Part 17

One can picture the tempered gratitude with which the Bishops, and the ladies of the Episcopal household, and the Domestic Chaplains--those "amiable young gentlemen who make themselves agreeable in the drawing-rooms of the Mitre"--must regard this obliging invitation to "live more simply." There is a good deal of human nature even in apostolic bosoms, and a man who has enjoyed an official income of £5000 a year does not as a rule regard with enthusiasm a reduction to £2000. The Bishop in "Little Dorrit," when the guests at Mr. Merdle's banquet were extolling their host's opulence, "tried to look as if he was rather poor himself"; and his successors at the present day take great pains to assure the public that they are not overpaid. The _locus classicus_ on the subject of episcopal incomes is to be found in the Rev. Hubert Handley's book called "The Fatal Opulence of Bishops," and was originally supplied by the artless candour of the present Bishop of London, who in the year 1893 published in the _Oxford House Chronicle_ a statistical statement by an unnamed Bishop. This prelate had only a beggarly income of £4200, and must therefore be the occupant of one of those comparatively cheap and humble Sees which the exigencies of the Church have lately called into being. Out of this pittance he had to pay £1950 for a removal, furniture, and repairs to the episcopal residence. This, to the lay mind, seems a good deal. Hospitality he sets down as costing £2000 a year; but somehow one feels as if one could give luncheon to the country clergy, and satisfy even the craving appetites of ordinands, at a less cost. "Stables," says the good Bishop, "are almost a necessity, and in some respects a saving;" but here the haughty disregard of details makes criticism difficult. "Robes, £100." This item is plain enough and absurd enough. The perverted ingenuity of fallen man has never devised a costume more hideous or less expressive than the episcopal "magpie"; and I am confident that Mrs. Bishop's maid could have stitched together the necessary amounts of lawn and black satin at a less cost than £100. But this exactly illustrates the plan on which these episcopal incomes are always defended by their apologists. We are told precisely what the Bishop expends on each item of charge. But we are not told, and are quite unable to divine, why each of those items should cost so much, or why some of them should ever be incurred. The Bishop of London (then Mr. Winnington-Ingram) thus summed up the statement of his episcopal friend in the background: "It amounts to this--a bishop's income is a trust-fund for the diocese which head ministers. It would make no difference to him personally if three-quarters of it were taken away, so long as three-quarters of his liabilities were taken away too; and it is quite arguable that this would be a better arrangement."

Certainly it is "quite arguable"; but is it equally certain that the change "would make no difference to the Bishop personally"? I doubt it. Married men, men with large families and plenty of servants, naturally prefer large houses to small, provided that there is an income to maintain them. Men who enjoy the comforts and prettinesses of life prefer an income which enables them to repair and furnish and beautify their houses to an income which involves faded wallpaper and battered paint. Men of hospitable instincts are happier in a system which enables them to spend £2000 a year on entertaining than they would be if they were compelled to think twice of the butcher's bill and thrice of the wine-merchant's. Men who like horses--and few Englishmen do not--naturally incline to regard "stables as a necessity," and even as "in some respects"--what respects?--"a saving." If their income were reduced to the figure suggested by Dean Lefroy, they would find themselves under the bitter constraint (as Milton calls it) of doing without a "necessity," and must even forgo an outlay which is "in some respects a saving."

Again, the anonymous Bishop returned his outlay in subscriptions at a fraction over £400 a year. I do not presume to say whether this is much or little out of an income of £4000. At any rate it is a Tithe, and that is a respectable proportion. But, supposing that our Bishop is a man of generous disposition, who loves to relieve distress and feels impelled to give a lift to every good cause which asks his aid, he is of necessity a happier man while he draws £4000 a year than he would be if cut down by reforming Deans to £2000.

I venture, then, with immense deference to that admirable divine who is now Bishop of London, to dissent emphatically from his judgment, recorded in 1895, that the diminution of episcopal incomes, if accompanied by a corresponding diminution of episcopal charges, would "make no difference to the Bishop personally." I conceive that it would make a great deal of difference, and that, though spiritually salutary, it would be, as regards temporal concerns, one of those experiments which one would rather try on one's neighbour than on oneself.

An ingenious clergyman who shared Dean Lefroy's and Mr. Handley's views on episcopal incomes, and had an inconvenient love of statistics, made a study at the Probate Office of the personalty left by English Bishops who died between 1855 and 1885. The average was £54,000, and the total personalty something more than two millions sterling. "This was exclusive of any real estate they may have possessed, and exclusive of any sums invested in policies of life-assurance or otherwise settled for the benefit of their families." Myself no lover of statistics or of the extraordinarily ill-ventilated Will-room at Somerset House, I am unable to say how far the episcopal accumulations of the last twenty years may have affected the total and the average. It is only fair to remember that several of the Bishops who died between 1855 and 1885 dated from the happy days before the Ecclesiastical Commission curtailed episcopal incomes, and may have had ten, or fifteen, or twenty thousand a year. On the other hand, it is to be borne in mind that, since Sir William Harcourt's Budget, the habit of "dodging the death-duties" has enormously increased, and has made it difficult to know what a testator, episcopal or other, really possessed. But it is scarcely possible to doubt that, if the public were permitted to examine all the episcopal pass-books, we should find that, in spite of the exactions of upholsterers and furniture-removers, butchers and bakers, robe-makers and horse-dealers, the pecuniary lot of an English Bishop is, to borrow a phrase of Miss Edgeworth's, "vastly put-up-able with."

Just after Mr. Bright had been admitted to the Cabinet, and when the more timid and more plausible members of his party hoped that he would begin to curb his adventurous tongue, he attended a banquet of the Fishmongers' Company at which the Archbishops and Bishops were entertained. The Archbishop of York (Dr. Thomson) said in an after-dinner speech that the Bishops were the most liberal element in the House of Lords, seeing that they were the only peers created for life. This statement Mr. Bright, speaking later in the evening, characterized as an excess of hilarity; "though," he added, "it is possible that, with a Bishop's income, I might have been as merry as any of them, with an inexhaustible source of rejoicing in the generosity, if not in the credulity, of my countrymen." To this outrageous sally the assembled prelates could, of course, only reply by looking as dignified (and as poor) as they could; and no doubt the general opinion of the Episcopal Bench is that they are an overworked and ill-remunerated set of men.

Yet there have been Apostles, and successors of the Apostles, who worked quite as hard and were paid considerably less, and yet succeeded in winning and retaining the affectionate reverence of their own and of succeeding generations. Bishop Wilson of Sodor and Man lived, we are told, on an income which "did not exceed £300 a year." By far the most dignified ecclesiastic with whom I was ever brought in contact--a true "Prince of the Church" if ever there was one--was Cardinal Manning, and his official income was bounded by a figure which even the reforming spirit of Dean Lefroy would reject as miserably insufficient. "It is pleasant," wrote Sydney Smith, "to loll and roll and accumulate--to be a purple-and-fine-linen man, and to be called by some of those nicknames which frail and ephemeral beings are so fond of heaping upon each other,--but the best thing of all is to live like honest men, and to add something to the cause of liberality, justice, and truth." It is no longer easy for a Bishop to "loll and roll"--the bicycle and the motor-car are enemies to tranquil ease--and, if Dean Lefroy's precept and Bishop Gore's example are heeded, he will find it equally difficult to "accumulate."

XL

PRELACY AND PALACES

That delicious prelate whom I have already quoted, but whose name and See are unkindly withheld from us by the Bishop of London, thus justified his expenditure on hospitality: "_Palace_, I am told, is from _Palatium_, 'the open house,' and there is almost daily entertainment of clergy and laity from a distance." I will not presume to question the episcopal etymology; for, whether it be sound or unsound, the practical result is equally good. We have apostolic authority for holding that Bishops should be given to hospitality, and it is satisfactory to know that the travel-worn clergy and laity of the anonymous diocese are not sent empty away. But would not the boiled beef and rice pudding be equally acceptable and equally sustaining if eaten in some apartment less majestic than the banqueting-hall of a Palace? Would not the Ecclesiastical Commissioners be doing a good stroke of business for the Church if they sold every Episcopal Palace in England and provided the evicted Bishops with moderate-sized and commodious houses?

These are questions which often present themselves to the lay mind, and the answer usually returned to them involves some very circuitous reasoning. The Bishops, say their henchmen, must have large incomes because they have to live in Palaces; and they must live in Palaces--I hardly know why, but apparently because they have large incomes. Such reasoning does not always convince the reformer's mind, though it is repeated in each succeeding generation with apparent confidence in its validity. After all, there is nothing very revolutionary in the suggestion that Episcopal palaces should be, in the strictest sense of the word, confiscated. Sixty-four years ago Dr. Hook, who was not exactly an iconoclast, wrote thus to his friend Samuel Wilberforce: "I really do not see how the Church can fairly ask the State to give it money for the purpose of giving a Church education, when the money is to be supplied by Dissenters and infidels and all classes of the people, who, according to the principles of the Constitution, have a right to control the expenditure. The State can only, if consistent, give an infidel education; it cannot employ public money to give a Church education, because of the Dissenters; nor a Protestant education, because of the Papists; and have not Jews, Turks, and infidels as much a right as heretics to demand that the education should not be Christian?" This strikes me as very wholesome doctrine, and, though enounced in 1843, necessary for these times. And, when he turns to ways and means, Dr. Hook is equally explicit: "If we are to educate the people in Church principles, the education must be out of Church funds. We want not proud Lords, haughty Spiritual Peers, to be our Bishops. Offer four thousand out of their five thousand a year for the education of the people. Let Farnham Castle and Winchester House and Ripon Palace be sold, and we shall have funds to establish other Bishoprics.... You see I am almost a Radical, for I do not see why our Bishops should not become as poor as Ambrose or Augustine, that they may make the people really rich." It is not surprising that Samuel Wilberforce, who had already climbed up several rungs of the ladder of promotion, and as he himself tells us, "had often talked" of further elevation, met Dr. Hook's suggestions with solemn repudiation. "I _do_ think that we want Spiritual Peers." "I see no reason why the Bishops' Palaces should be sold, which would not apply equally to the halls of our squires and the palaces of our princes." "To impoverish our Bishops and sell their Palaces would only be the hopeless career of revolution."

The real reason for selling the Episcopal Palaces is that, in plain terms, they are too big and too costly for their present uses. They afford a plausible excuse for paying the Bishops more highly than they ought to be paid; and yet the Bishops turn round and say that even the comfortable incomes which the Ecclesiastical Commission has assigned them are unequal to the burden of maintaining the Palaces. The late Bishop Thorold, who was both a wealthy and a liberal man, thus bemoaned his hard fate in having to live at Farnham Castle: "It will give some idea of what the furnishing of this house from top to bottom meant if I mention that the stairs, with the felt beneath, took just a mile and 100 yards of carpet, with 260 brass stair-rods; and that, independently of the carpet in the great hall, the carpets used elsewhere absorbed 1414 yards--a good deal over three-quarters of a mile. As to the entire amount of roof, which in an old house requires constant watching, independently of other parts of the building, it is found to be, on measurement, 32,000 superficial feet, or one acre and one-fifth." What is true of Farnham is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of Bishopthorpe with its hundred rooms, and Auckland Castle with its park, and Rose Castle with its woodlands, and Lambeth with its tower and guard-room and galleries and gardens. Even the smaller Palaces, such as the "Moated Grange" of Wells, are not maintained for nothing. "My income goes in pelargoniums," growled Bishop Stubbs, as he surveyed the conservatories of Cuddesdon. "It takes ten chaps to keep this place in order," ejaculated a younger prelate as he skipped across his tennis-ground.

Of course the root of the mischief is that these Palaces were built and enlarged in the days when each See had its own income, and when the incomes of such Sees as Durham and Winchester ran to twenty or thirty thousand a year. The poor Sees--and some were very poor--had Palaces proportioned to their incomes, and very unpalatial they were. "But now," as Bertie Stanhope said to the Bishop of Barchester at Mrs. Proudie's evening party, "they've cut them all down to pretty nearly the same figure," and such buildings as suitably accommodated the princely retinues of Archbishop Harcourt (who kept one valet on purpose to dress his wigs) and Bishop Sumner (who never went from Farnham Castle to the Parish Church except in a coach-and-four) are "a world too wide for the shrunk shanks" of their present occupants.

In the Palace of Ely there is a magnificent gallery, which once was the scene of a memorable entertainment. When Bishop Sparke secured a Residentiary Canonry of Ely for his eldest son, the event was so completely in the ordinary course of things that it passed without special notice. But, when he planted his second son in a second Canonry, he was, and rightly, so elated by the achievement that he entertained the whole county of Cambridge at a ball in his gallery. But in those days Ely was worth £11,000 a year, and we are not likely to see a similar festival. Until recent years the Archbishop of Canterbury had a suburban retreat from the cares of Lambeth, at Addington, near Croydon, where one of the ugliest mansions in Christendom stood in one of the prettiest parks. Archbishop Temple, who was a genuine reformer, determined to get rid of this second Palace and take a modest house near his Cathedral. When he asked the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to sanction this arrangement, they demurred. "Do you think," they asked, "that your successors will wish to live at Canterbury?" "No, _I don't_" replied the Archbishop, with indescribable emphasis, "_and so I'm determined they shall_."

If every Bishop who is saddled with an inconveniently large house were in earnest about getting rid of it, the Ecclesiastical Commission could soon help him out of his difficulty. Palaces of no architectural or historical interest could be thrown into the market, and follow the fate of Riseholme, once the abode of the Bishops of Lincoln. Those Palaces which are interesting or beautiful, or in any special sense heirlooms of the Church, could be converted into Diocesan Colleges, Training Colleges, Homes for Invalid Clergymen, or Houses of Rest for such as are overworked and broken down. By this arrangement the Church would be no loser, and the Bishops, according to their own showing, would be greatly the gainers. £5000 a year, or even a beggarly four, will go a long way in a villa at Edgbaston or a red-brick house in Kennington Park; and, as the Bishops will no longer have Palaces to maintain, they will no doubt gladly accept still further reductions at the hands of reformers like Dean Lefroy.

It would be a sad pity if these contemplated reductions closed the _Palatium_ or "open house" against the hungry flock; but, if they only check the more mundane proclivities of Prelacy, no harm will be done. One of the most spendidly hospitable prelates who ever adorned the Bench was Archbishop Thomson of York, and this is Bishop Wilberforce's comment on what he saw and heard under the Archiepiscopal roof: "Dinner at Archbishop of York's. A good many Bishops, both of England and Ireland, and not one word said which _implied_ we were apostles." Perhaps it will be easier to keep that fact in remembrance, when to apostolic succession is added the grace of apostolic poverty.

XLI

HORRORS

The subject is suggested to me by the notice-board outside the Court Theatre. There I learn that "The Campden Wonder" has run its course. A "horror" of the highest excellence has been on view for four weeks; and I, who might have revelled in it, have made, _per viltate_, the Great Refusal. I leave the italicized quality untranslated, because I am not quite sure of the English equivalent which would exactly suit my case. "Vileness" is a little crude. "Cowardice" is ignominious. "Poorness of Spirit "is an Evangelical virtue. "Deficiency of Enterprise" and "an impaired nervous system" would, at the best, be paraphrases rather than translations. On the whole, I think the nearest approximation to the facts of my case is to say that my refusal to profit by Mr. Masefield's Horror was due to Decadence. _Fuimus._ There has been a period when such a tale as the "Campden Wonder" would have attracted me with an irresistible fascination and gripped me with a grasp of iron. But I am not the man I was; and I am beginning to share the apprehensions of the aged lady who told her doctor that she feared she was breaking up, for she could no longer relish her Murders.

Youth, and early youth, is indeed the Golden Age of Horrors. To a well-constituted child battle and murder and sudden death appeal far more powerfully than any smooth tale of love. We snatch a fearful joy from the lurid conversation of servants and neighbours. We gaze, with a kind of panic-stricken rapture, at the stain on the floor which marks the place where old Mr. Yellowboy was murdered for his money; and run very fast, though with a backward gaze, past the tree on which young Rantipole hanged himself on being cut off with a shilling by his uncle Mr. Wormwood Scrubbs. In some privileged families the children are not left to depend on circumjacent gossip, but are dogmatically instructed in hereditary horrors. This happy lot was mine. My father's uncle had been murdered by his valet; and from a very tender age I could have pointed out the house where the murder took place--it went cheap for a good many years afterwards,--and could have described the murderer stripping himself naked before he performed the horrid act, and the bath of blood in which the victim was found, and the devices employed to create an impression of suicide instead of murder. I could have repeated the magnificent peroration in which the murderer's advocate exhorted the jury to spare his client's life (and which, forty years later, was boldly plagiarized by Mr. Montagu Williams in defending Dr. Lamson). The murderer, Benjamin Francis Courvoisier by name, long occupied a conspicuous place in Madame Tussaud's admirable collection. I can distinctly recall a kind of social eminence among my schoolfellows which was conferred by the fact that I had this relationship with the Chamber of Horrors; and I was conscious of a painful descent when Courvoisier lapsed out of date and was boiled down into Mr. Cobden or Cardinal Wiseman or some other more recent celebrity. Then, again, all literature was full of Horrors; and, though we should have been deprived of jam at tea if we had been caught reading a Murder Trial in the _Daily Telegraph_, we were encouraged to drink our fill of Shakespeare and Scott and Dickens and other great masters of the Horrible. From De Quincey we learned that Murder may be regarded as a Fine Art, and from an anonymous poet we acquired the immortal verse which narrates the latter end of Mr. William Weare. Shakespeare, as his French critics often remind us, reeks of blood and slaughter; the word "Murder" and its derivatives occupy two columns of Mrs. Cowden Clarke's closely-printed pages. Scott's absolute mastery over his art is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in his use of murderous mechanisms. "The Heart of Midlothian" begins, continues, and ends with murder. "Rob Roy" contains a murder-scene of lurid beauty. The murderous attack on the bridegroom in "The Bride of Lammermoor" is a haunting horror. Not all the Dryasdusts in England and Germany combined will ever displace the tradition of Amy Robsart and the concealed trap-door. Front-de-Boeuf's dying agony is to this hour a glimpse of hell. Greatest of the great in humour, Dickens fell not far behind the greatest when he turned his hand to Horrors. One sheds few tears for Mr. Tulkinghorn, and we consign Jonas Chuzzlewit to the gallows without a pang. But is there in fiction a more thrilling scene than the arrest of the murderer on the moonlit tower-stair in "Barnaby Rudge," or the grim escape of Sikes from the vengeance of the mob in "Oliver Twist"? For deliberate, minute, and elaborated horror commend me to the scene at the limekiln on the marshes where Pip awaits his horrible fate at the hands of the crazy savage Dolge Orlick.

But it was not only the great masters of fiction who supplied us with our luxuries of horror. The picture of the young man who had murdered his brother, hanging on a gibbet in Blackgrove Wood, is painted with a gruesome fidelity of detail which places Mrs. Sherwood high among literary artists; and the incidents connected with the death of Old Prue would entitle Mrs. Beecher Stowe to claim kinship with Zola.

It is curious to reflect that Miss Braddon, the most cheerful and wholesome-minded of all living novelists, first won her fame by imagining the murderous possibilities of a well, and established it by that unrivalled mystification which confounds the murderer and the murdered in "Henry Dunbar." Nor will the younger generation of authoresses consent to be left behind in the race of Horrors. In old days we were well satisfied if we duly worked up to our predestined murder just before the end of the third volume. To-day Lady Ridley gives us, in the first chapter of "A Daughter of Jael," one of the most delicate and suggestive pieces of murder-writing which I, a confirmed lover of the horrible, can call to mind.