II
Ever since Stone died my intention has been, before laying down my own pen, some day and so far as I am able, to picture him as I knew him. It seemed to me a duty, no less than a trust, that some of us should put on record what manner of man it was who wrote these noble hymns, and how nobly he lived and died. My reason for delaying thus long about what to me is a labour of love, was the difficulty of picturing Stone as he was, without seeming to exaggerate. Fortunately it has not been left only to me to bear tribute, for the Rev. F. G. Ellerton, Vicar of Ellesmere, to whose father we owe the famous hymn, “Saviour, again to Thy dear Name we raise,” has written a Memoir of his former Vicar (I recollect Mr. Ellerton as Stone’s curate, more than a score of years ago), which was prefixed to a volume of “Selections” from Stone’s Poems and Hymns. Only one who had lived and worked with Stone could have drawn so true and sympathetic a picture of Stone the Christian, Stone the Churchman, Stone the hymn-writer, and Stone the man; and, except for the fact that Mr. Ellerton and I approach our subjects from different standpoints, his beautiful Appreciation will be found amply to confirm what I say in my briefer Silhouette.
It is to a sister of mine that I owe my first meeting with Stone. From her girlhood upward she had contributed poems, sketches and stories to the magazines, earning each year by her pen sums which to the rest of us—how wonderful it all was!—seemed princely, and very proud of her we all were.
Ill-health, and her determination never, after marriage, to let her writing interfere with her duties as wife and mother, have prevented her from following up, except very occasionally, the work in literature which she so loved, though two years ago she was able to publish, and with success, a first long novel.
But at that time she had made some girlish reputation as a writer of religious verse, and was commissioned to contribute “A Golden Song” each week to a well-known periodical. Stone’s attention was attracted by the sweet-briar simplicity and beauty of some of these “Golden Songs,” and when he and my sister chanced to meet, each was singularly drawn to the other, and so it was that first she and he, thereafter he and I, became friends and remained so to the end.
Now let me try to describe Stone as he was at the time of our first meeting, when he was in early middle life. Emerson said once that we take a man’s measure when first we meet him—and every time we meet him. One’s first comment at sight of Stone would inevitably have been: “A Man!” And one’s second: “An Englishman!”
Englishman was written, as the phrase runs, “all over him”—in appearance, in voice, as well as bearing—and I can conceive no disguise out of which the unmistakable Englishman would not have peeped. Unmistakably English as he was in appearance, yet, when one talked with him, and he became interested, enthusiastic, excited, when he spoke of his life’s work, his life’s hopes and dreams, but most of all when one could induce him to talk of England, Oxford, patriotism, loyalty, love, duty or poetry, and saw the flash in the eye, the throb at the temples, and heard the thrill in the voice, one’s next comment was, “Here surely is not part Anglo-Saxon, but all Celt!”
The Celt in him, for—though he never told us whence it came—the quicksilver of Celtic blood, there must have been in his veins, made mock continually of the Anglo-Saxon. Yet, either the Fairy Godmother, or the forgotten forbear who was responsible for this freakish intermingling of quick-running Celtic blood, all ardour and eagerness, with the slower, surer and steadier pulsing of an Anglo-Saxon strain, doled out to Stone none of the Celtic defects but only of the Celtic best. From the irritability, uncertainty, and the “impossibility” which make some Celts—at all events some of us Irishmen—an inscrutable problem and mystery of Providence, as well as an ever-present perplexity to our best friends, Stone was entirely free. In that respect he was inwardly, and in character, as truly English as he was truly English in the outer man.
He was of exceptional physique and presence. Only slightly above the middle height, but muscular of limb, broad and square-shouldered, and deep-chested as a lion, Stone was a fine specimen of virile manhood. Proud of his strength, for, though devoid of vanity, he had his full share of what I may call a seemly and proper pride, he carried himself well and erectly—head up, shoulders squared—walking with a step that was firm, steady and soldierly.
And here I may interpolate that, a soldier’s grandson as he was, all Stone’s boyhood longings were set on soldiering. Only the knowledge that it was the heart’s desire of the father and mother he so revered that he should follow his father by taking Holy Orders, and later the conviction that he was called of God to the ministry, kept him from a commission in the Army. His renunciation of his boyhood’s dream was the first great act of obedience in a life of consistent obedience and devotion to duty. The sacrifice—as it was—of his own wishes, was made manfully and uncomplainingly, and he threw himself whole-heartedly thereafter into his ministerial work. But the pang remained, and to the last, when he spoke of soldiering, there was that in his voice and in his eye which reminded one of an exile, looking across far waters to the land of his birth. To Stone, to have led a company, or a half-company, and for the first time, into action in the service of his Sovereign and of his country, would have been, in the words of George Meredith, the very “bend of passion’s rapids,” as supreme a moment as Rossetti’s “sacred hour for which the years did sigh.” That he would have made a gallant soldier, I am sure, but not a great one. Leading a charge, he would have been irresistible, but his was too highly-strung, too impulsive a temperament, calmly to plan out and to carry through the cold-blooded details of a campaign. He was to the last a soldier in heart, if not in looks, for, by the beard and a certain breezy bluffness of presence, he might very well have passed for a sailor. The head was finely moulded and on large leonine lines, the forehead broad, full and lofty, the nose strong, straight, purposeful and well-proportioned, and the set of the firm mouth, and the shaping of the determined chin, were in keeping with the forcefulness and the frankness of the eyes and of the whole face. The darkness—so dark as to be almost black—of the straight thick hair, which was brushed up and off the forehead, accentuated the Saxon ruddiness of his complexion and the glossy red-brown (like that of a newly-fallen chestnut) of his crisply curling moustache and beard, which in sunlight were almost auburn.
His eyes instantly challenged and held your own, for he invariably looked the person to whom he spoke fully and fearlessly, but never inquisitively (one cannot think of the word in connection with Stone), in the face; and it was his eyes that most remained in your memory when he was gone. “Intent,” set, and full of fire, the look in them was like the spoken word of command which calls soldiers to attention. Brown in colouring, they were not the hard, glittering and unrevealing brown which one sometimes sees in woman or in man, but eyes that, when he was reading poetry, could shine as if his soul were a lit taper, of which they were the flame. At other times, I have seen them as merry as a happy boy’s, as untroubled as cool clear agate stones at the bottom of a brook. His were eyes that recalled the love and devotion which look out at us from the eyes of some nobly-natured dog, yet eyes that when he was preaching, and the very soul within him was trembling under a terrible sense of responsibility to his people and to God, could burn fiercely red, like a fanned coal in a furnace, but always as true, brave and loyal eyes as ever looked out of human head.