Chapter 14

I once had a little piece of biography to do which necessitated my writing requests for reminiscences to several of the friends of the subject of my book. I never had such a strange revelation of human nature. A very few people gave me just what I wanted to know--facts, and sayings, and trenchant actions. A second class of correspondents told me things which had a certain value--episodes in which my hero appeared, but intermingled with many of their own opinions, doings, and sayings. A third class wrote almost exclusively about themselves, using my hero as a peg to hang their own remarks upon. The worst offender of all wrote me long reminiscences of his own conversations, in the following style: "How well I remember the summer of 18--, when dear P---- was staying at F----. I and my wife had a little house in the neighbourhood. We found it convenient to be able to run down there and to rest a little after the fatigues of London life. I remember very well a walk I took with P----. It was the time of the Franco-Prussian War, and I was full of indignation at the terrible sacrifice of life which appeared to me to be for no end. I remember pouring out my thoughts to P----." Here followed a page or two of reflections upon the barbarity of war. "P---- listened to me with great interest; I cannot now recall what he said, but I know that it struck me very much at the time." And so on through many closely written pages.

Well, the editor of the Professor's letters has not done this at all; he keeps himself entirely in the background. But, after reading the book, the reflection is borne in upon me that, unless the hero is a good letter-writer (and the Professor was not), the form of the book cannot be wholly justified. Most of the letters are, so to speak, business letters; they are either letters connected with ecclesiastical politics, or they are letters dealing with technical historical points. There are many little shrewd and humorous turns occurring in them. But these should, I think, have been abstracted from their context and worked into a narrative. The Professor was a man of singular character and individuality. Besides his enormous erudition, he had a great fund of sterling common sense, a deep and liberal piety, and a most inconsequent and, I must add, undignified sense of humour. He carried almost to a vice the peculiarly English trait of national character--the extreme dislike of emotional statement, the inability to speak easily and unaffectedly on matters of strong feeling and tender concern. I confess that this has a displeasing effect. When one desires above all things to have a glimpse into his mind, to be reassured as to his seriousness and piety, it is ten to one that the Professor will, so to speak, pick up his skirts, and execute a series of clumsy, if comic, gambols and caracoles in front of you. A sense of humour is a very valuable thing, especially in a professor of theology; but it should be of a seemly and pungent type, not the humour of a Merry Andrew. And one has the painful sense, especially in the most familiar letters of this collection, that the Professor took an almost puerile pleasure in trying to shock his correspondent, in showing how naughty he could be. One feels the same kind of shock as if one had gone to see the Professor on serious business, and found him riding on a rocking-horse in his study, with a paper cap on his head. There is nothing morally wrong about it; but it appears to be silly, and silliness is out of place behind a gown and under a college cap.

But the Biography of Bishop F---- opens up a further and more interesting question, which I feel myself quite unequal to solving. One has a respect for erudition, of course, but I find myself pondering gloomily over the reasons for this respect. Is it only the respect that one feels for the man who devotes patient labour to the accomplishment of a difficult task, a task which demands great mental power? What I am not clear about is what the precise value of the work of the erudite historian is. The primary value of history is its educational value. It is good for the mind to have a wide view of the world, to have a big perspective of affairs. It corrects narrow, small, personal views; it brings one in contact with heroic, generous persons; it displays noble qualities. It gives one glimpses of splendid self-sacrifice, of lives devoted to a high cause; it sets one aglow with visions of patriotism, liberty and justice. It shows one also the darker side; how great natures can be neutralised or even debased by uncorrected faults; how bigotry can triumph over intelligence; how high hopes can be disappointed. All this is saddening; yet it deepens and widens the mind; it teaches one what to avoid; it brings one near to the deep and patient purposes of God.

But then there is a temptation to think that vivid, picturesque, stimulating writers can do more to develop this side of history than patient, laborious, just writers. One begins to be inclined to forgive anything but dulness in a writer; to value vitality above accuracy, colour above truth. One is tempted to feel that the researches of erudite historians end only in proving that white is not so white, and black not so black as one had thought. That generous persons had a seamy side; that dark and villainous characters had much to be urged in excuse for their misdeeds. This is evidently a wrong frame of mind, and one is disposed to say that one must pursue truth before everything. But then comes in the difficulty that truth is so often not to be ascertained; that documentary evidence is incomplete, and that even documents themselves do not reveal motives. Of course, the perfect combination would be to have great erudition, great common sense and justice, and great enthusiasm and vigour as well. It is obviously a disadvantage to have a historian who suppresses vital facts because they do not fit in with a preconceived view of characters. But still I find it hard to resist the conviction that, from the educational point of view, stimulus is more important than exactness. It is more important that a boy should take a side, should admire and abhor, than that he should have very good reasons for doing so. For it is character and imagination that we want to affect rather than the mastery of minute points and subtleties.

Thus, from an educational point of view, I should consider that Froude was a better writer than Freeman; just as I should consider it more important that a boy should care for Virgil than that he should be sure that he had the best text.

I think that what I feel to be the most desirable thing of all is, that boys should learn somehow to care for history--however prejudiced a view they take of it--when they are young; and that, when they are older, they should correct misapprehensions, and try to arrive at a more complete and just view.

Then I go on to my further point, and here I find myself in a still darker region of doubt. I must look upon it, I suppose, as a direct assault of the Evil One, and hold out the shield of faith against the fiery darts.

What, I ask myself, is, after all, the use of this practice of erudition? What class of the community does it, nay, can it, benefit? The only class that I can even dimly connect with any benefits resulting from it is the class of practical politicians; and yet, in politics, I see a tendency more and more to neglect the philosophical and abstruse view; and to appeal more and more to later precedents, not to search among the origins of things. Nay, I would go further, and say that a pedantic and elaborate knowledge of history hampers rather than benefits the practical politician. It is not so with all the learned professions. The man of science may hope that his researches may have some direct effect in enriching the blood of the world. He may fight the ravages of disease, he may ameliorate life in a hundred ways.

But these exponents of learning, these restorers of ancient texts, these disentanglers of grammatical subtleties, these divers among ancient chronicles and forgotten charters--what is it that they do but to multiply and revive useless knowledge, and to make it increasingly difficult for a man to arrive at a broad and philosophical view, or ever attack his subject at the point where it may conceivably affect humanity or even character? The problem of the modern world is the multiplication of books and records, and every new detail dragged to light simply encumbers the path of the student. I have no doubt that this is a shallow and feeble-minded view. But I am not advancing it as a true view; I am only imploring help; I only desire light. I am only too ready to believe in the virtues and uses of erudition, if any one will point them out to me. But at present it only appears to me like a gigantic mystification, enabling those who hold richly endowed posts to justify themselves to the world, and to keep the patronage of these emoluments in their own hands. Supposing, as a reductio ad absurdum, that some wealthy individual were to endow an institution in order that the members of it might count the number of threads in carpets. One can imagine a philosophical defence being made of the pursuit. A man might say that it was above all things necessary to classify, and investigate, and to arrive at the exact truth; to compare the number of threads in different carpets, and that the sordid difficulties which encumbered such a task should not be regarded, in the light of the fact that here, at least, exact results had been obtained.

Of course, that is all very silly! But I believe; only I want my unbelief helped! If you can tell me what services are rendered by erudition to national life, you will relieve my doubts. Do not merely say that it enlarges the bounds of knowledge, unless you are also prepared to prove that knowledge is, per se, a desirable thing. I am not sure that it is not a hideous idol, a Mumbo Jumbo, a Moloch in whose honour children have still to pass through the fire in the recesses of dark academic groves.--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON, Nov. 1, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have read, after a fashion, in the course of the last month, the Autobiography of Herbert Spencer. I know nothing of his philosophy--I doubt if I have read half-a-dozen pages of his writings; and the man, as revealed in his own transparent confessions, is almost wholly destitute of attractiveness. All the same it is an intensely interesting book, because it is the attempt of a profound egotist to give a perfectly sincere picture of his life. Of course, I should have read it with greater appreciation if I had studied or cared for his books; but I take for granted that he was a great man, and accomplished a great work, and I like to see how he achieved it.

The book is the strongest argument I have ever yet read against a rational education. I who despair of the public-school classical system, am reluctantly forced to confess that it can sow the seeds of fairer flowers than ever blossomed in the soul of Herbert Spencer. He was by no means devoid of aesthetic perception. He says that the sight of a mountain, and music heard in a cathedral were two of the things that moved him most. He describes a particular sunset which he saw in Scotland, and describes the experience as the climax of his emotional sensations. He was devoted to music, and had a somewhat contemptuous enjoyment of pictures. But the arrogance and impenetrability of the man rise up on every page. He cannot say frankly that he does not understand art and literature; he dogmatises about them, and gives the reader to understand that there is really nothing in them. He criticises the classics from the standpoint of a fourth form boy. He sits like a dry old spider, spinning his philosophical web, with a dozen avenues of the soul closed to him, and denying that such avenues exist. As a statistical and sociological expert he ought to have taken into account the large number of people who are affected by what we may call the beautiful, and to have allowed for its existence even if he could not feel it. But no, he is perfectly self-satisfied, perfectly decided. And this is the more surprising because the man was in reality a hedonist. He protests finely in more than one place against those who make life subsidiary to work. He is quite clear on the point that work is only a part of life, and that to live is the object of man. Again, he states that the pursuit of innocent pleasure is a thing to which it is justifiable to devote some energy, and yet this does not make him tolerant. The truth is that he was so supremely egotistical, so entirely wrapped up in himself and his own life, that what other people did and cared for was a matter of entire indifference to him. His social tastes, and they were considerable, were all devoted to one and the same purpose. He liked staying at agreeable country houses, because it was a pleasant distraction to him and improved his health. He liked dining out, because it stimulated his digestion. All human relationships are made subservient to the same end. It never seems to him to be a duty to minister to the pleasure of others. He takes what he can get at the banquet of life, and, having secured his share, goes away to digest it. When, at the end of his life, social entertainments tried his nerves, he gave them up. When people came to see him, and he found himself getting tired or excited by conversation, if it was not convenient to him to leave the room, he put stoppers in his ears to blur the sense of the talk. What better parable of the elaborate framework of egotism on which his life was constructed could there be than the following legend, not derived from the book? One evening, the story goes, the philosopher had invited, at his club, a youthful stranger to join him in a game of billiards. The young man, who was a proficient, ran out in two breaks, leaving his rival a hopeless distance behind. When he had finished, Spencer, with a severe air, said to him: "To play billiards in an ordinary manner is an agreeable adjunct to life; to play as you have been playing is evidence of a misspent youth." A man who was not an egotist and a philosopher, however much he disliked the outcome of the game, would have attempted some phrases of commendation. But Spencer's view was, that anything which rendered a player of billiards less useful to himself, by giving him fewer opportunities in the course of a game for what he would have called healthful and pleasurable recreation, was not only not to be tolerated, but was to be morally reprobated.

As to his health, a subject which occupies the larger part of the volumes, it is evident that, though his nervous system was deranged, he was a complete hypochondriac. There is very little repining about the invalid conditions under which he lived; and it gradually dawned upon me that this was not because he had resolved to bear it in a stoical and courageous manner, but because his ill-health, seen through the rosy spectacles of the egotist, was a matter of pleasurable excitement to him; he complains a good deal of the peculiar sensations he experienced, and his broken nights, but with a solemn satisfaction in the whole experience. He never had to bear physical pain, and the worst evil from which he suffered was the boredom resulting from the way in which he had to try, or conceived that he had to try, to kill time without reading or working.

Of course one cannot help admiring the tenacious way in which he carried out his great work under unfavourable conditions. Yet there is something ridiculous in the picture of his rowing about in a boat on the Regent's Park Lake, with an amanuensis in the stern, dictating under the lee of an island until his sensations returned, and then rowing until they subsided again. As a hedonist, he distinctly calculated that his work gave the spice to his life, and that he would not have been so happy had he relinquished it. But there is nothing generous or noble about his standpoint; he liked writing and philosophising, and he preferred to do it even though it entailed a certain amount of invalidism, in the same spirit in which a man prefers to drink champagne with the prospect of suffering from the gout, rather than to renounce champagne and gout alike.

The man's face is in itself a parable. He has the high, domed forehead of the philosopher, and a certain geniality of eye; but the hard, thin-lipped mouth, with the deep lines from the nose, give him the air of an elderly chimpanzee. He has a hand like a bird's claw; and the antique shirt-front and small bow-tie denote the man who has fixed his opinions on the cut of his clothes at an early date and does not intend to modify them. Quite apart from the intense seriousness with which the sage took himself, down to the smallest details, the style of the book, dry as it is, is in itself grotesquely attractive.

There is something in the use of solemn scientific terminology, when dealing with the most trivial matters, which makes many passages irresistibly ludicrous. I wish that I could think that the writer of the following lines wrote them with any consciousness of how humorous a passage he was constructing--

"With me any tendency towards facetiousness is the result of temporary elation, either . . . caused by pleasurable health-giving change, or more commonly by meeting old friends. Habitually I observed that on seeing the Lotts after a long interval, I was apt to give vent to some witticisms during the first hour or two, and then they became rare."

I can't say that the life is a sad one, because, on the whole, it is a contented one; but it is so one-sided and so self-absorbed that one feels dried-up and depressed by it. One feels that great ability, great perseverance, may yet leave a man very cold and hard; that a man may penetrate the secrets of philosophy and yet never become wise; and one ends by feeling that simplicity, tenderness, a love of beautiful and gracious things are worth far more than great mental achievement. Or rather, I suppose, that one has to pay a price for everything, and that the price that this dyspeptic philosopher paid for his great work was to move through the world in a kind of frigid blindness, missing life after all, and bartering reality for self-satisfaction.

Curiously enough, I have at the same time been reading the life of another self-absorbed and high-minded personality--the late Dean Farrar. This is a book the piety of which is more admirable than the literary skill; but probably the tender partiality with which it is written makes it a more valuable document from the point of view of revealing personality than if it had been more critically treated.

Farrar was probably the exact opposite of Herbert Spencer in almost every respect. He was a litterateur, a rhetorician, an idealist, where Spencer was a philosopher, a scientific man, and a rationalist. Farrar admired high literature with all his heart; though unfortunately it did not clarify his own taste, but only gave him a rich vocabulary of high-sounding words, which he bound into a flaunting bouquet. He was like the bower-bird, which takes delight in collecting bright objects of any kind, bits of broken china, fragments of metal, which it disposes with distressing prominence about its domicile, and runs to and fro admiring the fantastic pattern. The fabric of Farrar's writing is essentially thin; his thoughts rarely rose above the commonplace, and to these thoughts he gave luscious expression, sticking the flowers of rhetoric, of which his marvellous memory gave him the command, so as to ornament without adorning.

Every one must have been struck in Farrar's works of fiction by the affected tone of speech adopted by his saintly and high-minded heroes. It was not affectation in Farrar to speak and write in this way; it was the form in which his thoughts naturally arranged themselves. But in one sense it was affected, because Farrar seems to have been naturally a kind of dramatist. I imagine that his self-consciousness was great, and I expect that he habitually lived with the feeling of being the central figure in a kind of romantic scene. The pathos of the situation is that he was naturally a noble-minded man. He had a high conception of beauty, both artistic and moral beauty. He did live in the regions to which he directed others. But this is vitiated by a desire for recognition, a definite, almost a confessed, ambition. The letter, for instance, in which he announces that he has accepted a Canonry at Westminster is a painful one. If he felt the inexpressible distress, of which he speaks, at the idea of leaving Marlborough, there was really no reason why he should not have stayed; and, later on, his failure to attain to high ecclesiastical office seems to have resulted in a sense of compassion for the inadequacy of those who failed to discern real merit, and a certain bitterness of spirit which, considering his services to religion and morality, was not wholly unnatural. But he does not seem to have tried to interpret the disappointment that he felt, or to have asked himself whether the reason of his failure did not rather lie in his own temperament.

The kindness of the man, his laboriousness, his fierce indignation against moral evil, to say nothing of his extraordinary mental powers, seem to have been clogged all through life by this sad self-consciousness. The pity and the mystery of it is that a man should have been so moulded to help his generation, and then that this grievous defect of temperament should have been allowed to take its place as the tyrant of the whole nature. And what makes the whole situation even more tragic is that it was through a certain transparency of nature that this egotism became apparent to others. He was a man who seemed bound to speak of all that was in his mind; that was a part of his rhetorical temperament. But if he could have held his tongue, if he could have kept his own weakness of spirit concealed, he might have achieved the very successes which he desired, and, indeed, deserved. The result is that a richly endowed character achieves no conspicuous greatness, either as a teacher, a speaker, a writer, or even as a man.

The moral of these two books is this: How can any one whose character is deeply tinged by this sort of egotism--and it is the shadow of all eager and sensitive temperaments--best fight against it? Can it be subdued, can it be concealed, can it be cured? I hardly dare to think so. But I think that a man may deliberately resolve not to make recognition an object; and next I believe he may most successfully fight against egotism in ordinary life by regarding it mainly as a question of manners. If a man can only, in early life, get into his head that it is essentially bad manners to thrust himself forward, and determine rather to encourage others to speak out what is in their minds, a habit can be acquired; and probably, upon acquaintance, an interest in the point of view of others will grow. That is not a very lofty solution, but I believe it to be a practical one; and certainly for a man of egotistic nature it is a severe and fruitful lesson to read the lives of two such self-absorbed characters as Spencer and Farrar, and to see, in the one case, how ugly and distorting a fault, in the other, how hampering a burden it may become.

Egotism is really a failure of sympathy, a failure of justice, a failure of proportion, and to recognise this is the first step towards establishing a desire to be loving, just, and well-balanced.

But still the mystery remains: and I think that perhaps the most wholesome attitude is to be grateful for what in the way of work, of precept, of example these men achieved, and to leave the mystery of their faults to their Maker, in the noble spirit of Gray's Elegy:--