Part 17
No, apart from the question whether this story (I tell it as it was told me long ago) be true or not true, I do not claim for S. J. Stone that he was a saint. To some men the consciousness of what Stevenson called “a healthy dash of the brute” necessitates an ever watchful “on guard” lest one day the brute spring out to overpower the angel. To Stone--so wholly had he made honour, purity, and truth the very habit of his life--a lapse into anything false, impure, or dishonourable, into thinking or speaking, or even into allowing others, in his presence, to speak what was evil or slanderous, had become impossible. Had the proofs, or what seemed like the proofs, of some base act on Stone’s part been brought to the knowledge of any friend who knew him, as I knew him, that friend would not have stooped to examine them. His reply would have been, “I know this man, and though I am aware that he can be prejudiced, stubborn, overbearing, irritable, and that faults of temper, errors of judgment, and the like, may be laid to his charge, I know him well enough to be sure that of what is base he is incapable. Were all the facts before me, they would do no more than reveal him, possibly in a quixotic, but at least in a nobly chivalrous light.”
For all his quixotism, chivalry, and hot-headedness, Stone held so strongly that, as Christ’s minister, a clergyman must in certain matters be so entirely beyond even a shadow of reproach, that he was singularly wise and guarded in his dealings with the other sex. The foolish girls or women who go simpering to a clergyman, especially if a bachelor as Stone was, to ask advice on love-affairs and the like, he instantly if considerately dismissed to seek the advice of their mother or of some good woman known to him; and at all times, and upon all questions, he avoided seeing women-callers alone--not because he feared evil in them or in himself, but because he felt he owed it to his sacred office to avoid even the appearance of anything upon which evil-thinking folk might choose to put an evil construction.
He was not without experiences--what clergyman is?--of, in other respects, worthy and well-meaning women who, even in connection with Church work, contrive to set people by the ears, or otherwise to cause dissension and trouble. With these he was impatient. He did not hesitate to deal summarily with them, nor firmly, if considerately, to speak his mind; but Womanhood, I might almost say every woman, he held, if only for his own mother’s sake, if only because of a woman the Saviour of the world was born, in a reverence that no folly or sin could altogether break down. I have heard him speak to the poor harlot of the street--his “Sister” as he would not have hesitated to call her--with sorrowful courtliness, and with the pitifulness, the gentleness, and the consideration, which one uses to (as indeed not a few of such unhappy women are) an erring and ignorant child.
I remember, on another and very different occasion, a girl of the soft and silly type coming to the vicarage one day when I was with Stone--I think she came about a Confirmation Class. She had a certain innocence in her face; not the challenging, starry purity that one sees in some faces, but a negative, babyish innocence, which was pretty enough, and appealing in its way, but that meant no more, probably, than that the girl had not yet had to make choice for herself between good and evil.
“Did you notice the flower-like beauty of that child’s face?” Stone asked me, when she had gone. “In the presence of such exquisite purity and innocence,” he went on gravely, and with intense reverence in his voice, “one feels convicted of sin, as it were. One is so conscious of one’s own coarseness, grossness, and impurity as to feel unworthy to stand in such presence!”
And all the time, the white armour of purity in which he was clad, the armour and purity of his own soul’s--a strong man’s--forging, was compared with hers, as is the purity of fine gold tried in the furnace to metal mixed with base earth and newly brought all untested from a mine.
IV
His unfailing sense of humour, his boyish and buoyant love of fun, like the cork jacket by means of which a swimmer rides an incoming wave, carried Stone through difficulties which would have depressed another. Let me put one such instance on record. To brighten in any way the drab days of the poorest folks in his East End parish, he counted a privilege as well as a happiness, and he was constantly devising means for bringing some new gladness to their lives--the gift of a sorely needed bit of furniture, or a coveted ornament, a boating party with the children in Victoria Park, a magic-lantern entertainment--anything in fact which seemed to him likely to make them forget their many troubles and to call them out of themselves.
Most of the women in his parish were poor, many pitifully so. Here was a wife toiling all day in a laundry, to keep the home together, while her husband was out of work, or worse still, while her husband was on the drink; and there, a widow, the sole support of several children.
One day when Stone received an unexpected cheque--I think it was for the sale of his book of poems--he unfolded to me, radiant himself with happiness at the thought, a plan for taking some score of the very poorest mothers of the parish for an outing to Southend.
The great day--as it was in the lives of these poor people--came, and was fortunately fine. The party caught an early train to Southend, spent a long summer day by the sea, gathered at the appointed time, happy if tired, at the railway station, to find that Stone had misread the time-table, and that the last train to London had just gone. Here were some twenty mothers--mostly with husbands who looked to them for the preparation and cooking of supper at night, and of breakfast next morning. To these husbands telegrams of explanation and appeasement must, if the worse came to the worst, and return that night were impossible, be despatched. Other mothers there were with children awaiting their mother’s home-coming for a last meal and to be put to bed; and all the twenty good women--if to London they could not get that night--themselves requiring supper, and some decent place in which to sleep. Stone’s face, brick-red with mortified self-anger at his own muddling, as the agitated mothers crowded and clamoured around him, two or three shrilly or tearfully expatiating on the terrible things that would await them at the hands of their lord and master, should that lord and master and the children go supperless to bed, and rise breakfastless next morning, was, I am told, a study in dismay and bewilderment, until he discovered that, by paying for it out of his own pocket, a special train could be run.
Relieved to find that no one except himself would have to suffer for his carelessness, and even while ruefully regarding the document by the signing of which he made himself responsible for the entire cost (no inconsiderable sum to a poor man as he was) of the special train, the Gilbertian side of the situation--that he, a bachelor, should have a score of wives and mothers upon his hands--dawned upon him. He broke, so my informant tells me, into bluff and hearty Berserker-like laughter, till his chestnut beard wagged, and his burly form rocked; and vowing that--though he must in consequence go short for many a day of every luxury--the lesson he had received, and the story which he would then be able to tell against himself, were cheap at the price, he signed the document, and made mock of himself and his own carelessness all the way home.
Another story was once told me of Stone, concerning the accuracy of which I have my doubts. What happened might well, I admit, have happened to him, but my impression is that it was a friend of his who was the guilty party. However, here is the story, as it was told me, of Stone.
He was to take an afternoon service at a church--I think in Hoxton. Like many poets and some clergymen he was not always punctual, and when he arrived he surmised, by the fact that the bell had stopped, and that there was no thin and dribbling stream of late-comers filing through the doors, that he was more than a little late. The congregation as he saw was on its knees, so diving into the vestry, which was empty, he hastily threw his surplice over his head, and hurrying to his place in the chancel, read out the opening words of the Evening Prayer.
“When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive,” and thence passed on to the familiar “Dearly beloved brethren,” and so on to the end of the service--to discover when returning to the vestry, that he had inflicted upon the unfortunate congregation the penance of two Evensongs on the same afternoon. He had been under the impression that the service commenced at four o’clock, whereas the hour fixed was three. In Stone’s absence the curate-in-charge had felt that there was nothing for it but for him, the curate, to read the service himself, which he did, and in fact he had made an end of it, had pronounced the Benediction, and for some reason had left the church, not by the vestry, but by another door leading direct to the vicarage. It was the custom at the church in question for the congregation to stand while the clergy were passing out, and to return to their knees for a brief silent prayer, after the clergy had passed out. It was at this moment that Stone is supposed to have arrived and hurried in, to begin the service all over again.
V
At Oxford Stone had been an athlete, and an athlete and sportsman--oarsman, skater, fisherman and first-class shot--he remained almost to his life’s end. He was captain of the Pembroke boat, and stroked the college eight. Legend has it that he was chosen for his “Blue”--but did not have the honour of rowing against Cambridge for the following reason.
Between his merits as an oarsman and those of another candidate, there was absolutely nothing to choose. The other man was as good as, but no better than Stone, and Stone was as good as, but no better than, the other. As a way out of the difficulty it was thought best to decide the question by the spin of a coin, and Stone’s luck was uppermost. He was delighted, for no man would more eagerly have coveted his “Blue” than he, until he learned that it was a matter of “now or never” for his rival, who was shortly going down, and so would stand no other chance of rowing in the great race. As it could matter neither way for the boat’s success which had the seat, Stone, who was staying on at Pembroke and so would be eligible another year, pleaded that his rival be given this, his only chance--with the result that Stone’s own second chance never came.
So runs the legend of how Stone missed his “Blue.” As I never questioned him concerning its truth, and he was the last man to speak of such an incident himself, I relate it merely as it was related to me, and with no other comment than that such impulsive generosity is just what might have been expected from this clerical Don Quixote of lost causes, lost chances, forlorn hopes and self-forgetful chivalry.
To say of a man that all his geese were swans, as was often said of Stone, implies, indirectly, that he was something of a fool, if a generous one. It is true that Stone wished to think well of whatever a friend had done. If it were ill done he was not so blind as not to know it was ill done, and was too honest not to say so, if asked for an opinion, or to remain silent, if unasked. But if it were not ill done, then young and keen-visioned Joy, as well as dim-eyed Dame Pride alike clapped magnifying glasses on nose, to show him the thing not as it was, but as it appeared through the eyes of joy and pride in a friend’s work.
So, too, in regard to the friend himself. If Stone saw, or thought he saw, in his friend, some streak, no matter how rudimentary or infinitesimal of, let us say unselfishness, he saw it not as it was in his friend, but magnified to the scale in which it existed in himself. Hence his appreciation of a friend’s gifts or qualities and his own gratitude for some small service rendered were preposterously out of all proportion to the facts. For instance, I had been at some quite small trouble in reading, by his wish, the proofs of his _Lays of Iona_, and also, by his wish, in sending him my criticisms. Here is his letter (Oct. 23, 1897) in acknowledgment:
MY DEAR KERNAHAN,
What _thoroughness_ of friendship you have shown me from first to last in the matter of the _Lays_! Certainly I will alter the “no” to “not” in the Preface, if a second edition permits me. I had not noticed the error and jumped with a “How could I”! of exclamation when I read your note. You comforted me very much in the latter part of your note when you spoke of sundry passages you approved, especially by what you said of the humorous part of the work. I had specially feared about this, and indeed I had put in these two occasional pieces only to please my sister.
Good-bye, dear friend,
Ever yours gratefully and affectionately, S. J. STONE.
Everyone who knew Stone intimately will bear me out in saying that the gratitude here expressed, and disproportionate as it may be, was absolutely sincere. He literally glowed with gratitude for any small service done, or trivial personal kindness, and said no word more than he meant in making his acknowledgment, for of “gush,” of what was effusive or insincere, he had something like horror, and was as incapable of it, as he was of falsehood or of craft. And in regard to men and women whom he loved, it was not so much that he mistook geese for swans, as that he remembered that, on land, a swan’s waddle is no less unlovely than a goose’s, whereas, on water or on wing, a goose, no less than a swan, is not without grace. He idealised his friends--he saw in his mind’s eyes, his geese a-wing in the heavens or a-sail on water, as well as waddling on land, and loved them for the possibilities, and for the hidden graces he saw within. He was by no means the merely credulous, if generous fool, that some thought him. On the contrary, for most human weaknesses, he had an uncommonly shrewd and sharp eye, but he appealed always to the best and noblest, never to the vain or selfish side of those with whom he came into contact, and so his own unwavering faith in God, in Christ, and in human nature, was not only the cause of, but seemed to create similar and sincere faith on the part of others, just as his own integrity made even the rascal or the infirm of purpose ashamed of rascality or of weakness. But tricked, betrayed and deceived, or confronted with evil, Stone’s wrath was terrible and consuming.
I remember the blaze in his eyes, the fury in his face, concerning a scoundrel who had boasted of the deliberate betrayal, and cowardly and calculated desertion of a trustful girl. Had the villain fallen at the moment, when Stone first heard the facts, into my friend’s hands, there would have been left upon the fellow’s body and face, and from Stone’s fist, marks which would have borne witness to the end of his life of the punishment he had received. His own bitterest enemy, Stone could freely forgive, but for the man or woman whom he held to be the enemy of God, he had small mercy. Even in matters not of great consequence, but upon which he felt strongly, he was inclined to override his opponent, and generally to carry things with a high hand. That he always spoke, wrote, or acted with judgment, I do not maintain. His motives none could question, but his judgment, even his best friend sometimes doubted.
When I speak of him as obstinate, I must not be understood as meaning the type of obstinacy which is more frequently associated with weakness than with strength. Obstinacy, however, of a sort--stubbornness if you so like to call it--was undoubtedly a temperamental defect. He was inflexibly convinced that his own beliefs in regard to God, to the Throne, to the State, to the Church, and even in regard to politics--inherited as some of these beliefs were, influenced as were others by class feeling, by education, and by environment--were the only possible beliefs for a Christian, a Churchman, an Englishman and a gentleman. Hence he could not understand the position of those who differed, and was impatient of opposition.
I once heard him described by some one who misunderstood him as a man with a grievance, and a man with too thin a skin. His sensitiveness I do not deny, but it was a sensitiveness which was all for others, never for himself. And so far from being one of those single-cuticle abnormalities whose skin “goose-fleshes” at the very thought of cold, who at the approach of a rough blast wince in anticipation as well as in reality, and suffer more perhaps from the imagined effects of the buffeting than from the buffeting itself, Stone not only never troubled to ask whether the blast was, or was not, coming his way, but enjoyed battling with it when it came. If things went badly with him, he took Fate’s blows unconcernedly, and blamed only himself. About his own ills and sorrows, or breakdown in health, he was the most cheerful of men, but he could and would concern himself about the sorrows or troubles of others, and would move heaven and earth in his efforts to right their wrongs, if wrongs to be righted there were. That is not the way of the man with a grievance. The man with a grievance growls but never fights. He wears his grievance as a badge in his buttonhole, that all may see, and you could do him no unkinder turn than to remove the cause of it.
Stone never had a grievance, but he was ready to make the grievances of his people, real grievances, their grievous wrongs, not fancied ones, his own; and more than one employer of sweated labour, more than one owner of an insanitary slum, and occasionally some Parish Council, or public body in which Bumbledom and vested interests were not unknown, had cause to think Stone too touchy, too sensitive, and too thin-skinned, where the lives of little children, and the bodily and spiritual welfare of his people were concerned.
VI
In politics Stone was the stoutest of old-fashioned Tories, and by every instinct and sympathy an aristocrat. Like a certain courtier of high birth who expressed pleasure at receiving the Garter because “there is no pretence of damned merit about it,” he believed whole-heartedly in the hereditary principle. I am not sure, indeed, that he would not have thought it well that spiritual as well as temporal rank should go by inheritance. An archbishop who came of a long line of archbishops and was trained from birth upwards for that high office, Stone would probably have held to be a more fitting Spiritual Head than one whose preferment was due to his politics, to his suavity, and to the certainty that he would act upon “safe” and conventional lines. He believed in Government at home and abroad, in Great Britain as well as in her Dominions and Colonies, by the “ruling orders,” by the class that he held to be born with the power to command. In himself he possessed the power to command in a remarkable degree. I have heard him sternly rebuke and even silence seditious or blasphemous Sunday afternoon speakers in Victoria or Hyde Park, and I do not remember one occasion when he was answered with other than a certain sullen and unwilling deference, for, in spite of his authoritative and even autocratic way, something there was about him that compelled respect. A Socialistic orator of my acquaintance once spoke of him--not to his face--as one whose politics were pig-headed and his loyalty pig-iron. I am not altogether sure what constitutes pig-iron, but if the Socialist meant that Stone’s loyalty was rigid and unbending I do not know that I should quarrel with the description. It was in his loyalty to the throne that all his intolerance came out. Even those who were at heart no less loyal than he laughed sometimes at the boyishness and the extravagance of his worship for the Queen. The Queen, since she reigned by divine right, could do no wrong, and had Stone lived in Stuart times he would have died upon the scaffold, or fallen upon the field, for his Sovereign’s sake; nor am I sure that even for a Richard the Third or a King John, had either been his Sovereign, he would not equally have drawn the sword.
In religious as in other matters, all Stone’s sympathies were with those who have an affirmation to make, as contrasted with those who have an objection to lodge. He detested iconoclasts, and was prejudiced beforehand against any belief that he classed with “negatives” as opposed to “positives.” Just as he disliked the name of Protestant, because he could not understand a Christian man electing to be known by a name which “protests” against another’s faith, instead of affirming his own, so he found it hard to understand a Church which by its name proclaimed itself as not being in “conformity” with or as “dissenting” from another Church.
Stone could not understand that anyone should prefer the Free Church to the Anglican Catholic Church, but since it was so (and that it was so he sincerely and deeply grieved) he felt it better, while friendly and cordial to all the Nonconformists with whom he was brought into contact, that each should go his own way and worship God in his own manner. Hence he was not of the school of Churchmen who busy themselves in bringing about a closer union between Anglicanism and the Free Churches, and are for the removal of landmarks and the interchange of pulpits.
On the other hand, he attacked the religion of no one who believed in the Fatherhood of God, the Divinity, Atonement, and Resurrection of our Lord, but reserved all his fighting power for what (a true Browning lover) he would have accounted “the arch fiend in visible form”--the enemies of God and His Christ. He had no sympathy whatever with Churchmen who occupy themselves in bickerings and controversies with Nonconformists, or in denouncing the Church of Rome. To him good Churchmanship--and never was there stronger Churchman than he--meant, not disapproval of, dislike to, or antagonism towards other Churches, be they Roman or Free, but active love, practical loyalty and devotion to his own beloved Mother Church. Hence he never proselytised. He never sought to turn a Nonconformist into a Churchman, or a Roman into an English Catholic, but he would have fought to the last to keep a member of the Church of England from forsaking that Communion for any other.
But there was no indefiniteness about his attitude to Rome. Writing to me in 1899 about some one he and I knew, who had gone over to Rome, he said:
“I am deeply sorry. Rome is a real branch of the Church of the Redemption, and has the creeds, the ministry, and the Sacraments. But to leave our august Mother for Rome! I do not mean to imply that to be a Roman, or to become a Roman, has necessarily anything to do with vital error. I speak strongly only on the point of _comparison_, and as a loyal, happy, and satisfied Catholic of the English branch. Certain defects I own to in our English Mother, but they are very small and few, as regards the accretions and superfluities, to say the least of them (of which the gravest is Mariolatry), of her Roman Sister. On the other hand they _are_ sisters.”