Auld lang syne

When I had settled in England in 1847, my literary acquaintances began afresh. I have had the good fortune of being on more or less intimate terms with such poets as Kingsley, Clough, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, and with poets in prose such as Froude, Ruskin, Carlyle, and I may add, in spite of the Atlantic, Emerson, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I knew other writers such as Macaulay, Arthur Helps, Arthur Stanley, Frederick Maurice, Dr. Martineau; I may add even the names of Faraday, Lyall, Sedgwick, Thirlwall, Grote, Whewell, Richard Owen, Darwin, Huxley, among my personal acquaintances or friends.

Kingsley was married to one of my wife’s aunts. She was one of six most remarkable sisters, all married except the eldest and, I believe, the most gifted, who had devoted her life to the education of her younger sisters. Besides Charles Kingsley, the husbands of the other sisters were Froude, the historian; Lord Wolverton, of high standing in the financial world as the head of the house of Glyn, and the valued adviser of Mr. Gladstone in his earlier financial reforms; R. Mertyns Bird, an illustrious name in the history of India as the organiser of the North-Western Provinces; and “S. G. O.”

How soon popularity vanishes! There was a time when everybody knew and spoke of “S. G. O.” He was Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, an influential writer on political and social subjects, a frequent contributor to The Times during the Crimean War, a man of great force and independence of character. He was a giant in stature, and extremely attractive by his varied knowledge in different branches of physical science. He was a well-known microscopist, and when it was wanted, a doctor, a nurse, a surgeon, a dentist. However, he was not a poet, like his two brothers-in-law. He was an active clergyman, a sanitary reformer, a ready helper wherever poor people were ready to be helped. These five men, the husbands of five remarkable sisters—of whom one, Mrs. Bird, is still living at the age of ninety-six (she died this year), and not only living, but alive to all that is interesting in the world, and full of good works—represented a power in England. “S. G. O.” moved in a sphere of his own, and seldom came to Oxford. But Kingsley and Froude soon became my intimate friends.

If I call Froude a poet it is because, as I explained before, I do not consider rhyme as essential to poetry. But for really poetical power, for power of description, of making the facts of history alive, of laying bare the deepest thoughts of men and the most mysterious feelings of women, there was no poet or historian of our age who came near him. I knew him through all his phases. I knew him first when he was still a fellow of Exeter College. I was at that time often with him in his rooms in High Street, opposite to St. Mary’s Church, when he was busy writing novels, and I well remember passing an evening with him and trying to find the right name for a novel which afterwards appeared under the title of “Nemesis of Faith.” I saw him almost daily while his persecution at Oxford was going on, gaining strength every day. He had to give up his fellowship, on which he chiefly depended. I will not repeat the old story that his novel was publicly burnt in the quadrangle of Exeter College. The story is interesting as showing how quickly a myth can spring up even in our own lifetime, if only there is some likelihood in it, and something that pleases the popular taste. What really happened was, as I was informed at the time by Froude himself, no more than that one of the tutors (Dr. Sewell) spoke about the book at the end of one of his College Lectures. He warned the young men against the book, and asked whether anybody had read it. One of the undergraduates produced a copy which belonged to him. Dr. Sewell continued his sermonette, and warming with his subject, he finished by throwing the book, which did not belong to him, into the fire, at the same time stirring the coals to make them burn. Of what followed there are two versions. Dr. Sewell, when he had finished, asked his class, “Now, what have I done?” “You have burned my copy,” the owner of the book said in a sad voice, “and I shall have to buy a new one.” The other version of the reply was, “You have stirred the fire, sir.”

And so it was. A book which at present would call forth no remark, no controversy, was discussed in all the newspapers, and raised a storm all over England. Bishops shook their heads, nay even their fists, at the young heretic, and even those among his contemporaries at Oxford who ought to have sympathised with him, and were in fact quite as unorthodox as he was, did not dare to stand up for him or lend him a helping hand. Stanley alone never said an unkind word of him. The worst was that Froude not only lost his fellowship, but when he had accepted the Headmastership of a college far away in Tasmania, his antagonists did not rest till his appointment had been cancelled. Froude unfortunately was poor, and his father, a venerable and well-to-do Archdeacon, was so displeased with his son that he stopped the allowance which he had formerly made him. It seems almost as if the poverty of a victim gave increased zest and enjoyment to his pursuers. Froude had to sell his books one by one, and was trying hard to support himself by his pen. This was then not so easy a matter as it is now. At that very time, however, I received a cheque for £200 from an unknown hand, with a request that I would hand it to Froude to show him that he had friends and sympathisers who would not forsake him. It was not till many years later that I discovered the donor, and Froude was then able to return him the money which at the time had saved him from drowning. I should like to mention the name, but that kind friend in need is no longer among the living, and I have a feeling that even now he would wish his name to remain unknown. This is by no means the only instance of true English generosity which I have witnessed. But at the time I confess that I was surprised, for I did not yet know how much of secret goodness, how much of secret strength there is in England, how much of that real public spirit, of that chivalrous readiness to do good and to resist evil without lifting the vizor. Froude had a hard struggle before him, and, being a very sensitive man, he suffered very keenly. Several times I remember when I was walking with him and friends or acquaintances of his were passing by without noticing him, he turned to me and said: “That was another cut.” I hardly understood then what he meant, but I felt that he meant not only that he had been dropped by his friends, but that he felt cut to the quick. Persecution, however, did not dishearten him; on the contrary, it called forth his energies, and the numerous essays from his pen, now collected under the title “Short Studies on Great Subjects,” show how he worked, how he thought, how he followed the course that seemed right to him without looking either right or left. Bunsen, who was at the time the Prussian Minister in London, and had heard from me about Froude, took a deep interest in him, and after consulting with Archdeacon Hare and Frederick Maurice, suggested that he should spend a few years at a German university. I was asked to bring my young friend to Carlton Terrace, where Bunsen received him with the truest kindness. What he tried to impress on him was that the questions which disturbed him required first of all a historical treatment, and that before we attempt to solve difficulties we should always try to learn how they arose. Froude was on the point of going to Germany with the assistance of some of Bunsen’s friends when other prospects opened to him in England. But frequently in later life he referred to his interview with Bunsen and said, “I never knew before what it meant that a man could drive out devils.”

I confess I was somewhat surprised when Froude suddenly told me of his plan of writing a History of England, beginning with Henry VIII. My idea of a historian was that of a professor who had read and amassed materials during half his life, and at the end produced a ponderous book, half text, half notes. But, hazardous as the idea of writing a History of England seemed to me for so young a man, I soon perceived that Froude had an object in writing, and he certainly set to work with wonderful perseverance. Few of his critics have given him credit for what he did at Simancas and at the Record Office in London. I have seen him at work, morning and evening, among piles of notes and extracts. I know how the pages which are such pleasant light reading were written again and again till he was satisfied. Often I had to confess to him that I never copied what I had once written, and he was outspoken enough to tell me, “But you ought; and you will never write good English if you don’t.” He learnt Spanish, French, and German, so as to be able to read new and old books in these languages. He always kept up his classical reading, and translated, as far as I remember, several Greek texts from beginning to end. To these he afterwards referred, and quoted from them, without always, as he ought, going back again to the original Greek.

It is not for me to say that he did not make mistakes, and that he was not weak in some branches of historical knowledge. I cannot deny that in his translations also there are mistakes, arising from haste rather than from ignorance. But who has ever examined any translation from any language, without finding signs of what seems carelessness or ignorance? Four eyes see more than two. We have translations of Plato and Aristotle in Latin and in almost every language of Europe. The text has been critically examined for hundreds of years, and every difficult passage has been explained again and again. But is there any one translation which could be called immaculate? Was not even the last translation of Plato which is so deservedly popular, characterised by the late Rector of Lincoln, in the well-known words of a French writer, as très belle, mais peu fidèle? Now, while the true scholar, when examining a new translation, rejoices over every new happy rendering, the ill-natured critic, particularly if he wants to display his own superior knowledge, can easily pick out a number of passages where a mistake has been made, or where he thinks that a mistake has been made, and then proceed to show that the very best Greek scholar of the day does not know “what every schoolboy ought to know,” etc. There are many passages in Greek and other authors that admit of more than one translation. If the translator adopts one and rejects another, the game of the critic is easy enough: he has only to adopt the rejected rendering, and his triumph is secured. If that is so in Greek, how much more is it the case in translating passages from faded documents written in antiquated Spanish, nay, even letters of Erasmus written in his peculiar Latin, or statutes in Norman-French.

Translation is a difficult art, and scholars, particularly those who know the language from which, or the language into which, they translate as well as their own, consider a good translation almost impossible. I have had some experience in translating, and I know something of the treatment which translators may expect from conceited critics. The Sacred Books of the East, translated by myself and a number of friends, the best scholars I could find, have not escaped that kind of pedantic criticism. Impartial and honest critics have recognised the difficulties under which scholars labour in translating, often for the first time, ancient texts, whether Greek or Sanskrit. It is easy enough to translate a text, after it has once been translated; it is easy even to improve in a few places on the translations of the first pioneers. But to translate for the first time an ancient text, badly edited or not yet edited at all, is a totally different thing, and those who undertake it have a right not only to the indulgence, but to the gratitude of all who come after them. No one in our sphere of studies would call himself a scholar who has not edited a text never edited before, or at least translated a text that never was translated before. There are some critics who think they have done their duty if they can discover a few flaws in a translation, though they cannot even appreciate the labours and the brilliant though silent discoveries of a first translator. The work that has to be done by a first translator of an ancient text is often the work of a real decipherer. He has to grope his way through Egyptian darkness like the first interpreter of an Egyptian or Babylonian inscription. He cannot help making mistakes. But though we know now how often even a Champollion (died 1832) was mistaken, do we not feel ashamed if we read what another most eminent Egyptologist and Coptic scholar, Amadeo Peyron (died 1870), the head of the Egyptian Museum at Turin, said of Champollion? “I have known Champollion,” he said, “the so-called decipherer of hieroglyphics, very well, from his first visits to our Museum. I took him for an ordinary swindler, and his publications have afterwards confirmed me in my views. His philological labours have remained to me unsolved riddles.”^[7]

I have lately had another experience. I had to revise my translation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” and I was surprised to see how many passages there were which I had to alter, not because I did not know either German or English, but because in many places a translation can only be approximately faithful; and it is only a happy thought that enables us now and then to approach nearer to the German original, though in that case often at the expense of the English idiom.

In the case of Froude, we must remember that, whatever he wrote, he had to meet not a single critic only, but a whole army. As far as one could see, a kind of association had been formed for the suppression of his “History.” Those who were behind the scenes know how certain of his rivals and enemies actually banded themselves together, as if against a common enemy. Now, I remember seeing in Fraser’s Magazine, then edited by Froude, a review of Green’s “History of the English People,” with pages and pages of mistakes in names, in dates, in facts. Yet, the same writers who delighted in picking holes in Froude’s “History” from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, kept up a constant chorus of applause for Green’s “History of the English People”—no doubt rightly so; but why not mete the same measure to others also? One of his reviewers openly confessed that if he took the trouble of reading a book carefully, he could not afford to review it in one paper only, he had to write at least five or six articles to make it pay. This Φρουδοφονία, as it was called, went on year after year, but, strange to say, Froude’s work was not killed by it; on the contrary, it became more and more popular. In fact, together with his other works, it enabled him to live independently and even comfortably by his pen. Things have come to such a pass that, if we may trust the experience of publishers, nothing sells so well as a well-abused book, while laudatory notices seem to produce little or no effect. The public, it seems, has grown too wise. Even such powerful adjectives as epoch-making (Epoche-machend), monumental and even pyramidal, fall flat. Epoche-machend has too often been found out to mean no more than Poche-machend (Poche in German means claque), and monumental has once or twice proved a misprint for momental or momentary. Few scholars would agree with M. Le Bon that “works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination, as fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts.” This is a French exaggeration. But neither are books of history meant to be mere chronicles. History is surely meant to teach not only facts, but lessons also; and, though historians may say that facts ought to speak for themselves, they will not speak without a vates sacer. I am the last man to stand up for an unscholarlike treatment of history, or of anything else. But as I do not call a man a scholar who simply copies and collates MSS., makes indices or collects errata, I doubt whether mere Quellenstudium will make a historian. Quellenstudium is a sine quâ non, but it is not everything; and whereas the number of those who can ransack archives and libraries is large, the world has not been rich in real historians whom it is a delight to listen to, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and, may we not add, Macaulay and Froude? None of these historians, not even Gibbon, has escaped criticism, but how poor should we be without them!

Sir Walter Raleigh, when he was writing his “History of the World” in the Tower of London, overheard two boys quarrelling over the facts of an incident that had happened the day before; and he said to himself: “If these two boys cannot agree on an event which occurred almost before their own eyes, how can any one be profited by the narration which I am writing, of events which occurred in ages long past?” The answer which the critical historian would give to Raleigh would probably be: “Go and examine the two boys; find out their home, their relations, their circumstances, particularly the opportunities they had of seeing what they profess to have seen; and try to discover whether there was any bias in their minds that could have made them incline towards one side rather than the other. Give all that evidence, and then you are a real historian.” But is that true, and were any of the great historians satisfied with that? Was not their heart in their work, and is the heart ever far from what we call bias? Did not Herodotus, in describing the conflict between Greece and Asia, clearly espouse the cause of Greece? I know he has been called the father of lies rather than of history; but he has survived for all that. Did not Thucydides throughout his history write as the loyal son of Athens? Was Tacitus very anxious to find out all that could be said in favour of Tiberius? Was even Gibbon, in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” quite impartial? Ranke’s “History of the Popes,” may be very accurate, but for thousands who read Macaulay and Froude is there one who reads Ranke, except the historian by profession? History is not written for historians only. Macaulay wrote the history of the English Restoration as a partisan, and Froude made no secret on which side he would have fought, if he had lived through the storms of the English Reformation. If Macaulay had been one of the two boys of Sir Walter Raleigh, he would probably not have discovered some of the dark shadows on the face of William III. which struck the other boy; while some critics might possibly say of Froude that in drawing the picture of Henry VIII. he may have followed now and then the example of Nelson in the use of his telescope. Still, in describing such recent periods as the reign of Henry VIII., historians cannot, at all events, go very far wrong in dates or names. Froude may have been wrong in embracing the cause of Henry VIII. and accepting all the excuses or explanations which could be given for his violent acts. But Froude is, at all events, honest, in so far that no one can fail to see where his sympathies lie, so that he really leaves us free to decide what side we ourselves should take.

When the historian has to analyse prominent characters, and bring them again full of life on the stage of history, is it not the artist, nay the poet, who has to do the chief work, and not the mere chronicler? In Froude’s case the difficulty was very great. The contemporary estimates of Henry’s character were most conflicting, and without taking a line of his own, without claiming in fact the same privilege which Henry’s contemporaries claimed, whether friends or foes, it would have been impossible for him to create a character that should be consistent and intelligible. There was nothing too fiendish to be told of the English king by the Papal party, and yet we cannot help asking how such a caitiff, as he is represented to have been by Roman Catholic agents, could have retained the love of the English people and secured the services of some of the best among the noblemen and gentlemen of his time? If we take upon ourselves to reject all reports of Royal Commissioners in Henry’s reign as corrupt and mendacious, would it be worth while to write any history of the English people at all? It is, no doubt, an ungrateful task to whitewash a historical character that has been besmirched for years by a resolute party. Yet it has to be done from time to time, from a sense of justice, and not from a mere spirit of opposition. Carlyle’s heroes were nearly all the best-abused men in Christendom: Frederick the Great, Cromwell, and Goethe. Every one of these characters was lying, as Carlyle said himself, under infinite dung; yet every one of them is now admired by thousands, because they trust in Carlyle. It was the same Carlyle who encouraged Froude in his work of rehabilitating Bluff King Hal, and we ought, at all events, to be grateful to him for having enabled us to know all that can be said by the king’s advocates. If Froude wrote as a partisan, he wrote, at the same time, as a patriot, and if a patriot sees but one side of the truth, some one else will see the other.

Can we imagine any history of our own times written from the pole star, and not from amid the turmoil of contending parties? Would a history of the reign of Queen Victoria, written by Gladstone, be very like a history written by Disraeli? However, these squabbles of reviewers about the histories of Macaulay and Froude are now almost entirely forgotten, while the historical dramas which Macaulay and Froude have left us, remain, and Englishmen are proud of possessing two such splendid monuments of the most important periods of their history. Macaulay’s account of William III. remained unfinished, and it is characteristic of Froude that, if I understood him rightly, he gave up the idea of finishing the reign of Queen Elizabeth, because, as an Englishman, he was disappointed in her character towards the end of her reign.

I saw much of Froude again during the last years of his life, when he returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of History, having been appointed by Lord Salisbury. “It is the first public recognition I have received,” he used to say. He rejoiced in it, and he certainly did credit to Lord Salisbury’s courageous choice. His lectures were brilliant, and the room was crowded to the end. His private lectures also were largely attended, and he was on the most friendly and intimate terms with some of his pupils.

There is no place so trying for a professor as Oxford. Froude’s immediate predecessors, Goldwin Smith, Stubbs, and Freeman, were some of the best men that Oxford has produced. Their lectures were excellent in every respect. Yet every one of them had to complain of the miserable scantiness of their audiences at Oxford. The present Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Stubbs, in his “Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediæval and Modern History” (1886), states what may sound almost incredible, that he had sometimes to deliver his lectures “to two or three listless men.” The same may be said of some of the best lectures delivered in the University. The young men are encouraged in each college to attend the lectures delivered by the tutors, and are given to understand that professorial lectures “do not pay” in the examinations. These examinations are chiefly in the hands of college tutors. Professor Stubbs was not given to complain about anything that might seem to concern himself, yet he confesses that “sometimes he felt hurt that in the combined lecture list he found the junior assistant tutor advertising a course on the same subject, or at the same hours, as his own.” Nay, he goes so far in his modesty as to say: “It may be better that there should be a dozen or fifteen college lecturers working away with large classes, when I have only a few stray men,” but the real friends of the University would hardly think so. As things are at present, it has been said, and, I believe, truly said, that nearly all professorial lectures might be abolished, and the studies of the undergraduates would go on just the same. Oxford suffers in this respect from a real embarras de richesse. The University is rich enough, though by no means so rich as it was formerly, to keep up a double staff of teachers, professorial and tutorial. It supports sixty-five professors, readers, and lecturers, and probably four or five times as many tutors. Many of the tutors are quite equal to the professors, nay, it may be, even superior to them, but the most popular tutor, whose lectures, when in college, were crowded, has to be satisfied with two or three listless men as soon as he has been raised to the professoriate. Froude’s lectures formed an exception, but even this was quoted against him.

Froude was not only the most fascinating lecturer, but the most charming companion and friend. His conversation was like his writings. It never tired one, it never made one feel his superiority. His store of anecdotes was inexhaustible, and though in his old age they were sometimes repeated, they were always pleasant to listen to. He enjoyed them so thoroughly himself, he chuckled over them, he covered his eyes as if half ashamed of telling them. They are all gone now, and a pity it is, for most of them referred to what he had actually seen, not only to what he had heard, and he had seen and heard a good deal, both in Church and State. He knew the little failings of great men, he knew even the peccadilloes of saints, better than anybody. He was never ill-natured in his judgments, he knew the world too well for that, and it is well, perhaps, that many things which he knew should be forgotten. He himself insisted on all letters being destroyed that had been addressed to him, and from a high sense of duty, left orders that his own letters, addressed to his friends, should not be divulged after his death. Though he left an unfinished autobiography, extremely interesting to the few friends who were allowed to read it, those who decided that it should not be published have acted, no doubt, wisely and entirely in his spirit.

My friend Charles Kingsley was a very different man. He was a strong man, while Froude had some feminine weaknesses, but also some of the best feminine excellencies. His life and his character are well known from that excellent biography published by his gifted widow, not much more than a year after his death. This Life of hers really gave a new life to him, and secured a new popularity and influence to his writings. In him, too, what I admired besides his delightful character was his poetical power, his brilliant yet minute and accurate descriptions of nature, and the characters he created in his novels. With all the biographies that are now published, how little do people know after all of the man they are asked to love or hate! In order to judge of a man, we ought to know in what quarry the marble of which he was made was carved, what sunshine there was to call forth the first germs of his mind, nay, even whether he was rich or poor, whether he had what we rightly call an independence, and whether from his youth he was and felt himself a free man. There is something in the character of a man like Stanley, for instance, which we have no right to expect in a man who had to struggle in life like Kingsley. The struggle for life may bring out many fine qualities, but it cannot but leave traces of the struggle, a certain amount of self-assertion, a love of warfare, and a more or less pronounced satisfaction at having carried the day against all rivals and opponents. These are the temptations of a poor man which do not exist for a man of independent means. It is no use shutting our eyes to this. Every fight entails blows, and wounds, and scars, and some of them remain for life. Kingsley seems to have had no anxieties as a young man at school or at the University, but when he had left the University and become a curate, and, more particularly, when he had married on his small curacy and there were children, his struggles began in good earnest. He had often to write against time; he had to get up subject after subject in order to be able to write an article, simply that he might be able to satisfy the most troublesome tradesmen. He always wrote at very high pressure; fortunately his physical frame was of iron, and his determination like that of a runaway horse. People may say that he had the usual income of a country clergyman, but why will they forget that a man in Kingsley’s position had not only to give his children an expensive education, but had to keep open house for his numerous friends and admirers? There was no display in his quiet rectory at Eversley, but even the simplest hospitality entails more expense than a small living can bear, and his friends and visitors ranged from the lowest to the highest—from poor workmen to English and foreign royalties. As long as he could wield his pen he could procure the necessary supplies, but it had to be done with a very great strain on the brain. “It must be done, and it shall be done,” he said; yes, but though most of his work was done, and well done, it was like the work of an athlete who breaks down at the end of the day when his victory is won. People did not see it and did not know it, for he never would yield, and never would show signs of yielding. When, towards the end of his life, a canonry was offered him, first at Chester, then at Westminster, he felt truly grateful. “After all,” he said to me, “these stalls are good for old horses.” His professorship at Cambridge was really too much for him. He was not prepared for it. Personally he did much good among the young men, and was certainly most popular. At Cambridge as a professor he did his best, but he had hardly calculated Quid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent. Anyhow, the work soon became too much even for his iron constitution, and he was glad to be relieved. The fact is that Kingsley was all his life, in everything he thought and in everything he did, a poet, a man of high ideals, and likewise of unswerving honesty. No one knew Kingsley, such as he really was, who had not seen him at Eversley, and among his poor people. He visited every cottage, he knew every old man and old woman, and was perfectly at home among them. His “Village Sermons” gave them just the food they wanted, though it was curious to see every Sunday a large sprinkling of young officers from Sandhurst and Aldershot sitting quietly among the smock-frocked congregation, and anxious to have some serious conversation with the preacher afterwards. Kingsley was a great martyr to stammering, it often was torture to him in a lively conversation to keep us all waiting till his thoughts could break through again. In church, however, whether he was reading or speaking extempore, there was no sign of stammering; apparently there was no effort to overcome it. But when we walked home from church he would say: “Oh, let me stammer now, you won’t mind it.”

He was not a learned theologian, his one idea of Christianity was practical Christianity, honesty, purity, love. He was always most courteous, most willing to bow before higher authority or greater learning; but when he thought there was anything wrong, or mean, or cowardly, anything with which he, as an honest man, could not agree, he was as firm as a rock.

His favourite pursuits lay in natural science. He knew every flower, every bird, every fish, and every insect in his neighbourhood, and he had imbibed a belief in the laws of nature, which represented to him indirectly the thoughts of God. When, therefore, after a long continuance of drought, the bishop of his diocese ordered him to have a special prayer for rain, he respectfully and firmly declined. He would pray for the good gifts of heaven, offer thanks to God for all that He was pleased to send in His wisdom, but he would not enter into particulars with Him, he would not put his own small human wisdom against the Divine wisdom; he would not preach on what he thought was good for us, for God knew best. He had no difficulty in persuading his farmers and labourers that if they had any trust in God, and any reverence for the Divine wisdom that rules the world, they would place all their troubles and cares before Him in prayer, but they would not beg for anything which, in His wisdom, He withheld from them. “Thy will be done,” that was his prayer for rain. There was great commotion in ecclesiastical dovecotes, most of all in episcopal palaces. All sorts of punishments were threatened, but Kingsley remained throughout perfectly quiet, yet most determined. He would not degrade his sacred office to that of a rain-maker or medicine-man, and he carried his point. “In America we manage these things better!” said an American friend of Kingsley. “A clergyman in a village on the frontier between two of our States prayed for rain. The rain came, and it soaked the ground to such an extent that the young lambs in the neighbouring State caught cold and died. An action was brought against the clergyman for the mischief he had done, and he and his parishioners were condemned to pay damages to the sheep farmers. They never prayed for rain again after that.”

Kingsley incurred great displeasure by the support he gave to what was called Christian Socialism. His novel “Alton Locke,” contained some very outspoken sentiments as to the terrible sufferings of the poor and the duties of the rich. Kingsley, Frederick Maurice, and their friends, did not only plead, but they acted; they formed societies to assist poor tailors, and for a time the clothes they wore showed but too clearly that they had been cut in Whitechapel, not in Regent Street. Poor Kingsley suffered not only in his wardrobe, but in his purse also, owing to his having been too sanguine in his support of tailoring by co-operation.

However, his books, both in prose and poetry, became more and more popular, and this meant that his income became larger and larger.

Publishers say that novels and sermons have the largest market in England and the colonies, and Kingsley provided both. All went on well: even his being stopped once in the middle of a sermon by a clergyman who had invited him to preach in his church in London, but did not approve of his sermon, did not hurt him. He had many influential friends; both the Queen and the Prince of Wales had shown by special marks of favour how much they appreciated him, and he had a right to look forward to ecclesiastical preferment and to a greater amount of leisure and freedom. One unexpected cloud, however, came to darken his bright and happy life. Some people will say that he brought it upon himself, but there are certain clouds which no honest man can help bringing upon himself. He, no doubt, began the painful controversy with Newman. Having seen how much misery had been caused among some of his own dearest friends by the Romanising teaching under the auspices of Newman and Pusey, he made the mistake of fastening the charge of dishonesty, half-heartedness, and untruthfulness on Newman personally, instead of on the whole Roman Catholic propaganda in England from the time of Henry VIII.’s apostasy from the Roman Church to that of Newman’s apostasy from the Church of England. I shall not enter into this controversy again. I have done so once, and have been well punished for having ventured to declare my honest conviction that throughout this painful duel Kingsley was in the right. But Kingsley was clumsy and Newman most skilful. Besides, Newman was evidently a man of many friends, and of many able friends who knew how to wield their pens in many a newspaper.

In spite of having taken a most unpopular step in leaving the national church, Newman always retained the popularity which he had so well earned as a member of that Church. I have myself been one of his true admirers, partly from having known many of his intimate friends at Oxford, partly from having studied his earlier works when I first came to England. I read them more for their style than for their contents. If Newman had left behind him no more than his exquisite University sermons and his sweet hymns he would always have stood high among the glories of England. But Kingsley also was loved by the people and surrounded by numerous and powerful friends. It must be due to my ignorance of the national character, but I have certainly never been able to explain why public sympathy went so entirely with Newman and against Kingsley; why Kingsley was supposed to have acted unchivalrously and Newman was looked upon as a martyr to his convictions, and as the victim of an illiberal and narrow-minded Anglican clique. Certain it is that in the opinion of the majority Kingsley had failed, and failed ignominiously, while Newman’s popularity revived and became greater than ever.

Kingsley felt his defeat most deeply; he was like a man that stammered, and could not utter at the right time the right word that was in his mind. What is still more surprising was the sudden collapse of the sale of Kingsley’s most popular books. I saw him after he had been with his publishers to make arrangements for the sale of his copyrights. He wanted the money to start his sons, and he had a right to expect a substantial sum. The sum offered him seemed almost an insult, and yet he assured me that he had seen the books of his publishers, and that the sale of his books during the last years did not justify a larger offer. He was miserable about it, as well he might be. He felt not only the pecuniary loss, but, as he imagined, the loss of that influence which he had gained by years of hard labour.

However, he was mistaken in his idea that he had laboured in vain. Immediately after his death there came the most extraordinary reaction. His books sold again in hundreds of thousands, and his family received in one year a great deal more from his royalties than had been offered him for the whole copyright of all his books. People are more willing now to admit that though Newman may have been right in his “Apologia pro Vita Sua,” Kingsley was not wrong in pointing out the weak points in Newman’s character and in the moral and political doctrines of the Roman Catholic system, more particularly of the Jesuits, and the dangers that threatened his beloved England from those who seemed halting between the two Churches, the one national, the other foreign, the one reformed, the other unreformed.

There was another occasion when Newman’s and Kingsley’s friends had a sharp conflict at Oxford. When the Prince of Wales was invited to Oxford to receive his honorary degree of D.C.L., he had, as was the custom, sent to the Chancellor a list of names of his friends on whom he wished that the same degree should be conferred at the same time. One of them was Kingsley, then one of his chaplains. When his name was proposed a strong protest was made by Dr. Pusey and his friends, no one could understand why. Dr. Pusey declared distinctly that he did not mean to contest Kingsley’s orthodoxy, but when asked at last to give his reasons, he declared that Kingsley’s “Hypatia” was an immoral book. This was too much for Dr. Stanley, who challenged Pusey to produce one single passage in “Hypatia” which could be called immoral. On such conditions Shakespeare could never have received an honorary degree from the University of Oxford. I still possess the copy of “Hypatia” which Stanley examined, marking every passage that could possibly be called immoral. It need hardly be said that there was none. Still Dr. Pusey threatened to veto the degree in Convocation and to summon his friends from the country to support him. And what could have been done to prevent an unseemly scandal on such an occasion as a royal visit to Oxford? Dr. Stanley and his friends yielded, and Kingsley’s name was struck out from the Prince’s list, and, what was still worse, it was never placed again on the list of honorary doctors such as might really have reflected honour on the University. If ever the secret history of the degrees conferred honoris causa by the University of Oxford on truly eminent persons, not members of the University, comes to be written, the rejection of Kingsley’s name will not be one of the least interesting chapters.

Kingsley’s death was a severe blow to his country, and his friends knew that his life might have been prolonged. It was a sad time I spent with him at Eversley, while his wife lay sick and the doctors gave no hope of her recovery. He himself also was very ill at the time, but a doctor whom the Queen had sent to Eversley told him that with proper care there was no danger for him, that he had the lungs of a horse, but that he required great care. In spite of that warning he would get up and go into the sick-room of his wife, which had to be kept at an icy temperature. He caught cold and died, being fully convinced that his wife had gone before him. And what a funeral it was! But with all the honour that was paid to him, all who walked back to the empty rectory felt that life henceforth was poorer, and that the sun of England would never be so bright or so cheerful again, now that he was gone. Though I admired—as who did not?—his poetical power, his brilliant yet most minute and accurate descriptions of nature, and the lifelike characters he had created in his novels, what we loved most in him was his presence, his delightful stammer, his downright honesty, and the perfect transparency of his moral nature. He was not a child, he was a man, but unspoiled by the struggles of his youth, unspoiled by the experiences of his later years. He was an English gentleman, a perfect specimen of noble English manhood.

Having been particularly attached to his young niece, my wife, he had at once allowed me a share in his affections, and when other members of her family shook their heads, he stood by me and bade me be of good cheer till the day was won, and she became my wife. That was in 1859. Here are some verses he had addressed to his two nieces, to my wife and to her sister, afterwards Mrs. Theodore Walrond (died 1872):—

In the original, as written down in her album, there is a third verse between the two:—