Part 5
In describing my hero of 1880 as he surveyed his evening's amusements and chose the most rewarding, I took for granted that he had at least three balls to choose from. Nowadays he is lucky if he has one. Here again, and conspicuously, agricultural depression has made its mark. In the years between 1870 and 1880, during an unbroken spell of good trade and good harvests, rich people struggled with one another for a vacant night on which to entertain their friends. For example, Lady A. had just brought out a daughter, and wished to give a ball for her benefit. Say that she set her affections on Monday the 28th of May. Before she issued her cards she took counsel with all her friends, for in those days ball-giving mothers were a sort of Limited Company, and all knew one another. She found that Mrs. B. had mentally fixed on Tuesday, 29th, and, if Mrs. C. had thought of Monday, she would be so kind as to take Wednesday, 30th. So all was amicably agreed; there would be no clashing, which would be such a pity and would spoil both balls; and the cards were duly issued. Directly afterwards, as if moved by some occult and fiendish impulse, the Duchess of D---- pounced on Monday, 28th, for a Royal Ball at D---- House, or, worse still because more perilously tempting, for a "very small dance," to which all the nicest young men would go, and where they would stay till three. In the face of such mortifications as these, the emulous hospitalities of the aspiring Distiller were of no account; for the "nice men" would either disregard them, or, having looked in for half-an-hour, would come on to spend the night at the houses where they felt themselves at home.
The hero of 1880, if only he was well connected, well mannered, and sufficiently well known, might fairly reckon on dining six nights out of the seven at a host's expense. Indeed, if he was at all popular, he could safely afford to decline the invitation which old Mr. Wellbore issued six weeks in advance and reserve himself for a livelier meal at shorter notice. Not so to-day. Our young friend, if he has a constitutional objection to paying for his own dinner, must take what he can get in the way of invitations, and not be too particular about the cook or the company. Here the cause of change is not decrease of wealth. As long as there is a balance at the bank, and even when there is none, people will dine; and dinner-giving is the last form of hospitality which Society will let die. But nowadays dinners are made ancillary to Bridge. If our friend cannot afford to lose £50 in an evening he will not be asked to dine at a house which reckons itself as belonging to "the Mode"; or if, for old acquaintance' sake, he is allowed to find a place at the dinner-table, he is compelled to sit all the evening by the least attractive daughter of the house, or to listen to some fogey, too fossilized for Bridge, discoursing on the iniquities of Mr. Birrell's Bill. "Tobacco," said Lord Beaconsfield, "is the Tomb of Love." If he were with us now, he would pronounce that Bridge is the Extinguisher of Hospitality.
Yet once again I note a startling discrepancy between the Season as it was and the Season as it is. Then a young man who wanted air and exercise in the afternoon played tennis at Lord's, or skated at Prince's, or took a gallop in Richmond Park, or, if he was very adventurous and up-to-date, sped out to Hampton Court or Windsor on a bone-shaking bicycle six feet high. All these recreations are possible to him to-day; but all have yielded to motoring. Dressed in the most unbecoming of all known costumes, his expressive eyes concealed by goggles, and his graceful proportions swathed in oilskin, he urges his mad career to Brighton or Stratford or Salisbury Plain. No doubt he has the most fascinating companions in the world, for girls are enthusiastic motorists; but I fancy that Edwin and Angelina presented a more attractive appearance when, neatly dressed and beautifully mounted, they rode in the cool of the evening along the shady side of Rotten Row.
However, I am a kind of social "Old Mortality" rummaging among the tombs of what has been and can be no more, and I fancy that Old Mortality's opinions on youth and beauty would have been justly disregarded.
XI
THE SINS OF SOCIETY
In the year 1870 a flame of religious zeal was suddenly kindled in the West End of London. In that year the Rev. George Howard Wilkinson (now Bishop of St. Andrews) was appointed Vicar of St. Peter's, Eaton Square. The church in the Belgravian district was as dry as tinder; it caught fire from Mr. Wilkinson's fervour, and the fire soon became a conflagration. This is Matthew Arnold's description of the great preacher at the height of his power: "He was so evidently sincere, more than sincere, burnt up with sorrow, that he carried every one with him, and half the church was in tears. I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can give _light_, and Wilkinson's fire is very turbid; but his power of heating, penetrating, and agitating is extraordinary." This description belongs to the year 1872, but it might have been written with equal truth at any date between 1870 and 1883. In all my experience of preaching (which is long, wide, and varied) I have never seen a congregation dominated by its minister so absolutely as the congregation of St. Peter's was dominated by Mr. Wilkinson. I say "congregation" advisedly, for I should think that at least half the seatholders belonged to other parishes. The smartest carriages in London blocked the approach to the church. The great dames of Grosvenor Square and Carlton House Terrace rubbed shoulders with the opulent inhabitants of Tyburnia and South Kensington, Cabinet Ministers fought for places in the gallery, and M.P.'s were no more accounted of than silver in the days of Solomon.
And this was not a mere assemblage of hearers. The congregation of St. Peter's were pre-eminently givers. £4000 a year was the regular product of the alms-bags, let alone the innumerable sums sent privately to the Vicar. "I want a thousand pounds." This simple but emphatic statement from the pulpit one Sunday was succeeded on the following Sunday by the quiet announcement, "I have got a thousand pounds." What was the secret of this attraction? It was entirely personal. It did not in the least depend on theological bias. Mr. Wilkinson belonged to no party. He had begun life as an Evangelical, and he retained the unction and fervour which were characteristic of that school at its best; but he was feeling his way towards a higher churchmanship, and had discarded most of his earlier shibboleths. The fabric was frankly hideous, and the well-meant attempts to make it look less like a barn and more like a church only resulted in something between a mosque and a synagogue. There was no ritualism. The music was too elaborate for the choir, and the curates were feeble beyond all description. The Vicar was everything; and even he had none of the gifts which are commonly supposed to make a Popular Preacher. He was not the least flummery or flowery. He was reserved and dignified in manner, and his language was quite unadorned. His voice was a monotonous moan, occasionally rising into a howl. He was conspicuously free from the tendency to prophesy smooth things, and he even seemed to take a delight in rubbing the pungent lotion of his spiritual satire into the sore places of the hearers' conscience. If Jeremiah had prophesied in a surplice, he would have been like the Prophet of Belgravia; and as for Savonarola, his sermon, as paraphrased in chapter xxiv. of "Romola," might have been delivered, with scarcely a word altered, from the pulpit of St. Peter's.
And here we touch the pith and core of Mr. Wilkinson's preaching. He rebuked the Sins of Society as no one had ventured to rebuke them since the days of Whitefield and the Wesleys. The Tractarian Movement, so heart-searching, so conscience-stirring at Oxford, had succumbed in the fashionable parts of London to the influences which surrounded it, and had degenerated into a sort of easy-going ceremonialism--partly antiquarian, partly worldly, and wholly ineffective for spiritual revival or moral reformation. Into this Dead Sea of lethargy and formalism Mr. Wilkinson burst like a gunboat. He scattered his fire left and right, aimed high and aimed low, blazed and bombarded without fear or favour; sent some crafts to the bottom, set fire to others, and covered the sea with wreckage. In less metaphorical language, he rebuked the sins of all and sundry, from Duchesses to scullery-maids, Premiers to pageboys, octogenarian rakes to damsels in their teens. Then, as now, Society loved to be scolded, and the more Mr. Wilkinson thundered the more it crowded to his feet. "Pay your bills." "Get up when you are called." "Don't stay till three at a ball and then say that you are too delicate for early services." "Eat one dinner a day instead of three, and try to earn that one." "Give up champagne for the season, and what you save on your wine-merchant's bill send to the Mission Field." "You are sixty-five years old and have not been confirmed. Never too late to mend. Join a Confirmation Class at once, and try to remedy, by good example now, all the harm you have done your servants or your neighbours by fifty years' indifference." "Sell that diamond cross which you carry with you into the sin-polluted atmosphere of the Opera, give the proceeds to feed the poor, and wear the only real cross--the cross of self-discipline and self-denial."
These are echoes--faint, indeed, but not, I think, unfaithful--of thirty years ago, and they have suddenly been awoke from their long slumber by the sermons which Father Vaughan has just been preaching at the Jesuits' Church in Farm Street, Mayfair. The good Father, exalting his own church, perhaps a little unduly, at the expense of the Anglican churches in the district, observed complacently that "Farm Street, in spite of its extension, was all too small" for its congregation. For my own part, I do not belong to that fold, and I never wander to strange churches for the pleasure of having my ears tickled; so I only know Father Vaughan's utterances as they reach me through the newspapers. A report in the third person always tends to enfeeble rhetoric; but, in spite of that hindrance, Father Vaughan's style seems to lack nothing in the way of emphasis or directness. Here is a fragment of his sermon preached on Sunday the 10th of June 1906:--
"It was no easy task for the votaries of pleasure when Sunday came round to all of a sudden forget their class distinctions, their privileged sets, their social successes, their worldly goods, and to remember that they were going into the presence of Him before whom man and woman were not what they happened to have, but what they happened to be--that the debutante beauty might be before God less than her maid who waited up half the night for her, nay, less than the meanest scullery-maid below stairs; while the millionaire with means to buy up whole countries might be in God's sight far less pleasing and very much more guilty than the lowest groom in his stable yard."
Not less vigorous was the allocution of June 17.
"If Dives, who was buried in Hell, were to revisit the earth he would most surely have the _entrée_ to London's smartest set to-day. He would be literally pelted with invitations. And why not? Dives, so well groomed and turned out, with such a well-lined larder and so well-stocked a cellar, would be the very ideal host to cultivate. He would 'do you so well,' you would meet the 'right people at his place,' and you could always bring your 'latest friend.' Besides, what a good time one would have at his house-parties, where there would be no fear of being bored or dull!"[5]
[5] Here I seem to catch an echo of Dr. Pusey's sermon on "Why did Dives lose his soul?"
And yet again:--
"It was well when the winning-card fell into their hands, for then there was just a chance of some dressmaker or tradesman being paid something on account before becoming bankrupt. With such examples of the misuse of wealth before their eyes, it was a wonder there were not more Socialists than there actually were."
All the memories of my youth have been revived by Father Vaughan. Instead of 1906, 1876; instead of the Gothic gloom of Farm Street, the tawdry glare of St. Peter's, Eaton Square; instead of a Jesuit Father in the pulpit, a vigorous Protestant who renounces the Pope and all his works and glories in the Anglicanism of the Church of England. Grant those differences, which after all are more incidental than essential, and the sermons exactly reproduce those stirring days when the present Bishop of St. Andrews "shook the arsenal" of fashion, "thundered over" London, and achieved, as his admirers said, the supreme distinction of spoiling the London Season.
I am convinced that the Higher Critics of a later age, collating the Wilkinsonian tradition with such fragments as remain of Father Vaughan's discourses, will come to the conclusion that "Wilkinson" never existed (except in Wordsworth's ode to the Spade), but was a kind of heroic figure conceived by a much later generation, which had quivered under the rhetoric of a real person or persons called Vaughan; and the opinion of the learned will be sharply divided on such questions as whether Vaughan was one or many; if one, whether he was a Priest, a Cardinal, a Head Master, or an Independent Minister; or whether he was all four at different stages of his career.
XII
OXFORD
"Once, my dear--but the world was young then-- Magdalen elms and Trinity limes,-- Lissom the oars and backs that swung then, Eight good men in the good old times-- Careless we and the chorus flung then. Under St. Mary's chimes!
"Still on her spire the pigeons hover; Still by her gateway flits the gown; Ah, but her secret? You, young lover, Drumming her old ones forth from town, Know you the secret none discover? Tell it--when _you_ go down."
What Matthew Arnold did for the interpretation of Oxford through the medium of prose, that Mr. Quiller-Couch has done through the medium of verse. In the poem from which I have just quoted two stanzas he conveys, as no one else has ever conveyed it in poetry, the tender and elusive charm of that incomparable place.
"Know you her secret none can utter-- Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?"
It is a hard question, and susceptible of some very prosaic and therefore inappropriate answers. The true answer can, I think, only be given by those for whom Oxford lies, half hid, in the enchanted past: "Tell it--when _you_ go down."
Some parts of the spell which Oxford exercises on those who are subjected to her influence are in no sense secret. We perceive them from the day when we first set foot within her precincts, and the sense of them abides with us for ever.
"If less insensible than sodden clay In a sea-river's bed at ebb of tide,"
all sons of Oxford must realize her material beauty, her historical pre-eminence, her contribution to thought and culture, her influence on the religious life of England.
"Ah, but her secret? You, young lover."
There is nothing secret about all this; it is palpable and manifest; and yet it does not exhaust the spell. Something there is that remains undiscovered, or at best half-discovered--felt and guessed at, but not clearly apprehended--until we have passed away from the "dreaming spires"--the cloisters and the gardens and the river--to that sterner life for which these mysterious enchantments have been preparing us.
"Know you the secret none discover?"
If you do, that is proof that time has done its work and has brought to the test of practical result the influences which were shaping your mind and, still more potently, your heart, between eighteen and twenty-two. What that "secret" is, let an unworthy son of Oxford try to tell.
To begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to the well-spread table of an Oxford common-room. In a laburnum-clad villa in the Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in cities where five families camp in one room. But when we leave the actualities of life and come to the region of thought and opinion, all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes, I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the flames; and in this fervency of thought and feeling Oxford is characteristically prophetic. It is a tradition that in some year of the passion-torn 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) she has been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain have lain thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with rare irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever-recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture.
"Never we wince, though none deplore us, We who go reaping that we sowed; Cities at cockcrow wake before us-- Hey, for the lilt of the London road! One look back, and a rousing chorus! Never a palinode!"
It is when we have finally sung that chorus and have travelled a few miles upon that road, that we learn the secret which we never discovered while as yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We thought then that we were the most desperate partizans; we asked no quarter, and gave none; pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and made short work of a fallen foe. But, when all the old battle-cries have died out of our ears, we begin to perceive humaner voices. All at once we realize that a great part of our old contentions was only sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which we strove may have been absolutely right, our opponents were not necessarily villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford. All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending and alienating. We had attained to that temper which, in the sphere of thought and opinion, is analogous to the crowning virtue of Christian charity.
"Tell it--when _you_ go down."
Lately it has been my privilege to address a considerable gathering of Oxford undergraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and all with their eyes eagerly fixed on "the wistful limit of the world." With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's dogma that to call a man a "typically Oxford man" is to bestow the highest possible praise.
But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for a speaker who had travelled for thirty years on "the London road" to state as plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had decided the course and complexion of his life. And, when it was difficult to express that obligation in the pedestrian prose of an after-dinner speech, he turned for succour to the poet who sang of "the secret none discover." Wherever philosophical insight is combined with literary genius and personal charm, one says instinctively, "That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name of Edmund Burke; and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character: "It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but both selected--in the one to be placable, in the other immovable." Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.
XIII
SCHOOLS FOR SHEPHERDS
"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."
Why not? Because the Shepherds are so imperfectly trained for their business. This, at any rate, is the testimony of a Canon (sometime Examining Chaplain to a Bishop) who at the Diocesan Conference at Ely the other day declared that the clergy were "not qualified to provide instruction in Church Doctrine for the laity because they were not properly trained"; and further testified that "Nonconformist Ministers were much better trained" than the English Clergy. This testimony from a superior Shepherd is rather startling for the Sheep, and it suggests some interesting comparisons. It is, I take it, unquestionable that Nonconformist ministers and Roman Catholic priests alike have much more of a technical education than is thought necessary for their Anglican brothers. They are, so to say, caught early, and their studies from seventeen or eighteen onwards are directed steadily towards their appointed work in life. A Roman Seminarist learns his Latin and Greek as subsidiary to higher studies; he spends, I believe, two years in Philosophy and four in Theology, and is harassed by incessant examinations. The training of the youth who aspires to the Nonconformist ministry is of much the same kind. "Moral Theology," in other words the Science of the Confessional, he naturally does not learn; but, on the other hand, he is sedulously trained for the work of public speaking and preaching. "If you can't preach," said Spurgeon to his students at Stockwell, "it is a clear proof that God doesn't mean you to be a preacher, and you must choose some other occupation."