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.
III
In the fact that Stone was at heart intensely human lay the secret of his hold upon the hearts of others. I have claimed high place for him and have called him by high name, but a “saint” at least I have never called him nor claimed him to be. We have been told that it is impossible to be heroic in a high hat, nor is it easy to picture a “saint” in a very pepper of a temper (to say nothing of a boating sweater) at loggerheads, and more than half minded to knock down, a foul-mouthed bargee. Stone’s Homeric laughter would not have accorded ill with some Valhalla of the gods, but his rollicking sense of fun, his schoolboy high spirits, still remembered affectionately and joyfully as they are by some who were with him, first as a boy, and thereafter as more than a middle-aged man at Charterhouse, suggest neither a nimbus nor the Saints’ Calendar.
In later life, when the endless calls upon his time barred him from following, other than rarely, the field sports that he so loved, and even from the exercise which was so necessary for a man of his physique, Stone not only put on weight, as happens always with athletes out of training, but developed a tendency to stoutness—not, I gather, from some study of the Old Masters, in keeping with the character of Saints, who as a class do not appear to run to flesh.
Neither in looks nor in his life was there anything about Stone of the ascetic who, living aloof and apart, tells over to himself—the beads, as it were, in a rosary of self-mortification—the list of pleasures denied, until in the contemplation of his self-denials he comes at last to find a melancholy pleasure. Stone, on the contrary, was the most natural and normal of men, with a healthy appetite for the good things of this world. If he fasted, as was the case during such a season as Holy Week, none knew of it except himself. He held that the season, in which the Church bids us look back in awe and worship upon the agony of our Lord’s Passion, is not a time for bodily indulgence by Christ’s minister. But fasting in a monkish sense, or as followed by the Roman Catholic Church, he neither followed himself nor enjoined others to follow, and such fasting as he practised was more in the way of salutary discipline than anything else, and he imposed no fasting upon others.
None the less, though Stone was, as I have said, no saint, I doubt whether any saint who was ever canonised had half so child-pure a heart or lived half so stainless a life. His was not the negative purity of the cold-blooded, the anæmic, or the passionless, to whom the temptations of the flesh made small appeal. He was a full-blooded, healthy and whole-natured man, a splendid “animal,” by whom the animal (which by God’s wisdom and grace is in us all) was not done violence to, stamped down, crushed out, and unnaturally suppressed, to his own physical and spiritual detriment and even danger. That is the unwisest of all courses to pursue. By mutilating and maiming the beautiful work and image of God in us, which since He made it must in itself be innocent and beautiful, we sin against our own human nature and against God. Human nature is like a tree. It must have space in which to fulfil the purpose for which it was intended, and in which to grow. Crush down, and seek to crush out, its natural expansion, and it takes distorted shapes (crippled limbs, as it were, on the tree of life) and hideous fungus-like boles and excrescences appear on what would otherwise have been a fair, straight, and shapely young growth. In Stone (to return to my original metaphor) the animal, which is in us all, was not a beast to be bludgeoned down, or to drag us to earth, but a beautiful wild and winged creature which brings strength and gladness to human life, and, wisely guided and controlled, may even bear us aloft and afar. In Stone it was so dominated by an iron will, so sublimated by knightly and noble ideals, and by his innate purity of soul, as to make impossible what was gross, sensual or base. And may I add, perhaps wickedly, that the animal in him was sometimes a joy as when by sheer brute force, if you like so to call it, he fell upon (so I was once told) three blackguards who, late one dark night, were foully assaulting a poor girl in what was then a lonely part of London Fields. Stone heard her screams, rushed to her help, and knocked out his first man with one blow. Then he closed with number two, and trouncing him so soundly that the fellow howled for mercy, flung him to the ground, and made off after number three, who had taken to his heels.