AC 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 ACS .M42 
 
 In peril of change: essays wrtten n tl 
 
 olln 
 
 3 1924 029 633 066 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029633066 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 ESSAYS WRITTEN IN 
 TIME OF TRANQUILLITY 
 
 C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.A. 
 
 FELLOW OF Christ's college, Cambridge 
 
 '•^JVe cannot but acknowledge that lue are not yet at rest: ttor 
 can lue believe ive /lave yet enjoyed or seen enough to accomplish 
 the ends of God" 
 
 The Parliament to the People of England, 1653 
 
 NEW YORK 
 B. W. HUEBSCH 
 
 150 NASSAU STREET 
 
(All rights ixscrvid.) 
 
Co 
 NOEL BUXTON 
 
 IN MBMOKT OF TEN YBAES OF FRIENDSHIP 
 AND BFFOET IN A COMMON CAUSE. 
 
PBEFACE 
 
 THE essays in this book represent an effort made in 
 a time of tranquillity, to estimate forces which are 
 making for change. Some are attempts to examine the 
 ideals of the age immediately past, as one by one the 
 voices of the nineteenth century have sunk into silence. 
 Some deal vrith the life of the present, endeavouring to 
 reflect some immediate impression of the panorama of 
 life as it passes by. And some are concerned with the 
 future, seeking to interpret, in literature, in religion, in 
 social ideals, those obscure beginnings which are to 
 direct the progi'ess of the years to come. 
 
 In every case I have been less interested in the 
 manner of saying than in the thing said. Literature 
 has only been called in to pronounce its verdict upon 
 the business of life. It is this business of life, the 
 experience of a hunying present, which is the one 
 absorbing question : the actual high effort, apathy or 
 despair crowded into that interval when to-morrow is 
 becoming yesterday. To some the procession passes 
 as a pageant, to others as a masquerade, to others again 
 as a funeral march with the sound of solemn music. 
 But to all in that moment a world has perished, a world 
 been born. 
 
 xi 
 
PREFACE 
 
 If the note is in general sombre, with the sadness 
 of things more emphatic than their splendour, I can 
 only plead an experience more than usually complex 
 and baffling, spent in communication less with the 
 triumphs of civilisation than with its failures. 
 
 Expectancy and surprise are the notes of the age. 
 Expectancy belongs by nature to a time balanced 
 uneasily between two great periods of change. On the 
 one hand is a past still showing faint survivals of 
 vitality; on the other is the future but hardly coming 
 to birth. The years as they pass still appear as years 
 of preparation, a time of waiting rather than a time 
 of action. Surprise, again, is probably the first im- 
 pression of all who look on, detached from the 
 eager traf&c of man. The spectator sees him per- 
 forming the same antics in the same grave fashion 
 as in all the past: heaping up wealth which another 
 shall inherit, following pleasure which turns to dust 
 in the mouth, and the end weariness : thinking, as 
 always, that he will endure for ever, and calling after 
 his own name the place which shall know him no more. 
 But surprise passes into astonishment in confronting 
 the particular and special features of the age. Here is 
 a civilisation becoming ever more divorced from Natm-e 
 and the ancient sanities, protesting thi'ough its literatm-e 
 a kind of cosmic weariness. Society which had started 
 on its mechanical advance and the aggrandisement of 
 material goods with the buoyancy of an impetuous life 
 confronts a poverty which it can neither ameliorate nor 
 destroy, and an organised discontent which may yet 
 prove the end of the Western civilisation. Faith in 
 the invisible seems dying, and faith in the visible is 
 proving inadequate to the hunger of the soul. The 
 city state, concentrated in such a centre as London 
 
 xii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 remains as meaningless and as impossible to co-ordinate 
 with any theory of spiritual purposes as the law of 
 gravitation itself. 
 
 Experience in the heart of such a universe of neces- 
 sity takes upon itself a character of bewilderment. 
 Those whom I loved have died : and the miracle of 
 their parting has seemed more strange than the miracle 
 of their presence. I have seen so many sunsets, so 
 many radiant dawns. This man has failed and that 
 succeeded, and both have grown tired of it all. "What 
 right have I to grieve," as Thoreau said, "who have 
 not ceased to wonder ? " 
 
 And I think that I am not alone in longing for a time 
 when literature will once more be concerned with life, 
 and politics with the welfare of the people : and religion 
 fall back again upon reality: and pity and laughter 
 return into the common ways of men. 
 
 xm 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PASB 
 
 AFTER THE REACTION 1 
 
 DE MORTUIS: 37 
 
 William Eenest Henley . . , . .39 
 
 J. HjjNBY Shobthouse ..... 45 
 
 HfiNBT SiDOWIOK . , , . . .51 
 
 Peedebio Mydes ..... 60 
 
 GEOBaB GlSBING . . . . . .68 
 
 SPEHOEE AND OaBLYLE : A COMPARISON . . 74 
 
 dlsbabll and gladstone : a oontbast . . .97 
 
 The Chubch Militant : Temple, Westcott, Oeeighton, 
 Dolling ...... 115 
 
 BEFORE THE DAWN: 145 
 
 June in England ..... 147 
 
 In Dejection nbae Tooting . . . .155 
 
 The Bubden of London .... 159 
 
 The New Revolution . . . . .167 
 
 The Blasphemy ov Optimism . . . .173 
 
 Chicago and Fbancis ..... 180 
 
 The Making of the Superman . . . 190 
 
 XV 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAQE 
 
 THE CHALLENGE OP TIME . . . .213 
 OF DEATH AND PITY . . . .233 
 THE RELIGION OP THE CITY . . .257 
 IN PBEIL OP CHANGE BOX 
 
 XVI 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
" Yea, if no morning must behold 
 Man, other than were they now cold. 
 And other deeds than past deeds done, 
 Nor any near or far-off sum 
 Salute him risen and sunlihe-souled, 
 Free, boundless, fearless, perfect, one. 
 
 Let man's world die liTce worlds of old, 
 And here in heaven's sight only be 
 The sole sun on the worldless sea." 
 
 SWINBUENB, 
 
AFTER THE BE ACTION 
 
 LITEEATUEE as detached as is the literature 
 of to-day from the middle and working classes, 
 the unconscious rulers of England, would appear to be 
 independent of the actual processes of political and social 
 change. A few vigorous story-tellers, a group of writers 
 of pleasant yerse, some young and clever journalists, 
 vrill initiate a literary " movement " ; which will take 
 itself seriously, parade a pomp and circumstance, and 
 continue until the respectabilities of advancing age, and 
 often, alas ! the revelations of a failing inspiration, have 
 once again demonstrated the triumph of time and change. 
 Yet this emphasis of aloofness is not the whole truth. 
 Literature, indeed, has no direct concern with the dust 
 of the party struggle, with bills of licensing or local 
 government. But the larger transitions of the period, 
 the spirit which underlies some definite upheaval, whose 
 appearance in the world of action astonishes the un- 
 thinking, is certain to find itself first articulate in the 
 universe of art. Estimate in that universe a vital move- 
 ment of revolt from some accepted tradition or ideal; 
 you will be estimating a force which in no long time is 
 destined to enter into the play of outward affairs and to 
 mould the courses of the world. 
 
 No better example could be advanced than the history 
 3 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 of the Eeaction in tlie later years of the nineteenth 
 century. Weary of the long effort of reform, a little 
 bored by the strenuousness of the appeal to disinterested 
 causes, conscious of the possession of unparalleled means 
 of enjoyment, and of great possessions, the nation was 
 evidently prepared for a new spirit, a new inspiration. 
 That spirit and inspiration came with the Reaction ; 
 whose literature some fifteen years ago revealed the 
 only confident and secure proclamation of any kind 
 of definite appeal. As the former enthusiasms subsided 
 and the former systems were found unsatisfying ; as, in 
 a word, the new England disentangled itself from the 
 old ; so the message proclaimed by a few men of genius, 
 and diffused through a thousand obscure channels in 
 Press and platform, became suddenly arresting : and 
 now stands crystallised as the product characteristic of 
 those extraordinary years. 
 
 The contrast was glaring between the literature of the 
 earlier Victorian era and the literature of the closing 
 days. The old had been cosmopolitan. The new was 
 Imperial. The old had proclaimed the glory of the 
 " one imperishable cause," allied through all lands ; 
 the struggle for liberty against the accumulated atheisms 
 of a dozen centuries. The new was frankly Tory ; with 
 the Tory scofiing at the futilities of freedom, described 
 now as a squalid uprising of the discontented against 
 their masters. The old had been " Liberal " ; in that 
 wide definition including such extremes as a Browning 
 and a Tennyson. The new branded Liberalism as but 
 a gigantic fraud by which the weak deluded the strong 
 into an abnegation of their natural domination. The 
 old had been humanitarian ; preaching, if with a some- 
 what thick voice, yet with a sanguine air, the coming of 
 the golden age. War would be abandoned as irrational 
 
 4 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 A free and uniTersal trade would bind the nations into one 
 brotherhood. The sweet reasonableness of the English 
 character would shine forth its radiance through all 
 the envious nations of the world. The new had no such 
 hopes or dreams. It revolted always against the domina- 
 tion of the bourgeois. It estimated commerce as a means 
 of conflict and a weapon of offence. It clamoured for the 
 ancient Barbarism ; and delighted in war ; and would 
 spread an English civilisation, not by the diffusion of 
 its ideas but by the destruction of its enemies. It was 
 a message of vigour and revolt congruous to a nation 
 wearied of the drabnesa of its uniform successes ; with 
 the dissatisfaction and vague restlessness which come 
 both to individuals and communities after long periods 
 of order and tranquillity. To the friends of progress the 
 dominance of such a spirit seemed of the elements of 
 tragedy. Literature, after its long alliance with the 
 party of reform, had deliberately deserted to the enemy. 
 In the minds of the few faithful the dismay was some- 
 what similar to that aroused in the defenders of the 
 inviolate city, when the Shekinah departed from the 
 courts of the temple and passed over to the camp of its 
 foes. 
 
 This new spirit of the Eeaction gathered itself 
 especially round two men, each possessing more than 
 a touch of genius — Mr. W. E. Henley and Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling. Mr. Henley's denunciation of the accepted 
 codes of life, the thirst for blood and violence of one 
 physically debarred from adventure, became reflected in 
 a hundred eager followers, who plied the axe and 
 hammer of sneer and gibe round the humanitarian 
 ideal and the house of the good citizen. Mr. Kipling's 
 proclamation of the Imperial race co-operating with God 
 in the bloody destruction of alien peoples was interpreted 
 
 5 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 into tlie commonplaces of a journalism demanding above 
 all things sensation. The toiler of the cities in his life 
 of grey monotony, labouring for another's wealth, found 
 existence suddenly slashed with crimson. And every 
 morning the astonished clerk was exalted by the intelli- 
 gence of his devastation of Afghanistan, or civilisation 
 of Zanzibar, or slaughter of ten thousand fantastic 
 Dervishes in a night and a day. 
 
 It was a literature of the security of a confident 
 triumph; with that quality which distinguishes the 
 work of a dawn from the work of a declining day. 
 Its appeal was to enduring elements of human emotion. 
 It proclaimed the supremacy of England, a mother, 
 worth dying and living for; her children seeking 
 danger as a bride, searching all the confines of the 
 world; encountering and joyfully mastering enemies 
 and natural forces, the winds and the seas and the 
 terrors of elemental things. There were visions of ships 
 steering through deep waters and harvests gathered 
 from all seas ; of the pioneers whose hones have marked 
 the track for the advancing army that this might follow 
 where these had trod ; of the flag of England descried 
 amid mist and cold or under the Southern sun as every- 
 where triumphant by the testimony of all the winds of 
 heaven. It was a literature of intoxication ; adequate 
 to a nation which, having conquered the world in a fit of 
 absence of mind, had suddenly become conscious of the 
 splendour of its achievement. Small wonder that to 
 the eyes of the men of the time there came with it 
 something of the force of a gospel ; as the boundaries of 
 their thought lifted to disclose larger horizons than they 
 had ever known. 
 
 It was a literature, on the other hand, of a rather 
 forced ferocity; of an academic enthusiasm for the 
 
 6 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 noise and trappings of war; the work of men who 
 despised death because there was present in their 
 minds, not death as a reality but only death as an 
 idea. It preached a boastful insularity ; with a whole- 
 hearted contempt for disloyal Ireland or the cretins of 
 the continent. The Briton was revealed to himself, a 
 majestic figure, lord of the earth, who, with the approba- 
 tion of God, but by the power of his own right arm, had 
 gotten himself the victory. It presented a figure of the 
 Imperial race, like Nietzsche's Overman, trampling over 
 the ineffective, crushing opposing nations, boasting an 
 iron supremacy, administering an iron justice. It 
 thought scorn of all the ideals of philanthropy of the 
 middle classes, with their timidities and reticence and 
 dull routine ; of the poor with the clumsiness of their 
 ineffectual squalor. " More chops, bloody ones with 
 gristle," — so a critic has summed up in Mr. Kipling's 
 own words, his demand from life. It neglected and 
 despised the ancient pieties of an older England, the 
 little isle set in its silver sea. Greatness became big- 
 ness ; specific national feeling parochial. Imperial 
 Destiny replaced national well-being ; and men were 
 no longer asked to pursue the "iust" course, but to 
 approve the "inevitable." 
 
 The thing lasted only so long as it could keep 
 divorced from real things and confined to its world 
 of illusion. While British wars consisted of battues of 
 blacks, with the minimum of loss and pain to ourselves, 
 the falsity of the atmosphere of Mr. Kipling's battle tales 
 was nndiscoverable. The blind and gibbering maniac at 
 the end of " The Light that Failed," who shrieks^ 
 "Give 'em Hell, men, oh, give 'em Hell," from the 
 security of an armoured train, while his companions 
 annihilate their enemies by pressing the button of 
 
 7 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 a macbine gun, seemed not only a possible but even 
 a reputable figure. The sport of such " good hunting " 
 — " the lordliest life on earth " — was not recounted by 
 the historian of the hunted, the tribes of the hills whose 
 land was laid desolate and wells choked up and palm- 
 trees cut down and villages destroyed, who were joyfully 
 butchered to make an Imperial holiday. Their verdict 
 upon such "hunting" might have been less exuberant. 
 As Newman said in his defence of Catholics in England, 
 "Lions would have fared better, had lions been the 
 artists." 
 
 With the outbreak of real war and some apprehension 
 of its meaning the spell snapped. Directly Mr. Kipling 
 commenced to write of the actual conflict in South 
 Africa, the note suddenly jarred and rang false. His 
 judgment was found to be concerned not with war but 
 with the idea of war ; the conception in the brain of a 
 journalist. The jauntiness and cocksureness, the surface 
 swagger, were suddenly confronted with realities; — 
 Death and Loss and Longing. " There was a good 
 killing at Paardeherg; the first satisfactory killing of 
 the whole war " ; — this attitude immediately disclosed 
 its essential vulgarity; a grimace from the teeth out- 
 wards ; war as viewed from Capel Court or Whitechapel, 
 or any other place where men are noisy and impotent. 
 Eeal war gave indeed a revelation of high sacrifice, the 
 coming of the " fire of Prometheus " into the common 
 ways of men; flaming up under the stress of a vast 
 upheaval in the conflict of life and of death. It was not 
 given to the Apostles of the New Imperialism to estimate 
 or even to understand those deeper tides of the human 
 soul. Their conception was of war carried on in the 
 spirit of the music-hall comedy ; the men at the close of 
 the struggle wiping their hands which have successfully 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 gouged out the eyes of their enemies, while they hum the 
 latest popular song. It was left for another poet of a 
 different spirit, Mr. Henry Newbolt, to voice the common- 
 place of an unchanging tragedy in the only memorable 
 verse called forth by this three years' struggle. 
 
 With the coming of a war which it had so furiously 
 demanded, the literature of the Reaction fell, first into 
 shrillness, then into silence. Read to-day, the whole 
 thing stands remote and fantastic, the child of a time 
 infinitely far away. Of its authors, some are dead ; and 
 some continue a strange shadowy life in an alien time. 
 Mr. Kipling compiles such mournful productions as 
 " Traffics and Discoveries." But the pipe fails to 
 awaken any responsive echoes. Even those who before 
 had approved now turn away their heads. He appears 
 like one dancing and grimacing in the midst of the 
 set grave faces of a silent company. And so of the 
 others. Mr. Street, one of the briskest of the disciples 
 who once were young, contributes long letters on Tariff 
 Reform to the columns of the Times. They suggest 
 nothing so much as the return from beyond the grave 
 of the tenuous phantoms of the Greek heroes. The 
 spectacle is not without its pathos. We have not 
 changed, these writers may complain. Here is the 
 same music which you once approved, which once 
 moved you clumsily to caper in the market place. 
 What has caused the charm suddenly to cease? 
 
 It has ceased — is the reply — because your world of 
 phantasy has been judged and condemned by real 
 things ; because with that judgment a new Spirit is 
 dawning in England. 
 
 This new Spirit should make its first appearance in 
 9 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 literature. And the question immediately arises: can 
 we estimate to-day anything confident and Yital which 
 can be interpreted as the work of the pioneers, the 
 Spring of a Summer to be? 
 
 We shall find, I think, on examination two classes of 
 such writings. The first is of those who growing up 
 under the spirit and dominance of the Reaction, have 
 yet refused to give it their allegiance ; a Literature of 
 protest coloured by a sense of isolation from the ideals 
 of its age. The second is of those developing when 
 that dominance is passing away, and who exhibit there- 
 fore all the security and triumph which comes from the 
 conviction of a winning cause. 
 
 Of the first, the most noteworthy name is of one who 
 has always stood apart and alone, whose verse is 
 everywhere conscious of a popular indifference and 
 estrangement. The work of Mr. William Watson will 
 be judged in the future with that of Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling as representing a conflict of ideas which go 
 down to the basis of man's being. The very methods 
 reflect the diversified ideals. The one is detached, 
 elusive, cold ; standing apart upon the height ; content 
 in a serenity and a fastidious taste in words. The 
 other is coloured, barbaric, human ; tumid and rhetori- 
 cal; moving and rejoicing in the every-day world; 
 vital, appealing and alive. The one "magnificently 
 imperturbed," preaches always a vehement, if austere, 
 virtue ; judging the present by the ancient traditions of 
 an older time, by a past consecration of eflFort and 
 sympathy in disinterested service. The other beats 
 with the emotion of a crowd ; from the mi 'st of which, 
 and as its voice, he directs men's gaze towards an 
 illimitable future. 
 
 And the changes of the time could be no better 
 10 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 illustrated than in the comparison of two appeals. 
 In "The Purple East," contrasted with "The Seven 
 Seas," the divergence is manifest between one who 
 is speaking the mind of a nation and one obviously 
 beyond its sympathies. Mr. Watson demanded with 
 the violence of despair that England should accept the 
 obligations of her deliberate responsibility, and embark 
 in the spirit of the crusaders upon the vindication of 
 an unchanging justice. And the note of a baffling 
 indifference and defeat is over all the volume. Mr. 
 Kipling sang of the glories and the greatness of an 
 Empire swollen into one-eighth of the habitable world 
 and splashed around the seven seas ; and every line of 
 his vigorous verse seems punctuated with the applause 
 of invisible multitudes. 
 
 Ten years after appear two other volumes, almost 
 contemporaneous. The time has changed. The 
 wheel has come full circle. In " For England " there 
 breathes through every page the consciousness of vindi- 
 cation, an appeal to a judgment which even now has 
 proclaimed an honourable acquittal. In " The Five 
 Nations" the rhetoric has passed into bombast; an 
 audience slipping away or turning their backs is every- 
 where apparent. The sneers at_indifference, theheaped- 
 up insults upon "fools" and "oafs," the jibes and 
 abuse hurled upon a nation which will not rise to the 
 new gospel, stamp upon the whole mournful volume the 
 consciousness of failure. In the one is the jealousy of 
 the discarded favourite ; — 
 
 "And ye vaunted your fathomless power and ye flaunted 
 your iron pride, 
 Ere ye fawned on the younger nations for the men who 
 could shoot and ride. 
 11 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented 
 
 your soul 
 With the flanneled fools at the wicket and the muddied 
 
 oafs at the goal." 
 
 In the other is the dignity of confidence secure in an 
 ultimate verdict which is independent of man's 
 applause : — 
 
 "Friend, call me what you will: no jot care I; 
 I that shall stand for England till I die. 
 
 * 51: * * 
 
 The England from whose side I have not swerved; 
 The immortal England whom I, too, have served, 
 Accoimting her all Hving lands above, 
 In Justice, and in Mercy, and iu Love." 
 
 With the passing of the hitter days we may hope 
 for an increased consciousness of sympathy with an 
 England immortal and secure, restored to sanity and 
 desirable life after the fever of its dreams. 
 
 Next to the work of this isolated figure you may turn 
 to the work of a school. One original inspiration has 
 survived through all the clamorous days, in that 
 particular literature of Ireland which has disdained the 
 noise of the Eeaction. That literature boosts many men 
 and women of rare and delicate talent : one, Mr. George 
 Russell, of a real if remote genius ; and one, Mr. W. B. 
 Yeats, with the power of a universal appeal. 
 
 Mr. Yeats stands for the genius of the Celt ; not 
 unmixed, indeed, with a mysticism culled from other 
 sources ; but more than any other individual writer now 
 representing the soul of a nation. He is the outstand- 
 ing figure in a literary movement which is one of the 
 few vital things in the world of to-day. The movement 
 
 12 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 is the child of a Nationalism which is the antithesis 
 of Imperialism, whose scene is set in one of the great 
 tragic failures of the world. From the heart of that 
 failure, from a race as it would seem visibly dying 
 in its own land, Mr. Yeats and his comrades pro- 
 claimed their judgment of the forces to which has been 
 given domination. This " progress," with its noise 
 and bustle, its material opulence, its destruction of 
 all old and beautiful and quiet things, stand ever- 
 lastingly condemned by one whose first search is for 
 the Rose of an undying beauty, whose concern is 
 only with the ardours and hungers of the soul. He 
 looks out upon the tumult and the shouting, the noise 
 and splendour of passing things. He learns that 
 Tenderness, Compassion, Humility, those white-winged 
 angels of healing, find no place in this hot and heavy 
 air. He stands aside, an apostle of defeat ; of defeat 
 yet triumphant in its fall ; deliberately proclaiming 
 allegiance to the vanquished cause. " They went out 
 to battle but they always fell " is written over all this 
 haunting and musical verse, this haunting and appealing 
 prose. And into the old legends, mingled of dreams and 
 shadows, from twilights and dim dawns, the mystery 
 and the sadness of moving waters and hidden places, 
 the vsdnd among the reeds, the rose-leaves falling in the 
 garden, he has woven, with something of the quality of 
 magic, all the sorrow of an elegy over a doomed and 
 passing race. 
 
 Beauty and the love of beauty, the old things, 
 visions in the sunset, dreams by the fire light, are 
 passing from the world. The note of that passing and 
 of the judgment of the destructive forces enters into a 
 kind of exultant rejection of a civilisation which carries 
 even in its victory the seeds of decay; which has 
 
 13 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 received its heart's desire and leanness, in tlie soul. 
 Here is the defiance of one who notes that all the noise 
 and triumph of his conquerors will one day also hecome 
 ashes and a little dust. 
 
 So the dominant note of the work of his attractive, 
 wayward genius is this sadness and appeal. All the 
 soul's longing turns from the call of the wind and 
 shadowy waters, from a world ravaged by change and 
 time, to the "Land of the ever young," and the "Land 
 of Heart's Desire." "It is time now to go into the 
 glens," he can say with Don-nacha'Ban, "for gloom is 
 falling on the mountains and mists shroud the hills," 
 " There is enough evil in the crying of wind " ; " For 
 the world's more full of weeping than you can under- 
 stand " : so runs the record of ruin and pain : — 
 
 " We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore, 
 The grey cairn on the hill when day sinks drowned in dew, 
 Being weary of the world's Empires bow down to you. — " 
 
 Weariness of the world's Empires ; the " vanity of 
 Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire " ; a defiant 
 estrangement from all the courses of the world, hecome 
 visibly flat, stale and unprofitable, are written over all this 
 literature of protest and sorrow. Beauty passes as a 
 dream ; and " we and the labouring world are passing 
 by " ; and the consolation chiefly rests in the knowledge 
 that one day all will have gone, good and evil, man's 
 laughter and his tears, the yearning which can never 
 be satisfied. " God's wars " will end, not in victory, 
 but in silence. 
 
 " And when at last defeated in His wars, 
 They have gone down under the same white stars, 
 We shall no longer hear the little cry 
 Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die." 
 14 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 In his later work, indeed, Mr. Yeats has proclaimed a 
 real Eastern Nihilism. He sings the triumph of Death 
 and nothingness. Du Bellay's " Le Grandeur du 
 Rien " is set up as the consummation of all things. 
 And the soul rejoices that eyen "Le Grand tout " into 
 which " all other things pass and lose themselves " is 
 " some time itself to perish and pass away." In that 
 remarkable play, "Where there is Nothing," which 
 perplexed the inhabitants of Kensington on its perform- 
 ance and provided food for the humours of the dramatic 
 critics, there is an almost passionate expression of this 
 hatred of " making things," this hunger for the primi- 
 tive abyss and void. Paul Ruttledge, the hero, is a 
 kind of wild Tolstoy preaching the return, not to nature, 
 hut to nothingness. He seeks satisfaction first in the 
 escape from the artificiality of society to life with the 
 tinkers on the open road ; later in the asceticism of the 
 monastery; and then again to the simplicities of the 
 ruined abbey and bare subsistence from day to day. 
 His followers who have been attracted by his preaching 
 totally misunderstand this new gospel of despair, and 
 are found planning to build up again all which he has 
 destroyed. In the passage, which forms the climax of 
 the play, the apostle of Nihilism proclaims his faith : — 
 
 " Oh ! yes, I understand, you would weave them 
 together like this (weaves the osiers in and out), you 
 would add one thing to another, laws and money and 
 Church and bells, till you had got everything back 
 again that you had escaped from. But it is my business 
 to tear things asunder like this (tears pieces from the 
 basket), and this, and this — " 
 
 " At last," he cries, in the crypt of the church, " we 
 must put out the light of the Sun and of the Moon, and 
 all the light of the World and the World itself. We 
 
 15 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 must destroy the World ; we must destroy everything 
 that has Law and Number, for where there is nothing, 
 there is Grod." 
 
 Yet at other times this assertion of the ultimate 
 triumph of cold and darkness gives place to a hope 
 that the weak things of the world may even at the 
 end overcome the strong; and Beauty and Eomance 
 and the old Desires of the heart and the Vision 
 of far spiritual horizons return again into the ways 
 of men. " The movement of thought," Mr. Yeats 
 proclaims, "which has made the good citizen, or has 
 been made by him, has surrounded us with comfort and 
 safety and with vulgarity and insincerity. One finds 
 alike its energy and its weariness in churches which have 
 substituted a system of morals for spiritual ardour, in 
 pictures which have substituted conventionally pretty 
 faces for the disquieting revelations of sincerity, in 
 poets who have set the praises of those things good 
 citizens think praiseworthy above a dangerous delight 
 in beauty for the sake of beauty." 
 
 But while the old is crumbling the new is building. 
 Sometimes the hope is triumphant that " the golden 
 age is to come again and men's hearts and the weather 
 to grow gentle, as time fades into eternity " ; and at 
 times a confidence awakens in the coming of "a 
 change, which, begun in our time or not for centuries, 
 will one day make all lands holy lands again." 
 
 Mr. Yeats, in part as the expression of a national 
 movement, more, perhaps, through the compelling force 
 of his talent, has attained even under the uncongenial 
 skies of the Eeaction some recognition of his sincerity 
 and power. An English author, Mr. H. W. Nevinson, 
 no less individual and arresting, and far less remote 
 
 16 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 from ideala definitely English, has waited longer for 
 acceptance. Like Mr. Yeats, he belongs to a period of 
 protest — ^protest against a dominant spirit whose de- 
 parture seemed far distant. This protest has taken 
 varied forms. He has translated into literature the 
 appeal of the poor against the cruel indifference and, 
 perhaps, more cruel "charity" of the rich. He has 
 voiced the protest of the little nations with their 
 particular civilisations against an Imperialism which 
 rolls as a Juggernaut car, guided by sightless eyes, 
 not deliberately but clumsily, over all their variegated 
 lives. He has set up for judgment by the ancient, way- 
 ward things of man's existence, its high ardours, its 
 delight in the charged spirit of emotion, love and 
 battle and the open road, a civilisation spreading its 
 by-laws and decencies over all the broken lands, 
 and estimating its progress by its expenditure upon 
 sanitation and the dimensions of its public lavatories. 
 Against such " progress " he has appealed always for 
 those elements of transfiguring flame by which alone 
 man apprehends something of life and its purposes. 
 Behind " the set grey life and apathetic end," he has 
 discerned the flare of the fires of Prometheus. Beneath 
 the noise of the cities he can hear the pipe of Pan 
 among the reeds. In the midst of experience, set in 
 custom and routine, he can exalt the moments, rare and 
 imperishable, in which the " pent-up spirit " breaks 
 through into Eternity. 
 
 Mr. Nevinson is a child of Shrewsbury and Oxford, of 
 both of which he has written with that love for particular 
 places which is the essence of the spirit of patriotism. 
 He has lived in a block-dwelling; and from that life 
 came the writing of " Neighbours of Ours," the best 
 volume of tales which ever took as their theatre of 
 
 17 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 action the desolate and fascinating region of the "East 
 End." The contrast between the Eeaction and the 
 newer spirit is conspicuous in the comparison of Mr. 
 Nevinson's stories of the life of the poor with the 
 fruitful crop of pictures of slum life — the mean street, 
 the Jago, " Badalia Herodsfoot " or " 'Liza of Lambeth " 
 — which developed under the inspiration of that insistent 
 tyranny. The cleverness, the essential ignorance of 
 the journalist who prowls through the streets of poverty 
 as he would prowl through the interior of China seeking 
 copy; — with the same eye for picturesque effect and 
 the same contempt for its peoples, splashing on the 
 canvas his hard yellows and purples — is revealed in 
 its insolence by the work of one who has lived in sym- 
 pathy and comradeship with those who have failed. 
 Mr. Nevinson's stories — notably the " St. George of 
 Koohester " and " Father Christmas " — ^may be com- 
 mended to all who would understand the meaning of 
 tenderness and a man's compassion for the men and 
 women and children who are trampled under in the 
 modern struggle, the crowd whose acquiescence is more 
 tragical than its despau*. 
 
 From the homes of poverty Mr. Nevinson passed into 
 the larger world ; to see cities and men ; and everywhere 
 the strong triumphant and the weak suffering. He was 
 present at the pitiful comedy of the thirty days' war in 
 Greece ; present also at the more pitiful tragedy of the 
 destruction of two free nations in South Africa amid 
 the heroism of the one side and the other. From these 
 and the lessons learnt in them, from the " things seen " 
 in the great moments of life and the quiet interludes 
 " Between the Acts," he has collected those volumes 
 of impression and appeal which have revealed his power 
 in literature. 
 
 18 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 Two elements mingle in all his work. The one is 
 pagan, the plea of Pan, the protest of the " Savage 
 Soul." It is life passion protesting against the cramp- 
 ing boundaries of convention and dead things. The 
 other is Pity, learnt by the older gods in the watching 
 of the human tragedy through so many hurrying cen- 
 turies ; pity for all who find themselves with the few 
 against the many, crushed by the clumsiness and violence 
 of the world. The one thing which appears to him 
 intolerable is the rotting at ease. The one tragedy is 
 the burning out of high emotion into a little heap of 
 ashes. " To grow fat and foul in clubs and country- 
 houses," is the nightmare of one of his characters, " till 
 I slime away in the funeral of an elderly country gentle- 
 man who had been in the ai;my once." Against this 
 vision of the faint-hearted he exalts the company of the 
 warrior saints. "Life piled on life were all too little 
 for the unquenchable passion of my eyes." The praises 
 of a mechanical civilisation leave him cold. " To set 
 two bulging, flat-footed gentlemen," is his verdict, "to 
 stand on a flagstone instead of one, seems an unworthy 
 aim for Evolution after all its labours." 
 
 Pan is not dead. He but waits, a little contemptuous 
 of it all till the tyranny be overpast. Even in the 
 heart of tranquillity and rational order he can still be 
 found disguised : a wanderer : abiding his time and sure 
 of his ultimate triumph. 
 
 He appears in Greece, his old home, with all the 
 pageant of an unchallenged beauty, hill and heather, 
 and violet sea. He is found again by the ancient wall 
 across Britain marking the boundaries of another 
 Empire which once thought itself immortal. His 
 laughter startles the Cathedral close as he mocks the 
 anger of the Canon against his seiTant, Elizabeth, for 
 
 19 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 her transgression with her soldier-lover. He is present 
 with the new knowledge of pity upon the war-scarred 
 slopes of Waggon Hill above Ladysmith in the clear 
 night after the storm of men and elements, watching 
 over the bodies of the dead. 
 
 The contrast between this vision on the hillside, the 
 mingled sorrow and rejoicing over the body of a dead 
 peasant, with any of Mr. Kipling's latest tales, " The 
 Captive," or, " Private Capper," will reveal the meaning 
 of a change. All the music-hall song and cleverness 
 have vanished from the horizon of this poor sightless 
 body. Not in this lies its greatness : but in that 
 Divine Fire which entered into the heart of him as he 
 moved through the slow routine of his toil, and drove 
 him out here from his dear home into the battle in 
 passionate response to the call of the Fatherland : and 
 has left him here at evening, with all the story told ; 
 the dust gathering on his lips, silent in the summer 
 rain. 
 
 The author will re-echo the protest of Pan against 
 the plaint of the priest at man's seeming vnckedness. 
 Surveying the long course of history, he vrill testify 
 with something approaching awe to an endurance and 
 indomitable will which raises him above the level of the 
 older gods. There is a passage in this testimony not 
 unworthy to be placed with Lamennais's " Hymn of the 
 Dead," or Stevenson's awful vision in " Pulvis et 
 Umbra " :— 
 
 " They appear and are gone. Like shipwrecked boys 
 they are cast upon the shoals of time, and drop off into 
 darkness. No research of history, no deciphering of 
 village tombs can ever recover them. We think that 
 somewhere they may still lie nestled up, with all their 
 age about them ; but even darkness holds them no more, 
 
 20 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 They stood on this flying earth, we see their footsteps, 
 we hear the thin ghost of their voices, and on the stones 
 lies the touch of their dead hands, but they are nowhere 
 to be found at all. They knew how short their dear life 
 was, yet they filled it with labour and unrecorded toil. 
 Morning and night, through their little space of minutes, 
 they struggled and agonised to keep on living and feed 
 their children for the struggle and agony of a few 
 minutes more. The sun blasted them, ice devoured 
 their flesh, their mouths were mad with thirst, hunger 
 twisted them with cramps, plague consumed them, they 
 rotted as they stood, bolts of torture drove through 
 their brains, their bodies were clamped into hoops ; in 
 battle, in child-bed they died with extremity of pain. 
 Yet they endured, and into the chinks and loopholes 
 of their misery they crammed laughter and beauty and 
 a passion transfiguring them beyond the semblance of 
 the gods." 
 
 'Tis a sombre picture; yet not without its triamph. 
 " Let us leave it to the priests to marvel at men's 
 wickedness," he cries at the end. " Over any such 
 thing as love or laughter in the heart of man I could 
 stand astonished with admiration throughout the life- 
 time of a god." 
 
 The work of these writers is written, in Mr. Watson's 
 phrase, "in estrangement." Over all is the conscious- 
 ness of battle upon a losing side. They have kept the 
 faith in a dark hour when all the world seemed against 
 them. The tumult swept past them. They stood alone, 
 alien in spirit from the company : from the noisy rout, 
 which seemed the procession of an unending day. With 
 the visible passing of all this clamour has come the 
 growth of a newer spirit, with an ardour and buoyancy 
 
 21 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 lacking in those who suffered from its domination. 
 Such is the spirit of those younger writers who first 
 have apprehended that the Eeaction, instead of being 
 living and dominant, was become at heart dead and 
 sterile. Of such, two of the most vigorous to-day are 
 Mr. Hilaire Belloc and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. 
 
 Mr. Belloc has produced work which is excellent 
 in itself and more excellent in its promise of better 
 things to come. He exhibits especially two qualities 
 always rare in English writing — the quality of rhetoric 
 and the quality of irony. His earlier works, studies 
 of the Kevolution, Danton and Robespienre, are full of 
 the triumph of human personality over the influences 
 of outward things. His work, like the architecture of 
 that Middle Age which he loves so ardently, reveals 
 the union of this spirit of romance with the spirit 
 of laughter. The high roofs and spires are mingled 
 with the gargoyles and grotesques, and all the humour 
 and aspiration which gave its life to the greatest 
 century which the world has ever seen. He will pass 
 from the record of romance to the roaring satire of 
 "Dr. Caliban," or collaboration with Mr. Chesterton 
 in the ridiculing of the Tariff Eeform Commission. 
 High spirits and a kind of elemental energy are charac- 
 teristic of all his work. No present-day writing conveys 
 so much the impression of a huge enjoyment in its prepa- 
 ration. Much of Mr. Belloc's humour is indeed recondite, 
 written to please himself and for the few who will under- 
 stand ; the decent citizen but becomes conscious that 
 some one is laughing at him as indignant he hurries by. 
 
 In " The Path to Eome," the most popular of all his 
 books, this vitality is everywhere present. Youth, its 
 sincerity, its self-sufSciency, its vigour and hope and 
 gnormous dreams, is present in all this record of pij. 
 
 22 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 grimage. As the traveller swings out from Toul in the 
 sunset by the Nancy gate and strikes in a bee-line 
 across the backbone of Europe to the goal of his 
 wandering, he pours out all his experience of outer and 
 inner things. He makes up songs, and sings them as 
 he journeys, in dispraise of heretics or praise of God. 
 He finds companionship in the common people, the 
 people pf the road, the people of the villages, away 
 from the dust of the cities. He apprehends " the solid 
 form of Europe under him like a rock" ; unchanged 
 and permanent, beside which all the noise of progress 
 appears but vaporous and transitory. 
 
 In the story of "Emmanuel Burden," Mr. Belloc's 
 ironical method has attained its clearest expression. 
 The elaborate satire penetrates every page; from the 
 pompous parody of the title, through the nonsense of 
 the preface, to the Burden genealogies designed in the 
 futile exactitude of the three-volume biography. To 
 nine out of ten, reading, as they think, a dull and 
 straightforward narrative, all this will appear very 
 tedious. But in the underlying spirit there is a 
 marked and momentous change from the spirit of the 
 social satire of fifteen years ago. The literature of 
 the Reaction found the subject of all its humours in the 
 middle-class tradesman. It was never tired of mocking 
 at his outlook, his contempt for art and literature and 
 all ideas, his confinement within the grooves of sectarian- 
 ism and the making of money. To these clever young 
 men Mr. Grundy, the husband of the dictator of the 
 suburbs, was the subject of an unfailing ridicule. They 
 pelted him with epigram. They caricatured his decen- 
 cies and devotions. They rolled the poor old gentleman 
 in the gutter and departed laughing hugely at their own 
 BjnartnesB and bis bleats of indignation, 
 
 23 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 With Mr. Belloc the process is reversed. Satire has 
 come over to the other side. Over against the new 
 wits, the cleverness engaged in the intervals of self- 
 indulgence in running (or ruiniag) an Empire ; with its 
 surface sparkle and its inner emptiness and frivolity, 
 Mr. Grundy with his tenacity, his simplicity, his austere 
 devotion to duty, appears as an entirely reputable figure. 
 Mr. Burden is Mr. Grundy, the "honest man and good 
 citizen," ironmonger of Thames Street. In his side 
 whiskers and frock-coat, as depicted by Mr. Chesterton, 
 with his impossible mid- Victorian residence at Avon- 
 more, Alexandrovna Eoad, Upper Norwood, with his 
 forty years' daily devotion to his trade, " his home, 
 manner and habit of life seemed to me who knew him 
 to be always England, England." "To see him open 
 his umbrella was to comprehend England from the 
 Reform Bill to Home Rule." 
 
 Against this old and passing England, the England 
 which had built up the great heritage of Empire, Mr. 
 Belloc exhibits the dismal crowd who have entered into 
 that goodwill and seems determined upon its destruc- 
 tion. Here are the children of the old, mocking at the 
 limitations of their fathers ; cosmopolitan financiers of 
 Semitic origin, exploiting, ostensibly, remote marshes, 
 in reality the British public, under the sonorous clap- 
 trap of " Empire Expansion " ; broken down relics of 
 the feudal system compelled to re-establish their shat- 
 tered fortunes ; the new yellow journalism ; and the 
 rank and file of greedy persons of all classes who 
 rushed into the flotation, as clergymen and society ladies 
 and respectable country gentlemen rushed into the 
 gigantic gambling in South Africans which preceded 
 the Jameson Raid. These are the figures which fill 
 the foreground of the flotation of the M'Korio Delta 
 
 24 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 Development Co. Experience of the bitter food of those 
 astonishing nineties in England, the Hooley scandals, 
 the Liberator, the Chartered Company, Whitaker Wright, 
 are woven into a satire in which the restraint of 
 the irony scarcely veils the passionate protest against 
 all this new corruption of a nation marching down 
 calamitous ways. 
 
 In such a morass of foulness Mr. Burden is engulfed. 
 He finds himself immediately in the toils, surrounded 
 by vague forces of evil. There is nothing definite. 
 The outline moves. As soon as he strikes out, the 
 walls, which seemed to be closing around him, part 
 aside and elude his blows. The business is of a kind 
 to which he is unaccustomed. The suavity and plausi- 
 bility of his confederates are equal to aU his approaches. 
 There is a spirit in the air, in the public Press, around 
 the office of the company, a miasma which poisons the 
 blood and turns the balance of the brain. Although 
 the shares still stand high and there is outward pros- 
 perity, the conviction deepens that he is in the grasp of 
 unclean forces. He is troubled in the daytime with a 
 haunting sense of shame, at night by monstrous dreams. 
 The attempt of his colleagues to " freeze out " his 
 friend, Mr. Abbott (another absurd, early-Victorian 
 figure), who had refused to " come in," produces a 
 climax. The poor, bewildered mind breaks under the 
 strain. Mr. Burden, feeling actually in the presence 
 of a crowd, " the massed forces of this new world 
 surging against him," in one great scene of fury de- 
 nounces all his fellow-directors as rogues and thieves 
 and scum, and reels home to Upper Norwood to die. 
 The death scene is not inadequate to life's perpetual 
 irony. On the one hand is the outward, pitiful and 
 grotesque incident : a stout old man, muttering gibberish, 
 
 25 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 being put to bed by the knife-boy and the cook. On the 
 other is the inward grandeur, Death and his armies and 
 majesty visibly present in this suburban villa, and 
 present also the three great Angels, " the Design and 
 the Justice and the Mercy of God." 
 
 The M'Korio flourishes, Mr. I. Z. Bamett, who is 
 chief promoter, becomes Lord Lambeth. The shares 
 rise. But away in a remote suburb they have buried 
 Emmanuel Burden, Merchant, of Thames Street and 
 Upper Norwood (for whom, one is relieved to hear, Mr. 
 Belloc " has no fears at the Judgment seat ") ; and 
 with him they have buried the older England. 
 
 This remarkable work in some sense gathers up all 
 the threads of remonstrance into one deliberate im- 
 peachment of the spirit of the Eeaetion ; the fine fruits 
 of that " Imperialism " which ran like a species of 
 fluid madness through the veins of England during the 
 late disastrous years. Memorable in itself, it is more 
 memorable as a kind of pioneer of the revolt which 
 is essaying a return to sanity, and the broken tradition 
 of reform. 
 
 The rise of Mr. Chesterton in the public estimate has 
 exhibited the most sudden growth of all recent repu- 
 tations. While still on the right side of thirty, he 
 leapt into a position of which older men might well 
 be envious. His early work, "Greybeards at Play," 
 a volume of fantastic verse, " The Wild Knight," 
 serious poetry of remarkable originality and power, 
 "The Defendant," a collection of paradoxical essays, 
 revealed only to the few the presence of a new 
 writer and a new method. His life of "Browning," 
 however, both in its merit and its definite challenge, 
 evoked a universal testimony that here was something 
 
 26 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 which, whether you liked it or not, was henceforth to be 
 reckoned with in literature. Since then have followed 
 "Twelve Types," and "Watts," and a novel, once 
 again of daring originality, " The Napoleon of Netting 
 Hill " — a parable of the perpetual survival of the spirit 
 of patriotism, however mystical and irrational, against 
 all the forces of ridicule and common sense. The 
 output continues of an astonishing fertility in daily and 
 weekly and monthly magazines. It is these outpour- 
 ings of himself, stripped of all reticence, which have 
 earned for Mr. Chesterton the bulk of his fame. He 
 loves the very breath of controversy. Open any news- 
 paper interested in the things for which he cares : you 
 will have a good chance of finding Mr. Chesterton in the 
 midst of a lively argument against a host of opponents, 
 with a calm confidence in his rightness, an unfailing 
 good temper, a boisterous delight in the shrewd blows 
 given and taken. You will find him simultaneously 
 protesting against Dr. Clifford conducting a campaign 
 against Romanism under the guise of an attack upon 
 the Education Acts ; explaining to Mr. Blatchford and 
 Mr. McCabe the impossibility of Agnosticism, and his 
 envy of their simple belief; or expounding to an 
 audience inarticulate with wrath the necessity of 
 desiring Eussia's success in the war against Japan. 
 
 Beneath all there is no mere love of paradox or 
 intellectual agility, but a very definite philosophy of 
 life. As the attitude of Mr. Yeats was one of protest, 
 so that of Mr. Chesterton is one of acceptance. The 
 denial of life, the longing of a fatigued age for nothing- 
 ness and the great Void, is to him a fundamental atheism 
 and blasphemy. Not "where there is nothing," but 
 " where there is anything," there " is God." He is a 
 mystic and an optimist, entirely satisfied, as he swaggers 
 
 27 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 down Fleet Street, that all things are very good. With 
 Whitman he can protest, " No array of terms can 
 express how much at peace I am about God." To 
 many this boisterous content appears as an offence 
 and irreverence. To such he appears of those who are 
 too readily at ease in Zion. To others this revolt from 
 the denials of life has come with something of the nature 
 of an inspiration. 
 
 He is all for acceptance of the things that are, and 
 the revelation through these of the things that endure. 
 In all experience the present becomes a transfigured 
 past ; to the few only, as to this writer, that transfigura- 
 tion has been immediately accomplished. He has no 
 controversy with the results of modern progress, the 
 city, in slum or suburb. As wild and flaming meanings 
 call to him from beneath that dull surface as any appeal 
 in ancient forest or the voices of the mountains and the 
 sea. The great city he finds as something "wild and 
 obvious." The "casual omnibus" wears "the primal 
 colours of a fairy ship." The lights in the dark " begin 
 to glow like innumerable goblin eyes." Bermondsey is 
 decked with fairy bubbles for gas-lamps and haunted 
 with Presences of good and evil. The door-knockers of 
 Clapham, as he gazes at them, writhe into strange shapes, 
 the fat, red, polished pillar-boxes shout their mystical 
 meaning to the skies. Hardly a hair's breadth below 
 the cellars of Kensington flare the ancient elemental 
 fires. He is intoxicated by the " towering and tropical 
 visions of things as they are," the " gigantic daisies, the 
 heaven -consuming dandelions, the gi-eat Odyssey of 
 strange-coloured oceans and strange-shaped trees, of 
 dust like the wreck of temples, and thistledown like the 
 ruin of stars." Day by day the seeing eye beholds God 
 renewing his ancient rapture. The wild Knight in his 
 
 28 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 quest, hearing "the crumhling creeds, like cliffs washed 
 down by water, change and pass," finds " all these things 
 as nothing"; confident that the turn of the road will 
 reveal the goal of all his wandering. 
 
 " So with the wan waste grasses on my spear, 
 I ride for ever seeking aiter God. 
 My hair grows whiter than my thistle plume. 
 And all my limbs are loose; but in my eyes 
 The star of an unconquerable praise ; 
 For in my soul one hope for ever sings. 
 That at the next white corner of a road 
 My eyes may look on Him." 
 
 To one inspired by such visions all the spirit of the 
 Reaction is summed up in the tremendous picture of 
 Watts's "Mammon." The vision is not Mammon or 
 Commerce, but " something intangible behind," a ruling 
 element in modem life. Here is " the blind and asinine 
 appetite for mere power " ; symbolised in " the all- 
 destroying God and king adorned with the ears of an 
 ass, declaring that he was royal, imperial, irresistible, 
 and, when all is said, imbecile." 
 
 " This is something which in spirit and in essence I 
 have seen before," he proclaims, " something which in 
 spirit and in essence I have seen everywhere. That 
 bloated, unconscious face, so heavy, so violent, so wicked, 
 so innocent, have I not seen it at street comers, in 
 billiard rooms, in saloon bars, laying down the law 
 about Chartered shares, or gaping at jokes about 
 women ? Those huge and smashing limbs, so weighty, 
 so silly, so powerless, and yet so powerful, have I not 
 seen them in the pompous movements, the morbid 
 health of the prosperous in the great cities? The 
 hard, straight pillars of that throne, have I not seea 
 
 29 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 them in the hard, straight, hideous tiers of modern 
 warehouses and factories? That tawny and sulky 
 smoke, have I not seen it going up to heaven from all 
 the cities of the coming world ? This is no trifling with 
 argosies and Greek drapery. This is commerce. This 
 is the home of the god himself. This is why men hate 
 him, and why men fear him, and why men endure him." 
 Let all who are satisfied with the courses of modern 
 England during the past decade consider if there be not 
 at the last some warning of judgment in this verdict 
 upon an evil thing. 
 
 What is there common, it may be asked, to these 
 different writers, what spirit which may form the key 
 to the movement of the immediate years to come? 
 There is much evidently divergent ; a continuous transi- 
 tion indeed from the complete denials of Mr. Yeats to 
 the complete assertions of Mr. Chesterton. But in all 
 may he traced one element ; the assertion of a passionate 
 Nationalism against both the cosmopolitan ideals of the 
 Victorian period at its beginning and the Imperial ideals 
 at its close. In the vision of the earlier age all national 
 differences were to smooth themselves out by the advance 
 of knowledge and reasonableness. Common sense, com- 
 merce, a universal peace were to create a homogeneous 
 civilisation, secure in comfort and tranquillity and a 
 vague, undogmatic religion. In the preaching of this 
 ideal, undoubtedly some of its advocates came perilously 
 near the abnegation of any special national affection, 
 any particular pride in, or devotion to, their land ; and 
 gave a handle to the dreary chatter of a Press which 
 branded them as the friends of every country but their 
 own. Against this came the reaction. Imperialism 
 asserted, indeed, the devotion of the individual to his 
 
 30 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 own land; but crudely denied the right to others of a 
 similar affection. It was convinced in pathetically 
 sanguine fashion of the Divine mission of England to 
 elevate each separate and subject race to the level of 
 Mayfair or Brixton. So the Irish, the Dutch of South 
 Africa, the natives of India, or of Nyassa (" half devil 
 and half child ") for their own good were to be educated 
 out of their own ways into English ways. They would 
 be placed under the cold justice of the Imperial 
 rule. They would be taught to forget their own lan- 
 guage and deny their own religions and ancient pieties. 
 They would learn to ascend the steep path of labour and 
 virtue which would eventually turn them into some replica 
 of that finished product of the universe, the Imperial 
 Briton. 
 
 Such was the ideal at its best. At its worst it became 
 a crude assertion of dominance, with a contempt as much 
 for the old England which had not apprehended these 
 Imperial ideals as for the foreigner who still obstinately 
 resisted their sway. 
 
 Against both these movements is now being set a 
 Nationalism which, on the one hand, passionately 
 asserts a mystical and entire devotion to its own land ; 
 on the other, a respect for the devotion of others. It 
 brands the murder of a nation as a sin alike against 
 man and God. One catches a note even of laughter 
 in the defiant scorn with which the newer spirit 
 confronts those who identify their own calamitous 
 methods with the welfare of their country, and would 
 brand all others as traitors. It is in the name of 
 England, as Englishmen concerned primarily with the 
 honour of their own land, as those to whom the very 
 fields and flowers, and the breath of the particular soil 
 speaks with an unchanging appeal, that these writers 
 
 31 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 fling back the charges of disloyalty, made by those who 
 have never been able to understand the meaning of the 
 mystery of Patriotism. 
 
 This is common to all. Mr. Yeats is at the heart of 
 that National revival in life and literature which, in the 
 past few years, has made Ireland, on the remote boun- 
 daries of Europe, the centre of one of the few living and 
 compelling movements of the age. All his devotion 
 gathers towards the preservation of this individual 
 spirit, the spirit " at the heart of the Celt in the 
 moments he has grown to love through years of per- 
 secution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams 
 and hearing fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on 
 the soul and on the dead." 
 
 Mr. Watson laughs openly at " that odious charge 
 of inconstancy to my beloved and worshipped mother- 
 land." " To one conscious of these noble origins, 
 conscious, too, of having loved his country with the 
 vigilant love that cannot brook a shadow upon her 
 honour, the charge of being against her because he 
 deplores her temporary attitude and action, brings a 
 kind of amazement that has in it something akin to 
 despair." 
 
 Mr. NevinsOn has devoted his days to appeals for 
 the struggle of martyred nations to maintain their own 
 life, — in Ireland, in Macedonia, in South Africa. But 
 all his affection centres upon the very soil of his own 
 homeland. 
 
 " The seas gulf and fall around her promontories," is 
 his testimony, " or lie brooding there in green and purple 
 lines. Her mountains are low, like blue waves they run 
 along the horizon, and the wind flows over them. It is 
 a country of deep pasture and quiet downs and earthy 
 fields, whore the furrows run straight from hedge to 
 
 32 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 hedge. There is moorland too, and lakes with wild 
 names, and every village is full of ancient story. The 
 houses are clustered round old castle walls, and across 
 the breezy distance of fen and common the gi-ey cathe- 
 drals rise like ships in full sail." 
 
 Mr. Belloc is perhaps the most entirely Nationalist. 
 He is all for the smaller community against the larger. 
 He sings the praise of the South country whose " great 
 hills stand along the sea," and of the men of the South 
 country against the remoter regions of England. When 
 he drinks the home-brewed ale he drinks (in his own 
 absurd and happy phrase) " Nelson and all the Vic- 
 tories." He will even protest in great language 
 patriotism for a Europe encompassed with alien forces, 
 a world outside which can never understand devotions 
 beaten into her soil by the passion of a thousand 
 years ; — 
 
 " She will certainly remain. 
 
 " Her component peoples have merged and have re- 
 merged. Her particular, famous cities have fallen down. 
 Her soldiers have believed the world to have lost all, 
 because a battle turned against them. Her best has at 
 times grown poor and her worst rich. Her colonies have 
 seemed dangerous for a moment from the insolence of 
 their power, and then again (for a moment) from the 
 contamination of their decline. She has suffered in- 
 vasion of every sort; the East has wounded her in 
 arms and corrupted her with ideas ; her vigorous blood 
 has healed the wounds at once, and her permanent 
 sanity has turned such corruptions into innocuous 
 follies. She will certainly remain." 
 
 And Mr. Chesterton has made himself the very 
 apostle of a new Nationalism which proclaims this 
 variegated development as an essential for the preser- 
 
 33 V 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 vation of the sanity of the world. " There is a spirit 
 ahroad among the nations of the earth," he cries, 
 " which drives men incessantly on to destroy what they 
 cannot understand, and to capture what they cannot 
 enjoy." This is the spirit which all these men find in 
 the faction which has heen dominant in politics and 
 literature. Its final and desperate rally is now gather- 
 ing in the forces enlisting with Mr. Chamherlain, under 
 the appeal both to cupidity and Imperial dominance, in 
 a last effort to maintain a departing supremacy. And 
 this is the spirit against which the new movement has 
 declared uncompromising war. 
 
 If literature be any guide, therefore, one can prophesy 
 certain notes of the spirit of the coming time. 
 
 First, this spirit will be National; with no appearance 
 of balanced affection and an equal approval and sympathy 
 for all men, a universal benevolence. It will proclaim 
 always a particular concern in the well-being of England 
 and the English people ; a pride in its ancient history, 
 its ancient traditions, the very language of its grey skies 
 and rocky shore; 
 
 Second, it will, I think, dissever itself entirely from 
 those former rallies of a national spirit which have 
 immediately identified a nation with a small and limited 
 class, throwing up boundaries round its privileges 
 against a hungry and raging crowd. There will be 
 none of the follies of the " young England," or attempts 
 to revive a feudalism which had vigour in its day, but 
 now has ceased to be. The assertion will be of a 
 spiritual democracy, with a claim for every Englishman 
 and woman and child to some share in the great in- 
 heritance which England has won. 
 
 And third, therefore, you will note a bedrock demand 
 34 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 in the thrusting forward of those problems of social 
 discontent and social reform, which are destined 
 ultimately to brash aside the futilities of the present 
 party strife. Agaiust those who protest their devotion 
 to their country, but who have done nothing to make 
 that country more desirable for the masses of its 
 millions, and more secure in the devotion of free and 
 satisfied peoples, wiU be set up a determination at all 
 costs and through all changes to create an England 
 more worthy of the land of our desire. The repatriation 
 of a rural population with free men strong in the tenacity 
 which only security and contact with the land can give, 
 the grappling with the problems of om* restless cities, 
 the more even spread of the national wealth, the wider 
 distribution of the good things which have flowed so 
 plentifully into our store, the assertion of a minimum 
 standard of life for each citizen of such a land — these 
 are the things which will become more and more 
 insistent through the spirit that is arising after the 
 Reaction. 
 
 No gleam of such radiant visions penetrates through 
 the dusty atmosphere of contemporary politics. The 
 observer, limited to so dreary an outlook, might well 
 claim exoneration for despair of his country. Govern- 
 ment and Parliament are to-day seen mouthing and 
 mumbling over dead things with a kind of pompous 
 futility which would be ridiculous if it were not so 
 entirely tragical. 
 
 Such verses as those of Shelley in 1819 seem alone 
 adequate to the present ; with their vision of a 
 "Senate" with "Time's worst statute unrepealed"; 
 religion as " a closed book " ; " rulers who neither see 
 nor feel nor know." 
 
 But now, as then, there can be hope of the presence 
 35 
 
AFTER THE REACTION 
 
 also within these graves of that "glorious Phantom' 
 which may " burst to illumine our tempestuous day." 
 And those who have been watching all the long night 
 for the signs of its passing can even now see the dark- 
 ness lightened with the coming of the dawn. 
 
 36 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
" lis ont aussi pasie sur cette f/erre, its ont descendu lefleuve 
 du temps : on entendit leurs voix sur ses hords, et puis on 
 n'entendit phis rien. . , , 
 
 " II y en avadt qui discdent : Qu'est-ce que ces flats qui nous 
 emportent ? Y a-t-il quelque chose apres ce voyage rapide ? 
 Nous ne le savons pas, nul ne le sait. Et comme ils disaient 
 cela, les rives s'evanouissaient. . . . 
 
 "11 y en avait aussi qui semblaient dans un recueillement 
 profond icouter une parore secrete, et puis I'ceil fixe sur le 
 couchant, tout a coup ils cjiantaient une aurore invisible et 
 tm. jour qui ne finit ja/mcuis. , . . 
 
 "Ousont-ils? Qui nou^ le dira? Heureux les morts qui 
 meurent dans le Seigneur." 
 
 — Lambnnais. 
 
WILLIAM EBNEST HENLEY 
 
 You can count on the fingers of one hand the original 
 and formative minds in English letters; and there 
 is one fewer to-day than yesterday. The advent of 
 W. E. Henley marked the coming of a new spirit. His 
 career coincided with its riotous supremacy. It was 
 dead before he died. Its followers gathered round him 
 as disciples round a master. It found expression in the 
 short-lived journals which he edited so brilliantly. It 
 stamped its seal upon a whole generation of young 
 authors who became infected with its scorns and 
 its devotions, and spread its faith through the English- 
 speaking world. For the first time since the days of 
 " Young England," literature was whole-heartedly on 
 the side of the reaction. Barbarism and the joy of 
 existence was one side of it, with a craving for the 
 sharp and bitter rind of life. Imperialism and love of 
 adventure was another — the assertion of the right of the 
 strong man to rule, to trample on the weak, to crush 
 under and destroy for his pleasure. These were com- 
 bined with the hunger for the raw and primitive and 
 elemental ; the sloughing off of an ancient civilisation, 
 the calling up of the beast and the savage to arise firom 
 their long sleep. No body of blameless citizens ever 
 wallowed in blood so fearfully as Henley's young men. 
 No man ever hated any cause more untiringly than 
 
 39 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 Henley hated all that is meant by modern Liberalism. 
 Democracy and the rule of the many ; the protection of 
 the weak against the strong and the poor against the 
 powerful ; the decencies and respectabilities of ordered 
 life; the sentiment which dislikes pain and shrinks 
 from the brutalities of war ; all attempts to find a 
 sanctity in the rights of the common people, the cry 
 of the oppressed — these causes were involved in one 
 universal condemnation. It was a spirit and a cult not 
 without pose and affectation. But it was alive, fervent, 
 consuming while it lasted much dead refuse. We who 
 are emerging from its tyranny to the saner realities 
 need not grudge an acknowledgment of the strength 
 of the thundercloud and the fiery splendour of the 
 storm. 
 
 What a feast of good things was represented by the 
 old National Observer ! For a Saturday's sixpence one 
 could obtain the first work of a dozen original and 
 daring minds. There would be ferocious political 
 leaders, sarcastic, bitter, striking to kill. These might 
 be followed by a poem from an unknown author, just 
 becoming talked about, a Mr, Kudyard Kipling. For 
 " Middles " you might read one of that series of 
 "Modern Men," the most incisive and dramatic 
 character sketches in modern journalism; or one of 
 Henley's appreciations, as whole-hearted as his hatreds ; 
 or Mr. Kenneth Graham's " Golden Age " tales ; or 
 Mr. Marriott Watson's sketches (he has never done 
 better work) ; or, perhaps, the table-talk of Mr. 
 Street's inimitable "boy," or Mr. Harold Frederic's 
 Uncle. And in the reviews you would find something 
 equally unexpected, a distinctive note behind the 
 summary of contents, a sifting and judgment of 
 ephemeral literature by the light of the fixed stars of 
 
 40 
 
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 
 
 criticism. Financially, it was a failure. The clever- 
 ness and originality were too naked and unashamed. 
 Men reeled hack into the sobriety of The Spectator 
 and similar safe periodicals. But for the few of that 
 age who had received the great gift of youth all this 
 noise and sparkle and glitter represented an adventure 
 into faii-yland. 
 
 And the man who was at the centre of it all, the 
 heart of this exuberant and boisterous activity, was the 
 man who has died after a life of pain. The figure sug- 
 gested was of a great laughing giant, full of the open air 
 and physical well-being and personal response to the 
 zest of the battle of existence. The reality was a 
 tortured body, the experience of enormous suffering, life 
 creeping ever on broken wing in a maimed and restless 
 discomfort. With his life-long friend, Stevenson, he 
 has gone down singing into the darkness. History vrill 
 see these two optimists always in a clear white light of 
 afternoon. WhUe stout burgesses with ample means 
 wept or squeaked over the miseries of existence and 
 demonstrated their dolors to an admiring world, these 
 two great sufferers from their beds of pain were pro- 
 claiming the triumph of things. Coughing his life out 
 in his darkened room, Stevenson sang carols in praise 
 of Grod; so insistent that the innocent like Mr. Archer 
 could reproach him for his too complacent exulta- 
 tion, and praise of this " brave gymnasium." In hos- 
 pital, stricken by poverty and perpetual pain, with 
 nerves on the rack and the things he loved for ever 
 beyond his grasp, Henley responded with thanks for his 
 " unconquerable soul." Undoubtedly, when all transi- 
 tory disputes have vanished, the world will deem itself 
 the richer for so bracing an example. 
 
 More even than in most men of genius the child 
 41 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 survived in Henley. As a child he was wayward, 
 capricious, vain; never reconciled to the limitations 
 of life ; difficult to satisfy. He had all the child's 
 passionate loves and hatreds, the sudden transitions of 
 temper, the almost fierce affection ; with the occasional 
 inexplicable impulses to injure those he loved. The 
 attack on Stevenson, which caused the scandal of a day, 
 was but an example. It was one of the great friendships 
 of history with depth and intimacy not yet fully re- 
 vealed. The lines to Baxter — "How good it sounds, 
 Lewis and you and I"- — the dedications of "A child 
 curious and innocent," and " Time and Change," the 
 collaborated plays, show one side ; the figure of Burly in 
 Stevenson's " Talk and Talkers," the unforgettable 
 tribute at the end of the Christmas Sermon, the other. 
 But he saw a lay figure set up for worship. He struck 
 fiercely and blindly : at the figure and his dead friend. 
 The world was scandalised and delighted. " Lewis " 
 would have understood. 
 
 It is for the child elements that he wUl stand in 
 literature. He possessed a child's quick apprehension 
 of the sensuous aspect of things — the dying year and 
 the coming of spring, night and the sea in storm, and 
 all the magical world of out-of-doors. He loved with a 
 child's delight the pageantry of war, the sword's " high, 
 irresistible" song, the bright flash of steel, and the 
 tramp of armed men. He had a childlike, unreserved 
 love of England, expressing in a few magnificent 
 ballads the mystery and sacredness of a Patriotism 
 rare in these latter days. And in the most appealing 
 and universal of all his poems, it is the child shrinking 
 from the Unknown and the Future : the child that has 
 suffered so much wistfully asking the meaning of it all : 
 the simple, pitiful note of fear and surprise at 
 
 42 
 
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 
 
 "The terror of Time and Change and Death 
 That wastes the floating, transitory world." 
 
 There is little spontaneity in these songs. The 
 experiments in rhymeless metre are not altogether 
 successful. Even in the voice of triumph and exulta- 
 tion there is always the background of doubt and 
 menace. The chill of the coming cold is in the songs 
 of Summer: "in the sun, among the leaves, upon the 
 flowers," creeps the shadow of the approach of Death. 
 For all the indomitable spirit, the proclamation that life 
 is worth living, and the refusal to whine and whimper, 
 it is the sombre side of life which Henley paints in his 
 poems. The Hospital Ehymes are mere jagged cries of 
 agony. " Into the night go one and all," " fatuous, 
 ineffectual yesterdays," " the menace of the irreclaim- 
 able sea " — of such stuff are his verses woven. Perhaps 
 they wiU be remembered in the future more for their 
 occasional magnificence of phrase than for any natural 
 inevitableness and charm. " The past's enormous 
 disarray " ; " the unanswering generations of the 
 dead " ; " the immortal, ineommunicable dream " ; 
 " the high austere, nnpitying grave " ; " night with 
 her train of stars, And her great gift of sleep" — these 
 are as elemental and memorable as the great summaries 
 of Whitman. His is the poetry read by poets, the 
 quarry from which others will mine the marble and 
 fashion it into a thing of beauty. 
 
 As a great spirit unbreakable by time and fate, 
 Henley will go down to the future. To this man were 
 given many of the world's good things, varied interests, 
 a power of passionate appreciation of the best in 
 literature and common life, high and generous friend- 
 ships, love which was the inspiration of all the most 
 
 43 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 triumphant of his songs. To him also were given 
 failure and pain : a perpetual ill-success in every enter- 
 prise : such suffering of body and spirit as seemed to 
 make him the sport of mischievous powers. All his 
 literary schemes collapsed : he lacked money and the 
 little satisfactions of a sheltered and tranquil existence. 
 The craving for a life of action perpetually fretted him, 
 the " home sickness " of " those detained at home un- 
 willingly." He had one child whom he adored. She 
 was torn from him ; and in one poem which sounds the 
 uttermost depth of tears he pictures " the little exquisite 
 Ghost " calling back across the grave to her Father and 
 Mother in those home kingdoms left desolate by Death. 
 Sometimes he was irritable and indignant, and struck at 
 the friends who loved him. But for the most part there 
 was a resignation, a determination to make the best of 
 things, a resolute refusal to give up and acknowledge 
 the triumph of the powers of darkness, which lifts the 
 whole tragic record out of the region of sorrow, and 
 transfigures it with a kind of glory. 
 
 "So be my passing I 
 My task accomplished and the long day done, 
 My wages taken, and in my heart 
 Some late lark singing. 
 Let me be gathered to the quiet west, 
 The sundown splendid and serene. 
 Death." 
 
 The spirit of one of the most appealing of his earliei 
 poems is the spirit in which most who knew and loved 
 him will wish to bid him farewell. 
 
 U 
 
J. HENBY 8H0BTH0U8E 
 
 TWO writers are most responsible for whatever 
 popular success has been attained by the move- 
 ment termed a little grandiloquently "the Anglo- 
 Catholic revival in England." The one, Christina 
 Eossetti, wrote a few poems ; the other, J. Henry 
 Shorthouse, one novel. A woman and a layman of 
 the middle classes thus strangely provided the par- 
 ticular atmosphere of mysticism and aspiration which 
 softened the often hard, dogmatic teaching and the 
 fantastic ritual of the younger clergy. The enormous 
 popularity of " John Inglesant," described upon its first 
 appearance as " having taken the world by storm " and 
 enduring until to-day, is a little difficult fully to explain. 
 It is written in a rare and delicate prose, revealing a 
 rare and refined personality ; but this, if anything, 
 would militate against a wide acceptance. It advertises 
 itself as a " Eomance," but readers anticipating 
 " Tushery " of the familiar type are dismayed by an 
 immediate plunge into Platonic discussions upon the 
 nature of the soul. It possesses little sense of unity, 
 and violates every law that should govern the successful 
 novel. Yet it has never ceased to attract a varied array 
 of champions. Its reception, indeed, is largely a matter 
 of temperament. Mr. Birrell, with all his eclectic taste, 
 bas confessed that he cannot away with it. And many 
 
 45 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 others less candid have probably in silence endorsed this 
 condemnation. 
 
 The secret of this acceptance lies, I think, in an 
 appeal to a type, widely spread, desirous of accepting a 
 certain view of life. The world of Shorthouse in 
 all his novels is a world viewed under a particular 
 aspect. Existence is pictured as a perplexing and 
 disturbed dream. Guidance is doubtful. The good 
 is often at cross purposes with the good. Human 
 life assumes the aspect now of a brilliant phantasia, 
 now of a masquerade. The later renaissance in 
 Italy, as shown in these pages, is progressing in an 
 intoxicating atmosphere and under a vague sense of 
 oppression. Men and women move through an en- 
 chanted landscape charged with emotion. It is a vision 
 above all of sudden transitions, of the irony of Change 
 and Death everywhere crashing in upon the players. 
 The transition is immediate from masques and revelry 
 and unbridled license to the "Memento, homo, quia 
 pulvis es," in which the lights suddenly wax dim and 
 all the music changes into terror and tears. Through 
 this strange pageant — the strange pageant of life in 
 all time viewed from the towers of Eternity — John 
 Inglesant " walked often as in a dream." 
 
 But the appeal which caught the imagination of men 
 living in an equally perplexing age rests in the conviction 
 of the author that there is a clue to the mystery. As 
 was said of Dante, "he believed, and in spite of all 
 aflirmed the high harmony of the world." 
 
 This he was enabled to do by his spiritual interpreta- 
 tion both of the inward voice and the outward pageant 
 of things. In the latter he definitely accepted the 
 sacramental view of Nature. We are back in the 
 Middle Age. "All redness becomes blood, all water 
 
 46 
 
J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 
 
 tears." The natural is but the thin yeil of the super- 
 natural, for ever almost bursting through. God is 
 visibly acting in His world ; the most trivial events are 
 charged vrith a spiritual significance. Other Presences 
 are watching the little decisions of the little life of 
 man. This view tolerates immediately, and without 
 any sense of disturbance, the incursions into the 
 story of mystery and miracle, the appearance of 
 the ghost of Strafford, or the crystal vision of the 
 death of Eustace. It is an attitude towards things 
 which finds a satisfaction in the dramatic symbolism 
 of an external ceremony, in music and light and ritual, 
 which to the ordinary man may be but irritating. 
 Others have shared the discovery of John Inglesant, 
 in that most touching description of his visit to little 
 Gidding, that "the gracious figure over the altar and 
 the bowed and kneeling figures," are essentially con- 
 gruous with "the misty autumn sunlight and the 
 driving autumn rain." 
 
 And the other clue to life's mazes Mr. Shorthouse 
 found in that doctrine of the Inner Light which he 
 received with his Quaker upbringing, and unfolded with 
 so winning an appeal. The Platonic doctrine of the 
 Divine guidance, of the direct call of God within the 
 soul of man, is the belief which leads John Inglesant 
 through the confused and troublous life of the seven- 
 teenth century. It is heard in the three great crises of 
 the book, to which all the lesser events lead, but which, 
 when they come, come suddenly. The first is the temp- 
 tation of the world, when De Cressy, the Benedictine, at 
 Paris, offers him the more excellent way. The second 
 is the temptation of the flesh, in the damp mists and 
 breathless air in the flight with Laurette from Florence 
 to Pistoia. The third is the temptation of the devil, in 
 
 47 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 that most wonderful scene in the mountains of Umbria, 
 when John Inglesant lays his sword on the altar of 
 the little hillside chapel, and delivers his brother's 
 murderer to the judgment of Grod. Through these and 
 all other incidents of this play of tired children, amid 
 the troublous clash of war, in strange ways, with love 
 and loss, to the final serene sadness of old age, he has 
 ever the apprehension of this unseen hand. The pro- 
 mise was to his eager boyhood. " I think you may find 
 this doctrine," said his teacher, " a light which will 
 guide your feet in dark places ; and it would seem that 
 this habit of mind is very likely to lead to the blessed- 
 ness of the beatific vision of God." That promise 
 survived through all the vanity and terror of existence 
 tost amid the whirlpools of divergent spiritual tides. 
 And after it is all over he can assert with the confidence 
 of a direct experience that " we may not only know the 
 truth, but we may live even in this life in the very 
 household and com-ts of God." 
 
 Shorthouse only wrote one book. For twenty years 
 he put into these pages all his philosophy of existence. 
 He had said his say, and there was nothing more to be 
 said. Like Olive Schreiner, an author with whom, 
 despite superficial incongruities, he has much in com- 
 mon, he revealed his heart's secret in one supreme 
 emotional utterance. Pressed by his friends, he did 
 indeed essay further efforts. In the tranquil life of the 
 little German Court of the eighteenth century, he could 
 almost retain the atmosphere of large issues and spiritual 
 meanings, and in consequence the story of little Mark 
 nearly approaches success. But in the comfortable exis- 
 tence of nineteenth-century England, grave and sane 
 and v?ithout fear, in the life of the ordered city concerned 
 with sanitation and the Poor Law, the particular 
 
 48 
 
J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 
 
 spiritual ardour which he loved to portray appears 
 forced and artificial. So Lady Falaise failed, and Sir 
 Percival, his hero warrior, modelled after Gordon's 
 pattern, whose actual description perhaps almost 
 justified Barry Pain's cruel parody of the conversation 
 under the Tulip Tree. The writer who has most nearly 
 approached the spirit and success of Shorthouse's hero 
 in the modern world is John Oliver Hobbes in her 
 " Robert Orange." The record of the fashioning in 
 Vanity Fair through great bitterness in the School for 
 Saints of a Weapon keen and pliant to the will of God, 
 is a record of one moving amongst the phantom society 
 of the nineteenth century, as Inglesant moved through 
 the phantom courts of Italy three hundred years ago. 
 But the book most revealing the same inner spirit, with 
 something of the delicacy and charm of style, is the 
 " Eoad Mender," the work of an author also indebted 
 to a Quaker upbringing for keen insight into the things 
 of the spirit, and a capacity for the estimating, at true 
 value, of the Temporal and the Eternal. 
 
 The style of Shorthouse at its best stands almost 
 without rival in the literature of the past twenty years 
 for a particular refinement and delicacy. The inevitable 
 comparison is with Newman : not that " John Inglesant " 
 achieves even a momentary rivahy with that supreme 
 perfection of English prose, but that in each case there 
 is an altogether personal secret and appeal which defies 
 analysis. Passage after passage reads like music. 
 Who is ever likely to forget the concluding scene of 
 this great spiritual record : the sunset over the city : 
 and after the storm, in the quiet air of England, far 
 fi:om the confused and passionate life of Italy, John 
 Inglesant's farewell? 
 
 " We are like children, or men in a tennis-court, and 
 49 E 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 before our conquest is half won the dim twilight comes 
 and stops the game ; nevertheless, let us keep our 
 places, and, above all things, hold fast by the law of 
 life we feel within. Let us follow in His steps, and 
 we shall attain to the ideal life ; and, without waiting 
 for our 'mortal passage,' tread the free and spacious 
 streets of that Jerusalem which is above. 
 
 " He spoke more to himself than to me. The sun, 
 which was just setting behind the distant hills, shone 
 with dazzling splendour for a moment upon the towers 
 and spires of the city across the placid water. Behind 
 this fair vision were dark rain-clouds, before which 
 gloomy background it stood in fairy radiance and light. 
 For a moment it seemed a glorious city, bathed in life 
 and hope, full of happy people who thronged its streets 
 and bridge, and the margin of its gentle stream. But 
 it was ' breve gaudium.' Then the sunset faded, and 
 the ethereal vision vanished and the landscape lay dark 
 and chill. 
 
 " ' The sun is set,' Mr. Inglesant said cheerfully, 
 ' but it will rise again. Let us go home.' " 
 
 Only to those secure in such a serenity, amid all the 
 terror of passing things, can come, in the splendour of 
 sunset, so tranquil an acceptance of the ending of 
 the day. 
 
 50 
 
HENB7 8IDGWICE 
 
 " r I iHE year 1851," was said when Turner died, 
 _1_ " will in the future be remembered less for 
 what it has displayed than for what it has withdrawn." 
 The same prophecy may surely be made of the year 
 which took from us, scarcely noticed amid the clamour 
 of disastrous war, John Ruskin and Henry Sidgwick. 
 Each was in many respects typical of the University 
 he served so well. Euskin was a child of Oxford. 
 Eloquent, famous, dogmatic, no worshipper of con- 
 sistency, he lived before the world, taking all men into 
 the confidence of his changing opinion. Sidgwick, 
 retired, restrained, almost unknown to the crowd, 
 advanced with cautious steps, weighing each sentence 
 before giving it utterance, putting his life-force into 
 work for his University. The one attracted crowded 
 audiences to his lectures, which were subsequently read 
 wherever the English language was spoken. The other 
 at Cambridge addressed twelve or twenty students, and 
 only appealed in his writings to a few serious minds. 
 The death of the one, even in the most perilous period 
 of the war, was marked by the lamentation of the multi- 
 tude. The death of the other passed almost unnoticed 
 by the Press and the busy world. Future ages, I think, 
 will find a dif&culty in deciding to which of these 
 two thinkers the world owes the profounder debt of 
 gratitude, 
 
 51 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 Clarity of thought and unwavering fairness towards 
 opponents are characteristic of Sidgwick's philosophical 
 writings. Only once did he appear to approach the 
 limits of legitimate criticism : in his half-contemptuous 
 dismissal of Herbert Spencer's philosophy as a serious 
 advance in the progress of thought. For the rest his 
 expositions of other men's systems were astonishingly 
 clear and generous. He sometimes humorously com- 
 plained that he had never been able to found a school 
 at Cambridge : that no body of students acknowledged 
 him as their master. How could he found a school of 
 followers, who so temptingly placed before us the claims 
 of so many different philosophies : who would expound 
 another's creed with the same enthusiasm as his own ? 
 The school he founded was a school of those who 
 attained divergent positions, but who all acknowledged 
 the lessons learnt from him: — fairness to opponents, 
 ardent search for enlightenment, devotion to truth 
 wherever it might lead them. 
 
 He had resigned his fellowship in early life as incom- 
 patible with his beliefs. He never faltered in his con- 
 viction of the impossibility of the old tests and articles. 
 Yet all must have noted in his controversy with Dr. 
 Rashdall on the limits of religious conformity, how 
 anxious he was not to draw these limits tightly round 
 others. He would allow for all possibilities before 
 branding any fellow-man as guilty of the moral laxity 
 which with him always ranked amongst the deadly sins. 
 And yet with all this was no mistiness, no vagueness 
 in which all distinction vanishes. The limit may be 
 made as comprehensive as possible. But it is drawn at 
 the last with no faltering hand. Beyond this line, as he 
 can see it, there is a region to which no man may go 
 without peril to his soul. 
 
 52 
 
HENRY SIDGWICK 
 
 His "Ethics" is his greatest work. As a moralist 
 he will first be remembered. They are right who say 
 that he possessed a mind essentially analytical. They 
 are wrong who assert that he confined himself to criti- 
 cism and presented no constructive system. He broke up 
 the old Utilitarianism, with its illogical confasion of the 
 claims of self and others. He attempted to resolve all 
 the social duties into the primary virtue of benevolence. 
 And he acknowledged that the impulse to seek the 
 happiness of others owns its origin to an intuition which 
 no purely human outlook can justify or explain. So in 
 his famous concluding chapter he protested the insuf- 
 ficiency of all the popular naturalistic systems, and the 
 inadequacy of the moral sanction without the postulates 
 of God and Immortality. 
 
 His work was greater than his writing. The 
 University of Cambridge in its present constitution is 
 largely his creation. For twenty years he was the 
 acknowledged leader of the party of reform which 
 effected the transition from the old age to the new. 
 All through the struggle he was working for the expan- 
 sion of the University beyond its ancient limitations, 
 for the increasing of its capacity of national service. 
 In the efforts for the abolition of sinecures, the abandon- 
 ment of theological tests, the growth of the University 
 beyond the limits of the Colleges, above all in the 
 opening of its teaching to women students, he played 
 a prominent part. He lived to see the quiet induc- 
 tion of changes which a former time would have con- 
 templated with forebodings of ruin. Only at the close of 
 his long term of service was the outlook clouded by the 
 reaction inevitable after far^eaching reform. During 
 his later years there came the triumph of a conserva- 
 tism once impotent. All the special movements he had 
 
 53 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 advanced were suddenly checked in their progress. 
 The recognition of external students was refused by 
 the rejection of their appeal for the diploma. The 
 struggle for religious liberty was checked by the refusal 
 to sanction St. Edmund's Hostel ior Koman Catholic 
 students. Above all, the long effort for the education of 
 women was disastrously closed by the defeat of the 
 appeal for the titular degree. He could not be indif- 
 ferent to this change in the University he loved so well. 
 He recognised the inevitable, resigned his position on the 
 Council, and withdrew himself from the arena of conflict. 
 Here was no feeling of pique or transitory despondence. 
 But he acknowledged that his own work was done ; that 
 the future belonged to a newer generation, inspired by 
 different ideals. 
 
 So he noted a similar change in the wider questions 
 of his time. He had thrown himself with ardour into 
 the struggle for religious liberty which ennobled the 
 middle years of the century. " Absorbed," he described 
 the company to which he belonged, " in struggling for 
 freedom of thought in the trammels of an historical 
 religion." He had lived to see the triumph of his 
 cause. Now a new age had dawned and new dangers 
 threatened the health of society. He turned to confront 
 the problems of the newer time. "Freedom is won," 
 he said, "and what does Freedom bring us to? It 
 brings us face to face with atheistic science : the faith 
 in God and Immortality, which we had been struggling 
 to clear from superstition, suddenly seems to be in the 
 air : and in seeking for a firm basis for the fight we find 
 ourselves in the midst of the ' fight with death.' " 
 
 The Metaphysical Society of which he had been a 
 member had represented the older struggle : the conflict 
 of widely disordered faiths and denials. It had seen 
 
 54 
 
HENRY SIDGWICK 
 
 the triumph of its aims — the practical toleration of all 
 forms of belief and negation. Now the time for re- 
 construction had come the survivors should gather 
 together after the great conflict. So the newer Syn- 
 thetic Society was formed: endeavouring to unite all 
 those to whom the word " God " bore some intelligible 
 meaning. He himself had laid down the first principles 
 of union in his admirable clear essays. And in all the 
 further work of reconstruction it is difficult to over-esti- 
 mate the loss of his penetrating criticism, unflinching 
 expression of truth, and eager search for faith adequate 
 to save mankind &om advancing indifl'erence and 
 decay. 
 
 His active work for the Psychical Eesearch Society 
 was but an application of the principle which guided 
 all his progress. Here was no credulous search 
 after a spirit of divination, or hunger for marvels 
 in an age staled by custom. But he was ever the 
 seeker for all knowledge which could throw light upon 
 the things of life. He advanced as readily along 
 new and unpopular paths as on the beaten tracks of 
 progress. He ever waged unceasing war against the 
 spirit of condemnation without judgment, of rejection 
 of evidence because undesired, whether manifested in 
 the older theology or the newer sciences. So he gave 
 his great name and critical powers to the study of the 
 mysterious phenomena of the border world. He was 
 once the dupe of clever schemers, and often the subject 
 of the mockery of the Press. But he continued to 
 support the work until the end. The evidence con- 
 vinced him of the presence of dim, undefined forces, 
 of something operating in the world of human con- 
 sciousness which the ordinary man had failed to 
 recognise and science had hitherto ignored : and he 
 
 65 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 was deteraained in the necessity for the continuance 
 of the study and the wresting of the control of obscure 
 mental phenomena from the hands of the quack and the 
 charlatan. But it failed to yield him, as it seemed to 
 yield to some, clear and indubitable proof of the life 
 beyond death. Neither here nor in any past time could 
 he find satisfactory evidence of the penetration of the 
 inscrutable secret of the grave. 
 
 The philosophical proofs of Theism he was unable 
 to accept as satisfactory. " The more sceptical atti- 
 tude," he said, " has remained mine through life." 
 But he was convinced that belief in God and in Im- 
 mortality are vital to human well-being. " Humanity" 
 — this was his unshakable conviction — " humanity 
 will not and cannot acquiesce in a godless world." 
 He was eager to recognise the complete relativity 
 of our knowledge: the vast sea of ignorance that 
 surrounds us. One of his favourite theses rested on the 
 possibility of another great religious inspiration. He 
 could hope for the return of a period of unclouded 
 faith after the age of disintegration had passed away. 
 He re-echoes the famous lines of his friend, which he 
 says he " could never read without tears " : the pro- 
 test of the heart against the " freezing reason " and the 
 sound of "an ever-breaking shore that tumbles in the 
 godless deep " : the spirit that feels as " a child that 
 cries but crying knows his Father near." Wir heissen 
 euch hoffen — the sad yet not entirely mournful refuge of 
 so many of the great men of his time — was his final 
 message. " The revealing visions come and go : when 
 they come we feel that we know : but in the intervals 
 we must pass through states in which all is dark, and 
 in which we can only struggle to hold the conviction 
 that— 
 
 56 
 
HENRY SIDGWICK 
 
 " Power is with us in the night 
 Which made the darkness and the light 
 And dwells not in the light alone." 
 
 Beyond the work, greater far than the creed, was 
 the personality of the teacher we knew and loved. 
 To the younger of us at Cambridge, seeing in him 
 a figure who had "drunk delight of battle with his 
 peers " in the controversies of the age, he seemed 
 indeed the " Man of Wisdom " of the Greek dreamer ; 
 the philosopher whom the people, were they not blind, 
 would drag forth and crown king. To us he stood for 
 " philosophy " at its highest. Here was the spirit 
 which showed the power of the student of all time 
 and all existence. We noted in him the capacity for 
 weighing evidence, the detached judgment, the multi- 
 farious interests in all the thought and progress of the 
 world. His lectures were attended by a scanty few. 
 Men complained that they were of little utility for the 
 schools. In metaphysic he would spend the course of 
 a term in defining the words used and laying down 
 the first principles. The more impatient fled away. 
 In ethic he would trace the course of his own 
 spiritual development : from the Utilitarianism of Mill 
 through the influence of Butler: a progress always 
 directed to one end through the troubled waters of 
 controversy. To those pursuing a difficult voyage 
 through the same unquiet sea, the lectures proved 
 unique and fascinating. When we came to know 
 him personally, our respect and admiration deepened. 
 His hospitality at Newnham was long to be remem- 
 bered. Without the asceticism he repudiated or the 
 luxury he deplored in the newer generation, he proved 
 a host to whom we would readily have given all our 
 evenings. He was a brilliant talker, and we would 
 
 67 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 gladly have listened to him in silence. This he would 
 never allow. He would draw out the retiring, tolerate 
 the absurd, welcome even the dull and commonplace. 
 Our most fatuous remarks would be accepted and 
 discussed. We left feeling that we were worth 
 more than we had thought before: humbled indeed 
 by comparison with an almost impossible standard of 
 attainment : but saved from utter self-distrust by the 
 recognition that even to the mediocre and ignorant 
 there was the possibility of an occasional inspiration. 
 
 Nor wUl his assistance be forgotten in deeper matters. 
 More and more his advice was sought on questions of 
 perplexity and honour. It came to be accepted that 
 any course meeting with the approval of his high ideal 
 of life could be pursued with clear conscience. Those 
 alone who were accustomed to turn to him in the 
 difficult problems of practical life could adequately 
 understand the dreary, almost incredible blank created 
 by the knowledge of his death. 
 
 The end was worthy of the life. A paper read before 
 the Synthetic Society marked the beginning of the end. 
 " Everybody was struck by the power of the paper," 
 wrote one who was present, "but they were even more 
 impressed by the animation and brilliance with which 
 the reader took part in the subsequent debate. A few 
 days later his hearers learnt that their guest had gone 
 through the evening with the prospect of almost immi- 
 nent death before him." The command had suddenly 
 come to set his house in order. He prepared for death 
 by a rapid and terrible disease as one going on a 
 journey. One after the other he detached himself from 
 the multifarious accumulated interests of a busy life. 
 He resigned the professorship to which he had added 
 such distinction, only anxious that the work should be 
 
 58 
 
HENRY SIDGWICK 
 
 carried forward by the most competent hands. He 
 enforced secrecy as to the nature of his illness. He 
 would leave the place in which he had played so high a 
 part without any needless demonstration of ceremony or 
 of pity. He set himself in the last few months of 
 suffering, with no complaining against the inscrutable 
 decree, to await the end : still willing, as far as in him 
 lay, to perform the duties of life, still interested in the 
 activities of the scene he was so soon to leave for ever. 
 Although all knew the end was inevitable and the most 
 speedy was the most kindly, the news came with no 
 ordinary wonder that Henry Sidgwick had joined the 
 "unanswering generations of the dead." His writing 
 represents the philosophy of a transitional time, and may 
 not be destined long to endure. His reputation, always 
 confined to the few, will soon vanish from the memory 
 of man. But the character which shone so brightly 
 through those closing scenes, greater far than his 
 thought or his work, cannot but survive the inexorable 
 years. Wir heissen euch hqffen. We bid you to hope. 
 Is there anything more to say ? 
 
 59 
 
FBEDEBIG MYEB8 
 
 TOWAEDS the end of Myers's life, inspired by 
 that shining energy which only seemed to 
 increase as the sun dropped to the horizon, the 
 Psychical Research Society initiated an inquiry into 
 the attitude of modern man towards the promise 
 of immortal life. The investigation was, I believe, 
 abandoned in England, where reticence still forbids 
 an eager sincerity about ultimate questions. But it 
 flourished mightily in America, where a new child race 
 will discuss its own spiritual anatomy with all the 
 candour of interested children. I am not sure if the 
 complete results have ever been published. I know some 
 of the replies to the printed questions were of extra- 
 ordinary interest. The inquiry was of belief in 
 immortality and of hope for immortality. The main 
 revelation was of the latter. The attestation of man's 
 belief is irrelevant. Few know what they believe at all. 
 Belief changes from day to day, and in various atmo- 
 spheres, like a guttering flame. Belief over the breakfast- 
 table is something different from belief in time of the 
 soul's upheaval, or confronting the piteous silence of the 
 dead. And in any case belief or disbelief in life beyond 
 the grave can have no effect upon that life's reality or 
 illusion. But hope is more vital. A man is more at 
 home with his desires. And the hope itself may be a 
 
 60 
 
FREDERIC MYERS 
 
 factor in that hope's fruition ; in a universe where, as 
 a matter of experience, each hungry soul receives its 
 heart's desire; life more and fuller for those who 
 demand it, for those who demand it also the sleep of an 
 eternal night. 
 
 The answers exhibited a large and sincere body of 
 opinion joyfully accepting this second alternative. The 
 note of some was contentment with life well spent, 
 slowly rounding off the long day's work into the tran- 
 quillity of evening. The cry of others was the old cry of 
 startled fear at the unknown. " In that sleep of death 
 what dreams may come " seems to become a question 
 even more haunting with the advance of the years. They 
 feared to take the chance. Visions of a future menace 
 have been intensified by the spectral discoveries of the 
 sciences. The rolling up of the curtain of space and 
 time has revealed a boundless universe of night and 
 terrors, flaring fires of sun and star, an abyss without 
 purpose or plan. The perplexity of Tennyson in old age 
 before the vision of Vastness, the pathetic cry of Spencer 
 as he confronts an unintelligible evolution and dissolu- 
 tion with, beyond, an emptiness or reality all unknown, 
 has bitten deep into the minds of the more serious men 
 of the age. 
 
 But with most the desire for an end was built neither 
 upon contentment with the present nor fear of an incal- 
 culable future. The proclamation of life-weariness was 
 the dominant assertion. The shrinking was not from 
 life's suffering and confusion, but fi:om life itself. The 
 assertion has come from a civilisation tired alike of so 
 much — and so little — that the effort of hope and change 
 is itself an evil ; in a universe the fit consummation of 
 whose courses will be rest and quietness. 
 
 Against such acquiescence all the life of this man 
 61 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 was one passionate protest. He was filled with a fury 
 of aspiration similar to that of Tennyson after life's 
 unending day. Better life in all the circles of the 
 mediasval inferno, both of these life-worshippers as- 
 serted, than life vanishing like the vapour or the 
 candle-flame when the tale is told. The triumph of 
 death was the one unendurable consummation. The 
 acceptance of such a belief, while it lasted, in his 
 own experience emptied the zest from human action, 
 stole all the colours from the flowers. Life under 
 such a domination of greyness became a mere gnawing 
 of dead bones, a mumbling in the darkness ; told by 
 an idiot ; signifying nothing. Myers refused to accept 
 such a negation until some voice which rendered doubt 
 impossible proclaimed the death of man, and no hope in 
 dust. In the midst of an age and civilisation stamped 
 with life-weariness, literature everywhere finding a 
 sombre satisfaction in the end of it all, he appears as 
 a figure from another, more ardent, age. He belongs in 
 spirit to that earlier time when life piled on life appeared 
 all too little for the hungry heart of man ; or to the 
 new outburst of human energies in the birth of modern 
 days, when man flung himself with a kind of heroic fury 
 upon the boundaries of his tiny world. 
 
 It is in this nursing of the unconquerable hope through 
 an age too much inclined to abandon the quest in despair, 
 that Myers remained as a figure of unfading interest ; far 
 more than in any definite discovery which he thought 
 himself to have made of that hope's vindication. Given 
 life, he was entirely content with anything that life 
 might bring. He never had any fear of the possibilities 
 of evil dreams. He demanded no paradise of jewels and 
 gold. He feared no clumsy or malignant forces. He 
 asked merely " the glory of going on and still to be." 
 
 62 
 
FREDERIC MYERS 
 
 His attitude to the last was one of a large curiosity ; 
 "a little disappointed," he once wrote to me after 
 illness, at not " passing over." It was a re-echo of 
 Kingsley's " Beautiful, kind Death, when will you come 
 and tell me what I want to know? " Something was 
 there of "Whitman's brave spirit as the shadow crept 
 ever nearer over the hills — 
 
 " The untold want — by life and land ne'er granted 
 Now voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find." 
 
 The fragment of autobiography, published after his 
 death, so perfect in form, so resonant, to those of us 
 privileged to know its author, of that triumph of certainty 
 which filled all its later years, so tantalisingly brief and 
 broken to some who knew how much he had to say of 
 life's spiritual voyages, exhibited in every line this con- 
 cern in the one absorbing question. Early religion 
 which never gripped the heart yielded immediately to 
 the fascinations of the Hellenic ideal. It was a species 
 of intoxication ; fostering evil as well as good ; aiding 
 in his own words " imaginative impulse and detachment 
 from sordid interests " ; but providing " no check for 
 pride." It rose in a night as a revelation of a world of 
 unfading beauty. It fell in a day with the realisation that 
 nothing remained of it all but ruins and a dream. In a 
 vision, gazing from the summit of Syra on Delos and the 
 Cyclades, and those straits and channels of purple sea, 
 he apprehended that all this was dead and gone for ever. 
 And he turned, " with a passion of regret," from a world 
 which suddenly had crumbled to a little dust. 
 
 Afterwards, through the influence of Josephine Butler, 
 "Christian conversation came in a potent form." He 
 was introduced by an inner door, " not to its encum- 
 
 63 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 bering forms and dogmas, but to its heart of fire." 
 That " heart of fire " breathes through every line of 
 " St. Paul," the one gi-eat Evangelical poem of the 
 century : — 
 
 " Yea through life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning 
 He shall suf&oe me, for He hath sufficed ; 
 Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, 
 Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ." 
 
 Alas! the vision faded, and the ardour. "I, even I," 
 at first he could write to a friend, "wretched and half- 
 hearted beginner as I am, can almost say already that I 
 know the thing is true." " Gradual disillusion " came 
 from increased knowledge of history and of science, from 
 wider outlook on the world. That Christ, as in the 
 vision of a whole age, now appeared as "dead in that 
 lone Syrian town." The manger is found, filled with 
 mouldy hay ; the rain pours through the broken roof ; 
 the wind moans outside unheeded : — 
 
 " The ancient stars are tired and dim, 
 And no new star announces Him." 
 
 " Insensibly the celestial vision faded"; and "left 
 me to 'pale despair and cold tranquillity.'" 
 
 " It was the hope of the whole world that was 
 vanishing," he wi'ote, "not more alone." The effect 
 of agnosticism upon him was wholly evil. " During 
 this phase only can I remember anything of dreariness 
 and bitterness — of scorn of human life, of anger at 
 destiny, of deliberate preference of the pleasures of the 
 passing hour." 
 
 An entry in the diary, " H.S. on Ghosts," marked the 
 first line of light on the horizon. The thought came 
 to him of turning the weapons of negation against itself 
 and utilising in the work of rebuilding the very forces 
 
 64 
 
FREDERIC MYERS 
 
 which had destroyed the cloud-capped palaces. Life's 
 continuance should no longer be guaranteed by dreams 
 and visions, wild, unsupported hopes, a prion philosophy, 
 or the shadowy remembrance of things belonging to an 
 ever remoter past. But the evidence of the empirical 
 method itself, the severest tests which reason could 
 desire of manifestations now actually in the world, 
 should certify existence beyond the grave. Science 
 should itself rebuild what science had destroyed. 
 
 Varied motives drew first together that little band of 
 adventurers who were prepared to explore and to occupy 
 regions of experience, avoided by the common man as 
 poisonous and unclean. With some it was the demand 
 for rescue of such mysterious kingdoms from the 
 dominion of the criminal and the charlatan. With 
 others it was the conviction, an inheritance from the 
 ardour of the Renaissance, that no element in this 
 unintelligible world should be ruled out of investigation. 
 With a third was a faint^ if never entirely articulate, 
 hope that here might be given the very key of the 
 unopened door, which every generation of man had 
 sought to find in vain. Myers, then, as in all his days, 
 made no secret of his motive. It was less to investigate 
 dispassionately with a scientific detachment than with a 
 kind of furious determination to tear from Nature herself 
 the secret she had hidden for so long that he undertook 
 this exploration of the rubbish-heaps of life. He con- 
 fesses his first reluctance to " re-entering by the scullery 
 window the heavenly mansion out of which I had been 
 kicked by the back door." But he wrestled with this 
 mysterious spirit behind the world's outward show, as 
 Jacob wrestled with his mysterious visitant till the break- 
 ing of the day. " ' I will not let thee go until thou 
 bless me ' — so cried I in spirit to that unanswering shade." 
 
 65 F 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 In that heroic struggle he consumed the remainder 
 of his days. From near the beginning he held himself 
 to have obtained the evidence he desired. That hope 
 sustained him to the end. The results can be studied 
 in innumerable green volumes, The Transactions of the 
 "Psychical Research Society," and in the great work 
 issued after his death, in which he sets out at length the 
 evidence and the theories he had built upon it. It was 
 not an opinion, but a conviction. It transfigured all his 
 later life. I had the privilege of working some slight 
 degree with him in the last years. I shall never forget 
 the eagerness with which he essayed the work of in- 
 vestigation, the welcome to all obscure and remote 
 testimony, the sense almost of awe with which he would 
 announce some fresh fragment of evidence, however 
 grotesque or ridiculous. No devotee of the older religion 
 hunted for souls more eagerly than Myers hunted for 
 news of ghost stories and telepathy and roaming per- 
 sonalities and inexplicable tricks of hypnotism and 
 magic. I remember in sorting evidence with him 
 noting how his spirits would rise as the record of some 
 particular incident would deepen in mystery and horror. 
 It was a lifelong disappointment to him that, although 
 he pursued ghosts with the ardour of the youthful 
 Shelley, the actual vision was never vouchsafed to him. 
 No evidence of fraud deten-ed him. No ridicule in the 
 least affected him. After the detection of deliberate 
 cheating in one notorious " medium " at Cambridge, 
 his companions (perhaps wisely) refused to have any 
 further communication with her. Myers was undeterred 
 He was summoned to fresh seances at Paris ; and I 
 well remember being called to meet him on his 
 return and finding him triumphantly convinced that 
 in this particular case phenomena had occurred beyond 
 the possibilities of human trickery to devise. 
 
 66 
 
FREDERIC MYERS 
 
 The generations of undergraduates who passed so 
 quickly by him regarded all this with perplexity. He 
 was a magnificent lecturer upon literature and much 
 in demand for literary societies. He always charged 
 his discussion of his subject — Swinburne, Morris, and 
 the rest — with the expression of the one hope which 
 burned like a flame at his heart. He would gather 
 small bands of students, attracted somewhat fearfully, 
 to listen to his occult revelations. One meeting especially 
 I recollect, in which, after Myers had told a succession 
 of ever more blood-curdling ghost stories, in the breath- 
 less silence a late arrival suddenly crashed against the 
 door outside. The effect was somewhat similar to the 
 knocking at the gate after the murder of Macbeth, an 
 immediate galvanic shock in the "startled air." 
 
 His own life and vitality seemed more convincing 
 evidence of immortality than all these testimonies of 
 strange forces. It was impossible to conceive that 
 strong soul passing into nothingness, the triumphant 
 energy meekly bowing before the supremacy of death. 
 His purpose was ever to sail beyond the sunset. 
 Exultation was in all his doing. It is upon a note 
 of exultation he closes his brief testimony of a life 
 given to high causes. Exultation remains in the great 
 line which is carved upon the tablet erected to his 
 memory beyond the walls of Eome, in that most sacred 
 spot of English ground outside the boundaries of Eng- 
 land. Above the tomb where lies all that is mortal 
 of Shelley, stands the self-chosen summary of his life's 
 devotion — 
 
 ApvvfitvoQ ijvTe ^x^'' ""-^ voarov iraipiav, 
 
 " Striving to save my own soul, and my comrades 
 homeward way." 
 
 67 
 
GEOBGE GISSINa 
 
 OF all the losses which literature has lately endured, 
 the death of Gissing stands out as most exhibit- 
 ing the ragged edge of tragedy. That Death should 
 come just at the wrong moment was indeed entirely 
 congruous with a life which seemed all through the 
 sport of the gods. The irony of some malign or 
 malicious power seemed to be laid upon the course of 
 this troubled existence. It was almost with a clutch 
 of some frantic laughter — a laughter more desolate 
 than tears — that there came to his friends, at the 
 moment when life at last seemed beginning, the news 
 that life was at an end. 
 
 One's whole being revolted against such a bitter 
 bludgeoning of fate. Readers of "Mark Eutherford" 
 will remember the restrained but passionate irony of 
 the close. After the unendurable years are over, when 
 life has emerged into afternoon, with a prospect of 
 light at eventide, a few dispassionate sentences tell 
 of a sudden chance chill, a few days' struggle, and 
 then — another of earth's unimportant millions lies quiet 
 for ever. So it was with George Gissing. A long 
 struggle against heavy odds, the experience of the 
 worst, public neglect and private tragedies, had at last 
 given place to something like hopefulness and fame. 
 Recognition, long deserved, had arrived. The crudest 
 of life's cruelties had vanished. A benigner outlook, a 
 
 68 
 
GEORGE GISSING 
 
 softer, kindlier yision of the " farcical melodrama " of 
 man's existence had been apparent in these later 
 months. The words of the last of his books he saw 
 published sound strangely prophetic. "We hoped"-— so 
 he wrote of " Henry Ryecroft " — "we hoped it would 
 all last for many a year ; it seemed, indeed, as though 
 Eyecroft had only need of rest and calm to become 
 a hale man." "It had always been his wish to die 
 suddenly. . . . He lay down upon the sofa in his study, 
 and there — as his calm face declared — passed from 
 slumber into the great silence." 
 
 This is not the time to tell the details of that 
 troubled life, of the tragedy which lay behind that 
 arduous literary toil and coloured all the outlook with 
 indignation and pain. Some day, for the edification 
 or the warning of the children of the future, the 
 full story will be told. All that it is necessary to 
 know at the present is contained in those books in 
 which the author, under the thin veil of fiction, is pro- 
 testing out of his own heart's bitterness against the 
 existence to which he has been committed. "For 
 twenty years he had liyed by the pen. He was a 
 struggling man beset by poverty and other circum- 
 stances very unpropitious to work." " He did a great 
 deal of mere hack-work : he reviewed, he translated, he 
 wrote articles. There were times, I have no doubt, 
 when bitterness took hold upon him ; not seldom he 
 suffered in health, and probably as much from moral 
 as from physical overstrain." The tyranny of this 
 nineteenth-century Grub Street drove- his genius into 
 a hard and narrow groove. He might have developed 
 into a great critic — witness the promise of his essay on 
 Dickens. There was humour in him all unsuspected by 
 the public till the appearance of " The Town Traveller." 
 
 69 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 And a keen eye for natural beauty, and a power of 
 description of the charm and fascination of places, and 
 a passionate love of nature and of home were only made 
 manifest in "By the Ionian Sea," and the last and 
 most kindly volume. 
 
 All this was sacrificed : in part to a perverted sense of 
 " Mission," the burden, as he thought, laid upon him 
 to proclaim the desolation of modern life : partly to 
 a determination to make manifest to all the world 
 his repugnance and disgust. He remains, and will 
 remain, in literature as the creator of one particular 
 picture. Gissing is the painter, with a cold and mor- 
 dant accuracy, of certain phases of city life, especially 
 of the life of London, in its cheerlessness and bleak- 
 ness and futility, during the years of rejoicing at the 
 end of the nineteenth century. If ever in the future 
 the long promise of the Ages be fulfilled, and life 
 becomes beautiful and passionate once again, it is to 
 his dolorous pictures that men will turn for a vision 
 of the ancient tragedies in a City of Dreadful Night. 
 
 Gissing rarely if ever described the actual life of 
 the slum. He left to others the natural history of 
 the denizens of " John Street " and the " Jago." The 
 enterprise, variety, and adventurous energy of those 
 who led the existence of the beast would have dis- 
 turbed with a human vitality the pictui-e of his dead 
 world. It was the classes above these enemies of 
 society, in their ambitions and pitiful successes, which 
 he made the subject of his genius. He analyses into 
 its constituent atoms the matrix of which is composed 
 the characteristic city population. With artistic power 
 and detachment he constructs his sombre picture, till 
 a sense of almost physical oppression comes upon the 
 reader, as in some strange and disordered dream, 
 
 70 
 
GEORGE GISSING 
 
 There are but occasional vivid incidents ; the vitriol- 
 throwing in " The Nether World " ; the struggle of 
 the Socialists in " Demos," as if against the ten- 
 tacles of some slimy and unclean monster ; the par- 
 ticular note of revolt sounded in "New Grub Street," 
 when the fog descends not merely upon the multitude 
 who acquiesce, but upon the few who resist. But in 
 general the picture is merely of the changes of time 
 hurrying the individuals through birth, marriage, and 
 death, but leaving the general resultant impression 
 unchanged. Vanitas vanitatum is written large 
 over an existence which has " never known the sun- 
 shine nor the glory that is brighter than the sun." 
 Human life apprehends nothing of its possibilities of 
 sweetness and gentleness and high passion. The 
 energies, rude or tired, flaming into pitiful revolt or 
 accepting from the beginning the lesson of inevitable 
 defeat, end all alike in dust and ashes. 
 
 The Islington of " Demos," the Camberwell of " The 
 Year of Jubilee," the Lambeth of " Thyrza" : how the 
 whole violent soul of the man revolted against existence 
 set in these ! The outward obsession of the grey 
 labyriath seemed to reflect the spirit of a race of 
 tragic ineptitude. Comfort has been attained, and some 
 security. But beauty has fled from the heart, and the 
 hunger for it passed into a vague discontent. Religion 
 has lost its high aspiration. Passion has become 
 choked in that heavy air. The men toil — the decent 
 and the ignobly decent — without ever a sense of illu- 
 mination in the dusty ways, or the light of a large 
 purpose in it all. The women — what an awful picture- 
 gallery of women appears in Gissing's tales of suburban 
 existence ! — nag and hate, are restless with boredom 
 and weariness, pursue ignoble, unattainable social 
 
 71 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 aspirations, desire without being satisfied. The whole 
 offers a vision more disquieting and raucous than any 
 vision of the squalor of material failure. Here, the 
 Showman seems to announce at intervals, always 
 with an ironic smile, here is the meaning of culture, 
 civilisation, religion — in the forefront of your noisy 
 " progress," in the city of your heart's desire. 
 
 "Her object," said Mr. Hutton, of George Eliot's 
 " Middlemarch," " is to paint not the grand defeat, but 
 the helpless entanglement and miscarriage of noble 
 aims, to make us see the eager stream of high purpose, 
 not leaping destructively from the rock, but more or 
 less silted up in the dreary sands of modern life." I 
 have often thought this might serve for a verdict upon 
 all Gissing's characteristic work. To produce this 
 result he had, indeed, to cut out great sections of 
 human activity. The physical satisfaction in food and 
 the greater physical satisfaction in drink ; the delight 
 in the excitement of betting, an election, an occasional 
 holiday ; the illumination which comes to a few, at 
 least, from a spiritual faith or an ideal cause ; even the 
 commonest joy of all, " the only wage," according to 
 the poet, which "love ever asked " : 
 
 " A child's white face to kisa at mght, 
 A woman's smile by candlelight " : 
 
 — all these, if introduced at all, appear merely to relieve 
 for a moment the picture of the desolation of London's 
 incalculable, bewildered millions. Gissing set himself a 
 legitimate artistic effort : the representation of modern 
 life in a certain aspect, seen under a certain mood. It 
 is London, not in the glories of starlight or sunset, but 
 under the leaden sky of a cold November afternoon. 
 The third of Henley's "London Voluntaries" is th# 
 
 72 
 
GEORGE GISSING 
 
 characteristic outward scene of Mr. Gissing's gaunt 
 picture ; in which the " afflicted city " 
 
 " seema 
 A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting, 
 With wavering gulfs and antic heights, and shifting. 
 Bent in the stuff of a material dark, 
 Wherein the lamplight, scattered and sick and pale, 
 Shows like the leper's living blotch of bale." 
 
 The vision does not even possess the sense of magic 
 and mystery of twilight and gathering night. The 
 universe is simply raw and wretched, with a wind 
 scattering the refuse of the gutter, and, too hideous 
 and grotesque even to evoke compassion, a few old 
 tramps and forlorn children shivering in the cold. 
 
 It was because we saw in Gissing's later works an 
 escape from this insistent and hideous dream, a 
 promise of a warmer, saner outlook upon human develop- 
 ment and desire, that we felt as a kind of personal 
 outrage the news of his early death. For skilled, 
 artistic craftsmanship he held the first place in the ranks 
 of the younger authors of to-day. He was only forty- 
 six years old. The later books seemed to open possi- 
 bilities of brilliant promise. The bitterness had become 
 softened. The general protest against the sorry scheme 
 of human things seemed to be passing into a kind of 
 pity for all that suffers, and an acceptance with thank- 
 fulness of life's little pleasures. The older indignation 
 had yielded to perplexity as of a suffering child. With 
 something of that perplexity — with a new note of 
 wistfulness, the sudden breaking of the springs of 
 compassion — George Gissing passes from a world of 
 shadows which he foimd full of uncertainty and pain. 
 
 73 
 
8PENGEB AND CABLYLE 
 A COMPAEISON 
 
 HERBEET SPENCER teUs, in his autobiography, 
 how shortly after his migration to London G.eorge 
 Henry Lewes took him to see a writer whose work he 
 had already examined with interest. " My visits num- 
 bered three," he notes, " or at the outside four, always 
 in company with Lewes, and then I ceased to go. I 
 found that I must either listen to his absurd dogmas in 
 silence, which it was not in my nature to do, or get into 
 fierce arguments with him, which ended in our glaring 
 at one another. As the one alternative was impracticable 
 and the other disagreeable, it resulted that I dropped 
 the acquaintanceship." And Spencer goes on to com- 
 plain of Carlyle that " he thought in a passion " (and, 
 hence, could not be regarded as a philosopher, who, above 
 all others, thinks calmly) ; that the " old Norse ferocity " 
 was strong within him; that he "lacked co-ordination 
 alike intellectually and morally." " He had a daily 
 secretion of curses which he had to vent on somebody 
 or something." 
 
 A verbatim report of these three or four meetings 
 would prove to-day inimitable reading. For when Car- 
 lyle and Spencer came together there was an encounter 
 not only of two personalities but of two civilisations. 
 
 74 
 
SPENCEH AND CARLYLE 
 
 Spencer exhibited a life, for perhaps the first time in 
 history, entirely organised on a rational and scientific 
 basis. Each separate action was referred to general 
 laws. Guidance was sought in the complicated tangle 
 of life not in any "venture of faith," still less in the 
 commands of human emotion ; but in a codified system 
 of evolutionary ethics, with a deliberate search for such 
 elements of pleasure as could be obtained without inter- 
 ference with the pleasure of others. In places this 
 system of natural morality became as casuistical and 
 exacting as any of the rules and systems of venial and 
 mortal sins of the Catholic moralists. Spencer turned 
 back upon past action directed towards a certain end to 
 examine with an almost pathetic refinement whether as 
 a matter of fact the end has been attained; whether, 
 for example, he had derived more happiness from billiards 
 than might have been derived from other alternative 
 occupation ; whether he was justified in the use of 
 opium ; whether in his final examination of his whole 
 life history he could pronounce, with some anticipation 
 of an ultimate verdict of a Day of Judgment, that he had 
 chosen aright in determining to devote his life to the cause 
 of Evolution. He acknowledged a contiauous tradition 
 of Nonconformist upbringing and ancestry, with no cross- 
 ing of the pure stock — so that by inheritance he became 
 the very incarnation of the "Dissidence of Dissent." 
 This, overlaid with the inheritance of the " acquired 
 characters " of three generations of schoolmasters, ex- 
 plained sufficiently to himself the prevalence of those 
 unamiable characteristics which he confessed with such 
 naive simplicity. An aggressive disagreement with 
 persons and accepted traditions, refusal always to 
 brook contradiction, that inability to tolerate error in 
 others which compelled him always to set them right 
 
 75 ■ 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 when wrong, combined to make him a difficult person in 
 society. "No one will deny," he said, "that I am 
 much given to criticism. Along with exposition of my 
 own views, there has always gone a pointing out of 
 defects in the views of others." The "tendency to 
 fault-finding is dominant — disagreeably dominant." 
 Such fault-finding, he dismally announced, had brought 
 into his life a double loss — on the one hand leading 
 " to more or less disagreeableness in social inter- 
 course " ; on the other "it has partially debarred me 
 from the pleasures of admiration by making me too 
 much awake to mistakes and shortcomings." 
 
 Carlyle's dissent from current opinion was, indeed, as 
 intolerant and even louder-voiced ; but it was passionate 
 instead of rational, and hence far easier to endure. All 
 his opponents were consigned in storm to the nether pit. 
 The extravagant ferocity of denunciation was streaked 
 with gleams of wild humour revealing a human being, 
 an inspired, wilful, petulant child. There was nothing 
 of the child in Spencer. The fault-finding was thin- 
 lipped, rational, probably in every case justified, and 
 hence intolerable. Each of these men was the product 
 of inherited traditions of belief and conduct : of traditions 
 which regarded happiness as outside the legitimate 
 objects of man's endeavour. When Spencer attempted 
 to organise his life upon an hedonistic basis all these 
 traditions, which had become part of the very fibre of his 
 being, leapt upwards in protest and rendered the experi- 
 ment a failure. He was ever asking himself, "what 
 have been the motives prompting my career — how much 
 have they been egoistic and how much altruistic?" 
 Caught in such cobwebs he painfully laboured through 
 the whole catalogue ; examining in detail how far in 
 controversy "the wish for personal success has gone 
 
 76 
 
SPENCER AND CARLYLE 
 
 along with the wish to establish the truth," and how far 
 the one has predoniinated over the other ; or, whether 
 he would have done better to marry ; or explaining 
 how " in the kind of beneficence distinguishable as 
 positive," the incentives " have been commonly neutra- 
 lised by dislike to taking the requisite trouble." And 
 every day as it passed became a subject of critical study 
 and regret because it had gone charged with less positive 
 pleasure than might have been. 
 
 In the " reflections " at the end of the autobiography 
 Spencer told of a chance incident of travel " in the days 
 of my difficulties when compelled to travel in third-class 
 carriages." " Opposite to me," he says, " sat a man who, 
 at the time I first observed him, was occupied in eating 
 food he had brought with him — ^I should rather say 
 devouring it, for his mode of eating was so brutish as to 
 attract my attention and fill me with disgust, a disgust 
 which verged into anger. Some time after, when he 
 had finished his meal and become quiescent, I was 
 struck by the woebegone expression of his face. Years 
 of suffering were registered on it, and while I gazed on 
 the sad eyes and deeply -marked lines I began to realise 
 the life of misery through which he had passed. As I 
 continued to contemplate the face, and to understand 
 all which its expressions of distress implied, the pity 
 excited in me went to the extent of causing that con- 
 striction of the throat which strong feeling sometimes 
 produces." 
 
 This extract might serv6 as a sample of the whole 
 life history. The dispassionate pomposity of language, 
 the dispassionate contemplation of his own emotions, 
 the absorption first in the nature of the resonances 
 and reactions produced by external events in the mind 
 of the individual Herbert Spencer, accompanied by a 
 
 77 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 detachment and cold criticism which frees such absorp- 
 tion from any charge of selfishness — such elements 
 combined made of those thousand pages one of the 
 most extraordinary of all human records. It would 
 appear not impossible, indeed, that the author may 
 be remembered for the personal history taken up in 
 old age, and mainly to break the tedium of enforced 
 idleness, long after the laborious constructions of the 
 synthetic philosophy have become not only buried, but 
 forgotten. 
 
 Much of the life reads like frank caricature, the kind 
 of rather cruel satire that used to be written by Mr. 
 Mallock in his younger days. The reference of each 
 chance action to large principles, the humourless judg- 
 ment of events, the laborious justification of fishing or 
 billiards — all these produce an efi'ect which would be 
 inexpressibly ludicrous but for the pathos of the whole 
 afi^air. In the author's earlier years " there was no 
 sign of marked liking for children," he says in his 
 quaint, impersonal fashion. " My feeling was of a 
 tepid kind." Late in life, in an existence "passed 
 chiefly in bed and on the sofa, I one day, while think- 
 ing over modes of killing time, bethought me that the 
 society of children might be a desirable distraction." 
 Children were demanded and children supplied. The 
 result was " to awaken, in a quite unanticipated way, 
 the philoprogenitive instinct," and the society of two 
 little girls " afforded me a great deal of positive grati- 
 fication." Henceforward "the presence of a pair. of 
 children, now from this family of the clan, and now from 
 that, has formed a leading gratification — I may say the 
 chief gratification — during each summer's sojourn in the 
 country." Criticism is struck dumb by such entries as 
 these. It is life organised on the system of the Data 
 
 78 
 
SPENCER AND CARLYLE 
 
 of Ethics and the millennium there preached ; a man 
 moving through the rich and passionate experience 
 of to-day with complete obedience to a reasonable 
 appeal : a kind of nightmare of an entirely rational 
 world. 
 
 One possible variation from such frantic sanity was 
 rejected as soon as it was understood. Spencer de- 
 scribes his early friendship with George Eliot, "the 
 most admirable woman, mentally, I ever met." He 
 took her to the opera and the theatre, where he had 
 free admissions — more used " because I had frequently — 
 indeed, nearly always — the pleasure of her companion- 
 ship, in addition to the pleasure afforded by the per- 
 formance." He was then but thirty-two, and the 
 philosophy had scarcely been projected. There were 
 out-of-door walks, discussions on the terrace outside 
 Somerset House. " People drew inferences." "Quite 
 definite statements became cui-rent." " There were 
 reports that I was in love with her, and that we were 
 about to be married. But neither of these reports was 
 true." In the reflections at the end, forty years after- 
 wards, some indication of the reason was revealed. He 
 had described in painful detail her actual physical 
 appearance. "Usually heads have here and there 
 either flat places or slight hollows : but her head was 
 everywhere convex." He had once criticised a great 
 beauty, alike in face and figure, " I do not quite like 
 the shape of her head." " This abnormal tendency to 
 criticise has been a chief factor," he sadly acknow- 
 ledged, "in the continuance of my celibate life." 
 " Physical beauty is a sine qua non for me ; as was 
 once unhappily proved where the intellectual traits 
 and the emotional traits were of the highest." 
 
 Spencer's sturdy individualism produced a complete 
 79 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 disregard of authority, and tliat contempt or indif- 
 ference for accepted opinion which was perhaps neces- 
 sary for the elaboration of a new and unpopular 
 philosophy. The extraordinary judgments on books 
 and men scattered through the life are examples both 
 of this waywardness and of that complete absence 
 of moral fear which the author also recognised in him- 
 self. Of Plato, "time after time I have attempted to 
 read," he said, " and have put it down in a state of 
 impatience with the indefiniteness of the thinking and 
 the mistaking of words for things." " To call that a 
 'dialogue,'" he added, with that disordered common- 
 sense which was the curse of his existence, " which is 
 an interchange of speeches between the thinker and his 
 ' dummy,' who says just what it is convenient to have 
 said, is absurd." For Ballads with recurring burdens 
 he felt " a kind of vicarious shame, at their inane 
 repetition of an idea." Commencing Homer, " for the 
 purpose of studying the superstitions of the early 
 Greeks," after reading some six books he "felt what 
 a task it would be to go on — felt that I would rather 
 give a large sum than read to the end." He found 
 "the tedious enumerations of details of dresses and 
 sums," the " boyish practice of repeating descriptive 
 names," "the many absurdities, such as giving the 
 genealogy of a horse while in the midst of battle," the 
 "ceaseless repetition of battles and speeches" intoler- 
 able. Delighted with the "Modern Painters," he 
 opened the " Stones of Venice " with raised expecta- 
 tions. " On looking at the illustrations, however, and 
 reading the adjacent text, I presently found myself 
 called upon to admire a piece of work which seemed 
 to me sheer barbarism. My faith in Mr. Ruskin's 
 judgment was at once destroyed, and thereafter I paid 
 
 80 
 
SPENCER AND CARLYLE 
 
 no further attention to his writings than was implied by 
 reading portions quoted in reviews or elsewhere." 
 
 Such vigorous dismissal became more serious when 
 the work was a piece of essential criticism in his own 
 subject. Commencing the reading of Kant's critique, 
 Spencer fell upon the proposition that " Time and 
 space are nothing but subjective forms." This " I 
 rejected at once and absolutely ; and having done so 
 went no farther." "It has always been out of the 
 question for me to go on reading a book the funda- 
 mental principle of which I entirely dissent from," 
 owing to the "utter incredulity of the proposition 
 itself" and "the want of confidence in the reason- 
 ings, if any, of one who could accept a proposition so 
 incredible." Kant was flung aside. " Whenever in 
 later years I have taken up Kant's critique I have 
 similarly stopped short after rejecting its primary pro- 
 position." It is interesting to remember that two of 
 the most influential minds of the nineteenth century, 
 who, if not exactly philosophers, at least dealt largely 
 with the subject-matter of philosophy — the one from 
 the side of theology, the other from that of the 
 natural sciences — had thus failed to read the work 
 which has laid the foundation of all future speculation. 
 If Newman had read Kant earlier in life or Spencer's 
 impatience of absurdity had not prevented him from 
 persevering in its study, both the theological and 
 scientific progress, the " Oxford Movement " and the 
 " New Reformation," might have been profoundly 
 modified. 
 
 The actual efi'ort demanded in the construction of the 
 synthetic philosophy was nothing short of heroic. The 
 struggle through so many years of neglect and failure, 
 the persistence, through failing health, in poverty, at the 
 
 81 e 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 cost of final nervous collapse, is an achievement for which 
 the world is richer, which should go down to the future 
 as one of the great triumphs of human resolution over 
 circumstance. After the early years spent in engineer- 
 ing invention and wanderings, Spencer felt the call to 
 his life work. Intense mental strain at the age of thirty- 
 five upon a constitution naturally neurotic — he was the 
 only surviving child of parents hoth of whom exhibited 
 marked and painful mental derangement — ^produced 
 insomnia and mental disturbance, which lasted the 
 remainder of his life. All excitement had to be avoided, 
 correspondence declined, the working parts of life 
 jealously guarded for the great undertaking. Many of 
 the chapters were dictated at intervals of racquets or 
 rowing, the only practicable method — a quarter of an 
 hour's exercise, then ten minutes' dictation, then exercise 
 again. 
 
 No less heroic was the long struggle for persistence 
 against poverty. There is a letter written to John 
 Stuart Mill inquiring concerning the possibility of a 
 post at the India Office, which is almost elemental in 
 its simplicity and dignity. " Unhappily my books have 
 at present no adequate sale," writes the author. "Not 
 only have they entailed upon me the negative loss of 
 years spent without remuneration, but also a heavy 
 positive loss in unrepaid expenses of publication. What 
 little property I had has been thus nearly all dissipated. 
 And now that I am more anxious than ever to persevere, 
 it seems likely that I shall be unable to do so. My 
 health does not permit me to spend leisure hours in 
 these higher pursuits, after a day spent in remunerative 
 occupation. And thus there appears no alternative but 
 to desist." 
 
 After an attempt to issue the books by subscription, 
 82 
 
SPENCER AND CARLYLE 
 
 the failure of adequate support again threatened abandon- 
 ment. To prevent this Mill offered to guarantee the 
 expenses of future publication and past losses — " a 
 simple proposition," as he termed it, " of co-operation 
 for an important public purpose, for which you give 
 your labour and have given your health." The letters 
 in -which this offer — " a manifestation of feeling between 
 authors that has rarely been paralleled " — was made by 
 Mill and declined by Spencer are permanent assets in 
 the honourable record of literature. 
 
 Eventually, partly through liberal support in America, 
 partly through small inherited legacies, the work went 
 on. " I am quite content to give my labour for nothing. 
 I am content even to lose something by unrepaid costs 
 of authorship. But it is clear that I shall not be able 
 to bear the loss that now appears likely." Such were 
 the efforts by which a philosophy not remote and 
 dif&cult, but perhaps the most widely popular of all 
 nineteenth-century expositions, could alone become 
 articulate. 
 
 The cost to its originator in vital power was irre- 
 parable. At the end he discussed whether he had 
 chosen well. Financially, " it was almost a miracle 
 that I did not sink before success was reached." 
 " One who devotes himself to grave literature must 
 be content to remain celibate." "Adequate apprecia- 
 tion of works not adapted to satisfy popular desires is 
 long in coming, if it ever comes." Against such tardy 
 recognition he set the exasperation of misstatement and 
 the anger of threatened interests and offended prejudice. 
 " Do I regret that I was not stopped by such dis- 
 suasions ? " he mournfully asked. " I cannot say yes." 
 So great was the impulse to proclaim the truth that any 
 resistance would merely have produced " chronic irrita- 
 
 83 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 tion hardly to be borne." " Once having become 
 possessed by the conception of evolution in its compre- 
 hensive form, the desire to elaborate and set it forth 
 was so strong that to have passed life in doing some- 
 thing else would, I think, have been almost intolerable." 
 
 To some, and especially to those hailing the synthetic 
 philosophy as immortal, the triumph of the achievement 
 may seem amply to compensate the ruin of its cost. 
 I must confess a different impression. An enormous 
 sadness broods over Spencer's life history. At the 
 beginning are the shadowy recollections of ancestors, 
 of hard, ioyless lives, whose ultimate impression 
 is one of futility and failure. One grandfather 
 appears as a gaunt, pitiful figure, whose mental decay 
 ' ' took the form of supposing that he had matters of 
 business to look after, and led to rambles through the 
 town with a vain desire to fulfil them." The other is 
 " the image of a melancholy-looking old man sitting by 
 the fireside, rarely saying anything and rarely showing 
 any signs of pleasure." The substitution of a conscious 
 creed of hedonism for the stern Puritan survey of life 
 seemed to bring but little benefit to their descendant. 
 All through happiness proves elusive : the secret of 
 well-being is not apprehended ; the sense of failure and 
 baflled purposes is written large over the whole story. 
 At one period all his friends urged him to marry as a 
 remedy for his nervous affections. "Ever since I was 
 a boy," he sorrowfully writes, "I have been longing to 
 have my affections called out. I have been in the habit 
 of considering myself but half alive, and have often said 
 that I hoped to begin to live some day." 
 
 That "some day" never arrived. To the end exis- 
 tence was woven in a kind of bloodless scheme of moral 
 principle, with the changes rung on egoistic and altruistic 
 
 84 
 
SPENCER AND CARLYLE 
 
 impulse ; as divorced from the life of men who love 
 and hunger and desire, as the vision of the under- 
 world of the Greek hereafter to those who shivered 
 at its advent. In the later years the fame of Herbert 
 Spencer has gone out through all lands. Him- 
 self, an old man, wearied, and much concerned with 
 his maladies, is passing to his grave amid mournful 
 memories. For a few minutes in the morning he can 
 dictate perhaps half a page of his biography. " Through 
 the rest of the day the process of killing time has to be 
 carried on as best it may." Walking has to be re- 
 stricted to a few hundred yards ; reading of the lightest 
 kind proves as injurious as working ; conversation has 
 to be kept within narrow bounds ; recreation is im- 
 possible, " two games of backgammon " having " caused 
 a serious relapse." At night, in spite of the use of 
 opium, there is never a full, continuous sleep. "No 
 ingenuity," was his pathetic summary, " can prevent 
 weariness." 
 
 All outside the tangible, material universe had been 
 rejected at the beginning, and rejected almost without a 
 pang ; relegated to the region of the Unknowable and 
 seemingly left there without any further interest or con- 
 cern. Religion never left him because it never came 
 to him. " Memory does not tell me the extent of my 
 divergence from current beliefs," he here confesses. 
 " The ' creed of Christendom ' was evidently alien to 
 my nature, both emotional and intellectual. The ex- 
 pressions of adoration of a personal being, the utterance 
 of laudations, and the humble professions of obedience, 
 never found in me any echoes." Early he wrote, "We 
 cannot know " over all the ultimate questions of the 
 Universe ; and, with his entirely reasonable mind, de- 
 clined any further to trouble himself about them. 
 
 85 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 Occasionally, as when after his only game of golf with 
 Huxley, he sees some boys bathing and wonders how 
 such a creature as man has attained such dominance 
 over the beasts of the field, some of the disordered and 
 inexplicable things of life strike his fancy. But for the 
 most part that sense of incongruity which is the founda- 
 tion of humour was absent ; wanting not only in the 
 pleasant fancies of verbal play but in the large and 
 fundamental ironies of things which form the soul of 
 tragedy. To a mind so entirely synthetic the universe 
 came to arrange itself in relations, cubes, and parallels, 
 an orderly framework ; and the elements which would 
 not fit into this definite scheme of cause and efiect were 
 quietly dropped out of sight. Even the great bereave- 
 ments common to the lot of man awaken no sense of 
 deeper meanings or clamorous, unanswered questionings. 
 After the death of his mother — the loss which he seemed 
 to have felt most deeply — he laments, with sorrow but 
 with a reasoned outlook, a life " of monotonous routine, 
 very little relieved by positive pleasure." The utmost 
 he will allow is regret for " the dull sense of filial 
 obligations which exist at the time when it is possible 
 to discharge them, contrasted with the keen sense of 
 them which arises when such discharge is no longer 
 possible." Some natural tears he shed, but dried them 
 soon ; convincing himself, with more success than the 
 philosopher in " Rasselas," of the folly of gi-ieving over 
 irrevocable things. 
 
 Only at the end, when he is suddenly confronted 
 with the brooding menace of death, does he realise 
 the fact that beyond the evolutionary scheme were 
 strange unfathomed possibilities, that the reason of man 
 was but a tiny rushlight in an immense solitude, a 
 plumb-line swung into the midst of an unbounded deep. 
 
 86 
 
SPENCER AND CARLYLE 
 
 With Tennyson, he trembles before a vision of Vastness, 
 the abysm strewn with stars and the great cold beyond 
 their transitory flames. He gazes back into a waste of 
 time, forward into a fature like a shoreless sea. He 
 can make no meaning of the world itself, the strange 
 life spreading in the depths of ocean, the thousand 
 types which have for ever gone. The insistent query 
 haunts him, "To what end?" Along with this is 
 the paralysing thought, " What if of all this thus in- 
 comprehensible to us there exists no comprehension 
 anywhere." Suddenly he finds a new sympathy 
 awakened within him towards the adherents of the 
 religions which he had formerly despised ; seeing these, 
 as it were, the gathering of men together for warmth 
 and companionship in the darkness of space, and the 
 silence. "Keligious creeds " — so he concludes his 
 astonishing narrative — " I have come to regard with 
 a sympathy based on community of need ; feeling that 
 dissent from them results from inability to accept the 
 solutions offered, joined with the wish that solutions 
 could be found." 
 
 In the life of Carlyle we are breathing an entirely 
 different atmosphere. The contrast cuts deep into the 
 basis of being. Spencer is devoted above all things 
 to liberty as an end. "As if it were a sin to control, 
 or coerce into better methods human swine in any 
 way," is Carlyle's scornful comment upon reading 
 Mill's defence of the same position. Spencer again 
 is at the heart of the scientific movement, the "New 
 Eeformation," which was to create new heavens and 
 a new earth. " Can you really turn a ray of light on 
 its axis by magnetism ? " Carlyle shouts scornfully ; 
 "and if you could, what should I care?" Beyond 
 
 87 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 these questions of opinion is the fundamental divergence 
 in the outlook upon experience and its meaning. If 
 Spencer's life was maimed by a too complete limitation 
 to the things which are seen, Carlyle's was troubled by 
 too insistent apprehension of the Unseen Universe. In 
 an entry in his journal he describes how " I have been 
 at Mrs. Austin's, heard Sydney Smith for the first time 
 guffawing, other persons prating, jargoning. To me, 
 through these thin cobwebs. Death and Eternity sate 
 glaring." And the Vision of Death and Eternity, 
 glaring through all that travail of eighty years, was 
 not conducive to tranquillity. 
 
 In one of his letters Carlyle tells how, after a period 
 of severe mental strain, he rode down solitary into 
 Sussex : through " the Norman Conqueror's country," 
 the " green chalk hills, pleasant villages, good people, 
 and yellow corn." "It is all, in my preternatural 
 sleepless mood," he writes, "like a country of miracle 
 to me. I feel it strange that it is there, that I am here." 
 The sentence might stand for the secret of that 
 violent life. The record is of one moving through 
 a drowsy world in a " preternatua-al sleepless mood " ; 
 and the nineteenth century, however to the dulled 
 eye mechanical and grey, is to this man always " a 
 country of miracle," The sense of magic, of en- 
 chantment, hangs over the whole history. The present, 
 so mean as it appears and so commonplace, has become 
 transfigured with something of a glory only in general 
 realised when that present has become the past and to- 
 day has consented to be yesterday. The world of Nature 
 is everywhere charged with glamour, silences and 
 appeals which awaken emotion beyond the power of 
 words. The world of man, the turmoil of politics 
 and society chatter, is stricken through with the 
 
 88 
 
SPENCER AND CARLYLE 
 
 sense of great issues and a purpose beyond time. The 
 humble society of peasants living obscurely in remote 
 regions, the deaths and births and affections which form 
 the common lot of common humanity, are illuminated 
 with colours which are the stuff of dreams, and set in a 
 background of all the Eternities. 
 
 It is this transformation of the drab things of to-day 
 which gives this man his power of fascination and 
 wonder. In the letters is the real Carlyle : the man in 
 his true self: " a wild man," as he describes himself, 
 "a man disunited from the fellowship of the world he 
 lives in." It is a life lived at a furnace heat of emotion, 
 extravagant in laughter, in affection, in denunciation. 
 He passes from a ferocity of contempt or an uncontrolled, 
 shaggy humour, to outbreaks of appealing and mournful 
 beauty. He beholds always good and evil visibly at 
 death grips in the lives of men. Like his own favourite 
 hero, he has enough fire within him to burn up the 
 sins of the whole world. Consumed with a continuous 
 restlessness, he is ever seeking quiet. " Learn to 
 sit still, I tell you : how often must I tell you," he 
 breaks out. "I persist in my old detennination to be 
 at rest," he declares again and again. " God help us 
 all!" "God be merciful!" "As God lives lam 
 weary ! " — these are his constant burden. " Solitude 
 is indeed sad as Golgotha ; but it is not mad like 
 Bedlam ! " The world of wild warfare came more and 
 more to be contrasted with a future beyond the storms 
 of time. " We have hope through our Maker's good- 
 ness," he vsrrites to his mother, " of a time that shall 
 be always calm weather." " The soul that has been 
 devoutly loyal to the Highest," he cries again, "that 
 soul has the eternal privilege to hope. For good is 
 appointed it, and not evil, as God liveth." The best 
 
 89 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 good for one so fire-tost and tormented is rest; " such 
 rest as God's holy will has appointed, and as no man 
 knows." 
 
 Such thoughts were the only consolation after each 
 outburst of astonished anger at the madness of men. 
 " Poor Protectionists," he flared forth after the Disraeli 
 Budget of 1851, " there never were men so ' sold ' 
 since Judas concluded his trade." " This Jew, how- 
 ever, will not hang himself; no, I calculate he has a 
 great deal more of evil work to do in the world yet, if 
 he lives." " Whatever British infatuation has money 
 in its purse, votes in its pocket, and no tongue in its 
 head, here is the man to be a tongue for it." Imme- 
 diately he turns from such a ravening spectacle to that 
 eternity which was ever his "strong tower." "The 
 day is drawing down (with the generation I belong to), 
 and the tired labourers one by one are going home. 
 There is rest there, I believe, for those who could never 
 find any before. God is great. God is good." 
 
 All his letters are crowded with those verdicts on 
 men which read so ferociously, whose first publica- 
 tion scared the company of Carlyle worshippers, and 
 tumbled to pieces the monstrous image they had 
 erected of the Apostle of Silence. Beneath the Carlyle 
 charged with a cold, intellectual restraint, weighing his 
 words, preaching endurance and an austere, ethical 
 creed — a lath-and-plaster figure — the real man is 
 emerging ; infinitely more human, infinitely more 
 lovable ; lacking, above all things, restraint, seeing the 
 better course, but unable to follow it, violent, with 
 fierce affection, drawing deep and fiercely the outlines 
 and shadows of things. The prim moralist is offended 
 at the reckless scattering of contemptuous and fiery 
 judgments. Only those who have some similarity of 
 
 90 
 
SPENCER AND CARLYLE 
 
 temperament, who are accustomed to speak and think 
 in superlatives, will understand the spirit in which these 
 verdicts are cast forth ; understanding, they will refase 
 to condemn. 
 
 There is a wild humour ahout him, a mingling of 
 denunciation with a kind of elemental laughter, in 
 which the bitterness is dissolved. After reading a 
 Qicarterly attack on Kingsley and Maurice, "very 
 beggarly Crokerism," " no viler mortal," Carlyle 
 suddenly ejaculated, "calls himself man than old 
 Croker at this time." " One Merivale " attacked him 
 in a review. " He is a slight, impertinent man," was 
 Carlyle' s comment, " with good Furnival's Inn faculty, 
 with several dictionaries and other succedanea about 
 him — small knowledge of God's universe as yet, and 
 small hope of now getting much." Of the theory of 
 life of this economist " it struck me I had never seen in 
 writing so entirely damnable a statement." "It is to 
 me not a sorrowful prognostic," he concluded, " that 
 the day of that class of politicians does in all ways draw 
 towards its close." 
 
 Others who had not thus the temerity deliberately to 
 draw upon themselves the lightning of the gods were 
 not spared. Of Jowett, " a poor little good-humoured 
 owlet of a body " was the verdict, " ' Oxford Liberal,' 
 and very conscious of being so : not knowing right hand 
 from left otherwise. Ach Gott ! " Of Palmerston, " a 
 tall man, with some air of greediness and cunning," was 
 the unflattering description, " and a curious fixed sviile 
 as if lying not at the top, but at the bottom of his- 
 physiognomy." The worthy philanthropists of the 
 forties became "scraggy critics of the 'benevolent' 
 school." Louis Philippe was dismissed with con- 
 temptuous pity : " I begin to be really sorry for him, 
 
 91 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 poor old scoundrel." "An old man now, and has not 
 learned to be an honest man — he learns, or may learn, 
 that the cunningest knavery will not serve one's turn 
 either." The " Bentham Radical Sect" were treated 
 to a crescendo of vituperation till they were finally dis- 
 missed as " wretched, unsympathetic, scraggy Atheism 
 and Egoism," which Nature will never make "fruitful 
 in her world." "Enough, thou scraggy Atheism; go 
 thy ways, vrilt thou ! " 
 
 But there were enthusiasms for famous men no less 
 superlative ; in addition to that continual flow of un- 
 clouded family aflfection, the love of the clan, of the 
 peasant for the peasant family; above all the whole- 
 hearted elemental devotion of the son for the mother 
 who bore him, which illuminates all the violent and 
 passionate correspondence of nearly fifty years. In a 
 memorable letter to Browning, "You seem to possess a 
 rare spiritual gift," is the generous tribute, " poetical, 
 pictorial, intellectual, by whatever name we may prefer 
 calling it." " Persist in God's name, as you best see 
 and can, and understand always that my true prayer for 
 you is, good speed in the name of God." There was 
 often a touching gratitude for favours given, a surprise 
 at the toleration extended by " people in the highest 
 degree zealous to accommodate the surprising monster 
 who has been stranded among them." " Kindness is 
 frequent in this world," he declared in a sudden 
 quietude, "if we reckon upward from zero (as were 
 fair), not dovmwards from infinity ; and always very 
 precious, the more so the rarer." 
 
 Carlyle saw with the eye of the mystic, the eye 
 of the prophet. Common things lost their hard 
 outlines. The world appeared as a procession of 
 spectres and shadows. Again and again he cried 
 
 92 
 
SPENCER AND GARLYLE 
 
 that man is of the substance of dreams, and his little 
 life is rounded with a sleep. " The dead seem as 
 much my companions as the living," he asserted in 
 one letter. " Death as much present with me as 
 life." Sometimes the effect was ridiculous. The Devil 
 visibly walks in Cheyne Kow, Chelsea, inspiring the 
 unspeakable fowls of his neighbours to crow lustily in 
 the morning, or stimulating the thirst for gin of the 
 harassed domestics. More frequently, however, the 
 vision closes in splendour. The things of the present 
 are charged with the sense of mystery. The homely 
 virtues and affections of the Carlyle clan are carried 
 into a region of high emotion. The chatter and gossip 
 of society are seen but as a flickering candle flame in 
 the great red glare of sunrise. And in each successive 
 bereavement Carlyle is caught up into regions of mystic 
 sorrow and rejoicing, " a sacredness that led one beyond 
 tears." 
 
 Each obscure human life was for him a matter of 
 infinity import. London, as he looked down on it from 
 the Surrey hills, " its smoke rising like a great dusky- 
 coloured mountain, melting into the infinite clear sky," 
 became a meeting-place of Eternities in the " ever- 
 flowing stream of life and death." In the graveyard 
 of the dead, where " they all lay so still and dumb, 
 those that were once so blithe and quick at sight of us ; 
 gathered to their sleep under the long grass," the old 
 man " could not forbear a kind of sob, like a child's, 
 out of my old worn heart, at first sight of all this." 
 Kead if you can without emotion the letter, magnificent 
 in its simplicity, in which Carlyle describes to his 
 brother in Canada the last days and death of his 
 mother. It is the end of an obscure life, full of toils 
 and sorrows ; the dust returning to the earth, as it was, 
 
 93 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 tlirough that last indignity which is the common lot 
 of man. But to the eyes of one watching with a 
 love unconquered by the fretfulness of time, the voyage 
 of this humble soul " through the gloomy clouds of 
 death " was charged with a solemn splendour and 
 triumph. All the mystery of the greatness of human 
 existence gathered round the moment of the passing 
 into eternity of the spirit, returning to the God who 
 gave it. 
 
 The man to whom each solitary life was thus so 
 sacred had the faith at bottom which alone can con- 
 secrate all human progress. He had, indeed, no certain 
 solution of ultimate mysteries. But he refused to put 
 them aside. "God is great! God is good!" is his 
 continual burden ; " there remaineth a rest," his per- 
 petual prayer. " The ruins of time build the mansions 
 of Eternity " is the one sustaining hope with the passing 
 of the years. And all his longing goes out towards a 
 meeting with those whom he loved, now so quiet, in 
 " the Silent Kingdoms " where all that troubled the lot 
 of man " shall there be without the walls for evermore." 
 
 In such a contrast between the mystic and the man of 
 science is summed up much of the hunger and disturbance 
 of an age. Spencer's story of his existence is like the 
 even passage of a still and cloudy day. The hours pass 
 with scarcely perceptible change. There is a light in 
 the sky, dull, if cold and clear, slowly fading with the 
 coming of the night. Carlyle's life-history is like a day 
 of perpetual unrest. There is the flare of the dawn 
 with sunshine succeeding; and thunder-clouds roll up 
 in tempest with lightning and storm ; and the clouds 
 are torn apart for a moment, revealing the blue sky 
 beyond ; and the sun sets in crimson and yellow light, 
 
 94 
 
SPENCER AND CARLYLE 
 
 with a menace of disquietude still on the horizon, rain 
 and moaning wind, when darkness suddenly blots out 
 the whole troubled scene. 
 
 The one story ends in a vision of desolation. An irony 
 worthy of an ancient and tragic fate compelled the man 
 who, more than any previous thinker, had fashioned his 
 action upon rational and consistent ends, most com- 
 pletely to acknowledge failure. The conscious search for 
 the prize resulted in the cry that the prize had somehow 
 eluded the seeker ; and the neglect of all irrational 
 things — love and human comradeship, the larger 
 emotions, patriotism, and the losing of self in an ideal 
 cause — evolved but the old cry of weariness, and the 
 failure of orderly life to satisfy man's desires and his 
 dreams. 
 
 The other, from the heart of uncertainty and storm, 
 under the purple sky and sunset, lifts up his hope 
 triumphant above the things of time, sure in the 
 consummation of the victory and the abiding rest 
 beyond. " It was the Most High God that made 
 mothers," he testifies, " and the sacred affection of 
 children's hearts ; yes, it was He : — and shall it not, in 
 the end, be all well : on this side of death, or beyond 
 death ? We will pray once more from our inmost heart 
 if we can, ' Our Father which art in Heaven, Thy will 
 be done ' ! " 
 
 " Alas ! the inexorable years," he cries, " that cut 
 away from us, one after another, the true souls whom 
 we loved, who loved us truly, that is the real bitterness 
 of life." " How could one live," he had before written, 
 "if it were not for Death?" "We ourselves, my 
 friend " — this is his conclusion of the whole matter — "it 
 is not long we have to stay behind ; we, too, shall find a 
 shelter in the Silent Kingdoms ; and much Despicability 
 
 95 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 that barked and snarled incessantly round us here shall 
 there be without the walls for evermore. Blessed are the 
 Dead. . . . God is great, say the Moslems; to which 
 we add only, God is Good ; and have not, nor ever shall 
 have, any more to say." 
 
 So in faith and perplexity, the one with an unanswered 
 question on his lips, the other with the great longing in 
 his heart still unsatisfied, these two men went down into 
 darkness : and the grasses blow above their graves. 
 
 96 
 
DI8BAELI AND GLADSTONE 
 A CONTRAST 
 
 OF all the memorable comparisons in history, in which 
 two men of supreme talent have been exhibited 
 struggling through a lifetime for the triumph of conflicting 
 ideals, none will stand in history more illuminating 
 than that of Disraeli and Gladstone. The superficial 
 contrast has been a thousand times emphasised. But 
 the material is now for the first time available which 
 can enable the reader to penetrate beneath the surface 
 show. All the accidents of birth, fortune, and educa- 
 tion vanish ; and we enter those innermost recesses of 
 man's being which all men hide from the multitude, 
 in which the soul, stripped of the illusions of market- 
 place and arena, is confronted only with itself and with 
 Eternity. 
 
 The careers of Disraeli and Napoleon III. are the two 
 great romances of the nineteenth century. Each seemed 
 for all the earlier time "impossible." Each at the 
 beginning absurdly failed. Disraeli became the laugh- 
 ing-stock of England, Napoleon the laughing-stock of 
 Eurape. The grotesque invasions at Strasburg and 
 Boulogne seemed to certify an enduring collapse to the 
 
 97 H 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 one. Sydney Smith has descrihed the first appearance 
 of the other at Taunton, and how he was called the Old 
 Clothes Man by the children and pelted with slippers, 
 and finally driven out in contempt. But each, confident 
 in his genius and his star, pressed right onward, and 
 each attained such dazzling success as must have 
 excelled even his wildest dreams. The career of both 
 was closed in eclipse and ruin. Both were assailed with 
 such ferocity of vituperation as only falls to the few 
 really great. And both, when all is over, have secured 
 disciples essaying to erect an image of benevolence and 
 moral earnestness — images which would have astonished 
 the men who, however self deceived at the last, would 
 never have mistaken these ungainly creations for por- 
 traits of themselves. 
 
 Disraeli's career was " a romance of the will that 
 defies circumstance, and moulds the soil where ideas 
 are to flourish." In the strange figure at the end 
 as depicted by one of his admirers could be read 
 all the history of the past. " Few who gazed 
 on that drawn coimtenance," says Mr. Sichel, "could 
 have discerned in it the poetry and enthusiasm of hia 
 prime : only the unworn eyes preserved their piercing 
 fires, and the sunken jaw was still masterful. A long 
 discipline of iron self-control, much disillusion, growing 
 disappointments with crowning triumphs, and latterly a 
 great desolation, had subdued the fiercer force and the 
 elastic buoyancy of his heyday. Yet the intellectual 
 charm, and the spell of mind and spirit had deepened 
 their outward traces. Fastidious discernment, dis- 
 passionate will, penetrating insight, courage, patience, 
 a certain winning gentleness underneath the scorn of 
 shams, stamp every lineament." 
 
 " He was truly unselfish, and he was never known to 
 98 
 
DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE 
 
 blame a subordinate." "In two things only he was 
 profuse — books and light." Unlike his great rival in 
 this as in so many other characteristics, he was "utterly 
 careless of money." " Like childless men in general, 
 he was devoted to children," " He was a firm friend: 
 loyalty he always extolled as a sovereign virtue." "If 
 he was always ' the man of destiny,' he was also ever 
 ' faithful unto death.' " "Of music and art he was a 
 devotee . " "In matters of courtesy he was old-fashioned 
 and punctilious." "The common and the uncommon 
 people fascinated him, for in them he found ideas : the 
 middling charmed him less." 
 
 In the world outside also, that austere, pitiless, senti- 
 mental England of the mid-century, he was ever on 
 the side of kindness and compassion. He possessed 
 strong sympathy with labour and the sufferings of the 
 poor. "He foresaw the overcrowding of huge cities 
 through the waste of the soil with all its attendant 
 miseries." With Euskin he asserted that the English 
 poor " compared with the privileged of their own land 
 are in a lower state than any other population compared 
 with its privileged classes." He was "prouder of his 
 many social reforms than of his Berlin Treaty." "What 
 he specially sought to mitigate was irresponsible Pluto- 
 cracy." 
 
 The verdict of history will probably endorse Lord 
 Acton's judgment upon Disraeli. " The man was more 
 reputable than his party." He led them first by grati- 
 fying their hatreds, later by stimulating their hopes. He 
 led them through strange ways, but ultimately into the 
 promised land. . 
 
 The attempt, indeed, to prove that he was "con- 
 sistent " throughout all his political career, that he 
 was not " an adventurer," that his only motive was 
 
 99 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 the advancement of high moral causes, is an attempt 
 compared to which the rehabilitations of Richard Crook- 
 back and John Lackland were but trifles. No one doubts 
 Disraeli's greatness ; no one seriously imagines this 
 gi'eatness to be in the region of morality. His career is a 
 study for the admirer of a great enterprise conducted 
 through a lifetime with extraordinary tenacity and 
 courage. It is an asset for the cynic, the historian, the 
 detached observer of the absurd comedy of human life ; 
 not, surely, for the moralist. The attitude of his 
 admirers is more likely to be that of Mr. Swinburne in 
 his protest against the whitewashing of Mary Queen of 
 Scots. " Surely you were something better than 
 innocent ? " Disraeli knew his world, " the islanders," 
 as one of his biographers pleasantly terms them ; and 
 he knew himself. Ho had the power of those who have 
 stripped themselves of all illusions, swallowed all 
 formulas. He posed, and every one laughed at him; 
 but step by step he succeeded in deceiving first his party, 
 then his country, finally himself. 
 
 In such a survey, the superficial inconsistencies are 
 negligible. Whether at first he appeared as a Tory or 
 a Radical seems entirely irrelevant. Both opinions 
 were quite reconcilable with his after-life. He hated 
 the Whigs and the great houses who were excluding 
 such as he from politics. He hated the middle classes, 
 the Nonconformists. Above all, he hated that strenuous 
 assertion of moral ideals which always seemed to him 
 cant, which was to gather under the leadership of his 
 great opponent and overthrow him at the last. He 
 knew mid-century England as few others knew it. His 
 novels, despite their absurdity and their bizarre, fantastic 
 language, remain the most illuminating commentaries 
 upon the changes which this England was undergoing, to 
 
 100 
 
DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE 
 
 which the many were so blind. Against these middle 
 classes he apprehended, with the insight of genius and 
 the detachment of the alien, there could be united the 
 old English families from above and the populace from 
 below. The Eeform Act of '67, denounced as a 
 betrayal, was merely an attempt practically to realise 
 this conviction. 
 
 His policy was justified by its success. The force 
 of moral earnestness and enthusiasm was the one 
 force he could never understand. " I have been induced 
 to analyse what ' moral ' means are," he once said ; 
 " first, enormous lying ; second, iuexhaustible boasting ; 
 third, intense selfishness." This solitary mistake ended 
 his career in apparent ruin. Undoubtedly had he made 
 an adequate estimate of the power of moral enthusiasm, 
 he would have adjusted his policy to its demands, and 
 used it for his own aims. 
 
 But his success was never more apparent than after 
 his death. He became a cult and a great memory. 
 The romance of his marvellous career became magnified 
 by time. His policy of uniting the gentlemen of Eng- 
 land and the democracy which loves a lord against the 
 manufacturers and middle classes prospered exceedingly. 
 Other men entered into the heritage he bequeathed to 
 them ; and England settled down with satisfaction at the 
 end of the century under the Tory reaction for which 
 he had worked with such unparalleled ardour and 
 patience. 
 
 In this he was true to his own ideas, and true to 
 the interests of the class who cried out that he had 
 betrayed them. The most vehement opponents of the 
 Franchise Bill of '67, such as the late Lord Salisbury, 
 were those who lived to reap the great reward of the 
 policy which they had denounced. Without this 
 
 101 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 alliance the Conservative party were doomed to an 
 everlasting sterility. With it they ruled England for 
 seventeen out of the last twenty-five years of the 
 nineteenth century. For such a transformation they 
 have to thank this " alien adventurer " whom they never 
 entirely trusted. 
 
 They might, indeed, have remained in power for 
 decades to come if they could have learnt the lesson he 
 had tried to teach them : to press forward Social 
 Keforms, to demonstrate aristocracy as the true and 
 disinterested leaders of the people : in ruling, to give all 
 that the people would themselves demand if they them- 
 selves were in power. In Ireland he would have effected 
 by English legislation all the reforms that an Irish 
 Parliament could have effected for herself. At home, he 
 would have pushed forward his "policy of sewage," 
 persistently striven for better houses, better wages, 
 shorter hours, a humaner life for the working population. 
 He would have given everything except liberty : for he 
 was shrewd enough to know that when everything which 
 liberty demands is given, the demand for liberty itself 
 becomes suddenly silent. 
 
 Secure in the triumph achieved by his policy the 
 Conservative party have repudiated the principles by 
 which that triumph was attained. If the coming 
 collapse of the Tory Government in England will 
 mark the end not only of a party but of an epoch, 
 the future will but justify Disraeli's prophecies alike of 
 success and failure. And if once more the party which 
 calls itself " Liberal " enters upon power, it vrill be 
 because in adversity that party has learnt on the one 
 hand to forget many of the ideas whose inherent weak- 
 ness Disraeli descried ; on the other, to remember that 
 forces more vital than the middle-class individualism of 
 
 102 
 
DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE 
 
 the mid- Victorian period are necessary for the healing 
 of the diseases of a newer England. 
 
 In face of so magnificent a spectacle as Disraeli's 
 success, why arouse needless controversy, we may ask, 
 by attempting to drag in something so irrelevant as 
 questions of political morality? "I confess to be 
 unrecognised at this moment by you," Disraeli writes to 
 Sir Robert Peel in 1841 — " appears to me to be over- 
 whelming, and I appeal to your own heart — to that justice 
 and that magnanimity which I feel are your characteristics 
 — to save me from an intolerable humiliation." " Do 
 not destroy all his hopes," Mrs. Disraeli added, "and 
 make him feel his life has been a mistake." Five 
 years after, when reminded of this by Sir Eobert Peel, 
 " I can say I never asked a favour of the Government," 
 he calmly informed the House of Commons, " not even 
 one of those mechanical things which persons are 
 obliged to ask : yet these assertions were always made 
 in that way, though I never asked a favour ; and as 
 regards myself, I never, directly or indirectly, solicited 
 office." 
 
 Biographers have been concerned to explain this 
 incident in a thousand impossible apologies. It is 
 warmly asserted that Disraeli's bitter attacks upon Sir 
 Eobert Peel were not directed by personal revenge for 
 the rejection of his application. No one now imagines 
 STich an explanation. Disraeli was after too high stakes 
 to be turned aside by anything so petty as personal 
 revenge. He attacked Peel because with the eye of 
 genius he saw that Peel's desertion of the country party 
 gave him the opportunity for which he had waited half 
 a lifetime. It was the direct way to the hearts of 
 the *' gentlemen of England " bursting with inarticulate 
 fury, and welcoming with eagerness their spokesman as 
 
 103 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 their leader. One can regard with admiration the 
 imperturbable courage and audacity with which he threw 
 down this challenge to Peel. " In the small hours of 
 the morning following the debate," Peel " was fishing in 
 a sea of papers for Disraeli's letter," which he could not 
 find. Perhaps had he found it the history of England 
 might have been changed. There is no need to attempt 
 elaborate explanation of forgotten memory or momentary 
 madness in this particular incident of a career which 
 never pretended to acknowledge the impeding limitations 
 of the accepted moral standards. 
 
 To any detached observer of an imaginary Gerolstein 
 the career is one prolonged miracle. Even with a con- 
 sciousness of the ruin effected, it is almost impossible 
 not to cheer the onward advance. At the beginning, 
 "looking like Gulliver among the Liliputians" suffering 
 from chronic dyspepsia, he appears on the political 
 arena " devoured by ambition I did not see any means 
 of gratifying." He was an alien, without money, with- 
 out friends ; obviously to the great families of England 
 an adventurer ; impossible. At the end he has broken 
 the charmed circle, penetrated to the centre, bent the 
 great families of England to his will. He drives them 
 unresisting along roads they dread, towards ends they 
 cannot foresee. He has become the idol of the 
 aristocracy. He is the intimate friend of the Queen. 
 Finally, for one intoxicating moment, he stands in the 
 full gaze of the world. Dictator of Europe. 
 
 One half of the mind refuses to acquiesce. It sees the 
 lowering of public life, the unscrupulous manipulation 
 of ideal causes to forward one individual ambition; the 
 flattery, the adroitness, the despising of men. Estimated 
 now as if a long time ago and far away the playing upon 
 pettiness and silly ambition appears the work of one 
 
 104 
 
DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE 
 
 who, in Mr. Bryce's words, " watched English life and 
 politics as a student of natural history might watch the 
 habits of bees or ants." The critic apprehends the 
 dire consequences of this theatrical display. Modern 
 Jingoism is one of them, which has poisoned the springs. 
 Another is the ruin of the Christians of the East. 
 Here is a heavy price to pay for the set limelight scene 
 of "Peace with honour." 
 
 But the other half of the mind is with him through it 
 all. We applaud in whole-hearted fashion the spirit, 
 the pluck, the unconquerable will and determination. 
 We rejoice with almost a personal triumph as the long, 
 seemingly so hopeless, efforts of thirty years terminate 
 in the attainment of the desired goal. 
 
 And, indeed, something more reputable remains. 
 Outside the " game " of politics there was much 
 altogether admirable. He was a dutiful son, an 
 affectionate brother. He showed a real kindness to 
 friends ; a certain magnanimity. The never-waTering 
 gratitude to his wife for her whole-hearted devotion 
 illuminates this strange character with tenderness and 
 emotion. Above all, we owe him a certain cynical 
 sincerity very useful for " islanders," one of whose 
 characteristics is an unparalleled power of self-deception. 
 " Lying is a crime only where it is a cruelty." " When 
 I meet a man whose name I have utterly forgotten, I 
 say, ' And how is the old complaint ? ' " "No dogmas, 
 no Deans." In country houses "their table talk is 
 stable talk." " They think it the battle of Armaged- 
 don ; let us go to lunch." " I am never well save in 
 action, and then I feel immortal." These and similar 
 sayings have become part of the current coin of 
 England's worldly wisdom. 
 
 " Every one knows the steps of a lawyer's career — he 
 105 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 tries in turn to get on, to get honours, to get honest. 
 This one (of a certain Lord Chancellor) edits hymns 
 instead of briefs, and beginning by cozening juries he 
 compounds with heaven by cramming children in a 
 Sunday school." 
 
 There is a real pathos about the end, the pathos 
 which shrouds the end of all great actors. The play 
 is nearly played. The harsh world of reality can no 
 longer be kept out of the kingdom of fantasy and 
 illusion. Like another great actor, Chateaubriand, he 
 has " seen so many phantoms defile through the 
 dream of life." " Yes, but it has come too late," was 
 the reply to congi-atulation on the great triumph. " I 
 am so blind ; I come here : I look round : I see no 
 one : I go away." " Never defend me," was his last 
 request. 
 
 His definition of the most desirable life as " a con- 
 tinued grand procession from manhood to the tomb " 
 had been abundantly realised. " He faced the facts of 
 life," said one who loved him, " psychological and 
 spiritual, gravely, I had almost said sorrowfully : he 
 faced them compassionately." " I had rather live," he 
 asserted at the end; " but I am not afraid to die." His 
 verdict upon one of the characters of his creation is 
 perhaps the last word upon his own intimate soul, the 
 self which withdrew so securely from the madness of 
 life's fitful fever : — " What they called reality appeared 
 to him more vain and nebulous than the scenes and 
 sights of sleep." 
 
 n 
 
 Mr. Morley's great life and the Acton letters 
 have revealed now for the judgment of the sympathiser 
 
 106 
 
DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE 
 
 and the cynic the springs of action of Gladstone's 
 vast and complex character. Behind all the panorama 
 of the outward show, the concern which for most men is 
 all the world and its desires, stands that " heajrt of 
 fire " whose history forms one of the most fascinating 
 chapters in the story of men of renown. 
 
 " Not for two centuries," says his biographer, " since 
 the historic strife of Anglican and Puritan, had our 
 island produced a ruler in whom the religious motive 
 was paramount to a like degree." Later, as earlier, 
 there is the revelation of the inner life : an inner life 
 " maintained in all its absorbing exaltation day after 
 day, year after year, amid the ever-swelling rush of 
 urgent secular affairs." 
 
 " Not a devotional chUd," this " great Christian ' 
 described himself. " The planks between me and all 
 the sins were so very thin." " The inner life has been 
 with me extraordinarily dubious, vacillating, and, above 
 all, complex," is his confession at the end. All the 
 early years were spent in that rigorous, narrow, evan- 
 gelical piety which fashioned the characters of most of 
 the great men of nineteenth-century England. At 
 Oxford he is organising prayer-meetings. When 
 twenty-three years old he is refusing race-meetings 
 and theatres as involving an encouragement of sin. 
 In the early years of London life he is leading the 
 limited and austere life of this bleak tradition. At first 
 he cannot believe in liberty, and is bitterly hostile to 
 atheists. As late as 1836 he is tormented with doubts 
 as to whether a Unitarian can be saved. There is one 
 characteristic scene in his biography, in which " I had 
 my servant to prayers " before breakfast, and Words- 
 worth, who has come as a guest, obligingly makes a 
 third. He is a member of a brotherhood fonned by 
 
 107 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 Acland, with rules for systematic exercises of devotion 
 and works of mercy. Amidst much that is inspiring 
 there is much also that is tortuous and almost morhid 
 in these earlier self-examinations and prim rules of 
 conduct. " My inherited and bigoted misconceptions," 
 he afterwards came to call them. He has not yet 
 escaped from the stifling conception of a very limited 
 salvation to the larger and freer atmosphere of a Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 The change, when it came, seems to have been en- 
 tirely independent of the great spiritual upheaval at 
 Oxford. Quite suddenly, upon his first visit to Rome, 
 the sight of St. Peter's aroused a, longing for a visible 
 unity of the Church. " The figure of the Church rose 
 before me as a teacher," in addition to the Bibl©, 
 hitherto the sole guide. The old cramping barriers 
 gave way. A world vision of a vast society and fellow- 
 ship, divinely ordered and guided for the salvation of 
 the world, never afterwards left his mind. Hence- 
 forth, amid " the sublime and sombre anarchy of human 
 history," he beheld, says Mr. Morley, a Church 
 Catholic and Apostolic, with " its ineffable and mys- 
 terious graces " and its " incommeasurable spiritual 
 force" — an immense mystery. "This is the enigma, 
 and this the solution in faith and spirit, in which 
 Gladstone lived and moved. In him it gave to the 
 energies of life their meaning, and to duty its foun- 
 dation." 
 
 But a principle which Oxford failed to teach her 
 children was already commencing to work. " The 
 value of liberty as an essential condition of excellence 
 in human things" was to unite with this passionate 
 devotion to a Catholic Church, and prove the thread 
 to that labyrinth of policy which made Gladstone 
 
 108 
 
DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE 
 
 through all his career the most perplexing of states- 
 men to his generation. It was to undermine and 
 cast aside all those frameworks of compulsions of 
 which in the early days he was so determined an 
 advocate. It led him into the tearing down of an 
 Anglican Establishment, the abolition of Church rates 
 and Church tests, and all the policy of liberality and 
 liberation with which his name will be associated 
 through all future time. Everything had changed at 
 the end but his religious ideas. His earlier dogmatisms 
 and disquietudes crumbled into dust as the years went 
 by. But the deep bedrock beliefs of his nature in God 
 and the soul and an immortal life remained always 
 abiding and secure. " The fundamentals of the 
 Christian dogma," says Mr. Morley, "are the only 
 regions in which Mr. Gladstone's opinions have no 
 history." 
 
 The early period is fuU of the movement of the 
 Church revival, with all its revolutionary consequences. 
 Dissuaded from his original desire for the Christian 
 ministry, Gladstone threw himself into the world of 
 affairs deliberately as a servant of the Church. " I 
 contemplate secular affairs," he says, " chiefly as a 
 means of being useful in Church affairs." "Political 
 life," says Mr. Morley, "was only part of his religious 
 life." This crusading energy made him a strange 
 figure in the realm of early Victorian politics, amongst 
 that particular section of English life which has never 
 learnt to take religion seriously. Continually <and from 
 the beginning he is protesting against the infected 
 atmosphere of Parliament. Of public life, he con- 
 fesses, " every year shows me more and more that the 
 ideal of Christian politics cannot be realised in the 
 State according to present conditions of existence." 
 
 109 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 He was ever desiring a kind of monastic seclusion. 
 " The tumult of business follows and whirls me day 
 and night," he cries. He finds no time for tranquil 
 collection of himself or the cultivation of the things of 
 the spirit. He " anticipates a time " when he may 
 " breathe other air." 
 
 But to the party and ideas he stood for his posi- 
 tion was of supreme importance. The High Church 
 School consisted mainly of theologians hidden from 
 the world, of women, of amiable country gentlemen, 
 endeavouring to maintain feudal ideas in an atmosphere 
 removed from the new, energetic England. Here was 
 a man adequate to all occasions, with a miraculous 
 physical vitality, a frame of steel, toil "his native 
 element." He stood as the one man of deep religious 
 conviction endowed with capacity to direct the whirlwind 
 and control the storm. For the first time a statesman 
 of unparalleled energy and intellect was to confess him- 
 self before the world an ardent adherent of these new 
 doctrines. He was to become the idol of a middle class 
 utterly alien to the Catholic faith and tradition. He 
 was to manipulate national finance, to encounter and to 
 master, at their own poor game, the children of this 
 world. Through all the crowd of cross purposes and 
 shabby and pitiful ambitions which make up the uni- 
 verse of party politics he was to press forward as one on 
 a journey, passing to a sure end. 
 
 Confusion and perplexity were produced in the minds 
 of his contemporaries by this apparition of a man 
 with convictions and an ideal amid the shadows and 
 phantoms of the time. During the first sixteen years 
 of his political life in close association with his two 
 greatest friends. Manning and James Hope, he was 
 daily planning efforts for the restoration of the Church. 
 
 110 
 
DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE 
 
 The London movement advanced independently of the 
 Oxford movement, although along parallel lines. "I 
 stagger to and fro like a drunken man " was Gladstone's 
 comment when he saw the great leader passing to a 
 hostile communion. He was never quite in sympathy 
 with Newman. His thought was too objective for free 
 communion with that subtle mind. The motive was 
 never, as in Newman, ardour for a personal salvation, 
 but shame at " the laying waste of the heritage of the 
 Lord." The six years that followed were years of a 
 tense anxiety. Then, in 1851, came the great dis- 
 ruption and separation which changed the whole vision 
 of the future. "FuUy believing that the death of the 
 Church of England is among the alternate issues of the 
 Gorham case," he yet clung to the cause to which his 
 life had been dedicated. But Manning and Hope 
 passed over to the other side. " Their going," he 
 records in his diary, " may be to me a sign that my 
 work is gone with them." " Nothing like it can ever 
 happen to me again." It was the close of an epoch. 
 
 Ten years were spent in unsatisfactory hesitations. 
 Li 1859 he could still be branded as " the Jesuit of the 
 closet — really devout," and the " Simeon Stylites of his 
 time." But the principle of liberty was steadily work- 
 ing. The change from Oxford to South Lancashire 
 meant an escape from- shadows into the strong if cold 
 light of day. In 1863 he commenced relationships with 
 Protestant Nonconformists. Their whole point of view 
 was alien to his own. Often, as in the education con- 
 troversy, he strained their loyalty to the breaking-point. 
 They were " attracted by his personal piety, though re- 
 pelled by its ecclesiastical apparel." While his own 
 Church . regarded with distrust or hatred the greatest 
 layman it has ever possessed, the Nonconformists 
 
 111 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 followed him with a eplendid devotion. "We believe 
 in no man's infallibility," said Spurgeon; "but it is 
 restful to be sure of one man's integrity." Only at 
 the last, when he advocated a scheme for granting self- 
 government to a Koman Catholic nation containing a 
 Protestant minority, many with sorrow turned aside and 
 walked no more with him. 
 
 And through all the gigantic endeavour of these later 
 years the interior life continued its progress. Gladstone 
 will appear in history as the "practical mystic" ; one of 
 those apparitions which exercise amid a world of cloudy 
 purpose -SO miraculous a power. The consciousness of 
 personal responsibility, the sense of a Divine call and 
 election for service, the apprehension of a particular 
 Providence, the increasing recognition of the necessity 
 for some definite preparation for the hour of death and 
 the day of judgment ; these great commonplaces of the 
 religious life are continually with him. Of a particular 
 speech at the outset of his career : — " A poor perform- 
 ance," he writes, " but would have been poorer had He 
 never been in my thoughts, a present and powerful aid." 
 " On most occasions of very sharp pressure or trial," he 
 testifies, " some word of Scripture has come home to 
 me as if borne on angels' wings." In election contests 
 or Budget speeches he is strengthened by verses of the 
 Psalms. On his rejection by Oxford University the first 
 lesson in church supplies his need: — " And they shall 
 fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against 
 thee, for I am with thee, saith the Lord of Hosts." 
 Successive birthdays always drove him back in medita- 
 tion to the basic principles of his faith. On his sixtieth 
 birthday " The Almighty seems to sustain and spare me 
 for some good purpose of His own, utterly unworthy as 
 I know myself to be. Glory be to His name." Ten 
 
 112 
 
DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE 
 
 years afterwards, at the close of the intoxicating 
 triumphs of the Midlothian campaign, he " professes to 
 believe" that the battle has been fought for justice, 
 humanity, freedom, law. 
 
 " If I really believe this," he writes, " then I should 
 regard my having been morally forced into this work as 
 a high election of God. And certainly I cannot but 
 believe that He has given me special gifts of strength 
 on the late occasion, especially in Scotland. Three 
 things I would ask of God over and above all the bounty 
 which surrounds me. This first, that I may escape into 
 retirement. This second, that I may speedily be 
 enabled to divest myself of everything resembling wealth. 
 And the third — if I may — that when God calls me He 
 may call me speedily." 
 
 There was to be given him another great decade of 
 life, a struggle against doubt, cowardice, and the 
 accumulated wrongs of time, which in its large energies 
 and enthusiasms already seems the record of some 
 combat of giants in a half fabulous past. And at the 
 end there was given him also that gift which he had 
 desired so eagerly and so patiently, the interval of tran- 
 quillity and preparation "between Parliament and the 
 grave." 
 
 Two sentences adequately sum up the inner life of 
 Gladstone. The objective result is recorded in the 
 magnificent phrase addressed to him by an unknown 
 correspondent : — " You have so lived and wrought as to 
 have kept the soul, alive in England." The inner 
 springs of action are revealed in the Line from the 3rd 
 Canto of the Paradiso, which he accepted as possessing 
 an "inexpressible majesty of truth" — as if spoken by 
 the very mouth of God : " In la sua volontade e nostra 
 pace": la His Will is our Peace. To the obedience 
 
 X13 I 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 of that Will he dedicated all the ardour of a soul beyond 
 all men's impetuous and impatient. " The final state 
 which we are to contemplate with hope and seek by 
 discipline," he wrote, " is that in which we shall be one 
 with the will of God." 
 
 The effort demanded a continual examination and 
 struggle. He " achieved self-control," is the testimony 
 of his wife, " by incessant watching and prayer." In 
 all the Christian centuries no more splendid gifts 
 have been offered with whole-hearted devotion and 
 humility. The age has travelled beyond the special 
 intellectual affirmations of Gladstone's belief. His 
 principles were matured before the theory of evolution 
 and modem research had created a new world. But 
 the great ends and ideals of the passion of his soul, 
 the " bright crystal laws of life," in Mr. Morley's fine 
 phrase, " endure like pointing stars guiding a traveller's 
 eye to the celestial pole by which he steers." A large 
 benefaction remains to us and succeeding generations 
 from so shining an example. He raised above the 
 turmoil of the politics of a day a supreme moral ideal. 
 He reconciled the large claims of a Catholic faith with 
 the assertion of liberty as an essential condition of 
 excellence in human things. He maintained always 
 against the slow stain of the world's contagion the 
 detachment and ardour of an inner life fixed in entire 
 submission to the vnil of God. High efforts such as 
 these are as essential to-day as in that vanished universe 
 of Gladstone's first radiant dawn. To those amongst 
 whom, in however limited a sphere, is offered a possibility 
 of a similar enterprise, his life stands secure in the 
 courses of Time ; a challenge to all striving after transi- 
 tory things, a message of victory in the troublous years 
 to come. 
 
 114 
 
THE CEUBCH MILITANT 
 
 TEMPLE— WESTCOTT—OEBIGHTON— DOLLING 
 
 THE ecclesiastical life is never a very cheering docu- 
 ment. The atmosphere is often thin and rarefied, 
 the interests divorced from the varied experience of the 
 common thought of men. Li so many success has meant 
 the cautious pursuit of a well-trodden v?ay. Who now 
 remembers the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury of 
 a hundred years ago or the penultimate Dean of Lich- 
 field or Archdeacon of London ? But where personality 
 and strength are conspicuously present, the life of the 
 priest or minister acquires an especial interest. Always 
 there is the challenge, was it for that reason or for this, 
 that he forsook the combats of the world and entered 
 the service of a spiritual kingdom ? And of late years 
 interest has been intensified by the general break-up of 
 the traditional theology. There are many to-day who 
 are astonished that an honest man can stUl call himself 
 a Christian, or assent to formularies historic and out- 
 worn. There are others perplexed to reconcile the 
 Christian ethic with ihe modern economic organisation 
 of society, and scorn God because the cry of the poor 
 exercises so scanty a disturbance amid the apathy of the 
 Sabbath con^egation. The past few years have been 
 heavy in the loss of those to whom these and other 
 
 115 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 questions were very pressing. Their livea are an 
 attempt at answers. Temple was one of the strong 
 men of the century. Creighton was the most agile 
 and interested mind of his day. Westcott as a scholar 
 and a thinker stands heyond the reach of challenge. 
 Dolling was a personality who exercised a particular in- 
 fluence and attraction. The liyes of these men should 
 be fruitful in questions, if not in answers, to this problem 
 of faith disturbed and uncertain guidance which broods 
 over the future of England. 
 
 " We cannot understand how these opinions can 
 be held consistently with an honest subscription to 
 the formularies of our Church, with many of the funda- 
 mental doctrines of which they appear to us essentially 
 at variance." So forty-two years ago, in scathing con- 
 demnation, two archbishops and twenty-five bishops 
 publicly denounced seven writers who had united to 
 issue a little volume of theological essays. Nine years 
 afterwards the first of these writers was appointed by 
 Gladstone Bishop of Exeter. A vast hubbub arose. 
 Petitions poured in from Protestants and Eitualists, 
 joining against the common enemy. The Chapter were 
 urged to refuse to confirm the election. " I have letters 
 from all parts of the country," said the Dean of Exeter, 
 " about the sword of the Lord and Gideon, exhorting us 
 to go to prison and promising us visits there." On the 
 day of consecration bishop after bishop protested ; one 
 (still living) "in the fear of God and the Church"; 
 others counselling delay or wringing their hands in 
 despair. Time ultimately swept the clamour into 
 pilence. Thirty years after, this man who had been 
 
 116 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 judged by his Church's leaders as dishonest, died one 
 winter day amidst a universal tribute to a rugged 
 honesty — Frederick, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 Few lives have been able to show so dramatic a 
 revolution. Those who would understand the real 
 nature of the man can be recommended to study the 
 record of the long dead controversy over " Essays and 
 Reviews." Entombed in the dusty immensity of Arch- 
 bishop Tait's life is a chapter of Tait-Temple letters 
 which for vigour and interest in ecclesiastical corre- 
 spondence can only be paralleled by the Newman- 
 Manning letters in Purcell's first edition. Tait, after 
 promising to protect the writers, had yielded to the 
 agitation and signed that scathing document of condem- 
 nation. Later he attempted to persuade Temple to 
 desert the other essayists and leave them to their ruin. 
 The replies ring true and tempered across the interven- 
 ing years. It is strength against suavity. Here is the 
 restrained, passionate protest of a man who feels himself 
 wronged by the weakness and uncertainty of a iriend 
 cowering before a storm of public opinion. "If you do 
 not wish to alienate your friends, do not treat them as 
 you have treated me." " Nothing on earth will induce 
 me to do what you propose. I do not judge for others, 
 but in me it would be base and untrue." " You ought 
 not to make it impossible for a friend to calculate on 
 what you will do." " The greatest kindness you can 
 now do me is to forget till all this is over that any 
 friendship ever existed between us." "Your friends 
 complain that they cannot count on you. Your enemies 
 say they can." The sentences sear and burn after all 
 the lapse of time. Not often do high dignitaries who 
 attempt compromise thus learn the truth. The man is 
 revealed in a moment of time. He is true as steel, 
 
 117 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 honest as the day, with deep affection beneath the 
 outward harshness. He scornfully refuses to exculpate 
 himself at the expense of his comrades. He regards as, 
 perhaps, the meanest act of which a public man could 
 be guilty, the sacrifice of a cause or a friend to such an 
 aimless, despicable thing as the clamour of the crowd. 
 
 These were the heroic days of Liberalism. This 
 little book and these seven denounced men become the 
 centre and rallying cry of the movement. Temple had 
 not always been of this faith. At Oxford, with almost 
 all others of his generation, he had been influenced by 
 the Catholic revival. I once heard him describe the 
 fascination exercised over the University by Newman 
 from St. Mary's pulpit, with a voice, as he pictured it, 
 like a silver bell; a pleading for righteousness and 
 the judgment of God with the pierciag simplicity of a 
 child. In the break-up which followed he threw himseK 
 with energy into the liberal movement. The position of 
 the "Essays and Keviews" has now become an accepted 
 commonplace in the Church. As in the history of the 
 dreaded five-point Charter in politics, men now only 
 wonder at the consternation evoked by so mild a pro- 
 gramme. But the spirit of these writers in religion as in 
 politics is as necessary to-day as yesterday. The prin- 
 ciple which underlay the definite position, the right of 
 free inquiry, the acceptance of knowledge, indifference to 
 accusations of dishonesty and the hostility of all that 
 is comfortable and orthodox, were never more needed 
 than now. From the grave the words of the great 
 Archbishop come with a message of encouragement. 
 " I joined in writing this book in the hope of breaking 
 through that mischievous reticence which, go where I 
 would, I perpetually found destroying the truthfulness 
 of religion. I wished to encourage men to sp 
 
 118 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 out." The study of theology and criticism, "so full 
 of difficulties, imperatively demands freedom for its 
 conditions. To tell a man to study, and yet bid him, 
 under heavy penalties, come to the same conclusions 
 with those who have have not studied, is to mock 
 him. If the conclusions are prescribed the study is 
 precluded." 
 
 And if his first legacy to modern Liberalism is a 
 lesson of honesty and of progress, his second, no less 
 needful, is a lesson of work. He was neither a great 
 thinker, nor a great scholar, nor a great orator. He 
 was in many respects typically English ; practical, not 
 ' visionary, hating humbug and cant, sturdily pursuing 
 his own business. There was work to do, and he set 
 himself to do it. Plodding forward, shifting aside the 
 faint and laggard, trampling down anything that opposed 
 his progress, he drove along the machine : with creak- 
 ing and protest, rusty joints and unoiled hinges: but 
 still ever moving, A worker, he tested others by their 
 work. Not Carlyle himself enforced more emphatically 
 the Gospel of Labour. This was the key to all his 
 ecclesiastical policy so little understood, so much 
 debated. For millinery and sham he had no respect 
 whatever. He disliked ritual, and where he found it 
 hollow and lifeless, he ruthlessly condemned. Amidst 
 endless apocryphal stories two may be accepted as 
 authentic. He always, to the regret of High Church- 
 men, celebrated at the North side of the altar. At 
 one advanced church at which he was to officiate the 
 ingenious authorities had determined to force him to 
 assume the Eastward position. The Bishop found the 
 sides of the altar elaborately barricaded with flowers 
 and greenery. At the proper moment, however, with- 
 out any apparent emotion,, he sturdily tramped through 
 
 119 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 the palms and lilies, and standing amidst the flower- 
 pots, to the astonishment of the congregation, concluded 
 the ceremony with calmness. On another, in one of 
 the dead " Catholic " churches of the West End, he 
 entered at the tail of a long procession marching 
 towards the brilliantly lighted altar. The procession 
 entered the chancel, but without the Bishop. In the 
 hush of surprise a stentorian command resounded from 
 the end of the nave, " Put out those lights." These 
 being hastily extinguished, the Bishop tramped his 
 solitary way up the awestruck church. The vicar 
 afterwards attempted remonstrance. " But at St. 
 
 A s, my lord (naming a church in a poor district), 
 
 you allowed altar-lights." " They've got the kernel as 
 well as the husk," was the discomforting response. 
 
 Yet, despite this habitual attitude, under his rule 
 such developments of ritual were permitted as London 
 had never before seen. So long as work was progressing 
 — in the old language, so long as souls were being 
 gaved — he tolerated the widest divergence in non- 
 , essentials. In London's great welter of heathenism 
 and crime he refused to persecute those whose fruits, 
 however grown, were visibly good. Eitual seemed to 
 him so unimportant, five or five hundred candles, 
 marchings round the church, quaint or picturesque 
 clothing. He would have permitted a procession to 
 enter on their heads if it would have aided the great 
 cause. The result of this toleration was a Church 
 crisis, Mr. Kensit, Lady Wimborne, and a Protestant 
 agitation which disturbed his successors but troubled 
 him not at all. That a man should be in the least 
 moved by popular clamour, or yield to a cause through 
 the noise of its adherents, seemed to him not so much 
 cowardly as absurd. 
 
 120 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 To the last he remained strong in the principles for 
 which he had fought with Gladstone in the old days. 
 Yet he grew profoundly dissatisfied with the condition 
 of English politics. A few months before his death, 
 when we were discussing present-day questions, he 
 suddenly burst in upon us with the conundrum : " But 
 if you could call any living statesman to power, whom 
 would you name?" The answer was impossible. 
 Yet he always refused to attempt to read the future. 
 In a collection of fatuous forecasts of well-known men, 
 " What will the world be like at the end of the 
 century ? " his answer stands terse and characteristic ; 
 " I haven't the slightest idea." I remember an evening 
 when we deliberately attempted to draw from him 
 prophecies of the results of present-day movements. 
 "I don't know," was his invariable reply. He had 
 done his work. He belonged to a vanishing age. He 
 knew his time was short, that a new England had 
 arisen which must find its own leaders and work out 
 its own salvation. 
 
 With others, however, he noted the transference of 
 interest from political to economic questions. To the 
 end he was a strenuous advocate of social reform. Two 
 years before he died he unexpectedly appeared at the 
 Brighton Church Congress in a lethargic discussion 
 on the Housing Question, selecting this, as he said, 
 from all the subjects, that he might emphasise the 
 necessity for its consideration by the Church. It is no 
 secret to state that he was no whole-hearted advocate 
 of the Government's Education policy. The Bill as it 
 stood was fashioned by other hands. Though giving 
 a general assent he regarded it with misgiving. He had 
 not the contempt for " undenominationalism " which is 
 now fashionable. But he recognised the impossibility 
 
 121 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 of the present "religious" teaching in State schools. 
 "It may not be important," I heard him say a few 
 weeks before he died, " whether that or this dogma is 
 taught to children ; but it is important that whatever 
 religion is taught should be believed by the teacher." 
 
 " Some of those whom the gods love die young. 
 This man, because the gods loved him, lingered on to 
 be of immense, patriarchal age, till the sweetness it 
 had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last." 
 Pater's verdict on Michaelangelo naturally rises to 
 the mind in thinking of Temple's last days. To those 
 who only knew him at the close of his long career 
 the popular verdict of harshness seemed incredible. 
 Strength, simplicity, kindliness — these were the pre- 
 vailing impressions. In the vastness of Lambeth 
 Palace he encamped as a temporary occupant and on 
 a journey. Here were the simple iron bedstead, the 
 bare equipment for work, simple furnishing, simple 
 meals, in which one was encouraged to consume barley 
 water — a deplorable drink. Messengers poured in and 
 out, an enormous correspondence flooded to the four 
 quarters of the earth. Around him surged armies of 
 courtiers and flatterers. In the midst was the simple, 
 family life, with, at the centre, the old warrior, with 
 eye dim but force unabated, having borne unscathed 
 through a strange and disordered time the heart of a 
 little child. 
 
 The end found him still at work. A month before it 
 came he was fulfilling his crowded round of engagements, 
 doing the work of ten with an iron constitution which 
 apparently nothing could disturb — rushing over England 
 in long night journeys, preaching, writing, advising, driv- 
 ing forward the machine. Suddenly, and in a moment, 
 the overwrought body collapsed ; he left the House of 
 
 122 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 Lords a dying man. Slowly, continuouely, painlessly 
 the life ebbed away. With tranquillity and a certain 
 blitheness he waited for the end; leaving his work 
 accomplished, carefully taking his farewell of all, 
 apologising in historic words, for being such an uncon- 
 scionable long time a-dying. \ I like to think of him t\,s 
 seen in the evening service in Lambeth Chapel — amidst 
 the memorials of innumerable transitory generations, in 
 the broken lights and shadows, a strong and heroic figure 
 reciting with unfaltering accents the creed of that 
 faith which had sustained him for eighty years. An 
 elemental force vanished with him, a great personality. 
 Requiem etemam dona ei Domine : et lux perpetua 
 hiceat ei, 
 
 n 
 
 Westcott's life is the revelation of a character 
 rather than a record of -ecclesiastical history. Out- 
 wardly there is the career of usefulness: a fellow- 
 ship at Trinity, a mastership at Harrow, canonries at 
 Peterborough and Westminster, a Cambridge professor- 
 ship ; finally, the great Durham bishopric. But a 
 similar course has been followed by many energetic and 
 mediocre persons now reposing in unremembered graves. 
 Behind all this, which in Westcott's case was accidental, 
 is the life of thought in which he really lived. Like 
 his comrade Hort in his country parsonage this man in 
 the main was concerned with the things of the spirit. 
 
 It was a life of almost incredible toil combined with 
 an ascetic simplicity. As an undergraduate, we hear of 
 work from five in the morning untU past twelve at night, 
 with scanty intervals for meals and recreation, and a 
 biscuit for lunch. Later, "when we came down to 
 prayers in the morning," says his son, " we would 
 
 123 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 find him writing away with a pile of finished letters 
 before him, and when we went to bed he was working 
 still." At Harrow he stood for extreme simplicity of 
 living and a plea for the disciplined life. Here he 
 elaborated the idea of the " Coenobium," a kind of 
 community of families committed to three ends — ^the 
 conquest of luxury, the disciplining of intellectual 
 labour, religious exercises. The scheme was character- 
 istic both of the splendour of the ideal and the inability 
 to appreciate the littleness and vanities which make such 
 an ideal impossible. " Whenever we children showed 
 signs of greediness," says his son, " we were assm-ed 
 that such things would be unheard of in the Coenobium. 
 We viewed the establishment of the Coenobium with 
 gloomy apprehension." Even Harrow was unable to 
 fasten upon him the usual intellectual sterility of the 
 public-school mastership. Volumes of books on Chris- 
 tian philosophy and textual criticism were being issued 
 all the seventeen years. This devoted intellectual 
 labour was associated with a complete indifference to 
 most things which men delight in. Every form of 
 luxury was to him abhorrent. "When circumstances 
 compelled him so to do, he practically went without a 
 meal." He had an extreme disinclination to spend 
 money on himself. " He would insist on pronouncmg 
 threadbare and green coats, condemned by the universal 
 voice of the family, as ' excellent.' " In the enforced 
 display of the bishopric he would sit huddled up with 
 his back to the horses in his carriage, as a kind of mute 
 protest against such outrageous luxury. The sense of 
 life's intense seriousness was ever with him. "Holi- 
 days he could hardly take : he found no joy in them, 
 and more especially so in later years. Expenditure on 
 self was all but impossible." 
 
 124 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 The result of this ascetic toil was the accumulation 
 of vast knowledge in varied fields. He was a scholar, 
 in the exact sense, of European reputation. But with 
 this detailed, textual research, which came to be the 
 distinguishing feature of the Cambridge school of 
 theology, he combined a wide acquaintance with other 
 forms of science. He had dabbled in geology and 
 botany, and was familiar with all those scientific 
 discoveries which were filling the age in which he lived 
 with noisy echoes. He had read deep in philosophy, 
 ancient and modem. Comte, Browning, Baur, Mazzini, 
 were the modern writers to whom he owed most. In 
 the last years of life he commenced with all the ardour 
 of youth the study of those social questions which he 
 held were the real problems of the coming time. The 
 novel was the only form of literature with which he was 
 unfamiliar. " The Scarlet Letter," " Jane Eyre," 
 " ViUette," " Romola," " John Inglesant,"— this is the 
 pathetic list of his library. His strange failures in 
 reading men, the atmosphere of detachment which 
 made so much of his work difficult for the man of the 
 street, may be due to the dwelling in a universe of 
 ideas alien to the world of modern fiction. 
 
 His name will always be associated with two main 
 efforts : the elucidation of a text and the preaching of a 
 philosophy. On the one side he is linked with Light- 
 foot and Hort in that critical and constructive examina- 
 tion of the New Testament canon which was the special 
 work of the Cambridge school. The Westcott and 
 Hort text, an epoch-making book, " probably the most 
 important contribution to Biblical learning in our 
 generation " ; the great commentaries on St. John and 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Revised Version of 
 the Bible, are the permanent memorials of his life- 
 
 125 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 work. On the other side, he stands by himself, rather 
 pathetically alone. He elaborated a Christian philosophy 
 which the student found mystical and the ordinary man 
 perplexing. It was alien to the prevailing theology of 
 the Oxford Movement, hard, clear-cut, dogmatic. It 
 found no acceptance among the Evangelicals, with their 
 demands for emotional satisfaction in a simple creed. 
 It was distrusted by the new Broad Church divines, 
 cheerfully iconoclastic and hating mystery. Occasion- 
 ally the reader caught an illuminating sentence. 
 Gleams of a splendour never felt before would dis- 
 close abysses of spiritual meaning behind the terms 
 of a dead dogma. To a few, this teaching invested 
 all things with a light that never was on sea or 
 land. But, for the most part, there he waited alone. 
 In the early days he had passed through a period of 
 terrible doubt. He speaks of a wild storm of unbelief 
 " from the midst of which he gazed on the hundreds who 
 conform with a kind of awe and doubt — a mixture of won- 
 der and suspicion." He emerged on to the height with 
 a clear apprehension of spiritual things. All his later 
 years he seemed to possess a spiritual vision, to walk 
 amongst his companions in the cave with something of 
 the bewilderment of those who had seen the light in 
 Plato's allegory. One of his best-known worts was at 
 first suppressed, owing to the demand for modification 
 made by the Society for the Propagation of Christian 
 Knowledge. In the period of his first writings the 
 orthodox were profoundly perplexed by his utterances. 
 It is difficult to summarise his teaching. It has 
 been said that Westcott shifted thei central fact of 
 Christianity from the Atonement to the Incarnation. 
 The vision of a humanity burdened with its sins and 
 haunted by terrors of judgment became changed to the 
 
 126 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 vision of a humanity inspired by hope and waiting 
 expectant for a glory that shall be revealed. The con- 
 cluding lines of Browning's " Karshish " sum up 
 Westcott's creed. " The Bishop does not seem to 
 believe in the Fall," it was complained of him. He 
 scarcely realised the depth of degradation to which 
 human nature could xlescend. When confronted with 
 some particularly appalling case of clerical immorality 
 he would franjdy reject the overwhelming evidence 
 adduced, upon the ground that his categories of being 
 did not include the existence of such a monster. 
 "Humanity," he was never tired of asserting, is "not 
 a splendid shrine deserted by a great king, but a living 
 body stirred by noble thoughts which cannot for ever be 
 in vain." 
 
 This consciousness of the supreme greatness of 
 humanity made him one of the prophets of his genera- 
 tion. In the Incarnation he found the key to all 
 that social enthusiasm for which he is best remembered. 
 "A critic asks me," he sadly complains at the end, 
 " 'what has the Incarnation to do with war . . . with 
 the organisation of industry, with buying and selling — 
 with expenditure ? ' That such questions can be asked 
 by a man of average intelligence is a terrible proof of 
 our failure to make our message known." Eeligion 
 must come from the twilight of the Churches, he was 
 always insisting, aiid into the ways of men. So he 
 preached Christian Socialism, and became founder 
 and first President of the Christian Social Union, 
 perplexing the orthodox and respectable with the sight 
 of a bishop concerning himself with trade unions and an 
 eight hours' day. He exhibited the rare combination, 
 of the mystic with the practical man. The most spiritual 
 or* modem religious teachers descended most com- 
 
 127 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 pletely into concern with the petty questions of the 
 day. 
 
 Some very pleasing pictures remain of scenes in 
 Westcott's long and devoted life. There is the most 
 touching combat in self-effacement between him and 
 Lightfoot, each refusing to put himself as a candidate 
 for the professorship before the other. There are the 
 two sermons in "Westminster Abbey preached by the 
 solitary sorrower of the " triumvirate " over the grave 
 of his lifelong friends. There is one aspect of the man 
 in the somewhat eerie meditations in the great 
 cathedral at midnight, spent in thought and prayer and 
 communion with the dead ; a silent figure in the moon- 
 light, " when the vast building was haunted with 
 strange lights and shadows, and the ticking of the great 
 clock sounded like some giant's footsteps in the deep 
 silence." 
 
 In sharp contrast, but all of a piece, is the dramatic 
 scene at Auckland Castle, when the great coal strike, 
 which had desolated a thousand homes, was settled 
 by the personal pleading of the bishop. He invited 
 the masters and men to the castle, presided at a 
 ioint conference, speaking earnestly for peace: then 
 left them in separate rooms, himself acting as in- 
 teraiediary. The long hours passed, and no settle^ 
 ment arrived: the crowd which had gathered in the 
 town pressed up to the palace, waiting with painful 
 tension for any news. All the North was hanging on 
 the result. He pleaded with the owners for concession, 
 urging them to put aside all the aroused bitterness, to 
 consider the question as it would be judged in the years to 
 come. Finally, the force of sheer goodness prevailed : the 
 owners consented to the compromise : the rest was a wild 
 scene of rejoicing and gratitude in a, thousand homes, 
 
 128 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 Effort, devotion, utter humility, shine through all. 
 " If I had ever dared to form a wish," he writes con- 
 cerning one offer. " Here I have learnt to feel my own 
 deficiencies most keenly," he confesses to another, 
 " and I have found, too, those who are willing and able 
 to teach and to train me." With all this humility and 
 kindness there is no essential weakness. He warned 
 as well as encouraged. His occasional outbursts of 
 wrath, as in the correspondence concerning the action 
 of the bishops about the Revisers' Communion, are 
 almost terrible in their intensity. 
 
 He saw and rebuked the vices of his age as well as 
 its greatness. Many of his words were of doubt and 
 warning. Here was no soft and easy gospel to be 
 accepted by a nation living on the energies of the past 
 and noisily proclaiming itself immortal. "Will the 
 future say," he asked of this generation, " that crumb- 
 ling heap, that desolate iron surface, tells of work 
 performed only for the moment, which has cumbered the 
 earth with ruins ; those coarse and mean phrases which 
 have corrupted our language, tell of men who had no 
 reverence and no dignity; that class antagonism which 
 torments us, tells of the selfishness of our fathers, who, 
 when there was yet time, failed to bind men to men as 
 fellow-labourers iU the cause of God ? " 
 
 Assuredly never was such warning more needed than 
 in the time when the voice has become silent. 
 
 The keynote of this long life of single purpose is 
 summed up in one of his great sentences, " To make of 
 life one harmonious whole, to realise the invisible, to 
 anticipate the transfiguring majesty of the Divine 
 Presence, is all that is worth living for." To the end 
 his unclouded optimism never failed him. He lived on 
 the height. Something of the glory seemed to have 
 
 129 K 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 descended on him as, with rapt face and eyes which saw 
 things hidden from the crowd aronnd, he proclaimed 
 the reality of an unseen world or the coming of the 
 universal restoration. He lived in constant communion 
 with spiritual powers. In the cathedral or his own 
 chapel at night the dead seemed very near him. Those 
 who have heard him proclaim his gospel will long 
 remember how the little shrunken figure became trans- 
 formed, and the almost painful humility vanished, and 
 the voice took a sudden note of power, when, oblivious 
 to the presence of the listening crowd, he proclaimed 
 the spiritual message which he found almost too great 
 for human utterance. Preceded by all his old com- 
 rades, leaving the memory of a great example, with- 
 out fear, but with all his own humility and confession 
 of sinfulness, he passed triumphant to his rest. 
 
 m 
 
 The life of Creighton presents a threefold interest. 
 The first is the impression of the thought and change 
 of a stirring time as reflected in the mind of a man 
 of receptive and catholic sympathies. The second 
 is the spectacle not only of history making, but of his- 
 tory being made, by one called to play a great part in 
 the world's affairs. The third is the actual study of 
 one of the most fascinating (in a sense one of the most 
 baffling) of the great men of the later Victorian age, 
 who would have been almost equally a subject of 
 interest had he been Bishop of Mesopotamia or 
 Valparaiso. 
 
 Mandell Creighton was the son of a joiner of Carlisle, 
 who had made a runaway match at Gretila Green with 
 
 130 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 a kind-hearted woman, "very quick with her tongue." 
 Childhood " over the shop in Castle Street " was stern, 
 hard, rather joyless. He passed to Durham, then to 
 Oxford ; a brilliant career culminating in a Fellowship 
 at Merton. The age was an age of wide disbelief, when 
 all sane and clever men at Oxford were supposed to 
 have abandoned Christianity. Creighton was chiefly 
 renowned as a man who smoked multitudinous cigarettes 
 and read multitudinous French novels, and in conversa- 
 tion held pre-eminent place for the audacity of his 
 paradoxes. His ordination was " much commented on." 
 He himself acknowledged " that it was the habit in 
 Oxford to assume that a man who took orders must be 
 either a fool or a knave, and that as people could not 
 call him a fool they had concluded that he must be a 
 knave." " He never wore his spiritual heart on his 
 sleeve," is the judgment which would apply to all his 
 life, " and for this reason many thought he had none to 
 wear." 
 
 Then, too, as always, he never suffered fools gladly, 
 and held a hearty contempt for the majority of his 
 fellow-men. " We are told that all men are liars," 
 remonstrates a friend, " we are nowhere told that all 
 men are fools." " The strongest compound of grimness 
 and tenderness that I ever saw or conceived," is a 
 description. 
 
 " Dull and solemn people," writes a contemporary, 
 "thought him flippant; shallow people thought him 
 insincere. No man of his time was so constantly, so 
 freely, and so variously canvassed, not always favourably, 
 but invariably as a rare and strange portent, not to be 
 readily classified in any familiar category of human 
 nature. I remember that once, on a tour in Holland with 
 two friends, we talked of him daily and never exhausted 
 
 131 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 the subject ; and years afterwards I was told that it had 
 become so much the custom to discuss him at the 
 shooting-lodge of one of his friends in Scotland, that 
 some one proposed in fun to levy a fine on any one who 
 mentioned his name." 
 
 From the early time he showed his entire concern in 
 the practical life, in the historical method of approach- 
 ing questions. Of Darwin's discovery, " the whole 
 matter seems to me to be very ingenious and amusing," 
 he writes airily ; " but I have not time for it, and would 
 rather read some Italian history." 
 
 After his marriage he vanished from Oxford into a 
 Northumbrian village, and was Vicar of Embleton for 
 nine years — years of devoted work and incessant study 
 of which the "History of the Papacy" was the main 
 fruit. From thence he was called to the new Dixie 
 Professorship at Cambridge, where he astonished the 
 dull by his " frivolity." " Nowhere did he talk such 
 nonsense as in our Combination Room on Sundays," 
 was the admiring verdict of a friend. 
 
 After a canonry at Worcester, combined with his 
 professorship, and a momentary exchange to Windsor, 
 he was suddenly promoted to succeed Magee as Bishop 
 of Peterborough. He had absolutely no wish for office. 
 " My mind will go to seed," was his characteristic 
 verdict. " I shall utter nothing but platitudes for the 
 rest of my life, and everybody will write letters in the 
 newspapers about my iniquities." The latter judgment 
 was as completely fulfilled as the former falsified. His 
 work at Peterborough first revealed to the general world 
 same of his astonishing powers, and there was a universal 
 approval when the call brought him to London. 
 
 His five years in Londpn, in five of the most crowded 
 and momentous years of the century, stamped them- 
 
 132 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 Belves deep upon the history of the time. He always 
 resented the time spent in curbing human folly. " Every 
 ass in the diocese thinks that he has a right to come and 
 bray in my study," was one characteristic complaint- 
 London he branded as " this inhuman spot." " The 
 world which he defined as ' the activities of this life 
 with God left out ' seemed to him to invade everything 
 in London." He found himself in the toils of inter- 
 minable ritual disputes. He despised both parties — 
 the one for their foolishness, the other for their 
 bigotry and reliance on the secular arm ; and scarcely 
 took the trouble to conceal his contempt. His letters 
 aboimd in firm common-sense which neither party found 
 acceptable — ^which, indeed, he did not expect either 
 party to find acceptable. " We are all agreed in 
 regretting that there should be such a person as Mr. 
 Kensit," he wrote to one party ; "but the question how 
 best to deal with him is a purely practical one." 
 " There is no reason why your method should not be 
 tried," he wrote to Sir William Harcourt on the other 
 side, " except that no one wishes to try it, but only to 
 abuse the bishops for not trying it." 
 
 His activity was astonishing. He went everywhere 
 and did everything — generally two things at once. His 
 sayings afforded unfailing copy for the journalists 
 whom he so heartily despised. " I seem to be always 
 talking," is his complaint. Men wondered when the 
 Bishop of London found time to say his prayers. 
 
 It killed him in five years. At the end " he did not 
 seem as if he wished to live." He passed away with 
 " God " on his lips. 
 
 " For sheer cleverness Creighton beats any man I 
 know" was Archbishop Temple's judgment. "The 
 most alert and universal intelligence that existed in this 
 
 133 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 island at the time of his death " was the verdict of 
 Lord Kosebery. 
 
 All his life he remained aloof from contemporary 
 politics, but his judgments are full of wisdom. In 1880 
 he definitely came out on the platform to support the 
 Liberals against Disraeli's Imperialism, demanding that 
 " we might go back from assertions of our ascendency 
 to the duties which we met with at home." Later he 
 is appalled at " the mess " the Liberals are making of 
 it, and prophesies " a Conservative reaction that will 
 last our lifetime." In 1881, with an almost uncanny 
 foresight, he can foretell the future : — 
 
 " England is not healthy ; she is going through a 
 process of economical readjustment of which no one can 
 see the end ; it may result in the development of new 
 forces, or it may be the beginning of a quiet decay — not 
 decay exactly, but subsidence. All this sorely exercises 
 the mind of the spectator and fills him with wonder. 
 Trade and agriculture cannot any longer go on 
 the old lines; will they find new lines or will they 
 collapse ? Already I see the doctrine of Protection 
 taking a strong hold of the mind of separate classes. 
 I believe that separate interests will coalesce against 
 the public good and against the voice of wisdom. This, 
 by bringing in a fallacious solution, will suspend the 
 real settlement of the question and make a mess." 
 
 He distrusted Gladstone because of his enthusiasms 
 and emotions. All his life he was an enemy of emotion 
 and enthusiasm in public affairs. " Imperial policy will 
 drive home affairs into a corner " was a verdict in 1885. 
 He became a Unionist at the great disruption. In the 
 Armenian agitation he branded the movement as " hope- 
 lessly Pecksniffian," because it refused the only practical 
 step, " to hand the whole thing over to Russia." In the 
 
 134 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 South African trouble he condemned (as so many) the 
 Chamberlain policy, but accepted the war when it 
 broke out. " I don't like war with the Transvaal," he 
 wrote just before the crisis. " It may be a short cut to 
 great schemes, but we are great enough to wait." At 
 the end he took a gloomy view of the future : — 
 
 "We are ignorant and refuse to learn. We are 
 arrogant and refuse to sympathise. We believe in 
 our general capacity : we rejoice in our national wea,lth. 
 I think that in a few years our wealth will diminish in 
 comparison with that of the United States ; our com- 
 merce will be threatened by German competition, 
 founded on better education and receptive intelligence. 
 We must urge these considerations — and must not 
 settle down, to live in a fool's paradise. I feel that 
 the next ten years will be a very critical period for 
 England." 
 
 He was the frankest and most natural person of the 
 time. Whatever he thought he immediately spoke out 
 or wrote down in his letters. The results were often 
 disastrous. " If one stops to be judicious or wise or 
 discreet," was his apology, " one simply becomes dull." 
 He was undoubtedly "too clever": in many respects 
 a kind of ecclesiastical Bernard Shaw; producing the 
 same devastating effect on the plain man. He had no 
 self-restraint, and to the end remained as one of those 
 children whose company he most loved. He was 
 inclined to treat all men, especially enthusiasts, as 
 children; and the difficulties of the Ritual agitation 
 were greatly increased by his inability to convince the 
 violent partisans that he did not think them children 
 quarrelling over toys and playthings. He hated all 
 enthusiasm, all fanaticism. I remember hearing him 
 preach a University sermon at Cambridge— a sermon 
 
 135 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 on "Liberty," in many respects remarkable. He 
 stalked into the pulpit, unrolled a conspicuous manu- 
 script, read hurriedly in a passionless voice without ever 
 lifting his eyes from the paper, and without a sign of 
 emotion stalked out again at the end. It was impossible 
 to imagine anything more chilling. Later, as chairman 
 of the London Diocesan Conference, he sat at a table on 
 the dais writing interminable letters with an aspect of 
 cold detachment, while rival factions howled at each 
 other in the hall beneath. At the end he rose and 
 dismissed the whole thing (so it seemed) with a few 
 words of frigid contempt. He would go down to 
 some suburb to bless the local haSsock, and the Mayor 
 and chief citizens and clergy would be gathered 
 together, bursting with enthusiasm ; and he would rap 
 out some statement as that "this kind of thing bores 
 me to death," or that " the horrible thought has just 
 struck me that I shall be doing this sort of thing ten 
 years hence " ; and the fervour would somehow vanish 
 from the ceremony. 
 
 " Bored " and " amused," as the greatest evil and 
 the greatest good in life, run through his judgment. His 
 view of his fellow-men, and especially of Englishmen, 
 was of the lowest. " Sometimes it seems to me as if 
 the world was made up of moral invalids and moral 
 lunatics," was one verdict. The " heart of the English 
 people " he described as " the very last place I should 
 wish to be found in — -a sloppy sort of place, I take it." 
 Of history, "I know that we ought to believe," he wrote, 
 "that mighty movements always swayed the hearts of 
 men. So they have — when they made for their pecuniary 
 interest. But I believe that ideas were always second 
 thoughts in politics — they were the garb with which 
 men covered the nudity of their practical desires. I 
 
 136 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 mean that I can never ask myself first, 'What 
 mighty ideas swelled in the hearts of men ? ' But, 
 ' What made men see a chance of saving sixpence, of 
 gaining sixpence, or escaping from being robbed of 
 sixpence ? ' What man was clever eijough to devise a 
 formula round which men could rally for this purpose? " 
 " The English mind has no grasp of ideas," he declared, 
 " and no sense of proportion. Indeed, the English- 
 man has no mind at all; he only has an hereditary 
 obstinacy." 
 
 He heartily despised our English education, from the 
 elementary school upwards. He branded the nation as 
 a whole as in that dangerous condition of "half- 
 knowledge " which was more dangerous than ignorance. 
 He exhibited no sympathy at all with the newer ideals 
 of social reform, and seemed to care nothing for the 
 problems of London's poverty. His real enthusiasms 
 were reserved for knowledge, for liberty, and for that 
 Church of England which he called " the nation looked 
 at from the religious side," whose sober and unemotional 
 piety seemed to him the type of all that is best amongst 
 the religions of the world. 
 
 He was a wayward, always interesting, lovable 
 character. He hated getting up in the morning. He 
 hated the high mountains, "the rubbish heaps of 
 Nature's workshops." He was passionately fond of 
 children, who were entirely devoted to him. This love 
 of children he never discovered till he was nearly thirty ; 
 more fortunate than Herbert Spencer, who pathetically 
 realised the attraction of children's society only when 
 an old man. 
 
 " Probably no one," writes Mrs. Creighton, "was ever a 
 better hand at a romp than he was. He would toss the 
 children about like balls, and allow them to ill-treat him 
 
 137 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 in any way they liked. He was also an adept at telling 
 nonsense stories ; sometimes on a walk with the children 
 hanging round him, each struggling to get as close as 
 possible, and their elders also trying to keep near enough 
 to listen ; or lying full length on the hearthrug before 
 the fire with all the children sitting upon him, making 
 what he called a ' regular pie.' He seemed to enjoy 
 his own inventions fully as much as his hearers, as he 
 spun them out of his brain without a moment's pause." 
 
 At Sandringham, just after being appointed to the 
 Bishopric of London, " yesterday afternoon," he wrote, 
 " I was careering round the hall with the Duke of York's 
 eldest son on my shoulder, and Lord Salisbury looking 
 at my agility with amazement." A pretty story is told 
 of an incident of Queen Victoria's last visit to London. 
 Standing with his chaplain in the crowd, to see her 
 pass, the Bishop noticed a child who was too small 
 to be able to see; so he gave his chaplain his hat 
 to hold, and lifted the child to a safe seat on his 
 shoulder whence it could see everything. 
 
 Beneath all the cleverness and scornful judgment of 
 men — the brilliancy and glitter and capacity which 
 astonished so many — was the inner life of affection 
 and devotion. I remember being surprised by the 
 sudden depth of feeling displayed in one of the last of 
 his sermons — a Lent address to a small audience — upon 
 the words " Incorruptible and undefiled and that fadeth 
 not away." The purpose of life, his deliberate verdict, 
 was " an opportunity for loving." " The longer I live," 
 he wrote in those last years, " the more deeply I am 
 convinced that the true and abiding qualities are not 
 the intellectual qualities, but the qualities of absolute 
 simplicity and straightforwardness, and the desire for 
 the right." 
 
 138 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 " To me the one supreme object of human life," he 
 confessed in a rare revelation of himself, " is, and 
 always has been, to grow nearer to God ; and I regard 
 my own individual life as simply an opportunity of 
 offering myself to Him." 
 
 IV 
 
 The main outline of Boiling's life is known to 
 all. Here was a combination of diverse elements 
 which caught the imaginations of men, and gave him 
 a supreme interest amongst ministers of religion to the 
 lay mind. Humanity in its larger aspects, naturalness, 
 simplicity, a love of life and of all the varied men and 
 women in the world, especially the sinners, the poor, 
 and those outside the pale of the Church ; these were 
 some outstanding features of a life of single-hearted 
 devotion to one high cause. He never felt at home until 
 he escaped from the atmosphere of the theological 
 college and the dull respectabilities of conventional 
 society, and settled down in his Portsmouth slum, among 
 the people whom he loved. There was always much 
 wilMness in him. The element of revolt was never 
 far from the surface. The " dear street-corner out-of- 
 work people," as he calls them, were always more con- 
 gruous to him than the ordinary well-to-do ratepayer. 
 Brought up in the old evangelical tradition, his was a 
 mind naturally catholic, delighting in symbol and cere- 
 monial expression and the light and colour of service 
 and procession. He had little reverence for the past, 
 and about minute points of ritual he cared not at all. 
 But the possibility of the magnificence of church and 
 ceremony in the midst of the huddled, squalid dwellings 
 of the poor made to him an irresistible appeal. His 
 
 139 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 artistic sense was limited. Elaborate music he always 
 hated, and the sesthetic Catholicism which combined 
 contempt of the common people with the sensuous 
 appeal of " Cathedral " service, he regarded as an 
 enemy of mankind. But the Catholic discipline he 
 frankly accepted, He held that irreparable wrong had 
 been done to these common people by the practical 
 neglect of the Sacraments for bo many centuries. And 
 he recognised that the dreary condition of minds vacant 
 and dulled with an entirely material outlook and little 
 power of resistance to the forces of evil — the condition 
 in which he found great masses of the neglected poor — 
 could only be broken up and restored to a living faith 
 by the full inheritance of Sacramental worship. 
 
 The years at St. Agatha's were the great years of hia 
 life. The later period was more fruitful in lessons for 
 the time. From the astonishing success of his Ports- 
 mouth parish, with the enthusiasm of all classes of the 
 town for a vigorous social reformer, and the utter 
 devotion of his own poor people, he passed, after a 
 year of wandering, into the grey, dead atmosphere of 
 East London. The earlier successes could not be 
 repeated in such a dreary environment. " Religion 
 has, so to speak," he confessed, "gone to pieces; there 
 is no opposition; we do not care enough to oppose. 
 God is not in any of our thoughts ; we do not even fear 
 Him. We face death with perfect composure, for we 
 have nothing to give up and nothing to look forward to. 
 Heaven has no attraction, because we should be out of 
 place there. And Hell has ho terrors." 
 
 The conviction of the utter wrongness of such a 
 condition of lassitude and of the disloyalty of a Church 
 which allowed, without protest, the continuance and 
 propagation of conditions creating this dreadful ac- 
 
 140 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 quiescence, drove tim in the last few years of his life 
 to assume the function of a prophet. There is, perhaps, 
 something a little incongruous in the idea of this 
 exuherant, happy, rollicking Irishman, who retained 
 through the whole of his life the heart of a child, thus 
 warning grave and learned dignitaries of the menace 
 of the time. But, indeed, it was just this childlike 
 simplicity which gave force to his denunciation. He 
 saw the wrong that was being done on the earth, not 
 with the eyes of one who had grown up in its atmos- 
 phere and accepted its conditions as inevitable, but 
 with the insight and clear power of judgment of a 
 child suddenly confronting the things of the present 
 with the laws of justice and truth. 
 
 Dolling was never a Church defender. He cared 
 nothing at all for the Establishment and all the social 
 influence which the Establishment represents. " If your 
 heart is aflame," he said, "to defend the Church of 
 England, first, at any rate, see that you cleanse 
 her." 
 
 " As to the present so-called crisis," he declared, in 
 the last time of upheaval, " the real crisis, the one that 
 ought to make Churchmen, on their knees in penitence 
 before God, confess their negligence, is that the vast 
 majority of English people care nothing for the Church, 
 many even nothing for God." 
 
 The smug respectability which Dolling's biographer 
 brands as the evil genius of reformed Christendom, was 
 his perpetual enemy. As the end approached and he 
 felt the years passing without seeing any great change, 
 as he measured the condition of such a parish as Poplar 
 against the dull platitudes which he heard in high 
 places, his denunciation took on a fiercer tone. The 
 articles which he published in The Pilot just before his 
 
 141 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 death are a scathing criticism of " the genius of the 
 Church of England." 
 
 " She is tied to a perfectly unworkable system, with 
 no power of adapting herself to modem needs. She has 
 had now for many generations, and still has, a perfect 
 genius for destroying all enthusiasm, a genius for getting 
 rid of her best unless her best will become common- 
 place. Is this too hard a description of the Church of 
 England?" 
 
 In the unhappy bishops he finds the centre and head 
 of the offence. " They have but one opportunist canon 
 of dogma : be commonplace, be respectable, after the 
 sober-minded ritual of the Church of England."* "On 
 no question of any importance, religious or social, have 
 the bishops given any lead to their people unless they 
 have been driven to it." We are left with " nothing 
 but a complacent failure." Undoubtedly the strain of 
 the work, the perpetual begging for the machinery of 
 the parish, and the absence of colour and life, the 
 intolerable weariness and content of his East London 
 people, were here telling upon him. "We are as a 
 whole bloodless and ansemic." " At Portsmouth our 
 chief duty was to repress ; here it is to incite " — this 
 is the burden of his cry. He saw wrongs unrighted all 
 around him ; the poor perishing and no man laying it 
 to heart. He found overcrowding, with the laws pro- 
 tecting the poor always evaded. " My people," was 
 his pathetic appeal, " have been dealt with unjustly." 
 They have " never been given a chance. Think of the 
 houses that they are born in, the overcrowding, the 
 drains, the damp." " The law that safeguards the 
 poor is always in the hands of those who do not put it 
 into force." " Charity only makes people meaner and 
 baser, and will never prove the solution of the problem." 
 
 142 
 
THE CHURCH MILITANT 
 
 He demanded in the names of these disinherited millions, 
 not charity, but justice. The spirit of the child delight- 
 ing in its life gave place to the spirit of the strong man 
 having work laid upon him to do and straitened till 
 it be accomplished. He -went down to his death, 
 appealing to the whole Church " for the righting of 
 wrongs that cry continually into the„ ears of the Lord 
 God of Sabaoth." 
 
 DoUing's radiant personality exercised a unique 
 fascination upon all classes of men. The man was 
 entirely sincere, filled with one persistent enthusiasm, 
 the love of God and man. It is an Irishman with no 
 respect for the sober conventions of English life. Some- 
 times he is singing comic songs with his boys in the 
 smoke-filled atmosphere of cellar or attic. Again, he 
 is leading an agitation against the liquor interest, or for 
 some measure of social progress. Criminals are sent to 
 him, and those who have failed, and all receive welcome. 
 He kept the affection and confidence of Winchester 
 through all struggles and for ten years. He encouraged 
 dancing and healthy joy, and loved especially his riotous 
 soldiers and sailors. His mothers' meeting — whom he 
 addressed as " My Dears " — was one of the most un- 
 conventional of all his gatherings. In his church he 
 varied simple extempore prayer with the elaborate pro- 
 cession and ritual in which his people delighted. He 
 scandalised enormous numbers of respectable persons. 
 " With your ultra-High Church proclivities on the one 
 hand," wrote the Warden of Winchester, " and your 
 Socialistic teaching on the other, no sober-minded and 
 loyal citizen can be expected to support the mission." 
 "Last came Father Dolling," wrote a Protestant paper, 
 " a biretta perched on his most disloyal head." "He 
 stirreth up the people," writes Father Tyrrell, " would, 
 
 143 
 
DE MORTUIS 
 
 I suspect, be the truest formulation of his ecclesiastical 
 iniquities." And the opposition was not only stirred up 
 among the Protestants. His social enthusiasms seriously 
 offended numbers of those who supported his Catholic 
 teaching. He threw open his church in Poplar for a 
 meeting of protest against the East End Water Com- 
 panies. " The withholding of rain from the district," 
 wrote a scandalised shareholder, " is God's punishment, 
 and to ninety-nine Catholics in a hundred, the present 
 visitation upon the East End of London is consequent 
 upon the appointment of Mr. Dolling to St. Saviour's." 
 But at his death the opposition was drowned in the uni- 
 versal recognition that one had gone whose place could 
 never be adequately filled. He has set a new standard 
 in the possibilities of the Church of England and its 
 relation to the life of the poor. He stands within 
 this communion, a figure filled with passionate zeal for 
 iustice and love of those down-trodden by the world ; 
 one of a class mainly, alas ! confined to other branches 
 of the Catholic Church. " Many hard things are being 
 Said against us " — his farewell to St. Agatha's is a 
 Bummai7 of his life — "many doubt our loyalty to the 
 Church of England. But you will believe us, I am sure, 
 when we say that we have had but one single aim, to 
 bring some poor people in a slum in Landport to the 
 knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." 
 
 144 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
"They made me a keeper of the vin&yarAs: hut mime own 
 vmeyard hme I not Icept." 
 
JUNE IN ENGLAND 
 
 THE station has been built where thin branches of 
 railway shoot off on either side from the main 
 stem. And hard by the station have gathered the 
 habitations of men ; so that the passing traveller sees 
 a vision of little red houses nestling amid the cherry 
 and apple orchards, with all round the long fields of 
 hops and growing com. Down these steel tracks, 
 which stretch out straight over the level land till 
 lost in the haze of the horizon, hurries all the traffic 
 of Empire. As we wait, the drowsy afternoon is 
 torn with a shriek and the earth shaken. In a 
 whirlwind of smoke and fire the mail passes that is 
 hurling through our quiet air passengers for Brindisi 
 and Singapore. Then the train from which we have 
 alighted gathers up its belongings and thoughtfully 
 puffs its way after its violent comrade. Finally, in 
 quite leisurely fashion, the quaint collection of carriages 
 in the siding, with the antique locomotive at its head, 
 makes up its mind to depart down one of the divergent 
 branches. Drawing out from the little town sleeping 
 so quietly in the June sunlight, it moves slowly up- 
 wards from the plain towards the villages which lie 
 among the hollows of the hills. 
 
 147 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 The platform of each tiny toy station shows white in 
 the sunshine, with green growing things and climbing 
 roses pushing through the fences and over the white- 
 washed palings. The town traveller, smeared with the 
 hurry and dust of the cities, finds a sudden restfulness 
 and serenity as he alights at one of these. When 
 the train with its burden has passed onward, and the 
 last echoes have died away, something of the great 
 peace of the summer afternoon gathers round him, and 
 envelopes him like a garment. In the little lane which 
 leads from the station to the village the air is filled with 
 the scent of grasses and the new-mown hay. On either 
 side the full fields stretch upwards, with the clover and 
 tall daisies making a tapestry of bright colours. There 
 is no constant stillness. Now a light wind moves along 
 the tree-tops. Insects with gauzy wings are dancing in 
 the light. There is a rustling under the hedges and 
 along the borders of the meadows. You can almost 
 hear the music of the sap as it rises in it& million tiny 
 channels, pushing the growing life outwards into the 
 buds and the petals of the expanding flowers. Life — 
 life everywhere : the song of laughing, overflowing life 
 is the melody sung in exultation and content by all the 
 world in these shining summer days. It is heard 
 proclaimed in the hedges crowded with honeysuckle 
 and wild roses, and the climbing plants rushing 
 upwards towards the sun. It speaks from the little 
 gardens with their fragrant old-fashioned flowers — 
 pinks and sweet-williams, and the glory of the tall white 
 lilies. It riots triumphant in the weeds which have 
 pitched their camps on the sides of all the country 
 lanes, now waist-deep in tangled grasses : with shy blue 
 flowers hiding in their depths, and above a blaze of 
 yellow cups and white stars and crimson bells. A turn 
 
 U8 
 
JUNE IN ENGLAND 
 
 of the lane discloses suddenly the wide panorama of the 
 plain from which we have climbed. Here is a good land 
 and a large : a great green land with scattered red- 
 roofed villages, and standing from their midst the white 
 cones of the hop-kilns and the dark towers of village 
 churches. In the boundaries of a remote distance 
 brood the blue round-shouldered hills. Across the 
 plain into some mysterious land beyond, run the straight 
 white roads — the white roads which lead to the end of 
 the world. 
 
 The land is fair always — in the later harvest, when 
 the promise of the year is fulfilled, with the cornfields 
 and their sheaves alternating with the hop-vines under 
 the blue sky ; or in the autumn, when all the leaves are 
 gold, and the distant church spires stand out from a 
 background of fiery splendour ; but fairest in the month 
 of expectancy, of preparation, when the year has first 
 gathered together the pageant of the early summer. 
 These are enchanted days, firom the clear brightness of 
 the dawn, through the splendid oppression of the mid- 
 day heat, down the long afternoon, till the sun drops 
 behind the pine-trees, and the light glances level along 
 the world ; and in the gathering twilight a thousand 
 fairy lights kindle over the great plain, and on a still 
 evening you may hear the sound of many bells. " Then 
 shall the earth bring forth her increase." Some- 
 thing of the exultation of the rich fulfilment of the 
 promise has escaped in such seasons even into this 
 island set in its grey northern seas. In the pollen- 
 laden air, with all the scents and music of the world, 
 the old apprehension of the miracle of the passing of 
 dead matter into life, acquires a sudden vivid meaning. 
 " He sendeth the springs into the valleys that run among 
 the hills." " The valleys also shall be so thick with 
 
 149 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 com that they shall laugh and sing." "Before you the 
 mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing, 
 and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." 
 
 n 
 
 In one of these broad fruitful valleys, facing the sun, 
 and open to the delicate air of the south, stands the 
 village which has held, since before the dawn of history, 
 the homes of the passing generations of men. The 
 houses gather round the green, and straggle in lessening 
 avenues down the diverging roads. In the centre is the 
 old inn, the focus of all social life, in the great parlour 
 of which the ancients were wont to gather after the toil of 
 day, smoking their long pipes in a soothing silence. Hard 
 by is the blacksmith's forge ; the pond, with the shadows 
 of the tall trees over it ; and the general shop ; and 
 the little primitive school, with roses trespassing on the 
 palings and knocking at the windows. The little thatched 
 cottages have their wooden gates and fences, and their 
 red-tiled footpaths, and their gardens gay vrith flowers. 
 On the hill-top is the home of a family with a high 
 record of service in Church and State, a great white 
 house vrith a little chapel by it, within all gold and 
 jewelled with coloured glass; and the tombs of old 
 knights in armour with crossed legs and folded hands ; 
 and the petition for the prayer of the passing stranger, 
 that the place of those whose hearts once beat so high 
 with passionate desire may at the last be found in 
 peace. And up the road that winds through the 
 woods and meadows is the little church, with its old 
 Norman arch and square time-beaten tower, gathering 
 round it the bodies of the humble, forgotten dead. 
 Here was the centre of sorrow, exultation and pain : the 
 
 150 
 
JUNE IN ENGLAND 
 
 home of mirth and weeping. The mysteries of Birth 
 and of Death found here a meaning and significance. 
 At length when the tale was told and the lights 
 extinguished here were gathered enemy and friend, saint 
 and sinner, in that sleep which henceforth nothing would 
 disturb but the trump of the Archangel heralding the 
 last judgment of God. Ever within the vision of each 
 patient toiler were the graves of his fathers, the place 
 where he also would one day be laid. The tombs 
 and gravestones travelled backwards to a near past. 
 Behind were the shadowy figures of the dead, resting 
 through all the centuries, whose blood still beat in 
 those now for a season enduring the sunlight and 
 the winter rain. And with the old church itself, 
 the ivy-covered windows and grey arches and tower, 
 which had looked down on so many hurrying gene- 
 rations, thought is swept backward through the gulfs 
 of time into a far-off England; which once hewed 
 the white stone from the rock and raised these towers 
 and high-roofed arches and swinging bells ; that in 
 all the long ages to come, through the great awaken- 
 ings and voyagings which were to carry men into 
 stranger and more hazardous regions than those first 
 pioneers ever dreamt of or desired, this fair building 
 should testify to the imperishable faith of those who 
 thus could build. 
 
 m 
 
 It is all passing: crumbling visibly year by year, 
 almost day by day : and the thought infects vrith a 
 kind of austerity and sadness the glory of these rich 
 June days. For into these remote valleys, long hidden 
 unheeded amongst the hills, at length has entered Pro- 
 
 151 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 gress : and Progress with all the strange uncanny shapes 
 which follow in her retinue. At first the rout came 
 timidly, with hesitating footsteps : later with impetuous- 
 ness and a certain arrogance as of those with an accepted 
 supremacy and triumph. The old inn is going under, 
 defeated in competition with the new house, glaring 
 in the raw hideousness of red and white paintj the 
 enterprise of a firm of neighbouring brewers, with the 
 publican a hired servant ; and active catering for the 
 stranger and the insatiable thirst of travel. The black- 
 smith is overshadowed by the corrugated edifice of the 
 " Mid Kent Motor Company : Eepairs executed at the 
 shortest notice." The great house has been sold by the 
 bankrupt heir of the old line to a family of German 
 Jews. The chapel with its ancient tombs remains 
 undisturbed : but the wealth of South Africa pours as 
 through a funnel into the countryside, and converts the 
 peasants who were sold with the estate into a race of 
 parasites. Secure in comfort liberally dispensed, they 
 are for the most part prepared to return deference and 
 the aping of the old feudal life to masters of alien race 
 and tradition. The little church is in the main deserted. 
 Services are continued, but the bulk of the diminishing 
 village population rarely attend. On Sundays they gather 
 in aimless groups in service-time outside the new public- 
 house or at the cross-roads to see the motors pass. The 
 Motor is indeed the keynote of the newer changes. All 
 these June Sundays a procession of wandering locomo- 
 tives hustles along the roads and avenues. The air 
 is vocal with theu- hooting and shrill cries, the ritual of 
 the New Religion, as they clank and crash through the 
 village, leaving behind the moment's impression of the 
 be-goggled occupants, an evil smell, a cloud of grey 
 dust. 
 
 152 
 
JUNE IN ENGLAND 
 
 Despite this revival of the countryside, the newest 
 industry and recreation which is finding a market 
 for so many derelict estates and bringing a fevered 
 energy along the old roads of England, the people are 
 slowly vanishing from the village and the surrounding 
 fields. No one notes their departure, nor greatly cares 
 whether they go or stay. The new wealthy live in a life 
 of their own, careless of any responsibility for the peasant 
 peoples surrounding them. And the farmer, adjusting 
 with astuteness his industry to the newer conditions, is 
 basking in a brief spell of prosperity. The land is pass- 
 ing back into grass and pasture, cattle taking the place 
 of men. In the new fruit farms and hop farms, during 
 seed-time the work is huddled through by the old men and 
 the children and the few who can be attracted to remain. 
 And the harvest is reaped by nomadic hordes, lured out 
 for a season firom the slums of the cities, blinking in dull 
 wonder at the strange world of sunshine and silences to 
 which they have been conveyed. So first at fruit-picking 
 and later at the hop harvest, the litter of their encamp- 
 ments is manifest in the day, and the lights of their 
 revelry shine far into the night. The casual labourers of 
 the lowest depths of the cities are spewed out over our 
 green land riotous and rejoicing. The old inhabitants, 
 secure in the pride of ancient heritage, gaze dismally at 
 the pandemonium. With such double assistance from 
 above and beneath — wealth which is the plaything of 
 rich men above, poverty which is their scorn below — 
 rural England confronts the exodus of its peoples with 
 a stout heart and undismayed. 
 
 Only the magic of the evening becomes charged 
 with a sadness in the memory of all the days that 
 have gone and the homes henceforth for ever desolate. 
 And in the stillness of the summer night, while the stars 
 
 153 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 flash over the great plain and one by one the lights 
 of the villages go out into darkness, the silence with its 
 cool air and scent of flowers drives home to the heart 
 something of the sorrow of other lights extinguished, as 
 the children of England pass from their own land into 
 the cities where June itself is but a memory. 
 
 IV 
 
 Far to the northward, as the shadow creeps over the 
 valley, one can almost discern the great lights streaming 
 up behind the hiUs. In a momentary picture appears 
 the vision of the labyrinth of lamplit streets, the crowded 
 thoroughfares, the crowded warrens and tenements, the 
 restless life of those who have gone. 
 
 So in this June, with the magic of its passing hours, 
 Time, which changes all good and evil things, fashions 
 from the ruins of the old a newer England. 
 
 164 
 
IN DEJECTION NEAB TOOTING 
 
 HOW to get there ? That is not easy, hecause it 
 is the place of all forgotten things. But across 
 the riyer you may find municipal trams inscribed with 
 its inspiriting title, and by elbowing out a few tired 
 workgirls and edging away aged men of battered 
 physique obtain the desired seat. You journey tardily 
 for immense spaces of time past a moying show of 
 shadow shapes of mean houses, in which airy nothing 
 has taken a local habitation and a name. The texture 
 changes from slum to suburb and from suburb back to 
 slum. At length, amid an impression of rawness, 
 public-house, and red brick, the final jarring outrage 
 of the municipal brake announces your destination. 
 
 The cemetery made it first, established as far from 
 human intercourse as was compatible with a reasonable 
 fare for the conveyance of the remains of the departed. 
 In the old English village the dead were buried in 
 friendly fashion round the most frequented centre, the 
 village church. In the old English town the houses 
 gathered comfortably by the churchyard in a kind of 
 sanitary reformer's nightmare. For in former days it 
 was desired that the dead should be unforgotten, and 
 death should be much in the minds of the living. But 
 in the modem city, eager with its pursuit of material 
 comfort, nothing is less desired than the evidence of the 
 
 155 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 end of it all, the presence of those who before disquieted 
 themselves in vain. The emblems of mortality are apt 
 to weaken the zeal of the pursuit of a comer in pork or 
 an accumulation of much goods in store. So it came 
 to pass that the dead were hurriedly shovelled into the 
 ground at Upper Tooting. 
 
 And as through the presence of the dead the place 
 seemed secure, gradually there followed all other things 
 that it is desirable should be hidden away. Wandering 
 solitary in the Tooting uplands, amidst turnip fields 
 and coarse yellow charlock, I lighted suddenly upon 
 some of these. On every high hUl towered a monstrous 
 building of that particular blend of austerity and dignity 
 dear to the municipal mind. Each was planned of vast 
 spreading dimension, with innumerable blank windows, 
 surrounded by high polished walls. Down below in the 
 valley, conveniently adjacent to the cemetery, was the 
 immense fever hospital, a huddle of buildings of corru- 
 gated iron. In front was a gigantic workhouse ; behind, a 
 gigantic lunatic asylum ; to the right,, a gigantic barrack 
 school ; to the left, a gigantic prison. Other shadowy 
 and enormous buildings rose dimly in the background. 
 Yet even the presence of these monuments of ruin could 
 not arrest the eruption of mean streets, driven forward by 
 the pressure behind them of unthinkable numbers. All 
 round the fever hospital crept their red tentacles, the 
 slums of the future — little red terraces leaning against 
 each other as if reluctant to advance, yet pushed bodily 
 forward, ending in builders' chaos and the indecent, 
 naked skeletons of terraces yet to be. 
 
 The discovery of these fortress prisons threw sudden 
 light upon a problem which had often proved difficult. 
 In Italy and the South the English visitor is shocked 
 and saddened by the spectacle of the old, incredibly 
 
 156 
 
IN DEJECTION NEAR TOOTING 
 
 withered and wrinkled, lying in the sunlight and beg- 
 ging of the passer-by. Where are the similar old of 
 England ? At last I had found them — ^behind high 
 walls, at Upper Tooting, Here also are our brigands, 
 enemies of society, where they can trouble society no 
 more. In the South are the young also, begging, 
 uncared for, unless subtly kidnapped by the Church. 
 Our orphan young, safely guarded from that Church's 
 activities, are secure at Upper Tooting. So by a 
 smooth-working, efficient machinery all superfluous 
 and unnecessary things are sorted out and ticketed 
 and packed into the places prepared for them. 
 
 As I gazed at these large silent palaces on the 
 cold winter afternoon I was able to frame some 
 picture of this ordered and regular existence. All 
 would be smooth, polished, spotlessly clean ; warmed 
 by hot water, and with a steam laundry. Par- 
 ticulars would be scheduled and classified; sanitation 
 upon the latest methods ; dietary calculated by a 
 scientific scale, with bread weighed by the ounce and 
 calculated to a crumb. Discipline would be perfect, and 
 movements directed by the sound of a bell. Each 
 institution had its chaplain. There was probably in 
 each a library of edifying books. Hundreds of thousands 
 of pounds had been expended upon every building, and 
 the expense was borne universally, and, on the whole, 
 contentedly, by the citizens who lived in the warmth 
 far away. Gradually there rose before the inward eye 
 some vision of the life within : and with that vision the 
 apprehension of much before inexplicable. From the 
 turnip fields of Tooting I apprehended the British 
 Empire and something of its meaning ; why we 
 always conquered and never assimilated our conquests ; 
 why we were so just and so unloved. Amidst aliei? 
 
 157 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 races we have brought rest and security, order out 
 of chaos, equality of justice, a patient service of recti- 
 tude which is one of the wonders of the world. Yet 
 there is not one amongst these alien peoples who 
 would lift a finger to ensure the perpetuation of our 
 rule, or shed a tear over its destruction. For the spirit 
 of that Empire — clean, efficient, austere, intolerably 
 just — is the spirit which has banished to these forgotten 
 barrack-prisons and behind high walls the helpless 
 young and the helpless old, the maimed, the restless, 
 and the dead. 
 
 Night fell as thus dismally I mused amongst the 
 vegetable gardens of Upper Tooting. The fortresses 
 which marked the bulwarks of British civilisation 
 loomed menacing in the twilight. A cold wind stirred 
 the discoloured grasses. A bell clanged moumfolly 
 from the distant prison. I shivered and fled the scene : 
 with a vague discomfort which did not disappear till I 
 had again mingled with the procession of mean street 
 and shabby edifice ; had recrossed the river and recog- 
 nised again the kindly familiar buildings, the ample 
 eating-houses, the crowds, if insurgent, unconfined. I 
 shall never see Tooting again, but the memory of it will 
 mingle with many a disordered dream. And when I 
 hear, as hear I do daily for my sins, large men with 
 chains and seals and rings discoursing upon modem 
 Imperialism, the Empire, the decadence of Southern 
 races, and the unparalleled results of modern progress ; 
 I say nothing, for nothing could make them understand. 
 But there rises the vision of the bleak hUls and the 
 fortress prisons crowning them, gaunt and silent in 
 the dying day. And the eloquence becomes charged 
 with an atmosphere of varying emotion: ironical j a 
 little fantastic ; not lacking in tears. 
 
 168 
 
THE BUBDEN OF LONDON 
 
 " I \0 not send a philosopher to London," wrote 
 -l—^ Heine, " and for heaTen's sake do not send a 
 poet. The grim seriousness of all things, the colossal 
 monotony, the engine-like activity, the moroseness even 
 of pleasure, and the whole of this exaggerated London 
 will break his heart." The statement appears to the 
 plain man but the sneer of the unpleasant foreigner, 
 scarce concealing his eager envy. The stuccoed 
 squares, the grave evidences of accumulation, the lines 
 of terraces attesting a placid opulence — small wonder, 
 thinks the plain man, that the unpleasant foreigner 
 gnashes his teeth and rails in fury. And those to 
 whom the plain man counts for nothing and the 
 stuccoed terrace appears but vanity turn again, and yet 
 again, to hymn the praise of "London." The city 
 standing " at the entering of the sea," the picturesque 
 centre of the commerce of the world ; the golden glory 
 of Piccadilly in a summer sunset; the river with its 
 dreams of a dead past that cannot die, immortalised in 
 the " London Voluntaries " ; the mystery and magic of 
 the November twilight in street and alley — who has not 
 cut his tooth in salad days with the first proclamation 
 of these discoveries ? 
 
 Only with widened knowledge and the greynesa 
 which life brings does the aspirant learn that these 
 
 159 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 are not London. He has fallen into the common error 
 of mistaking "London" for London. London is not 
 the City, spinning the financial web of the world. Nor 
 is London the squares and parks and gardens westward, 
 and the places of healthful or of desolate pleasure. 
 These are but the accidents and chance development : 
 alien to the essence, the soul of London. As a pleasure 
 city " London " is surpassed by Vienna, as a centre of 
 wealth by New York, as a home of art and literature by 
 Paris or Pekin. But London is neither a pleasure city 
 nor a centre of wealth nor a home of art and literature. 
 London is an aggregation — amorphous and chaotic : 
 six and a quarter millions of humanity. The aggrega- 
 tion is composed of a homogeneous substance : the City 
 Dweller — a novelty in the world — gazing out upon the 
 universe from a crowded street, in a swarming mob, 
 from over the shoulders or beneath the legs of his 
 fellows. He is coagulated into a broad smudgy ring 
 round the city which lives and moves. He dwells 
 apart from the city which desires and is satisfied. 
 Bealisation of his existence, in its aimlessness and 
 acquiescence, chills as with a sudden bleakness the 
 feverish enthusiasm of the minor poet for the glory 
 and greatness of London. 
 
 Who will interpret the soul of this London— this 
 condensation of the unimportant which for a century 
 has sucked in the life of the country districts, and is 
 now turning out a third or fourth generation crushed, 
 distorted, battered into futility by perpetual struggle 
 towards no rational end? Observers have attempted 
 the task, and all acknowledged failure. G. W. 
 Steevens, after sizing up America and India, is bidden 
 to perform similar service for London. He walks 
 through it from south to north, from east to west. 
 
 160 
 
THE BURDEN OF LONDON 
 
 He notes its markets, its food consumption, its 
 drainage system; he finds himself bewildered, baffled. 
 He abandons the effort as beyond his powers. Charles 
 Booth assails the problem with a staff of helpers. He 
 issues seventeen stout volumes, life, labour, religion, or 
 the lack of it, of the people — Class A, Class B, maps of 
 blue, yellow, and red of brilliance and complexity. He 
 confesses he is no nearer estimation at the end of it all. 
 Figm-es by the hundred thousand, woven into curves, or 
 condensed into tables, statistics of overcrowding, of 
 drunkenness, of pauperism, of crime, all pass like a tale 
 of little meaning, though the words are strong. The 
 age still waits for the interpreter of this, the strangest 
 riddle of the modern world. 
 
 Yet this essential London should not be a compli- 
 cated study. Knowing the life of one, you know the 
 life of all. Only no one has yet apprehended the life 
 of that one. The city is, for the most part, an end- 
 less series of replicas — similar streets, similar people, 
 similar occupations : crowded existence, drifting through 
 the choked and narrow ways. You journey on the 
 tardy tram by stages linking together conspicuous 
 gin-palaces, the only landmarks of successive regions : 
 now you are in "Walworth," now in " Peckham," 
 again in "Deptford." The varying titles are useful but 
 deluding. The stuff is homogeneous, woven of drab 
 buildings and a life set in grey. Lay down an inter- 
 minable labyrinth of mean two-storied cottages. Pepper 
 the concoction plentifully with churches, school-build- 
 ings, and block-dwellings of an assorted variety of 
 ugliness. Cram into this as much labouring humanity 
 as it will hold, and then cram in some more. Label 
 with any name, as Stepney or Kentish Town. You 
 have in essence the particular ghetto that you desire. 
 
 161 M 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 Beyond this ring the hlotch we term London sprawls 
 into still more unknown and desolate regions whose life 
 is clogged and heavy owing to their distance from the 
 central heart. On the one side, in a lopsided and 
 monstrous outgrowth, the city spreads out into vast 
 shallow suburbs of the labouring classes, stretched over 
 the marsh land below the level of the sea. Here are 
 districts so far removed from the place of work as to 
 have become mere gigantic dormitories. Man rises up 
 a great while before day to go forth to his work and to 
 labour until the evening. The whole margin of life of 
 the labourer disappears in the transit. The scufiSe into 
 the city, the prolonged and odorous journey, the scufSe 
 out again, the hastily wolfed-up meal, curtailed sleep, 
 represent the home life of the people. To these for- 
 gotten, nameless regions, apart from the inhabitants 
 themselves and the occasional forlorn dust-collector, 
 " no man comes, nor hath come, since the making of 
 the world." On other margins of the city the texture 
 insensibly is transformed into something quaint and 
 strange. The lines of cottages protrude into bow 
 vrindows. Children are scooped inside instead of dis- 
 charged outside the houses. The population clothes 
 itself in black coats, entertains yearnings after respect- 
 ability, and attends on Sunday places of public worship. 
 This is Clerkdom : Dulwich and Clapham and Harringay ; 
 where pale men protest Imperialism and women are 
 driven by the tedium of nothingness into Extension 
 Lectures or the Primrose League — an uncanny and 
 humorous region, illuminated with perplexing ideals. 
 
 But these regions are also parasitic. London in its 
 characteristic product is the city of the ghetto. Here 
 gather the unparalleled masses of the obscure. They 
 are members of no trades union. They are inspired by 
 
 162 
 
THE BURDEN OF LONDON 
 
 no faith in progress. They are forgotten, as it seems, 
 alike of man and of God. Labouring populations, in 
 which no one rises above the rank of the local publican, 
 outnumber the inhabitants of many great kingdoms. 
 The dreariness of their lives does not depend on their 
 poverty. They are scourged with specific ills, of which 
 no outsider knows or cares. But the tragedy resides in 
 their acquiescence : the absence of eager revolt and 
 protest: the listless toleration of intolerable things. 
 They extend under sunshine and darkness, an inter- 
 minable acreage, shabby, impotent, grotesquely negli- 
 gible. They imbibe open-mouthed any specious illusion, 
 cheering for blood when full of meat, when meatless 
 clamorous for plunder. Few know of their existence : 
 none realise its import. Populations of great colonies 
 or European capitals could be torn from them without 
 appreciable diminution. Who would even be conscious 
 of change if, say, Wandsworth or Hoxton vanished with 
 to-morrow's sunrise? A wave of human life has silently 
 become pent up into a menacing congestion. There has 
 been nothing like it before in the history of the world. 
 Please God, after its destruction there shall be nothing 
 like it again. 
 
 What of the race that is being reared in this stagnant 
 marshland, lying aside from and unmoved by the stream 
 of progress ? No one knows. It is a portentous vision 
 of silence : a mob drifting from the cradle to the grave, 
 without ever rising to articulate speech. No poet 
 immortalises himself in " Ballads of Bermondsey," or 
 " Lines written in dejection near Haggerston." No 
 passionate protest from Pentonville rouses as with a 
 trumpet-call. No Camberwell woman's love-letters 
 disturb the serenity of the literary horizon. Visitors, 
 indeed, from a different universe of being penetrate 
 
 X63 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 these regions, attempt to crystallise into words the 
 cloudy emotions of the ghetto. A Gissing will set 
 himself to record the life of the decent and the ignohly 
 decent. A daily newspaper will encourage the con- 
 fession of their half-haked theologies and atheisms. A 
 Davidson will proclaim, with a kind of scorching flame, 
 the futility of life at thirty hob a week. But these 
 interpretations remaiu, for the dissected subject, things 
 distant and unknown. Noise, indeed, he makes in 
 abundance in his brief passage between two Eternities. 
 The play of children, the mirthless jest, the quavering 
 militant melody, the sounds of contest and blasphemy, 
 rises continually towards the quiet stars. He has been 
 discerned emerging from beyond the river at daybreak, 
 or trampling among his friends in a scuffle for the tram 
 to convey him to his lair in the gathering twilight. But 
 the mystery of the inner springs of his existence, the 
 happiness, acquiescence, or discomfort of life as viewed 
 from the sixth story of a block-dwelling or the half of 
 a house in a mean street, are locked up beneath that 
 harassed inscrutable face of his, a secret he will carry 
 with him to the grave. 
 
 Such is the Burden of London : unfelt by the 
 majority who pass by : weighing like a nightmare upon 
 some of those who gaze forward towards the coming 
 years. The vision is of London not, like the Holy 
 City, at unity with itself: but a manifest object-lesson 
 in a nation falling asunder, "being old." To-day we 
 discern a race which is separating into communities 
 profoundly ignorant of each others' existence : cities of 
 artisans, cities of clerks, cities of labourers, cities of the 
 wealthy. At bottom this is for the most part a parasitic 
 population : from which the higher energies are not 
 demanded, and by which in consequence these are not 
 
 164 
 
THE BURDEN OE LONDON 
 
 supplied : lacking the pushfulness of the artisan of the 
 North as much as the obstinate endurance of the 
 peasant of the fields. "We apprehend hundreds of 
 thousands engaged in the supply of artificial wants, in 
 carrying people from here to there, in ministering to 
 the changing fashion, or pandering to the unchanging 
 appetites of men. And we recognise a population 
 destined ever to extend. Greater London in less than 
 thirty years is to amount to ten millions. The main 
 part of the increase will be woven of this drab material. 
 North, east, south, and west the aggregation is 
 silently pushing outwards like some gigantic Plasmo- 
 dium : spreading slimy arms over the surrounding fields, 
 heavily dragging after them the ruin of its desolation. 
 And Tooting and East Ham, and Plumstead and Silver- 
 town, are born into a world which shows no joy at their 
 advent. Humanity staggers at the vision of the next 
 generation : uninvigorated by the influx of the country 
 life, ravaged by the diseases of overcrowding in dwelling 
 and area, dulness, vacuity of labour, and lust for artificial 
 excitement: dead to the faiths which once provided a 
 tangible background to existence. 
 
 " Eevolving this and many things," one can note the 
 astonishing prescience of a poet of the far-back, long- 
 despised, "early Victorian" era, who found in the 
 bHnd Bull-god of the spoil of Assyria the image of 
 the god of this people ; having wings but not to fly 
 with : and eyes, but not to look up with : bearing a 
 written image engraved of which he knows not, and 
 cannot read it ; crowned, but not for honour : — 
 
 " Those heavy wings spread high 
 So sure of flight which do not fly, 
 That set gaze never on the sky, 
 Those soriptured flanks it cannot see. 
 165 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 Its crown, a brow-oontraoting load, 
 Its planted feet which trusts the sod, 
 
 Nineveh, was this thy god. 
 Thine also mighty Nineveh ? " 
 
 But until the end is revealed no man can know whether 
 this or some other god be indeed the god of the city. 
 
 166 
 
THE NEW BEVOLUTION 
 
 " FTIHE struggle between belief and unbelief," said 
 _L Goethe, " is the only thing in the memoirs of 
 humanity worth considering." And the problem of 
 the religion and general outlook on the world which is 
 likely to be evolved by an age of tranquillity and comfort 
 is the problem which most immediately faces the civilisa- 
 tion of to-day and to-morrow. For the first time in 
 many centuries, and especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, 
 in England, in parts of America, and in the Colonies, 
 we see a race developing who have experienced nothing 
 but a serene and ordered existence. From the beginning 
 they have been sheltered from the disturbing elements 
 of life. They do not possess imagination necessary to 
 realise that this is an abnormal and transitory phase of 
 the world's development. All their accepted ideas in art, 
 ethics, and religion, are inherited from times when this 
 tranquillity was lacking. They are becoming vaguely 
 conscious that for them the language is strained, ex- 
 travagant, unreal. They have no conception of the 
 meaning of such a cosmic upheaval, the disarrangement 
 of a universe, as, for example, the great disturbance 
 of '89 in France or the deliquescence of the whole 
 social order before the invader in 1870. Even Nature's 
 catastrophies have been sedulously removed. There is 
 no fear of great epidemics, and only the occasional remote 
 
 167 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 and unrealised echo of such an unexpected destruction 
 as that of Martinique. Undoubtedly the contrast be- 
 tween such a life as that of Dulwich or Toronto or 
 Dunedin and the life of all the past must implicate the 
 coming of great changes in human life and its outlook 
 upon the world. 
 
 Towards Nature, towards himself, and towards the 
 apprehension of any spiritual principle outside and 
 behind these, man's ideas are becoming profoundly 
 modified. In Nature he has come to recognise the 
 element of permanence. He is at home for the first 
 time in an orderly world. The old fear — the panic 
 fear — of some sudden menace no longer lurks in the 
 shadows. The feelings of horror with regard to Nature 
 and its operations and the feelings of insecurity are 
 passing away from the minds of men. The general 
 view of Nature which this new race is cultivating is 
 that of the well-ordered watering-place which is the 
 sole experience of most of them : a cleaned beach, 
 breakwaters to temper the rough onslaught of the sea, 
 with promenade and pier and safe playing-ground for 
 the children, and the faint, emotional strains of the 
 nigger minstrels in the evening. 
 
 And the progress of intelligence has drawn each man 
 closer together to his neighbour. The world has 
 become one. With an absence of any large and im- 
 pelling impulse towards reform, men are vaguely desii-ous 
 that all theii- neighbours should enjoy some sort of 
 similar comfort to their own. Mr. Gilkes, in his little, 
 most suggestive essay on the subject, has emphasised 
 this restlessness in face of the evidence of pain. " They 
 do not wish any longer," he says, " that regulations 
 made by man should keep men from working and playing 
 as they ought to work and play. A man can no longer 
 
 168 
 
THE NEW REVOLUTION 
 
 eat his dinner comfortably when there are beneath him 
 dungeons full of his fellow-creatures whom his own act 
 has placed there, however strictly legal that act may 
 be, and consequently there is a general impatience of all 
 privilege, all excess of possession and of comfort." 
 
 With this altruism which finds its expression on the 
 one hand in the largeness of so-called charity, and on 
 the other hand in the general demand for the Churches 
 to cease to strive towards impossible perfections and 
 spiritual ardours, there has come a tendency to acquiesce 
 in an average standard of attainment. In a recent con- 
 troversy bearing the title "Do we Believe? " the popula- 
 tions of the suburbs poured out their hearts in the columns 
 of a daily paper. It was instructive to note the general 
 revolt from the violence and disturbance of religions 
 which drove men and women out of their accustomed 
 ways. The demand came more and more to con- 
 centrate upon a vague, amiable philanthropy. The 
 less reputable sins were to be banished. The duty of 
 man was to lead the life of the good citizen, voting 
 in parliamentary if not in municipal elections, and at 
 Christmas-time making liberal provision for the feeding 
 and clothing of the poor. 
 
 The sense of sin and of a great humility and all the 
 vast machinery of aspiration and penitence which have 
 gathered around these, have become clouded in the 
 minds of the dwellers in the modern cities. 
 
 But it is in the relation of man to God the greatest 
 changes are evident. With the coming of this gospel 
 of decency and good manners there has vanished those 
 ardours and agonies of the soul whose interest now 
 appears mainly pathological. No one can be blind to 
 the process, accompanying this diffused ethic, of the 
 weakening apprehension of spiritual things. 
 
 169 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 " If he received some sign," says Mr. Gilkes again, 
 "to show him what he should do, some sign which 
 showed him when he was in danger of doing wrong, 
 which revealed to him his ideal, he might do right con- 
 tinually ; hut he receives no sign ; perhaps once in a 
 month or a year he sees his ideal plainly and God 
 plainly, hut often, even hefore he reaches the end of the 
 road where he was when he saw it, the colour has faded 
 from what he saw. He says the words which he said 
 hefore, but they are dead words, and he would no longer 
 go readily to death for the truth which they express." 
 
 When in time of order the new revolution is success- 
 fully accomplished, there are some who will look forward 
 with longing to the change beyond the change. In 
 the provision of elements of permanent value for the 
 life of man periods of disturbance have always been 
 more conspicuous than periods of certitude. The times 
 of disorder and unsettlement when men suffered from 
 oppression, trembled in terror hefore vague and inexplic- 
 able forces, were ravaged by great plagues and Uved 
 always in uncertainty, were the times which produced 
 the highest developments of art and the finest flower of 
 human character. When man was doubtful if he would 
 see to-morrow's sunrise he built as if not dreaming of 
 a perishable home. To-day when he cannot believe 
 that death will touch him, and his orderly life stretches 
 forward as an endless end of the world, he will leave for 
 the amazement of future ages the Crystal Palace and 
 the City Temple and the Peabody Building. 
 
 Dr. Arnold, in his " Survey of History," came to the 
 conclusion that after all the changes of the past the 
 world was now entering into a course of steady, orderly, 
 and consistent development in a phase from which the 
 unexpected would be abolished. Man would sit down 
 
 170 
 
THE NEW REVOLUTION 
 
 comfortably in a world whose forces at length he rightly 
 estimated. It was a belief characteristic of an early 
 Victorian Age unable to conceive of any more perfect 
 life than that represented by its mahogany sideboards 
 and its material opulence. It is a more hopeful view 
 that we are on the edge of a process of profound change. 
 Ruins if furnished with plush and alpaca and labelled 
 Brixton and Holloway, will not provide a permanent 
 habitation for the soul of man. Assuredly the con- 
 dition of the ultimate flower of the process of evolution 
 in the expanding middle class of England and America 
 is not a condition of stable equilibrium. They cultivate 
 habits of regularity. They weave themselves into 
 other men's ideas. They are cut off from disturbing 
 realities. They attend places of religious worship ; but 
 they hear language of ancient liturgies wrung out of 
 passion and terror which seems to them archaic or 
 meaningless. They are conscious of a vague, emotional 
 satisfaction at an evening service or singing the hymns 
 of childhood. Sometimes they feel a little queer at the 
 death of a child or at the signs of the coming of old 
 age. Occasionally, despite the avoidance of Nature and 
 its mysteries, some old memories, the smell of Spring 
 and Autumn, a wind blown into the city with the scent 
 of flowers or up the river from the sea, stir into momen- 
 tary disquietude emotions which have lain long buried 
 under the weight of custom and routine. Love and 
 Birth and Death, those divine Anarchists, are always 
 disturbing, as Plato apprehended long ago, to any satis- 
 fied civilisation. These, with the exultations and 
 agonies which form their " great allies," may be trusted 
 to disintegrate any society which has banished mys- 
 tery from its midst and turned its back on realities ; 
 and set itself down to use and wont, pitiful pleasures, 
 
 171 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 and the obstinate fear of change ; and put aside the 
 heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible 
 world. 
 
 How the change will come it is impossible to foresee. 
 Perhaps there may arise the sudden and unexpected 
 outbreak of forces fermenting among the neglected 
 populations, of whose existence and whose hunger for the 
 material goods denied them this ordered state has but 
 little apprehension. Perhaps, as in a former period of 
 Imperial peace, a universally awakening consciousness 
 may protest the futility and worthlessness of it all. 
 Weariness will come of the " impracticable hours " of 
 life divorced from passion and emptied of high, spiritual 
 enterprise. However excited, those concerned with the 
 soul's development rather than with the attainment of 
 material comfort will be prepared to welcome the change. 
 For such change will tear down the veil of comfortable 
 things, velvet and cushions and fine clothes, which man 
 will always raise if he can between himself and the 
 unknown. Behind are the realities with whom he is 
 never at ease, and whose acquaintance he is always 
 anxious to elude ; himself : the world of real things ; 
 God Who is the Beginning and the End of all. 
 
 172 
 
THE BLASPHEMY OF OPTIMISM 
 
 TO assail one who has bewildered many decent 
 people and added to life a new literary inspiration 
 is a thankless and dismal task. To join issue with 
 Mr. Chesterton, whose work is a perpetual stimulus to 
 humility and astonishment, would appear but a mournful 
 ingratitude. Nevertheless, it is time for some dull 
 person to raise the banner of protest, however sober 
 and grave, against the philosophy of life which Mr. 
 Chesterton is steadily hammering into the brain 
 of the English householder. The very brilliancy 
 of his weapons, the paradox, the bold metaphor, the 
 statement which leaves one doubled up and speechless, 
 the divine lunacy of his intoxicated inspiration, foretells 
 the success of his onslaught upon things customary, 
 honoured, and secure. Avowedly in his criticism as in 
 his poetry, as he acknowledges in his preface to his 
 " Defendant," Mr. Chesterton is preaching a philo- 
 sophy, maintaining an attitude, announcing a creed. 
 We now possess in his collected works a consistent 
 volume of doctrine which can be contemplated as a 
 whole. Essays on " Chesterton as a religious teacher " 
 will soon be utilised at the older universities to stimulate 
 aspiring merit with mean monetary compensation. Before 
 this consummation arrives it is well that the immorality 
 of such a creed should be demonstrated. 
 
 173 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 With the side issues raised by Mr. Chesterton I am 
 altogether in sympathy. It is hut the main contention 
 ■which is ultimately vicious. That Mr. Chesterton 
 should seek to defend the obsolete and neglected virtue 
 of Patriotism is a subject rather for praise than for 
 blame. That he should endeavour to arouse Kensing- 
 ton to consciousness of its proximity to the Eternal 
 fires should make for Kensington's righteousness if not 
 for Kensington's equanimity. That he should attempt 
 to interest the English people in the English Bible — a 
 work much read by their forefathers — is a commendable 
 if desperate enterprise. That he should hail himself as 
 God is only to be deprecated by some rival claimant to 
 the title. But that he should profess a blasphemous 
 contentment, associate pessimism with minor poetry, 
 and extol the average decent citizen for his average 
 decency, partakes of the nature of that sin for which 
 there is no place for repentance, though it be sought 
 bitterly and with tears. 
 
 " I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity," 
 announces Mr. Chesterton, " and found a treasure in all 
 of them." No one doubts the treasure in the dust- 
 heap. The difficulty lies in the apprehension of the 
 treasure in the drawing-room. The jewel is manifest 
 in that which humanity discards. It is less discernible 
 in that which humanity retains. Mr. Chesterton holds 
 that all dross can be converted into gold by the believing 
 mind. Nothing is either good or bad, he would say 
 with the Danish optimist, but thinking makes it so. 
 Assert in firm tones that all things are very good, and, 
 lo ! all things are very good. It is a simple creed, and 
 yet pleasant when one considers it. In the spirit of his 
 capering maniac Mr. Chesterton traverses the world 
 charging himself everywhere with contentment and 
 
 174 
 
THE BLASPHEMY OF OPTIMISM 
 
 triumph. A drunken man reels out of the heerhouse, 
 zigzags heavily down the pavement, clutches wildly 
 at vacuity, and flops into the garbage of the gutter. 
 To himself he is a mass of internal discomfort, a 
 dulled vacancy, and the earth an unkind stepmother 
 springing up to knock him down. To Mr. Chesterton, 
 observant, he is the living representative of the happy 
 peasant, the modern pastoral idyll, and his soul is with 
 the stars. The good citizen is journeying through 
 the tube, portly, double-chinned, reading Bright Bits 
 and breathing heavily. Should he but spring upwards, 
 Mr. Chesterton holds, prance wildly down the carriage 
 and spin round like a Dervish, he would inaugurate the 
 golden age. Surbiton is a city of mystery and enchant- 
 ment, Penge and Poplar suggest a restored fairyland, 
 Wapping is the antechamber to the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 All perspective is levelled in such a dreary morass of 
 satisfaction. Mr. Chesterton is convinced that the 
 Devil is dead. A children's epileptic hospital, a City 
 dinner, a political "At Home," a South African 
 charnel camp, or other similar examples of cosmic 
 ruin fail to shake this blasphemous optimism. At the 
 least he would design to make the Author of Evil die of 
 chagrin at persistent neglect, or perish from the reple- 
 tion of persistent flattery. The scheme is attractive 
 but delusive. That ancient strategist has seen so many 
 Chestertons flare and fade that he is unlikely to be 
 entrapped by such naive methods. Nor will the in- 
 clusion of good and evil in a higher synthesis, 
 embracing both in a universal approbation, create 
 any permanent or lasting peace in the war which is 
 being everlastingly waged — on earth, as in heaven. 
 
 Progress has never been effected but by persistent 
 toil and the emphatic demonstration of the wicked- 
 
 175 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 ness and sorrow of the world. Mr. Chesterton's 
 creed will act as a disintegrating force upon the never 
 very secure foundations of this edifice. He will not, 
 indeed, be able to convince a man that his own tooth- 
 ache is good ; but he may succeed with alacrity in 
 assuring him of the sanctity and desirableness of the 
 toothache of others. Here is a citizen who presents at 
 times a singular combination of the hog and the hyena, 
 with the seed of a god stifled beneath deep rolls 
 of avidity and desire. All effort towards fructifica- 
 tion of this seed is effected only by the sudden 
 flashing into his face of some monstrous and un- 
 negligible wrong. Show him a cab-horse about to 
 trample on a child, and, at the cost of considerable 
 bodily discomfort, he will effect a rescue. Kaise a 
 barrier of use and wont between him and the children 
 which he dully knows are perishing and he will consume 
 his dinner with withers unwrung. A holocaust of four- 
 teen thousand children was demanded, with all the 
 incredible accompaniments of bereavement, loss, and 
 longing, before he realised in blear-eyed manner that 
 away in South Africa his clumsy hoof was crushing 
 something delicate and divine. Tell him that (say) 
 Bermondsey is a blasphemy of stunted, distorted 
 existence, outrage alike on God and man, and he 
 may be startled into the effort towards reform. 
 Tell him, as Mr. Chesterton tells him, that down 
 in Bermondsey the gas lamps are fairy bubbles, the 
 atmosphere is magical and charged with emotion, that 
 each fuddled toper is in Paradise beneath the approval 
 of the eternal stars ; with a deep content, thanking 
 God that he is rid of a knave, he turns him again to 
 slumber. 
 
 Mr. Chesterton holds that all things are very good. 
 176 
 
THE BLASPHEMY OF OPTIMISM 
 
 He may assert that he has a certain reputable precedent 
 for such a statement. The plea cannot be entertained. 
 God found all things " very good." Such a discovery is 
 a prerogative of divinity. No man can look on God 
 and live ; and no man can live who sees things as God 
 sees them. Mr. Chesterton would urge us to believe 
 that each man's life is illuminated by the same light 
 which he himself discerns, though it were never on sea 
 or land. It is the pathetic fallacy, eternally untrue. 
 " The same sun shines on the windows of the alms- 
 house as on the walls of the castle." Never was there 
 a profounder delusion. The sun which shines on the 
 castle is not the sun that shines on the almshouse. 
 Contentment terminates in mortification. Complete 
 satisfaction is indistinguishable from death. 
 
 Mr. Chesterton, alive himself, would fain persuade us 
 that other men and women are alive. He assumes a 
 point which he would find it impossible to prove. Men 
 and women have been alive : there are intervals in the 
 career of the most obscure when they should be alive. 
 But the chief accusation against the modern city is 
 that it has choked so many innumerable human lives : 
 a mob moving who are dead. Compared with this 
 outrage, the massacre of actual assassination fades into 
 insignificance. At three periods, at least, humanity 
 should rise above the line of life. For a moment they 
 should live as children, in the world of fairyland peopled 
 by a strange and kindly race who pursue generous 
 action. For a moment they should live again when 
 through sudden, passionate, inexplicable emotion men 
 and women look into each other's eyes and realise their 
 kinship with the stars. And for a moment they should 
 live at death — though the experience, it has been 
 noted, usually comes too late in life to be of mu«h 
 
 177 N 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 practical utility. But in the life of the modern 
 crowd crushed into a mass of blurred humanity 
 these avenues of the spirit are choked and blighted. 
 Childhood is clumsily spoiled and broken by the mis- 
 placed ingenuity of the "Grown folk, mighty and 
 cunning." Courtship is the panting pursuit of Phyllis 
 by Strephon round the block-dwellings, or the sombre, 
 nudging pilgrimage through a city of dreadful night. 
 And most men die with a grunt or a bleat, lamenting 
 the lack of gin, or protesting that they could drink 
 pea soup. We have never seen a man die, was 
 Thoreau's challenge; because we have never yet seen 
 a man alive. 
 
 Once man apprehended that God walked with him 
 in the garden in the cool of the day. Then he could 
 lift his eyes to the magical world about him and 
 Heaven's unchanging stars. Now the Archangel stands 
 at the entrance with the flaming sword in His hand; 
 attesting, on the one hand the effort needed for 
 return, on the other the futility of acquiescence in any 
 lesser aspiration. Mr. Chesterton would assuage the 
 divine hunger by the pretence that outside the wilder- 
 ness is fair. The man with the muck rake can obtain 
 the golden crown, not by the painful effort to look up- 
 wards, but by weaving the sticks of the floor into a 
 coronet and assuring himself that it is gold. Man has 
 wandered into the wilderness and solitary places. It is 
 well for him if here he finds no city to dwell in. Mr. 
 Chesterton would urge him to build booths of boughs, 
 assure him that Paradise is here or nowhere, expound 
 to him the grandeur of the desert scrub, and the glory 
 of the desert sand. Far on the horizon shines the 
 Land of Promise, demanding first for its attainment a 
 divine discontent and an eager pushing forward. Effort 
 
 178 
 
THE BLASPHEMY OF OPTIMISM 
 
 unwearying, the sweat and blood of men, the wreck of 
 a thousand lives, a world travail of pain, has been the 
 price men have paid for permission sometimes to 
 whisper to each other in the twilight that all things 
 are very good. The ultimate tragedy of history, at 
 which the sun veiled his face and the pillars of the 
 earth were shaken, was necessary in order that humanity 
 might be able to cherish for nineteen disordered centuries 
 the desperate hope that God is Love. 
 
 179 
 
CHICAGO AND FBANCIS 
 
 IN pursuit of my trade as a reviewer of books it befell 
 a while ago that I was reading two volumes deal- 
 ing with subjects of especial interest. The one was a 
 description, compiled with enthusiasm and pride, of the 
 triumphs of the New America. The other was a record, 
 a little sentimental, but very pleasant and simple, of 
 the lives of the followers of Francis. And the chance 
 combination of two such subjects set one a-thinking. 
 The new America exhibits a nation definitely 
 organised for one purpose, straining every nerve and 
 sinew to attain that end. "Business" is the all- 
 absorbing interest ; by the side of which nothing else 
 counts at all. The nation is joyously set on the com- 
 mercial conquest of the world. As in former times the 
 people organised throughout as a military race was 
 enabled to trample down all rivals, so in a commercial 
 age the people which has with devotion moulded every- 
 thing towards commercial energy is destined to crumple 
 up its less single-hearted competitors. The vision is 
 presented of a life where all other interests aie ruth- 
 lessly planed away. In parallelogramed cities of 
 monotonous architecture, amid the shrieks of whistles 
 and the noise of telegraphs and monsterphones, a vague 
 impression appears of eager men in a crowd. They rise 
 hastily from sleep to rush from factory to counting- 
 
 180 
 
CHICAGO AND FRANCIS 
 
 house, consuming meals in their shirt-sleeves and toiling 
 with a rude energy which is one of the wonders of the 
 modem world. Leisure, solitude, art, literature, medita- 
 tion, religion — all these are brushed aside as by-pro- 
 ducts, apart from the main business of life. Socialism 
 has made less progress than in any other civilised 
 country : with each man possessing the marshal's baton 
 in his knapsack, why turn aside to raise all to the level 
 of lance-corporal ! High above the throng tower the 
 figures of those who have attained : a Jay Gould, a 
 Vanderbilt, a Carnegie, who started vrith the proverbial 
 penny. Such unified energy is producing its results. 
 Already the old nations, with their militarism and their 
 ideals, are feeling the commencement of the strain : the 
 cry has gone forth for a Europe united against the 
 common enemy — the new Barbarians knocking at its 
 doors. But the flimsy barriers which such a Europe 
 can erect are destined to be swept aside. The figures 
 of commercial progress for even ten years in America are 
 something stupendous ; in steel, in oil, in pig, in cotton, 
 the output springs upward in a night. For the moment 
 there is respite while the internal markets absorb the 
 energies of the factories; but in a few years' time 
 America will once more leap forward to the commercial 
 exploitation of the world. In the perfect adaptation of 
 means to an end and the throwing over as lumber of all 
 that does not subserve that end she stands unrivalled. 
 We bow to our future conquerors. 
 
 America is changing beneath our very eyes. Yester- 
 day's books concerning her are antiquated ; descriptions 
 of ten years ago are hopelessly out of date ; between the 
 writing of a book and its publication half its facts have 
 changed. Yet the New America still awaits its inter- 
 preter. What exactly is the meaning of the events 
 
 X81 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 daily recorded ; not in terms of oil or pig, but in their 
 inner and larger meaning ? What is the significance, 
 i.e., of the vast system of popular colleges in the cities 
 of the Mississippi Valley? What contribution to 
 human welfare is provided by (say) Athens, Georgia ? 
 What exact function in the spiritual progress of man- 
 kind is performed by the Sixth Methodist Episcopal 
 Church of Minneapolis ? These are the kind of problems 
 upon which we seek light. 
 
 American civilisation has " come to centre about the 
 conception of life as a matter of industrial energy." 
 With rude strength, utter devotion, and boisterous 
 energy, the American capitalist and worker have com- 
 bined in alliance for the commercial exploitation of the 
 world. Life itself vanishes in the terrific elaboration 
 of the giant machine. In America there are " two 
 kinds of slaves, the nigger and the white." Youth 
 is everywhere evident. "Under the new strenuous 
 rSgime there are no old men." Men as well as machines 
 are thrown with reckless disregard to the scrap-heap. 
 "America is paying more for her industrial success 
 than we would care to pay; more, indeed, than humanity 
 can afford." The women alone live. While these read 
 books, discuss art, or pilgrimage through Europe, the 
 men, in the midst of the shrieks of whistles and the 
 clang of machinery, provide a panorama of a stampede 
 from counting-house to factory, wolfing up meals of 
 oyster-stew in an atmosphere of perpetual dyspepsia. 
 
 " Where are all your old men ? " asks the visitor as 
 he gazes at young, tired faces everywhere. " Come up 
 to the cemetery and I will show you," is the genial 
 
 reply. 
 
 The Spanish war marked a deep-cut moment of 
 phange ; and the American nation is still intoxicated 
 
 183 
 
CHICAGO AND FRANCIS 
 
 by the ease with which it crumpled up an historic military 
 power. To the other nations of the world its entrance 
 into Welt-politik has been like a descent of a brigade 
 from the planet Mars, wielding a force singularly potent, 
 absolutely new, and not quite accountable. The result 
 has left the American people, on the one hand, with the 
 legacy of great possessions : "an American Empire is 
 arising." Forgetting their greatest President's dictum 
 that " the Almighty never made a people good enough 
 to rule over other people," stimulated by the alluring 
 claptrap concerning the White Man's Burden and the 
 Trustees of Progress, with the unlimited possibilities 
 of trade exploitation that "expansion " always provides, 
 they have set themselves to the task of elevating the 
 Philippines and Cuba to the civilisation of Chicago. 
 And on the other hand, with the taste for blood once 
 whetted, their appetite for large interventions has been 
 aroused. So they lecture Roumania on its treatment of 
 the Jews, consider the possibility of intervention in 
 Turkey, and elaborate a Navy for fresh conquests. In 
 a few years the lectures are destined to find their fruit 
 in aqjion : and with that action the Coming Race enters 
 into its heritage. 
 
 Turn from this vision of the complacent, shouting 
 twentieth century to the pictures of the influence of an 
 ideal in that strange Europe of seven centuries ago. 
 Life is rude and troubled. Wars and brutalities abound, 
 the Empire and the Church are fighting for a world 
 mastery ; wolves, as in Salimbene's picture of the 
 miseries of the time, howl under the walls of the 
 little cities of Italy and at night enter the towns and 
 devour men. There is little comfort and no content. 
 Life has not yet come to revolve round an economic 
 
 183 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 centre. But in all the ctaos of a world but imperfectly 
 comprehended, full of fear and strange adventure, there 
 are interests leading to high spiritual endeavour and the 
 triumph of the soul. The wonder is not in the unique 
 and gracious figure of Francis. This, indeed, is a 
 miracle. But similar if less complete miracles abound 
 in the history of Christendom. But it lies in the spirit 
 of the sons of Francis : in that madness from beyond 
 the boundaries of the world, which fell upon so many 
 quite ordinary men, merchants, soldiers, citizens, who 
 in this century might have served a Beef Trust or 
 engineered a corner in wheat. After twelve hundred 
 years, attempts had again been made faithfully to follow 
 the life of the Master. The living example of the 
 Christian life had once more proved its appealing power. 
 And the thirteenth century recognises for a moment at 
 least the key to the secret of the transitory life of man. 
 By the end the spiritual impulse is fading into the light 
 of common day ; the followers of Holy Poverty are 
 becoming less faithful in their allegiance. But even at 
 the end, a hundred years after the Blessed Francis, the 
 new Art is drawing all its inspiration from his life and 
 teaching. Dante is proclaiming the greatness of the 
 Franciscan ideal ; and such a miracle can happen as 
 that strange pilgrimage of kings and cardinals to the 
 mountains, to bring down fi-om his refuge amongst the 
 clouds a hermit who in a moment of madness or 
 inspiration had been elected to the proudest position in 
 the world, to inaugurate the golden age. 
 
 Haunting the whole of this tumultuous and fascinat- 
 ing time is the ideal of the Great Restoration: the 
 sense of impending change in that visible revelation of 
 the Kingdom of God to which the best minds turned 
 with the eager longing of children. The third Kingdom, 
 
 184 
 
CHICAGO AND FRANCIS 
 
 the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, was about to dawn. 
 To-day, or at farthest to-morrow, the Angel of the 
 Everlasting Gospel would proclaim the entrance of the 
 armies of God. 
 
 They are a fascinating company — these children of 
 Francis, the members of the new order of spiritual 
 chivalry enrolled in the service of their Lady Poverty. 
 First are those who were with him, Nos qui cum eo 
 fuimus, possessing some infection as it were of the 
 altogether personal charm that surrounds the little poor 
 man of Assisi. Bernard, who had loved him so, died 
 protesting " I feel in my soul that for a thousand worlds 
 I would not have been other than a servant of Christ. 
 Hear my prayer, that ye love one another." Eufino 
 nursed him at the end. Giles in his high perch at 
 Perugia spoke his rough words of common sense and saw 
 visions of eternal things. Masseo's life was broken by 
 the death of his master. Leo, the pecorello di Dio, the 
 little sheep of God, so humble and patient, could kindle 
 into fierce anger at the violation of the rule in the 
 building of the great Church of San Francesco, the 
 wonder of the world. And after these came the long 
 succession of those who gladly took up the torch from 
 the first followers, rejoicing in the revelation of the 
 secret. In fi:ont are a few selected figures : Salim- 
 bene, the kind-hearted gossip and traveller, in whose 
 Chronicles lives all the life of the mediasval world; 
 or John of Parma, the great General of the order, 
 journeying on foot fi:om house to house along the roads 
 of Europe, taking the humblest place and the meanest 
 duties at his visitations, as befits the greatest in 
 this stronge reversal of human standards : in the 
 banqueting-hall of the king found amongst the tables of 
 the poor. The strangest, most attractive figure is 
 
 185 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 Jacopone da Todi, with his austerities and his joyous- 
 ness ; his tender songs over the Christ Child and his 
 poetry, through which hreathes the open air and all 
 the hot, coloured life of Southern Italy : " sun and sky 
 and flowing water and flower-lined roads." Visions of 
 unimaginable sweetness attend him in his prison ; the 
 End in Good unimagined and measureless Light is ever 
 before him ; he weeps " because love is not loved " and 
 "would fain have suffered for the demons in hell and 
 have seen them go before him into Paradise." At his 
 death " it was believed," says the chronicler, " by those 
 standing near that he died, not so much conquered by 
 his malady, though that was grave, as from an extra- 
 ordinary excess of love." And behind these gi-eater 
 figures is a multitude ot forgotten common people 
 who have caught fire at the message and whose life has 
 become transformed ; as those who set out to convert the 
 Mohammedans, or the Friars that came joyfully singing 
 into Stynkynge Alley in the city of London in Eng- 
 land, or the obscure and shadovry figures who are 
 discerned tending the lepers or foUovnng the track of 
 the great armies to nurse the wounded and bury the 
 dead. 
 
 Later there is conflict between the strict and the 
 relaxed ; the world rolls in again and stifles the ideal ; 
 and the faithful retire to the moimtains with gloomy 
 prophecies of ruin to become the soured and bitter 
 Fraticelli of the fourteenth century. But in this early 
 time the vision seemed not far away. There is a strange 
 reason, a kind of disordered common sense, an unanswer- 
 able and rather distressing logic, subversive of the 
 respectabilities and the gospel of success about these 
 followers of Madonna Poverty. Here are none of the 
 austerities and contempt of the world, the pitiless 
 
 186 
 
CHICAGO AND FRANCIS 
 
 laceration of the body of an earlier and gloomier time. 
 Though pilgrims and strangers, seeking a country, they 
 go singing through a land which for them is very fair. 
 They love all natural things — the unclouded sky and the 
 hot nights of Umbria. Lacking all possessions tlaey are 
 full of song in praise of God. They love all men and 
 women, are passionately affectionate one to another. 
 They are cheered by the abiding vision of the un- 
 seen world. Life when released from the intolerable 
 burden of possessions they proclaim as very good. 
 There is a blitheness here, somehow vanished from the 
 modem manufacturing city ; an absurd satisfaction in 
 the picture of the world as a cloister lacking in the more 
 up-to-date picture of the world as a factory. 
 
 And despite the changes of the intervening years, how 
 singularly contemporary is their appeal ! The Sacrum 
 Commercium Beati Francisci cum Domina Paupertate, 
 the prose version of Giotto's picture in the lower Church 
 at Assisi — in its eloquence and shrewdness the summary 
 of the whole spirit of the Franciscan revival — might 
 have been written yesterday. St. Francis in his quest 
 for Holy Poverty will go to the great ones and to the 
 learned sages. This he did. But the great ones and 
 the sages answered him hardly, saying, " What new 
 doctrine is this thou bringest to our ears ? Let the 
 Poverty thou seekest be thine and thy children's after 
 thee. For us be the enjoyment of delight and the over- 
 flowing of riches. For brief and full of labour are the 
 days of our life and in the end of man what refuge ? 
 Nothing better have we found than to eat and drink and 
 be merry while we live." And the temptation of 
 Avarice, determining to take unto her the name 
 Prudence and speaking humble wise, might have been 
 delivered by any ecclesiastical dignity explaining the 
 
 187 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 " twentieth century spirit of Francis " in Sabatier 
 meetings, 
 
 " With all peace and quietness you can work your own 
 salvation and others, if once your storehouse be full. . , . 
 Will God not accept you if you have wherewith to 
 give to the needy and. are mindful of the poor? . . . 
 What fear for you in the contact of riches, since ye hold 
 them as nothing? Evil is not in things but in the mind 
 — for God saw everything that He had made and behold 
 it was very good. So to the good all things are good. 
 ... how many rich men spend foolishly, whereas, 
 if you had wealth you would turn it to good use : for 
 your purpose is holy and holy your desire." 
 
 An appealing vision was needed to combat a tempta- 
 tion so subtle and plausible. It was found in the vision 
 of that Lady Poverty as Giotto painted her who " alone 
 clave to the King of Glory when all His chosen and 
 loved ones left Him in fear." 
 
 " I am not rude and unlearned, as many think ; but 
 ancient and full of days as I am, I know the nature of 
 things, the variety of creatures, and the changes of the 
 times. I have known the restlessness of the human 
 heart, learning it now in my experience of the world, 
 now by subtlety of nature and now by gift of grace. I 
 was in the Paradise of God when man was naked, 
 wandering through all that spacious realm fearing 
 nothing. . . . There I thought to remain for ever. . . . 
 Very joyful was I, sporting with him all the day, having 
 nothing of my own, for all was God's." 
 
 Back one is driven to the old haunting question. 
 Which of these have attained the real secret of success — 
 these visionaries of Umbria long dead, or the solid live 
 men who have made Chicago ? those who get, or those 
 
 X88 
 
CHICAGO AND FRANCIS 
 
 who give ? Truly if they were right then the modern 
 world is altogether wrong. A modern novelist, M. de 
 Coulevain, has attempted to represent the conflict of 
 these ideals — the product of modern America in its most 
 cultured and effective form with this dream world of the 
 past. His heroine visiting Assisi only expresses regret 
 that St. Francis and St. Claire never married. The 
 language of the Saints towards the real things of the 
 Eternal world is uncouth and alien to her. "There will 
 never he any saints in America," she confidently 
 asserts. 
 
 "No! No! I don't see an American divesting himself 
 of his goods, preaching poverty and talking to doves. 
 Instead of St. Francis we shall, may be, have men who 
 will lessen 'poverty and make the world a more com- 
 fortable place." 
 
 Wealth accumulated as a reality, wealth distributed as 
 an ideal — ^here is the watchword of the spirit of the age. 
 It may seem madness to cling to any divergent dream. 
 Yet a certain suspicion still refuses to be stifled. " What 
 shall it profit? " appears at times written large over all 
 the monstrous buildings and shrieking factories. For 
 long after Chicago and Birmingham and all the products 
 of a complacent and mechanical age have become the 
 habitation of bats and owls, men's hearts will still turn 
 with longing towards the little brown cities of Italy, 
 for love of those lives whose fragrance clings to their 
 crumbling walls and appeals across the silence of so 
 many dead centuries. 
 
 189 
 
THE MAKING OF THE 8UPEBMAN 
 
 MR. WELLS and Mr. Bernard Shaw are our 
 two living prophets. Both hare entered the 
 profession, like the shepherd of Tekoa, by unorthodox 
 ways. Both interpret the function of prophecy as much 
 in the diagnosis of the present as in the forecast of the 
 changes of the future. Both follow the New Testament 
 in preferring the wicked to the mean. Both have faith 
 in nothing but youth. "Every man of forty is a 
 scoundrel " is the cheerful aphorism of the one ; and the 
 other appeals always to the young men to enrol in the 
 crusade for the New Eepublic. They survey the squalid 
 course of contemporary life in England, from the cottage 
 to the castle, vrith a kind of disgusted pity. They find 
 in the life of the average Briton, his complacency, his 
 dull pretence of wisdom, his dull thirst for gain, the 
 random routine of his unedifying day, something which 
 cries to heaven as an offence. Both call for the Super- 
 man. But in the case of the one the call remains as a 
 pious aspiration, a mere summary of revolt and weari- 
 ness. In the other there is an attempt to ransack the 
 springs of action, to drive down into fundamental things, 
 to examine how, if at all, it is possible by breeding, by 
 education, by social reconstruction to hasten the arrival 
 of the Coming Race. 
 
 190 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 A figure famous in the literature of Europe has also in 
 these later years joined the prophetic company. M. 
 Maeterlinck has progressed steadily from the method 
 and atmosphere of a dead past, through the wisdom and 
 destiny of the present, to the proclamation of his faith 
 in the future. Examination of three writers of such 
 varied talent and temperameiit should throw some light 
 upon the prohlem of the days to come. 
 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his latest plays, reveals the 
 attitude of revolt. He is tired of the tedious inepti- 
 tude, of the persistent muddle of life. It is the man of 
 forty ; disenchanted ; the mocking spirit confronting 
 existence with a grimace and a gibe. All the earlier 
 illusions have vanished. The ideals of the time which 
 he would term the " eighteen-eighties " have passed like 
 a dream. He sees life in its grim and ugly naked- 
 ness, and he is filled with a hopeless disgust at the 
 prospect. With one of his own characters he has 
 "swallowed all the formulas, even that of Socialism," 
 and found that he has eaten the east wind. The 
 work of dramatic criticism commenced the process ; the 
 completion was attained in experience as a Borough 
 Councillor of St. Pancras. He heaps scorn upon pro- 
 gress, sentiment, all effort to regenerate the world. 
 The foolishness and vapidness of the upper classes, 
 the "cricketers to whom age brings golf instead of 
 wisdom"; the bourgeois with their respectability and 
 their unclean reticence, the swinish multitude who are 
 content to have it so — all are equally repulsive. The 
 method of the Fabian Society and the method of the 
 Barricade are both " fundamentally futile . " " Enough, ' ' 
 
 191 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 he cries, " of this goose cackle about Progress ; man as 
 he is never will nor can add a cubit to his stature by any 
 of its quackeries, political, scientific, educational, religious, 
 or artistic." There is merely an illusion of bustling 
 activity ; no real advance. " I do not know whether you 
 have any illusions left," he writes to "My dear Walkley," 
 " on the subject of education, progress, and so forth. I 
 have none." The world to him, as, he gravely announces, 
 it was to Shakespeare, is " a great stage of fools, on 
 which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort 
 of sense in living in it at all." Vanitas vanitatum, omnia 
 vanitas. He turns round and roars with laughter at the 
 absurdity of it all ; the blindness of the little toiling race 
 of men to the stupidity of its aspirations and the fatuity 
 of its efforts. Like Gilbert's jester, when he has nothing 
 else to laugh at, he laughs at himself till he aches for it. 
 In the words of one of his characters in "John Bull's 
 Other Island," he finds no jest so diverting as that of 
 telling the truth. " The world will not bear thinking of 
 to those who know what it is" is the burden of his cry. 
 Huxley was prepared to hail a "kindly comet" which 
 would sweep the whole affair away as a kindly consumma- 
 tion. But since, in Mr. Bernard Shaw's pleasant words, 
 " the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites, 
 which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance 
 on the Pentateuch," Nietzsche, with the gospel of the 
 Superman, has shown a more excellent way. Mr. Shaw 
 calls for the elimination of the Yahoo and the breeding 
 of the Superman. 
 
 In " Man and Superman," and " John Bull's 
 Other Island," he has expressed in his own un- 
 equalled fashion this bedrock scorn of life. In " Man 
 and Superman " the old illusions and the new fret and 
 strut their hour upon the stage. Here are Roderick 
 
 192 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 Eoebuck, of the eighteen-sixties, with his portraits of 
 John Bright, Herbert Spencer, and Martineau, and his 
 autotypes of allegories of Mr. G. F. Watts ; Mr. John 
 Tanner, M.I.R.C. (Member of the Idle Eieh Class), 
 author of the Revolutionists' Handbook; Anne, a "Vital 
 Genius," representing "the Life Force"; Hector 
 Malone, an Eastern American, distinguished by " the 
 engaging freshness of his personality and the dum- 
 foundering staleness of his culture." The " new man " 
 — the " man of the future " — is represented by one of 
 Mr. Wells's engineers, Straker, the chauffeur, educated 
 at a Board School and a Polytechnic, of a brilliant 
 and engaging vulgarity. Behind this company is the 
 machinery which pulls the strings and decides the 
 issue. In a dialogue between the Devil, Mozart's 
 original Don Juan, Anne, and the statue of her father, 
 a temporary visitant from heaven, is revealed the gospel 
 of Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and Shaw. 
 
 Briefly, this is the futility of all things except the 
 blind but persistent purposes of Nature which subtly 
 checkmate the plans of the individual for happiness or 
 suicide, and direct all things towards the perpetuation 
 of the race and the coming of the Superman. The Devil 
 who had left heaven because he was bored represents 
 the disillusioned spirit. " In the arts of lifb," he says, 
 " man invents nothing ; but in the arts of death he 
 outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and 
 machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and 
 famine." " The power that governs the earth is not 
 the power of Life, but of Death." Each generation 
 thinks the world is progressing because it is always 
 moving. "Where you now see reform, progress, fulfil- 
 ment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on 
 the stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things^ 
 
 193 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 you will see nothing but an infinite comedy ot 
 illusion." 
 
 To this Don Juan opposes his exaltation of Life, 
 "the force that ever strives to attain greater power of 
 contemplating itself." Against the citizen with his 
 abject respectabilities and negations he uplifts the 
 fanatic. He sings " Not arms and the hero, but the 
 philosophic man." " Of all other sorts of men I 
 declare myself tired. They are tedious failures." He 
 sees modem pleasure-loving society dancing gaily to 
 sterility. But he is confident in the victory of the Life 
 Force, when " the plain-spoken marriage services of the 
 Church will no longer be abbreviated, and half-suppressed 
 as indelicate." With the expunging of the " unbear- 
 able frivolities " of the " romantic vowings and pledg- 
 ings and untU-death-do-us-partings," the real purpose 
 of marriage will be honoured and accepted. The Devil 
 gloomily promises a future of disillusionment and 
 credulity. The Life Force will thrust mankind " into 
 religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to 
 save their souls from me ; then it will drive you from 
 religion into science, where you will snatch the babies 
 from the water sprinkling, and inoculate them with 
 disease to save them from catching it acciden- 
 tally" ; then to politics, and other dusty and lamentable 
 things. But Don Juan is persistent, and while the 
 Devil deplores his failure with the Life worshippers, 
 departs to heaven, of which a characteristic picture is 
 given : — 
 
 " At every one of these concerts in England you will 
 find rows of weary people who are there not because 
 they really like classical music, but because they think 
 they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in 
 heaven. A number of people sit there in glory not 
 
 194 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 because they are happy, but because they think they 
 owe it to their position to be in f^heayen. They are 
 almost all English." 
 
 The scene ends upon the earthly stage. Anne, the 
 Vital Genius, stalks and captures her prey. Tanner 
 recognises that " the trap was laid from the beginning 
 — ^by the Life Force," and yields while shouting his 
 protests, and protesting that he would prefer to be 
 hanged. He is gravely congratulated by the leader of 
 the brigands. " Sir," says Madoza, " there are two 
 tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. 
 The other is to get it. Mine and yours, sir." And 
 the curtain falls upon " universal laughter." 
 
 "Violet (with intense conviction): You are a brute, 
 Jack. 
 
 "Ann (looking at him with fond pride and caressing 
 his arm) : Never mind her, dear. Go on talking. 
 
 "Tanner: Talking! 
 
 " Universal laughter." 
 
 " Universal laughter " is also the note of " John 
 Bull's Other Island," and laughter that has no mirth 
 in it, the only alternative to tears. The " anglicised 
 Irishman" substitutes science for sentiment, and daily 
 loathes himself more profoundly. The " Gladstonised 
 Englishman " attains his heart's desire without ever 
 apprehending the emptiness and foolishness of the 
 figure he cuts in the sight of' God. Heaven is 
 once more pictured as a place of boredom and blue 
 satin, mainly peopled by the English. Imagination 
 curses one man, lack of it another. The peasant, 
 freed, sets himself to squeeze the labourer. All are 
 bought by flattery, which they know to be flattery,, and 
 yet accept joyfully. The dreamer who feels pity for all 
 life is universally proclaimed as a madman. The world 
 
 195 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 worshipping efficiency is announced as creating effi- 
 ciently the machinery of labour and the machinery of 
 pleasure, all turning to dust. Hotels, golf-links, land- 
 purchase, membership of Parliament, ideals, desires, 
 dreams — this is the end of every man's desire. The 
 eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with 
 hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which 
 shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun. 
 That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and 
 that which is wanting cannot be numbered. " I have 
 seen all the works that are done under the sun, and 
 behold all is vanity and vexation of spirit." 
 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw sees the world a den of dangerous 
 animals, amongst whom our few accidental supermen 
 must live as precariously as tamers do, " taking the 
 humour of their situation and the dignity of their 
 superiority as a set-off to the horror of the one and the 
 loneliness of the other." His cry for the Superman is 
 little more than the cutting of a stick with which to 
 emphasise the ultimate impossibility of the finite life of 
 man. Amidst his world of supermen, undoubtedly one 
 rebel against the common superiority would be Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw, convicted of a horror and loneliness all 
 the more real because there would be less obvious 
 material for his pleasant and bitter discontents. 
 
 II 
 
 The stories of Mr. Wells have thinly veiled, under 
 the guise of scientific romance, an impeachment of pre- 
 sent things. In the history of the " Sleeper " he shows 
 in the future all the forces of the present ten times 
 multiplied — more noise, more confusion, more wealth, 
 more poverty, more separation from nature, more blind- 
 
 196 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 ness to aught but material things. Society has again 
 passed into the condition of the later days of Kome, 
 when, having attained an end and with nothing to 
 anticipate, the springs of action have been choked 
 with a world weariness. Later, however, in "Anticipa- 
 tions," and "Mankind in the Making," and a "New 
 Utopia," he has attempted a saner estimate of actual 
 possibilities. The forces of life are estimated, as well 
 as the forces of death : the revolt from the present and 
 its unclean poverty and routine, the mess that man is 
 making of life, becomes itself a guarantee that effort 
 will be directed towards a better existence for our 
 children's children. 
 
 Mr. Wells is a master of the suggestive phrase which 
 suddenly opens great issues. He pictui-es the student 
 of divinity to-day coming " into a world full of the 
 ironical silences that follow great controversies." There 
 is a whole universe in that single phrase. " To state 
 these questions," -he says of the Republican ideal, "is 
 like opening the door of a room that has long been 
 locked and deserted. One has a lonely feeling." Many 
 a man with a youthful dream of noble things "peers 
 to-day from between preposterous lawn sleeves or under 
 a tilted coronet, sucked as dry of his essential honour 
 as a spider sucks a fly." In his discussion of the sex 
 question — a sane and clean discussion of one of the 
 most baffling of human problems — he sees common 
 human nature with a really dreadful insight. " I had 
 purported to call this paper 'Sex and the Imagination,' " 
 he says, " and then I had a sudden vision of the thing 
 that happens. The vision presented a casual reader 
 seated in a library turning over books and magazines, and 
 casting much excellent wisdom aside, and then suddenly, 
 as it were, waking up at that title, arrested, displaying a 
 
 197 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 furtive alertness, reading, flushed and eager, nosing 
 through the article." 
 
 By such unflinching observation of the facts of the 
 world around him does Mr. Wells justify his claim to 
 preach the gospel of the New Republic — of the Super- 
 man. 
 
 " Call ye that a Society," cried Carlyle seventy years 
 ago, " where there is no longer any Social Idea extant ? " 
 "One writes 'our present civilisation,' " re-echoes Mr. 
 Wells to-day, " and of previous civilisations, but, 
 indeed, no civilisations have yet really come into 
 existence." With a kind of smooth and polished 
 bitterness, Mr. Wells heaps up his indictment of 
 the men of his time. It is all a little cruel; too 
 detached to be entirely pleasant : the author surveys 
 the scrambling horde as the observer surveys the ant- 
 heap or the locust crowd with a cold resentment and 
 contempt. He has known something of the foulness of 
 the struggle. He has been near to be himself suffocated 
 in the swarm. He has escaped with no illusions con- 
 cerning the heroism and loveliness of the average citizen 
 of the Imperial race. All his onslaught could be summed 
 up in a single challenge. Stand in the street of any 
 modern English city and watch the stream drift by of 
 shuffling, shabby bodies, of dissatisfied or vacuous 
 minds. Or contrast in thought the ox-like seriousness 
 over trivial things, the compromise and gross living of 
 the prosperous middle-class citizen and his wife, with 
 the vision of their radiant childhood. Mr. Lowes 
 Dickinson has summed up his fundamental dissatis- 
 faction with life in a picture of the active and graceful 
 lambs transmuted by time into the stolid and silly 
 sheep. It is to-day's progress of mankind. And the 
 play of malign forces upon these beautiful children, 
 
 198 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 with their possibilities of rational and refined existence, 
 points all the sombre warnings of the message of this 
 modern prophet. 
 
 His purpose is to seek for remedy. He has been 
 compelled to rule out, though with reluctance, a method 
 that would appear easy and pleasant. Why cannot we 
 artificially " breed " the Superman as we breed strong 
 horses or fat cattle ? Because, in part, of our ignorance 
 of the subtle laws of inheritance and the strange sports 
 and variations it produces. Because, again, our Super- 
 men will be dififerent the one from the other, will em- 
 brace a combination of qualities, so that even in the 
 case of mere superficial physical beauty it is quite im- 
 possible to choose a particular pair to produce a particular 
 type in the second generation. And, above all, because 
 it is the abnormal and the variation which are most 
 useful to mankind : the genius trembling on the border 
 of insanity, often flowering on a tainted stock ; the fiery 
 mind of a Stevenson or a Henley pent up in a diseased 
 or battered body ; the eccentric distortion of the saint or 
 the hero. You can breed out, but you cannot breed in. 
 You could conceivably eliminate all lopsided personality 
 and produce a gross acreage of decent citizen. But the 
 result would be a kind of a nightmare of the mediocre, 
 a universal Brixton. 
 
 At the conclusion of the record of Mr. Lewisham's 
 somewhat squalid life history, his creator discloses a 
 sudden illumination almost in the form of a revelation. 
 The coming of the Child, with all its possibilities, 
 reaching down to endless generations, takes this shabby 
 little clerk from the cramped surroundings of his 
 personal life, and gives him somehow a pathetic but 
 real dignity as the steward of the heritage of all the 
 future, Id his later social appeals Mr. Wells attempts 
 
 199 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 to awaken in his readers some thrill of the same 
 emotion. In a whimsical picture he presents " all our 
 statesmen, our philanthropists, our puhlic men, gathered 
 into one great hall," and regarding perplexedly "a huge 
 spout that no man can stop," discharging " ahaby every 
 eight seconds." " Our success or failure with that 
 unending stream of babies is the measure of our 
 civilisation." As in the dream of a great novelist, he 
 sees the might have been, the fair vision of an ideal 
 of individual life which will never be realised, con- 
 trasted with the mean and pitiful reality ; and with 
 something of the fervour of a Hebrew prophet, he 
 confronts the men of his time with the inquiry, Why 
 these things should be ? 
 
 " With a weak and wailing outcry, that stirs the 
 heart, the creature comes protesting into the world." 
 Already it is handicapped by ancestral sins and scars of 
 body and mind. But from the first we increase that 
 handicap, according to Mr. Wells, with our selfishness, 
 our clumsiness, and cm- ignorance. First we slay an 
 enormous proportion by preventable squalor and disease. 
 The statistics of infant mortality reveal a holocaust 
 of children, a " perennial massacre of the innocents " — 
 161 children out of 1,000 in Lancashire — which is alone 
 evidence of the survival of barbaric conditions. In one 
 of the few passages in which the author has allowed 
 his feeling to emerge from beneath the polished and 
 scornful invective of his denunciation, Mr. Wells 
 arraigns society in the name of these murdered children: 
 " stiff little life-soiled sacrifices to the spirit of disorder 
 against which it is man's pre-eminent duty to battle." 
 Our civilisation has neither the courage to kill them 
 outright, painlessly, nor the heart to give them what 
 they need. 
 
 200 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 " There has been all the pain in their lives, there has 
 been the radiated pain of their misery, there has been 
 the waste of their grudged and insufficient food, and all 
 the pain and labour of their mothers, and all the 
 world is sadder for them because they have lived in 
 vain." 
 
 But those who have run the gauntlet of this hazardous 
 infancy are in hardly a better plight. Mr. Wells shows 
 by tables and statistics the far falling away, which is 
 the destiny of the children of the poor, from any 
 reasonable standard of physical development. The con- 
 sequences endure — the fruit of bad feeding, mothers 
 " battered and exhausted with child-bearing ; insanitary, 
 ugly, inconvenient homes ; absence of fresh air and sun- 
 light." These figures " serve to suggest, but they do 
 not serve to gauge, the far graver and sadder loss, the 
 invisible and immeasurable loss through mental and 
 moral qualities undeveloped, through activities warped 
 and crippled and vitality and courage lowered." 
 
 But the child grows; reason awakens the imitative 
 faculties, the beginnings of will. In Mr. Wells's in- 
 dictment of the cunning grown folk everywhere these 
 are waiting for him : with bludgeons and clubs, with 
 pitfalls dug for his unwary feet, with the grosser 
 cruelty of their kindness. We begin by using the 
 child as a plaything for ourselves : giving him foolish 
 toys that he may be amused, talking " baby language " 
 to him because* it causes us vague satisfaction. As he 
 grows older, we infect him with our mean compromises 
 and shabby virtues. We rear him in the terrible sham 
 genteel homes of the middle classes, which the author 
 describes with a kind of cold fury. " A raging father, 
 a scared, deceitful mother, vulgarly acting, vulgarly 
 thinking friends, all leave an almost indelible impress," 
 
 201 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 Then comes education. Of all Mr. Wells's hatreds the 
 dreary farce we term middle-class education perhaps 
 occupies the supreme position. With no thought-out 
 plan, with a thousand inherited shams and inconsis- 
 tencies, with an unctuous boast of moral influence 
 and the teaching of a religion which we do not our- 
 selves believe, we thrust the developing soul through 
 the period of awakening passion. Some collapse and 
 go under. Some hold on and develop into the kind of 
 creatures of compromise which make up the horde 
 of average men and women. It is all wrong — all 
 fundamentally wrong. The child, with all its infinite 
 possibilities, has become even as one of us: a "suburban 
 white nigger," with a thousand a year and the " conceit 
 of Imperial destinies"; or full of "the haughty in- 
 capacity, the mean pride, the parasitic lordliness of the 
 iust-independent, well-connected English." 
 
 It is a sombre picture of the raw disorder and mean- 
 ness of average English life. The kind of picture when 
 painted half a century ago by John Kuskin or Matthew 
 Arnold, left English readers speechless with furious 
 amazement. The men of to-day, with a less good 
 conceit of themselves, will possibly receive it with a 
 gloomy acquiescence. By the side of the " clean and 
 beautiful child " Mr. Wells places in cruel contrast 
 " the mean and graceless creature of our modern life, 
 his ill-made clothes ; his clumsy, half-fearful, half- 
 brutal bearing ; his coarse, defective speech ; his dreary, 
 unintelligent work ; his shabby, impossible, bathless, 
 artless home." The author lifts the curtain for a 
 moment on some phase of this creature's typical 
 activity, "enjoying himself" on a Bank Holiday, or 
 "rejoicing, peacock feather in hand, hat askew," on 
 "the defeat of a numerically inferior enemy." The 
 
 202 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 conversion of the one into the other he upholds as the 
 persistent tragedy of modern life. 
 
 No discriminating observer can contemplate the 
 particular type of civilisation, or the lack of it, which is 
 developing in Anglo-Saxon communities without pro- 
 found disquietude. " He gave them their heart's 
 desire, and sent leanness withal into their souls," 
 might be written over all the vast material success and 
 the fundamental spiritual poverty of the dominant race. 
 Mr. WeUs, passing to his remedy for these discontents, 
 has found a less eager following. The astonishment 
 and rather poor humour which htive been evoked by the 
 sweeping nature of his suggestions may indeed be put 
 aside. Such criticism is merely the result of a lack of 
 imaginative foresight. No social system could ever be 
 more entirely incredible than the social system of the 
 present day, if explained on paper to the denizens of 
 another world. No possible changes in the immediate 
 future could ever be more revolutionary and profound 
 than have been the changes of the immediate past. 
 A Government, by an adapted jury system, replacing 
 the universal democracy ; the State subsidy to selected 
 authors and critics ; the development of the " New 
 Republic " ; the deliberate attack on the problem of 
 poverty and low-grade life ; the large reorganisations of 
 education — all these which, to the dull mind, appear 
 but fantastic dreams, will certainly be paralleled by 
 equally disturbing changes before the century has 
 closed. 
 
 It is rather in his fundamental theory of life and of 
 human well-being that one would join issue with this 
 acute critic. He believes, as ardently as the newer 
 Fabians, in efficiency, that latest of the cries which 
 Mr. Shaw covers with the violence of his scorn. He 
 
 203 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 has a really remarkable faitli in the power of revised 
 organisation and government to modify the life of man. 
 Strangely enough for such a shrewd observer of the 
 tragic comedy of human affairs, he appears still to 
 believe that the intellect, the human reason, counts for 
 much in human progress ; that men may be reasoned 
 into sanity, cleanliness, order, and an ardour for all 
 excellent things. Whole pages of his books bum 
 with the same generous fire as that possessed by the 
 eighteenth -century French vmters, or the English ro" 
 formers of the early Victorian school. The vast catas- 
 trophe of the revolution in the one case, the prolonged 
 sunset of hope deferred in the other, emphasised a 
 lesson which humanity is always being compelled to 
 re-learn : that as the razor to the granite rocks or the 
 mooring thread of silk to the vessel, so is human intel- 
 lect and reason confronting "those two giants, the 
 passion and the pride of man." 
 
 This pleasant intellectual enthusiasm extends even to 
 free libraries, towards which Mr. Wells exhibits a 
 devotion shared, one would think, by no one but the 
 admirable Mr. Carnegie. " Give books," he cries with 
 fervour ; diffuse useful knowledge ; increase " the 
 amount of intellectual activity in the State . " " Thought 
 is the life of a community." " For three thousand 
 years and more the book has become more and more 
 the evident salvation of man." 
 
 He has failed to realise the practical difficulties of 
 amelioration and reform when the people, as a whole, 
 are content to have things otherwise. He demands, for 
 example, a " minimum standard of soundness and sani- 
 tation " for houses and "legislation against overcrowd- 
 ing." We have such minimum standard at present, 
 and such legislation ; but the law is a dead letter. It 
 
 204 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 is no one's interest to put it into force : it lies undis- 
 turbed on dusty shelves. He assails again our present 
 system of treating the children of vicious and drunken 
 parents : using " the quivering, damaged victim " as our 
 instrument for punishment of the parent. He would 
 take the child away to an institution (though, as he 
 wisely recognises in another place, these " institu- 
 tions " are but " aspects of failure "), and debit the cost 
 on the parent. The system is at present at work in the 
 industrial schools. There is a continuous pressure 
 on the part of undesirable parents to get rid of their 
 children. But, as every poor-law guardian knows, the 
 parent very shortly skips off and is lost in the crowd of 
 the city, leaving the State to rear its ill-fated offspring. 
 Nothing but a German system of classification and 
 registration could overcome this difficulty. But, in 
 fact, as Mr. Wells recognises in his revised scheme 
 of Government by Juries, we are faced, not as the 
 prejudiced assert, with a breakdown in Democratic 
 Government, but with a breakdown in all Government. 
 You call for a Dictator, you organise a central Execu- 
 tive, and you get — the English War Office. You 
 delegate authority and create local interest, and the 
 result is — the London Borough Council. It is a kind 
 of deliquescence of character and responsibility. " The 
 National energy is falling away." " Our workmen take 
 no pride in their work any longer ; they shirk toil and 
 gamble. And, what is worse, the master takes no pride 
 in his work ; he, too, shirks toil and gambles." In his 
 onslaught upon philanthropic institutions Mr. Wells 
 indicates the truth. " They do not work " is his severe 
 but just summary. " In cold fact it is impossible to get 
 enough capable and devoted people to do the work." 
 "Able, courageous, vigorous people are rare, and the 
 
 205 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 ■world urges a thousand better employments upon them." 
 It is the creation of "able, courageous, vigorous people" 
 which is the crying need of the modern world ; with sim- 
 plicity, tenacity, clean minds, and, above all, a personal 
 responsibility and devotion for the gifts of body and 
 soul. 
 
 There is no indication of the method by which such 
 character can be obtained, only a message of desolation 
 at its loss. 
 
 To all the modem claim for character building and a 
 moral training, Mr. Wells is frankly scornful. Religion 
 is kept out of his survey, but there are enough occasional 
 asides to show the direction of his thought and his con- 
 tempt for the claims of "religious" instruction. "In 
 spite of a ceremonial adhesion to the religion of his 
 fathers," the author says of the modern man, "you will 
 find nothing but a profound agnosticism. He has not 
 even the faith to disbelieve." Till some such internal 
 change or faith has come to him, and the society in 
 which he moves, it is difi&cult to see how he can be 
 saved. All manipulations of machinery will leave the 
 heart cheerless and cold. 
 
 Mr. Wells's books are crowded with excellent sug- 
 gestions of social reorganisation, the clearing away of 
 lumber and refuse, the oiling and cleaning and polishing 
 of crank and wheel. But at bottom Mr. Wells is 
 appealing to a spirit behind the material change. 
 With the great eighteenth-century dreamers, he desires 
 a fresh start. With Carlyle and all the school of the 
 prophets, he demands a new heart; in the old theological 
 language, a mind set on righteousness, a wUl directed 
 toward harmony with the will of God. He appeals 
 to the young men. " After thirty there are few 
 conversions and fewer fine beginnings ; men and women 
 
 206 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 go on in the path they have marked out for themselves." 
 What man over thirty — so rings his challenge— ^dares 
 hope for the Kepuhlic hefore he die ? or for an infantile 
 death-rate imder ninety in the thousand, with all the 
 conquered desolation that such a change would mean ? 
 or "for the deliverance of aU of our blood and speech 
 from those fouler things than chattel slavery, child and 
 adolescent labour " ? With the young men and women 
 lies all the hope of the future. A refusal to acquiesce 
 may be in them a generous ardour for reform. Clean 
 thought and a vision of better things may lead forward 
 to a newer day. With this new spirit, which feels 
 something of the sorrows of the world and its confusion 
 alike as a reproach and a call to action, the fulfilment of 
 the coming years may be "better than all our dreams." 
 
 ni 
 
 In sharp contrast to the bitter humours of the one 
 and the energy of the other comes the serene out- 
 look of the third of the prophets. M. Maeterlinck 
 also is watching the night for the" signs of the dawn. 
 His attitude also is one of acceptance of modern pro- 
 gress, and its transfiguration. He finds good in the 
 world of the present. He will have nothing to say 
 to the cry of disenchantment. He believes this pre- 
 sent itself may be charged with significance and high 
 ardour, adequate to all the demands of the human 
 soul. With a note of triumph he turns from the 
 long com-ses of human history, already hurried into 
 a vanished past, to confront with eagerness and long- 
 ing the flower and consummation of man's effort in a life 
 more desirable than man has ever known. 
 
 Much of his writing upon modem things is the work 
 207 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 of fancy — fancy not simple, but carefully elaborated — 
 rather than of imagination. Efforts to personify the 
 motor-car, the " wonderful beast," " the dreadful hippo- 
 griff," with description of its soul, its " terrible complex 
 heart," " the mighty viscera," appear artificial and 
 overstrained. His summaries of the flowers, the 
 begonia, "pretty but insolent, and a little artificial" ; 
 the double geranium, "indefatigable and extraordinarily 
 courageous"; the nasturtium which "screams like a 
 parrakeet climbing up the bars of its cage" are more 
 quaint than illuminating. The reader recognises that 
 the author feels compelled to make a certain effect, and 
 the results attained are forced rather than spontaneous. 
 But behind it all is that philosophy of practical life and 
 outlook upon human affairs which bring M. Maeteriinck's 
 writings as a real inspiration to many perplexed minds. 
 He sees a universe from which the old lights have fallen. 
 The schemes of salvation, the control of benignant 
 spirits, the manifest presence of a Deity concerned with 
 human welfare, having suddenly vanished from man's 
 outward survey. He sweeps the heavens with his 
 telescopes, and finds no God. He is driven to take up 
 the business of life with no pillar of cloud by day or 
 pillar of fire by night to guide him on his journey. 
 " We are emerging (to speak only of the last three or 
 four centuries of our present civilisation)," he says — 
 "we are emerging firom the great religious period." 
 The background, the " somewhat gloomy and threaten- 
 ing background," which " gave a uniform colour to the 
 atmosphere and the landscape," is to-day " disappearing 
 in tatters." And the space — the abode of our ignor- 
 ance, " which after the disappearance of the religious 
 ideas, had appeared frightfully empty, is gradually 
 becoming peopled with vague but enormous figures." 
 
 208 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 The "Void," the "Infinite," the blind and meaningless 
 schemata of the sciences which have assumed the 
 thrones of the elder gods, continue to put unanswerable 
 questions to the bewildered minds of men. They put 
 questions to us "and we stammer as best we may." 
 But the " active idea which we conceive of the riddle 
 in the midst of which we have our being " is opening 
 gradually a "luminous and boundless perspective" 
 which is destined to transfigure all man's activities 
 and dreams. 
 
 " We were, it might be said, like blind men who 
 should imagine the outer world from inside a shut 
 room. Now, we are those same blind men whom an 
 ever-silent guide leads by turns into the forest, across 
 the plain, on the mountain, and beside the sea. Their 
 eyes have not yet opened ; but their shaking and eager 
 hands are able to feel the trees, to rumple the spikes of 
 corn, to gather a flower or a fruit, to marvel at the ridge 
 of a rock, or to mingle with the cool waves, while their 
 ears learn to distinguish, without needing to understand, 
 the thousand real songs of the sun and the shade, the 
 wind and the rain, the leaves and the waters." 
 
 On the one hand there is this vision of hope and the 
 enlargement of the human mind which comes from the 
 apprehension of infinite horizons. " Though we no 
 longer count, the humanity of which we form a part 
 is acquiring the importance of which we are being 
 stripped." The greatest dangers that awaited this 
 humanity at its hazardous infancy have now been over- 
 passed.. " The instability of the seas and the uprising 
 of the central fire " are to-day infinitely lass to be 
 feared. We may be permitted to believe that the peril 
 of " collision with a stray star " may be averted for " the 
 few centuries of respite necessary for iis to learn how to 
 
 209 p 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 ward it o£f " : till we have learnt to " lay hold of that 
 essential secret of the worlds which for the time heing 
 and to soothe our ignorance (even as we soothe a child 
 and lull it to sleep by repeating meaningless and 
 monotonous words) we have called the law of gravita- 
 tion." We feel, therefore, in this age the greatness of 
 expectation — looking towards a revealing glory. " We 
 are in the magnificent state in which Michaelangelo 
 painted the prophets and the just men of the Old 
 Testament on that prodigious ceiling of the Sistine 
 Chapel : we are living in expectation, and perhaps in 
 the last moment of expectation." 
 
 " Expectation, in fact, has degrees which begin with 
 a sort of vague resignation, and which do not yet hope 
 for the thrill aroused by the nearest movements of the 
 expected object. It seems as though we heard those 
 movements ; the sound of superhuman footsteps, an 
 enormous door opening, a breath caressing us, or light 
 coming ; we do not know ; but expectation at this pitch 
 is an ardent and marvellous state of life, the fairest 
 period of happiness, its youth, its childhood. . . ." 
 
 The one attitude is this of expectation, of inquiry, the 
 sense of vast powers and purposes almost revealed. M. 
 Maeterlinck's essays have the best quality of reverie. 
 There is much directly reminiscent of Sir Thomas 
 Browne ; reveries of life and death, of the mystery of 
 things, of symbols and colours, and the secret meanings 
 of signs and numbers. A fascination for the occult distin- 
 guishes his latest work, for the spells and enchantments 
 of the modern spiritualisms and thought-reading, and 
 oracles and teachings which blossom now, as in former 
 times, on the ruins of the great systems of religion. He 
 wiU inquire concerning the mysteries of chance as seen in 
 the dancing of the tiny ball on the roulette table at 
 210 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN 
 
 Monte Carlo. He will inquire again how it is, if the 
 future, arising naturally from the changes of the present, 
 is as real as the past, that the veil is never withdrawn 
 which hides this real world from us. 
 
 The other attitude is the attitude of contentment with 
 the common things of life ; the conclusion of the 
 philosophy of the eighteenth century that "it is neces- 
 sary to cultivate our garden." Under the mysteries 
 already unfolded, amid the conflagrations of worlds and 
 systems, undeterred by the vast solitudes of space and 
 their enormous cold, M. Maeterlinck will cultivate his 
 garden. Lightness and brightness are added to the 
 vision of natural beauty. On the " motionless- road 
 where none passes save the eternal forces of life " 
 spring comes and autumn, the rain and the sun, the 
 silence and " the night followed by the light of the 
 moon." It is no small thing that the world should 
 grow fairer year by year, and men's hearts and the 
 weather more gentle. " We live in a world in which 
 flowers are more beautiful and more numerous than 
 formerly ; and perhaps we have the right to add that 
 the thoughts of men are more just and greedier of 
 truth." "We are mastering the nameless powers." 
 We are making our planet all our own. We are 
 " adorning our stay " — we should rejoice at it — " and 
 gradually broadening the acreage of happiness and of 
 beautiful life." 
 
 The curtain rises upon the violent revolt against the 
 things of the present which Mr. Shaw voices — the voice 
 of a generation's disgust and weariness. The action of 
 the play is along the lines of deliberate improvement 
 outlined by Mr. Wells with such energy and appeal. 
 
 211 
 
BEFORE THE DAWN 
 
 And the curtain falls upon a vision of gentleness and 
 tranquillity in the garden of flowers. 
 
 Is this a forecast — or but a challenge — of the courses 
 of human life in the civilisation of the West during the 
 century which has opened with such uncertain dawn ? 
 
 212 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
" To the scientist the earth must for ever roll arownd the 
 central solar fire: to the poet the svm itmstfor ever set behind 
 the western hills." 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 TIME corrodes all weakness and stamps strength 
 with the guarantee of its approval. Examina- 
 tion of its fretting upon the work of earlier enthusiasms 
 is a task always fruitful, always mournfol-. Science, 
 Literature, Eeligion alike are compelled to encounter its 
 salt winds and suhtle forces of decay. Science rests, it 
 would appear, upon knowledge secure when attained, 
 and henceforth indifferent to its ravages. Literature is 
 the expression of man's soul in which Time can effect no 
 change. Eeligion and its experience belongs to a time- 
 less universe. Yet the man who, with candour, will 
 examine the work of the years immediately past will 
 find in none of these regions of human action that 
 serene security. I can think of three authors which 
 each at one time burst upon the mind with an over- 
 mastering domination. Huxley had said the final 
 word of the sciences. Mr. Swinburne represented the 
 supreme expression of all that passionate youth desires 
 of literature. Newman had penetrated to the ultimate 
 recesses of the human soul within, and the revelation 
 without of a hidden God. It is no unprofitable task to 
 review after a decade what of these ardours still endures. 
 
 How is time treating the man of science, whose name 
 sounds through all the great intellectual conflicts of the 
 past half-century? Huxley was indeed more than a 
 
 215 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 scientific investigator. Writing a pure and nerYous 
 English, he plunged into varied fields — philosophy, 
 theology, sociology, the struggle for intellectual free- 
 dom. In all these many hailed him as leader. Here 
 time has already commenced the work of destruction. 
 The enthusiasm stimulated by the vision of succes- 
 sive scientific advances has become less strident. 
 The "fairy godmother" whom he praised has proved 
 powerless to abolish the evils of life. Pain and 
 poverty still remain to trouble the little life of man. 
 The Golden Age has been relegated to a remoter 
 future. In face of a seven-million peopled Abyss of 
 lives austere with want and crime, the famous alterna- 
 tive which Huxley himself suggested, the " kindly 
 comet " whose advent he would hail as a " desirable 
 consummation," might seem a not unwelcome alter- 
 native. In this and in other matters the spirit of men 
 has undergone a profound change. His was an age of 
 faith without belief; ours, of belief without faith. He 
 fought for a dismal nescience with the fervour and 
 devotion of a Puritan. We have witnessed a spiritual 
 revival, a reaction towards constructive belief and a 
 faith in the unseen. But this faith is languid and 
 spiritless. Men for the most part hold these things 
 only tedious, and marvel at the excitement manifested 
 by their fathers. 
 
 Beyond the changes of the age, the work of Huxley 
 can be seen in a clearer perspective. His vigorous 
 certainty, the power of popular controversy which he 
 possessed, the transparent honesty and truthfulness of 
 the man, exercised a dominant influence upon his 
 contemporaries. It seemed impossible to conceive 
 that he could be in the wrong. To-day certain limi- 
 tations appear. He was never a Liberal, either in 
 
 216 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 politics or in the world of thought. He held in a real 
 abhorrence everything represented by the name of 
 Gladstone. To the most heroic and sincere of all 
 English statesmen he found it difficult to award eyen 
 the common virtue of honesty. Huxley joined issue 
 along the whole line from Home Rule to the Gadarene 
 pigs. He read into the political action some of the 
 rather complicated and tortuous methods of the theo- 
 logical controversies. He became convinced that he 
 was dealing with a mind evasive and rhetorical, over- 
 rated, leading England down slippery paths. Towards 
 the end of his life he recognised that a kind of sacred 
 duty was laid upon him to assail the Liberal leader 
 at every vulnerable point. Nor was he a Liberal in 
 thought. He fought, indeed, for tolerance. But he 
 desired the toleration, not of opinion, but of his own 
 opinions. His attitude, as Herbert Spencer told him 
 unkindly and in a famous controversy, was that of a 
 theologian rather than a philosopher. He refused 
 resolutely to defend the baser and more popular 
 atheisms. His treatment of the newer sciences of 
 mental disturbance and obscure aberration was essen- 
 tially similar to the treatment against which his own 
 sciences had slowly struggled to recognition. His 
 attitude to the Psychical Eesearch Society to the last 
 was one of contempt. One can imagine the disgust 
 with which he would contemplate the respect and wel- 
 come which have been given in later years to the work 
 of this body of explorers. 
 
 Sure of himself and with a power of relentless 
 analysis possessed by but a few, he became the terror 
 of all weak adherents of traditional creeds. Certainly 
 he cleared the ground of much encumbering rubbish. 
 Yet his philosophy, when viewed as a whole, shows 
 
 217 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 strange inconsistencies, and his theological knowledge 
 presents startling gaps. In philosophy he knew the 
 English thinkers well, Hume and Berkeley; he could 
 estimate upon the traditional English lines the prohlems 
 presented by the newer knowledge. But he never under- 
 stood Kant. All German metaphysics he dismissed as 
 moonshine. He spoke for the moment, upon set occa- 
 sion, and it is impossible to unify his often sensational, 
 always noteworthy, lectures and essays into one con- 
 sistent body of doctrine. In one place he pictured 
 human beings as " conscious automata " with aU future 
 changes exactly determined by the past, and conscious- 
 ness but as the shadow of the locomotive, accompanying 
 but uninfluencing the progress of change. At another 
 he breaks into a passionate assertion that human will 
 " counts for something as a condition of the course of 
 events," and urges each of his hearers deliberately to 
 set himself to lighten the world's load of suffering. 
 On the broad question of ultimate reality he fluctuated 
 in quite an extraordinary fashion between an idealism 
 and a materialism. At one time he compared the 
 advance of law in the spiritual world to the advance of 
 an eclipse upon a tenified sun-worshipper seeing the 
 extinction of his god. At another he is roundly dismiss- 
 ing all these "laws" and compulsions as gratuitously 
 invested bugbears. On the moral question he definitely 
 changed. At first he was laboriously pleading for a 
 purely natural system of ethics, and the handy and ser- 
 viceable garments which science would provide. Later, 
 in his Eomanes lecture, the most brilliant in style of 
 all his work, he is tearing to tatters a " cosmic process " 
 consummating only in the instincts of the ape and the 
 tiger. In his theological excursions, acute and sugges- 
 tive as they remain, his limitations are no less manifest. 
 
 218 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 He knew the work of Baur and one or two other German 
 scholars. The opponents he fought unfortunately knew 
 less. But he was convinced that the whole fabric of 
 the accepted religion stood as one piece. He had been 
 brought up to hold verbal inspiration as the only legiti- 
 mate theory. The rejection of a Garden of Eden or a 
 Noachian deluge seemed to him the rejection of the 
 whole of Christianity. Those who treated these 
 stories in any but literal form he branded as disin- 
 genuous and " wrigglers." He appeared never to 
 have heard of Clement or Origen, or a time when 
 while Christianity was making its greatest advances, 
 these early legends were frankly accepted as allegorical. 
 Such are the losses. What remains? The man 
 still stands as a great figure and character, for which 
 the world is richer. He was strong, hewn from rock, 
 trenchant of all shams and sophistries, honest as the 
 day, stem often, but With a fund of passionate tender- 
 ness only revealed to the outside world after his death. 
 Ever a fighter, he delighted in battle with his peers. 
 He loved the combat for the combat's sake. Yet he 
 was ever courteous, generous, scrupulously fair, deter- 
 mined never needlessly to offend. ' The honesty and 
 utter devotion to truth is perhaps the outstanding 
 feature. His letter to Charles Kingsley, in which, 
 under the sudden agony of a strong man's suffering, 
 he poured out to his friend the secrets of his heart, 
 stands as one of the great utterances in the history of 
 the life of the spirit. From the grave of his dead 
 child he refused to delude himself vrith a hope which, 
 could he only accept it, would have changed the face of 
 the world. Like George Eliot, he resolved to do without 
 opium. It was this resolute truthfulness which gave 
 him the power to destroy with such sudden and over- 
 
 219 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 whelming destruction such as Samuel Wilberforce. 
 The scene at the British Association meeting at 
 Oxford has become historic as one of the great 
 episodes in the conflict between authority and progress. 
 
 The record of friendships which kept such a body as 
 the X Society dining together for so many decades ; 
 the touches of home affection, the very human outbursts 
 of impatience at stupidity and ignorance in high places ; 
 the tenderness of the strong man towards children and 
 the weak; the occasional passages of almost startling 
 self-revelation, of half-wistful hope moderating the trucu- 
 lent agnosticism as he confronts the mysteries of Life 
 and Death — ^these are the elements which reveal a 
 character of an unchanging attraction. 
 
 It is the strenuous life devoted to high ends. There 
 is a very pleasant picture in his life of the Sunday even- 
 ings in St. John's Wood in the latter years. In summer 
 the family are gathered in the garden. Friends drop in, 
 there is talk of the latest scientific results, of progress, 
 and the smiting of the enemy. It is the afternoon 
 of the successful man, golden, but with a touch of 
 evening and the approaching night. There is that in 
 plenty which should accompany old age : honour, love, 
 obedience, troops of friends. Only in the end some- 
 thing appears lacking. Perhaps the outlook entirely 
 narrowed to a fragment of time and the success of a 
 lifetime stands judged by a sense of larger issues beyond. 
 It is Sunday evening. Outside the walled garden is a 
 chaos of confusion and pain. And as the twilight falls 
 there comes the sound of a world-old appeal renewed 
 ever in humility and patience : " Pitifully behold the 
 sorrows of our hearts. Mercifully forgive the sins of 
 Thy people." 
 
 220 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 II 
 
 Mr. Swinburne in the preface to the collected edition 
 of hia work, has surveyed the long progress from the 
 day when "Atalanta" revealed a new and magnifi- 
 cent force in literature, and later the first poems and 
 ballads astonished and scandalised the world. He 
 found nothing of which to repent, nothing to with- 
 draw. He described the whole succession of changing 
 subjects : the early poetry of passion, the songs of 
 sunrise, the national faith and its heroes, the dramas, 
 the poems of spiritual revolt, and the celebration of 
 the coming dawn ; and after these the poetry of 
 natural things and of childhood ; and, above all, the 
 voice of triumph and longing which runs through the 
 whole series, the "light and sound and darkness 
 of the sea." Of the first, "there are photographs 
 from life in the book," he asserted, " and there are 
 sketches from imagination. Some which keen-sighted 
 criticism has dismissed with a smile as ideal or imaginary 
 were as real and actual as they well could be ; others 
 which have been taken for obvious transcripts from 
 memory were utterly fantastic or dramatic." To all 
 that hubbub of anger of " the spiritually still-born 
 children of dirt and dullness," the author was as 
 indifferent then as he is to-day. 
 
 But in the poems of freedom " there is no touch of 
 dramatic impersonation or imaginary emotion." They 
 were inspired by " such faith as is born of devotion and 
 reverence " ; reverence to a cause and to its leaders ; 
 especially to "the three living gods, I do not say of my 
 idolatry, for idolatry is a term inapplicable where the 
 gods are real and true, but of my whole-souled and 
 
 221 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 single-hearted worsliip " — Landor, Hugo, Mazzini — the 
 last "the man whom I had always revered above the 
 other men on earth." 
 
 The appeal of the new spiritual sunrise, with the 
 signs of the passing of the night of the older re- 
 ligions Mr. Swinburne gathered up especially in " twin 
 poems of antiphonal correspondence in subject and 
 sound," "the 'Hymn to Proserpine' and the 'Hymn 
 of Man' — the death song of spiritual decadence, and 
 the birth song of spiritual renascence." 
 
 Such a defiant re-assertion of the faith of a lifetime 
 is a challenge to all the memories of the past. I 
 commenced, a boy at school, with the earlier selections, 
 reading in mingled perplexity and tedium. The long 
 sea poems of the second series of the " Poems and 
 Ballads," with their difficult metres, their rhetoric, and 
 their frequent obscurity, serve as about the worst 
 possible form of introduction to Mr. Swinburne's poetry. 
 And a volume which contained scarcely anything from 
 the first " Poems and Ballads," and none of the greatest 
 of the Atalanta choruses — a volume omitting " The 
 Garden of Proserpine" and the " Triumph of Time" 
 and "Hesperia," with the "Songs before Sunrise" 
 very inadequately represented, failed altogether to reveal 
 the magic of the master. 
 
 My conversion was efiected later, at Cambridge, and 
 at a lecture upon Swinburne by Mr. Frederic Myers. 
 The instrument of the sudden change was the end of 
 " Tristram " recited in the deep, impassioned chant 
 which I suppose Myers had learnt from Tennyson. I 
 can still hear the throb of the music as the emotion 
 deepened to the splendour of that imperishable close : — 
 
 222 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 " Nor where they sleep shall moon or sunlight shine, 
 Nor man look down for ever ; none shall say 
 Here once, or here, Tristram and Isenlt lay ; 
 But peace they have that none may gain who live, 
 And rest about them that no love can give, 
 And over them, while death and Ufe shall be. 
 The light and sound and darkness of the sea." 
 
 From that moment commenced an allegiance which 
 speedily passed into an unfaltering worship. 
 
 Then came the period, which most young men have 
 passed through, of intoxication, when we would hurl 
 Swinbumian imprecations upon "whatever gods may 
 be," or in the interval between a football match and a 
 hearty meal proclaim our thirst for annihilation to the 
 unconscious stars. Time and the experience of sorrow 
 wore down these earlier ardours ; much of the swing- 
 ing stanzas began to appear as rhetoric, or at best 
 eloquence, rather than poetry. Much also was revealed 
 as so detached, cold, and separate from " the labouring 
 world "as to give the impression of a hard, inhuman 
 glitter and brilliance ; the brilliance of the Arabian 
 Nights, the hardness and cruelty of the stories of 
 fairyland. 
 
 But still the old spell in part remains. To-day one 
 can again recall the fascination of the buoyancy and 
 ardour, the waves of passionate eloquence, that violence 
 of triumph and weariness which will make Swinburne 
 always the singer of the springtime, and only pass when 
 youth has vanished from the world. 
 
 No poet has attained such general recognition of 
 supremacy with less general acceptance of his ideals in 
 life and literature. In a secure vitality, and with 
 Death a thing incredible, we were all intoxicated with 
 the poems of its praise. Later, with life passing, and 
 
 223 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 the shadow lengthening on the hills, " the end of every 
 man's desire " seemed something less desirable. It 
 says much for the spells and sorcery of the enchanter, 
 the magic of an outburst of music, alike mournful and 
 triumphant, that the accepted verdict could even for a 
 moment be denied, and men at the last gather to enlist 
 under the defiant banner of defeat. 
 
 For it is not death alone which is here commemorated 
 in song. Not only the fascination of sleep and silence 
 are celebrated in the hymn to Proserpine, and revealed 
 in the unforgettable vision of her garden, with its 
 bloomless poppies and dreams of forsaken days. Here 
 is also the elevation of Destruction as against Creation, 
 the denial of the desirability of life itself, the deliberate 
 rejection of that exultation of Being for which the 
 morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God 
 shouted for joy. Mr. Swinbui*ne took the work of the 
 Revolution and pushed it home, without that faith in a 
 universal restitution which broke the seals and poured 
 out the vials and loosened " the thunder of the trumpets 
 of the night." He tears down King and Priest. He 
 rages against all the ancient oppressive laws. He 
 demands the clearance of the accumulated refuse of the 
 dead. But this alone will not content him. Destruc- 
 tion, renunciation, annihilation must be elevated in the 
 place of the gods dethroned. And in the end he 
 passes to a world vision of the work of dissolution 
 accomplishing itself to its far conclusion: the earth 
 and all its peoples passing, its hopes and hates, its homes 
 and fanes, the bones of the grave and the grave in which 
 they have been laid ; sun, moon, and stars crashing into 
 the abyss : hell and the palaces of heaven and the older 
 and the newer gods, and everything that is and has been 
 and is to come crumbling into darkness and silence, with 
 
 224 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 all that remains an enormous nothingness, an enormous 
 cold. Others have gazed upon this picture with shudder- 
 ing, while deeming it but a dream and a vision. Modern 
 theories of Evolution have suddenly endowed it with 
 fierce and insistent life. It was left for the century 
 which felt the thing gripping at its heart to produce a 
 poet who would confront it not with horror, but with 
 exultation, proclaiming with a passionate violence the 
 ending of all violence and passion. 
 
 This is new in literature, and this must endure, for 
 the vision is not yet destined to vanish. A civilisation 
 becoming more and more divided from sane and rational 
 things is destined more and more eagerly to welcome a 
 Gdtterddmmerung which will involve not only itself, 
 but all existence in a cosmic desolation. Two great 
 and emotional appeals against this assertion of an 
 elemental despair lie in the early work of Mr. 
 Swinburne. In the choruses of the " Atalanta " is 
 the revolt rather than the acquiescence of man in 
 such an ending. " Because thy name is life and 
 our name death " ; because " thou hast fed one rose 
 with dust of many men " ; therefore" all we are against 
 thee, against thee, God most high." And in the 
 " Songs before Sunrise," with their celebration of national 
 resistance to Imperial supremacy, a resistance congruous 
 with " the actual earth's equalities, air, light, and night, 
 hills, winds, and trees," manifested in the European 
 struggle for the liberation, of the smaller peoples, the 
 worship of Proserpine vanished before the vision of a 
 splendid dawn. 
 
 Later Mr. Swinburne turned back upon the national 
 cause : and with that desertion his inspiration fell from 
 him like a garment ; so that with each successive volume 
 of fluent verse men said sadly to one another : " There 
 
 22& Q 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 was a Swinburne." These later productions form a 
 study of profound sadness. With the poems arranged in 
 order of writing, and surveyed as a whole, the volumes 
 might not untruthfully be labelled " the dying of Genius." 
 To turn from the opening of the " Poems and Ballads " 
 to the close of the " Channel Passage " is to turn from 
 life to death. Youth has gone, and with youth the 
 passionate faith in high, disinterested causes. The 
 poems leave a nasty taste in the mouth ; the taste of a 
 snarl and a sneer. Much might appear as a parody 
 of Swinburne written by a reporter of the journalism 
 of the day. The injunction to the Kussian revolu- 
 tionists upon the accession of the present Czar — to 
 " smite and send him howling down his father's way " — 
 may perhaps be passed as, at least, in the tradition of 
 the terrible sonnets of 1870 upon " Napoleon m." 
 But what is to be said of the jeerings at the Irish 
 Nationalists, the clamorous invective dashed against 
 Gladstone ? Or those deplorable sonnets in which the 
 poet acclaims the sailing of the soldiers against the 
 Boer Eepublics ? The foes of England are chivalrously 
 described as " like wolves," " dogs agape with jaws 
 afoam," with " foul tongues that blacken God's dis- 
 honoured name." The poet cries for vengeance and 
 destruction and screeches shrilly for blood. 
 
 The emotion aroused in the reader is that of Japhet 
 towards the drunken Noah. These poems are already 
 dead. In the future they will be mercifully forgotten. 
 To escape from this fog and foulness to a cleaner air 
 and the sight again of sunlight and the stars you have 
 only to turn back to the former things : — 
 
 " Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done ; 
 There lies not any troublous thing before, 
 226 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 Nor sight nor eound to war against thee more ; 
 For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, 
 All waters as the shore." 
 
 It is welcome to turn from so indecent a spectacle to 
 the memories of the earlier time. For here is the out- 
 burst of an inspiration's dawn ; before a too passionate 
 spring tide and time which changes all good things had 
 left nothing but scentless autumn flowers, and of all the 
 year's earlier promise " only dead yew leaves and a little 
 dust." 
 
 m 
 
 Newman, of all the pilgrims of Eternity, absorbed in 
 a world alien to the common interests of man, stands 
 alone in the fascination of his influence upon those 
 of entirely incongruous ideals. Amongst all the strange 
 problems of his personality, none are more perplexing 
 than that of the origins. That " typical Englishmen " 
 should have inherited traditions long imbedded in the 
 past. The writer of the most perfect and simple Eng- 
 lish prose since Bunyan, the child of the English 
 Church, with enthusiasm for her ancient ways, the 
 voice through which the very spirit of Oxford and the 
 old University ideal became articulate, should have 
 originated, one would think, in some secluded line of 
 ancestry, an historical family of the landed classes, or 
 with memories of ancestral services to learning and 
 religion. The facts were entirely otherwise. Newman 
 was a stranger, an alien, with scarcely a drop of Eng- 
 lish blood in his veins. On his father's side he was 
 descended from a line of Dutch Jews ; on his mother's, 
 from a family of French Huguenots. He appears as 
 the son of a clerk in a banking firm, in straitened cir- 
 
 227 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 cumstances. His childliood was passed near Richmond. 
 He attended a middle-class school at Ealing. His 
 sister's name was Jemima. He was reared in the 
 typical evangelical piety of the middle classes, which, 
 turned stagnant, gave cause later for such merciless 
 satire in " Loss and Gain." Two rough deductions 
 from history to which Newman seemed an exception, 
 are indeed confirmed by the discovery of this ancestry. 
 The one is that genius is the child of the mixture 
 of races. The other is that the great religious 
 leaders and saints of England, from the days of Anselm 
 or Hugh of Lincoln, the "humble and heavenly 
 stranger," have been for the most part of alien stock. 
 The pure Saxon blood does not easily turn to the high 
 endeavours of the soul. 
 
 Those who would fully estimate the life of this extra- 
 ordinary man, are confronted with a difficulty at the 
 present insuperable. In the first half of the story, the 
 material is superabundant ; in the second, almost 
 entirely lacking. " The going out of '45 " cut through 
 the life history, severing all the strings of friendship 
 and tradition. From existence passed in a glare of 
 sunshine almost pitiless, revealing every spot and 
 wrinkle, Newman suddenly passed into silence and 
 grey shadow. For over forty years there remain but a 
 few scattered letters : the Manning correspondence, 
 occasional notes to Lord Acton and others, and such 
 chance reminiscences as have appeared in the biography 
 of others. The published books alone for the majority 
 revealed that Newman still lived on. These years were 
 of tranquillity indeed, and confidence in the haven 
 attained after rough voyaging. But there were schemes 
 of service always checked and baflSed, and the failure of 
 many designs whose influences might have been incal- 
 
 228 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 culable. The plan for his retranslation of the Catholic 
 Bible was sanctioned by Wiseman, then withdrawn in 
 obedience to the protest of the booksellers. The daring 
 project of a return to Oxford, which might haye changed 
 the history of the future, was checked and finally 
 destroyed by Manning in a piece of ecclesiastical 
 intrigue which the friends of Catholicism would fain 
 forget. " A painful correspondence " ended in "a 
 lifelong estrangement." Seven years were spent in 
 a kind of nightmare struggle in Ireland, endeavour- 
 ing to create a Catholic University, amid a chaos of 
 political intrigue and religious bigotry. The history of 
 this he has left in a volume privately printed. The 
 true history of that troublous experiment would make a 
 record at once entertaining and piteous. He was torn 
 between two parties, each demanding the support of his 
 great name, each indignant when he refused to throw in 
 his lot with them. The Liberals, under Lord Acton, 
 held that he had deceived and betrayed them. To the 
 last. Lord Acton could never afterwards speak of New- 
 man without reproach and bitterness. The opponents 
 of Liberalism on the other hand, were never likely to 
 forgive the spirit which found expression in the denun- 
 ciation of their methods in the letter on the Vatican 
 decree. A criticism, says his latest biographer, " which 
 includes all his opponents," is " that they failed to 
 comprehend an intellect greater than their own, busy 
 with problems to the vast horizons of which their view 
 could not extend." 
 
 The great works which remain to-day for our estimate 
 and judgment are in fact but polemical pamphlets called 
 forth by the controversy of a day. But for the madness 
 of the Catholic aggression, we would never have had the 
 " Present Position of Catholics," one of the great books 
 
 229 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 of the nineteenth century : a plea against moh-nde un- 
 equalled in its mingling of pathos, irony, and restraint. 
 But for the call to impossible work in Ireland, the 
 lectures on the " Ideal of a University " would never 
 have been given ; and the world would have been poorer 
 by the most magnificent of appeals for knowledge as in 
 itself an end, for theology as an essential of true learn- 
 ing, for education in its true and not its accepted 
 meaning. And but for Kingsley's random and reckless 
 onslaught the " Apologia " would never have been 
 written, and Newman would have gone to his grave 
 unvindicated ; the product of six weeks' white-heat 
 emotion having produced, as by a kind of miracle, one 
 of the most convincing of all records of the pilgrimage of 
 the soul. 
 
 Still to-day, however, abides unchallenged the 
 supremacy of Newman's English prose. For mingled 
 refinement, simplicity, gentleness, this stands unrivalled 
 in his time. Specially concerned and entirely congruous 
 with the deeper things of existence — sin and its con- 
 sequences, the mysteries encompassing human life, its 
 uncertainty and future, the longing of the soul for God 
 — it possesses qualities which would have made Newman 
 triumphant upon the plane of the controversies of the 
 world. His power of irony, indeed, is unsurpassed; 
 triumphant in all its expressions : firom the more delicate 
 irony of the description of the English gentleman, 
 through the broader satire upon the English view of 
 " Don Felix Melatesta de Guadaloupe," to the savage 
 and awful irony of the lost soul's awakening in the 
 " Sermons to Mixed Congregations," at which the 
 reader is moved against his will to a kind of metallic 
 laughter. 
 
 It is as a mysterious, majestic figure that Newman 
 230 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME 
 
 appears in the history of his age : at heart solitary. 
 Life for him was " a dialogue not a drama." Turn 
 where you will in his writing, you find the same spiiit : 
 an inner life of absorbing interest, a grave wonder at the 
 ends and ideals of man, his folly, his aspirations, the 
 confusion he has made of his world. The music of that 
 voice holds the listener enchanted, as it appeals from 
 all transitory things to those which alone are secure and 
 abiding; — 
 
 " The world goes on from age to age, but the Holy 
 Angels and blessed Saints are always crying alas, alas ! 
 and woe, woe ! over the loss of vocations and the dis- 
 appointment of hopes, and the scorn of God's love and 
 the ruin of souls. . . . Times come and go, and men 
 will not believe that that is to be which is not yet, or 
 that what now is only continues for a season, and is 
 not eternity. The end is the trial : the world passes : 
 it is but a pageant and a scene : the lofty palace 
 crumbles, the busy city is mute, the ships of Tarshish 
 have sped away. On heart and flesh death is coming ; 
 the veil is breaking. ... 0, my Lord and Saviour, let 
 me die as I desire to live, in Thy faith, in Thy Church, 
 in Thy Service, and in Thy love." 
 
 The curtain of that quiet life is torn aside for a 
 moment at intervals as the years go by. At each 
 revelation Nevnnan appears, still expecting, looking 
 outwards at the tremendous turmoil of the world with 
 pity, sadness, surprise. In his own chosen epitaph, he 
 turned " Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem." That 
 world then and afterwards has been at once attracted 
 and baffled : as the world is ever attracted and baffled 
 by one who possesses both a secret which it cannot 
 penetrate, and an indifference to all it holds dear. 
 
 231 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
'Nil nisi Divinwn stabile est, ccetera fitrrms." 
 
 — Mantegna. 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 THERE are books and writers which command 
 a universal attention. The critic immediately 
 can assert a supremacy. Here is literature, unchal- 
 lenged, secure. The world may be indifferent, the 
 comment of the crowd perplexed or doubtful. But the 
 decision is confident and final. There are others, for 
 which no similar high claim can be advanced, which 
 yet may appeal to the individual with a particular 
 entreaty. There are weaknesses obvious, flaws, limita- 
 tions. The legitimacy of another's criticism must be 
 recognised, as the claim is dismissed with scorn or 
 aberration, and direct interest is suggested as the cause 
 of the extravagant praise. Nevertheless every writer 
 who is compelled to pass under review any large 
 quantities of prose and poetry must of necessity find 
 some which, through temperament or common interest, 
 comes with a special appeal. Henceforth this work is 
 placed upon a particular shelf of the memory. He can 
 listen unmoved to all analysis and depreciation. To 
 you these are nothing, or but ruins of great effort : to 
 me they have come with something of the force of an 
 inspiration. 
 
 I can think of certain tiny volumes — in all a few 
 hundred pages — which in the past few years, amongst 
 
 235 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 literature still unrecognised, have given me this special 
 delight. Here I can describe some of them : a volume 
 of gloomy, almost morbid, self-analysis by an author 
 terming himself " Mark Rutherford " : a series of little 
 impressionist sketches by Mr. Lewis Hind : the " Son- 
 nets of the Wingless Hours " : the poems of Mrs. 
 Marriott Watson. 
 
 All of these penetrate beneath the outward show of 
 things. All present a picture of a world of tragic 
 import unheeded in the traffic of men. There is 
 the soul's hunger behind the visible pages, a vision of 
 longing and baffled purposes. The spirit which unites 
 them all is the sense of the greatness and the sadness 
 of the life of man, pent up in the kingdoms of Pity 
 and of Death. 
 
 My first reading of the "Autobiography" was at 
 Cambridge, and my marked copy is the fifth edition, 
 dated 1892. I took the book home firom the book- 
 sellers and read it through at a sitting, and immediately 
 hurried out and ordered the " Deliverance," which, 
 when it came, received the same treatment. I thought 
 then that the two books represented in their intimacy 
 and sincerity and simple, refined style something 
 unique in modern English literature. For perhaps 
 the seventh time I have read this life story again. 
 And I would entirely endorse the earlier verdict. If 
 this be not literature "of the centre," then all our 
 accepted standards of taste must be abandoned, and the 
 test of greatness sought in the popular rhetoric and 
 the largest circulation in the world. 
 
 236 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 Yet " Mark Rutherford " has never entirely come 
 into his own. Many who are familiar with that thin 
 stream of literature which still trickles through the 
 parched and blackened land of present printed matter, 
 have failed to recognise the greatness of this life history 
 of one of the unimportant. I remember once discussing 
 with Professor Henry Sidgwick these and other works. 
 He told me that as he was getting older he came more 
 and more to limit his novel reading to those books 
 which gave him pleasure, and that he could not find 
 pleasure in such works as the "Autobiography of Mark 
 Rutherford." And indeed the standpoint has to be 
 somewhat detached — an appreciation of artistic excel- 
 lence, of one thing set to do, and supremely well done — 
 if pleasure is to be obtained from this haunting picture 
 of man's futility and his failure. " Mark Rutherford," 
 as Bagehot's old lady said of Thackeray, is "an un- 
 comfortable writer." The passionless detachment of 
 the narrative makes the resultant impression all the 
 more challenging and sorrowful. The reader finds 
 himself suddenly confronted with pictures which he 
 would fain forget, with questionings which he has 
 generally managed to put by in the bustle of business 
 or pleasure. A modern scientific writer has announced 
 a transformation, through the growth of a newer 
 knowledge, of the last words of the ancient wisdom. 
 " Man, know thyself," has been changed into the 
 counsel, " Man, may thou never know what tihou art." 
 If this verdict is to be accepted as final, the work of 
 " Mark Rutherford " may well be placed on some future 
 index of proscription of a race determined to life always 
 in the summer days. 
 
 This dreary outlook, in his case as in the case of 
 another painter of modern life and its failures, 
 
 237 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 George Gissing, may be the chief cause of the 
 lack of recognition. In the city civilisation of the 
 present there is an element of boisterous and lively 
 fancy, noisy and cheerful and untroubled by the pale 
 cast of thought. Hampstead Heath and Margate 
 Sands, the popular election scrimmage, the Daily 
 Telegraph, give together that note of exuberance 
 which Mr. Boutmy has found most characteristic of 
 the English middle class. This note is altogether 
 absent from Mark Eutherford's pages. In one of the 
 late chapters of the " Deliverance " the author describes 
 how one Sunday, on " a lovely summer's morning in 
 mid July," he and Ellen and the child Marie took an 
 excursion to Hastings. " Our pleasure was exquisite, 
 we had a wonderful time." " To be free of the litter 
 and filth of a London suburb, of its broken hedges, its 
 brickbats, its torn advertisements, its worn and trampled 
 grass in fields, half given over to the speculative builder, 
 in place of this to tread the immaculate sea-shore, over 
 which breathed a wind not charged with soot, to replace 
 the dull, shrouding obscurity of the smoke by a distance 
 so distinct that the masts of the ships whose hulls were 
 buried below the horizon were visible — all this was 
 perfect bliss." 
 
 " We wanted nothing, we had nothing to achieve." 
 Later, on the return home, " all the glory of the 
 morning" was forgotten in a huddled, overcrowded 
 carriage, with drinking women roaring obscene songs. 
 The incident is symbolic of a life history, or, rather, of 
 a temperament. His companions on the excursion were 
 probably profoundly bored by the sun and the sea, and 
 only happy in the intervals of eating, rollicking merri- 
 ment, and the joys of the return journey. Lacking this 
 rollicking joy through all discomfort, the single isolated 
 
 238 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 toiler, trampled under in the modern struggle for exist- 
 ence, may be forgiven if he thinks that he has anticipated 
 the tortures of the Inferno. And the type of all civilised 
 existence is gathered up in one pitiful figure here 
 exhibited for a moment in the waste of London. A 
 clerk in a gallery, four foot from the ceiling in a gas- 
 lighted office, his life consists in addressing envelopes 
 ten hours a day. He is bewildered by the perpetual 
 foul grossness of his fellow-slaves : and only able to 
 endure the awful monotony of his existence by changes 
 from steel pens to quills, or variations in the walk to the 
 house of his servitude. 
 
 Modem England appears in these pages, modern 
 England, indeed, under grey skies, and interpreted by one 
 to whom the passing of the dreams of childhood and its 
 high hopes for the future has brought none of the 
 customary apathy and numbness. In the " Auto- 
 biography" the scene is mainly in the provinces. 
 The interest is in spiritual combats amongst the 
 ultimate questions of existence. Here is an unfor- 
 gettable gallery of portraits of the types of the lower 
 middle class in provincial cities. These, it must be 
 confessed, are in the main unpleasant with narrowness 
 and hypocrisy. Sordid love of gain is dominant, with 
 an incredibly low standard of culture and of honour. 
 They include the students of the theological college, 
 the worshippers of Water Lane, Mr. Snale, the " Christian 
 tradesman " and bully, and Mrs. Snale, " cruel, not 
 with the ferocity of the tiger, but with the dull insensi- 
 bility of a cart-wheel," and Mr. Hexton, with "not a 
 single chink, however narrow, through which his soul 
 looked out of itself upon the great world around." 
 They come, they go. Of few are more than a few 
 words said. The narrator passes from the college 
 
 239 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 through the Baptist chapel at the little provincial 
 town to the Unitarian chapel in the country, and so 
 to the private school and the Atheistic publishing office. 
 But in each chapter appear these clear-cut characters, 
 drawn with a confident, firm hand. So that the reader 
 is convinced that all these societies still live on. Beyond 
 his interests is enduring that strange world of obscure 
 and complacent human lives, carried through an exist- 
 ence to whose meaning and possibilities of kindliness 
 and high endeavour, in its brief passage between 
 two J' eternities, they seem destined to be for ever 
 blind. 
 
 In the "Deliverance" the scene has passed to 
 London. The spiritual struggle has become replaced 
 by revolt against the meanness and monotony and 
 squalor, the material ills of ugliness and poverty. The 
 problems here presented of degenerating life appear 
 "round and hard like a ball of adamant," and men 
 and women move through time, helpless, disconsolate, 
 " with great gaping needs which they longed to satisfy." 
 In two or three chapters a gaunt and desolate picture is 
 drawn of the modern city, the isolation of its inhabitants 
 each from the other, its confusion, its carelessness of 
 pain. London on Sunday afternoon in autumn fog, or 
 the cold winds of spring ; London in shadow ; the 
 actual slums with their outrage on the senses, and 
 the gaudy sign of the undertaker as the sole evidence 
 of the survival of human aspiration ; the solitary sufferers 
 who have been trampled under and flung aside, John, 
 the waiter, Cardinal, burdened with his jealous wife, 
 Taylor, the coal porter, working always in the dark — all 
 these in a few pages call up a pageant of maimed and 
 broken lives which remain long after the book has closed 
 as a troublous vision. 
 
 240 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 The picture, indeed, is Hot entirely grey. The world 
 of which " no theory is possible " is seen to contain 
 besides " children sickening in cellars " and "the rain 
 slowly rotting the harvest," no less obvious " an evening 
 in June, the delight of men and women in one another," 
 love and human kindness. Something like tranquillity 
 is attained before death enters as with a bludgeon, and 
 suddenly and clumsily makes an end of all. There 
 is acceptance of life's simple pleasures, gratitude for any 
 kind of response and affection, a wearing down of the 
 harsh fretting of the enigmas into a patience which 
 can even cherish a kind of hope. Human life, here 
 and now, with the age of belief in a fature restitution 
 dead, and the age of a satisfying present not yet 
 born, appears in the life history of Mark Rutherford not 
 unlike his own picture of the Essex marshes. The land 
 -Stretches low and level into the far horizon ; with thick 
 yellow clay clinging round the bitter weeds and dis- 
 coloured yellow grasses ; and stagnant, scum-covered 
 pools mingling with the smell of the earth the rank odour 
 of decay. But there is a crimson light in the west 
 at evening : the wind that blows at sunset is laden 
 with the breath and salt scents of the sea ; and all 
 the long night in the high heavens wheel and flash the 
 unchanging stars — the stars that shone in Eden, and 
 will shine again in Paradise. 
 
 n 
 
 The language of the famous " Conclusion " rises 
 naturally to the mind as the reader turns over the 
 pages of "Life's Lesser Moods." Here, indeed, "not 
 
 241 K 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end." 
 " With this sense of the splendour of our experience 
 and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one 
 
 "^desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have 
 time to make theories about the things we see and 
 touch." Walter Pater, afterwards in " Marius," 
 showed the practical workings of a life thus startled 
 by magnificence and the apprehension of death into a 
 " constant and eager observation." Moving detached 
 through field and forest, or along the city ways, the 
 observer drew from the things seen — autumn leaves, 
 the sun behind the pine-trees, the face of a child — the 
 apprehension of " some passionate attitude of those 
 about us," and the "tragic dividing of forces on their 
 ways." The experience is won from common things, 
 in the appeal which the labouring world passes by : a 
 sudden revelation of hidden emotion; a colour that 
 flares, and in a moment fades ; " a breath, a flame in 
 the doorway, a feather in the wind." 
 
 The attitude of Marius eighteen hundred years ago 
 is the attitude of Mr. Hind to-day. He, too, is to be 
 reckoned among those who looked on, a little perplexed, 
 a little diverted, sometimes sorrowful, as they confront 
 the noise of passing things. Men are planting and 
 building, busy about material things, eager for wealth, 
 and crying for fame, for the heaping up of wealth 
 which another shall inherit, for a fame which is but 
 the ripple of a moment in the midst of an Eternal 
 Silence. Conscious even in the grey city of the 
 splendour of our experience, with the sense also of 
 its awful brevity ever before him, he sees the thing 
 pass like a panorama in which the shouting becomes 
 shrill and presently dies away, and all the gold and 
 glory crumbles to a little dust. Immediately, however, 
 
 242 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 is the present experience, directly apprehended. There 
 resides an appeal as insistent and compelling in the 
 labyrinth of London as in the autumn of dying Eome ; 
 the setting sun reflected in the roadside puddle ; a night 
 of rain, a night of stars ; high emotion in meeting and 
 parting, ten minutes in a railway carriage, the sights 
 of a street on a winter morning. The flame of outward 
 life, of the unchanging beauty: the flame of inner 
 passion : the inscrutable mysteries of each individual 
 separate soul, knowing its own bitterness, knowing its 
 heart's particular joy ; these make up the world of the 
 wanderer, as he roams with hungry heart through Eng- 
 land and Spain and Italy, and records impressions of 
 life's lesser moods — " a breath, a flame in the doorway, 
 a feather in the wind." 
 
 The attitude of detachment, a refusal to judge, is 
 written on every page. An impression is given, here 
 and now, recounted as truthfully as may be. And there 
 each is left ; standing isolated in the past, a picture ; 
 without any attempt to co-ordinate it to the entire 
 scheme of things, glad or sorry ; to estimate, to approve, 
 or to condemn. The method is so un-English that it 
 is difficult to prophesy its development or popularity. 
 We write for edification. We never rest on the expe- 
 rience without demanding its fruit or teaching. Each 
 particular incident must carry thought from itself to the 
 boundaries of things. The record of a child shivering 
 in the rain would appear to us intolerably celd without 
 an appeal at the end for free breakfasts, or an impeach- 
 ment of a society which can allow such things to be. 
 The gleam of a golden sunshine must attest the good- 
 ness of God. Thunder and the bitter frost must certify 
 the presence of evil in the world. To stand aside is fro 
 acknowledge indifference. To accept all is to enlist 
 
 243 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 amongst those who neither for God nor for His enemies, 
 are " scorned alike of heaven and hell." 
 
 An actual example will best illustrate this un-EngliSh 
 attitude. In one of Mr. Hind's sketches he pictures 
 the " Unemployed " marching through the West End 
 streets. The dingy red banner, the meagre figures, 
 escorted by the stalwart, indifferent policeman, the 
 rattle of the collecting-boxes, the clang of many foot- 
 steps along the frozen roads, the scornful comment of 
 the bystanders are woven into an impression of con- 
 tempt and pity with an undemote of fear. 
 
 " Later in the day I met them again. It was twiHght 
 time ; but the fog had made an end of the day early 
 in the afternoon. Over everything hung that murky 
 gloom, over the procession of the unemployed, over the 
 faces of the employed who left their work to watch. 
 The day's tramp was ending; they were going east- 
 wards — home — but the fog was so dense that I could 
 see only those who slouched close by. Somewhere far 
 in front the head of the procession felt its way through 
 the dim streets ; somewhere far behind the tail followed 
 obediently ; and out of the thick night came the rattle 
 of the coins in the collecting-boxes. A woman near me 
 pushed the box contemptuously away. * Want work, 
 do they?' she cried. 'I've been a week trying to 
 get a man to mend a window-sash.' " 
 
 " The barrow with the naphtha lamp passed on. I 
 watched the last straggler of the London unemployed 
 disappear into the fog." There is no approval. There 
 is no condemnation. There is no denunciation of 
 society or appeal to Charity Organisation. There is 
 no effort to weigh merits or pardon offences. There is 
 merely an extraordinarily vivid picture of an actual 
 experience, for a moment present, in a moment gone. 
 
 244 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 The author, like the ancient magicians, can reveal the 
 vision. No more than they can he reveal the inter- 
 pretation thereof. 
 
 The danger of the method is sufficiently obvious. 
 Life has a tendency to become a mere variegated pat- 
 tern, pleasing or discordant ; a Persian carpet ; or a 
 succession of sense impressions, in which the picture, 
 or any meaning which the picture can convey, is lost 
 in the search for agreeable combinations of curves and 
 colours. Against this danger is here set the sensitive- 
 ness to the emotional background, the conviction that 
 even if the impression be but for a moment, that moment 
 must represent the illumination of forces of eternal 
 significance. Love and Death, the passing of Change 
 and of Time, the high ardours of the spirit, the ques- 
 tioning ironies of man's existence and helplessness and 
 unknown destiny, are written over all these experiences 
 of life's lesser moods. 
 
 So that the experience itself is found to unfold large 
 issues. A vision is given, if for the moment only and 
 without judgment or approval, down the long vistas of 
 human life towards far horizons. A " Citizen " presents 
 the type of a life vanishing from England. The life of 
 effort, unwearying, narrow toil, acceptance of respon- 
 sibilities, is set over against " the zest for pleasure that 
 marks these days, the refusal to accept responsibilities, 
 the petulant protest against irksome tasks." A com- 
 panion picture is that of a woman pursuing always 
 " The Way," with " the glow of spiritual awakening 
 and expansion that came when the particular duties of 
 her life were fulfilled, and she could invite the whisper 
 of the mysteries." There are visions of the " Time of 
 Buttercups," with children dancing in the sunshine ; of 
 the death of a child of genius, a cripple, bom in a 
 
 245 
 
or DEATH AND PITY 
 
 humble peasant home ; of the fires of an unforgettable 
 sorrow luminous after nineteen years. There is much 
 of London, its vastness, its desolation ; of its sombre 
 magnificence ; of its callousness and its charity, the 
 emanations of its million lives, the problem of its 
 present and its incalculable future; of "her loneli- 
 ness," "her littleness," "her magic," "her terror," 
 "her silence." And at the end the scene shifts into 
 the South, Spain and Italy, the little queer incidents of 
 travel, the conflict of diverse civilisations ; and the living, 
 blinking, blear-eyed, or with thoughts of memory and 
 of pity, around the memorials of the dead. 
 
 Everywhere Mr. Hind shows himself particularly 
 attracted to the revelation of some inner springs of 
 serenity, the secret of a life hidden from the modern 
 world. This he apprehends in the Salvation Army 
 lasses collecting alms in the Strand, in the old priest 
 upon the mountains, the monks as he sees them in his 
 garden, the poor who acquiesce and are content. The 
 apprehension of the permanent in the transitory, the 
 Divine unclouded by the " little smoke " of men's mad 
 wants and mean endeavours is the end of the story. 
 
 " I had entered Italy through Genoa," he concludes, 
 " her stainless marble palaces soaring proudly into the 
 sky. I left her by Venice, her stained marble palaces 
 shimmering sadly down into the water. I had seen 
 the fireflies all along the Umbrian valley, that candle 
 flickering in the dark church of the Frari, and Man- 
 tegna's last picture^ on which he had inscribed, 
 ' Nothing but the Divine endures ; the rest is smoke.' " 
 The vision was complete. 
 
 246 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 ni 
 
 " The Sonnets of the Wingless Hours," that tragic 
 sequence of bewilderment and pain, have now been 
 revealed as born of the intimate experience of life's 
 sorrows. The protest and perplexity everywhere pre- 
 sent in them drives home under the force of this 
 knowledge, with a renewed appeal. Mr. William Sharp, 
 in his preface to the Canterbury edition of Mr. Lee 
 Hamilton's poems, has taken the world into the secret 
 of the laboratory in which were fused these shining 
 jewels. The author — half-brother to "Vernon Lee" — 
 at the beginning seemed to have all life before him in 
 most favoured circumstance.. In the midst of his work 
 as diplomatist he was suddenly seized with that 
 dreadful disease from which Heine suffered years of 
 martyrdom. "From the first definite collapse in 1874 
 all hope was practically abandoned." He lay in a 
 semi-paralysed condition through the months and years 
 of agony. "For a long period suffering was too acute 
 to enable him to be read to ; conversations, messages, 
 letters, had to be condensed into a few essential words." 
 So passed twenty of the best years of manhood " in the 
 posture of the grave," years he compares to the old 
 torture of prisons whose walls steadily closed in upon 
 their victims, a little nearer every day. Pity itself can 
 only stand silent before such a tragedy. 
 
 And from this tragedy were bom the " Sonnets of the 
 Wingless Hours." Nowhere is there weak complaint ; 
 nor any hope for a future which will vindicate the 
 purpose of the punishment, and provide adequate com- 
 pensation for the ruin of a lifetime. Charon now 
 sleeps, asserts the author, in the rushes by the deserted 
 
 247 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 shore, and no souls demand the services of the ferry of 
 the underworld. Heine, from his mattress-prison, like 
 some old heathen defying his tormenters, went down 
 into his grave hurling mockery and imprecation at the 
 God whose irony had overwhelmed him. But here 
 even the consolation of defiance is denied. For the 
 gods themselves have vanished into vapour, and the 
 walls of Heaven crumhled into dust. Henley deepened 
 the poignancy of his hospital rhymes by deliberate 
 roughness and jagged edges, telling of sudden agonies ; 
 and by the attitude, as of a startled child, towards all 
 the apparatus of pain. But in the sonnet which 
 demands more than any other medium perfection of 
 form, this method is impossible. The very smoothness 
 and simplicity of the language of this sequence of 
 Buffering deepens the sense of sorrow and tears. His 
 muse has brought him 
 
 " A branch of dead sea fruit, not bay, 
 Plucked by tbe bitter waters of the soul." 
 
 Sometimes " bitterer is the cup than can be told," and 
 the only hope is for the quick coming of " death's 
 unstarred and hospitable night." Sometimes a sudden 
 passion of regret for a life thus wasted catches him by 
 the throat : 
 
 "And now my manhood goes where goes the song 
 Of captive birds, the cry of crippled things ; 
 It goes where goes the day that unused dies." 
 
 But for the most part there is patience and endurance, 
 gratitude for the little golden cup of " Poesy's wine of 
 gold," as the sufferer watches the years go one by 
 one in 
 
 " A garden where I lie beyond the flowers. 
 And where the snails outrace the creeping sun." 
 248 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 These fruits of the wingless hours, the children of 
 endurance and pain, have the intimacy and distinction 
 which should give them permanence in literature. 
 There are, indeed, flaws; hardly a sonnet is quite 
 perfect ; and flaws so obvious that one could mark, as it 
 were, with a pencil, the weak line or, in most cases, the 
 single word which mars the perfection of the whole. 
 But there is a splendour of style and thought charged 
 with an emotion sometimes passionate, always sincere, 
 which lift these sonnets from the ranks of the ephemeral, 
 and justify comparison even with the greatest. 
 
 Two qualities in particular they possess. The flrst is 
 the very sharp-cut impression of beauty of form and 
 colour. As aU things stand clear in a storm-swept 
 atmosphere, so in the heightened sensitiveness of this 
 life of suffering Nature has become charged with a 
 shining brightness unheeded in the common ways of 
 men. The verse throbs with the colour contrasts of 
 Italy, Siena with its dizzy belfry stabbing the fiery air ; 
 evening in Tuscany ; the rich, hot scent of " old fir 
 forests heated by the sun " ; and all the magic of an 
 enchanted land. 
 
 Such a sonnet as "Twilight" — containing, indeed, 
 two obvious weak lines — abides in the memory for a 
 particular luminous atmosphere, for a moment harmoni- 
 ous with a mood in which sorrow itself has become 
 serene. 
 
 " A sudden pang contracts the heart of Day, 
 As fades the glory of the sunken sun. 
 The bats replace the swallows one by one ; 
 The cries of playing children die away. 
 
 Like one in pain, a bell begins to sway ; 
 A few white oxen, from their labour done. 
 Pass ghostly through the dusk ; the crone that spun 
 
 Beside her door, turns in, and all grows grey. 
 249 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 And still I lie, as I all day have lain, 
 
 Here in this garden, thinking of the time 
 Before the years of helplessness and pain ; 
 
 Or playing with the fringes of a rhyme, 
 Until the yellow moon, amid her train 
 Of throbbing stars, appears o'er yonder lime." 
 
 The greater poems are those in which these outward 
 visions are used to create an imagery conveying thought 
 charged with human emotion. The appeal of a personal 
 suffering passes into a universal cry. The sadness is 
 in the April air when a "breeze from Death's great 
 wings Shakes down the blossoms that the fruit trees 
 bear." The note of sorrow is heard, which runs through 
 all the music of the world. There are poems of most 
 delightful, child-like fancy, and a whole series of 
 imaginary experience of historical incident. But the 
 sonnets which stand out with a strength of emotional 
 power are those translating the individual experience 
 into the human cry. The eternal subjects of loveliness 
 and longing, time hurrying into nothingness the tran- 
 sitory generations, the sadness of the memory of all 
 vanished joy, the great dreams and desires of a race 
 which passes from essaying the walls of Heaven to the 
 silence of a little grave — these are interpreted each in 
 terms of some visual picture. Such are the sonnets 
 that already have become famous. In " Sunken Gold " 
 long lost hopes are seen lying as on some reefy shelf, 
 " the gleam of irrecoverable gold " in the twilight of the 
 dim sea forests. All Souls' Day in the wintry evening 
 mingles the memory of the multitudes of the forgotten 
 dead with the figure of the sower, " grey and lone " in 
 the autumn fields. And the sonnets entitled " The 
 Wreck of Heaven " unfold a majestic vision of the ruin 
 
 250 
 
OF DEATH AND PTTY 
 
 of Paradise and its battlements and towers, with an 
 echo of the closing music of the Gotterdammerung in 
 its mingled exaltation and despair. 
 
 " Ay, ay, the gates of pearl are crumbling fast ; 
 The walls of beryl topple stone by stone ; 
 The throngs of souls in white and gold are gone; 
 The jasper pillars lie where they were oast. 
 
 The roofless halls of gold are dumb and vast ; 
 
 The courts of jacinth are for ever lone ; 
 
 Through shattered ohrysoUte the blind winds moan, 
 And topaz moulders to the earth at last." 
 
 Behind this vision of the destruction of the most 
 wpnderful dream which has ever comforted the hearts of 
 men, there stands the earth and its realities ; and man, 
 uncheered by hope of a future glory, but enduring with 
 the old brave patience all the accidents of time, flinging 
 the grain into the furrow in hope of another harvest. 
 
 All admirers of the "Wingless Hours" must re- 
 joice at the wonderful thing which came at last to 
 their creator. "After twenty-one years of this pro- 
 longed half-life, the miraculous happened. The disease 
 commenced to wane. The invalid arose from a bed to a 
 new life; thereafter, recovery to health became 
 complete." He travelled; love came to him; the note 
 of sadness and patience in his verse gave place to joy 
 and a renewed sense of the beauty of the world. In a 
 little volume called " Forest Notes," in which he has 
 collaborated with his wife, also a distinguished writer, 
 he has given the first taste of the product of this new 
 life. These little poems lack the sombre magnificence 
 of the sonnets, but they possess a delicacy and a charm 
 which will be welcome to all oppressed with the un- 
 answerable questions which the sonnets inevitably 
 
 251 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 raise. That happiness and a great contentment may 
 be given to the author of this little book for many 
 years must be the hope of all who can appreciate an 
 indomitable courage and suffering heroically borne. 
 That this contentment may be as fruitful in song as 
 the bitter past must be the desire of all lovers of 
 poetry. 
 
 IV 
 
 Modem poetry is feeling after the expression, in varied 
 form, of one of two emotions. The first is the ultimate 
 exultation and triumph of being, "the glory of the sum 
 of things." The second is the ultimate sadness and 
 regret of aU that changes, the "idle tears" of "the 
 days that are no more." It is to the latter class that 
 Mrs. Marriott Watson belongs. Her work demands 
 recognition for its simplicity, pathos, and a rare gift of 
 sincerity. The influence of Henley is strong. The inevit- 
 able word is not indeed so successfully attained. Many of 
 these little detached lyrics leave the reader with a sense 
 of imperfection owing to some weakness often in the last 
 line or stanza. But in many there is a haunting 
 melody and beauty. "I am weary of all that passes " 
 is the cry of a great modern writer ; and something of 
 the pathos of that passing — regret over the coming of 
 age and the death of the flowers — at times poignant, 
 more often quiet as the sadness of a summer evening, 
 illuminates these little songs of loss and longing. 
 
 "After Sunset," the title of her latest volume, would 
 serve as a title to the whole. The light has fallen, and 
 there is silence ; only the shadows are creeping over the 
 hills and the signs are manifest of the coming night. 
 The song of the blackbird again and again recurs : " in 
 
 252 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 the dusk of the cold spring dawn," " Singing the Song 
 of Songs by the Gates of Dream," or telling the oft- told 
 story of " dreams and the dying spring." The verse is 
 woven of the material of sorrow : — " the poor dead whom 
 none remembereth " : Death's black pavilion in the 
 Unshapen Lands, and all the grey flowers in Death's 
 garden : the old wind which 
 
 " Goes murmuring still of unremembered seas, 
 And cities of the dead that men forget." 
 
 But more than the tragedy of death it is the tragedy 
 of change which has here found expression. There 
 will be many fairer days, but never again yesterday. 
 Flowers will again blossom, but not those flowers 
 which have faded. Other generations will rise into 
 exultant life, with perhaps the days of summer unending 
 and the roses blowing earlier in those after, happier 
 years. But the generations of the present are going into 
 silence and the generations of the past have gone. 
 That time itself should triumph over love and hope and 
 endless desire : that childhood should vanish and all its 
 absorbing interests ; that youth should be hurried forward 
 into age, and no efi"ort stay the march of the intolerable 
 hours ; this is the irony of life which makes all human 
 experience a thing so helpless and piteous and transitory. 
 " Alas, that Spring should vanish with the rose " might 
 have been written on the title-page of all her poems. 
 
 "They are mowiag the meadows now, and the whispering, 
 sighing 
 
 Song of the scythe breathes sweet on my idle ear, — 
 Songs of old Summfers dead, and of this one dyiag, 
 
 Boses on roses fallen, aad year on year." 
 
 With this also comes the almost blinding contrast 
 
 253 
 
OF DEATH AND PITY 
 
 between the renovating powers of Nature and the 
 little life of man. " You are not here, and yet it 
 is the Spring." No temporal consolation can satisfy 
 the hunger aroused by the mute mocking of such a 
 contrast. 
 
 " Youth comes no more for ever — even although 
 The fields take flower again, and lilacs blow. 
 And pointed leaf-buds gather on the vine ; 
 Even although the sun should sail and shine 
 Bright as of old." 
 
 Here, indeed, is the protest which has rung down all the 
 centuries since that distant dawn when Moschus, crying 
 for his dead friend, found himself but mocked by the 
 mallow and the parsley and the renewal of all the 
 splendour of field and flower. 
 
 To the vigorous citizen desirous above all of banishing 
 uncomfortable thoughts, this emphasis of the tragedies 
 of change will appear morbid and futile. Outside the 
 garden life goes roaring by. In the dust and bustle 
 there is little time for the hauntings of memory or the 
 cultivation of the sorrow of passing things. "With this 
 world Mrs. Marriott Watson has little concern. There 
 is a strange sense of incongruity in the intrusion of such 
 a masterful figure as Lord Kitchener into her poems. In 
 her enchanted land the vision is of the ruined altar, the 
 deserted home, the white way that winds down the hiU, 
 the cry of children that are gone out into the night. 
 
 Above all here is the cry of the children. The songs 
 of childhood have an especial grace and charm. Some 
 have the tenderness of mingled smiles and tears, as in 
 the sight of the discarded toys and all the child's for- 
 gotten world. Some have the deeper note of longing for 
 the childhood vanished in the natural growth to maturity: 
 
 254 
 
or DEATH AND PITY 
 
 the disappearance of the " small, down-vestured head " : 
 "the innocent eyes": "the sweet, impetuous little 
 feet." And some have the note of anguish which wails 
 round the most unendurable of all the outrages of death, 
 in the calling through the night of the ruined heart for 
 a little child struck down by those merciless hands — 
 
 " Leave the door upon the latch — she could never reach it, 
 You would hear her crying, crying there till break of day, 
 Out on the cold moor 'mid the snows that bleach it, 
 "Weeping as once in the long years past away." 
 
 Such is the garden " after sunset." The night and its 
 shadows have not yet come. The sadness is tempered by 
 the charm of the dying day. Tenderness and compassion 
 walk more blithely than in the glare of the afternoon. 
 And all the magic of the evening gathers round that 
 land of longing and tears, which stretches its horizon 
 into far distances when once the sun has dropped behind 
 the hills. 
 
 255 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
" For the world is not to he won by amy thing except on those 
 conMi/ions with which the Kingdom of Seawen first came. 
 What conquers must ha/ve those who devote themselves to it: 
 who prefer it to all other things: who are proud to suffer for 
 it : who can bear anything so that it goes forward." 
 
 — E. W. CH0ECH. 
 
THE BELiaiON OF TEE CITY 
 
 AT the beginning of the twentieth century two 
 attempts on a large scale have been made to 
 estimate the religion of London. The results have in 
 the main confirmed the statements of those who assert 
 that the condition of these familiar, crowded populations 
 is in reality as obscure as that of China or Mexico. The 
 one was statistical, the other impressionist. Facts 
 limited to bare numbers were given by the Daily News 
 census. A vast complexity of conversations, testimonies, 
 experiences was provided by Mr, Booth's seven volumes. 
 It is to the student of opinion and social change that 
 the first of these — the numbering of the religions of 
 London — will prove of lasting value. Only advertise- 
 ment, cynicism, or vulgar curiosity benefits from the 
 announcement that Mr. A's church (heralding itself as 
 exercising enormous spiritual influence) gathers four 
 hundred worshippers every Sunday, or that Mr. B's 
 church (proclaiming a similar success) gathers forty. 
 The tabulated results of the Census have been used as 
 the basis for crude and ill-informed deductions. They 
 will form the material in the future for the demonstra- 
 tion of all manner of preconceived ideas. But this 
 is the common fate of statistic. Let the figures be 
 taken for what they profess to be — the record of the 
 numbers of attendance, men, women, and children, at 
 morning and evening service on certain Sundays in the 
 years 1902-3 in every public religious edifice in London. 
 No claim is made that these figures give adequate basis 
 
 259 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 for comparison of the spiritual influence of different 
 individual churches or of the aggregate of organised 
 religions. One church, in a poor district, attracts a 
 congregation by a distribution of cocoa and slabs of 
 bread at the commencement or the conclusion of the 
 service. Another, in a comfortable suburb, fills its pews 
 with an audience to whom church-going is the custom 
 and the fashion, a display of smart clothing, the occupa- 
 tion of a seat hired by the year, or a method of killing 
 the boredom of an idle Sunday. A third, hidden in a 
 back street, gathers together thirty or forty poor men and 
 women who support the expenses with their scanty 
 earnings, and meet for edification or for worship outside 
 the sphere of both fashion and material benefit. There 
 is no common denominator of religious aspiration which 
 will measure three such congregations as these ; but in 
 dispassionate estimate of figures they are of necessity 
 weighed together as if each individual attendance were 
 of similar account. 
 
 Yet the figures themselves are of quite extraordinary 
 interest and value — an interest and value which will 
 increase as the memories of London in 1903 fade into an 
 almost fabulous past. They have stamped in permanent 
 form certain facts of the spiritual energies of this strange 
 and perplexing city in this particular period of change. 
 Corrected by personal knowledge, and retranslated from 
 their bloodless skeleton of information into terms of 
 human eff'ort, tenacity, and aspiration, they become 
 charged with a romance and significance paralleled by 
 few other such tables of numbers and names. 
 
 Mr. Charles Booth's investigation has not been 
 received with so universal an acceptance. Comments, 
 often angry, have been evoked by the somewhat sweeping 
 strictures of his investigators. The personal impression 
 
 260 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 of curate or minister seems often to have formed the 
 main basis of judgment. Pretentiousness, noisiness, 
 vulgarity, produce emphatic condemnation ; the critics 
 would have done well to remember that pretentiousness, 
 noisiness and vulgarity have often been associated with 
 a real and vigorous religion. Mr. Booth deliberately (I 
 am inclined to think, rightly) rejected the statistical 
 method as misleading in the estimation of something so 
 elusive and intangible as spiritual influence. But as a 
 corrective to many of his statements the Census figures 
 are quite invaluable. No serious student can neglect 
 either the one or the other. Eead first the seven 
 volumes of Mr. Booth ; examine and analyse the figures 
 of this Census ; make yourself personally familiar with at 
 least a few selected districts of different types — the 
 wealthy, the suburban, the artisan, the poor : you will 
 then be in a position to offer at least some tentative 
 suggestions towards an estimate of the religious condition 
 of this great congeries of cities which we term London. 
 
 In the commencement of examination it is desirable 
 to attempt an estimate of the characteristic classes of 
 the people of the city. We may omit the specialised 
 class of the West End : that particular " golden " area 
 in which is condensed the product of all the spoil of 
 Empire. Religion has never been the serious concern of 
 the wealthy. They play with it as they play with life. 
 They contribute the funds of impersonal charities, they 
 discuss the sufferings of the poor, they patronise all creeds 
 offering a new sensation — Christian Science, Esthetic 
 Catholicism, Spiritualism, Revivalism. It is sincere in so 
 far as any sincerity in such a life is possible. But it in 
 
 261 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 no way essentially differs from the homage which this 
 class is always prepared to pay to the accepted gods of a 
 nation. The real problem of the future of religion in 
 the city is being fought out amongst those classes 
 which make up the grey matrix of labour of which that 
 city is composed. 
 
 For purposes of investigation this solid background of 
 the city's energies can be split into four main divisions. 
 First we may note the " poor " in the proper sense of 
 the term; those, in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's 
 now famous phrase, living "on the verge of hunger " if 
 not " on the verge of starvation." These are, the 
 subjects of Messrs. Booth and Kowntree's dismal 
 statistics. They are a class which only emerges above 
 the political horizon when some energetic statesman is 
 composing a moving peroration or essaying a new 
 policy. They are the forlorn multitude of those who 
 have failed. They are most numerous in South and 
 East London, forming great wedges and masses along 
 the riverside, and collecting in scattered pools or isolated 
 streets in all the other boroughs. They form the ready 
 prey of church and mission. Each particular district in 
 which they herd is swarming with rival agencies essaying 
 their bodily sustenance and the salvation of their souls. 
 A continuous vast river of charitable help pours through 
 the channels of these missions into every corner and 
 crevice of their homes. Bread, clothing, boots, vegetable 
 soup, grocery tickets, monetary assistance, fall some- 
 times, like the rain of heaven, upon the just and unjust, 
 sometimes only upon those who are willing to make a 
 decent return in attendance at public worship or mothers' 
 meetings. This source of supply is eked out in most 
 cases with casual labour or the more desolating forms of 
 unskilled employment, with outdoor relief, with the pro- 
 
 262 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 ducts of home industries, the earnings of school children, 
 and the munificent wage earned by the free unorganised 
 labour of women. The children are innumerable. The 
 death rate of infants is high, but a sufficient number sur- 
 viye to ensure the transmission of the rickety type, 
 stunted physique and fragile or diseased constitution, to 
 the generations of the future. The individuals rise or 
 fall. The class remains, a stagnant pool of low-grade 
 life which is slowly extending its borders, and swelling 
 its multitudes to a bulk which finally will compel atten- 
 tion to the menace of its futility. 
 
 The second class makes up the matrix of which the 
 great mass of working London is composed. It is the 
 class of decent working men, from the highly paid artisan 
 to the better paid labourer. Here is the "poor" as it 
 appears to the rich, lumping into one common category 
 all below the status of retail tradesmen. It more than 
 fills the block dwellings and cottages in which it is 
 housed, and it is continually flowing over through leaks and 
 gaps into the suburbs which surround it on all sides, to 
 the infinite disgust of the original inhabitants of these 
 desirable regions. It works for the most part away from 
 its residence, and spends much of its leisure in journeys 
 to and fro. It is on the whole contented with its life. 
 But its intel igence and vitality seem partially sapped by 
 its crowded city existence, and it manifests none of the 
 somewhat aggi-essive social and political vigour which is 
 characteristic of a similar class in other cities of England. 
 At present it is largely country bred. It still shows 
 traces of the open air and the life of the fields. But 
 each year the rural elements diminish, the urban 
 increase It is a race passing in bulk through the 
 greatest change in the life of humanity, the change in 
 which nature vanishes from the horizon and is replaced 
 
 263 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 by the perpetual presence of man. It represents at the 
 present a stage in this transition, with stability, acquies- 
 cence, and the peculiar city characteristics not yet folly 
 attained. 
 
 The third class is one often overlooked, whose neglect 
 has originated some of the more absurd generalisations 
 upon the life of the poor. In all the boroughs, poor as 
 well as rich, lining all the main roads and many of the 
 side streets is the class of tradesmen who minister to the 
 needs of the vast populations which are hidden behind. 
 These form a prosperous bourgeois class, possessing con- 
 siderable vigour and enterprise, and very sharply divided 
 in interest and outlook from the poor and the artisan 
 who do business with them. In the poorest boroughs 
 they form an aristocracy of wealth. In the wealthier 
 boroughs they are less conspicuous, aud there are social 
 grades from which they are excluded. But they are 
 numerous in all, and in all offer a very marked contribu- 
 tion to the religious life of London. 
 
 Lastly, in the outlying districts we find the suburban 
 dweller, forming, on the hills principally of the South 
 and the North, a class of quite peculiar and specialised 
 life and characteristics. He is a product of those 
 economic conditions which have made London the 
 banking centre and clearing-house of the world. He is 
 a dependant of the City, to which he journeys every 
 morning. He leads an entirely sedentary existence, 
 writing other men's letters, adding other men's accounts, 
 each a cog or link in the machinery of other men's ideas- 
 The energy pent up in this remarkable toil is reserved 
 for the hours of freedom. There is active home life, 
 strong family affection, little gardens and ornamented 
 villas, ambition for the children. A certain artificiality 
 distinguishes such an existence, a divorce from reality 
 
 264 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 which only intrudea at intervals of love or suffering or 
 death. Vigour may be more conspicuous than breadth 
 of outlook or intellectual agility, and there are often set 
 up quite astonishing standards of "respectability" in 
 politics and religion. But there are compensating ele- 
 ments in a widespread material comfort, enjoyment of 
 simple pleasures, and a very real and active religious life, 
 probably stronger here than in any other class of the 
 community. It is here that the churches and chapels 
 are crowded, that their activities blossom out on week- 
 days into mutual improvement associations, debating 
 clubs, and innocuous amusement. The orthodox religions 
 receive a wUliug adherence which has resisted success- 
 fully all the disintegrating forces of changes in thought 
 and environment. This is the class beyond all others 
 where the particular characteristics find expression in the 
 edifices it has reared for its worship and the nature of 
 the services it generously maintains within them. 
 
 Let us see what light the Beligious Census will 
 throw upon the spiritual condition of this world of 
 working humanity. Although it would be quite inac- 
 curate to judge the influences exercised from particular 
 churches by the simple comparison of the numbers of 
 worshippers ; and although, undoubtedly, a religious 
 enthusiasm focussed in the Sunday gatherings diffuses 
 through great numbers who never or rarely are actually 
 present ; yet on the whole we may say that the 
 organised religious and ethical bodies stand practically 
 for the active spiritual enterprise of London. Once I 
 had expected it otherwise — thinking that the widespread 
 break-up of faith and the influence of destructive 
 criticism would have created a large class of persons 
 unable conscientiously to attach themselves to church 
 or chapel, but eager for ethical progress and the asser- 
 
 265 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 tion of the supremacy of the things of the spirit. But 
 
 experience has failed to discover any number of such 
 
 individuals. Many, indeed, pass through a stage in 
 
 which all definite religions are judged and condemned 
 
 as insincere or untrue. But either interest in all 
 
 ultimate questions vanishes, or the inquirer in time 
 
 finds himself drawn to some church or congregation. 
 
 Even those who are unable to make any positive 
 
 spiritual affirmation may unite in some positivist 
 
 society or ethical fellowship. The influence of such 
 
 bodies, indeed, containing some of the most sincere and 
 
 devoted of men and women, is altogether underestimated 
 
 by the meagre numbers of attendance. Outside there 
 
 is much vague social discontent, and often a feeling of 
 
 bitterness against all organised religions. But such 
 
 feelings, however praiseworthy, are not in themselves 
 
 guarantees of spiritual or moral energy. The man who 
 
 will abstain from church-going, and informs you with 
 
 complacency that his religion is that of the Sermon on 
 
 the Mount, is usually distinguished by little but an 
 
 amiable unwillingness to do conscious injury to those 
 
 who have not injured him, and by a determination at 
 
 least not to love himself less than his neighbour. As 
 
 symbols and representatives of whatever spiritual life 
 
 still remains in London, we may quite confidently limit 
 
 our outlook to the religious bodies who are dealt with in 
 
 the Census return. 
 
 To come then to the facts. Let us first consider the 
 bare aggregate of numbers. 
 
 In the County area of London one man out of every 
 twelve, and one woman out of every ten, attends some 
 form of Divine worship each Sunday morning ; and one 
 man in every ten, and one woman in every seven, attends 
 each Sunday evening. 
 
 266 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 And if we may accept the figures given by the super- 
 intendent of the Census of 38 per cent, making a double 
 attendance, we can lead on to the further statement : 
 
 In London one man out of every six, and one woman 
 out of every five, attends some place of worship at least 
 once every Sunday. 
 
 I must confess that this is a far larger proportion 
 than I should have anticipated. Living amongst a 
 population which has practically abandoned church- 
 going, I had mechanically interpreted my own experi- 
 ence into the larger whole. The twelfth man who goes 
 off to church at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning had 
 escaped my vision. As a rough estimate I should have 
 given anything from 1 to 4 per cent, as the total 
 actively Christian population of labouring London. 
 One is grateful to the Census if for this alone — the 
 revelation of larger numbers of attendance than one 
 had dared to hope — however much later examination 
 may show such attendance to be meaningless and 
 conventional. 
 
 Let us pass from these massed aggregates which 
 mean little to the more interesting and difficult analysis 
 of classes — to the attempt to estimate how these wor- 
 shippers are divided amongst the main grades of society. 
 Here is the ready field of wild deduction. Many critics 
 knowing dimly that Southwark (say) is poor and 
 Chelsea wealthy, have concluded that the statistics of 
 the borough of Southwark show the statistics of church 
 attendance of the poor, and those of the borough of 
 Chelsea that of the rich. Some have thus discovered 
 a fixed proportion of church-goers in all classes. 
 Others wUl tell you confidently of the demonstration 
 by such numbers of the strength of some particular 
 denomination amongst the poor or the rich. Such 
 
 267 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 crude deductions are entirely erroneous. On the one 
 hand, a poor horough may contain places of worship 
 which attract well-to-do worshippers from a wide area. 
 Southwark, for example, contains an Anglican and a 
 Eoman Catholic cathedral, as well as the great chapel 
 made famous through the English-speaking world hy 
 the pastorate of Charles Spurgeon, whose enormous 
 audience of 3,625 represents a similar cathedral 
 gathering. In the poorest district of Lambeth, again, 
 is the great church presided over by Mr. F. B. Meyer, 
 which draws a well-to-do and intelligent audience from 
 all the southern suburbs. And on the other hand, such 
 a statement altogether neglects the comfortable class of 
 tradesmen and the middle class who live in all the 
 poorer boroughs, and provide perhaps the most ardent 
 adherents of many flourishLag religions. Any one inti- 
 mate with such a district will know that it is this class 
 in the main which contributes such worshippers as the 
 churches and chapels are able to gather together in 
 working-class districts. The places of worship line the 
 main thoroughfares. Their frequenters are respectable, 
 well-dressed men and women, the dwellers in those 
 main thoroughfares and the better-class squares and 
 streets that remain undestroyed. Investigate every 
 place of worship down (say) Walworth Road from the 
 " Elephant" to Camberwell Green — the heart of a poor 
 district. In all the varied centres of religion, whose 
 buildings are thickly studded at close intervals, you will 
 find no signs of obvious poverty. In the districts 
 behind, in some obscure gathering of Primitive Metho- 
 dists or Bible Christians, you may discover the class 
 you are seeking. But in all central South London, 
 the district with which I am most intimate, I have 
 only seen the poor in bulk collected at two places of 
 
 268 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 religious worship — Mr. Meakin's great hall in Ber- 
 mondsey, and St. George's Roman Catholic Cathedral 
 at Southwark — an object-lesson in (amongst other 
 things) the wisdom of the permission of the late Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury for the use of incense " for fumi- 
 gatory purposes." In London as a whole — apart from 
 certain isolated and exceptional instances — I have no 
 hesitation in asserting that it is the middle classes 
 which attend church and chapel, the working-classes 
 and the poor who stay away. 
 
 This can be illustrated by comparison, not of the 
 large areas of the boroughs, but of some definite 
 working-class area with some suburban district. I 
 have been at some pains to make such a comparison, 
 whose figures are appended. The working-class area 
 I have chosen is a triangular patch in the centre of 
 South London, bounded by three great thoroughfares. 
 It is a normal crowded district with which I am per- 
 sonally familiar, varying from the lowest poverty to the 
 comparative comfort of skilled industry, and bounded by 
 the middle-class shopkeepers in the main roads. If 
 anything, it should be unusually favoured in its religious 
 effort, for it is the scene of some very interesting experi- 
 ments. Several of the public-school and Cambridge 
 College missions are here, and the well-known Browning 
 Hall settlement. The churches are high, low, and 
 broad. The clergy are Tory, fladical, and Socialist; 
 they include amongst them borough councillors, guar- 
 dians, and two of the best known Radical parsons of 
 London. All types of Nonconformity are represented, 
 including a flourishing Baptist and a flourishing 
 Wesleyan Chapel. 
 
 To compare with this I selected a suburban district 
 jn South Dulwich and Forest Hill, which is as yet 
 
 269 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 comparatively free from the imroad of the working 
 lan. 
 The figures for the two districts compare as follows : — 
 
 Adult Attendance. 
 
 man. 
 
 
 Pop. 
 
 C3hurch, 
 
 Noncon- 
 formist. 
 
 Total. 
 
 Percent- 
 age of 
 Pop. 
 
 WorKng-olass District . 
 Suburban District . 
 
 99,261 
 32,096 
 
 9,2H9 
 6,686 
 
 4,255 
 3,147 
 
 6,644 
 9,833 
 
 6-6 
 30-6 
 
 The figures become more striking, perhaps, if areas 
 of equal population are compared. The single parish 
 of St. Mary Magdalene, Old £ent Boad, contains almost 
 as large a population as five of the suburban parishes. 
 But the church attendances are different. 
 
 Adult Attendance. 
 
 
 Pop. 
 
 Church. 
 
 Noncon- 
 formist. 
 
 Total. 
 
 Percent- 
 age of 
 Pop. 
 
 St. Mary's, Walworth . 
 
 Five Dolwioh and 
 
 Sydenham Parishes 
 
 20,142 
 21,873 
 
 189 
 3,320 
 
 1,089 
 2,868 
 
 1,278 
 6,178 
 
 6 
 29 
 
 When it is further remembered that the suburban 
 district undoubtedly also supplies worshippers to a 
 number of churches and chapels outside its borders, 
 and that by scraping off a layer of middle-class houses 
 from the main streets of Walworth you would probably 
 diminish your church attendance by at least two-thirds' 
 I think the illustration is striking of the difference in 
 
 270 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 habits of church attendance between the prosperous and 
 the poor. 
 
 An isolated example such as this is indeed not con- 
 clusive. But I would ask any critic still doubtful to 
 work out similar calculations from the Census returns. 
 Let him compare Bermondsey with Lewisham, inner 
 with outer Lambeth, Deptford with Blackheath — he 
 will find similar results. The results were, indeed, well 
 known to those familiar with the life of the poor, and 
 are continually asserted in Mr. Booth's investigation. 
 The new city race of workers is developing apart 
 froin the influences of religion. The spiritual world 
 has vanished from their vision. The curtain of 
 their horizon has descended round the life of toil 
 which constitutes their immediate universe. Here and 
 there, widely scattered, you may find a successful 
 religious community of the poor; but these are mere 
 isolated instances in an area of grey indifference. 
 The energy, determination, and devotion put forth' by 
 adherents of all the religious bodies to convert some 
 portion of this vast multitude, is one of the most notice- 
 able displays of self-sacrificing effort to be found in 
 modem England. Every expedient is essayed, from 
 the guilds and fraternities, processions and banners of 
 " advanced " churches to the antics of " Jumping Jack" 
 or " Salvation Joe " of a different school of Christianity. 
 The wealthier members of the varied religions generously 
 pour subscriptions and material gifts for the same 
 arduous task. The best of the younger members of 
 the Church "of England undertake work amongst the 
 poor, and certainly the standard of the clergy in the 
 central districts where the churches are empty need 
 not fear comparison with the standard in the outlying 
 suburbs where the churches are crammed. If the 
 
 271 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 works done in London to-day, one ia inclined to assert, 
 had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah, they would 
 have repented in sackcloth and ashes. To all this 
 the great unknown multitude remains unresponsive. 
 So far as a conscious spiritual life is concerned the 
 results seem almost negligible. The key to the heart 
 of the City has not yet been found. Its interminable 
 streets and desert of crowded dwellings wait for some 
 outpouring of the spirit as yet withholden. Against its 
 amiable acquiescence and passive resistance to the 
 exhortations, threatenings, and promises of the 
 churches all these energies beat themselves in vain. 
 The indifference to religion is, indeed, accompanied by 
 indifference to all intellectual effort, to political and 
 social action, to the advancement of any ideal cause. 
 " It was supposed," is one verdict, "that as men would 
 not come to church they would go to the hall of science. 
 Not a bit of it. Of the two they would prefer the 
 church, but what they really want is to be left alone." 
 " The fact is," said a lady to a friend of mine who was 
 canvassing for a vote, " me and my 'usben' don't take 
 no interest in anythink." 
 
 Amongst the third class of residents — the middle 
 classes, stretching in a kind of skeleton framework 
 through the cities of labour, so strangely members of 
 this unique community, yet alien from all its hopes 
 and desires — we can recognise a strong and vigorous 
 religious life. It develops mainly an individualistic 
 gospel ; stern ; a doctrine that every man should help 
 himself, and that if he fails it is his own fault. It 
 recognises an "old-fashioned" teaching — heaven and 
 hell as realities, unaffected by the destructive influences 
 of modem ideas. Here, if anywhere, is the survival in 
 London of the Puritan element, the distrust of worldly 
 
 272 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 ^pleasures, the looking forward to the salvation of the 
 elect, escaping, though hardly, from a world destined 
 for everlasting fire. This population fills the great 
 Nonconformist tahernacles which occupy so conspicuous 
 a position in the religious life of London. It is 
 interesting to see how its existence causes a reversal 
 of the standards recognised elsewhere — clergymen, for 
 example, repeatedly explaining to Mr. Booth that their 
 wealthy people were "too well off" for the Church of 
 England, or that the edifice is "placed in a wealthier 
 part among people who are Dissenters or nothing." 
 " These churches," is the verdict on one district and 
 one religious hody — it may be extended to all — " are 
 mainly supported by the lower middle class ; with the 
 working class their difficulties begin, and in the streets 
 that show a really poor element all religious efforts fail, 
 here as elsewhere." The summary of a particularly 
 successful Baptist tabernacle in Camberwell is written 
 large over the whole of London. " Few are rich, for 
 the rich have left the neighbourhood ; none are poor, 
 for the poor do not come, and a mission started for their 
 sake has not been a success. But as a middle-class 
 organisation the church is the centre of a vigorous 
 congregational life." In these districts at least, Non- 
 conformists form the aristocracy, and the Church and 
 the Koman Catholics work with a lower social stratum. 
 In our fourth class — the residents of the suburbs — we 
 have perhaps the largest proportion of church atten- 
 dance in any district in London. Practically the whole 
 population attends religious service on Sunday. Places 
 of all religions are crowded with overflowing congrega- 
 tions. The disintegrating influences which have swept 
 over Society and the West have here as yet scarcely 
 penetrated. Sunday amusement is still sternly dis- 
 
 273 T 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 couraged. Sunday is made as unpleasant a day as is 
 possible for the ungodly who refuse to recognise the 
 obligations of worship. The record everywhere is of 
 activity and enterprise. Munificent sums have been 
 spent on new buildings and endowments. Church 
 attendance is the fashion, pews are rented for families ; 
 the chief difficulty is to provide accommodation for the 
 increasing demands. Adjacent to each other, indeed, 
 we have here two populations, each inhabiting an 
 entirely separate universe. In the centre the mioister 
 may talk with the tongue of man and angel, and the 
 church remains deserted. In the suburbs he may roll 
 out commonplace platitudes, and the church is crammed. 
 "A certain class will come to church," is the summary 
 of one minister, " provided you do not positively repel 
 them ; while another class cannot be induced to come 
 at all." In the suburbs we hear of districts in which 
 " almost every one in this neighbourhood goes to some 
 place of worship " ; others where " you have only to 
 build a church and it will be^ filled, unless you drive the 
 people away." 
 
 The conclusions of Mr. Booth and the statistical 
 Census now further sift themselves under classes. 
 
 In London the poor (except the Roman Catholic poor) 
 do not attend service on Sunday, though there are a few 
 churches and missions which gather some, and forlorn 
 groups can he collected hy a liberal granting of relief. 
 
 The working man does not come to church. A few 
 small communities of Primitive Methodists, Baptists, 
 Salvationists, and similar bodies, as a general rule 
 represent his contribution to the religious life of the 
 nation. 
 
 The tradesmen and middle class of the poorer 
 boroughs exhibit an active religious life, mainly gathered 
 
 274 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 in the larger Nonconformist bodies, especially the 
 Baptists. 
 
 The residents in the suburbs crowd their churches and 
 chapels, and support with impartiality and liberality 
 all forms of organised religion. 
 
 Before passing to conclusions, there are some further 
 points of interest to be noted concerning the region of 
 religious effort and failure. 
 
 First, I think the statistics conclusively demonstrate 
 the failure of what I may call the "mission " system. 
 The original conception was an idea of a very attrac- 
 tive simplicity. The parish church or the mother 
 chapel was to be the place of meeting of a cultured and 
 comfortable audience. These paid for the seats, and 
 were edified by the ministrations of a cultured and 
 comfortable pastor. " The poor will not come to 
 church." The presence of their squalor, if they found 
 their way in, would, indeed, be a little embarrassing. 
 So in the poor part of the parish a " mission-hall " is 
 built, where the curate or the faithful laymen of the 
 church may extemporise popular and breezy addresses, 
 and conduct with the aid of an harmonium popular and 
 breezy hymns. The mother congregation will contri- 
 bute generously to this necessary supplement to their 
 efforts, the lady members will assist in the singing or 
 become district visitors, and the hall will be a centre 
 for the liberal distribution of meat, clothing, and 
 coals. One may perhaps rejoice at the failure of this 
 vicious system, as revealed by these investigations. 
 Mr. Booth brings a sweeping indictment against 
 the whole collection of shabby, dilapidated mission- 
 halls of tia or drab brick, which he found offered 
 as homes for the spiritual nourishment of the poor. 
 And in practically every borough the attendance 
 
 275 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 of adults at these lamentable erections is found to be 
 approaching the vanishing point. Earely does it reach 
 a hundred. 43, 34, 16 in the Anglican, 8 in the 
 Baptist, 41, 41 in the Congregational, I find the 
 mission-hall attendance in one district. In another are 
 ten Baptist missions with an average morning adult 
 attendance of 7, and evening of 33 ; in another five 
 Anglican with a morning average of 13, and evening of 
 50. Not on such lines, it may safely be asserted, will 
 the news of the kingdom of God come to the working 
 populations of London. 
 
 A second noteworthy feature is the power seemingly 
 possessed by the old parish churches to gather congre- 
 gations within their walls. They stand, for the most 
 part, of a Georgian or early Victorian architecture, like 
 great ships washed by the flood of humanity which has 
 swept around them ; built for a time when Walworth 
 was a fashionable suburb, or Stepney surrounded by 
 gardens, or Woolwich a flourishing, self-centred country 
 town. They awaken memories of a vanished past, 
 before the torrent of poverty swept down on the fields 
 and marshes and destroyed, like the lava stream, 
 all green trees and every living thing. Something, 
 however, of their quaintness and old-world atmosphere 
 seems to have clung around them. The services them- 
 selves are nearly all of a " moderate " type, most 
 characteristic of an Established Church and early 
 Victorian religion. Most of these parish churches, 
 with their type of worship now almost superseded by 
 modem, energetic innovations, exhibit a noteworthy 
 number of Sunday attendances. 
 
 A third item is the manifest tendency of the Noncon- 
 formist worshippers to collect together into strong 
 centres — that centralising system which is inevitable 
 
 276 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 where preaching is so emphasised and the stimulus and 
 guidance of the pulpit so much desired. I have no 
 doubt the tendency implies loss as well as gain — that 
 the smaller chapels round, which are emptied to swell 
 the great congregations, must inevitably suffer from 
 depression and a sense of failure. In Woolwich, for 
 example, we may note Mr. Wilson's great tabernacle, 
 with an adult attendance of 1,669; and ten other 
 Baptist chapels dividing 1,520 between them, or an 
 average at each service of 76 persons. In Southwark 
 Mr. Spurgeon attracts a magnificent congregation of 
 1,054 adults in the morning and 1,954 in the evening ; 
 the seven adjacent Baptist chapels obtain between them 
 873 in the morning and 1,769 in the evening, an 
 average of 188 per service; while the adjacent four 
 Congregational churches are occupied by but 628, or an 
 average of 78. Mr. Meakin's hall in Bermondsey, 
 again, with its 1,217 evening attendance, presents a 
 sharp contrast to adjacent Wesleyan churches with 
 congregations of 12, 130, and 19, and to the desolate 
 condition of churches and chapels of other bodies in the 
 same desolate region. Undoubtedly there are high 
 compensating advantages. The power of the great 
 preacher is multiplied. The stimulus of these vast 
 multitudes is invaluable to the bodies of Christians 
 scattered and small in the surrounding indifference. 
 The sight of the congregation of the Newington Taber- 
 nacle singing hymns on Sunday evening on the steps of 
 the great edifice is a guarantee to the heedless stream 
 which passes by that there are some who still believe in 
 their religion. But work under the shadow of these 
 cathedral gatherings in the humbler chapels is a de- 
 pressing experience. The congregation slowly melts 
 away, as the old faithful depart and the younger mem- 
 
 277 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 bers are drawn to more obvious attractions. I know of 
 few more depressing sights than the gathering of the 
 few score dejected faithful scattered through buildings 
 of size and pretension from which all the life has 
 departed. 
 
 The parochial system of the Established Church, with 
 its strong emphasis on local ties, is a resistent against 
 this tendency in the Anglican community; the com- 
 paratively unimportant place occupied by the preacher 
 is another. Undoubtedly, however, the Anglican atten- 
 dances suffer as well as the Nonconformist from the 
 attractive influences of these gigantic tabernacles and 
 mission-halls. One is driven more and more to the 
 conclusion that under present conditions the percentage 
 of attendance at church to population in London is 
 about a fixed number. You may, by special effort of 
 preaching, music, or excitement, draw a large and 
 active congregation. But you have done so by empty- 
 ing the churches of your neighbours. The water is not 
 increased in quantity, but merely decanted from bottle 
 to bottle. In the cases mentioned above, the great 
 chapels with their allied branches and their immense 
 activity, I can very gladly testify from personal know- 
 ledge to the real spiritual enthusiasm and benefit 
 which they diffuse. There are, however, other popular 
 attractive services which must be received with less 
 unqualified praise. Efforts are made, wholesale, 
 reckless, sensational, to excite an emotional vigour. 
 The influence in any case appears transitory. The 
 adherents of the churches are lured from their less 
 exciting services, dosed with a kind of spiritual intoxi- 
 cation, and left to recover from the debauch as best 
 they can. Energetic, well-meaning persons, seeing 
 London as a heathen city, hire large halls, flash 
 
 278 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 lantern slides before the eyes of the crowd, advertise 
 " Salvation Jack " to preach on the subject " Catch 'em 
 alive." The success is phenomenal, and they go to 
 sleep at nights convinced that they have advanced by 
 their efforts the conversion of England. People who 
 had attended humble churches and chapels, often miles 
 away, are drawn to this new spiritual excitement. In 
 many cases they never return to their old membership, 
 finding the old methods humdrum and unstimulating. 
 I am sure I am in agreement with the majority of the 
 ministers in London when I say that experience has 
 created a distrust of the large "undenominational" 
 mission, with its lavish charities and sensational appeals, 
 the special advertisement and religious excitement, and 
 all efforts to reach " the outcast who has never heard of 
 the Gospel " (who scarcely exists in London) by the 
 satisfaction of his stomach or the adaptation of the 
 methods of the circus and the music-hall. 
 
 Another feature of interest is the evidence of the 
 progress of Ritualism and "advanced" doctrine amongst 
 the suburbs of London. This was a surprise to me. I 
 had thought these energies mainly exhibited amongst the 
 rich who were attracted by its ceremonial and the poor 
 who welcomed its gospel of Socialism and fellowship. 
 But here are strong churches among the middle classes 
 — churches mostly built in recent years, and by the 
 worshippers themselves without external assistance — 
 evidently providing something which their congregations 
 desire. Here, if anywhere, is to be found the Ritualistic 
 grocer whom Sir William Harcourt once challenged his 
 ecclesiastical opponents to produce. The suburbs, I 
 should have thought, would have remained the last 
 home of Protestantism, and around the northern boun- 
 daries of London they remain entirely faithful to the 
 
 279 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 evangelical tradition. But all through the south and 
 the west we find largely attended " Catholic " churches. 
 All new districts of mixed population seem to be 
 ef&cient fields for these newer energies. It is a note- 
 worthy factor in the estimation of the changing aspects 
 of London's religious life, a movement still progressing 
 towards an end no one can clearly foresee. 
 
 Many other striking features are revealed as by a 
 sudden light thrown into a universe of cloud and dark- 
 ness. There is the smallness of number and magnitude 
 of congregation of the Eoman Catholic churches, reveal- 
 ing both the poverty of this body and the readiness of 
 its members to travel considerable distances to fulfil 
 their obligations of attendance at Mass. There is the 
 astonishing blossoming out of offshoots and branches of 
 the main stream of Christian life into all kinds of quaint 
 minor sects, each with its own specific doctrine and 
 place of meeting. These become most pronounced in 
 the suburbs, as in Camberwell, where we find the New 
 Jerusalem Church with 45 morning worshippers, the 
 Calvinistic Independents with 153, the Christadelphians 
 with 49, besides such less conspicuous bodies as the 
 Holiness Gospel Mission with 15, the Christian Band 
 Hall with 70, and two branches of Spiritualists with 13 
 and 89 adherents. Again, there is evidence of the com- 
 parative failure of " undenominational " services, with a 
 series of minute attendances ; the inability of the Salva- 
 tion Army to attract inside audiences ; and the great 
 contrast, in the case of the Wesleyan Methodists, 
 between attendances at the new centres of the forward 
 movement and the old circuit chapels. 
 
 Finally, it may be asked. What is the relation 
 between the figures of attendance and actual religious 
 influence ? How far can the activity of a Church in 
 
 280 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 districts be measiared by or limited to the number of 
 adherents here given? This is a question largely a 
 matter of personal impression for which there are no 
 exact data. My own opinion is that, in translation into 
 the world of real yalues, the numbers for the central 
 districts are considerably too small, those for the 
 suburban considerably too large. This is due, on the 
 one hand, to the far wider diffusiTe influence of the 
 Church in the poorer districts than that which is repre- 
 sented by the handful of worshippers ; on the other, to 
 what I might call the greater religious intensity of the 
 worshippers who do attend where church-going is out of 
 fashion than of those who attend where it is the recog- 
 nised custom. The Church in the vast city is a great 
 en^e of civilisation. There is a network and 
 machinery of social organisation — clubs, guilds, boys' 
 brigades, mothers' meetings, improvement societies. 
 It may indeed be questioned how far a Church is 
 justified in turning its energies from its definite spiritual 
 mission to the more practical work of the provision of 
 pleasure and the amelioration of the hard life of the 
 poor. But certainly it is undoubted that civilisation 
 would be considerably delayed were this apparatus 
 removed. This activity has earned for the Church the 
 friendliness and toleration of vast populations still 
 impervious to its spiritual message, and a few years ago 
 in an attitude of open hostility. An overwhelming 
 proportion of the children attend catechism and Sunday 
 School and are launched into life with such cloudy 
 religious conceptions as these institutes are able to 
 provide. The clergy are frequent and often welcome 
 visitors. Each individual is present at service at least 
 at his baptism, his marriage, and his funeral ; and 
 occasionally on other special occasions — ^harvest festi- 
 
 281 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 vals, confirmations, and the last night of the year. 
 The services of the minister of religion are requisitioned 
 in times of trouble or illness, and few would willingly 
 die without at least one visit from the clergyman. All 
 this means a real if diffusive influence. Keligious ideas 
 are still " in the air " ; and the message of the Church, 
 the consciousness of sin, the need for repentance, and 
 the expectation of fature judgment, have not yet 
 entirely vanished from the horizon of London. 
 
 I should be inclined to assert again that, in quality, 
 our attendance within the congested area more than 
 compensates for the quantity of the region beyond. 
 We come, if at all, because our religion is real, and 
 amid the manifested contempt of our neighbours. In 
 the smaller churches and chapels at least there are no 
 meretricious attractions to lead us thus to defy public 
 opinion. Suburban religion is largely of a different 
 character. Much of it is the mere conventional homage 
 to the accepted gods of the community. And even the 
 section that is honest and deliberate is often partly 
 lacking in certain essentials of an active and aggressive 
 Christian endeavour. It upholds a decent life and a 
 clean moral standard, with much individual personal 
 piety. But it is far too content to limit its outlook to 
 its own family or church, heedless of the chaos of 
 confusion and failure which lies at its very. doors. It 
 regards with disapproval and often with contempt this 
 world of poverty with its dumb demand for aid. It is 
 generous in charity, but no appeal for justice in the 
 name of the forgotten poor goes forth with united voice 
 from the churches of London. It is content to cultivate 
 its own garden, to save its own soul. It is loth to 
 identify its interests with those of its less successful 
 neighbours. The challenge, "Which think ye was 
 
 282 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 neighbour to him that fell amongst thieves ? " remains 
 unaccepted. For this neglect of obvious Christian duty 
 its loss is at least as great as the loss of those it 
 declines to aid. It becomes more and more cut off 
 from the realities to which a living religion has 
 always appealed. It draws the line tight round its own 
 border, and endeavours to satisfy with missions and 
 gifts of money the obligation of personal service and of 
 a campaign for justice to all the desolate and oppressed. 
 It has remained up till now unaffected by destructive 
 criticism and the changes of thought and outlook which 
 have so ravaged the orthodox religions in other regions. 
 But there are not wanting signs of the approach of the 
 disturbance. It has still to pass through a time of trial 
 in which it will be tested to its foundations. Material- 
 ism, the lust for pleasure, the modern impatience with a 
 definite creed, are slowly creeping into this vigorous 
 suburban area ; and the negative assertions of science 
 and biblical criticism are creating centres of local 
 disquietude. If the prevailing type of religion largely 
 withers before such forces as these, it will be because it 
 has set itself apart in comfort, content with a personal 
 creed of salvation; because it has felt no passionate 
 impulse to assert a common fellowship with the less 
 fortunate who are lying at its doors — no call to 
 right the wrongs which, in the words of a modern 
 reformer, " cry continually into the ears of the Lord 
 God of Sabaoth." 
 
 We have enough facts, I think, to justify us in the 
 statement that the religions life of England at the dawn 
 of the ceintury occupies a quite unparalleled position 
 amid that of the nations of Western Europe. In the 
 case of all other countries, religion has been practically 
 abandoned by the rich and successful, and is still 
 
 283 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 grasped with tenacity and devotion by the masses of the 
 poor. In the cities, indeed, amongst the male popula- 
 tions of the working classes, the historical faiths of 
 Christianity hare been replaced to a large extent by the 
 newer creed of Socialism. But Socialism, with its 
 sense of fellowship, its demand for the merging of the 
 individual life in the success of the cause, its uphfting 
 of an ideal condition of justice, and its effort towards a 
 day of better things, in many ways provides a back- 
 ground to life and the vision of a larger horizon. 
 But in England exactly the reverse conditions prevail. 
 The claims of religion are still acknowledged by 
 the rich and governing classes. They are inoperative 
 amongst the lives of the poor. No dreams of a reno- 
 vated society have entered the chambers left empty by 
 their absence. Few can doubt that in this contrast 
 ours is the greater loss. Religion to the rich is a by- 
 product — a luxury or a plaything. Religion to the poor 
 is an essential ingredient of lives at the best stunted 
 and confined, oppressed by the perplexities of existence 
 and limited by the day's toil or the evening's pleasure. 
 
 It is not an encouraging picture which is finally 
 stamped upon the mind in the investigation of human 
 life in London. It is a vision of vast and shadowy 
 multitudes of human beings driven by some blind 
 impulse to the struggle for material comfort and the 
 needs of a day. Happiness is there, family affection, 
 the play of children, even ambition and a high moral 
 standard. But it is the life of a day with a narrowed 
 outlook. There is light to work by, but no clear radiance 
 of dawn or sunset. At the end comes nightfall, with 
 no vision beyond. Vague hope of a better time for the 
 children seems rarely to develop into a conscious effort 
 after the attainment of a new social order. Vagu« 
 
 284 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 acknowledgment of a phantom and tenuous life beyond 
 the grave is the sole representative of that hunger for 
 immortality which in every age has refused to acquiesce 
 in the visible ruin of death. Those who have lived with 
 and learnt to love its labouring peoples, with their in- 
 domitable cheerfulness, pluck, and endurance, will be 
 the first to afOrm that their predominant need is the 
 sense of a larger life, without which human existence is 
 as that of the gnat or the midge ; an uplifting of the 
 material surroundings to show, if but for a moment, an 
 encompassing spiritual horizon ; and an ideal cause 
 able to illuminate even the scene of contemporary 
 failure with a kind of glory 
 
 II 
 
 It is interesting to note how, in the discussion of 
 remedies for the ineffectiveness of religion in modern 
 England, almost all critics plunge straightway into the 
 question of machinery. The worship of machinery, 
 as Matthew Arnold continually asserted, is a national 
 characteristic of Englishmen. And each observer 
 appears to hold that if that particular section of the 
 machine in which he can detect a flaw could be repaired, 
 or if a particularly up-to-date invention replaced some 
 antiquated adjustment, the machinery of the Churches 
 would once again grind out religious enthusiasm. With 
 one it is the edifice. He deplores the cold, Gothic 
 building, repellent to the poor. He would substitute 
 large lighted halls of the remarkable and dignified style 
 characteristic of the later nineteenth century, with plenty 
 of carpets, paint, and colour. With another it is the 
 edifices themselves. Let the leaders of religion come 
 out into the street, he holds, and the problem is solved. 
 
 285 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 With one again it is the service, antiquated, unintelli- 
 gible to the vulgar. Collect a hand, he urges, sing the 
 " Holy City " and other moving modem melodies, weave 
 into your prayers allusions to politics and incidents of 
 the day. With another it is the sermon ; the minister 
 is too cold, or speaks with stammering tongue. Let us 
 place a great preacher in every pulpit, and the masses 
 will vehemently fight for entrance to our churches. 
 Some advocate, some deprecate, the methods of the 
 theatre. Some would abolish pews altogether, and let 
 the men stand. Some see the inevitable advance of 
 religion if pews are made more comfortable. Each one 
 has convinced opinions as to what "the poor" vnll 
 come to — the large hall, the small mission, the street 
 corner. Few seem to care to face the question what 
 "the poor" are to be offered when they come. 
 
 All this would be very relevant if we could recognise 
 large populations with real desire after religious devotion 
 on the one hand, and a Church with a living message 
 which can satisfy this desire on the other. The whole 
 problem would then exhibit itself as a consideration of 
 the method by which the one can be most effectively 
 brought in contact with the other. But the conditions 
 are quite otherwise. On the one hand are masses of 
 people to whom the spiritual world has no meaning, 
 and from whose lives the fundamental bedrock appeal 
 of religion seems to have vanished. On the other are 
 Churches whose faith has grown cold, and whose good 
 news sounds far removed from anything approaching 
 the passionate enthusiasm of earlier Christian centuries. 
 Were this enthusiasm present, the problem of machinery 
 would soon be solved. Preachers would be speaking 
 with a conviction itself eloquent. The services would 
 take upon themselves a character of infectious courage. 
 
 286 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 The people would themselves build, as always in the 
 past, edifices reflecting in the very stones the character- 
 istics of their faith. Religion would impetuously flow 
 forth from their limited spaces into the open ways. 
 Until such a wind of the spirit can animate the dry 
 bones of religious organisation with some such violent 
 life, all conscious modifications of machinery become 
 but attempts at creating a soul through the body, 
 the artificial galvanising from without of an organism 
 from which the inner life has fled. 
 
 Yet, even with such imperfect message as we have, it 
 is well to criticise the vessels in which it is conveyed ; 
 more especially if these be but survivals of antique 
 furniture, or symbols of class distinction and a dead 
 faith. How far and in what particulars, we may 
 profitably inquire, is the message of the Churches 
 hampered by its methods of deliverance? 
 
 First in regard to ihe services. Undoubtedly we are 
 here suffering from the dead hand of the past. The 
 morning and evening services of the Church of England, 
 as normally performed, with their complicated and 
 mysterious variations of canticles, prayers, and irrele- 
 vant readings of Scripture, are altogether bewildering 
 to those not intimately familiar with the books from 
 which they are compiled. The reformers of the six- 
 teenth century endeavoured to restore worship to the 
 people in the vulgar tongue. Unfortunately the Eefor- 
 mation was in essence aristocratic, never, as the 
 Reformation abroad, awakening response from the 
 masses of the population. The churches passed from 
 the hands of the people, who ceased to take a pride in 
 them. The Church services became more and more 
 an inheritance of a limited aristocracy. The longing 
 for something warm, human, inspiring, contributed 
 
 287 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 largely to create the independent bodies which in all the 
 subsequent centuries have formed minor centres of wor- 
 ship. I have no hesitation in saying that, for the majority 
 of the poor, to-day's services are as incomprehensible 
 as if still performed in the Latin tongue. The central 
 service of the Eoman Catholic Church, indeed, with its 
 dramatic and appealing character, is far more intelligible 
 even to the humblest worshipper. The Keformation 
 changes provided the essentials of the Mass in the 
 English Communion service, a service for dignity and 
 beauty quite unparalleled. The monkish matins were 
 never intended for formal parade one day in the week, 
 swollen by elaborate music into intolerable dimension. 
 Any one concerned with the religious life of the poor 
 will welcome most heartily the increased honour paid to 
 the feast of the Lord's Supper in recent years, and the 
 progress towards its restoration to the central position 
 of the Sunday worship. Such a change alone would, I 
 believe, remove one of the chief obstacles to Church 
 attendance. 
 
 We may welcome also the renewed efforts after light, 
 colour, and beauty ; the introducisiblf of tgntnbolic action, 
 procession, and some elements of movement and drama 
 into the drabness of our churches. Religion is inde- 
 pendent of such adventitious aids, and the essentials 
 must never be lost in the attractions of sensuous imagery. 
 But I am sure that, in the acres of desolate hideousness 
 of the streets of our working populations, all the appeals 
 of sense and sound and colour should be associated 
 with a worship which is to lift the minds of tired men 
 and women to some other vision than that of their 
 material meanness. I should like to see the churches 
 of the wealthy studiously plain ; not vulgar, indeed, 
 like the " up-to-date " religious edifice, a building which 
 
 288 
 
THE RELIGIOK OF THE CITY 
 
 will serve as a record and a warning to future ages of 
 the condition of religion in twentieth-century England ; 
 but with whitewashed walls and scant decoration, that 
 the worshippers may contrast this simplicity with the 
 splendour of their own homes, and acknowledge one 
 standard of reality in man's judgments, another in 
 those of God. And I would see the churches of the 
 poor rich with colour and light — with great paintings on 
 all the walla and the freest use of every artistic appeal 
 — that these also might learn from day to day that the 
 monotony and meanness of the grey streets in which 
 they are confined, and the grey lives to which they are 
 destined, is not a destiny which was designed for them, 
 nor a bondage from which they will never be freed. 
 
 In passing from the ceremonial to the character of 
 the service, we are confronted with a manifest difficulty. 
 Living in a transitory time or order, and with a vision 
 limited to our own settled and decent lives, much of the 
 language used by men who dwelt amongst the enduring 
 facta of human existence appears to us archaic and 
 meaningless. " Agony and bloody sweat " ; " widows 
 and orphans and all that are desolate and oppressed " ; 
 " battle, murder, and sudden death " ; " the hour of 
 death and the day of judgment " — how faint and far 
 away all this seems to the rational and settled life of 
 suburban London ! The difficulty, indeed, will endure 
 but for a time. The persistence of comfort in a world of 
 illusion has never existed but for a few generations. 
 Here, if anywhere, the absence of sympathetic imagina- 
 tion, and the faithlessness of the Churches to the larger 
 vision, has produced an aspect of make-believe. If these 
 congregations could be roused to apprehension of some- 
 thing of the real world outside — of Ireland or South 
 Africa in the immediate nast, of Macedonia in the imme- 
 
 289 U 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 diate present, of the life of the poorest always — these 
 exclamations and cries of appeal would become charged 
 with an awful significance, a demand urged with violence 
 in the name of fear and pity for the vindication of the 
 government of a righteous God. 
 
 And as with the service, so with the sermon. I 
 would not reiterate the demand for "good preaching," 
 which seems to me utterly to confase the purposes of 
 the services of the Church. We meet, not for edification, 
 but for worship — 'to confess our sins, to obtain spiritual 
 succour, to renew the visible guarantee of fellowship. 
 Eloquence will attract everywhere, in the pulpit as in 
 the market-place. But the crowds which run after a 
 popular preacher, which purchase his portraits and 
 finger his clothes and pry into his family life and the 
 contents of his larder, seem to me somehow alien from 
 the sincerest forms of religion. Yet there is no doubt 
 that the patient layman has a right to appeal for better 
 preaching. The pulpit in many cases is not only not an 
 attractive, but is actually a repellent, force. We have 
 no privilege to insist upon eloquence. But we can 
 demand sincerity, the frank facing of difficulty, freedom 
 from the conventional machinery of the popular exposi- 
 tion of doctrine. The prevailing theology, even more 
 perhaps than the prevailing liturgy, is wrapped up in 
 an ancient language. The very terms are technical — 
 grace, justification, conversion, perseverance. They 
 flow out glibly from the student who has soaked himself 
 in their historical meanings ; they are Greek to the 
 general. They were once living realities for which men 
 fought gladly and died. They still symbolise realities, 
 the permanent elements of the life-history of the soul. 
 But they are wrapped around in cobwebs and the com- 
 plications of a technical system, frozen into sterility. 
 
 290 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 They have no more meaning and no more appeal to the 
 audience at whom they are thrown in such profusion 
 than the details of the performance of the Mosaic ritual, 
 or the genealogies of the legendary heroes of the 
 Hebrew Bible. We want neither edifying lessons 
 drawn from the wanderings of Israel or the Book of 
 Joshua; nor brilliant "word-painting" of some of the 
 scenes of the Bible with a more up-to-date eloquence ; 
 nor the exposition of the machinery of schemes of salva- 
 tion once real from which the life has departed; but 
 some message concerning the things of the spirit, 
 delivered in simplicity and humility and sincerity to 
 men who would fain be simple and humble and sincere. 
 
 A special question has been aroused by the impeach- 
 ment, with significant emphasis, of the methods of 
 modem charity and its alliance with religion. Mr. 
 Booth discovers over the whole town a persistent and 
 undignified struggle between competing religious bodies; 
 and in any particular choice slum area a competition, 
 rising into an almost open warfare, for possession of the 
 field. One half of London seems engaged in entertain- 
 ing the other half with soup and bread with a view to 
 its subsequent spiritual edification. Bound the city he 
 finds the whole population visibly tainted by the corrupt 
 influence of competitive charity : " ' Irreligion,' said 
 one incumbent, ' is the result of all this bribery ; we are 
 all in it, church and chapel are equally bad. It begins 
 with the children ; buns to come to Sunday School, and 
 so on, so that they grow up with the idea that the 
 Church is simply a milch cow for tracts and <!harity.' " 
 
 The typical East End, the happy hunting-ground of 
 the slummer, is "overdone with religion and relief." 
 In St. Luke's on Sunday afternoon "visitors from five 
 different agencies in the buildings are found bribing the 
 
 291 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 people to come to their meetings." In Soho, " nowhere 
 is the clash of rival doctors so great as here." But 
 even the far-off regions at the limits of the city tell a 
 similar tale. In Deptford " the poor parts are indeed a 
 regular Tom Tiddler's ground for missions, and we hear 
 of one woman, busy at the wash-tub, calling out, ' You 
 are the fifth this morning.' " In Greenwich there is 
 "too much competition for the moral health of the 
 people." In Woolwich the inhabitants are " fought 
 over by the various religious bodies with more than 
 common vivacity." Even in the new districts, whose 
 development almost immediately into slum areas is one 
 of the most appalling revelations of Mr. Booth's book, 
 the same astonishing competition is shown. Down in 
 Wandsworth "religious activity takes the shape very 
 largely of missionary efforts, competing with each other, 
 not without mutual recrimination." In Kilbum " there 
 are four churches after every poor family," and the 
 observer wonders at the strange struggle " fought over 
 men's bodies for their souls." 
 
 These competitive charities become most pernicious 
 when they are definitely used to wean adherents from 
 a rival faith. It is a somewhat dismal commentary 
 on the nature of the forces behind the distribution 
 of modern charities to find that while a particular 
 mission in a neglected district fails to evoke support, 
 a mission planted down to combat the influence of some 
 rival Christian body never seems to lack money or 
 adherents. This is especially true of the opposition to 
 the new Eitualistic energies which in the past twenty 
 years have swept into all the poorer quarters of London. 
 " The record of the Evangelical mission," says Mr. 
 Booth of one district, and a similar commentary is 
 repeated all through the volumes, " is simply that of a 
 
 292 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 struggle with the High Church for the souls and bodies 
 of the children. It is dole versus dole and treat versus 
 treat, and the contest openly admitted on both sides, 
 while people taking the gifts with either hand explain 
 how careful they must be when attending service that 
 the other side knows nothing aboiit it." " This atrocious 
 system," as Mr. Booth rightly calls it, is a very dis- 
 tressing revelation of the superior power of religious 
 rivalry to religious charity. 
 
 This enormous stream of charity flows down through 
 the various religious agencies from the rich to the poor. 
 We hear of mission funds with incomes of ten or twenty 
 thousand a year ; some business-like, some not audited at 
 all, or " audited in heaven." Twenty-five thousand chil- 
 dren are fed in one winter by one mission ; over a million 
 men receive shelter, cocoa, and bread from another ; in 
 a third to all comers is a free night-refuge. Yet the 
 problem of poverty is no nearer solution. Nor do the 
 attempts to bring men within the reach of the Gospel 
 by means of the offer of food and gifts appear to create 
 permanent results. That the whole system does more 
 harm than good is the verdict of those familiar with its 
 results. One would think it was almost time for a 
 definite and united appeal to the members of the different 
 churches and the charitable rich seriously to consider 
 the harm which is being done by the cruelty of their 
 kindness. 
 
 Other questions of machinery of the lesser importance 
 are of interest. There is the failure of the Sunday 
 Schools either to implant intelligible religious ideas or 
 to foster a desire for spiritual communion and worship. 
 There is the (as I think) deplorable theory that some 
 special kind of popular "hall" is necessary for the 
 development of the religion of " the poor " ; that by 
 
 293 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 massing these into bnge aggregations you may encou- 
 rage their reviving energies, save the expense of too 
 lavish "plant," and use your single successful evan- 
 gelist to the best advantage. But the essence of the 
 problem resides in the spirit which lies behind the 
 machinery and its influence on the religious life of 
 London. 
 
 On the side of the working peoples this is certainly a 
 period of unusual difficulty. The uprooting from the 
 country and the transference to the town has caused a 
 general confusion and disorder. Man has not yet 
 clearly apprehended his position or appreciated its 
 possibility. He has been "dumped" down in some 
 casual street, unknown to his neighbours, unconnected 
 with a corporate body or fellowship. He moves through 
 time in a kind of confused twilight, dimly wondering 
 what it all means. Material comfort and security is 
 inevitably under these conditions his main interest. 
 The memories of a life which is independent of the hard, 
 visible boundaries become daily dimmer, as he clangs 
 the hammer, or heaves merchandise, or manipulates 
 continually hard, material things. I think we may 
 safely affirm that this creation of a city race is in no 
 small degree responsible for the present manifest failure 
 of appeal of all spiritual creeds. 
 
 But the failure is none the less considerable from the 
 side of the Churches. We come from outside with our 
 gospel, aliens, with alien ideas. The Anglican Church 
 represents the ideas of the upper classes, of the imiver- 
 sities, of a vigorous life in which bodily strength, an 
 appearance of knowledge, a sense of humour, occupy 
 prominent places. The large Nonconformist bodies 
 represent the ideals of the middle classes, the strenuous 
 self-help and energy which have stamped their ideas 
 
 294 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 upon the whole of Imperial Britain. Each lives in 
 poor districts, in them, not of them. Each totally fails 
 to apprehend a vision of life as reared in a mean street, 
 and now confronting existence on a hazardous weekly 
 wage from a block-dwelling or the half of a two-storied 
 cottage. Our movements and inexplicable energies are 
 received with a mixture of toleration and perplexity. 
 We are recognised as meaning well, but our aims and 
 ideals never become clearly intelligible. " What is he 
 after?" "What does he get?" "What is behind it 
 all ? " — are questions I have heard frequently asked as 
 some church has bourgeoned out into fresh and ingenious 
 enterprise. Sometimes we are interpreted as pursuing 
 some deep game of party politics ; sometimes as a kind 
 of unofficial policemen paid by the rates and taxes : 
 more often perhaps as possessed of a kind of exuberant 
 energy which must somehow find relief in religious 
 services and mothers' meetings. Funds from outside 
 raise churches and chapels ; funds from outside provide 
 clubs and material relief. We appear and we vanish. 
 After a few months of this perplexing enthusiasm the 
 curate or minister is called to another sphere of work, 
 and disappears from the universe of those who had just, 
 perhaps, commenced to realise that he possesses some 
 traits of ordinary humanity. If we could only appre- 
 hend how entirely baffling and irrational all this must 
 appear to those who are looking out of, instead of into, 
 the abyss, our surprise, I think, would be less at the 
 vastness of our failure than at the magnitude even of 
 our poor success. 
 
 Connected with this divergence we must recognise 
 how scantily up to the present the Churches and mis- 
 sions have identified themselves vrith those demands of 
 Labour, the deliberate attempts to strike at the roots 
 
 295 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 of the ills and oppressions of the time, which the 
 working man knows to be just. The battles of the 
 past for social amelioration have been fought apart 
 from, and often with the open opposition of, the larger 
 religious organisations. "All the Churches are against 
 me," Lord Shaftesbury notes in the course of his 
 campaign for the redemption of the child-life of 
 England. And the bitterest opposition to such social 
 reformers as Charles Kingsley came from the official 
 Christian communities. Are we better to-day than our 
 fathers? Factory law, the right of combination, free 
 trade, sanitary dwellings, a humane poor law — these 
 were slowly and painfully accomplished without the 
 assistance of the Churches. The needs are as insistent 
 to-day. Decent housing and a home, shorter hours of 
 labour, a living wage, opportunities of life, the develop- 
 ment of common interests in the municipal community — 
 where in such questions of fundamental justice as these 
 are the united voices of the Christian community 
 demanding the recognition of a universal responsibility 
 in the name of the common fellowship ? Undoubtedly 
 it is because a certain section of the High Church party 
 have fearlessly proclaimed this social gospel of a visible 
 kingdom of God that they have earned, to a degree so 
 perplexing to many who deplore their doctrines, the 
 respect and friendship of the leaders of labour and the 
 devotion of the poor. These clergymen have no mono- 
 poly of devoted work, nor do they give in charity more 
 than the missions which endeavour to stem their in- 
 fluence. The working man has no affection for 
 elaborate ritual. He accepts with resignation, as part 
 of an inexplicable activity, the ornaments, the proces- 
 sions, and the ceremony. If they processioned round 
 their churches standing on their heads, he would con- 
 
 296 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 front the performance with the same toleration. But 
 they have gone down and lived amongst the people ; 
 they have proclaimed an intelligible gospel of Christian 
 Socialism; demanding not "charity," but "justice." 
 The campaign has brought upon them a storm of 
 obloquy from the world of orthodox religion. It has 
 earned them the affection of the poor. Such a life as 
 that of Father Mackonoche, or Father Lowder, or, in 
 recent times, Father Dolling, with his continual appeal 
 for " a chance " for " my people," has struck the 
 popular imagination and evoked a pathetic gratitude. 
 I am aware that this social message is not the whole 
 gospel, not perhaps the most important part of the 
 Christian message. But it is far the hardest part to 
 get uttered, and it is the message which the times 
 imperatively demand. The cry for justice provokes a 
 bitter indignation in quarters where the plea for charity 
 evokes a ready response. It is not unnatural that many 
 successful enterprises doing much good work should 
 hesitate to alienate their supporters and subscribers 
 with the revolutionary teachings of the New Testament. 
 But I am entirely convinced that no message which does 
 not contain as an integral and essential part of its pro- 
 clamation this effort towards a visible social salvation 
 will fall upon any but deaf ears amongst the working 
 populations of our great cities. 
 
 Professing Christians, it has been a little cynically 
 asserted, are the chief obstacles to the spread of 
 Christianity in England. Those outside the Church 
 are continually confronting the charters of our creed 
 and the weekly profession of our intentions with the 
 dull and uninspired acquiescence of our daily lives. 
 Small wonder that they conclude on the whole that 
 they cannot understand what we are after, and that 
 
 297 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 what they can understand they don't admire. They see 
 us as eager and tenacious of social and monetary success 
 as those who make no profession of unworldliness. They 
 note our great charities, but they note an equal if not 
 greater charity in the unbeliever ; ia such a class as, 
 for example, the players of a theatre, which many 
 profess to despise. In many quarters the advice has 
 been traditional amongst the workmen to avoid a 
 "Christian" employer. They discern us kindling into 
 occasional spasmodic violence, not at social wrong or 
 the enormous suffering of the world, but when we are 
 accusing some particular Church of attempting to over- 
 reach the others in the distribution of public funds. 
 They find us noisily advertising our own wares and 
 proclaiming the shoddiness of our neighbours ; devoting 
 at least as much energy to the undermining of their 
 efforts as to the establishment of our own. They note 
 large numbers of actively professing Christians who 
 manifest no obvious fruits of the spirit; who are 
 querulous or exacting masters or mistresses, whose 
 lives pass in a cold routine of self-centred business ; 
 alien altogether from that eager and passionate enthu- 
 siasm of humanity to which St. Paul affixed the great 
 name of charity. The verdict may be superficial — it 
 neglects, and unfairly neglects, the other side of the 
 picture ; but that it is a verdict endorsed explicitly and 
 implicitly by a vast proportion of the population of 
 London, I have no doubt whatever. 
 
 Religion has rejoiced in the clear knowledge of God 
 and forgotten the fellowship of man. And the punish- 
 ment has been, not the overthrow of its outward 
 prosperity, but the slow withdrawal of that revelation 
 of which it seemed to possess so secure a certainty. 
 So that now we walk for the most part blindly, in the 
 
 298 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 twilight, with no clear vision of a spiritual world and 
 an unseen Father. It may be that the way back to the 
 unclouded height will be found through the humble and 
 deliberate search after that fellowship which has been 
 offended and denied. Confronted with records of the 
 religion of ^London in this time of tranquillity, I 
 can imagine no more sensational discoYery than 
 the first message of the Christian teaching and its 
 judgment of the life of the day. Teaching so familiar 
 as to become meaningless may assume a new signifi- 
 cance. The feast to which first are to be called the 
 friendless and poor ; the " Inasmuch " with its triumph 
 and its mysterious warning; the strange and solitary 
 revelation of future judgment for a rich man who lived 
 happily with want and misery lying unnoticed at his 
 doors ; the woes pronounced on the complacent orthodox 
 religions, so entirely convinced that they are fulfilling 
 every jot and tittle of the law ; these have a meaning 
 for Christianity in England at the dawn of the twentieth 
 century. Assuredly it is as well that the old gospel 
 should be given a trial before we proclaim the necessity 
 for a new. 
 
 Men need never despair of the future of religion. 
 Humanity, as a great philosopher affirmed, is not des- 
 tined permanently to inhabit ruins. A world which is 
 forgetting God does not involve a God who is forgetting 
 the world. The movement of new spiritual advance 
 may arise from without, not from within the Church ; as 
 so many of the great restorative movements of the past 
 generation, whose divine origin and guidance were un- 
 recognised by the members of the organised Christian 
 community. We may be very confident that the time 
 of frost and present cold will break up before the 
 warmth of another spring. The Church by neglect of 
 
 299 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE CITY 
 
 its election and high calling may prolong the misery and 
 increase the confusion of time. But no human wilfulness 
 or weakness can for ever delay the restitution of all 
 things and the triumph of the end. A new dawn will 
 one day illuminate the vastness and desolation of the 
 city. Each solitary life of its millions, perishing, as 
 it seems, unheeded and alone, is destined at last to 
 find the purpose of its being in union with the Infinite, 
 alike its origin and its goal. 
 
 300 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
" The lights begin to twinkle from the rocJcs ; 
 The long day wanes : the slow moon cUmbs : the deep 
 Moans round with many voices." 
 
 — Tbnnysoh. 
 
IN PEBIL OF GHANaE 
 
 A WHITER once complained of Charles Kingsley, 
 that he wrote as if always anticipating the 
 happening of something tremendous ahout the middle 
 of next week. The quotation is a judgment, less of 
 the excitement of the author than of the insensibility 
 of the critic. For, throughout the age in which 
 Kingsley lived, something tremendous always did 
 happen in the middle of next week. The spectator, 
 astonished or indifferent, confronted one of the greatest 
 of all historical upheavals of the foundations of the 
 mind of man. The Victorian Age, which now, alike 
 in its sobriety and its sanguine dreams, stands so 
 remote in the background of the memory of those who 
 are living in an alien time, will be stamped in the 
 record of the future as an age of hurrying change. In 
 many respects that change has resulted in a profounder 
 transformation than had been effected by all the pre- 
 ceding centuries. The gulf is greater between the 
 England of to-day and the England which, in its 
 secure and tranquil life, accepted without emotion the 
 death of the last of the Georgian Kings, than between 
 that England and the spacious days of Elizabeth, or 
 the coming of Augustine with a new faith from over the 
 sea. Eighty years ago England was a quiet community, 
 chiefly agriculturist, scattered over a little island. The 
 
 303 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 traveller journeyed to Edinburgh or to Kome by the 
 same methods of progress as those which had served 
 the messengers of the Conqueror. The peasant flung 
 his seed into the soil, and hoped for the direction of the 
 forces of Nature, the rain and kindly sun, towards the 
 attainment of the harvest, as at any day through all 
 the centuries. The generations of the common people 
 gathered for petition or praise, accepting the unchal- 
 lenged announcement that the visible ruin of death was 
 but a prelude to an awful judgment ; when all the actual 
 deeds done in the flesh would be brought to account ; 
 and the books set and the seals broken and the verdict 
 proclaimed, which should decide the fate of the poor, 
 pitiful human soul throughout unending time. 
 
 The age which has just gone by, with all its 
 meannesses and heroisms, its periods of great passion 
 and intervening tranquillities, has exhibited the 
 passing of this earlier England. And now, those 
 who anywhere attempt to penetrate beneath the 
 surface, with all its humour and glitter and material 
 opulence, realise that they are estimating forces and 
 equilibriums in a new nation. In the earlier period 
 such changes as were accomplished were visible and 
 open ; there were manifest tremors and violence in the 
 world of politics and religion, controversies through the 
 fabric of organic society. So Chartist Agitations, 
 Oxford Movements, Anti-Corn Law Leagues, Liberal 
 Aggressions, Evolution and " the New Reformation," 
 with the noise of the fall of privilege and the songs 
 of triumph of the victors, proclaimed to all men that 
 great events were toward. But in the later time these 
 portents of change had passed away. Men's minds 
 turned towards other horizons : expansion "beyond the 
 sky-line " and the harvesting of their rich fortune of 
 
 304 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 prosperity. And the sound of the great storms of the 
 nineteenth century died slowly into silence, as the 
 rough seas subsided into the mere ground-swell of past 
 disturbance, and this again to the quiet ripple of the 
 waves along the shore. Content with the present, 
 convinced that enough had been done, a little wearied 
 with the tempests of reform, England settled down to 
 sleep. 
 
 Yet to the sensitive eye this vanishing of visible up- 
 heaval has in no way checked or changed the processes 
 of development and decay. The thirty years of reaction 
 will appear to the future as fruitful in the seeds of 
 transition as the previous thirty years of progress. For 
 events in the world of thought and opinion — the only 
 world which ultimately matters, which will inevitably 
 now, or in the coming time, mould the world of material 
 things in accordance with its claims — do not cease to 
 march forward because men have become weary of the 
 effort of adjustment. Throughout this passing time 
 of order forces of creation and destruction have been 
 playing upon the plastic material of the minds of men. 
 Outwardly, things appear settled and unchanged. The 
 ancient institutions of the realm, the Constitution, the 
 feudal system, the Protestant faith, the Established 
 Church, stand, it would seem, even more secure than in 
 that restless past when the utility of all old things was 
 being roughly called in question. Yet men need to 
 remember — need again and again to remember — that a 
 nation, no more than an individual, can bid time stand 
 still, and proclaim the permanence of the summer days. 
 There is an irony of judgment in the spectacle of all 
 those past brief periods of peace, in which a people, on 
 the verge of some vast disquietude, riddled with forces 
 which are hastening the upheavals of the abyss, stands 
 
 305 X 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 proud and satisfied, confident that at length it has 
 attained the certainties of an afternoon, golden and 
 unending. To-day,, were we but as sensitive to dis- 
 turbance in the world of man's profound convictions, 
 as to the outward modifications of the forms of society 
 in which those convictions are clothed, our ears naight 
 well be deafened by the noise of the crash of the 
 elements, of growing and of dying worlds. 
 
 And, whether delayed by idleness or man's natural 
 fears of the violence of an unknown future, and so 
 postponed again and yet again by those whose first 
 demand is peace at least in their time ; sooner or later, 
 without any doubt at all, the outward fabric must 
 respond to the realities of the inner life. Euins must 
 collapse and be cleared away, and new dwelling places 
 be constructed adequate to man's desires. To the 
 eye which can scan the larger stretches of time, 
 and see the end in the beginning, the process 
 has been already completed before a stone has been 
 disturbed. The French Eevolution was accomplished 
 when society laughed with Voltaire, instead of lament- 
 ing, over the Church's immoralities ; and applauded 
 Rousseau's proclamation, with lean, upraised claw, of 
 the coming of an age of innocence and gold. And all 
 the intervening time of troublous dreams, of financiers 
 oppressed with a national bankruptcy, and bishops 
 timidly essaying a reform of manners, and the coming of 
 a new king and an age of enlightenment amid a universal 
 rejoicing, were but the passing scenes in a drama whose 
 fifth act had been already composed. A similar insight 
 can be applied to the things of to-day. The passing of 
 the first peasant, unehallenged, into the labyrinth of 
 the city, his discovery there of independence and an 
 adequate return for his labour, was the passing of the 
 
 306 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 feudal system in England. The company which 
 witnessed the admission of the first Dissenter into 
 Parliament witnessed also, all unwittingly, the fall of 
 the Established Church. And the perplexities of the 
 author of " Colenso's Arithmetic " over the reconciliation 
 of iiTeconcilable numbers in the estimates of the wander- 
 ings and the fightings of the children of Israel, marked 
 the close of a particular type of Protestant civilisation 
 which had been dominant in England for three 
 centuries. 
 
 Here are three institutions built out of living forces 
 into forms and systems congruous with a former 
 energetic life, which now stand, to the impartial eye, 
 undermiued in their foundations. Each had been 
 fiercely assailed during the time immediately passed; and 
 each, while the springs of an inner life remained, stood 
 secure against all the forces of reason and of hatred 
 which fell upon them. In the mid-century, the fury of 
 the middle, classes and of manufacturing England threw 
 itself against the old Landed System. Cobden, after 
 the freeing of trade, was already joyfully proclaiming 
 " the crash of feudalism " as the completion of his 
 policy. The landed interests were tense with the 
 consciousness of the coming of change, and banding 
 themselves together for a final, desperate, and, as most 
 would have confessed, hopeless resistance. Yet the 
 fifty years have passed, and, with their passing, all the 
 noise of conflict. The system remains, and in practice 
 almost unchallenged. Little more than thirty years 
 ago, the visible end of the Established Church appeared 
 but a matter of days. The destruction in Ireland had 
 seemed but a prelude to a greater destruction this 
 side of the sea. In the records and memoirs of the 
 'seventies, while the forces of the Liberation Society 
 
 307 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 and other assailants breathe the consciousness of 
 victory, the records of the Church's leaders are full 
 of mournful forebodings of an imminent and inevit- 
 able destruction. Yet the kaleidoscope has changed ; 
 and the noise and forecast of coming success have died 
 into silence. And to-day the Liberation Society has 
 become a negligeable force in politics, and all questions 
 of reform or disestablishment of the national religion 
 relegated to purely academic discussion. Little more 
 than a generation back, again, the popular faith seemed 
 tottering upon the verge of ruin. The adherents of the 
 " New Reformation " were openly anticipating a renewal 
 of the large upheavals of the sixteenth century. The 
 astounding advance of the sciences, the examination by 
 the new critical methods of the ancient Biblical nar- 
 ratives, the spread of education and a more humane 
 culture would leave, it was held, the popular religion as 
 a mere survival of absurd and forgotten things. Yet 
 the days have gone, and the visible change has not 
 hastened. Protestantism stands entrenched and secure ; 
 its temples increasing in number and in splendour ; its 
 adherents, it would seem, confident in themselves and 
 in the triumph of their cause. It is the survivors of 
 the crusaders of these earlier days who now, in some 
 sadness, contemplate the walls they had set themselves 
 to destroy, still high and inviolate ; and who now 
 wonder why all the efforts of their forces and of Time 
 have thus forlornly failed. 
 
 So these questions have drifted out of the region of 
 living politics. The reformer who enters upon his 
 career with arguments concerning land reform or 
 religious equality is likely to be roughly Reminded 
 that some time has elapsed since the death of Disraeli, 
 or that he is not living in the days of the Prince 
 
 308 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 Consort. The word "Disestablishment" would produce, 
 in the mind of the present-day statesman, the same 
 bewildering effect as the word " delicacy " upon Matthew 
 Arnold's friend. For the first time, those committed 
 to the maintenance of the older order are prepared to 
 relax their efforts, as they assure themselves that at 
 length the danger is passed, and, for many generations, 
 the victory assured. 
 
 Yet, while the outward signs of struggle have thus 
 died away, hidden and unseen forces have been effecting 
 a more fatal destruction. To-day, indeed, the end is 
 far more clearly assured than in all the time of the 
 conflict. While the leaves were green and the sap 
 flowed freely in the branches, the tempest beat down 
 in vain. The tree stands now in the security of a 
 quiet air. But, if the vital forces are withdrawn, and 
 within the wood has turned to a little dust, all the 
 fair outward seeming may hold a delusive danger: a 
 breath of summer wind may ensure a ruin which could 
 not be accomplished before its time by all the storms 
 of winter. 
 
 And such appears, to some at least, to be the con- 
 dition to-day of ancient systems, whose stability at the 
 present receives scarcely a passing challenge. 
 
 The first, and perhaps the most far-reaching of these, 
 is the English Landed System : the feudal organisation, 
 with all its implications of leadership and obedience, as 
 embedded in the very heart of the old life of England. 
 Here is one place in which the thirty years of silence 
 have effected more momentous changes than all the 
 hubbub of the former time. Bents were high in the 
 early 'seventies, land increasingly valuable. The 
 landed interest had attained supremacy in Parliament 
 for the first time in a generation. The great uprising 
 
 309 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 of the agricultural labourer had been successfully over- 
 come ; and, with the breaking of the Union, the farmers 
 were rejoicing at the battening down of the hatches 
 upon the revolting slaves. The old tripartite division 
 of landlord, farmer, and landless labourer might have 
 appeared as something in the nature of a Providential 
 order, convenient to the genius and conditions of the 
 English race. 
 
 A statesman has well said, that if the great changes 
 which have fallen on the English landed interest during 
 the last few decades had been essayed by legislation and 
 human demands, instead of by blind and impersonal 
 forces, they could only have been accomplished through 
 revolution and civil war. An immense fall in prices 
 has resulted in a widespread destruction. Rents and 
 farmers' profits have alike diminished, in places below 
 any possible continuance of the old system. The per- 
 sistence of feudalism under these circumstances could 
 only have been affected by two stringent provisions : the 
 one, the closing of the ports of England to foreign food ; 
 the other, the barricading of the entrances of all the 
 cities to the agricultural labourer. With organisation 
 destroyed and all hope of improvement abandoned, the 
 labourer has quietly taken revenge on his masters. 
 With hatches battened down, the slave has crawled out 
 of the window. So that now an exodus of all the young 
 and able-bodied, all who possess energy and hope and 
 confidence in themselves, pours an ever-increasing flood 
 from the deserted fields into the streets of the towns. 
 Imagination has been struck by the dolorous case of 
 Ireland, a population, it would appear, vanishing from 
 its own land. Isolate rural England, and exactly the 
 same problem is revealed. It is the cities alone which 
 retain the influx, and keep the people of England, a 
 
 310 
 
m PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 landless people, still within the borders of their own 
 land. Wages rise steadily to attract the forlorn 
 remnant, land passes from arable to pasture, from 
 pasture to scanty sheep runs, or developes special 
 cultivations, dependent upon nomadic labour lured 
 outwards for a moment from the slums of the cities. 
 But still the famine of men deepens ; and from east to 
 west the cry goes up, that what is left is scarce worth 
 retaining, that the departm-e of the present generation 
 wiU witness the end of an age. 
 
 Here is the change at the silent basis, that assiduous 
 and docile stratum of serf labour upon which the whole 
 complex structure was reared. A change no less pro- 
 found has been effected, meanwhile, around the summit. 
 The structure is being replaced, piece by piece, by other 
 material ; until, at the end, without visible collapse, the 
 whole thing has become transformed. The old country 
 gentleman, the type of the lesser landed aristocracy of 
 England, is already becoming a thing of the past. On 
 the one hand has come the blow of the fall in land 
 values. On the other, an increasing comfort and 
 extravagance of society has stimulated a more rapid 
 squandering of fortune. He is vanishing from Parlia- 
 ment. His voice is no longer potent in the councils of 
 his party. His place is being taken by the men of the 
 new wealth — rich brewers, financiers, a Rutherfoord 
 Harris or a Harry Marks. He is vanishing also from 
 the land of his inheritance. One day his house and 
 lands are sold to one of the new rich, desirous of 
 establishing a position and founding a family ; and he 
 has passed from the horizon of those who regretfully, or 
 with bitter memories, are compelled to own allegiance 
 to another master. The larger estates, indeed, still 
 remain for the most part secure. The American 
 
 311 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 marriages, the gold-fields of South Africa, the harvest 
 of the increasing ground rents of the cities, have here 
 prevented the crumbling of the whole concern into 
 ruin. But although some kind of material prosperity 
 is thus secured, and round the great houses a race of 
 dependants can still be reared, and the occupations 
 of game-preserving or gardening or the repairing of 
 motors replace the direct cultivation of the soil, yet the 
 spirit of the old cannot be transformed to the exotic life 
 of the new. The country house, instead of being a 
 centre of local interest, is now an appendage of the 
 capital. A tiny piece of London is transferred in the 
 late summer and autumn to a more salubrious air and 
 the adjacency of the coverts. Eural England appears 
 as slowly passing into gardens and shooting grounds, 
 with intervening tracts of sparse grass-lands, committed 
 to the rearing of cattle and of pheasants, rather than of 
 men. Fifty years ago, one class of reformer could still, 
 without absurdity, find the solution of social discontent 
 in a revived feudalism. A Carlyle or a Kuskin would 
 passionately plead with the gentlemen of England to 
 take up the burden of government committed to a 
 landed aristocracy. What observer of the England of 
 to-day would have the hardihood to proclaim a similar 
 message ? Frenzied efforts of sectional influences 
 attempt to deal with the special hurt that grips them. 
 The farmer demands Protection and such impossible 
 follies. The landlord seeks grants-in-aid in relief of the 
 rates. The country clergyman laments the vanishing 
 of nearly half his income in a generation. The friends 
 of the labourer desire more and better cottages, or a 
 modified educational system, or the music-hall entertain- 
 ment, as alone able to keep him contented in his 
 position. They are one and all blind to the fact that 
 
 312 
 
m PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 they are confronting, not a series of special discontents, 
 but a whole dying order. Changes, which they can 
 neither comprehend nor control, are creating an Eng- 
 land alien from the England which they have ever 
 known. 
 
 The change could be accepted with tolerance, and 
 even with some humour, but for the fact that the ruins 
 and the playgrounds cumber the ground, and forbid the 
 creation of the new order. The new millionaires might 
 play at patronage, the model village be spread out for 
 the delight of the town visitor, the farms and fields 
 crumble into picturesque decay, were it not that the 
 elimination of any free and healthy country-bred life 
 means the loss of elements of stability and human well- 
 being vital to the future of the race. The land available 
 is limited : and the effort demanded for the creation 
 either of a scientific agriculture on a large scale, or of a 
 race of free yeomen or peasant farmers, finding economic 
 security in co-operation, supplementing the work of the 
 fields with home industries, is effectually damped by the 
 opposition, on the one hand, of those who know not that 
 their day is over, on the other of those entirely convinced 
 that their day has come. So that there is no active 
 effort to establish a system which everywhere abroad, 
 from Brittany to Bulgaria, is alone proving adequate to 
 the exigencies of the newer time. To the patriot the 
 spectacle is one of desolation. He knows the necessity 
 of a continual stream of vigorous life to replenish the 
 furnace of the cities. He recognises that that stream is 
 likely to vanish through the drainage of its sources of 
 supply. He is convinced also that the restoration of the 
 people to their land, in which at the present they move 
 as aliens, is one of the insistent needs of social advance. 
 He can examine in diverse districts of England, in 
 
 313 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 Dorset, and Hants, and Lincoln, and Worcester, solitary 
 experiments which have shown conspicuous success. 
 Yet he finds no interest in his schemes, no response to 
 his appeal. He is heating the thin air in vain. Ee- 
 formers like Mr. Eider Haggard are compelled to 
 confess that the whole subject is regarded as caviare 
 to the general, that the man who would determine to 
 thrust it forward runs the risk of being branded as 
 a bore. 
 
 Such of the land. What of the Church during the 
 same tranquil time? With the active onslaught upon 
 the Establishment dying away, there have here been 
 changes equally noteworthy, equally suggestive of some 
 future explosive action. Briefly, it may be said that 
 these changes have developed two deep-flowing and 
 diverse currents. While the clergy, as a whole, and 
 the more militant laity, have been drifting towards a 
 Catholic position, the great bulk of the laity, faithful 
 and unfaithful, have remained Protestant or indifferent. 
 This statement does not, indeed, imply an endorsement 
 of the follies of those who see a vast "Eomanising" 
 conspiracy amongst the bishops and clergy, or who 
 contemplate with wrathful impotence the announcement 
 of a dogma, or the elaboration of a ritual, which they 
 hold to be puerile, dangerous, or foreign. Extremists 
 must always accompany any large movement of spiritual 
 assertion, and always scandalise those who demand, first 
 of all, sobriety and adherence to the orthodox ways. It 
 is not a " Eomanising" but a "Catholic" revival, which 
 the student of religions will emphasise. The attempt is 
 deliberate to emphasise the Catholic elements in the 
 compromise of the sixteenth century, and all those par- 
 ticular conceptions of religious life which gather round 
 
 314 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 the real existence of a visible Church. On the one side, 
 now, are the Catholic assertions. The Chui'ch is seen 
 as a definite organism with a divinely constituted 
 ministry. The Sacraments appear as channels of a 
 supernatural life. Symbolism is welcomed as the ex- 
 pression of a deliberate ritual of worship. There is 
 insistence upon a disciplined life ; with the observance 
 of seasons and times ; the setting forth of an austerity, 
 a fervour of devotion, a humility, courses of self-examina- 
 tion, as the way towards the perfect life. On the other, 
 is the opinion of the vast bulk of present public opinion ; 
 to which the Church and its ministers are matters of 
 very human construction, of no particular authority or 
 veneration; and the Sacraments at most pleasant 
 memorial ceremonies ; and ritual is absurd ; and 
 times of abstinence or special devotion entirely re- 
 pugnant ; and the highest aim of religion the setting 
 forth of a sober and not too exaggerated piety, sweeten- 
 ing the struggle of the life of the day. Here is an 
 antinomy which no legislation can reconcile. The hope, 
 still stoutly maintained by a few forlorn fighters, that it 
 will be possible by special legislation, Church Discipline ' 
 Bills and the like, either to purge the Church of England 
 of all its Catholic elements, or to reduce these by threats 
 and persecutions to a decent Protestantism, shows a 
 pathetic ignorance of the actual possibilities of the 
 future. Could some such shattering decision be obtained 
 by law, or embodied in legislation, as that which has 
 recently stripped half its endowments firom the United 
 Free Church of Scotland, and the Catholic position be 
 declared untenable within the Establishment, without 
 any doubt at all those thus dispossessed would go forth 
 contentedly into the wilderness ; and the remnant would 
 find itself in a position somewhat parallel to the " Wee 
 
 315 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 Kirk," with large endowments and no ministers to enjoy 
 them. No one can study the position of the moTcment 
 which its opponents delight to call "the Cathohc re- 
 action," without being conscious of the existence of a 
 vigorous life. Its congregations are large and enthu- 
 siastic. Its churches, many recently built in slum or 
 suburb, are erected and maintained largely by present- 
 day contributions. Most of the vital force of religion, as 
 at present manifest in the Church of England, the effort 
 towards social regeneration, the militant combat against 
 unbelief, has enrolled under its banners. Few sights 
 are at once more ludicrous and more pathetic, than the 
 efforts of the faithful ladies and laymen to stem the tide. 
 The appeals in bulky correspondence jn the Times, the 
 description of enormities seen in some village church, 
 the money so freely expended upon "Protestant" 
 defence, the rich livings awaiting the skilled advocate 
 of the orthodox belief, all fail ; because lacking in that 
 one element of spiritual ardour and enthusiasm and con- 
 fidence in its cause, which neither indignation can 
 kindle nor money buy. 
 
 Beyond this fundamental and dangerous divergence, 
 time has brought other changes. The old position of 
 the Church as an accepted element of a social order, the 
 traditional attitude of the clergyman in the fabric of the 
 country life, is passing with that order's decline. The 
 clergy have lost heavily by the fall of the tithe and of 
 land values ; and their poverty now presents a separate 
 and importunate problem. The layman offers a steady 
 and successful resistance to any suggestion that he shall 
 take upon himself the burden of their support. The 
 supply of clergy actually decreases, despite the enormous 
 increase of population. Attendance at the Church's 
 worship seems likewise to exhibit a steady decline. 
 
 316 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 Thought has driven far beyond the boundaries of the 
 old formularies and historic creeds. To the men of the 
 twentieth century the assertions and warnings of the 
 medisBval age sound strangely remote and incongruous. 
 At the same time, the actual present relationship of 
 the Church to the legislature of the nation is becoming 
 more and more conspicuously impossible. It is tied 
 with the bonds of a vanished past, unable either to 
 reform itself or to obtain relief through legislation. In 
 each specific instance, a Parliament, composed of men 
 of all religions and of none, gravely or frivolously dis- 
 cusses the expediency of action, in debates which are at 
 once unedifying and ridiculous. Those who have de- 
 liberately repudiated any connection or membership are 
 the first to advocate the modifications of its theology or 
 the tuning of its pulpits. The deadlock has extended 
 even into the manipulations of its machinery. A tiny 
 Bill for the authorisation of two new Bishoprics, for 
 which the funds had been privately subscribed, was 
 lengthily discussed, bitterly opposed, and only earned, 
 after years of delay, by the definite determination of the 
 Government to push it through at any cost. Nor is it 
 possible to see how, without the fortunate accident of a 
 Prime Minister unusually concerned with the Church's 
 welfare, it would be possible for such a Bill to be ever 
 carried again. No future Ministry, it will be safe to 
 say, whether Protectionist or Eadical, will be much 
 concerned in occupying time or arousing resistance with 
 minor measures of Church organisation. Beyond is the 
 universal chaos of opinion amongst those who can at 
 once appeal to, and refuse to be bound by, formularies 
 stereotyped into uniformity three centuries ago. Each 
 particular reformer sets forth his gospel, and challenges 
 his opponents either themselves to fall back upon the 
 
 317 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 position from which he has diverged, or to bring his 
 orthodoxy to the test and judgment of the paralysed 
 secular arm. 
 
 The situation has become, in these latter years, 
 manifestly impossible. A movement has arisen within 
 the boundaries of the Church, and obtained allegiance 
 from all parties, towards the forwarding of an internal 
 reform. But, in its actual progress, the movement 
 seems drifting farther and farther away from an appre- 
 hension of the hard realities of the situation. The effort 
 has been directed, and rightly, towards the formation of 
 some kind of National Council, a union of reformed 
 Convocations, or some specially constituted Synod, to 
 which may be committed the maintenance of discipline 
 and adjustment of formularies, and ultimately the control 
 of material endowment. But the distrust of the various 
 parties of the Church, each for the other, is so profound, 
 that the preliminary difficulty has not yet been solved of 
 the constitution of such a Council, and the qualification 
 of the body which its members shall be authorised to 
 represent. The States-General once called together, it 
 is feared, movement must of necessity originate : — from 
 Council to National Assembly, from Assembly to Con- 
 vention, and an ecclesiastical Eeign of Terror. The 
 one party, therefore, more and more distrustful of the 
 religion of the average complacent citizen, has demanded 
 sometimes that the franchise shall be limited to those 
 confirmed, who have the right to communicate; more fre- 
 quently, perhaps, to those who actually communicate with 
 some assiduity. The faith which believes that the State 
 will ever again incorporate in statutory definition a body 
 whose qualifications shall be that each " shall, communi- 
 cate at the least three times in the year, of which Easter 
 to be one," is only surpassed in its naive simplicity by 
 
 318 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 the faith that, to a body so constituted, will be handed 
 over the goodwill and fabrics and endowments of the 
 National Church of England. On the other side are 
 those who desire for the suffrage merely the qualification 
 of a ratepayer, accompanied by a refusal to " contract 
 out," and deliberately to repudiate membership. Inheri- 
 tors, though unknowingly, of the traditions of Hooker 
 and of Arnold, these discern the Church as a reflection 
 in another aspect, a more humane and spiritual aspect, 
 of the activities of the State, the whole constituted 
 people. They are prepared, in conformity with such an 
 ideal, to carry through large modifications. They would 
 subdue the defiant doctrines to the requirements of 
 modern thought. They would modify the moral law of 
 the Church — such as the law concerning divorce and 
 marriage — into harmony with the slow moving changes 
 of the main stream of the national morality. They 
 would strive to include certainly all Christian, perhaps 
 all theistic or ethical, bodies in this national body. 
 They are impatient of subtle theological divisions which 
 separate sect from sect, and set them thundering each 
 against the other. They desire to work towards an 
 " undenominational " religion of a cheerful and not 
 too exacting character, which shall emphasise the 
 more distinctively British virtues, provide the emotional 
 satisfaction of a simple spiritual worship, conduct the 
 work of charity, and maintain missions and the standard 
 of morality and right reverence for the accepted order, 
 amongst the working classes and the poor. 
 
 The one party emphasises the adjective — " National" ; 
 the other the substantive—" Church." The obstacle to 
 the one change is the passive resistance of the laity ; 
 to the other, the active resistance of the clergy. Yet 
 it seems diflScult to see how movement can be long 
 
 319 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 delayed, and how movement can proceed upon any 
 except upon one of these two lines. Upon which of 
 these the choice ultimately falls, depends the character 
 of [that Church's future. The paths steadily diverge 
 from the present point of junction. If the first prove 
 triumphant, one can picture the Church of the future, a 
 separated hody in doctrine and discipline and, ultimately, 
 undoubtedly in moral standard ; becoming more and 
 more alien from the main stream of progressing opinion. 
 With some endowment assured, and a great stimulus of 
 ardour and enthusiasm amongst its members, it is safe 
 to prophesy conspicuous activity and devotion, a rising 
 standard of life and obligation. One can discern a body 
 raising always a banner in open defiance of the newer 
 changes in moral law, and gathering round it as a centre 
 all the re-actions from the hurried progress of things, 
 all picturesque rallies towards the worship of an older 
 time, all to whom the lethargy of the decent and the 
 ignobly decent, and the severe technical outlook of a 
 scientific world, are remote and hostile. Ultimately, 
 no doubt, though only perhaps after centuries and 
 through change, both on the one side or the other, 
 some kind of working union can be prophesied between 
 this isolated Church on the one hand and the Church 
 which at present centres in Kome on the other ; both 
 fighting a battle for preservation in the midst of a 
 civilisation entering upon that "positive" stage which 
 is the hall-mark of old age and coming death. Such 
 is the anticipation of that most courageous and in- 
 dividual of all social prophets, Mr. H. G. Wells ; who 
 sees in the "New Eepublio" the Catholic or Roman 
 Catholic the sole form of Christianity surviving, gather- 
 ing round it all the ardours and devotions which 
 still maintain a condition of revolt against the 
 320 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 furious energies and purposes of the new scientific 
 creed. 
 
 There is, however, an equally probable alternative. 
 "The nation looked at from the secular side is the 
 State," wrote Bishop Creighton, " looked at from the 
 religious side, it is the Church ; and separation between 
 the two is impossible." Development upon these other 
 lines would herald a process of adjustment of the 
 Church's formularies and discipline, through violent 
 and bitter change, to the common sense of the time. 
 One can foresee the vanishing of much that appears 
 outworn. Ancient prayers and articles would be thrown 
 over as out of date. Creeds would be modified towards 
 a studied vagueness. Petition would be adjusted 
 towards conceptions of a reign of law in nature, and a 
 time of security in society. Such changes might in- 
 volve cataclysms. But there is no cataclysm (even to 
 a clean sweep of the Bench of Bishops, or the driving 
 out of a half or a third of the clergy from their livings) 
 to which the Church's past history is unable to afford a 
 parallel. It is possible to picture a Church of the fature 
 after the work of "adjustment" had been completed. It 
 would be a Church in close touch with the stream of domi- 
 nant opinion, with a flexible adaptation to changing con- 
 ditions. It would still be playing a vital part in all 
 " national " celebrations, with a chaplain for the prayers 
 of Parliament and the pomp of Coronation for King or 
 President. One sees a progress towards a compre- 
 hensive vagueness, with a diffused philanthropy and 
 humanitarian sentiment, rather than any high spiritual 
 ardour. It would be much occupied in distribution of 
 alms, and communications from the nation of the 
 wealthy to the differentiated nation of the poor. 
 There would seem, under these conditions, no inherent 
 
 321 T 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 obstacle to the fulfilment of the genial visions of James 
 Mill : with a Church " without dogmas or ceremonies," 
 and the clergy employed to give lectures on ethics, 
 botany, political economy, and so forth, besides holding 
 Sunday meetings, with decent dances, specially invented, 
 and "social meals," with tea and coffee substituted for 
 bread and wine. Nor would moral adjustments fail to 
 follow the intellectual ; and the vision of " the sleeper " 
 in the popular novel, wakiag in the days to come, and 
 cheered by conversation with " one of the subsidiary 
 wives of the Bishop of London," might not prove 
 entirely a fantastic dream. 
 
 For if there is one thing manifest in the world of 
 thought to-day in England, it is the steady if silent 
 collapse of the foundations of the ancient national faith. 
 The intellectual position once changed, it is but a 
 matter of time for the actions and limitations to collapse 
 also. The new morality is abeady commencing to 
 regard as things trivial or tedious those survivals 
 which have lost intelligible meaning, and are merely 
 maintained by the inertia of the resistance of the 
 average man to disturbance. Many years ago 
 Matthew Arnold had excited a violent hatred by 
 the candour of his diagnosis. "Its organisations," 
 he asserted of the popular Protestantism, " strong and 
 active as they look, are touched with the finger of 
 death ; its fundamental ideas, sounding forth still every 
 week fi'om thousands of pulpits, have in them no 
 sympathy and no power for the progressive thought of 
 humanity." Ai-dent desire for its fulfilment doubtless 
 had ante-dated the prophecy. The leisured and wealthy 
 classes were to shed their conventional religion as a 
 garment at one end of the scale. At the other, the 
 
 322 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 great mass of the "populace" were to develop into 
 aggi-essive and self-conscious life, without even having 
 entered the universe of religious experience. But, 
 between these, the successful and expanding middle 
 classes were for many decades to dominate the national 
 life and policy, and impart to that life their peculiar 
 flavour and tone, and establish their definite type of 
 Puritan civilisation; so that one extremity of society 
 would grow ashamed of violation of its moral mandates, 
 the other afraid. That great tradition of austerity and 
 reticence which, alarmed at the demand for fuller 
 existence and the large curiosity of the Elizabethan 
 Age, had " entered the prison of Puritanism and had 
 th& key turned upon its spirit for two hundred years," 
 emerged at last with the vigour of the stored-up 
 energies of generations of clean living. It found its 
 qualities triumphant in a commercial age. Never did 
 the prospects of Protestantism look fairer than in the 
 age in which Arnold was announcing its dissolution. 
 It had torn its way into the Universities and public 
 services, from which it had been excluded. It had 
 re-entered, it had in a sense absorbed, the main current 
 of the national life. It had woven into the very fabric 
 of the national system of Education a religious teaching 
 entirely acceptable to its desires. 
 
 But, in essentials, we can now see that Arnold was 
 right. In the triumph lay the seeds of decay. The 
 coming out into the open day had meant of necessity 
 the exposure to the disintegrating forces of the rain and 
 sun. The old religion, with its affirmations and denials, 
 of Protestant and of Puritan England — the civilisation 
 definitely dependent upon that particular outlook on the 
 world— is to-day visibly dissolving. Within a generation 
 its dominant doctrines have been quietly cast aside. 
 
 323 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 Predestination and Calvinism, in their unflinching 
 forms, have practically gone. Even in Scotland, with 
 its relentless logic, the true home of its birth, they are 
 repudiated by the main stream of the Presbyterian 
 tradition. In England they seek refuge in the remoter 
 Christian sects. And the new Calvinism of the natural 
 sciences, with its blind forces and destinies, more in- 
 exorable and terrible even than the ancient conception 
 of an inflexible directing Will, has not yet entered into 
 the schemes of any of the popular religions. Gone, 
 also, is that doctrine of Everlasting Punishment in a 
 lake of material fire, to which are immediately com- 
 mitted at the moment of death all those who have not 
 accepted the scheme of salvation. A few years ago, 
 the most typical figure of English Protestantism, Mr. 
 Charles Spurgeon, could thus picture to his terrified 
 audience the " Kesurrection of the Dead" : — 
 
 " When thou diest thy soul vnll be tormented alone : 
 that will be a hell for it ; but at the day of judgment 
 thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt have 
 twin-hells, thy soul sweating drops of blood and thy 
 body suffused with agony. In fijre exactly like that 
 which we have on earth, thy body will lie asbestos-like, 
 for ever unconsumed, all thy veins roads for the feet of 
 pain to travel on, every nerve-string on which the devil 
 shall for ever play his diabolical tune of hell's unutterable 
 lament." 
 
 From what representative Nonconformist pulpit could 
 a similar stateme'nt be put forth to-day ? The change 
 has come, and v/ith a rush, within a lifetime. 
 
 And going or gone, also, before the labours of a per- 
 sistent critical method, is that belief in a literal and 
 verbal inspiration of the books of the Hebrew Scriptures, 
 which invested with the glamour of a Divine origin 
 
 324 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 every tangled genealogy ; and accepted esoteric meaning 
 for every unedifying incident ; and discerned the Mosaic 
 code as originating in the writings of the finger of God 
 upon tables of stone, amid the thunders and lightnings 
 of Mount Sinai. 
 
 With these recognised changes within the fold have 
 gone larger changes amongst those outside, who never 
 accepted with whole-hearted conviction the afSrmations 
 of the faithful. To these the abandonment of Calvinism 
 has meant the practical repudiation of any directing will 
 in human affairs. The repudiation of the fear of Hell 
 has meant the fading of any conception of retribution 
 for the sins done in the flesh — the future apprehended 
 as an unending sleep, or the asphodel and lilies of a 
 good-tempered God. And the work of criticism has 
 meant the destruction of all authority in the Hebraic 
 or Christian scheme of life, a rejection of all evidence 
 of a special Divine revelation. The conception of sin 
 has changed from that of "a monster to be mused 
 on" into "an impotence to be got rid of"; and 
 effort towards the increase of enjoyment, personal or 
 general, is set forth as the foundation of the new ethical 
 code. 
 
 These changes are being assisted by the natural 
 development inherent in an age of security and 
 triumphant material success. The menace of social 
 upheavals, ruin, and the breaking up of laws, sounds 
 faint and far away. In the life of the cities the 
 forces which make for disturbance — the larger dis- 
 quietudes, Nature and the wind that blows from the 
 hills, the insistent presence of the Dead — are being 
 effectively banished. To-day the older austerity is 
 deliquescing into an increasing, if still half-timid, 
 
 325 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 determination to throw off the ancient restraints. The 
 insistence on the English Sunday of silence and 
 spiritual exercises ; the whole-hearted condemnation of 
 the theatre, dancing, card-playing, all literature and art 
 unsteeped in reticence ; the hatred of the public-house, 
 of betting and gambling ; the branding of the supreme 
 viciousness of any violation of the monogamic order of 
 society, or an union unblest by Church and State — all 
 this belongs to a vanishing England. The march of 
 change is not everywhere evident. There are occasional 
 rallies, and fortresses which still present an unyielding 
 front to a change branded as a National Apostasy. But 
 each year and each day exhibit some subtle advance, as 
 one man after another realises that the sanction has 
 vanished for some particular restraint, and that nothing 
 is keeping him from pursuing the desirable course but 
 the forces of custom and routine. 
 
 This is not to say, indeed, that the whole fabric of 
 the Protestant religion is immediately collapsing in 
 England ; or that the great Nonconformist bodies, in 
 which that Protestantism is most conspicuously vocal, 
 are about to wither into nothingness. It is to say, on 
 the one hand, that an increasing population is developing, 
 to whom the doctrines of Protestantism are unbelievable, 
 and the practical worship that is dependent upon these 
 doctrines repugnant ; on the other, that, within those 
 bodies themselves, there is fermenting a large process of 
 change. There will be " Independents " and " Bap- 
 tists" and "Methodists" at the close of the century. 
 But the Methodism will not be that of Mr. Hugh Price 
 Hughes, nor the Independence that of Dr. Binney, nor 
 the Baptist's faith that of Mr. Charles Spurgeon. Itwould 
 be foolish to assert that all is loss or all is gain in this 
 
 326 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 momentous change. There is, indeed, a liheration from 
 restraint, an advance towards freedom, combined with a 
 wider culture and curiosity, and a general mellowing 
 and humanising of individual life. But there is a loss 
 also in the dying away of a contempt for pleasure, and 
 a consciousness of purpose in the world, and of the 
 infinite difference between good and evil, and the in- 
 finite value of the human soul. Mr. Burden, in Mr. 
 Belloc's story, the sturdy ironmonger of Upper Norwood, 
 has been the butt of all the sharp wits and satires of the 
 age. He is at least a more reputable figure than his 
 son, Cosmo, with his weak thirst for ineffectual plea- 
 sure, or Mr. Barnett and Lord Benthorpe and Mr. 
 Harbury, with their cant of an expanding Empire and 
 Imperial destinies, and their inner cheerlessness and 
 greed. 
 
 Such are some of the things now in England in peril 
 of change — the Landed System, the Established Church, 
 the Popular Religion. There is opportunity for a states- 
 man who would rightly apprehend the situation, and 
 definitely interpret to the nation the danger of the 
 collapse of ruins. Yet, confronting present affairs and 
 the temper of the people, one can but emphasise some- 
 thing of the almost forlorn heroism of the enterprise. 
 The land implicates a thousand vested interests, crying 
 if assailed. The falling feudalism is backed by the 
 wealth of the newer commerce. The increasing cities 
 care nothing for the ruin of rural England. In the 
 country, every day weakens the forces essential to 
 reform. Twenty or fifteen years ago, those vanishing 
 villages could still be kindled by some intelligible hope. 
 The " Land for the People " was a popular watchword, 
 influential, at least, at successive elections. To-day 
 
 327 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 another generation has fled the fields ; and written all 
 over the crumbling buildings and passionless people, is 
 the apathy which is content to wait for the end. From 
 what unimaginable crevasses of the city labyrinths — so 
 runs the obvious challenge — from what secluded hamlets 
 removed from all the past destruction, are you going to 
 lure forth the companies of stout peasants and yeomen 
 with energies adequate to the England of your dreams ? 
 Compared to this, the work in Ireland was child's play ; 
 yet in Ireland the transformation was effected only after 
 one of the fiercest fights in all history, an incredible 
 suffering, an incredible devotion of a whole nation pro- 
 longed through twenty years. What species of " Land 
 League" or united "Nationalist" party, fighting for 
 Agrarian Reform, is probable or possible in the England 
 of to-day ? 
 
 Nor is the question of the Establishment any more 
 hopeful. Here is an organisation to be torn up, whose 
 roots reach deep down into the basis of society. A 
 thousand hazardous questions immediately arise. What 
 of the future, of endowments, of fabrics, the care or 
 ownership of cathedrals and village churches ? From 
 what material, with what qualification, are you to 
 construct the living Church that is to remain after all 
 your efforts ? What again of the great Dissenting 
 bodies, and their claim to represent at least a vigorous 
 portion of the religious life of the nation ? What of 
 adjustment of formulas and obligations, of marriage 
 laws. Thirty-nine Articles, or the Apostles' or Athanasian 
 Creed ? Here is a task, compared to which the mere 
 denouncing of the Concordat in France appears but a 
 little thing; a task, indeed, which might appear only 
 possible in the white hot fires of revolution. 
 
 Yet in all these, as was said at another time in peril 
 328 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 of change — standing still is the one thing more im- 
 possible than going forward. 
 
 Ingenious efforts are often attempted to disentangle 
 historical parallels to the present in the past, and from 
 these to emphasise confidence or disquietude concerning 
 the future. Writers have recounted the story of these latter 
 days in England in the language of Gibbon concerning 
 the dying Koman Empire. Here, also, can be found agri- 
 culture declining at home, and all the people crowding 
 into the capital ; fed from the corn ships of Alexandria 
 or Argentina. Here, too, is the decay in the ancient 
 austerities and pieties ; the sudden and intoxicating 
 consciousness of a supreme greatness, of an Imperialism 
 exacting tribute from the four corners of the earth ; and 
 the breeding of a parasitic race of little street-bred 
 people, demanding before all things food and pleasure : — 
 free meals and professional games and vicarious " little 
 wars." The menace is not lacking also, as in the 
 famous forebodings of the Eoman historian, in the rise 
 of shadowy and inscrutable nations, the barbarians in 
 the cold North. In the East are the yellow races 
 awakening from slumber. In the West is the newest- 
 born child of all the hardiest of the peoples. Each may 
 be able, not only through the old methods of actual 
 invasion, but in the new methods of trade competition, 
 to strike a fatal blow at the heart of Empire. 
 
 Others have found a similarity between the com- 
 mencement of the sixteenth and the commencement of 
 the twentieth centuries in England. In the former 
 as in the later day a Church, heavily weighted with 
 the burden of the things of a dead past, is 
 struggling towards internal reform. A new learning has 
 suddenly rolled back the dim horizons and boundaries of 
 
 329 
 
IN PERIL OF CHANGE 
 
 thought, and opened limitless vistas. And in those 
 days also, a moment's breathing space was given before 
 the changes in the world of thought became translated 
 into the world of action, and the new knowledge crashed 
 into the chaos of the Eeformation. 
 
 Others, again, have found much that the observer 
 would do well to study in comparing the England of 
 to-day with the France of the years immediately pre- 
 ceding the Revolution. An increasing burden of national 
 expenditure, and the development of an absentee land- 
 lordism, there hastened the coming of change. A kind 
 of general atrophy of governing power amongst the 
 governing classes had ensured the failure of the forces 
 of resistance. An improvement of economic condition 
 in a momentary "Age of Gold " had brought hope to 
 those dim and submerged classes among which hope 
 rarely comes. And, indeed, one can realise that if only 
 hope — hope, that most dangerous of all revolutionary 
 forces — were once to penetrate among the poor of the 
 cities of England, some explosion of elemental forces might 
 boil up beneath the thin layer of the ordered society of 
 to-day, and again amid the furnace flame reveal the 
 " heights and depths which are still in man." 
 
 A deeper examination in each case will show the im- 
 possibility of thus interpreting the future from the 
 lessons of the past. Never before has met together that 
 particular combination of forces which in any particular 
 age, in their contact and interaction, are creating a new 
 world. The new world of the future we confront with as 
 little knowledge of its possibilities as was possessed by 
 any prophet of the past. In the time immediately 
 before centuries of quiet men foretold the beginnings 
 of a universal desolation, the coming of the twilight 
 
 330 
 
IN PERU. OF CHANGE 
 
 of the gods. On the verge of vast and shattering 
 cataclysms men proclaimed that never was the sky 
 more serene, the continuance of security more sure. 
 
 Examination of the actual present can hut emphasise 
 evidence of equilibrium disturbed. The study of the 
 past can but guarantee that through rough courses or 
 smooth, heedless of violence and pain, in methods 
 unexpected and often through hazardous ways, equi- 
 librium will be attained. 
 
 331 
 
The substance of much of this book has appeared in 
 the " Contemporary Review," the "Independent Review," 
 the "Commonwealth," the "Speaker," the "Pilot," 
 and the "Daily News." I am indebted to the courtesy 
 of the editors for permission to make use of it in this 
 volume. 
 
 UirWIN ER0THEB9, LIMITES, THE QKESHAM PKBSa, ■WOKfSO AKD LONDON.