The Upton Letters Part 10

His depression and collapse, which he so mercilessly chronicles, after the disaster, do not appear to me to be cowardly. He was an over-worked, over-strained man, with a strong vein of morbidity in his const.i.tution; and to have the great prize of a headship, which was the goal of his dearest hopes, put suddenly and evidently quite unexpectedly in his hands, and then in so unforeseen a manner torn away, must have been a terrible and unmanning catastrophe. What is ungenerous is that he did not more tenderly realise that eventually it all turned out for the best. He recognises the fact somewhat grudgingly. Yet he was disengaged by the shock from professional life.

He gained bodily strength and vigour by the change; he began his work of research; and then, just at the time when his ideal was consolidated, the Rectorship came to him--when it might have seemed that by his conduct he had forfeited all hopes of it.

In another respect the book is admirable. Mark Pattison attained high and deserved literary distinction; but there is no hint of complacency on this subject, rather, indeed, the reverse; for he confesses that success had upon him no effect but to humiliate him by the consideration that the completed work might have been so much better both in conception and execution than it actually was.

I feel, on closing the book, a great admiration for the man, mingled with infinite pity for the miseries which his own temperament inflicted on him; it gives me, too, a high intellectual stimulus; it makes me realise the n.o.bility and the beauty of knowledge, the greatness of the intellectual life. One may regret that in Pattison's case this was not mingled with more practical power, more sympathy, more desire to help rather than to pursue. But here, again, one cannot have everything, and the life presents a fine protest against materialism, against the desire of recognition, against illiberal and retrograde views of thought. Here was a great and lonely figure haunted by a dream which few of those about him could understand, and with which hardly any could sympathise. He writes pathetically: "I am fairly ent.i.tled to say that, since the year 1851, I have lived wholly for study. There can be no vanity in making this confession, for, strange to say, in a university ostensibly endowed for the cultivation of science and letters, such a life is hardly regarded as a creditable one."

The practical effect of such a book on me is to make me realise the high virtue of thoroughness. It is not wholly encouraging, because at a place like this one must do a good deal of one's work sloppily and sketchily; but it makes me ashamed of my sketchiness; I make good resolutions to get up my subjects better, and, even if I know that I shall relapse, something will have been gained. But that is a side-issue. The true gain is to have been confronted with a real man, to have looked into the depth of his spirit, to realise differences of temperament, to be initiated into a high and n.o.ble ambition. And at the same time, alas! to learn by his failures to value tact and sympathy and generosity still more; and to learn that n.o.ble purpose is ineffective if it is secluded; to try resolutely to see the strong points of other workers, rather than their feeblenesses; and to end by feeling that we have all of us abundant need to forgive and to be forgiven--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON, Sept. 26, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I am much exercised in my mind about school sermons. It seems to me that we ought to make more of them than we do. We have our sermons here, very wisely, I think, at the evening service. The boys are more alert, the preacher is presumably in a more genial mood, the chapel is warm and brightly lighted, the music has had a comforting and stimulating effect upon the mind; it is exactly the time when the boys are ready and disposed to be interested in themselves, their lives and characters; they are hopeful, serious, ardent. The iron is hot, and it is just the moment to strike.

Well, it seems to me that the opportunity is often missed. In the first place, all the clerical members of the staff are asked to preach in turn--"given a mount," as the boys say. The headmaster preaches once a month, and a certain number of outside preachers, old Uptonians, local clergy, and others are imported.

Now the first point that strikes me is that to suppose that every clergyman is ipso facto capable of preaching at all is a great mistake.

I suppose that every thoughtful Christian must have enough materials for a few sermons; there must be some aspects of truth that come home to every individual in a striking manner, some lessons of character which he has learnt. But he need not necessarily have the art of expressing himself in a penetrating and incisive way. It seems to me a mistaken sort of conscientiousness which makes it necessary for every preacher to compose his own sermons. I do not see why the sermons of great preachers should not frankly be read; one hears a dull sermon by a tired man on a subject of which Newman has treated with exquisite lucidity and feeling in one of his parochial sermons. Why is it better to hear tedious considerations on the same point expressed in a commonplace way than to listen to the words of a master of the art, and one too who saw, like Newman, very deep into the human heart? I would have a man frankly say at the beginning of his sermon that he had been thinking about a particular point, and that he was going to read one of Newman's sermons on the subject. Then, if any pa.s.sage was obscure or compressed, he might explain it a little.

Again, I want more homeliness, more simplicity, more directness in sermons; and so few people seem to be aware that these qualities of expression are not only the result of being a homely, simple, and direct character, but are a matter of long practice and careful art.

Then, again, I want sermons to be more shrewd and incisive. Holiness, saintliness, and piety are virtues which are foreign to the character of boys. If any proof of it is needed, it is only too true that if a boy applies any of the three adjectives holy, saintly, or pious to a person, it is not intended to be a compliment. The words in their mouths imply sanctimonious pretension, and a certain Pharisaical and even hypocritical scrupulousness. It is a great mistake to overlook this fact; I do not mean that a preacher should not attempt to praise these virtues, but if he does, he ought to be able to translate his thoughts into language which will approve itself to boys; he ought to be able to make it clear that such qualities are not inconsistent with manliness, humour, and kindliness. A school preacher ought to be able to indulge a vein of gentle satire; he ought to be able to make boys ashamed of their absurd conventionalism; he ought to give the impression that because he is a Christian he is none the less a man of the world in the right sense. He ought not to uphold what, for want of a better word, I will call a feminine religion, a religion of sainted choir-boys and exemplary death-beds. A boy does not want to be gentle, meek, and mild, and I fear I cannot say that it is to be desired that he should. But if a man is shrewd and even humorous first, he can lift his audience into purer and higher regions afterwards; and he will then be listened to, because his hearers will feel that the qualities they most admire--strength, keenness, good humour--need not be left behind at the threshold of the Christian life, but may be used and practised in the higher regions.

Then, too, I think that there is a sad want of variety. How rarely does one hear a biographical sermon; and yet biography is one of the things to which almost all boys will listen spellbound. I wish that a preacher would sometimes just tell the story of some gallant Christian life, showing the boys that they too may live such lives if they have the will. Preachers dwell far too much on the side of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation. Those, it seems to me, are much more mature ideals. I wish that they would dwell more upon the enjoyment, the interest, the amus.e.m.e.nt of being good in a vigorous way.

What has roused these thoughts in me are two sermons I have lately heard here. On Sunday week a great preacher came here, and spoke with extraordinary force and sense upon the benefits to be derived from making the most of chapel services. I never heard the thing better done. He gave the simplest motives for doing it. He said that we all believed in goodness in our hearts, and that a service, if we came to it in the right way, was a means of hammering goodness in. That it was a good thing that chapel services were compulsory, because if they were optional, a great many boys would stay away out of pure laziness, and lose much good thereby. And as they were compulsory, we had better make the most we could of them. He went on to speak of attention, of posture, and so forth. There are a certain number of big boys here, who have an offensive habit of putting their heads down upon their arms on the book-board during a sermon, and courting sleep. The preacher made a pause at this point, and said that it was, of course, true that an att.i.tude of extreme devotion did not always mean a corresponding seriousness of mind. There was a faint ripple of mirth at this, and then, one by one, the boys who were engaged in attempting to sleep raised themselves slowly up in a sheepish manner, trying to look as if they were only altering their position naturally. It was intensely ludicrous; but so good for the offenders! And then the preacher rose into a higher vein, and said how the thought of the school chapel would come back to the boys in distant days; that the careless would wish in vain that they had found the peace of Christ there, and that those who had worshipped in spirit and truth would be thankful that it had been so. And then he drew a little picture of a manly, pure, and kind ideal of a boy's life in words that made all hearts go out to him. Boys are heedless creatures; but I am sure that many of them, for a day or two at all events, tried to live a better life in the spirit of that strong and simple message.

Well, yesterday we had a man of a very different sort; earnest enough and high-minded, I am sure, but he seemed to have forgotten, if he had ever known, what a boy's heart and mind were like. The sermon was devoted to imploring boys to take Orders, and he drew a dismal picture of the sacrifices the step entailed, and depicted, in a singularly unattractive vein, the life of a city curate. Now the only way to make the thought of such a life appeal to boys is to indicate the bravery, the interest of it all, the certainty that you are helping human beings, the enjoyment which always attaches to human relationship.

The result was, I confess, extremely depressing. He made a fervent appeal at the end; "The call," he said, "comes to you now and to-day."

I watched from my stall with, I am sorry to say, immense amus.e.m.e.nt, the proceedings of a great, burly, red-faced boy, a prominent football player, and a very decent sort of fellow. He had fallen asleep early in the discourse; and at this urgent invitation, he opened one eye and cast it upon the preacher with a serene and contented air. Finding that the call did not appear to him to be particularly imperative, he slowly closed it again, and, with a good-tempered sigh, addressed himself once more to repose. I laughed secretly, hoping the preacher did not observe his hearer.

But, seriously, it seemed to me a lamentable waste of opportunities.

The Sunday evening service is the one time in the week when there is a chance of putting religion before the boys in a beautiful light. Most of them desire to be good, I think; their half-formed wishes, their faltering hopes, their feeble desires, ought to be tenderly met, and lifted, and encouraged. At times, too, a stern morality ought to be preached and enforced; wilful transgression ought to be held up in a terrible light. I do not really mind how it is done, but the heart ought somehow to be stirred and awakened. There is room for denunciation and there is room for encouragement. Best of all is a due admixture of both; if sin can be shown in its true colours, if the darkness, the horror, the misery of the vicious life can be displayed, and the spirit then pointed to the true and right path, the most is done that can be done.

But we grow so miserably stereotyped and mannerised. My cautious colleagues are dreadfully afraid of anything which they call revivalistic, and, indeed, of anything which is unconventional. I should like to see the Sunday sermon made one of the most stirring events of the week, as Arnold made it at Rugby. I should like preachers to be selected with the utmost care, and told beforehand what they were to preach about. No instruction is wanted in a school chapel--the boys get plenty of that in their Divinity lessons. What is wanted is that the heart should be touched, and that faint strivings after purity and goodness should be enforced and helped. To give the spirit wings, that ought to be the object. But so often we have to listen to a conscientious discourse, in which the preacher, after saying that the scene in which the narrative is laid is too well known to need description, proceeds to paint an ugly picture out of The Land and the Book or Farrar's Life of Christ. The story is then tediously related, and we end by a few ethical considerations, taken out of the footnotes of the Cambridge Bible for Schools or Homiletical Hints, which make even the most ardent Christian feel that after all the pursuit of perfection is a very dreary business.

But a brave, wise-hearted, and simple man, speaking from the heart to the heart, not as one who has attained to a standard of impossible perfection, but as an elder pilgrim, a little older, a little stronger, a little farther on the way--what cannot such an one do to set feeble feet on the path, and turn souls to the light? Boys are often pathetically anxious to be good; but they are creatures of impulse, and what they need is to feel that goodness is interesting, beautiful, and desirable. . . . Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON, Oct. 5, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--It is autumn now with us, the sweetest season of the year to a polar bear like myself. Of course, Spring is ravishingly, enchantingly beautiful, but she brings a languor with her, and there are the hot months to be lived through, treading close on her heels.

But now the summer is over and done; the long firelit evenings are coming, and, as if to console one for the loss of summer beauty, the whole world blazes out into a rich funeral pomp. I walked to-day with a friend to a place not far away, a great, moated house in a big, ancient park. We left the town, held on through the wretched gradations of suburbanity, and then, a few hundred yards from the business-like, treeless high-road, the coverts came in sight. There is always a dim mystery about a close-set wood showing its front across the fields. It always seems to me like a silent battalion guarding some secret thing.

We left the high-road and soon were in the wood--the dripping woodways, all strewn with ruinous gold, opening to right and left; and soon the roofs and towers of the big house--Puginesque Gothic, I must tell you--came in sight. But those early builders of the romantic revival, though they loved stucco and shallow niches, had somehow a sense of ma.s.s. It pleases me to know that the great Sir Walter himself had a hand in the building of this very house, planned the barbican and the water-gate. All round the house lies a broad moat of black water, full of innumerable carp. The place was breathlessly still; only the sharp melancholy cries of water-birds and the distant booming of guns broke the silence. The water was all sprinkled with golden leaves, that made a close carpet round the sluices; the high elms were powdered with gold; the chestnuts showed a rustier red. A silent gardener, raking leaves with ancient leisureliness, was the only sign of life--he might have been a spirit for all the sound he made; while the big house blinked across the rich clumps of Michaelmas daisies, and the dark windows showed a flicker of fire darting upon the walls. Everything seemed mournful, yet contented, dying serenely and tranquilly, with a great and n.o.ble dignity. I wish I could put into words the sweet solemnity, the satisfying gravity of the scene; it was like the sight of a beautiful aged face that testifies to an inner spirit which has learnt patience, tenderness, and trustfulness from experience, and is making ready, without fear or anxiety, for the last voyage.

I say gratefully that this is one of the benefits of growing older, that these beautiful things seem to speak more and more instantly to the mind. Perhaps the faculty of eager enjoyment is somewhat blunted; but the appeal, the sweetness, the pathos, the mystery of the world, as life goes on, fall far oftener and with far more of a magical spell upon the heart.

We walked for a while by a bridge, where the stream out of the moat ran hoa.r.s.ely, choked with drift, in its narrow walls. That melancholy and sobbing sound seemed only to bring out more forcibly the utter silence of the tall trees and the sky above them; light wreaths of mist lay over the moat, and we could see far across the rough pasture, with a few scattered oaks of immemorial age standing bluff and gnarled among the gra.s.s. The time of fresh spring showers, of sailing clouds, of basking summer heat, was over--so said the grey, gentle sky--what was left but to let the sap run backward to its secret home, to rest, to die? With such sober and stately acquiescence would I await the end, not grudgingly, not impatiently, but in a kind of solemn glory, with grat.i.tude and love and trust.

My companion of that day was Vane, one of my colleagues, and we had discussed a dozen of the small interests and problems that make up our busy life at this restless place; but a silence fell upon us now. The curtain of life was for a moment drawn aside, the hangings that wrap us round, and we looked for an instant into the vast and starlit silences, the formless, ancient dark, where a thousand years are but as yesterday, and into which the countless generations of men have marched, one after another. That is a solemn, but hardly a despairing thought; for something is being wrought out in the silence, something of which we may not be conscious, but which is surely there. Could we but lay that cool and mighty thought closer to our spirits! That impenetrable mystery ought to give us courage, to let us rest, as it were, within a mighty arm. Behind and beyond the precisest creed that great mystery lies; the bewildering question as to how it is possible for our own atomic life to be so sharply defined and bounded from the life of the world--why the frail tabernacle in which we move should be thus intensely our own, and all outside it apart from us.

Yet in days like this calm autumn day one seems to draw a little closer to the mystery, to take a nearer share in the great and wide inheritance, to be less of ourselves and more of G.o.d.--Ever yours,

T. B.

MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON, Oct. 12, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have nothing but local gossip to tell you. We have been having a series of Committee meetings lately about our Chapel services; I am a member of the Committee, and as so often happens when one is brought into close contact with one's colleagues upon a definite question, I find myself lost in bewilderment at the views which are held and advanced by sensible and virtuous men. I don't say that I am necessarily right, and that those who disagree with me are wrong; I daresay that some of my fellow-members think me a tiresome and wrong-headed man. But in one point I believe I am right; in things of this kind, the only policy seems to me to try to arrive at some broad principle, to know what you are driving at; and then, having arrived at it, to try and work it out in detail. Now two or three of my friends seem to me to begin at the wrong end; to have got firmly into their heads certain details, and to fight with all their power to get these details accepted, without attempting to try and develop a principle at all. For instance, Roberts, one of the members of the Committee, is only anxious for what he calls the maintenance of liturgical tradition; he says that there is a science of liturgy, and that it is of the utmost importance to keep in touch with it. The sort of detail that he presses is that at certain seasons the same hymn ought to be sung on Sunday morning and every morning throughout the week, because of the mediaeval system of octaves. He calls this knocking the same nail on the head, and, as is common enough, he is led to confuse a metaphor with an argument. Again, he is very anxious to have the Litany twice a week, that the boys may be trained, as he calls it, in the habit of continuous prayerful attention. Another member, Randall, is very anxious that the services should be what he calls instructive; that courses, for instance, of sermons should be preached on certain books of the Old Testament, on the Pauline Epistles, and so forth. He is also very much set on having dogmatic and doctrinal sermons, because dogma and doctrine are the bone and sinew of religion. Another man, old Pigott, says that the whole theory of worship is praise, and he is very anxious to avoid all subjective and individual religion.

I find myself in hopeless disagreement with these three worthy men; my own theory of school services is, to put it shortly, that they should FEED THE SOUL, and draw it gently to the mysteries of Love and Faith.

The whole point is, I believe, to rouse and sustain a pure and generous emotion. Most boys have in various degrees a religious sense. That is to say, that they have moments when they are conscious of the Fatherhood of G.o.d, of redemption from sin, of the indwelling of a Holy Spirit. They have moments when they see all that they might be and are not--moments when they would rather be pure than impure, unselfish rather than self-absorbed, kind rather than unkind, brave rather than cowardly; moments when they perceive, however dimly, that happiness lies in activity and kindliness, and when they would give much never to have stained their conscience with evil. It seems to me that school services ought to aim at developing these faint and faltering dreams, at increasing the sense of the beauty and peace of holiness, at giving them some strong and joyful thought that will send them back to the world of life resolved to try again, to be better and worthier.

I am afraid that I do not value the science of liturgical tradition very much. The essence of all science is that it should be progressive; our problems and needs are not the same as mediaeval problems and needs. The whole conception of G.o.d and man has broadened and deepened.

Science has taught us that nature is a part of the mind of G.o.d, not something to be merely contended against; again, it has taught us that man has probably not fallen from grace into corruption, but is slowly struggling upwards out of darkness into light. Again, we no longer think that everything was created for the use and enjoyment of man; we know now of huge tracts of the earth where for thousands of years a vast pageant of life has been displaying itself without any reference to humanity at all. Then, too, as a great scientist has lately pointed out, the dark and haunting sense of sin, that drove devotees to the desert and to lives of the grimmest asceticism, has given place to a n.o.bler conception of civic virtue, has turned men's hearts rather to amendment than to repentance; well, that, in the face of all this, we should be limited to the precise kind of devotions that approved themselves to mediaeval minds seems to me to be a purely retrograde position.

Then as to arranging services in order to cultivate the power of continuous prayer among boys, I think it a thoroughly unpractical theory. In the first place, for one boy so trained you blunt the religious susceptibilities of ninety-nine others. Boys are quick, lively, and bird-like creatures, intolerant above all things of tedium and strain; and I believe that in order to cultivate the religious sense in them, the first duty of all is to make religion attractive, and resolutely to put aside all that tends to make it a weariness.

As to doctrinal and dogmatic instruction, I cannot feel that, at a school, the chapel is the place for that; the boys here get a good deal of religious instruction, and Sunday is already too full, if anything, of it. I believe that the chapel is the place to make them, if possible, love their faith and find it beautiful; and if you can secure that, the dogma will look after itself. The point is, for instance, that a boy should be aware of his redemption, not that he should know the metaphysical method in which it was effected. There is very little dogmatic instruction in the Gospels, and what there is seems to have been delivered to the few and not to the many, to the shepherds rather than to the flocks; it is vital religion and not technical that the chapel should be concerned with.

As to the theory of praise, I cannot help feeling that the old idea that G.o.d demanded, so to speak, a certain amount of public recognition of His goodness and greatness is a purely savage and uncivilised form of fetish-worship; it is the same sort of religion that would attach material prosperity to religious observation; and belongs to a time when men believed that, in return for a certain number of sacrifices, rain and sun were sent to the crops of G.o.dly persons, with a nicer regard to their development than was applied in the case of the unG.o.dly. The thought of the Father of men feeling a certain satisfaction in their a.s.sembling together to roar out in concert somewhat extravagantly phrased ascriptions of honour and majesty seems to me purely childish.

My own belief is that services should in the first place be as short as possible; that there should be variety and interest, plenty of movement and plenty of singing, and that every service should be employed to meet and satisfy the restless minds and bodies of children. But though all should be simple, it should not, I think, be of a plain and obvious type entirely. There are many delicate mysteries, of hope and faith, of affliction and regret, of suffering and sorrow, of which many boys are dimly conscious. There are many subtle and seemly qualities which lie a little apart from the track of manly, full-fed, game-playing boyhood; and such emotions should be cultivated and given voice in our services.

To arrange the whole of our religion for brisk, straightforward boys, whose temptations are of an obvious type and who have never known sickness or sorrow is, I believe, a radical mistake. There is a good deal of secret, tender, delicate emotion in the hearts of many boys, which cannot be summarily cla.s.sed and dismissed as subjective.

Sermons should be brief and ethical, I believe. They should aim at waking generous thoughts and hopes, pure and gracious ideals. Anything of a biographical character appeals strongly to boys; and if one can show that it is not inconsistent with manliness to have a deep and earnest faith, to love truth and purity as well as liberty and honour, a gracious seed has been sown.

Above all, religion should not be treated from the purely boyish point of view; let the boys feel that they are strangers, soldiers, and pilgrims, let them realise that the world is a difficult place, but that there is indeed a golden clue that leads through the darkness of the labyrinth, if they can but set their hand upon it; let them learn to be humble and grateful, not hard and self-sufficient. And, above all, let them realise that things in this world do not come by chance, but that a soul is set in a certain place, and that happiness is to be found by interpreting the events of life rightly, by facing sorrows bravely, by showing kindness, by thankfully accepting joy and pleasure.

And lastly, there should come some sense of unity, the thought of combination for good, of unaffectedness about what we believe to be true and pure, of facing the world together and not toying with it in isolation. All this should be held up to boys.

Even as it is boys grow to love the school chapel, and to think of it in after years as a place where gleams of goodness and power visited them. It might be even more so than it is; but it can only be so, if we realise the conditions, the material with which we are working. We ought to set ourselves to meet and to encourage every beautiful aspiration, every holy and humble thought; not to begin with some eclectic theory, and to try to force boys into the mould. We do that in every other department of school life; but I would have the chapel to be a place of liberty, where tender spirits may be allowed a glimpse of high and holy things which they fitfully desire, and which may indeed prove to be a gate of heaven.

Well, for once I have been able to finish a letter without a single interruption. If my letters, as a rule, seem very inconsequent, remember that they are often written under pressure. But I suppose we each envy the other; you would like a little more pressure and I a little less. I am glad to hear that all goes well; thank Nellie for her letter.--Ever yours,

T. B.