In a wider sense, perhaps, there was a more rational basis for the outcry. For Temple, with all his good and great qualities, was too little of the mystic to appeal to those who regarded the Church as something above and beyond a useful (or even indispensable) organisation. His sense of professional duty was high, but his mind was eminently that of a practical man of affairs, and he would probably have acted more wisely, in other interests as well as his own, if he had remained in the scholastic work to which the earlier part of his life was devoted. When he went to Exeter Temple had behind him a great record as an educational bureaucrat, and a still greater record as head-master of Rugby. But he had never served as a parish priest; his disposition was aloof, his temper autocratic, his manner rugged, his voice harsh and rasping; he had little imagination, and the quality of his mind fitted him more for politics, for high finance, for law, or even for soldiering than for the duties of a Christian high priest. A great spiritual leader in the full sense Temple could never have been. But he “made good” as a Bishop as he had “made good” as a head-master, and in much the same way. His diocese became a well-managed school, and his clergy were put in their places much like the boys of Rugby; some, perhaps, regarded him as a “beast,” none could call him other than a “just beast” and an energetic one. With the laity he had a certain popularity, partly because he was severe on any sacerdotal eccentricities that annoyed them, partly because with ordinary people he was more prone to unbend than with his professional brethren. He was at his very easiest in dealing with boys.

The translation to London, after fifteen years in the West, came in the natural course of events, and the Nineties found Temple well established at Fulham. He was now an old man, but his power of work was as little diminished as the angularity of his character. In a single year he would answer about ten thousand letters, perhaps a third of them in his own hand; the meetings he attended averaged more than one a day; he held seventy or eighty confirmations and ordained a hundred and fifty priests annually, and yet found time for services and addresses for nearly every day of the year. The masculine strength of his mind, the beautiful simplicity of his life, won admiration, but Archbishop Benson had often to deplore the want of that “little more” which would have been so much in his old friend and ex-principal. “He will not say or do,” he laments, at the time of the dockers’ strike, “one thing with the idea that men should think well of him.” “It is very painful,” he says again, in 1891, “very painful, to see the Lords so unappreciative of the Bishop of London—the strongest man nearly in the House, the clearest, the highest-toned, the most deeply sympathetic, the clearest in principle—yet because his voice is a little harsh and his accent a little provincial (though of what province it is hard to say), and his figure square and his hair a little rough, and because all this sets off the idea of his independence, he is not listened to at all by the cold, kindly, worldly-wise, gallant, landowning powers.” The Archbishop was a little cross because during the dockers’ strike Cardinal Manning managed to figure much more largely than Temple in the public eye. But this was something like blaming Darwin because he was not Sir Henry Irving. Temple was Temple, and Manning was Manning; and, if Manning was wise to be always Manning, Temple was certainly wise to be always Temple. A histrionic or diplomatic Temple is something from which the very imagination recoils. And, after all, the gentle Archbishop’s repinings were hardly justified. The kind of worth which Temple represented rarely wins enthusiasm, but it seldom fails to gain respect. To suggest that Temple made any real impression on the great pagan capital would be absurd; like everybody else who has been called for generations to the See of London he was mocked by the gigantic hopelessness of his task. Before London can be made Christian it must be made human, and, though Londoners remain very human, London had long ceased to be so. “London,” says an admirer, “expected in Temple a man of grit and steel, and so it found him.” London, of course, expected nothing, and was in no way disappointed; it was little more concerned with his coming than with the appointment of a new magistrate at Bow Street, and little more concerned with his departure than with the retirement of a Lord Mayor. To London as London—London, just as ignorant of the men who make its laws as of the men who tear up its pavements—Temple was exactly nothing. To a great many people in London he was a name, and to a great many more a character. To only a tiny fraction of London was he anything else. But here, as at Exeter, he “made good” in the narrower sense. He organised and energised, wisely stirred up some dogs which had slept in his predecessor’s time, still more wisely administered soothing syrup to other dogs too emphatically awake, put down his foot in some small matters, kept it discreetly poised in some big ones, and imparted to all who worked under him something of his own single-mindedness and passion for work.

He was seventy-six when he removed to Lambeth, and could save a shilling on his cab fare. “I have still five years’ work in me,” he said to a friend after he had accepted Lord Salisbury’s offer of the Primacy, and the forecast was almost exact; he died before he had completed his sixth year as Archbishop. The work was hardly new to him; for years he had been Archbishop Benson’s chief adviser, and the change was more one of form than of substance. The duties of the highest ecclesiastical office were carried through in the same spirit as those which had gone before; in spite of failing powers the indomitable old man did all that presented itself as his proper work, and, like the patron of Gil Blas, refused to recognise that the same Time which had now reduced him to a rebellious invalidism had had some effect on his sturdy intelligence. He outlived both the century and the great Queen; it actually fell to him, born under George IV, to crown Edward VII, and, like Chatham, he was addressing the House of Lords when he sank under the blow which within a few days ended his life.

On the broad current of the national life at the beginning of a bustling new reign, the news of his death caused but a momentary ripple. But far outside the limits of his own Church and circle there were not wanting men who felt that a figure had been removed that left none to vie with it in its rugged and lonely majesty. It was not a time of popularity for the typical Victorian virtues. It stood to the age that had passed somewhat as the Regency did to the last phase of the reign of Louis XIV. But those who read at the close of 1902 the record of the full and fine life that had begun eighty-one years earlier could only admit that the age must have been great in which Temple after all never reached quite the first rank.

CHAPTER X
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL

In 1880 Lord Randolph Churchill was regarded as a trifler; in 1885 he was definitely numbered among the three or four men who counted in British politics; in 1890 he was, politically speaking, a ghost; and in 1895 he died. His whole political career—or at least that part of it which could distinguish him from the ordinary representative of a family borough—scarcely extended to fifteen years; the significant part of it was compressed within five. Yet those five years sufficed to give him an ascendancy in the Tory Party far more marked than that which Disraeli had established after decades of laborious application. The moment before his fall it seemed certain that he, and no other, would shape Tory policy; that he would, sooner or later, oust the Cecils; that he would get rid of the Birmingham influence; and that, within some quite measurable period, he would, with undisputed authority, reign over a Cabinet of young Tories committed to the task of making actual part at least of the Young England dream of the great Jew who, with his usual generous appreciation of youthful talent, had marked Lord Randolph early as one who must, with any reasonable prudence and industry, play a great part in affairs.