A New Medley of Memories Part 3

I paid a visit to Eton this summer, on the occasion of the laying of the foundation of the South African war memorial by Princess Alexander of Teck (her husband and brother were both Etonians), who looked charming all in ivory white, with a long plume of Eton blue in her hat.

The school O.T.C. formed the guard of honour, the only _contretemps_ being that several of the youthful warriors were overcome by the heat, dropping down in the ranks one after another, like so many ninepins.

The new building was to occupy the site of "m' tutors" ("the tallest house in college," he had said to me on my first arrival, "as I am the tallest master!"), and I walked {51} through the hideous building for the last time--_memor temporis acti_--before going on to the head master's party in his charming garden sloping down to the river--a farewell function, as Dr. Warre was resigning the head mastership to Edward Lyttelton this half, and several masters were leaving with him.

I went to London from Eton to attend Hyde's marriage to Miss Somers c.o.c.ks, and (though the season was over) met many friends afterwards at Lady Dudley's house in Carlton-gardens, where the wedding guests foregathered.

A visit to Arundel a little later was signalized by great festivities in honour of the birth of the Duke's little daughter. The four thousand guests who, as the fancy took them, danced in the tilting-yard (converted into a great open-air ballroom), listened to martial music from military bands, roamed through the beautiful state-rooms, or gazed admiringly at the myriad fairy lamps which glowed many-coloured on castle walls, battlements, and towers, were literally of every cla.s.s.

Peers and peeresses, officers and deans and doctors, and Suss.e.x county magnates, mingled freely with the farmers, artisans, and workmen who were their fellow-guests. The fete wound up with a grand display of fireworks in the park, and the host and hostess (the latter looking very nice in her white summer frock, with flowing crimson sash and a string of great pearls round her neck), made every one happy with their affability and kindness.

On my way north I stayed a few days with the Gainsboroughs at Exton, near Oakham--my first visit to the little shire of Rutland. A most attractive place, I thought: a charming modern Jacobean {52} house (the ruins of the Elizabethan hall, burnt down a century before, stood close by): beautiful gardens and a n.o.bly-timbered park, in which stands the fine old parish church with its singularly graceful spire. Tennis, _al fresco_ teas, and much music, occupied a few days very agreeably; and I then went on to St. Andrews for my usual autumn sojourn, which I always enjoyed. But my most memorable Scottish visit this autumn was to Abbotsford, which, curiously enough, I had never yet seen, though I had known its owners for thirty years. My grandfather and Sir Walter Scott had been friends for many years: they were planning and building at the same time their respective homes in the western and eastern Lowlands, and often exchanged visits and letters. Here is a little note (undated) in which Sir Walter acknowledged, with an apt Shakespearian reference, a gift of game from Blairquhan:--

My Dear Sir David,--

I thank you much for your kind present. The pheasants arrived in excellent condition, and showing, like Shakespeare's Yeomen, "the mettle of their pasture."[13]

When are you and Lady Blair going to take another run down Tweed?

Your obliged humble servant, WALTER SCOTT.

My father had stayed at Abbotsford as a little boy, before he entered the Navy, and two or three years before Sir Walter's death in 1832. He had not the customary reminiscence of having sat on {53} the great man's knee;[14] but he remembered a beautiful collie which lay outside the study door, and refused to let any one enter in his master's absence. We were all brought up on Scott--his _Tales of a Grandfather_, his novels and poems. My father seemed to know the latter all by heart: he would reel them off (with fine elocution, too) by the hour, and we children loved the stirring music of the Border songs, the _Lady of the Lake_ and the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, which only in our later and more sophisticated days suggested the answer to a flippant conundrum.[15]

To me, of course, Abbotsford had, and has, a special and peculiar charm, as having been for more than sixty years one of the "Catholic Homes of Scotland."[16] The "incongruous pile" sneered at by Ruskin, the bizarre architecture which, I suppose, made Dean Stanley describe it as a place to be visited once and never again, are open to criticism and easily criticized. I prefer the judgment of Andrew Lang, that "it is hallowed ground, and one may not judge it by common standards." To {54} Catholics it is doubly hallowed--as a Catholic centre in the sweet Border-land which Scott knew and loved so well, and as the "darling seat" of one who by the magic of his writings made the Catholic past of Scotland live again, and the last words on whose dying lips were lines from two of the n.o.blest and most sacred hymns in the Catholic liturgy.[17]

The Dowager Lady Bute was the occupant of Abbotsford during my visit there, and had hoped to make it her home for some time; but her stay was cut short by a serious motor accident, in which she and her daughter sustained rather severe injuries. I was at the time at Dumfries House, where Bute and his bride were happily settled for the autumn; and there was of course great concern at the Abbotsford disaster, which fortunately turned out less grave than was at first feared. I was interested in the recent additions to Dumfries House, including a fine Byzantine chapel, a saloon lit from the roof for the Stair tapestries,[18] and a new library-billiard-room, all so cleverly tucked in by the architect behind the existing wings, that the beautiful Adam front remains as it was. Lady Bute, smartly frocked, and twinkling with diamonds, sapphires, and ropes of pearls, was quite "Lothair's bride." On Sunday we had the regulation walk to the lovely old garden, stables, farm, and poultry-yard. A great {55} "wale" of c.o.c.ks and hens,[19] among which our hostess dropped one of her priceless earrings, and we had a long hunt for it. Reading my Glasgow paper in the train next day, on my way south, I came on a paragraph announcing the "reception into the Roman Church" of the Professor of Greek (J. S. Phillimore) at Glasgow University--a Christ Church man, and a scholar of the highest distinction. What (I thought) will the "unco guid" of Glasgow say now?[20]

[1] Sir William Harcourt's son, commonly known as "Lulu" (now Viscount Harcourt), had lately inherited Nuneham on the death of his father.

[2] It ran as follows: "In an age when faith is tinged with philosophic doubt, when love is regarded but as a spasm of the nervous system, and life itself as but the refrain of a music-hall song, I believe that it is still the function of art to give us light rather than darkness.

Its teaching should not be to prove that we are descended from monkeys, but rather to remind us of our affinity with the angels. Its mission is not to lead us through the fogs of doubt into the bogs of despair, but to point us to the greater light beyond."

[3] On what principle, I could not help asking myself, are Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits (all engaged in active work, and therefore _ex hypothesi_ dangerous), freely tolerated in Rome, and Carthusians (whose only occupation is prayer) expelled from Naples?

[4] On a previous occasion our Catholic Society had voted on the same motion in precisely the contrary sense. But the opinions of the "Newman," as of all university debating societies (not excluding the Union), were quite fluid and indeterminate on almost every subject.

[5] Sir Charles Lyell, I am inclined to believe. But I cannot "place"

the quotation.

[6] Curious; because the Authorized translation (presumably used at Keble) ignores the _medici_ altogether, its version being "Shall the dead arise and praise Thee?" There is, I fancy, some authority for my friend's interpretation; still, the context seems to show clearly that _suscitabunt_ means "rise from the dead," and that what the words convey is that dead doctors, like other dead men, are done with praising G.o.d anyhow in this world.

[7] A monk of the abbey of Maredsous, in Belgium, but by birth a Norman, a native of Caen. He was somewhat of the destructive school of patristic critics, and I once heard it said that Dom Germain would not die happy until he had proved to his own satisfaction that all the supposed writings of St. Augustine were spurious!

[8] Radley House, his birthplace, had been sold to the college some years before by Sir George Bowyer, the eminent Catholic jurist and writer, who had preceded Manning into the Church in 1850, and who built the beautiful church annexed to the Catholic Hospital in Great Ormond Street (removed later to St. John's Wood). I well remember in my early Catholic days (I think about 1876) the excitement caused by the expulsion of Sir George--whose strongly-expressed views on the Roman question and other matters were highly distasteful to British Liberals--from the Reform Club.

[9] I think I heard afterwards that the sailors got him off his pony once or twice; but the reward was not earned, and he lived to become First Lord of the Admiralty just three years later!

[10] Only visible in the clearest weather. From a point farther south (the Mull of Galloway) could be descried also, across the Solway Firth, the c.u.mberland hills; and my grandfather, standing there, used to say that he could see five kingdoms--the kingdom of Scotland, the kingdom of Ireland, the kingdom of England, the kingdom of Man, and the kingdom of Heaven!

[11] I had inherited Dunskey nearly fifty years before, on my grandfather's death (1857). The place was bought in 1900 by Charles Orr Ewing, M.P., who married my niece, the Glasgows' eldest daughter.

[12] A theory which, reduced to practice, had its disadvantages. I remember Lord Rosebery writing to the papers complaining that the lunatics of Epsom, finding no difficulty, under the new and improved system, in escaping from duress, used occasionally to saunter from the local asylum into his grounds, and, I think, even his house, near by.

[13] The reference, of course, is to _King Henry V._, Act iii., Sc. 2:

"And you, good yeomen, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture."

[14] My dear old cousin Felicia Skene, whose father had been one of Scott's closest friends, told me that this had been her privilege. So also did the late George Boyle, sometime Dean of Salisbury, who, however, in his autobiography, speaks merely of having once seen Sir Walter (looking very old and ill) when he came to call on his (the Dean's) father.

[15] "If you happened to find an egg on a music-stool, what poem would it remind you of?"

[16] James Hope Scott, the eminent parliamentary lawyer, friend of Newman, Manning and Gladstone, and husband of Sir Walter's granddaughter and eventual heiress, made his submission to Rome in 1851. His daughter Mary Monica (afterwards Hon. Mrs. Joseph Maxwell Scott), inherited Abbotsford at his death; and it is now owned by her son, General Walter Maxwell Scott.

[17] The _Dies Irae_ and the _Stabat Mater_. See Lockhart, _Life of Walter Scott_ (2nd Ed.), vol. x., p. 215.

[18] From the looms of Gobelin: presented by Louis XIV. to an Earl of Stair, British Amba.s.sador in Paris. They had come into the Dumfries (Bute) family through the marriage of a son of the first Earl of Stair to Penelope, Countess of Dumfries in her own right. It was a standing grievance of our old friend the tenth Earl of Stair that these tapestries were not at Lochinch.

[19] "Wale"=choice, or selection. A Fife laird, driving home across Magus Moor after dining not wisely but too well, fell out of his gig, and his wig fell off, but was recovered by his servant. "It's no' ma wig, Davie, it's no' ma wig," he moaned as he lay in the mire, thrusting the peruke away. "You'd best take it, sir," said the serving-man dryly; "_there's nae wale o' wigs on Magus Moor_."

[20] They said much that was nasty, but they could not oust the professor (though they tried their best) from his professorship. _Au contraire_, he received promotion soon afterwards, being elected to the Chair of Humanity; and a protest organized by certain bigots was allowed to "lie on the table"--i.e., went into the waste-paper basket.

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CHAPTER IV

1905-1906

An event of Benedictine interest in the autumn of 1905, and one which attracted many visitors to Downside, our beautiful abbey among the Mendip Hills, was the long-antic.i.p.ated opening of the choir of the great church. Special trains, an overflowing guest-house, elaborate services, many congratulatory speeches, and much monastic hospitality, were, as customary on such occasions, the order of the day.

Architecturally, I confess that I found the new choir disappointing: it but confirmed the impression (which after many years had become a conviction with me) that the art of building a real Gothic church on a grand scale is lost, gone beyond hope of recovery. _Ecce signum!_ Design, material, workmanship all admirable, and the result, alas!

lifeless, as lifeless as (say) the modern cathedrals of Truro and Liverpool and Edinburgh, the nave of Bristol, and the great church of Our Lady at Cambridge. I have seen Downside compared with Lichfield: nay, some one (greatly daring) placed pictures of them side by side in some magazine. Vain comparison! Lichfield, built long centuries ago, is _alive_ still--instinct with the life breathed into it by its unknown creators in the ages of faith; but these great modern Gothic churches seem to me {57} to have never lived at all, to have come into existence still-born. No: Gothic architecture, in this century of ours, is dead. Such life as it has is a simulated, imitative, galvanized life, which is no more real life than the tunes ground out of a pianola or a gramophone are real living music.[1] "'Tis true, 'tis pity: pity 'tis, 'tis true."

Another engagement which I had in the west about this time was to preach at the opening of the new Benedictine church at Merthyr Tydvil.

Bishop Hedley and I travelled thither together from Cardiff, through a country which G.o.d made extremely pretty, with its deep glens and hills covered with {58} bracken and heather, but which man, in search of coal, has blackened and defaced to an incredible extent: the whole district, of course, a hive of industry. Lying in bed at night, I saw through my blindless window the flames belching from a score of furnace-chimneys down the valley, and thought what it must be to spend one's life in such surroundings. A curious change to find oneself next day in the verdant environment of Cardiff Castle, where, once within the gates, one might be miles away from coalpits and from the great industrial city close by. My room was the _quondam_ nursery, of which the walls had been charmingly decorated by the fanciful genius of William Burges (the restorer of the castle), with scenes from children's fairy stories--Jack the Giant-killer and Cinderella and Red Riding-hood and the rest, tripping round in delightful procession. The Welsh metropolis was _en fete_ on the day of my arrival, in honour of the town having become a city, and its mayor a lord-mayor; and Lord Bute was giving a big luncheon to civic and other magnates in the beautiful banqueting hall, adorned with historic frescoes and rich stained gla.s.s. The family was smiling gently, during my visit, at the news published "from a reliable source," that my young host was to be the new Viceroy of Ireland. Another report, equally "reliable" (odious word!) published, a little later, his portrait and not very eventful biography, as that of the just-appointed Under-Foreign Secretary. Why not Lord Chancellor or Commander-in-chief at once? one was as likely as the other.

The reference to the commander-in-chief reminds me that the Oxford Union was honoured this {59} (October) term by a visit from Lord Roberts, who gave us a very informing lecture, ill.u.s.trated with many maps, on the N.W. frontier of India and was received by a crowded house with positive shouts of welcome.[2] Almost equally well received, a week later, was Lord Hugh Cecil, who had held no office in the Union in his undergraduate days, but had often since taken part in its debates.

His theme on this occasion was the interminable fiscal question; and the curiously poignant and personal note in his oratory appealed, as it always did, to his youthful hearers, who supported him with their votes as well as their applause.

A little later there was a great audience in the Town Hall, to hear Joe Chamberlain inveigh against the new Government,[3] and preach _his_ fiscal gospel. He was in excellent form, and looked nothing like seventy, though his long speech--his last, I think, before his great break-down--certainly aged him visibly. A little incident at the opening showed his undiminished apt.i.tude for ready repartee. He announced his intention of treating Tariff Reform from the Imperial standpoint, adding, "I am not going to deal with the subject from the economic side"; and then, as a derisive "Yah!" broke from some disgruntled Liberals at the back of the hall, going on without a moment's hesitation--"not, however, for the reason which I see suggests itself to some of the _acuter_ minds among my audience!"

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S---- H----, whom I found waiting to see me when I got home from the Town Hall, told me that after two years in the Catholic Church he was thinking of returning to the flesh-pots of Anglicanism, and said (among other foolish things) that he had "a Renaissance mind!" I ventured to remind him that he had also an immortal soul. How to increase his income seemed his chief preoccupation; and he did not "see his way"

(that fatal phrase again!) to do this as a "practising" Catholic.

Wilfrid Ward, the Editor of the _Dublin Review_, had recently started a "dining-and-debating-club" in London with a rather interesting membership; and I went up in November to read a paper on "Catholics at the National Universities." I was less "heckled" than I expected; but there was some "good talk" (as old Johnson would have said), and I enjoyed the evening. Less enjoyable was another evening spent with our Architectural Society at Oxford, to hear a lecture by Wells (fellow and future Warden) of Wadham, on "Tudor Oxford" an interesting topic, and treated by a man who knew his subject, but disfigured by strongly Protestant interpolations about monks, Jesuits, and "b.l.o.o.d.y Mary," much out of place in an address to a quite "undenominational" society. It recalled another paper read to us on the inoffensive subject of "Bells." The reader on that occasion adroitly founded on the text of the inscriptions on church bells a violent diatribe against the invocation of saints and other "mediaeval corruptions," to the intense annoyance of my little friend the Master of Pembroke (himself an Anglican bishop), who sat next me, and whom I with difficulty restrained until {61} the end of the lecture from rising to protest, as he ultimately did with some warmth, against "turning an archaeological address into a polemical sermon."