Prime Ministers and Some Others: A Book of Reminiscences

by George William Erskine Russell

VII

HENRY MONTAGU BUTLER

The loved and honoured friend whose name stands at the head of this section was the fourth son and, youngest child of Dr. George Butler, Dean of Peterborough, and sometime Head Master of Harrow. Montagu Butler was himself-educated at Harrow under Dr. Vaughan, afterwards the well-known Master of the Temple, and proved to be in many respects the ideal schoolboy. He won all the prizes for composition, prose and verse, Greek, Latin, and English. He gained the principal scholarship, and was Head of the School. Beside all this, he was a member of the Cricket Eleven and made the highest score for Harrow in the match against Eton at Lord's.

In July, 1851, Montagu Butler left Harrow, and in the following October entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Scholar. He won the Bell University Scholarship, the Battie University Scholarship, the Browne Medal for a Greek Ode twice, the Camden Medal, Porson Prize, and First Member's Prize for a Latin Essay, and graduated as Senior Classic in 1855. Of such an undergraduate career a Fellowship at Trinity was the natural sequel, but Butler did not long reside at Cambridge. All through his boyhood and early manhood he had set his heart on a political career. He had a minute acquaintance with the political history of modern England, and his memory was stored with the masterpieces of political eloquence.

In 1856 he accepted the post of Private Secretary to the Right Hon. W. F. Cowper, afterwards Lord Mount Temple, and then President of the Board of Health in Lord Palmerston's Administration. In this office he served for two years, and then, retiring, he spent eleven months in foreign travel, visiting in turn the Tyrol, Venice, the Danube, Greece, Rome, Florence, and the Holy Land. During this period, he changed his plan of life, and in September, 1859, he was ordained Deacon by Bishop Lonsdale of Lichfield, on Letters Dimissory from Bishop Turton of Ely. His title was his Fellowship; but it was settled that the College should present him to the Vicarage of Great St. Mary's, Cambridge; and till it was vacant he was to have worked as a classical tutor in Trinity. Then came another change. "Dr. Vaughan's retirement," he wrote, "from the Head Mastership of Harrow startled us. We all took quietly for granted that he would stay on for years." However, this "startling" retirement took place, and there was a general agreement among friends of the School that Vaughan's favourite pupil, Montagu Butler, was the right man to succeed him. Accordingly, Butler was elected in November, 1859, though only twenty-six years old; and, with a view to the pastoral oversight of Harrow School, he was ordained priest, again by Bishop Lonsdale, at Advent, 1859.

In January, 1860, Montagu Butler entered on his new duties at Harrow, and there he spent five-and-twenty years of happy, strenuous, and serviceable life. He found 469 boys in the School; under his rule the numbers increased till they reached 600.

Butler's own culture was essentially classical, for he had been fashioned by Vaughan, who "thought in Greek," and he himself might almost have been said to think and feel in Latin elegiacs. But his scholarship was redeemed from pedantry by his wide reading, and by his genuine enthusiasm for all that is graceful in literature, modern as well as ancient. Under his rule the "grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum," which Matthew Arnold satirized, fought hard and long for its monopoly; but gradually it had to yield. Butler's first concession was to relax the absurd rule which had made Latin versification obligatory on every boy in the School, whatever his gifts or tastes. At the same time he introduced the regular teaching of Natural Science, and in 1869 he created a "Modern Side." An even more important feature of his rule was the official encouragement given to the study of music, which, from an illicit indulgence practised in holes and corners, became, under the energetic management of Mr. John Farmer, a prime element in the life of the School.

In January, 1868, Butler admitted me to Harrow School. My father had introduced me to him in the previous September, and I had fallen at once under his charm. He was curiously unlike what one had imagined a Head Master to be—not old and pompous and austere, but young and gracious, friendly in manner, and very light in hand. His leading characteristic was gracefulness. He was graceful in appearance, tall and as yet slender; graceful in movement and gesture; graceful in writing, and pre-eminently graceful in speech. He was young—thirty-four—and looked younger, although (availing himself of the opportunity afforded by an illness in the summer of 1867) he had just grown a beard. He had a keen sense of humour, and was not afraid to display it before boys, although he was a little pampered by a sense of the solemn reverence due not only to what was sacred, but to everything that was established and official. To breakfast with a Head Master is usually rather an awful experience, but there was no awe about the pleasant meals in Butler's dining-room (now the head Master's study), for he was unaffectedly kind, overflowing with happiness, and tactful in adapting his conversation to the capacities of his guests.

It was rather more alarming to face him at the periodical inspection of one's Form. ("Saying to the Head Master" was the old phrase, then lapsing out of date.) We used to think that he found a peculiar interest in testing the acquirements of such boys as he knew personally, and of those whose parents were his friends; so that on these occasions it was a doubtful privilege to "know him," as the phrase is, "at home." Till one reached the Sixth Form these social and official encounters with Butler were one's only opportunities of meeting him at close quarters; but every Sunday evening we heard him preach in the Chapel, and the cumulative effect of his sermons was, at least in many cases, great. They were always written in beautifully clear and fluent English, and were often decorated with a fine quotation in prose or verse. In substance they were extraordinarily simple, though not childish. For example, he often preached on such practical topics as Gambling, National Education; and the Housing of the Poor, as well as on themes more obviously and directly religious. He was at his best in commemorating a boy who had died in the School, when his genuine sympathy with sorrow made itself unmistakably felt. But whatever was the subject, whether public or domestic, he always treated it in the same simply Christian spirit. I know from his own lips that he had never passed through those depths of spiritual experience which go to make a great preacher; but his sermons revealed in every sentence a pure, chivalrous, and duty-loving heart. One of his intimate friends once spoke of his "Arthur-like" character, and the epithet was exactly right.

His most conspicuous gift was unquestionably his eloquence. His fluency, beauty of phrase, and happy power of turning "from grave to gay, from lively to severe," made him extraordinarily effective on a platform or at a social gathering. Once (in the autumn of 1870) he injured his right arm, and so was prevented from writing his sermons. For three or four Sundays he preached extempore, and even boys who did not usually care for sermons were fascinated by his oratory.

In the region of thought I doubt if he exercised any great influence. To me he never seemed to have arrived at his conclusions by any process of serious reasoning. He held strongly and conscientiously a certain number of conventions—a kind of Palmerstonian Whiggery, a love of "spirited foreign policy;" an admiration for the military character, an immense regard for the Crown, for Parliament, and for all established institutions (he was much shocked when the present Bishop of Oxford spoke in the Debating Society in favour of Republicanism); and in every department of life he paid an almost superstitious reverence to authority. I once ventured to tell him that even a beadle was a sacred being in his eyes, and he did not deny the soft impeachment.

His intellectual influence was not in the region of thought, but in that of expression. His scholarship was essentially literary. He had an instinctive and unaffected love of all that was beautiful, whether in prose or verse, in Greek, Latin, or English. His reading was wide and thorough. Nobody knew Burke so well, and he had a contagious enthusiasm for Parliamentary oratory. In composition he had a curiosa felicitas in the strictest meaning of the phrase; for his felicity was the product of care. To go through a prize-exercise with him was a real joy, so generous was his appreciation, so fastidious his taste, so dexterous his substitution of the telling for the ineffective word, and so palpably genuine his enjoyment of the business.

As a ruler his most noticeable quality was his power of discipline. He was feared—and a Head Master who is not feared is not fit for his post; and by bad boys he was hated, and by most good boys he was loved. By most, but not by all. There were some, even among the best, who resented his system of minute regulation, his "Chinese exactness" in trivial detail, his tendency to treat the tiniest breach of a School rule as if it were an offence against the moral law.

I think it may be said, in general terms, that those who knew him best loved him most. He had by nature a passionate temper, but it was grandly controlled, and seldom, if ever, led him into an injustice. His munificence in giving was unequalled in my experience. He was the warmest and staunchest of friends; through honour and dishonour, storm and sunshine, weal or woe, always and exactly the same. His memory for anything associated with his pupils careers was extraordinarily retentive, and he was even passionately loyal to Auld Lang Syne. And there is yet another characteristic which claims emphatic mention in any attempt to estimate his influence. He was conspicuously and essentially a gentleman. In appearance, manner, speech, thought, and act, this gentlemanlike quality of his nature made itself felt; and it roused in such as were susceptible of the spell an admiration which the most meritorious teachers have often, by sheer boorishness forfeited.

Time out of mind, a Head Mastership has been regarded as a stepping-stone to a Bishopric—with disastrous results to the Church—and in Butler's case it seemed only too likely that the precedent would be followed. Gladstone, when Prime Minister, once said to a Harrovian colleague, "What sort of Bishop would your old master, Dr. Butler, make?" "The very worst," was the reply. "He is quite ignorant of the Church, and would try to discipline his clergy like school-boys. But there is one place for which he is peculiarly qualified—the Mastership of Trinity." And the Prime Minister concurred. In June, 1885, Gladstone was driven from office, and was succeeded by Lord Salisbury. In October, 1886, the Master of Trinity (Dr. W. H. Thompson) died, and Salisbury promptly offered the Mastership to Dr. Butler, who had for a year been Dean of Gloucester. It is not often that a man is designated for the same great post by two Prime Ministers of different politics.

At Trinity, though at first he had to live down certain amount of jealousy and ill-feeling, Butler's power and influence increased steadily from year to year, and towards the end he was universally respected and admired. A resident contemporary writes: "He was certainly a Reformer, but not a violent one. His most conspicuous services to the College were, in my opinion, these: (1) Sage guidance of the turbulent and uncouth democracy of which a College Governing body consists. (2) A steady aim at the highest in education, being careful to secure the position of literary education from the encroachments of science and mathematics. (3) Affectionate stimulus to all undergraduates who need it, especially Old Harrovians. (4) The maintenance of the dignity and commanding position of Trinity and consequently of the University in the world at large."

To Cambridge generally Butler endeared himself by his eager interest in all good enterprises, by his stirring oratory and persuasive preaching, and by his lavish hospitality. As Vice-Chancellor, in 1889 and 1890, he worthily maintained the most dignified traditions of academical office. Those who knew him both on the religious and on the social side will appreciate the judgment said to have been pronounced by Canon Mason, then Master of Pembroke: "Butler will be saved, like Rahab, by hospitality and faith."

VIII

BASIL WILBERFORCE[*]

[Footnote *: A Memorial Address delivered in St. John's Church, Westminster.]

In the House of God the praise of man should always be restrained. I, therefore, do not propose to obey the natural instinct which would prompt me to deliver a copious eulogy of the friend whom we commemorate—an analysis of his character or a description of his gifts.

But, even in church, there is nothing out of place in an attempt to recall the particular aspects of truth which presented themselves with special force to a particular mind. Rather, it is a dutiful endeavour to acknowledge the gifts, whether in the way of spiritual illumination or of practical guidance, which God gave us through His servant; and, it is on some of those aspects as they presented themselves to the mind of Basil Wilberforce that I propose to speak—not, indeed, professing to treat them exhaustively, but bearing in mind that true saying of Jeremy Taylor: "In this world we believe in part and prophesy in part; and this imperfection shall never be done away, till we be transplanted to a more glorious state."

1. I cannot doubt about the point which should be put most prominently.

Wilberforce's most conspicuous characteristic was his vivid apprehension of the Spiritual World. His eyes, like Elisha's, were always open to see "the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire." Incorporeal presences were to him at least as real as those which are embodied in flesh and blood. Material phenomena were the veils of spiritual realities; and "the powers of the world to come" were more actual and more momentous than those which operate in time and space. Perhaps the most important gift which God gave to the Church through his ministry was his lifelong testimony against the darkness of Materialism.

2. Second only to his keen sense of the Unseen World was his conviction of God's love.

Other aspects of the Divine Nature as it is revealed to us—Almightiness, Justice, Awfulness (though, of course, he recognized them all)—did not colour his heart and life as they were coloured by the sense of the Divine Love. That Love seemed to him to explain all the mysteries of existence, to lift

"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: God, 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 God Who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

Those familiar words of Coleridge perfectly express Wilberforce's attitude 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 God-like love of all that God 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 Assisi, 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 God has provided as our companions in this life, and perhaps—for aught we know—in the next. In a word, he loved all God's creatures for God'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? Assuredly he never lost his hold on the central facts of the Christian revelation as they are stated in the creed of Nicæa 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 God 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 passage, tread the free and spacious streets of that Jerusalem which is above."

IX

EDITH SICHEL

This notice is more suitably headed with a name than with a title. 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 principal 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, Shoreditch, 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 class 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 Documents 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, Fénelon 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 God 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 God."