XVIII
SOME LETTERS AND TABLE TALK
My father's letters were seldom without a dash of playfulness or humour somewhere; a thing always fresh and spontaneous, unlike the calculated or laboured playfulness sometimes to be observed in the epistolary touch of literary folk. A capital example is a note to Matthew Arnold, at whose house he had left his umbrella. Arnold, it may be added, had recently been critically engaged upon the works of Bishop Wilson:—
Look at Bishop Wilson on the sin of covetousness, and then inspect your umbrella stand. You will there see a beautiful brown smooth-handled umbrella which is not your property.
Think of what the excellent prelate would have advised, and
bring it with you next time you come to the Club. The porter
will take care of it for me.
Sometimes the words will come trippingly from the pen as if they were flung out in a brilliant flash of talk, like the following sketch of human character:—
Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice—with an angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple in the posset—and when they can do exactly as they please they are very hard to drive.
As to his conversation, that, wrote the late Wilfrid Ward,
was singularly finished and (if I may so express it) clean cut; never long-winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid illustrations. He was an excellent raconteur, and his stories had a stamp of their own which would have made them always and everywhere acceptable. His sense of humour and economy of words would have made it impossible, had he lived to ninety, that they should ever have been disparaged as symptoms of what has been called "anecdotage."
Some fragments of his talk have been preserved by the same hand. Speaking of Tennyson's conversation, he said: "Doric beauty is its characteristic—perfect simplicity, without any ornament or anything artificial."
Telling how he had been to a meeting of the British Museum Trustees, he said: "After the meeting Archbishop Benson helped me on with my greatcoat. I was quite overcome by this species of spiritual investiture. 'Thank you, Archbishop,' I said; 'I feel as if I were receiving the pallium.'"
On another occasion he drew a distinction between two writers, with neither of whom he sympathized. "Don't mistake me. One is a thinker and man of letters, the other is only a literary man. Erasmus was a man of letters; Gigadibs a literary man. A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs. I should call him Gigadibsius Optimus Maximus."
Of his quickness in rising to the occasion Professor Howes tells a story. Staying after a lecture to answer questions, he turned to a student and said: "Well, I hope you understood it all." "All, sir, but one part, during which you stood between me and the blackboard," was the reply; the rejoinder: "I did my best to make myself clear, but could not render myself transparent."
From among my own recollections I give the following:—"It is one of the most saddening things that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy." Of the attitude towards Spiritualism of a certain member of the Society for Psychical Research:—"He doesn't believe in it, yet lends it the cover of his name. He is one of those people who talk of the 'possibility' of the thing, who think the difficulties of disproving a thing as good as direct evidence in its favour."
Again:—"It is very strange how most men will do anything to evade responsibility." Later, we were talking of the contrast between Hellene and Hebrew. "The real chosen people," he said, "were the Greeks. One of the most remarkable things about them is not only the smallness but the late rise of Attica, whereas Magna Graecia flourished in the eighth century. The Greeks were doing everything—piracy, trade, fighting, expelling the Persians. Never was there so large a number of self-governing communities.
"They fell short of the Jews in morality. How curious is the tolerant attitude of Socrates, like a modern man of the world talking to a young fellow who runs after the girls. The Jew, however he fell short in other respects, set himself a certain standard in cleanliness of life, and would not fall below it. The more creditable to him, because these vices were the offspring of the Semitic races among whom the Jew lived.
"There is a curious similarity between the position of the Jew in ancient times and what it is now. They were procurers and usurers among the Gentiles, yet many of them were singularly high-minded and pure. All, too, with an intense clannishness, the secret of their success, and a sense of superiority to the Gentile which would prevent the meanest Jew from sitting at table with a pro-consul.
"The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe for eighteen centuries his own superstitions—his ideas of the supernatural. Jahveh was no more than Zeus or Milcom; yet the Jew got established the belief in the inspiration of his Bible and his law. If I were a Jew, I should have the same contempt as he has for the Christian who acted in this way towards me, who took my ideas and scorned me for clinging to them."
Here may be quoted a passage from a letter to Professor George
Romanes:—
I have a great respect for the Nazarenism of Jesus—very little for later "Christianity." But the only religion that appeals to me is prophetic Judaism. Add to it something from the best Stoics and something from Spinoza and something from Goethe, and there is a religion for men. Some of these days I think I will make a cento out of the works of these people.
This cento, however, he never made. Had he done so, he would assuredly have illustrated his saying to Charles Kingsley:—
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact; not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations—
a notion expanded thus:—
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every pre-conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I resolved at all costs to do this.