1.50.
THE HISTORY OF THE EAST- ern Church. With an Introduction on the study of Ecclesiastical History. Crown Svo, $2.50.
WESTMINSTER EDITION OF the History of the Jewish Church. Handsomely printed on superfine paper, and tastefully bound. Three vols., Svo. (Sold in sets only.) $9.00.
THE LIFE AND CORRESPOND- ence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., late Head Master of Rugby School. 2 vols, in one. Crown Svo, §2.50.
For sale by all booksellers, or sent^ post-paid^ upon receipt oj price, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers,
743 AND 745 Broadway, New York.
Men and Books;
OR, STUDIES IN HOMILETICS.
Lectures Introductory to the " Theory of Preaching." By Professor AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D.
One Volume. Crown 8vo. - - $2.00
Professor Phelps' second volume of lectures is more popular and gen- eral in its application than " The Theory of Preaching." It is devoted to a discussion of the sources of culture and power in the profession of the pulpit, its power to absorb and appropriate to its own uses the world of real life in the present, and the world of the past, as it lives in books.
There is but little in the volume that is not just as valuable to all students looking forward to a learned profession as to theological students, and the charm of the style and the lofty tone of the book make it difficult to lay it down when it is once taken up.
"It is a book ohviously free from all padding:. It is a li7>e boolc, animated as well as sound and instructive, in which conventionalities are brushed aside, and the author goes straight to the marrow of the subject. No minister can read it without being waked up to a higher conception of the possibilities of his calling."
— Professor George P. Fisher.
•'It is one of the most helpful books in the interests of self-culture that has ever been written. While specially intende 1 for young clergymen, it is almost equally well adapted for students in all the liberal professions." — Standard oj" the Cross.
" We are sure that no minister or candidate for the ministry can read it without profit. It is a tonic for one's mind to read a book so laden with thousjht and suggestion, and written in a style so fresh, strong and bracing." — Boston IVatchman.
*' Viewed in this light, for their orderly and wise and rich suggestiveness, these lec- ture> of Professor Phelps are of simply incomparable merit. Every page is crowded with observations and suggestions of striking pertinence and force, and of that kind of wisdom which touches the roots of a matter. Should one begin to make quotations illustrative of this remark, there would be no end of them. While the book is meant specially for the preaclier, so rich is it in sajje remark, in acute Jiscernment, in penetrating observation of how men are most apt to be influenced, and what are the most telling qualities in the va- rious forms of literary expression, it must become a favorite treatise with the best minds in all the other professions. The author is, in a very high sense of the term, an artist, as for a quarter of a century he has been one of the most skillful instructors of young men in that which is the noblest of all the arts." — Chicago Advance,
For sale by all booksellers^ or sent^ post-paid.^ upon receipt of
price., by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers,
743 AND 745 Broadway, New York.
|
DATE DUE |
|||
|
****** |
|||
|
DEMCO 38-297 |
1 i