Studies in Contemporary Biography Part 5

However, he did not long remain in that arena, but on the retirement of Lord Romilly from the office of Master of the Rolls, was in 1873 appointed to succeed him. In this post his extraordinary gifts found their amplest sphere. The equity judges in England used always to sit, and in nearly all cases do still sit, without a jury to hear causes, with or without witnesses, and they despatch a great deal of the heaviest business that is brought into the courts. Commercial causes of the first importance come before them, no less than those which relate to trusts or to real property; and the granting of injunctions, a specially serious matter, rests chiefly in their hands. Each equity judge sits alone, and the suitor may choose before which of them he will bring his case. Among the four--a number subsequently increased to five--equity judges of first instance, Jessel immediately rose to the highest reputation, so that most of the heavy and difficult cases were brought into his court. He possessed a wonderfully quick, as well as powerful, mind, which got to the kernel of a matter while other people were still hammering at the sh.e.l.l, and which applied legal principles just as swiftly and surely as it mastered a group of complicated facts.

The Rolls Court used to present, while he presided over it, a curious and interesting sight, which led young counsel, who had no business to do there, to frequent it for the mere sake of watching the Judge. When the leading counsel for the plaintiff was opening his case, Jessel listened quietly for the first few minutes only, and then began to address questions to the counsel, at first so as to guide his remarks in a particular direction, then so as to stop his course altogether and turn his speech into a series of answers to the Judge's interrogatories. When, by a short dialogue of this kind, Jessel had possessed himself of the vital facts, he would turn to the leading counsel for the defendant and ask him whether he admitted such and such facts alleged by the plaintiff to be true. If these facts were admitted, the Judge proceeded to indicate the view he was disposed to take of the law applicable to the facts, and, by a few more questions to the counsel on the one side or the other, as the case might be, elicited their respective legal grounds of contention. If the facts were not admitted, it of course became necessary to call the witnesses or read the affidavits, processes which the vigorous impatience of the Judge considerably shortened, for it was a dangerous thing to read to him any irrelevant or loosely-drawn paragraph. But more generally his searching questions and the sort of pressure he applied so cut down the issues of fact that there was little or nothing left in controversy regarding which it was necessary to examine the evidence in detail, since the counsel felt that there was no use in putting before him a contention which they could not sustain under the fire of his criticism. Then Jessel proceeded to deliver his opinion and dispose of the case. The affair was from beginning to end far less an argument and counter-argument by counsel than an investigation directly conducted by the Judge himself, in which the princ.i.p.al function of the counsel was to answer the Judge's questions concisely and exactly, so that the latter might as soon as possible get to the bottom of the matter. The Bar in a little while came to learn and adapt themselves to his ways, and few complained of being stopped or interrupted by him, because his interruptions, unlike those of some judges, were neither inopportune nor superfluous. The counsel (with scarcely an exception) felt themselves his inferiors, and recognised not only that he was better able to handle the case than they were, but that the manner and style in which they presented their facts or arguments would make little difference to the result, because his penetration was sure to discover the merits of each contention, and neither eloquence nor pertinacity would have the slightest effect on his resolute and self-confident mind. Thus business was despatched before him with unexampled speed, and it became a maxim among barristers that, however low down in the cause-list at the Rolls your cause might stand, it was never safe to be away from the court, so rapidly were cases "crumpled up" or "broken down" under the blows of this vigorous intellect. It was more surprising that the suitors, as well as the Bar and the public generally, acquiesced, after the first few months, in this way of doing business. Nothing breeds more discontent than haste and heedlessness in a judge. But Jessel's speed was not haste. He did as much justice in a day as others could do in a week; and those few who, dissatisfied with these rapid methods, tried to reverse his decisions before the Court of Appeal, were very seldom successful, although that court then contained in Lord Justice James and Lord Justice Mellish two unusually strong men, who would not have hesitated to differ even from the redoubtable Master of the Rolls.

As I have mentioned Lord Justice Mellish, I may turn aside for a moment to say a word regarding that extraordinary man, who stood along with Cairns and Roundell Palmer in the foremost rank of Jessel's professional contemporaries. Mellish held for some years before his elevation to the Bench in 1869 a position unique at the English Common-law Bar as a giver of opinions on points of law. As the Israelites in King David's day said of Ahithophel that his counsel was as if a man had inquired at the oracle of G.o.d,[25] so the legal profession deemed Mellish practically infallible, and held an opinion signed by him to be equal in weight to a judgment of the Court of Exchequer Chamber (the then court of appeal in common-law cases). He was not effective as an advocate addressing a jury, being indeed far too good for any jury; but in arguing a point of law his unerring logic, the lucidity with which he stated his position, the cogency and precision with which he drew his inferences, made it a delight to listen to him. The chain of ratiocination seemed irrefragable:

+en d' ethet' akmotheto megan akmona, kopte de desmous arrhektous alutous, ophr' empedon authi menoien.+[26]

He had, indeed, but one fault as an arguer. He could not argue a point whose soundness he doubted as effectively as one in which he had faith; and when it befell that several points arose in a case, and the Court seemed disposed to lay more stress on the one for which he cared little than on the one he deemed conclusive, he refused to fall in with their view and continued to insist upon that which his own mind approved.

I remember to have once heard him and Cairns argue before the House of Lords (sitting as the final Court of Appeal) a case relating to a vessel called the _Alexandra_--it was a case arising out of an attempt of the Confederates, during the American War of Secession, to get out of a British port a cruiser they had ordered. Cairns spoke first with all his usual power, and seemed to have left nothing to be added. But when Mellish followed on the same side, he set his points in so strong a light, and placed his contention on so solid a basis, that even Cairns's speech was forgotten, and it seemed impossible that any answer could be found to Mellish's arguments. One felt as if the voice of pure reason were speaking through his lips.

Such an intellect might seem admirably qualified for judicial work.

But as a judge, Mellish, admirable though he was in temper, in fairness, in learning, and in logic, did not win so exceptional a reputation as he had won at the Bar. People used to ascribe this partly to his weak health, partly to the fact that he, who had been a common-law pract.i.tioner, was sitting in a court which heard equity appeals, and alongside of a quick and strong colleague reared in the equity courts.[27] But something may have been due to the fact that he needed the stimulus of conflict to bring out the full force of his splendid intelligence. A circ.u.mstance attending the appointment of Mellish ill.u.s.trates the remark already made that a great counsel whose work lies apart from so-called "sensation cases" may remain unknown to his contemporaries. When Mr. Gladstone, being then Prime Minister, and having to select a Lord Justice of Appeal, was told that Mellish was the fittest man for the post, he asked, "Can that be the boy who was my f.a.g at Eton?" He had not heard of Mellish during the intervening forty years!

However, I return to the Master of the Rolls. In dealing with facts, Jessel has never had a superior, and in our days, perhaps, no rival.

He knew all the ways of the financial and commercial world. In his treatment of points of law, every one admitted and admired both an extraordinary knowledge and mastery of reported cases, and an extremely acute and exact appreciation of principles, a complete power of extracting them from past cases and fitting them to the case in hand. He had a memory which forgot nothing, and which, indeed, wearied him by refusing to forget trivial things. When he delivered an elaborate judgment it was his delight to run through a long series of cases, cla.s.sifying and distinguishing them. His strength made him bold; he went further than most judges in readiness to carry a principle somewhat beyond any decided case, and to overrule an authority which he did not respect. The fault charged on him was his tendency, perhaps characteristic of the Hebrew mind, to take a somewhat hard and dry view of a legal principle, overlooking its more delicate shades, and, in the interpretation of statutes or doc.u.ments, to adhere too strictly to the letter, overlooking the spirit. An eminent lawyer said, "If all judges had been like Jessel, there might have been no equity." In that respect many deemed him inferior to Lord Cairns, the greatest judge among his contemporaries, who united to an almost equally wide and accurate knowledge of the law a grasp of principles even more broad and philosophical than Jessel's was. Be this as it may, the judgments of the Master of the Rolls, which fill so many pages of the recent English Law Reports, are among the best that have ever gone to build up the fabric of the English law. Except on two occasions, when he reserved judgment at the request of his colleagues in the Court of Appeal, they were delivered on the spur of the moment, after the conclusion of the arguments, or of so much of the arguments as he allowed counsel to deliver; but they have all the merits of carefully-considered utterances, so clear and direct is their style, so concisely as well as cogently are the authorities discussed and the grounds of decision stated. The bold and sweeping character which often belongs to them makes them more instructive as well as more agreeable reading than the judgments of most modern judges, whose commonest fault is a timidity which tries to escape, by dwelling on the details of the particular case, from the enunciation of a definite general principle. Positive and definite Jessel always was. As he put it himself: "I may be wrong, but I never have any doubts."

At the Bar, Jessel had been far from popular; for his manners were unpolished, and his conduct towards other counsel overbearing. On the Bench he improved, and became liked as well as respected. There was a sort of rough _bonhomie_ about him, and though he could be disagreeable on occasions to a leading counsel, especially if brought from the common-law bar into his court, he showed a good-humoured wish to deal gently with young or inexperienced barristers. There was also an obvious anxiety to do justice, an impatience of mere technicalities, and a readiness, remarkable in so strong-willed a man, to hear what could be said against his own opinion, and to reconsider it. Besides, a profession is naturally proud of any one whose talents adorn it, and whose eminence seems to be communicated to the whole body.

Ever since, under the Plantagenet kings, the Chancery became a law court, the office of Master of the Rolls had been that of a judge of first instance. In 1881 its character was changed, and its occupant placed at the head of the Court of Appeal. Thus it was as an appellate judge that Jessel latterly sat, giving no less satisfaction in that capacity than in his former one, and being indeed confessedly the strongest judicial intellect (except Lord Cairns) on the Bench.

Outside his professional duties, his chief interest was in the University of London, at which he had himself graduated. He was a member of its senate, and busied himself with its examinations, being up till the last excessively fond of work, and finding that of a judge who sits for five or six hours daily insufficient to satisfy his appet.i.te. He was not what would be called a highly cultivated man, although he knew a great deal beyond the field of law, mathematics, for instance, and Hebrew literature and botany, for he had been brought up in a not very refined circle, and had been absorbed in legal work during the best years of his life. But his was an intelligence of extraordinary power and flexibility, eminently practical, as the Semitic intellect generally is, and yet thoroughly scientific. And he was also one of those strong natures who make themselves disliked while they are fighting their way to the top, but grow more genial and more tolerant when they have won what they sought, and perceive that others admit their pre-eminence. The services which he rendered as a judge ill.u.s.trate not only the advantage of throwing open all places to all comers--the bigotry of an elder day excluded the Jews from judicial office altogether--but also the benefit of having a judge at least equal in ability to the best of those who practise before him. It was because Jessel was so easily master in his court that so large and important a part of the judicial business of the country was, during many years, despatched with a swiftness and a success seldom equalled in the annals of the English Courts.

[25] 2 Sam. xvi. 23.

[26] _Odyss._ viii. 274: "And upon the anvil-stand he set the mighty anvil; and he forged the links that could be neither broken nor loosed, so that they should stay firm in their place."

[27] Lord Justice James said of his colleague that he had only one defect as a judge: "He was too anxious to convince counsel that they were wrong, when he thought their contention unsound, seeming to forget that counsel are paid not to be convinced."

LORD CHANCELLOR CAIRNS

Hugh M'Calmont Cairns, afterwards Earl Cairns (born 1819, died 1885), was one of three remarkable Scoto-Irishmen whom the north-east corner of Ulster gave to the United Kingdom in one generation, and each of whom was foremost in the career he entered. Lord Lawrence was the strongest of Indian or Colonial administrators, and did more than any other man to save India for England in the crisis of the great Mutiny of 1857. Lord Kelvin has been, since the death of Charles Darwin, the first among British men of science. Lord Cairns was unquestionably the greatest judge of the Victorian epoch, perhaps of the nineteenth century.[28] His name and family were of Scottish origin, but he combined with the shrewd sense and grim persistency of Scotland some measure of the keen partisanship which marks the Irish Orangeman. Born an Episcopalian, he grew up a Tory in politics, an earnest Low-Church Evangelical in religion; nor did his opinions in either respect ever seem to alter during his long life. His great abilities were perceived both at school (he was educated at the Academy in Belfast) and at college (Trinity College, Dublin), and so much impressed the counsel in whose chambers he studied for a year in London, that he strongly dissuaded the young man from returning to Dublin to practise at the Irish bar, promising him a brilliant career on the wider theatre of England. The prediction was verified by the rapidity with which Cairns, who had, no doubt, the advantage of influential connections in the City of London, rose into note. He obtained (as a Conservative) a seat in Parliament for his native town of Belfast when only thirty-three years of age, and was appointed Solicitor-General to Lord Derby's second Ministry six years later--a post which few eminent lawyers have reached before fifty. In the House of Commons, though at first somewhat diffident and nervous, he soon proved himself a powerful as well as ready speaker, and would doubtless have remained in an a.s.sembly where he was rendering such valuable services to his party but for the weakness of his lungs and throat, which had threatened his life since boyhood.

He therefore accepted, in 1867, the office of Lord Justice of Appeal, with a seat in the House of Lords, and next year was made Lord Chancellor by Mr. Disraeli, then Prime Minister, who dismissed Lord Chelmsford, then Chancellor, in order to have the benefit of Cairns's help as a colleague. Disraeli subsequently caused him to be raised to an earldom.

After Lord Derby's death, Cairns led the Tory party in the House of Lords for a time (replacing the Duke of Richmond when the latter quitted the leadership), but his very p.r.o.nounced Low-Church proclivities, coupled perhaps with a certain jealousy felt toward him as a newcomer, prevented him from becoming popular there, so that ultimately the leadership of that House settled itself in the hands of Lord Salisbury, a statesman not superior to Cairns in political judgment or argumentative power, but without the disadvantage of being a lawyer, possessing a wider range of political experience, and in closer sympathy with the feelings and habits of the t.i.tled order.

There were, however, some peers who, when Lord Beaconsfield died in 1881, desired to see Cairns chosen to succeed him in the leadership of the Tory party, then in opposition, in the Upper Chamber. Whether in opposition or in power, Cairns took a prominent part in all "full-dress" political debates in the House of Lords and in the discussion of legal measures, and was indeed so absolutely master of the Chamber when such measures came under discussion, that the Liberal Government, during the years from 1868 to 1874, and again from 1880 till 1885, could carry no legal reforms through the House of Lords except by his permission, which, of course, was never given when such reforms could seem to affect any political issue. Yet the vehemence of his party feeling did not overcast his judgment. It was mainly through his interposition (aided by that of Archbishop Tait) that the House of Lords consented to pa.s.s the Irish Church Bill of 1869, a measure which Cairns, of course heartily disliking it, accepted for the sake of saving to the disestablished Church a part of her funds, since these might have been lost had the Bill been rejected then and pa.s.sed next year by an angrier House of Commons. Of all the members of Disraeli's two Cabinets, he was the one whom Disraeli himself had been wont most to trust and most to rely on. In January 1874, when Mr. Gladstone's suddenly announced dissolution of Parliament startled all England one Sat.u.r.day morning, Disraeli, who heard of it while still in bed, was at first frightened, thinking that the Liberal leader had played his cards boldly and well, and would carry the elections. When his chief party manager came to see him he was found restless and dejected, and cried out, "Send for Cairns at once." Lord Cairns was sent for, came full of vigour, hope, and counsel, and after an hour's talk so restored the confidence of his ally that Disraeli sat down in the best spirits to compose his electoral manifesto. As everybody knows, Cairns's forecast was right, and the Tories won the general election by a large majority.

For political success Cairns had several qualities of the utmost value--a stately presence, a clear head, a resolute will, and splendid oratorical gifts. He was not an imaginative speaker, nor fitted to touch the emotions; but he had a matchless power of statement, and a no less matchless closeness and cogency in argument. In the famous controversies of 1866, he showed himself the clearest and most vigorous thinker among the opponents of reform, more solid, if less brilliant, than was Robert Lowe. His diction, without being exceptionally choice, was pure and precise, and his manner had a dignity and weight which seemed to compel your attention even when the matter was uninteresting. A voice naturally neither strong nor musical, and sometimes apt to sound hollow (for the chest was weak), was managed with great skill; action and gesture were used sparingly but effectively, and the tall well-built figure and strongly-marked, somewhat Roman features, with their haughty and distant air, deepened the impression of power, courage, and resolution which was characteristic of the whole man.

The qualities of oratory I have described may seem better fitted to a comparatively sober and sedate a.s.sembly like the House of Lords than to a changeful and excitable a.s.sembly like the House of Commons. Yet, in point of fact, Cairns spoke better in the Commons than he did afterwards in the Lords, and would have left an even higher oratorical reputation had his career in the popular House been longer and his displays more numerous. The reason seems to be that the heat of that House warmed his somewhat chilly temperament, and roused him to a more energetic and ardent style of speaking than was needed in the Upper Chamber, where he and his friends, commanding a large majority, had things all their own way. In the House of Commons he confronted a crowd of zealous adversaries, and put forth all the forces of his logic and rhetoric to overcome them. In the more languid House of Lords he was apt to be didactic, sometimes even prolix. He overproved his own case without feeling the need, which he would have felt in the Commons, of overthrowing the case of the other side; his manner wanted animation and his matter variety. Still, he was a great speaker, greater as a speaker upon legal topics, where a power of exact statement and lucid exposition is required, than any one he left behind him.

Why, it may be asked, with these gifts, and with so much firmness and energy of character, did he not play an even more conspicuous part in politics, and succeed, after Lord Beaconsfield's death, to the chieftaincy of the Tory party? The answer is to be found partly in the prejudice which still survives in England against legal politicians, partly in certain defects of his own personality. Although sincerely pious, and exemplary in all the relations of domestic life, he was ungenial and unbending in social intercourse. Few equally eminent men of our time have had so narrow a circle of personal friends. There was a dryness, a coldness, and an appearance of reserve and hauteur about his manner which repelled strangers, and kept acquaintanceship from ripening into friendship. To succeed as a political leader, a man must usually (I do not say invariably, because there are a few remarkable instances--Mr. Parnell's would appear to be one of them--to the contrary) at least seem sympathetic; must be able to enter into the feelings of his followers, and show himself interested in them not merely as party followers, but as human beings. There must be a certain glow, a certain effluence of feeling about him, which makes them care for him and rally to him as a personality. Whether Lord Cairns wanted warmth of heart, or whether it was that an inner warmth failed to pierce the cloak of reserve and pride which he habitually wore, I do not attempt to determine. But the defect told heavily against him. He never became a familiar figure to the ma.s.s of his party, a person whose features they knew, at whose name they would cheer; and nowadays all leaders, to whatever party they belong, find a source of strength in winning this kind of popularity. The quality which Americans call magnetism is perhaps less essential in England than in the country which distinguished and named it; but it is helpful even in England. Cairns, though an Irishman, was wholly without it.

In the field of law, where pa.s.sion has no place, and even imagination must be content to move with clipped wings along the ground, the merits of Lord Cairns's intellect showed to the best advantage. At the Chancery bar he was one of a trio who had not been surpa.s.sed, if ever equalled, during the nineteenth century, and whom none of our now practising advocates rivals. The other two were Mr., afterwards Lord Justice, Rolt, and Mr. Roundell Palmer, afterwards Lord Chancellor Selborne. All were admirable lawyers, but, of the three, Rolt excelled in his spirited presentation of a case and in the lively vigour of his arguments. Palmer was conspicuous for exhaustless ingenuity, and for a subtlety which sometimes led him away into reasonings too fine for the court to follow. Cairns was broad, ma.s.sive, convincing, with a robust urgency of logic which seemed to grasp and fix you, so that while he spoke you could fancy no conclusion possible save that toward which he moved. His habit was to seize upon what he deemed the central and vital point of the case, throwing the whole force of his argument upon that one point, and holding the judge's mind fast to it.

All these famous men were raised to the judicial bench. Rolt remained there for a few months only, so his time was too short to permit him to enrich our jurisprudence and leave a memory of himself in the Reports. Palmer sat in the House of Lords from his accession to the Chancellorship in 1872 till his death in 1896, and, while fully sustaining his reputation as a man of eminent legal capacity, was, on the whole, less brilliant as a judge than he had been as an advocate, because a tendency to over-refinement is more dangerous in the judicial than in the forensic mind. He made an admirable Chancellor, and showed himself more industrious and more zealous for law reform than did Cairns. But Cairns was the greater judge, and became to the generation which argued before him a model of judicial excellence. In hearing a cause he was singularly patient, rarely interrupting counsel, and then only to put some pertinent question. His figure was so still, his countenance so impa.s.sive, that people sometimes doubted whether he was really attending to all that was urged at the bar. But when the time came for him to deliver judgment, which in the House of Lords is done in the form of a speech addressed to the House in moving or supporting a motion that is to become the judgment of the tribunal, it was seen how fully he had apprehended the case in all its bearings. His deliverances were never lengthy, but they were exhaustive. They went straight to the vital principles on which the question turned, stated these in the most luminous way, and applied them with unerring exact.i.tude to the particular facts. It is as a storehouse of fundamental doctrines that his judgments are so valuable. They disclose less knowledge of case-law than do those of some other judges; but Cairns was not one of the men who love cases for their own sake, and he never cared to draw upon, still less to display, more learning than was needed for the matter in hand. It was in the grasp of the principles involved, in the breadth of view which enabled him to see these principles in their relation to one another, in the precision of the logic which drew conclusions from the principles, in the perfectly lucid language in which the principles were expounded and applied, that his strength lay. Herein he surpa.s.sed the most eminent of contemporary judges, the then Master of the Rolls, for while Jessel had perhaps a quicker mind than Cairns, he had not so wide a mind, nor one so thoroughly philosophical in the methods by which it moved.

Outside the spheres of law and politics, Cairns's only interest was in religion. He did not seem, although a good cla.s.sical scholar and a competent mathematician, to care either for letters or for science. But he was a Sunday-school teacher nearly all his life. Prayer-meetings were held at his house, at which barristers, not otherwise known for their piety, but believed to desire county court judgeships, were sometimes seen. He used to take the chair at missionary and other philanthropic meetings. He was surrounded by evangelisers and clergymen. But nothing softened the austerity or melted the ice of his manners. Neither did the great position he had won seem to give a higher and broader quality to his statesmanship. It is true that in law he was wholly free from the partisanship which tinged his politics.

No one was more perfectly fair upon the bench; no one more honestly anxious to arrive at a right decision. And as a law reformer, although he effected less than might have been hoped from his abilities or expected from the absolute sway which he exercised while Chancellor in Lord Beaconsfield's Government from 1874 to 1880, he was free from prejudice, and willing to sweep away antiquated rules or usages if they seemed to block the channel of speedy justice. But in politics this impartiality and elevation vanished even after he had risen so high that he did not need to humour the pa.s.sions or confirm the loyalty of his own a.s.sociates. He seemed to be not merely a party man, which an English politician is forced to be, because if he stands outside party he cannot effect anything, but a partisan--that is, a man wholly devoted to his party, who sees everything through its eyes, and argues every question in its interests. He gave the impression of being either unwilling or unable to rise to a higher and more truly national view, and sometimes condescended to arguments whose unsoundness his penetrating intellect could hardly have failed to detect. His professional tone had been blameless, but at the bar the path of rect.i.tude is plain and smooth, and a scrupulous mind finds fewer cases of conscience present themselves in a year than in Parliament within a month. Yet if in this respect Cairns failed to reach a level worthy of his splendid intellect, the defect was due not to any selfish view of his own interest, but rather to the narrowness of the groove into which his mind had fallen, and to the atmosphere of Orange sentiment in which he had grown up. As a politician he is already beginning to be forgotten; but as a judge he will be held in honourable remembrance as one of the five or six most brilliant luminaries that have adorned the English bench since those remote days[29] in which the beginning of legal memory is placed.

[28] No biography of Lord Cairns has (so far as I know) appeared--a singular fact, considering the brilliancy of his career, and considering the tendency which now prevails to bestow this kind of honour on many persons of the second or even the third rank.

One reason may be that Cairns, great though he was, never won personal popularity even with his own political party or among his contemporaries at the bar, and was to the general public no more than a famous name.

[29] The reign of King Richard the First.

BISHOP FRASER

James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester from 1870 till 1885, was born in Gloucestershire, of a Scottish family, in 1818, and died at Manchester in 1885.[30] He took no prominent part in ecclesiastical politics, and no part at all in general politics. Though a sound cla.s.sical scholar in the old-fashioned sense of the term--he won the Ireland University Scholarship at Oxford, then and still the most conspicuous prize in the field of cla.s.sics--he was not an exceptionally cultivated man, and he never wrote anything except official reports and episcopal charges.

Neither was he, although a ready and effective speaker, gifted with the highest kind of eloquence. Neither was he a profound theologian.

Yet his character and career are of permanent interest, for he created not merely a new episcopal type, but (one may almost say) a new ecclesiastical type within the Church of England.

Till some sixty or seventy years ago the normal English bishop was a rich, dignified, and rather easy-going magnate, aristocratic in his tastes and habits, moderate in his theology, sometimes to the verge of indifferentism, quite as much a man of the world as a pastor of souls.

He had usually obtained his preferment by his family connections, or by some service rendered to the court or a political chief--perhaps even by solicitation or intrigue. Now and then eminence in learning or literature raised a man to the bench: there were, for instance, the "Greek play" bishops, such as Dr. Monk of Gloucester, whose fame rested on their editions of the Attic dramatists; and the _Quarterly Review_ bishops, such as Dr. Copleston, of Llandaff, whose powerful pen, as well as his wise administration of the great Oxford College over which he long presided, amply justified his promotion. So even in the eighteenth century the ill.u.s.trious Butler had been Bishop of Durham, as in Ireland the ill.u.s.trious Berkeley had been Bishop of Cloyne. But, on the whole, the bishops of our grandfathers' days were more remarkable for their prudence and tact, their adroitness or suppleness, than for intellectual or moral superiority to the rest of the clergy. Their own upper-cla.s.s world, and the middle cla.s.s which, in the main, took its view of English inst.i.tutions from the upper cla.s.s, respected them as a part of the solid fabric of English society, but they were a mark for Radical invective and for literary sneers. Their luxurious pomp and ease were incessantly contrasted with the simplicity of the apostles and the poverty of curates, and the abundance among them of the gifts that befit the senate or the drawing-room was compared with the rarity of the graces that adorn a saint. The comparison was hardly fair, for saints are scarce, and a good bishop needs some qualities which a saint may lack.

That revival within the Church of England which went on in various forms from 1800 till 1870, at first Low Church or Evangelical in its tendencies, latterly more conspicuously High Church and Ritualist, began from below and worked upwards till at length it reached the bishops. Lord Palmerston, influenced by Lord Shaftesbury, filled the vacant sees that fell to him with earnest men, sometimes narrow, sometimes deficient in learning, but often good preachers, and zealous for the doctrines they held. When the High Churchmen found their way to the Bench, as they did very largely under Lord Derby's and Mr.

Gladstone's rule, they showed as much theological zeal as the Evangelicals, and perhaps more talent for administration. The popular idea of what may be expected from a bishop rose, and the bishops rose with the idea. As Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Samuel Wilberforce was among the first to make himself powerfully felt through his diocese. His example told upon other prelates, and prime ministers grew more anxious to select energetic and popular men. So it came to pa.s.s that the bishops began to be among the foremost men in the Church of England. Some, like Dr. Magee of Peterborough, and afterwards of York, were brilliant orators; some, like Dr. Lightfoot of Durham, profound scholars; some, like Dr. Temple of Exeter, able and earnest administrators. There remained but few who had not some good claim to the dignity they enjoyed. So it may be said, when one compares the later Victorian bishops with their Georgian predecessors, that no cla.s.s in the country has improved more. Few now sneer at them, for no set of men take a more active and more creditable part in the public business of the country. Their incomes, curtailed of late years in the case of the richer sees, are no more than sufficient for the expenses which fall upon them, and they work as hard as any other men for their salaries. Though the larger sees have been divided, the reduction of the toil of bishops thus effected has been less than the addition to it due to the growth of population and the increased activity of the clergy. The only defect which the censorious still impute to them is a certain episcopal conventionality, a disposition to try to please everybody by the use of vague professional language, a tendency to think too much about the Church as a church establishment, and to defer to clerical opinion when they ought to speak and act with an independence born of their individual opinions. Some of them, as, for instance, the three I have just mentioned, were not open to this reproach. It was one of the merits and charms of Fraser that he was absolutely free from any such tendency. Other men, such as Bishop Lightfoot, have been not less eminent models of the virtues which ought to characterise a great Christian pastor; but Fraser (appointed some time before Lightfoot) was the first to be an absolutely unconventional and, so to speak, unepiscopal bishop. His career marked a new departure and set a new example.

Fraser spent the earlier years of his manhood in Oxford, as a tutor in Oriel College, teaching Thucydides and Aristotle. Like many of his Oxford contemporaries, he continued through life to think on Aristotelian lines, and one could trace them in his sermons. He then took in succession two college livings, both in quiet nooks in the South of England, and discharged for nearly twenty years the simple duties of a parish priest, unknown to the great world, but making himself beloved by the people, and doing his best to improve their condition. The zeal he had shown in promoting elementary education caused him to be appointed (in 1865) by the Schools Inquiry Commissioners to be their a.s.sistant Commissioner to examine the common-school system of the United States, and the excellence of his report thereon attracted the notice of the late Lord Lyttelton, one of those Commissioners who were then sitting to investigate the state of secondary education in England. His report long remained by far the best general picture of American schools, conspicuous for its breadth of view, its clearness of statement, its sympathetic insight into conditions unlike those he had known in England. On the recommendation (as has been generally believed) of Lord Lyttelton and of the then Bishop of Salisbury, who was a friend of Dr. Fraser's, Mr. Gladstone, at that time Prime Minister, appointed him Bishop of Manchester in 1870. The diocese of Manchester, which included all Lancashire except Liverpool and a small district in the extreme north of the county, had been under a bishop who, although an able and learned man, capable of making himself agreeable when he pleased, was personally unpopular, and had done little beyond his formal duties. He lived in a large and handsome country-house some miles from the city, and was known by sight to very few of its inhabitants. (I was familiar with Lancashire in those days, for I had visited all its grammar-schools as a.s.sistant Commissioner to the Commission just referred to, and there was hardly a trace to be found in it of the bishop's action.) Fraser had not been six months in the county before everything was changed. The country mansion was sold, and he procured a modest house in one of the less fashionable suburbs of the city. He preached twice every Sunday, usually in some parish church, and spent the week in travelling up and down his diocese, so that the days were few in which he was not on the railway. He stretched out the hand of friendship to the Dissenters (numerous and powerful in the manufacturing districts), who had hitherto regarded a bishop as a sort of natural enemy, gained their confidence, and soon became as popular with them as with the laity of his own Church. He a.s.sociated himself with all the works of benevolence or public utility which were in progress, subscribed to all so far as his means allowed, and was always ready to speak at a meeting on behalf of any good enterprise. He dealt in his sermons with the topics of the day, avoiding party politics, but speaking his mind on all social and moral questions with a freedom which sometimes involved him in pa.s.sing difficulties, but stimulated the minds of his hearers, and gave the impression of his own perfect candour and perfect courage. He used to say that as he felt it his duty to speak wherever he was asked to do so, he must needs speak without preparation, and must therefore expect sometimes to get into hot water; that this was a pity, but it was not his fault that he was reported, and that it was better to run the risk of making mistakes and suffering for them than to refuse out of self-regarding caution to give the best of himself to the diocese. He had that true modesty which makes a man willing to do a thing imperfectly, at the risk of lowering his intellectual reputation. He knew that he was neither a deep thinker nor a finished preacher, and was content to be what he was, so long as he could perform the work which it was in him to do.

He lost no opportunity of meeting the working men, would go and talk to them in the yards of the mills or at the evening gatherings of mechanics' inst.i.tutes; and when any misfortune befell, such as a colliery accident, he was often among the first who reached the spot to help the survivors and comfort the widows. He made no difference between rich and poor, showed no wish to be a guest in the houses of the great, and treated the poorest curate with as much courtesy as the most pompous county magnate. His work in Lancashire seldom allowed him to appear in the House of Lords; and this he regretted, not that he desired to speak there, but because, as he said, "Whether or not bishops do Parliament good, Parliament does bishops good."

Such a simple, earnest, active course of conduct told upon the feelings of the people who read of his words and doings. But even greater was the impression made by his personality upon those who saw him. He was a tall, well-built man,[31] erect in figure, with a quick eye, a firm step, a ruddy face, an expression of singular heartiness and geniality. He seemed always cheerful, and, in spite of his endless labours, always fresh and strong. His smile and the grasp of his hand put you into good-humour with yourself and the world; if you were dispirited, they led you out of shadow into sunlight. He was not a great reader, and had no time for sustained and searching thought; yet he seemed always abreast of what was pa.s.sing in the world, and to know what the books and articles and speeches of the day contained, although he could not have found time to peruse them. With strong opinions of his own, he was anxious to hear yours; a ready and eager talker, yet a willing listener. His oratory was plain, with few flights of rhetoric, but it was direct and vigorous, free from conventional phrases, charged with clear good sense and genuine feeling, and capable, when his feeling was exceptionally strong, of rising to eloquence. He had a ready sense of humour, the best proof of which was that he relished a joke against himself.[32] However, the greatest charm, both of his public and private talk, was the transparent sincerity and honesty that shone through it. His mind was like a crystal pool of water in a mountain stream. You saw everything that was in it, and saw nothing that was mean or unworthy. This sincerity and freshness made his character not only manly, but lovable and beautiful, beautiful in its tenderness, its loyalty to his friends, its devotion to truth.

His conscientious anxiety to say nothing more than he thought was apt to make him an embarra.s.sing ally. It happened more than once that when he came to speak at a public meeting on behalf of some enterprise, he was not content, like most men, to set forth its merits and claims, but went on to dwell upon possible drawbacks or dangers, so that the more ardent friends of the scheme thought he was pouring cold water on them, and called him a Balaam reversed. In a political a.s.sembly he would have been an _enfant terrible_ whom his party would have feared to put up to speak; but as people in the diocese got to know that this was his way, they only smiled at his too ingenuous honesty. As he spoke with no preparation, and was naturally impulsive, he now and then spoke unadvisedly, and received a good deal of newspaper censure.

But he was never involved in real trouble by these speeches. As Dean Stanley wrote to him, "You have a singular gift of going to the very verge of imprudence and yet never crossing it."

No one will wonder that such a character, set in a conspicuous place, and joined to extraordinary activity and zeal, should have produced an immense effect on the people of his city and diocese. Since Nonconformity arose in England in the seventeenth century, no bishop, perhaps, indeed no man, whether cleric or layman, had done so much to draw together people of different religious persuasions and help them to realise their common Christianity. Densely populated South Lancashire is practically one huge town, and he was its foremost citizen; the most instant in all good works; the one whose words were most sure to find attentive listeners. This was because he spoke, I will not say as a layman, but simply as a Christian, never claiming for himself any special authority in respect either of his sacerdotal character or his official position. No English prelate before him had been so welcome to all cla.s.ses and sections; none was so much lamented by the ma.s.ses of the people. But it is a significant fact that he was from first to last more popular with the laity than with the clergy.

Not that there was ever any slur on his orthodoxy. He began life as a moderate High Churchman, and gradually verged, half unconsciously, toward what would be called a Broad-Church position; maintaining the claim of the Anglican Church to undertake, and her duty to hold herself responsible for, the education of the people, and upholding her status as an establishment, but dwelling little on minor points of doctrinal difference, and seeming to care still less for external observances or points of ritual. This displeased the Anglo-Catholic party, and even among other sections of the clergy there was a kind of feeling that the Bishop was not sufficiently clerical, did not set full store by the sacerdotal side of his office, and did not think enough about ecclesiastical questions.

He was, I think, the first bishop who greeted men of science as fellow-workers for truth, and declared that Christianity had not, and could not have, anything to fear from scientific inquiry. This has often been said since, but in 1870 it was so novel that it drew from Huxley a singularly warm and impressive recognition. He was one of the first bishops to condemn the system of theological tests in the English universities. He even declared that "it was an evil hour when the Church thought herself obliged to add to or develop the simple articles of the Apostles' Creed." These deliverances, which any one can praise now, alarmed a large section of the Church of England then; nor was the bishop's friendliness to Dissenters favourably regarded by those who deny to Dissenting pastors the t.i.tle of Christian ministers.[33]

The gravest trouble of his life arose in connection with legal proceedings which he felt bound to take in the case of a Ritualist clergyman who had persisted in practices apparently illegal. Fraser, though personally the most tolerant of men to those who differed from his own theological views, felt bound to enforce the law, because it was the law, and was at once a.s.sailed unjustly, as well as bitterly, by those who sympathised with the offending clergyman, and who could not, or would not, understand that a bishop, like other persons in an official position, may hold it his absolute duty to carry out the directions of the law whether or no he approves the law, and at whatever cost to himself. These attacks were borne with patience and dignity. He was never betrayed into recriminations, and could the more easily preserve his calmness, because he felt no animosity.

A bishop may be a power outside his own religious community even in a country where the clergy are separated as a caste from the lay people. Such men as Dupanloup in France show that. So too he may be a mighty moral and religious force outside his own religious community in a country where there is no church established or endowed by the State. The example of Dr. Phillips Brooks in the United States shows that. But Dupanloup would have been eminent and influential had he not been a clergyman at all; and Dr. Brooks was the most inspiring preacher and the most potent leader of religious thought in America long before, in the last years of his life, he reluctantly consented to accept the episcopal office. Fraser, not so gifted by nature as either of those men, would have had little chance of doing the work he did save in a country where the existence of an ancient establishment secures for one of its dignitaries a position of far-reaching influence. When the gains and losses to a nation of the retention of a church establishment are reckoned up, this may be set down among the gains.

If the Church of England possessed more leaders like Tait, Fraser, and Lightfoot--the statesman, the citizen, and the scholar--in the characters and careers of all of whom one finds the common mark of a catholic and pacific spirit, she would have no need to fear any a.s.saults of political foes, no temptation to ally herself with any party, but might stand as an establishment until, after long years, by the general wish of her own people, as well as of those who are without, she pa.s.sed peaceably into the position of being the first in honour, numbers, and influence among a group of Christian communities, all equally free from State control.

Fraser's example showed how much an att.i.tude of unpretending simplicity and friendliness to all sects and cla.s.ses may do to mitigate the jealousy and suspicion which still embitter the relations of the different religious bodies in England, and which work for evil even in its politics. He created, as Dean Stanley said, a new type of episcopal excellence: and why should not originality be shown in the conception and discharge of an office as well as in the sphere of pure thought or of literary creation?