Chapter 3

And as in small things, so in great. One principle consecrated his whole life. His love of God constrained him to the service of men, and no earthly object or consideration--however natural, innocent, or even laudable--was allowed for a moment to interpose itself between him and the supreme purpose for which he lived. He was by nature a man of keen ambition, and yet he twice refused office in the Household, once the Chief Secretaryship, and three times a seat in the Cabinet, because acceptance would have hindered him in his social legislation and philanthropic business. When we consider his singular qualifications for public life--his physical gifts, his power of speech, his habits of business, his intimate connections with the official caste--when we remember that he did not succeed to his paternal property till he was fifty years old, and then found it grossly neglected and burdened with debt; and that his purse had been constantly drained by his philanthropic enterprises--we are justified in saying that very few men have ever sacrificed so much for a cause which brought neither honours, nor riches, nor power, nor any visible reward, except the diminished suffering and increased happiness of multitudes who were the least able to help themselves.

Lord Shaftesbury's devotion to the cause of Labour led him to make the Factory Acts a touchstone of character. To the end of his days his view of public men was largely governed by the part which they had played in that great controversy. "Gladstone voted against me," was a stern sentence not seldom on his lips. "Bright was the most malignant opponent the Factory Bill ever had." "Cobden, though bitterly hostile, was better than Bright." Even men whom on general grounds he disliked and despised--such as Lord Beaconsfield and Bishop Wilberforce--found a saving clause in his judgment if he could truthfully say, "He helped me with the chimney-sweeps," or, "He felt for the wretched operatives."

But even apart from questions of humane sentiment and the supreme interests of social legislation, I always felt in my intercourse with Lord Shaftesbury that it would have been impossible for him to act for long together in subordination to, or even in concert with, any political leader. Resolute, self-reliant, inflexible; hating compromise; never turning aside by a hair's-breadth from the path of duty; incapable of flattering high or low; dreading leaps in the dark, but dreading more than anything else the sacrifice of principle to party--he was essentially the type of politician who is the despair of the official wire-puller.

Oddly enough, Lord Palmerston was the statesman with whom, despite all ethical dissimilarity, he had the most sympathy, and this arose partly from their near relationship and partly from Lord Palmerston's easy-going habit of placing his ecclesiastical patronage in Lord Shaftesbury's hands. It was this unseen but not unfelt power as a confidential yet irresponsible adviser that Lord Shaftesbury really enjoyed and, indeed, his political opinions were too individual to have allowed of binding association with either political party. He was, in the truest and best sense of the word, a Conservative. To call him a Tory would be quite misleading. He was not averse from Roman Catholic emancipation. He took no prominent part against the first Reform Bill. His resistance to the admission of the Jews to Parliament was directed rather against the method than the principle. Though not friendly to Women's Suffrage, he said: "I shall feel myself bound to conform to the national will, but I am not prepared to stimulate it."

But while no blind and unreasoning opponent of all change, he had a deep and lively veneration for the past. Institutions, doctrines, ceremonies, dignities, even social customs, which had descended from old time, had for him a fascination and an awe. In his high sense of the privileges and the duties of kingship, of aristocracy, of territorial possession, of established religions, he recalled the doctrine of Burke; and he resembled that illustrious man in his passionate love of principle, in his proud hatred of shifts and compromises, in his contempt for the whole race of mechanical politicians and their ignoble strife for place and power.

When Lord Derby formed his Government in 1866, on the defeat of Lord Russell's second Reform Bill, he endeavoured to obtain the sanction of Lord Shaftesbury's name and authority by offering him a seat in his Cabinet. This offer was promptly declined; had it been accepted, it might have had an important bearing on the following event, which was narrated to me by Lord Shaftesbury in 1882. One winter evening in 1867 he was sitting in his library in Grosvenor Square, when the servant told him that there was a poor man waiting to see him. The man was shown in, and proved to be a labourer from Clerkenwell, and one of the innumerable recipients of the old Earl's charity. He said, "My Lord, you have been very good to me, and I have come to tell you what I have heard." It appeared that at the public-house which he frequented he had overheard some Irishmen of desperate character plotting to blow up Clerkenwell prison. He gave Lord Shaftesbury the information to be used as he thought best, but made it a condition that his name should not be divulged. If it were, his life would not be worth an hour's purchase. Lord Shaftesbury pledged himself to secrecy, ordered his carriage, and drove instantly to Whitehall. The authorities there refused, on grounds of official practice, to entertain the information without the name and address of the informant. These, of course, could not be given. The warning was rejected, and the jail blown up. Had Lord Shaftesbury been a Cabinet Minister, this triumph of officialism would probably not have occurred.

What I have said of this favourite hero of mine in his public aspects will have prepared the sympathetic reader for the presentment of the man as he appeared in private life. For what he was abroad that he was at home. He was not a man who showed two natures or lived two lives. He was profoundly religious, eagerly benevolent, utterly impatient of whatever stood between him and the laudable object of the moment, warmly attached to those who shared his sympathies and helped his enterprises--_Fort comme le diamant; plus tendre qu'une mère_. The imperiousness which I described at the outset remained a leading characteristic to the last. His opinions were strong, his judgment was emphatic, his language unmeasured. He had been, all through his public life, surrounded by a cohort of admiring and obedient coadjutors, and he was unused to, and intolerant of, disagreement or opposition. It was a disconcerting experience to speak on a platform where he was chairman, and, just as one was warming to an impressive passage, to feel a vigorous pull at one's coat-tail, and to hear a quick, imperative voice say, in no muffled tone, "My dear fellow, are you never going to stop? We shall be here all night."

But when due allowance was made for this natural habit of command, Lord Shaftesbury was delightful company. Given to hospitality, he did the honours with stately grace; and, on the rare occasions when he could be induced to dine out, his presence was sure to make the party a success. In early life he had been pestered by a delicate digestion, and had accustomed himself to a regimen of rigid simplicity; but, though the most abstemious of men, he knew and liked a good glass of wine, and in a small party would bring out of the treasures of his memory things new and old with a copiousness and a vivacity which fairly fascinated his hearers. His conversation had a certain flavour of literature. His classical scholarship was easy and graceful. He had the Latin poets at his fingers' ends, spoke French fluently, knew Milton by heart, and was a great admirer of Crabbe. His own style, both in speech and writing, was copious, vigorous, and often really eloquent. It had the same ornamental precision as his exquisite handwriting. When he was among friends whom he thoroughly enjoyed, the sombre dignity of his conversation was constantly enlivened by flashes of a genuine humour, which relieved, by the force of vivid contrast, the habitual austerity of his demeanour.

A kind of proud humility was constantly present in his speech and bearing. Ostentation, display, lavish expenditure would have been abhorrent alike to his taste and his principles. The stately figure which bore itself so majestically in Courts and Parliaments naturally unbent among the costermongers of Whitechapel and the labourers of Dorsetshire. His personal appointments were simple to a degree; his own expenditure was restricted within the narrowest limits. But he loved, and was honestly proud of, his beautiful home--St. Giles's House, near Cranbourne; and when he received his guests, gentle or simple, at "The Saint," as he affectionately called it, the mixture of stateliness and geniality in his bearing and address was an object-lesson in high breeding. Once Lord Beaconsfield, who was staying with Lord Alington at Crichel, was driven over to call on Lord Shaftesbury at St. Giles's. When he rose to take his leave, he said, with characteristic magniloquence, but not without an element of truth, "Good-bye, my dear Lord. You have given me the privilege of seeing one of the most impressive of all spectacles--a great English nobleman living in patriarchal state in his own hereditary halls."

IV.

CARDINAL MANNING.

I have described a great philanthropist and a great statesman. My present subject is a man who combined in singular harmony the qualities of philanthropy and of statesmanship--Henry Edward, Cardinal Manning, and titular Archbishop of Westminster.

My acquaintance with Cardinal Manning began in 1833. Early in the Parliamentary session of that year he intimated, through a common friend, a desire to make my acquaintance. He wished to get an independent Member of Parliament, and especially, if possible, a Liberal and a Churchman, to take up in the House of Commons the cause of Denominational Education. His scheme was much the same as that now[3] adopted by the Government--the concurrent endowment of all denominational schools; which, as he remarked, would practically come to mean those of the Anglicans, the Romans, and the Wesleyans. In compliance with his request, I presented myself at that barrack-like building off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, which was formerly the Guards' Institute, and is now the Archbishop's House. Of course, I had long been familiar with the Cardinal's shrunken form and finely-cut features, and that extraordinary dignity of bearing which gave him, though in reality below the middle height, the air and aspect of a tall man. But I only knew him as a conspicuous and impressive figure in society, on public platforms, and (where he specially loved to be) in the precincts of the House of Commons. I had never exchanged a word with him, and it was with a feeling of very special interest that I entered his presence.

We had little in common. I was still a young man, and the Cardinal was already old. I was a staunch Anglican; he, the most devoted of Papalists. I was strongly opposed both to his Ultramontane policy and to those dexterous methods by which he was commonly supposed to promote it; and, as far as the circumstances of my life had given me any insight into the interior of Romanism, I sympathized with the great Oratorian of Birmingham rather than with his brother-cardinal of Westminster. But though I hope that my principles stood firm, all my prejudices melted away in that fascinating presence. Though there was something like half a century's difference in our ages, I felt at once and completely at home with him.

What made our perfect ease of intercourse more remarkable was that, as far as the Cardinal's immediate object was concerned, my visit was a total failure. I had no sympathy with his scheme for the endowment of denominational teaching, and, with all the will in the world to please him, I could not even meet him half way. But this untoward circumstance did not import the least difficulty or restraint into our conversation. He gently glided from business into general topics; knew all about my career, congratulated me on some recent success, remembered some of my belongings, inquired about my school and college, was interested to find that, like himself, I had been at Harrow and Oxford, and, after an hour's pleasant chat, said, "Now you must stay and have some luncheon." From that day to the end of his life I was a frequent visitor at his house, and every year that I knew him I learned to regard and respect him increasingly.

Looking back over these fourteen years, and reviewing my impressions of his personality, I must put first the physical aspect of the man. He seemed older than he was, and even more ascetic, for he looked as if, like the cardinal in _Lothair_, he lived on biscuits and soda-water; whereas he had a hearty appetite for his midday meal, and, in his own words, "enjoyed his tea." Still, he carried the irreducible minimum of flesh on his bones, and his hollow cheeks and shrunken jaws threw his massive forehead into striking prominence. His line of features was absolutely faultless in its statuesque regularity, but his face was saved from the insipidity of too great perfection by the imperious--rather ruthless--lines of his mouth and the penetrating lustre of his deep-set eyes. His dress--a black cassock edged and buttoned with crimson, with a crimson skullcap and biretta, and a pectoral cross of gold--enhanced the picturesqueness of his aspect, and as he entered the anteroom where one awaited his approach, the most Protestant knee instinctively bent.

His dignity was astonishing. The position of a cardinal with a princely rank recognized abroad but officially ignored in England was difficult to carry off, but his exquisite tact enabled him to sustain it to perfection. He never put himself forward; never asserted his rank; never exposed himself to rebuffs; still, he always contrived to be the most conspicuous figure in any company which he entered; and whether one greeted him with the homage due to a prince of the Church or merely with the respect which no one refuses to a courtly old gentleman, his manner was equally easy, natural, and unembarrassed. The fact that the Cardinal's name, after due consideration, was inserted in the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor immediately after that of the Prince of Wales and before Lord Salisbury's was the formal recognition of a social precedence which adroitness and judgment had already made his own.

To imagine that Cardinal Manning regarded station, or dignity, or even power, as treasures to be valued in themselves would be ridiculously to misconceive the man. He had two supreme and absorbing objects in life--if, indeed, they may not be more properly spoken of as one--the glory of God and the salvation of men. These were, in his intellect and conscience, identified with the victory of the Roman Church. To these all else was subordinated; by its relation to these all else was weighed and calculated. His ecclesiastical dignity, and the secular recognition of it, were valuable as means to high ends. They attracted public notice to his person and mission; they secured him a wider hearing; they gave him access to circles which, perhaps, would otherwise have been closed. Hence, and for no other reason, they were valuable.

It has always to be borne in mind that Manning was essentially a man of the world, though he was much more than that. Be it far from me to disparage the ordinary type of Roman ecclesiastic, who is bred in a seminary, and perhaps spends his lifetime in a religious community. That peculiar training produces, often enough, a character of saintliness and unworldly grace on which one can only "look," to use a phrase of Mr. Gladstone's, "as men look up at the stars." But it was a very different process that had made Cardinal Manning what he was. He had touched life at many points. A wealthy home, four years at Harrow, Balliol in its palmiest days, a good degree, a College Fellowship, political and secular ambitions of no common kind, apprenticeship to the practical work of a Government office, a marriage brightly but all too briefly happy, the charge of a country parish, and an early initiation into the duties of ecclesiastical rulership--all these experiences had made Henry Manning, by the time of his momentous change, an accomplished man of the world.

His subsequent career, though, of course, it superadded certain characteristics of its own, never obliterated or even concealed the marks left by those earlier phases, and the octogenarian Cardinal was a beautifully-mannered, well-informed, sagacious old gentleman who, but for his dress, might have passed for a Cabinet Minister, an eminent judge, or a great county magnate.

His mental alertness was remarkable. He seemed to read everything that came out, and to know all that was going on. He probed character with a glance, and was particularly sharp on pretentiousness and self-importance. A well-known publicist, who perhaps thinks of himself rather more highly than he ought to think, once ventured to tell the Cardinal that he knew nothing about the subject of a painful agitation which pervaded London in the summer of 1885. "I have been hearing confessions in London for thirty years, and I fancy more people have confided their secrets to me than to you, Mr. ----," was the Cardinal's reply.

Once, when his burning sympathy with suffering and his profound contempt for Political Economy had led him, in his own words, to "poke fun at the Dismal Science," the _Times_ lectured him in its most superior manner, and said that the venerable prelate seemed to mistake cause and effect. "That," said the Cardinal to me, "is the sort of criticism that an undergraduate makes, and thinks himself very clever. But I am told that in the present day the _Times_ is chiefly written by undergraduates."

I once asked him what he thought of a high dignitary of the English Church, who had gone a certain way in a public movement, and then had been frightened back by clamour. His reply was the single word "_infirmus_," accompanied by that peculiar sniff which every one who ever conversed with him must remember as adding so much to the piquancy of his terse judgments. When he was asked his opinion of a famous biography in which a son had disclosed, with too absolute frankness, his father's innermost thoughts and feelings, the Cardinal replied, "I think that ---- has committed the sin of Ham."

His sense of humour was peculiarly keen, and though it was habitually kept under control, it was sometimes used to point a moral with admirable effect.

"What are you going to do in life?" he asked a rather flippant undergraduate at Oxford.

"Oh, I'm going to take Holy Orders," was the airy reply.

"Take care you get them, my son."

Though he was intolerant of bumptiousness, the Cardinal liked young men. He often had some about him, and in speaking to them the friendliness of his manner was touched with fatherliness in a truly attractive fashion. And as with young men, so with children. Surely nothing could be prettier than this answer to a little girl in New York who had addressed some of her domestic experiences to "Cardinal Manning, England."

"My Dear Child,--You ask me whether I am glad to receive letters from little children. I am always glad, for they write kindly and give me no trouble. I wish all my letters were like theirs. Give my blessing to your father, and tell him that our good Master will reward him a hundredfold for all he has lost for the sake of his faith. Tell him that when he comes over to England he must come to see me. And mind you bring your violin, for I love music, but seldom have any time to hear it. The next three or four years of your life are very precious. They are like the ploughing-time and the sowing-time in the year. You are learning to know God, the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the presence and voice of the Holy Ghost in the Church of Jesus Christ. Learn all these things solidly, and you will love the Blessed Sacrament and our Blessed Mother with all your heart. And now you will pray for me that I may make a good end of a long life, which cannot be far off. And may God guide you and guard you in innocence and in fidelity through this evil, evil world! And may His blessing be on your home and all belonging to you! Believe me always a true friend, Henry Edward, Card. Abp. of Westminster."

The Cardinal had, I should say, rather a contempt for women. He exercised a great influence over them, but I question if he rated their intellectual and moral qualities as highly as he ought, and their "rights" he held in utter detestation. General society, though in his later days he saw little of it except at the Athenaeum, he thoroughly enjoyed. Like most old people, he was fond of talking about old days, and as he had known hosts of important and interesting men, had a tenacious memory, and spoke the most finished English, it was a pleasure to listen to his reminiscences. He wrote as well as he talked. His pointed and lucid style gave to his printed performances a semblance of cogency which they did not really possess; and his letters--even his shortest notes--were as exquisite in wording as in penmanship. As he grew older, he became increasingly sensible of the charms of "Auld Lang Syne," and he delighted to renew his acquaintance with the scenes and associations of his youth.

On July 15, 1888, being the first day of the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's, a few old Harrovians of different generations met at a Harrow dinner. The Cardinal, who had just turned eighty, was invited. He declined to dine, on the ground that he never dined out, but he would on no account forego the opportunity of meeting the members of his old school, and he recalled with pride that he had played for two years in the Harrow Eleven. He appeared as soon as dinner was over, gallantly faced the cloud of cigar-smoke, was in his very best vein of anecdote and reminiscence, and stayed till the party broke up.

The Cardinal's friendships were not, I believe, numerous, but his affection for Mr. Gladstone is well known. It dated from Oxford. Through Manning and Hope-Scott the influence of the Catholic revival reached the young member for Newark, and they were the godfathers of his eldest son. After their secession to Rome in 1851 this profound friendship fell into abeyance. As far as Manning was concerned, it was renewed when, in 1868, Mr. Gladstone took in hand to disestablish the Irish Church. It was broken again by the controversy about _Vaticanism_, in 1875, and some fifteen years later was happily revived by the good offices of a common friend. "Gladstone is a very fine fellow," said the Cardinal to me in 1890. "He is not vindictive. You may fight him as hard as you like, and when the fight is over you will find that it has left no rancour behind it."