The death of John Llewelyn Davies in May last took from us a man of great strength of character and power of mind. He was in his ninety-first year when he died, and had outlived nearly all his contemporaries. Through his long life he was known to the few rather than to the many; but to those who knew him he was a notable figure, connoting high and pure aims, firm will, deep religious faith, and elimination of self in the service of his fellow-men. The outer man in his case did not tell the full story of his nature. No one had a warmer or kinder heart, a greater fund of sympathy, or more real and abiding enthusiasm for the causes in which he believed, and for which he zealously contended. Fire was there and humour too, but there was no effusiveness in manner or in speech. Strong feeling was held in restraint by stronger self-control.
He was a man of varied interests and claims to distinction, without being in the ordinary sense a many-sided man. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as in later years were three of his sons; and he took his degree in company with a singularly able body of men, comprising, for instance, Bishop Westcott, the great Latin scholar Professor Mayor, and Lord Stanley, as he then was, afterwards Lord Derby, Foreign Minister under Disraeli, Colonial Minister under Gladstone. Four years later the soundness of his scholarship was abundantly proved by giving to the world the well-known translation of Plato’s ‘Republic,’ used and implicitly trusted as hardly any other translation of a classical author before or since. His colleague in the work was the Rev. David Vaughan, brother of the great headmaster of Harrow, who was afterwards Master of the Temple and Dean of Llandaff. Llewelyn Davies and David Vaughan had been bracketed in the Tripos, and as Llewelyn Davies was one of the Founders of the Working Men’s College in London, so Vaughan a little later founded a Working Men’s College at Leicester on the same lines.
As a theologian, he belonged to the sane, masculine Cambridge school, which included his friends Lightfoot, Westcott, Hort, and others—a race of men who were not afraid to bring scholarly criticism to bear upon theological writings and doctrines, strengthening the faith by broadening its basis. On sacred subjects, as on Plato, he wrote with acknowledged authority. The man whom he followed above all others, and whose views he embodied, was Frederick Denison Maurice. He read the last words over Maurice’s grave, and, until he himself was laid to rest, he preached and practised the life which Maurice led and taught.
Virile in mind, he was virile in body also. One of the original members of the Alpine Club, and a pioneer in some notable ascents, he lived to attend the jubilee dinner of the Club, and was well over eighty when he visited Switzerland for the last time. A hard-working clergyman of the Church of England, hard-working whether in town or country, for his benefices ranged from Whitechapel and Marylebone to Kirkby Lonsdale in Westmorland, he was all the time not a clergyman only, but a citizen, holding that the one implied the other; that the preacher of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man must practise what he preaches; that you cannot guide the people unless you know them, not as a member of an exclusive caste, but being among them as one that serveth. At one time he was a member of the London School Board: he was a staunch supporter of the co-operative movement: he laboured for the cause of women, was Principal of Queen’s College, Harley Street, and Chairman of the governing body of the Working Women’s College. So strong was his sense of public duty that a friend described him as the only man who had ever been known to take a positive pleasure in paying rates and taxes.
Like Maurice, he was wholly indifferent to worldly gain, and the last man to solicit preferment in any shape. His own words on the subject were, that he would rather that people asked why he was not made a bishop than why he was. The story goes that Mr. Gladstone once attended his church in Marylebone, in order to judge for himself of the vicar’s fitness for promotion. The Prime Minister was so depressed by the discourse which he heard and the small attendance, that all chance of promotion vanished. The great man did not know that, as a matter of fact, he had been listening to another preacher altogether, that, as it happened, Llewelyn Davies was away on a holiday and not in the church that day. It is true that the latter was somewhat cold in manner and measured in address, not by any means a preacher to electrify large congregations and appeal to popular audiences, one who convinced rather than attracted—a guide to thinking men, not a master of the rhetoric which moves the multitude. Still, in a worldly sense, he never received his due. Our Church of England seems to have considerable capacity for leaving its best and wisest sons out in the cold. Maurice and Llewelyn Davies kept numbers in the faith who would otherwise have drifted from it, because their teaching and their lives proved to demonstration that breadth of view, intellectual power, and democratic sympathies are wholly compatible with intense religious belief, conspicuous before all men every day and all day.
He took his degree in what he himself styled the ‘fateful year’ 1848, a time of social and industrial upheaval. Then it was that what was known as the Christian Socialist Movement came into being, and six years later, in 1854, the Christian Socialists founded the Working Men’s College. Llewelyn Davies was one of them; and when he died, the last of the founders passed away after nearly sixty-two years of the life of the College. They were a great band of men, these Christian Socialists. Charles Kingsley was prominent among them. So was John Ruskin, so were Tom Hughes, John Malcolm Ludlow, the father of Friendly Societies, Professor Westlake, the International lawyer, and many other men of note. They were poles asunder from one another in character, in pursuits, in a hundred ways; but they all had the betterment of their fellow-men in mind, and one man held them all together, the greatest but most humble-minded of them all, Maurice, a leader in spite of himself. I came into the College years after Maurice had died, but I found that some rare and potent influence had been and still was at work, that some personality had left an impress, which was different in kind and greater in degree than anything in ordinary life. Men of all religions and of no religion seemed to have become infected with a kind of noble contagion, and in turn to be infecting others. One old student explained to me that the secret of Maurice’s influence was his transparent truthfulness, that he taught ‘No lie ever had done or ever could do any conceivable good in the world.’ Another found the explanation in his burning sense of brotherhood. The truth was that a man had come among them who, as no other man they ever saw or heard of, gave the message and lived the life of Christ.
Charles Kingsley did not take much active part in founding and fashioning the College, and after Maurice died the clerical element among the founders was represented by Llewelyn Davies. I have said that the founders were of the most divers views, in religion as in other respects. Notwithstanding, the College was cradled in religion; the influence of Maurice was paramount; and to Ludlow or Tom Hughes, laymen both, religious faith was as the breath of life. Of all the founders, other than Maurice himself, Hughes was probably Llewelyn Davies’ closest friend. The two men were of the most different types. Hughes was sanguine, trustful, impulsive, carrying on into old age all the warmth and buoyancy and charm of youth. Davies was calm, thoughtful, reserved, weighing men and things in the balance with the utmost care. But their very diversities seemed to bring them together, and they loved one another. In the Jubilee volume of the College, which Davies edited, he wrote of his friend Hughes as ‘the man of childlike heart, of knightly loyalty, of the most humane geniality, and of the simplest Christian faith.’
Hughes was Principal of the College, in succession to Maurice, when I joined it: many were the stories which he told himself, and many gathered round him. He used to tell with glee his experience as a teacher, when the College first opened its doors. Professor Westlake’s account of what happened is as follows: ‘His teaching of English law, not by his fault, but by that of the subject, never, I think, attracted the numbers which the value of the study ought to command.’ Hughes’ own account was far more racy: he took a law class, which was a complete failure, upon which he converted it into a boxing class, which was an unbounded success. One evening Hughes impressed upon us that the great object of the College was to teach what were known in old days as ‘the Humanities.’ Lord Justice Bowen, who was present and spoke after him, pertinently asked whether he included boxing among the Humanities.
A great friend of Hughes and his circle, and a warm friend of the College, was James Russell Lowell, who, it will be remembered, was at one time American ambassador in this country—not the only American ambassador to whom the College owes a debt, for Mr. Choate at a later date gave us a notable address on Benjamin Franklin. I remember an annual gathering at which both Hughes and Lowell spoke. Hughes in his speech recalled the beginnings of the College and of the co-operative movement, the two having been closely associated with each other, and told the story of a certain brushmaker who had been a student of the College. The brushmaker had fallen on evil times, and his business had collapsed. Hughes and other co-operators and Christian Socialists clubbed together to set him up again, and in gratitude the brushmaker made them all brushes which, according to Hughes, had exceedingly hard bristles. Now Hughes had a most shiny bald head, and, with his eye on that head, Lowell, who spoke afterwards, in stately and measured terms, expressed a hope that all the students of the College did their work as thoroughly and effectively as the brushmaker had done his. On this same occasion Hughes referred to the fact that some time before Nathaniel Hawthorne had come to tea at the College. Again Lowell saw and took his opportunity. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘Mr. Hughes has made a slip; it cannot have been tea that my friend Hawthorne came to, for Hawthorne was a man of robuster fibre.’
I always think of Lowell as the most accomplished master of graceful English to whom I ever listened. I should never have heard or seen him, I should never have come across Llewelyn Davies or Tom Hughes, or many other men of mark in the world, had I not gone to the College. I went there, a young Oxford man, anxious to ‘do my bit,’ and thinking that I could confer benefits on others by teaching them. My experience is—and numbers of young University men have had the same experience—that I received infinitely more than I ever gave. Apart from friendships made for life, apart from having become, I hope, infected with the contagion of which I have spoken, simply and solely from the point of view of getting on in the world, it was a distinct gain to a young man to be thrown into association with great men or the intimate friends of great men, and to be constantly in an atmosphere of wide interests, high aims, and tolerant views. My start in the teaching line was even more unlucky than Tom Hughes’. Apparently he got some kind of class together, who then deserted him until he took to boxing. My recollection is that I put out an elaborate prospectus of what I was going to teach, and that no class turned up at all. Subsequently, however, I did manage to scrape together a small class, and supplemented teaching, not by boxing, but by becoming an active member of the Maurice Cricket Club, the President of which was Alfred Lyttelton, who, like Hughes, took a law class, but with much greater success.