The main source of the Duke’s influence was, indeed, the general conviction that, with a masculine but ordinary understanding, he combined perfect disinterestedness and straightforwardness. This faith was not based wholly on the fact that he was a great noble; the middle class might, indeed, have been a little scandalised by the side of him illustrated in the affair of the napkin-ring. The Duke had seen in the paper that somebody had given a certain bride a set of napkin-rings. He worried about the meaning of this until he came across a knowledgeable man, who, he thought, could explain what napkin-rings were. The explanation was given that in a certain class of society people did not use clean napkins for every meal, and that therefore each member of the family kept a distinctive ring. The Duke remained silent for ten minutes. Then he suddenly exclaimed: “Good God!” It was certainly not this kind of aloofness that gave the Duke his power. Nor was it so much to the point that he was placed, by his rank and wealth, far above all vulgar ambitions. Many men as rich and as highly placed have been the objects of sleepless suspicion. Apart from money, there are plenty of temptations open to rank, and wealth is no guarantee of honesty. The Duke enjoyed public confidence in an extraordinary degree because it was so very obvious, not only that he was getting nothing, but that it was impossible for him to get anything out of politics. His yawn, in fact, was his great talisman. Everybody knew that if he had consulted his own tastes he would hardly have stirred beyond his park palings. Everybody knew that he carried out what he believed to be his political duties just as he carried out what he believed to be his social duties, not because he got any pleasure or profit from them, but because the obligations were there and had to be met. It is said that he once invited the Prince of Wales to lunch, and then forgot all about it; the Prince presumably arrived to find Devonshire House fragrant with the ducal equivalent of Irish stew; while His Grace himself had to be summoned by telephone from his club by a terrified major-domo. It was part of the Duke’s strength that such a story could be related of him. The true point was not that he was a great nobleman, and therefore disinterested; it was that he was from every point of view uninterested. It was not simply that he had no financial or social axe to grind; there was no fancy cutlery of the spiritual or intellectual kind which he desired to sharpen. Men do not always ruin their country for a fee; they more often do so for a fad. The Duke was free from all fads, except Whiggism. He had a certain honourable interest in education. He nourished, in his dry and secretive way, a distinct love of the arts in general and of certain departments in literature. But on all public questions he was able to bring his faculties, such as they were—and it was particularly easy to rate them too lowly—without subjective disturbance; it may almost be said that he thought in vacuo.
Moreover, he was in essence a very ordinary Englishman. With an effort he might think of himself as a Briton, or as a citizen of the British Empire. But his inner mind knew nothing of Acts of Union; he was English and nothing but English. And being very English, it followed that he cared a great deal about truth and very little about logic, and that he was much more inclined to follow the beaten track than to initiate. People felt that he was a safe man, who would not go far, but therefore could not go far wrong. He once described himself, rather pathetically, as “the brake on the wheel.” It is a humble, but on occasion a useful, function, and the sheer unimaginativeness of the man was time and time again an asset to his country. But such a character arouses no great enthusiasm, and if the Duke was trusted without limit, he was neither a popular idol nor the hero of a small circle. He went his way in a certain detachment, never alone but always a little lonely. Even in his own houses there was a tendency to regard him as something to gather round instead of someone to talk to. He might almost be said to fulfil the function of the dining-table rather than of the host.
The position had its compensations. The Duke was the chartered libertine of his time. He could go poaching where others could not look over the hedge. Lord Rosebery’s Derby victories caused scandal among the virtuous of his party. Nobody troubled about the Duke’s bets or race-horses. He played bridge for high points, but nobody thought of him as a gambler. He used emphatic adjectives, without the reproach attaching to the swearer of profane oaths. It may be an exaggeration to say that whatever the Duke did was right. But nobody troubled about his doing wrong; no doubt because people felt that it would not be very much wrong, after all. And in this their judgment was sufficiently sound. The man was in no sense a saint or a hero. He never said or did a thing to make a single man’s pulse beat quicker. He was incapable of the highest in any kind. But his character, however prosaic, was based on a foundation of granitic firmness. If not a great man, he was at least a true and honest one.
CHAPTER IX
ARCHBISHOP TEMPLE
It is related of Frederick Temple, when he was Bishop of London, that he offered two shillings to a cabman who had brought him from somewhere near Piccadilly to Fulham Palace. The cabman looked at the Bishop more in sorrow than in anger. “Would St. Porl,” he asked, “if he were alive now, treat a poor man like that?” “No,” said Temple, “if St. Paul were alive he would be at Lambeth, and the fare there is only a shilling.”
The wit and the philosophy were equally characteristic of the gnarled old man who, at a time of life when most people are fit only for the chimney corner, was still regarded as the strongest prelate on the Bench. Wit, the wit of the peasant rather than of the courtier—and there is no more authentic variety—Dr. Temple had in full measure; there was something reminiscent of Swift in the homely shrewdness of his judgments, and in the terse vigour with which he expressed them. The peasant predominated also in his philosophy; the Rugby boy who delivered the famous opinion that he was “a beast, but a just beast,” was probably not conscious how very right the description was. Temple had eminently the peasant’s sense of what was due from as well as to him. He was spiritual kinsman to that Scottish gardener in Mr. Chesterton’s tale who, being bequeathed “all the gold of the Ogilvies,” took it all, to the very stopping in the testator’s teeth, but left everything else. That manner which many found repellent was not the manner of a really harsh man; Temple could feel deeply, and the sobs that convulsed him when he heard of Archbishop Benson’s sudden death were the authentic heralds of a warm heart. But he had Dr. Johnson’s impatience of “foppish complaints,” of unmeaning compliments, of the little graces that matter so much with the ordinary run of men and women. Of work well and truly done he was sufficiently appreciative, but only sufficiently; after all, good work was the thing to expect, and why make a fuss about it? When people who had no right expressed appreciation of himself he snapped savagely. A courtly Rector once expressed the fear that his lordship must be very tired after such long and self-sacrificing exertions. “Not more tired than a man ought to be,” barked Temple. A careful Vicar remonstrated with him for standing so long bare-headed under a blazing sun. “My skull is thicker than yours,” was the only reply. Above all, he hated anything suggesting professional “gush.” At the laying of the foundation-stone of a new church a clergyman with tendencies that way remarked on the pleasure it must be to him to take part in ceremonies so eloquent of the extending scope of the Church in his diocese. “Not at all,” retorted Temple, “at these affairs I get nothing but cold lamb and ‘The Church’s One Foundation,’ and I’m tired of both.” Though a connoisseur in vintages, he gave up the use of wine simply in order to make easier his task as a temperance-worker; but this self-immolation (and he would have snarled at anybody who praised it as such) made him only the more acid at the expense of men who seemed to him to talk exaggerated nonsense about teetotalism as the foundation of all the virtues.
The truth was that Temple, though of good blood, was himself half a peasant, and was full of that impatience with any kind of pretence which comes of close contact with the soil. He had all the peasant’s pride, together with all the peasant’s contempt for what they call in the country “mucky pride.” Himself master of a pure and masculine style, he detested all floridity of speech. To the end of his life his manners were a little rustic, and he retained that sense of economy (having no necessary relation to meanness) which is inborn in most country people above the station of the labourer and below that of the landlord; when Primate of All England he munched his bun and sipped his milk at a tea-shop with the more satisfaction for the consciousness that they cost only twopence; the “tip” he would omit. Curiously enough, this most English of men was born on soil always Hellenic, and now officially Greek. Thirteenth of the fifteen children of an infantry officer who had been appointed Resident of Santa Maura, one of the Ionian Isles, Temple grew up to speak modern Greek and Italian as fluently as his mother tongue. His father, able and upright, but of explosive temper, came originally from the North Country, and belonged to a branch of that Temple family which, first made illustrious by the husband of Dorothy Osborne and the patron of Swift, has given so many statesmen to England. The mother of the future Archbishop was a Cornish woman by blood and a Puritan by habit and tradition, frugal, pious, authoritative, and immensely capable. She taught Frederick till he was twelve; and, though she knew no Latin, and had no notion of the low cunning of Euclid, she managed to give him a very fair grounding in these and other subjects. The only drawback of this queer kind of instruction was that the boy was left to his own devices in the matter of quantities, and years afterwards the masters at Blundell’s were horrified by his barbaric pronunciation of the polished tongue of Virgil. After his retirement from the Ionian Islands, the paternal Temple bought a small farm in Devonshire, but he could not make it pay, and was forced to take a small appointment in West Africa, where he died. His widow did her best with the farm and a small pension, and young Temple learned how to “muck out” pigsties, to handle stock, and, above all, to plough; years after he could boast that he could draw as straight a furrow as any man in Cornwall, and when as an undergraduate he applied for admission to a Chartist meeting he was allowed to pass the barrier on the testimony of his hands; they were those of an indubitable manual worker.
Mere hard work and hard living, however, fail to embitter a lad of healthy mind and body who is conscious of a creditable past and ambitious of a better future. Temple could bear with stoicism the regimen of dry bread which the poverty of the family compelled. The only severe wound was to his pride. “I think the thing that pinched me most,” said Temple long afterwards, “was to wear patched clothes and patched shoes.” But even this does not seem to have weighed much; his character was sturdy and his spirits were high; and the picture we have of him at Blundell’s is by no means that of the self-conscious poor scholar. Not only was he a hearty player and fighter, but (on the authority of the head-master) “the most impudent boy that ever lived”; and the abounding health of his mind is proved by his detestation of Swiss Family Robinson—“a hateful book,” he calls it, “the liars were so lucky.” At Balliol, where he went with a scholarship, life was hard; he had no fire in his room even in the depth of winter, and was known to read under the light of the hall lamp because he had no oil for his own. The Tractarian movement was then at its climax; Newman was preaching the last of his sermons at St. Mary’s before his conversion to the ancient Church. But Temple seems to have kept his head surprisingly amid all this ferment; he had in truth, throughout life, something of that calm outlook on religion which struck young Esmond in Master Thomas Tusher. He believed in Christianity much as a sound business man believes in double entry, but with conviction there was no emotion. No man dreamed fewer dreams, partly, no doubt, because few men did harder work; work kills dreaming, for good as well as for ill. Outwardly there was little to distinguish Temple from those great pagans of the eighteenth century who nearly made the Church in England what the Church in Ireland actually became. But he had somewhere hidden under the harsh husk of rationalism a little of that wistfulness which one notes in so many of the nineteenth-century clergy; the thing is best described by referring to Kingsley’s anxiety to be with the earliest authorities in theology and the latest authorities in science. In his earlier life, naturally enough, the tendency to modernism was most marked. Temple’s orthodoxy was called into question over his contribution to Essays and Reviews, but there seems no reason to suppose that he departed far from the straight path, and those who have survived to hear most of the great Christian dogmas attacked in conspicuous Church pulpits find inexplicable on purely doctrinal grounds the storm which broke when Mr. Gladstone offered Temple the See of Exeter.