Prime Ministers and Some Others Part 9

"the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world";

to make its dark places light, its rough places plain, its hard things easy, even its saddest things endurable. His Gospel was this: G.o.d, Who made us in His own Image, loves us like a Father; and therefore, in life and in death, in time and in eternity, all is, and must be, well.

3. "He prayeth best, who lovest best All things both great and small.

For the dear G.o.d Who loveth us, He made and loveth all."

Those familiar words of Coleridge perfectly express Wilberforce's att.i.tude towards his fellow-creatures, and when I say "fellow-creatures,"

I am not thinking only of his brothers and sisters in the human family.

He was filled with a G.o.d-like love of all that G.o.d has made. Hatred and wrath and severity were not "dreamt of" in his "philosophy."

Towards the most degraded and abandoned of the race he felt as tenderly as St. Francis felt towards the leper on the roadside at a.s.sisi, when he kissed the scarred hand, and then found that, all unwittingly, he had ministered to the Lord, disguised in that loathsome form. This was the motive which impelled Wilberforce to devote himself, uncalculatingly and unhesitatingly, to the reclamation of lives that had been devastated by drunkenness, and which stimulated his zeal for all social and moral reforms.

But his love extended far beyond the bounds of the human family; and (in this again resembling St. Francis) he loved the birds and beasts which G.o.d has provided as our companions in this life, and perhaps--for aught we know--in the next. In a word, he loved all G.o.d's creatures for G.o.d's sake.

4. No one had a keener sense of the workings of the Holy Spirit in regions beyond the precincts of all organized religion; and yet, in his own personal heart and life, Wilberforce belonged essentially to the Church of England. It is difficult to imagine him happy and content in any communion except our own. Nowhere else could he have found that unbroken chain which links us to Catholic antiquity and guarantees the validity of our sacraments, combined with that freedom of religious speculation and that elasticity of devotional forms which were to him as necessary as vital air.

Various elements of his teaching, various aspects of his practice will occur to different minds; but (just because it is sometimes overlooked) I feel bound to remind you of his testimony to the blessings which he had received through Confession, and to the glory of the Holy Eucharist, as the Sun and Centre of Catholic worship. His conviction of the reality and nearness of the spiritual world gave him a singular ease and "access" in intercessory prayer, and his love of humanity responded to that ideal of public worship which is set forth in _John Inglesant:_ "The English Church, as established by the law of England, offers the Supernatural to all who choose to come. It is like the Divine Being Himself, Whose sun shines alike on the evil and on the good."

5. In what theology did Wilberforce, whose adult life had been one long search for truth, finally repose? a.s.suredly he never lost his hold on the central facts of the Christian revelation as they are stated in the creed of Nicaea and Constantinople. Yet, as years went on, he came to regard them less and less in their objective aspect; more and more as they correspond to the work of the Spirit in the heart and conscience. Towards the end, all theology seemed to be for him comprehended in the one doctrine of the Divine Immanence, and to find its natural expression in that significant phrase of St. Paul: "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

Spiritually-minded men do not, as a rule, talk much of their spiritual experiences; but, if one had asked Wilberforce to say what he regarded as the most decisive moment of his religious life, I can well believe that he would have replied, "The moment when 'it pleased G.o.d to reveal His Son _in_ me.'"

The subject expands before us, as is always the case when we meditate on the character and spirit of those whom we have lost; and I must hasten to a close.

I have already quoted from a writer with whom I think Wilberforce would have felt a close affinity, though, as a matter of fact, I never heard him mention that writer's name; I mean J. H. Shorthouse; and I return to the same book--the stimulating story of _John Inglesant_--for my concluding words, which seem to express, with accidental fidelity, the principle of Wilberforce's spiritual being: "We are like children, or men in a tennis-court, and before our conquest is half-won, the dim twilight comes and stops the game; nevertheless, let us keep our places, and above all hold fast by the law of life we feel within. This was the method which Christ followed, and He won the world by placing Himself in harmony with that law of gradual development which the Divine wisdom has planned.

Let us follow in His steps, and we shall attain to the ideal life; and, without waiting for our mortal pa.s.sage, tread the free and s.p.a.cious streets of that Jerusalem which is above."

IX

_EDITH SICHEL_

This notice is more suitably headed with a name than with a t.i.tle.

Edith Sichel was greater than anything she wrote, and the main interest of the book before us[*] is the character which it reveals.

Among Miss Sichel's many activities was that of reviewing, and Mr.

Bradley tells that "her first object was to let the reader know what kind of matter he might expect to find in the book, and, if necessary, from what point of view it is treated there." Following this excellent example, let us say that in _New and Old_ the reader will find an appreciative but not quite adequate "Introduction"; some extracts from letters; some "thoughts" or aphorisms; some poems; and thirty-two miscellaneous pieces of varying interest-and merit. This is what we "find in the book," and the "point of view"

is developed as we read.

[Footnote *: _New and Old_. By Edith Sichel. With an Introduction by A. C. Bradley. London: Constable and Co.]

To say that the Introduction is not quite adequate is no aspersion on Mr. Bradley. He tells us that he only knew Miss Sichel "towards the close of her life" (she was born in 1862 and died in 1914), and in her case pre-eminently the child was mother of the woman. Her blood was purely Jewish, and the Jewish characteristic of precocity was conspicuous in her from the first. At ten she had the intellectual alertness of sixteen, and at sixteen she could have held her own with ordinary people of thirty. To converse with her even casually always reminded me of Matthew Arnold's exclamation: "What women these Jewesses are! with a _force_ which seems to triple that of the women of our Western and Northern races."

From the days of early womanhood to the end, Edith Sichel led a double life, though in a sense very different from that in which this ambiguous phrase is generally employed. "She was known to the reading public as a writer of books and of papers in magazines....

Her princ.i.p.al books were warmly praised by judges competent to estimate their value as contributions to French biography and history;" and her various writings, belonging to very different orders and ranging over a wide variety of topics, were always marked by vigour and originality. Her versatility was marvellous; and, "though she had not in youth the severe training that makes for perfect accuracy,"

she had by nature the instinct which avoids the commonplace, and which touches even hackneyed themes with light and fire. Her humour was exuberant, unforced, untrammelled; it played freely round every object which met her mental gaze--sometimes too freely when she was dealing with things traditionally held sacred. But her flippancy was of speech rather than of thought, for her fundamental view of life was serious. "Life, in her view, brings much that is pure and unsought joy, more, perhaps, that needs transforming effort, little or nothing that cannot be made to contribute to an inward and abiding happiness."

Some more detailed account of her literary work may be given later on; at this point I must turn to the other side of her double life.

She was only twenty-two when she began her career of practical benevolence among the poor girls of Bethnal Green, Sh.o.r.editch, and Shadwell. She established in the country Homes for the girl-children of an East End work-house, and maintained them till she died. For twenty-two years she was treasurer of a Boys' Home. She was a manager of Elementary Schools in London. She held a cla.s.s for female prisoners at Holloway. She was deeply impressed by the importance of starting young people in suitable employment, and threw all her energies into the work, "in case of need, supplying the money required for apprenticeship." In this and in all her other enterprises she was generous to a fault, always being ready to give away half her income--and yet not "to a fault," for her strong administrative and financial instinct restrained her from foolish or mischievous expenditure. All this work, of body and mind, was done in spite of fragile health and frequent suffering; yet she never seemed overburdened, or fussed, or flurried, and those who enjoyed her graceful hospitality in Onslow Gardens would never have suspected either that her day had been spent in what she called "the picturesque mire of Wapping," or that she had been sitting up late at night, immersed in _Human Doc.u.ments from the Four Centuries preceding the Reformation_.

We have spoken of her humour. Those who would see a sample of it are referred to her description of the Eisteddfod on p. 22; and this piece of pungent fun may be profitably read in contrast with her grim story of _Gladys Leonora Pratt_. In that story some of the writer's saddest experiences in the East End are told with an unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in it. Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly disgusting.

"It might," she said, "be well for the modern realist to remember that literalness is not the same as truth, nor curiosity as courage."

She was best known as a writer of books about the French Renaissance, on which she became an acknowledged authority. She was less well known, but not less effective, as a reviewer--no one ever dissected Charlotte Yonge so justly--and she excelled in personal description.

Her accounts of her friends Miss Emily Lawless, Miss Mary Coleridge, and Joseph Joachim, are masterpieces of characterization. All her literary work was based on a wide and strong foundation of generous culture. German was to her a second mother-tongue, and she lectured delightfully on _Faust_. Though she spoke of herself as talking "fluent and incomprehensible bad French," she was steeped in French scholarship. She had read Plato and Sophocles under the stimulating guidance of William Cory, and her love of Italy had taught her a great deal of Italian. The authors whom she enjoyed and quoted were a motley crowd--Dante and Rabelais, Pascal and Montaigne, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, Tolstoi and George Borrow, "Mark Rutherford" and Samuel Butler, Fenelon and Renan and Anatole France.

Her vein of poetic feeling was strong and genuine. In addressing some young girls she said: "We all think a great deal of the importance of opening our windows and airing our rooms. I wish we thought as much of airing our imaginations. To me poetry is quite like that. It is like opening the window daily, and looking out and letting in the air and the sunlight into an otherwise stuffy little room; and if I cannot read some poetry in the day I feel more uncomfortable than I can tell you." She might have put the case more strongly; for poetry, and music, and painting, and indeed all art at its highest level, made a great part of her religion. Her family had long ago conformed to the Church of England, in which she was brought up; but she never shook off her essential Judaism.

She had no sympathy with rites or ordinances, creeds or dogmas, and therefore outward conformity to the faith of her forefathers would have been impossible to her; but she looked with reverent pride on the tombs in the Jewish cemetery at Prague. "It gave me a strange feeling to stand at the tombstone of our tribe--900 A.D.

The oldest scholar's grave is 600 A.D., and Heaven knows how many great old Rabbis lie there, memorable and forgotten. The wind and the rain were sobbing all round the place, and all the melancholy of my race seemed to rise up and answer them." Though she was a Churchwoman by practice, her own religion was a kind of undefined Unitarianism. "The Immanence of G.o.d and the life of Christ are my treasures." "I am a heretic, you know, and it seems to me that all who call Christ Master with adoration of that life are of the same band." Her favourite theologians were James Martineau, Alfred Ainger (whose Life she wrote admirably), and Samuel Barnett, whom she elevated into a mystic and a prophet. The ways of the Church of England did not please her. She had nothing but scorn for "a joyless curate prating of Easter joy with limpest lips," or for "the Athanasian Creed sung in the highest of spirits in a prosperous church"

filled with "sealskin-jacketed mammas and blowsy old gentlemen." But the conclusion of the whole matter was more comfortable--"All the clergymen in the world cannot make one disbelieve in G.o.d."

X

_"WILL" GLADSTONE_

"He bequeathed to his children the perilous inheritance of a name which the Christian world venerates." The words were originally used by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce with reference to his father, the emanc.i.p.ator of the negro. I venture to apply them to the great man who, in days gone by, was my political leader, and I do so the more confidently because I hold that Gladstone will be remembered quite apart from politics, and, as Bishop Westcott said, "rather for what he was than for what he did." He was, in Lord Salisbury's words, "an example, to which history hardly furnishes a parallel, of a great Christian, Statesman." It was no light matter for a boy of thirteen to inherit a name which had been so n.o.bly borne for close on ninety years, and to acquire, as soon as he came of age, the possession of a large and difficult property, and all the local influence which such ownership implies. Yet this was the burden which was imposed on "Will" Gladstone by his father's untimely death. After an honourable career at Eton and Oxford, and some instructive journeyings in the East and in America (where he was an attache at the British Emba.s.sy), he entered Parliament as Member for the Kilmarnock Boroughs. His Parliamentary career was not destined to be long, but it was in many respects remarkable.

In some ways he was an ideal candidate. He was very tall, with a fair complexion and a singular n.o.bility of feature and bearing.

To the most casual observer it was palpable that he walked the world

"With conscious step of purity and pride."

People interested in heredity tried to trace in him some resemblance to his famous grandfather; but, alike in appearance and in character, the two were utterly dissimilar. In only one respect they resembled each other, and that was the highest. Both were earnest and practical Christians, walking by a faith which no doubts ever disturbed, and serving G.o.d in the spirit and by the methods of the English Church. And here we see alike Will Gladstone's qualifications and his drawbacks as a candidate for a Scottish const.i.tuency. His name and his political convictions commended him to the electors; his ecclesiastial opinions they could not share. His uprightness of character and n.o.bility of aspect commanded respect; his innate dislike of popularity-hunting and men-pleasing made him seem for so young a man--he was only twenty-seven--austere and aloof. Everyone could feel the intensity of his convictions on the points on which he had made up his mind; some were unreasonably distressed when he gave expression to that intensity by speech and vote. He was chosen to second the Address at the opening of the Session of 1912, and acquitted himself, as always, creditably; but it was in the debates on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill that he first definitely made his mark. "He strongly supported the principle, holding that it had been fully justified by the results of the Irish Disestablishment Act on the Irish Church. But, as in that case, generosity should characterize legislation; disendowment should be clearly limited to t.i.thes. Accordingly, in Committee, he took an independent course.

His chief speech on this subject captivated the House. For a very young Member to oppose his own party without causing irritation, and to receive the cheers of the Opposition without being led to seek in them solace for the silence of his own side, and to win general admiration by transparent sincerity and clear, balanced statement of reason, was a rare and notable performance."

When Will Gladstone struck twenty-nine, there were few young men in England who occupied a more enviable position. He had a beautiful home; sufficient, but not overwhelming, wealth; a property which gave full scope for all the gifts of management and administration which he might possess; the devoted love of his family, and the goodwill even of those who did not politically agree with him.

His health, delicate in childhood, had improved with years. "While he never neglected his public duties, his natural, keen, healthy love of nature, sport, fun, humour, company, broke out abundantly.

In these matters he was still a boy"--but a boy who, as it seemed, had already crossed the threshold of a memorable manhood. Such was Will Gladstone on his last birthday--the 12th of July, 1914. A month later the "Great Tribulation" had burst upon the unthinking world, and all dreams of happiness were shattered. Dreams of happiness, yes; but not dreams of duty. Duty might a.s.sume a new, a terrible, and an unlooked-for form; but its essential and spiritual part--the conviction of what a man owes to G.o.d, to his fellow-men, and to himself--became only more imperious when the call to arms was heard: _Christus ad arma vocat_.

Will Gladstone loved peace, and hated war with his whole heart.

He was by conviction opposed to intervention in the quarrels of other nations. "His health was still delicate; he possessed neither the training nor instincts of a soldier; war and fighting were repugnant to his whole moral and physical fibre." No one, in short, could have been by nature less disposed for the duty which now became urgent. "The invasion of Belgium shattered his hopes and his ideals." He now realized the stern truth that England must fight, and, if England must fight, he must bear his part in the fighting. He had been made, when only twenty-six, Lord-Lieutenant of Flintshire, and as such President of the Territorial Force a.s.sociation. It was his official duty to "make personal appeals for the enlistment of young men. But how could he urge others to join the Army while he, a young man not disqualified for military service, remained at home in safety? It was his duty to lead, and his best discharge of it lay in personal example." His decision was quickly and quietly made. "He was the only son of his mother, and what it meant to her he knew full well;" but there was no hesitation, no repining, no looking back. He took a commission in the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and on the 15th of March, 1915, he started with a draft for France. On the 12th of April he was killed. "It is not"--he had just written to his mother--"the length of existence, that counts, but what is achieved during that existence, however short." These words of his form his worthiest epitaph.

XI

_LORD CHARLES RUSSELL_

A man can have no better friend than a good father; and this consideration warrants, I hope, the inclusion of yet one more sketch drawn "in honour of friendship."

Charles James Fox Russell (1807-1894) was the sixth son of the sixth Duke of Bedford. His mother was Lady Georgiana Gordon, daughter of the fourth Duke of Gordon and of the adventurous "d.u.c.h.ess Jane,"

who, besides other achievements even more remarkable, raised the "Gordon Highlanders" by a method peculiarly her own. Thus he was great-great-great-grandson of the Whig martyr, William, Lord Russell, and great-nephew of Lord George Gordon, whose Protestant zeal excited the riots of 1780. He was one of a numerous family, of whom the best remembered are John, first Earl Russell, princ.i.p.al author of the Reform Act of 1832, and Louisa, d.u.c.h.ess of Abercorn, grandmother of the present Duke.

Charles James Fox was a close friend, both politically and privately, of the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Bedford, and he promised them that he would be G.o.dfather to their next child; but he died before the child was born, whereupon his nephew, Lord Holland, took over the sponsorship, and named his G.o.dson "Charles James Fox." The child was born in 1807, and his birthplace was Dublin Castle.[*] The Duke of Bedford was then Viceroy of Ireland, and became involved in some controversy because he refused to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act. When Lord Charles Russell reached man's estate, he used, half in joke but quite half in-earnest, to attribute his lifelong sympathy with the political demands of the Irish people to the fact that he was a Dublin man by birth.