If among all the considerable painters of the Nineties I distinguish Leighton and Watts, it is not because I think them possessed of the greatest talents, or even the most interesting personalities, but because they seem between them to represent rather specially what sharply marked off the art then passing away from what has taken its place. Both were very much of the nineteenth century in the largeness of their ideas and their sense of the importance of their mission. In many ways there could have been no two men, and no two craftsmen, more distinct. Both were picturesque and stately figures. Both had features cast in the noblest mould; the grand-ducal geniality of Leighton was not less impressive in its kind than the frozen though gentle austerity of Watts. In any circle each took quite naturally a commanding position—Leighton as a kind of king, Watts as a kind of priest. Each was at bottom shy, though both were immovable in their opinions in any company. But spiritually they were so utterly unlike that the one served as a foil to the other. When they were together—they were early friends, and the friendship lasted till the end of Leighton’s life—they might have served as models for an allegory after Watts’s own heart. Leighton was the epicurean, Watts the stoic. Leighton represented the world at its gracefullest, Watts the travail of the spirit. Of Leighton it might be said that he would have been a better painter could he have thought of something really worth painting. It may certainly be said of Watts that he was at his best when he was under no obligation to decide what was worth painting. His painfully meditated allegories might now be spared without too considerable a pang; his portraits, simply as documents of the time, could not. But, strongly as they differed in other ways, both men illustrated in a remarkable degree the curious seriousness and arrogance characteristic of the Victorians. Leighton conceived that the painter should be very much of the gentleman. Watts conceived that the painter should be very much of the preacher. Neither felt that he had any affinity to the workman. When I say seriousness, I do not mean that either was a prig; I only mean that each had a profound conviction that the painting of easel pictures is an immensely important thing, whereas the painter of to-day of anything like equal stature would be the first to say that, while he paints easel pictures for a living, they are about as important as chocolates, cigars, liqueurs, circulating library novels, and vintage wines—things, that is to say, to titillate individuals rich enough to afford them. When I say arrogance, again, I do not mean that they were vulgarly conceited: Watts revealed a beautiful humility, and Leighton was always bemoaning his inadequacy. But both were full of the notion that the artist is in the world to teach something, if it is only deportment, and should be respected as a teacher. Both would have rebelled against the suggestion that the artist is a workman, and that it is his sole business, as it is any workman’s, to make the best use of his material.

It is not to the present purpose to adjudicate between the didactic and the ultra-technical ideas of art; the question, moreover, is by no means so simple as many of the controversialists have made it; no Victorian was ever fool enough to believe that bad technique was excused by good ethics, and it may be doubted whether any sane person on the other side ever believed—though some apparently sane persons have occasionally said—that technique is an end in itself. Grant that a painter has essentially the same problem, and is essentially the same kind of craftsman, as the bricklayer; grant that ethical painting is as absurd as ethical bricklaying, we are still far from admitting the wilder developments of “art for art’s sake.” The bricklayer’s business, after all, is to build houses for men and styes for pigs, and not simply to play the wizard—or the fool—with his material out of mere joy in his dexterity. So the painter, too, has a task to perform, and if he does not perform it, if he leaves unachieved the main and obvious purpose, then he has failed, whatever incidental miracles he may have performed. The difference between the Victorians and their successors is not to be measured by the stupidest of one age and the maddest of the other. Yet the difference is there, it is really considerable, and it is, I think, in the main the difference between the first and second generation of agnosticism.

The great Victorians were in general agnostics; Watts certainly was one. They were of an age when every advance in science seemed to confirm the philosophic rationalism of the eighteenth century. But they retained much of the spirit of faith. We have all seen those ingenious advertisements which command us to “watch the letters in red” and then close our eyes. When we obey the advertiser, and do close our eyes, the image of the object is still visible, though we no longer see the object itself. But, if the eyes remain closed for a little while, the image fades completely away. This may serve to represent the difference between the Victorians and ourselves. They were, as a whole, no longer believers in the sense that Dante and Bunyan were believers. But some, while confining themselves by no dogma, still persuaded themselves that they believed, and yet more reverenced still what they would not believe. Dickens represents the one type, Huxley the other. It is very singular to note how in Dickens rationalism jostles with his instinctive respect for the greater Christian dogmas. He talks about “the world that sets this right” as simply as about the world that wants setting right. Yet (as in the case of Joan of Arc) he is downright angry over people who would suggest that a miracle is possible. When he writes from the heart he accepts as a little child the greatest of all miracles; when he writes with the head he is as scornful as Voltaire, and scarcely less ribald.

We are conscious of this double mood through most of the nineteenth century, and it explains much of the characteristic Victorian limp. The giants of those days nearly all had one intellectual leg shorter than the other; in poise they looked majestic, but whenever they got excited the effect was always a little laughable. Thus Carlyle suddenly forgets that he is a sort of Hebrew prophet, and runs after Newman or the Pope, throwing mud, for all the world like a small boy at Portadown. Thus Kingsley, one moment quite big and universal, is the next moment a shrill sectarian. Thus Tennyson descends abrupt from Virgilian grandeur to suburban prejudice. So many of the great Victorians seemed to be really so anxious to believe in God, and so afraid that it was not an advanced thing to believe, that the fear of dogma and the yearning for faith caused them perpetually to wobble. Their attitude to all sorts of questions was one of what may be called violent indecision, and people now seem agreed to call it contemptible. But, whatever it was, it determined the character of nearly all Victorian things, and among them of much Victorian painting.

When men believe seriously they are generally not too serious about their beliefs; witness the mediæval faith and what seems to us the mediæval profanity. When a man is happily married to a woman, he does not spend his time paying her high-flown compliments; he takes it for granted that she loves him and knows that he loves her. There are exceptions, of course, like Warren Hastings, who in old age called his wife (epistolarily and to herself) “his elegant Marian.” There are exceptions also among religious people; just as there are some husbands who seem only visitors in their own houses, so there are some saints who are never quite at home in their faith. The rule, however, is that the man who is married to a woman, and the man who is married to a creed, act like spouses and not like sweethearts. But just as usually we may be sure that a man has not quite made up his mind to commit himself to matrimony with a girl if he still treats her with grave gallantry and composes laborious sonnets to her eyebrows, so we are seldom far wrong in assuming that the man who talks too solemnly about the beauty of a creed is already inclined to regard it as a myth. Tennyson, for example, could not have been so ceremonious with Arthur and his knights if he had truly felt them as real people. And if this half-faith tends to an unbalanced solemnity, it inclines a man also to an exaggerated sense of responsibility and to that kind of humility which is really a form of presumption. The man of firm faith realises his own insignificance, and is content to leave much to God. The man of no faith, and no hankering after faith, washes his hand of things in general, and “eats his pudding” without any kind of uneasiness. But the man of half-faith is exceedingly prone to imagine himself consecrated to set everything right, except possibly himself. We, having lost that half-faith of the Victorians, having no longer imprinted on our minds the image of things at one time very real, have little sympathy with their ideals and perplexities, and therefore a very imperfect understanding of their performances. We see their inconsistency of thought and feeling, and do little justice to their honesty of purpose. We sneer at their pomposity, but fail to see that it was the effect of their immense sense of their accountability—to someone or something they were not quite sure about.

In Watts this sense of accountability was a dominating fact; it is the inner stuff of everything he did. But even Frederick Leighton, a man of much lighter make, was penetrated with an immensely serious conviction of the importance of the mission of painting in general, and of himself as a painter in particular. Leighton belonged immediately to the upper middle class, but the family was originally noble, and he could trace his descent through the female line to a considerable mediæval family in Shropshire. He was the son and the grandson of a doctor. His grandfather attained such a degree of professional eminence as to gain appointment as Court Physician to the Czar Nicholas, and but for the accident of a delicate constitution his father would have continued in Russian employment. This ill-health, and the consequent necessity for climate-hunting, led to a life of genteel vagrancy, and before Frederick Leighton had reached the age of a fifth-form lad he had seen many countries, and had acquired that fluent command of French, Italian, and German which distinguished him as the best linguist who ever presided over the Royal Academy. His general education was not neglected; at seventeen he was a good classical scholar, and he used to say afterwards that he then knew more of anatomy than when he became President.

Though his taste for art was early manifested, his father intended him for medicine, and it was with some reluctance that he at last consented to recognise facts, and permit the lad to enter on a course of serious study. In view of the seignorial grace of Leighton’s maturity it is a little piquant to find that his style as a young man caused great distress to his mother. “My child,” she writes just before his twenty-fourth birthday, “your manners are very faulty, and I am consequently much disappointed. You take so much after me, and my nearest relations had such refined manners, that I made sure you must resemble my father and brothers. There is, however,” she adds cheeringly, “nothing whatever to prevent your becoming a gentleman.” One is almost tempted to believe that one of the lady’s near relatives was Mrs. Nickleby, and another perhaps Mrs. Micawber. She certainly recalls those ladies not only in her excessive reverence for her family, but in her apparent incapacity to come to a clear judgment on the facts before her. For it is impossible to believe that at any time a man so gifted as Leighton could have been boorish: a good profile is generally worth a hundred primers on etiquette.

At twenty-five Leighton exhibited the picture which brought him a sudden fame, the immense canvas of Cimabue’s Madonna being carried in triumph through the streets of Florence to the Church of Santa Maria Novella. In the Academy of 1855 this work attracted great attention, and Queen Victoria bought it for the considerable price of six hundred guineas. “A huge thing which everybody talks about,” Rossetti describes it; “the R.A.’s have been gasping for years for someone to back against Hunt and Millais, and here they have him, a fact that makes some people do the picture injustice in return.”

The Cimabue was painted in Rome, where the young artist had for some years enjoyed himself in the Bohemian society which Thackeray deals with so happily in The Newcomes, qualifying himself for association with hirsute genius by growing a full beard and a “feeble moustache.” He now returned to London to make the most of his success. But he showed no eagerness to pass through all the doors obligingly thrown open to him, and it is rather curious that a man who became afterwards so complete a social success incurred resentment on the ground of what was interpreted as a supercilious aloofness. The truth was that his health was not strong, and that he always had to pay dearly for late hours and contact with general society. Indeed, this physical inadequacy was one of the main facts of his life: devotion to the social duties of the Presidency ultimately killed him, and it is hardly fanciful to suppose that a constitutional lack of vigour was responsible for one feature of his art which must have struck the most casual observer. “I have not and never shall have,” he wrote of himself, “enormous power.” He put into all his works the very best that was in him; Watts himself was not more conscientious; and among all modern painters there was none more ambitious. He deliberately challenged comparison with the masters of the golden age of Italian art; indeed, Leighton’s natural bent was to the grand manner, and in the matter of composition he had a real affinity with the great men he admired. But, apart from unfortunate methods of manipulation learned from his German masters, there was almost always a certain deficiency or a certain exaggeration peculiar to inherent want of power, which must either under-do or over-do.

But if he were not quite a great painter he was certainly a great President. The Academy never had a chief who better looked, spoke, and played the part. By the Nineties his excessive labours as President had told on his never robust health, and for some years he had had warnings of angina pectoris. But nothing would induce him to restrain his activities within the limit which advancing years had inexorably fixed; the life of the valetudinarian was impossible for him. So the round of speeches, dinners, soirées, and receptions, was kept up almost to the last, though the haggard face satirised the light grace of his manner and the rather theatrical showiness of his dress. Leighton had long been a baronet; it was one of the distresses of his life that Watts refused a like honour. On January 1, 1896, he was created a Peer, and twenty-four days later the public learned, with something of a pang, that he was dead. His last spoken words were in German, and there was some appropriateness in the fact, for no little of German pedantry tinctured his classical enthusiasms. But in character and sentiment he was wholly English, and in nothing more English than in his regrets that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it. He achieved a social position never before occupied by a British painter; he won the worship of innumerable friends; he did an enormous amount of work at a generally high technical level. Yet, two years before his death, he told a friend, “I have never got what I most wanted in this world.” The “what” he did not indicate.

“His was a nature the most beautiful of any I have ever known,” was Leighton’s epitaph by his friend Watts. Leighton died long before he had become old-fashioned. It was Watts’s fate to linger in a world of which he could not possibly have approved. The recluse of Limnerslease—the very name smacks eloquently of the Victorian mood—seemed to those who caught a glimpse of him like some stern old Puritan brooding in retirement over the jiggings and Jezebelisms of the Restoration. The nineteenth-century seriousness which Leighton had, but could put on and off like a garment, was the very soul of Watts; he was probably the most serious painter who ever lived. That nineteenth-century “cheek” which made Leighton pit himself against all the old masters on their own ground was wildly exaggerated in Watts; he set himself to paint things which were to be not only the greatest of paintings, but the most powerful of sermons—sermons, too, addressed not to a sect or even a faith, but to the whole human race, now and yet to be. Mr. Chesterton, I think, has remarked in his interesting monograph on Watts that he avoided of set purpose all conventional imagery, from the cross downwards, so that his allegories should have universal appeal, and should be intelligible to the cultured Bantu or Papuan of five thousand years hence who happens to disinter them from the ruins of the Tate Gallery. The painter who takes his work like that may be, as Watts was, humble as a human individual, but as an artist we can only feel his colossal arrogance.

But this arrogance was the great fact of the time. When I see a Watts picture—I am not speaking of his admirable portraits, but of his didactic allegories—it seems to conjure up, not so much the noble reflections that appear to rise in some other men, but odd memories of all sorts of Victorian things. I think of Kingsley setting out to crush the unbeliever and solve the social problem by writing Hypatia and Alton Locke; of Herbert Spencer (when his circulation did not give him too much trouble) confidently measuring the Knowable and the Unknowable with his synthetic inch-tape; of Browning settling the nature of Providence in an abrupt sentence and then going jollily off to dinner; of Tennyson dismissing the French nation with a wave of his kingly hand as victims of “red-fool fury”; of Carlyle hurling thunderbolts at everybody who did not feel like a Scotch peasant or think like a German philosopher. These Victorians were wonderful men and did wonderful things, and we have not earned the right of easy scorn for them and theirs. But in few ages have men, almost all of whom were bewildered in one way or another, been so supremely confident of their power to settle everything. The nineteenth century, in fact, left nearly everything unsettled through that wondrous faith in the power of talk. It hated dogma, and gave birth to perhaps the most dogmatic people who have ever lived.

The mixture of humility and audacity in Watts was partly of the time and partly of his nature, but also partly of his circumstances. Watts lived all his life in the kind of detachment which, while it makes men personally shy and diffident, gives them a gigantic confidence in their own ideas. He was a born draughtsman: he never remembered the time he could not draw. But he had scarcely any formal education in art before he won with his cartoon of “Caractacus” the scholarship which permitted him to study in Italy; and no master, dead or living, ever seems to have exerted any real influence on his style. He had many friends and comrades, but only one real hero, Tennyson, with whom he could not compete, and who could not compete with him. Sympathies he had with many movements and many kinds of men, even on certain points with politicians and publicists whom he must have regarded generally with a certain distaste; something of a Radical in politics and much of a Puritan in temperament, he occasionally intervened in political and social causes on which he felt strongly. But he led no one, and he allowed no one to lead him; acknowledging no master, he left no pupil. This isolation was favourable to an exaggeration of the general tendency of the Victorian great men to take themselves with immoderate seriousness, and the solemnity of Watts was a little oppressive to the natural man who chanced to come into his majestic presence. He had to be a very bold youngster who could venture on any flippancy within the range of “those pure eyes,” which, in company with a nose of splendid line, a fine white beard, and a black silk skull-cap, suggested the “perfect witness,” if not of “all-judging Jove,” at least of the very archetype of a Puritanical Evangelical Chairman of Quarter Sessions.

If Watts was a great painter, he was assuredly a greater man, and one really felt in his presence the vastness of the possibilities of the race. But as a small human individual one also felt very small indeed. That is the effect of the Puritan. Probably most people felt small when they met Milton. But I can imagine that nobody could be in the same room with Shakespeare without feeling great.

CHAPTER XXVI
CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON—WILLIAM BOOTH

I have remarked in another place that the man who takes his religion too seriously stands suspect of not quite believing in it. Those who are never troubled with doubts are prone to a wild hilarity which often exposes them to the charge of irreverence and coarse handling of sacred things. Since Nonconformity has widened, and new theologies have been propounded, it has become almost oppressively refined. When it was very narrow and dogmatic, and assured of itself, its chief exponents were often condemned as vulgar people. They were not really vulgar; they were only so much on terms with their belief that they could take liberties with it and all things.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a man of that type. He was an unlearned man, and if he had been learned it is not at all likely that he would have been a profound or exact thinker; it is much more probable that he would have been dulled into mere mediocrity. But if he did not know much of bookish things, he knew a good deal about things in general, and he knew (or thought he knew) absolutely one thing in particular, namely, that he was right in his conception of the purpose of Providence. It was this certitude, rather than any ingrained coarseness, that made him so boisterous and rollicking in his dealings with the most solemn subjects. He looked on “soul-saving” with the same sense of reality that a bricklayer looks on bricklaying, and he joked about it as a bricklayer jokes when anything funny is suggested to him by an incident in his work.

Spurgeon did not survive long into the Nineties, but his influence did not altogether cease to count till the end of the decade. By the new century it was dying, and to-day it is dead—at any rate, so far as the high places of Nonconformity are concerned. The name Spurgeon is Dutch, and the great preacher was a Hollander in his remote origin; he descended from a refugee who came to this country to escape the Alva persecution. Spurgeon’s father was an Independent Minister, and he himself was “converted” by the Primitive Methodists, but at an early age he embraced the Baptist faith, and he preached as a Baptist his first sermon, delivered at sixteen, in a Cambridgeshire cottage. His family wished him to have some sort of “college” education, but he went his own way, believing then as always that practical work in “soul-saving” was more important than scholarship.

He was little more than a boy when he gained fame as a London preacher, addressing congregations of ten thousand at the Surrey Music Hall before the Metropolitan Tabernacle was built for him. His style was then very theatrical: a foreign scoffer remarked that his denunciations of the stage must have been prompted by jealousy, since he was himself so consummate an actor. In later years he relied less on meretricious effects and more on his essential earnestness, but to the end he took any liberties that occurred to him with his subject or his audience. In other respects he changed little or nothing. Through all the Darwinian controversy he remained unmoved by the arguments which flurried so many theological dovecotes. “Huxley and Darwin,” he would say, “can go to—their ancestors the monkeys,” and he would pause wickedly after the “to” for his congregation to titter. With the Higher Criticism, as with evolution, he would have no truck whatever. But against the Church he had no particular feeling; he read the Anglican divines much as another man might read Confucius, thinking them curious and interesting people from whom something might be learned. To the students of the Camberwell College, indeed, he recommended a book of Anglican sermons. Its author, he said, had been a parson, still worse a bishop, but despite these grave disadvantages had been a worthy and able man. In later years he even withdrew from the Liberation Society, apparently because he felt that his fellow-Dissenters were on the whole readier than the Church to fall in with what he called “down-grade” tendencies in biblical criticism. For the same reason he even withdrew from the Baptist Union. “If,” he said, “you preach what is new, it will not be true; if you preach what is true, it will not be new.” For Rome, Spurgeon never pretended tolerance. When another Baptist owned that during a visit to France he had been present at the Mass, and “had never felt nearer the presence of God,” Spurgeon replied that it was a good illustration of the text, “If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.” It was, no doubt, his hatred of Rome that led him in 1886 to become a Liberal Unionist.

His Radicalism, however, had always been of a peculiar kind. He did not believe in “trusting the people,” since most of the people were miserable sinners. He was not a Pacifist. “Turn the other cheek,” he used to say, “but if that is smitten too, another law comes in; you must either go for your man or get away from him.” It was long, also—not, indeed, until he grew gouty—before he could be got to adhere to the teetotal movement, while he simply jeered at an anti-tobacco crusade. Spurgeon himself liked a good cigar; was in no way an ascetic; lived in style at Norwood, and used to drive to the Tabernacle in a turnout which would have done credit to a stockbroker. On the other hand, he was the unrelenting foe of the theatre, and he denounced dancing as having cost the first Baptist his head. There was, indeed, in him a great deal more of the old hard-headed than of the new soft-hearted Puritan. His only departure from the seventeenth century was in the matter of his jocularity. It was natural with him—perhaps an inheritance from some jovial Hollander of the Jan Steen type—but it was also carefully cultivated. He kept an immense library of funny books to draw on for pulpit use, and was never more carelessly happy in the telling of a story than when he had studied it in all its bearings the night before. He never hesitated to use slang when it seemed to him effective; witness the following:

“It is always best to go where God sends you. Jonah thought he would go to Tarshish instead of Nineveh, but when the whale got hold of him he was sucked in.”

“Though you are teetotallers you must all come to your bier at last.”

“To some people Bible reading is like flea-catching; they pick up a thought here and there, hold it between finger and thumb, and then hop on somewhere else.”

“Seek to possess both unction and gumption.”

These sentences were addressed to candidates for the Baptist ministry. It is noteworthy that in such Spurgeon always assumed a lack of refinement—an assumption which would be hotly resented by the Nonconformist student of to-day. Especially irritating would be his advice never to drop an aspirate; to the importance of the initial “H” he was continually reverting. In deeper matters he was insistent on eternal punishment; to question hell was to question the Scripture. But he used to say that no doubt God would show “every consideration” to those predestined to damnation—how he never explained in detail. He would have been very angry with feminism if it had been an important thing in his day; woman, he thought, should be kept in her place; and he despised the man who was swayed by his wife. He was fond of pointing out that most of the troubles of the Hebrew patriarchs could be traced to their too much marriage.

And the rest of the acts of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the wideawake that he wore, the clerical coat that he would not wear, the puns and money that he made, the stones that he weighed, and the spiritual bread that he dispensed, the sermons that he preached, the 30,000 printed copies a week that he sold, the men that he knew, those that he consorted with, and those that he assailed mightily—are they not written in chronicles of Nonconformity? In due time Charles Haddon Spurgeon died, and was gathered to his fathers, and nobody reigned in his stead, and of the mighty house that he did not build nothing is written anywhere, for, with all his brightness and breeziness and firm faith and sturdiness and trite common sense, he lacked all the qualities that go to the building of anything but a reputation. He had a voice, and after that little.

But for just that which Spurgeon wanted William Booth would have been another Spurgeon. But to his faith and enthusiasm he joined something not at all common among religious enthusiasts in this country. His heart was a chaos of crude and uncontrolled emotionalism, but he had the head of a ruler. It is a common reproach against English Protestantism that it does not understand how to harness spiritual energy. Of that art William Booth was a master, and in more favouring circumstances he would probably have been included in the list of founders of mighty religious orders. It is tempting to speculate what might have been the present position of the Salvation Army had Booth, who was brought up as a member of the Church of England, and had certainly no enmity to that Church, been encouraged to pursue his work within its communion. Left to himself, he was unable to provide his organisation with that firm philosophical basis which seems a necessary condition of permanence in a religious society. He could invent a hierarchy, but he had to borrow a theology; and the raggedness of his dogmatic formation was in pathetic contrast with the splendid “dressing” of his human cohorts. He could offer a dram to the spiritually fainting, but man cannot live by stimulants alone, and the Salvation Army had little more in the way of spiritual nutriment to offer those who began to hunger for something more solid. Its only expedient was to join the excitement of definite work to that of cloudy religion. The Army tended even in Booth’s lifetime to become more and more an organ of social endeavour and less and less a definitely Christian thing; it was in its lay and not in its religious character that it won during the Nineties the goodwill of countless excellent pagans, and was patronised by precisely the same sort of people who had at first assailed it as the blasphemous travesty of a sect.

“A bawling, fanatical, send-round-the-hatical, pick-up-the-pence old pair.” So were Booth and his devoted wife described by Truth in the early Eighties. Fifteen years later the old “General,” now a widower, was never mentioned in a reputable paper without profound respect. The inverted commas had long disappeared, and even Royalty condescended to compliment him on his fine work for the “submerged tenth.” But all this recognition was really a sign of failure. Or, to put the matter less crudely, it was a sign that the secondary object of the Army had become more important than its primary aim. Booth had set out first of all to save men’s souls, and some people threw cabbage stalks at him, while others flung him jeers and slanders. The applause only came when it was evident that, with the incidental disadvantage of brass bands and a crazy vocabulary of enthusiasm, the Army was very useful for distributing soup and getting firewood chopped.

Booth proved how thin are the partitions dividing the excess of democracy from autocratic rule. His government was at first purely paternal. When the family got too large for his personal rule he had to delegate authority, but every officer whom he put in a position of trust was given plenary power to the extent of his commission. “Government by talk” he had tried and put aside. “This method of work,” he said, “will never shake the Kingdom of the Devil”; and so he adopted the military system. In this he was probably only following the suggestion of his own imperious nature. But if he had been actuated by the deepest craft he could hardly have hit on a more certain method of keeping his converts together. Men and women care a great deal less for liberty than for domination; they will accept most cheerfully subordination for themselves if it affords them a present chance or a sure prospect of exercising despotic sway over others. “From the moment,” says Booth, “of our adopting the simple method of responsible and individual commands and personal obedience our whole campaign partook of a new character; in place of the hesitation and almost total want of progress from which we have been suffering, every development of the work leaped forward.” The brass band, the flag, and the red jersey probably had comparatively little to do with the Army’s success. These were useful to attract attention, and may perhaps have allured some simple-minded and very unæsthetic people. But apart from the deeper spiritual elements, the main point, I imagine, was the fascination of authority. Comfortable people, accustomed to deference throughout life, have little conception of the hunger for respect which reigns among those who seldom get it. Indeed, half our social troubles would be over if the “better” classes could grasp the simple fact that the “lower” classes are much more sensitive than themselves on all points of dignity. To a mere factory hand, man or woman—it was a novelty of the Army that it put the sexes from the first on an exactly equal footing—it was luxury to put off insignificance with the work-day clothes and put on importance with the Army uniform. In the Booth hierarchy there was room for the pride of the wretched and the ambition of the destitute.

It was the great talent of Booth to put to use the most unlikely things. His use of vulgarity was very characteristic. The vulgarity of some other popular preachers of the time was a natural emanation. But Booth was not naturally vulgar; no man could be with such a profile. He had really fine manners; to a king he would talk as if he were an old king himself; and there was never a suggestion in his intercourse with the greatest either of bumptiousness or servility. The vulgarity of his methods was of set purpose, like St. Francis’s hostility to worldly culture, and, though it was at once common form to inveigh against the coarse profanities of a Salvation Army meeting, I have found highly sensitive people far less repelled by their wildest extravagances than by the much more ordinary irreverence of the regulation “revivalist.” It might not be true to say that while others vulgarised sacred things Booth sanctified vulgarity. But it is true that, if one might sometimes smile at his audacities, they never made one shudder.

In other conditions, as I have said, Booth might have won immortality as a saint of the Church. In still other circumstances he might have been a most considerable statesman. His Darkest England is much more than a philanthropic manifesto. The schemes outlined in it for dealing with unemployment by training and emigration are eminently wise and practical, and, if it is permissible to indulge a regret that his great qualities were not available for the Church, it may also be suggested that something was lost by the failure of politicians to make fuller use of his remarkable insight and experience concerning social problems. The inspiration on these matters gradually passed from him to the Webbs. It was not, probably, a change for the better. For though Booth was quite hard-headed in these concrete matters, he had also that wisdom of the heart in which Fabianism was deficient. He would say, and quite justly, in reply to those who argued that the Army attracted people too lazy for regular work, and actually created a class of unemployables, that John Jones was outside in the street, without work or food, and something must be done for him at once; it was useless to wait for a social revolution. But he was under no illusions as to the nature of existing society. “There are many vices,” he wrote, “and seven deadly sins; but of late years many of the seven have contrived to pass themselves off as virtues. Avarice, for instance, and Pride, when re-baptised Thrift and Self-Respect, have become the guardian angels of Christian Civilisation, and as for Envy, it is the corner-stone upon which much of our competitive system is founded.” Again: “I am a strong believer in co-operation, but it must be co-operation based on the spirit of benevolence. I don’t see how any pacific readjustment of the social and economic relations between classes in this country can be effected except by the gradual substitution of co-operative associations for the present wages system.” Assuredly the man who wrote these things was something more than a fanatic.

Booth’s decision with regard to his children’s education was most typical of the man. Certain friends offered to pay the expenses of a University training for his eldest son. No, said Booth; he should enlist in the Army at an early age, and go through the usual Salvation training. Booth was not stupid, and could have had none of the stupid man’s contempt for education. But he seemed to be a little afraid of it, and from his own point of view who can say he had not reason? In the same spirit the Churchmen of the Renaissance fought against the teaching of Greek, not because they were all fools, but because some of them foresaw the dangers that actually followed. Booth was perhaps not wrong in suspecting that the higher education of his time, while making a man cocksure about things now debatable or disproved, would tend to make him dubious or indifferent about things which in his view permitted neither of incertitude nor of lukewarmness.

But if he hoped thus to secure to the thing he had made the vitality he had temporarily imparted to it, the hope was doomed to be disappointed. It could hardly be fulfilled, in any case, if the Army was to continue in isolation; for the Army was an order rather than a sect, with a discipline rather than a creed, and in the absence of its creator’s inspiration its tendency must have been to harden into formalism. That process had, indeed, begun even before the General’s death. It was suggested above that during the Nineties the Salvation Army was wounded by kindness. In the days of its persecution it was at least free; it had the feeling that it might just as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. But when the suburbs threw bouquets instead of stones the Salvationists found that the respect of the respectable is a chain. They were henceforth fettered. They could expand, but they could not change. The movement was canalised and stereotyped; it had won recognition as a useful social adjunct, and it had to live up to its reputation. It became static in everything but its statistics. Gradually its tunes have grown old-fashioned; its uniforms are one with the tight military trouser and the bustled skirt; the War Cry is as definitely a paper with a past as Reynolds’s or the Referee. In its way the Army, no doubt, does as much good as ever. But the limits of that good are known. And it keeps nobody awake at night thinking of what might happen with the ferment of a revolutionary Christianity working among the English poor.

Booth was a great man of his kind—greater far than most of the Right Honourables and Right Reverends of his day—and it was a mighty thing that he built from defaced stones and nameless rubble rejected by all others. But he was too honest to fabricate a new religion, and a religious order implies a Church to order it.

CHAPTER XXVII
SOME LAWYERS

Dim enough now is the memory of the Parnell Commission. There are few who, without reference to record, could give an intelligent summary of the findings of the unhappy judges whom political exigency condemned for over a year to take “evidence” concerning a vast amount of miscellaneous matter incapable of legal proof.

But from the general vagueness of that dreary inquiry there still stand out in sharp and abrupt relief two main figures. One is that of an ageing man, bald and bowed, of a threadbare respectability; respectability, indeed, is the only real thing about him, and to that god he is presently to make the last sacrifice. Richard Pigott was not, one imagines, a specially bad man. But, unfortunately for himself, there was the necessity for him and his to live respectably, and his situation and endowments did not permit him to live at once respectably and honestly. He had no kind of settled calling behind the wall of which he could fruitfully cultivate such small talents as he possessed. In a shop or an office he might have carried his little battle of life to the point where one may at least make terms of dignity with Death. But he had strayed into one of the dangerous trades. Journalism abounds in perils to all men; it is quite fatal to the man who lacks both scruple and ability. Richard Pigott was a bravo with the parts of a small shopkeeper. One of Fagin’s pupils let others take the risks and glory of burglary; his specialty was the “Kinchin Lay,” or snatching pence out of the hands of small children. Pigott belonged to the “kinchin lay” of political journalism; his business was that of furtive slander and timid lying. He was only used by his employers for jobs which bigger if not more scrupulous men would disdain; and as these jobs were neither numerous nor lucrative he had sunk in middle life to all sorts of miserable stratagems to keep his small pot boiling. On such service, however, or the pretence of it, Pigott acquired a certain standing with propagandist auxiliaries of the Unionist Party, and was eventually employed to collect evidence connecting Parnellism with crime. He was paid a guinea a day; expenses were liberally defrayed, and for the first time for many years the poor hack found himself in clover. During a considerable period he enjoyed himself at first-class hotels in Ireland, Great Britain, and on the Continent. But as time went on his patrons, disappointed with the tame and inconclusive character of the “evidence,” hinted that something much more sensational was wanted, or supplies would be stopped. Pigott saw before him a new plunge, perhaps this time without hope of re-emergence, into the penury from which he had momentarily escaped. The prospect was too bleak, and he decided that, whatever happened, his employers must be satisfied, and the essential something must be supplied. So he forged certain letters purporting to be written by Mr. Parnell—letters which, if genuine, would have proved Parnell’s privity to the Phœnix Park murders, and branded him as a man merely infamous. These letters had been printed in facsimile as Parnell’s; they were supported by all the prestige of a great newspaper; and probably a majority of people in this country still believed they were really Parnell’s when Richard Pigott first stood up to face the cross-examination of Sir Charles Russell.

Those who sat through that cross-examination will never forget it. It is usual to describe such a spectacle as dramatic, and in a sense this spectacle was. It was, however, the drama not of the theatre, with its surprises and quick alternations, but of one of those gigantesque novels of Victor Hugo which depict some devoted wretch overwhelmed by the slow march of an unrelenting destiny. For two days Pigott saw closing round him, thread by thread and mesh by mesh, the net from which death was the sole escape. At first he was moderately glib and composed. But as the cross-examination proceeded the miserable man showed in the contortion of his features, in a brow dank with perspiration, in whitened face and trembling limb, the agony that oppressed him. It was a sight to awaken compassion even in those who had suffered most from his villainy. In his easiest moments Sir Charles Russell was sufficiently formidable. “A more frigid-looking man,” says his Irish biographer, “it had never been my fortune to behold.” His eyes were of the kind that take in everything and give out nothing; in one mood they seemed to search the very soul of his interlocutor, in another they were capable of the kind of ferocity that has the effect of physical shock. It is said that an unfortunate suitor lost his wits at the glare of Jeffreys, and those who had to do with Russell could find no great difficulty in believing the legend.

Not a few judges, fenced round with scarlet dignity, felt the terror of Russell’s manner, and as for the solicitors who brought him briefs, “the way he treated them,” says a contemporary, “won’t bear repeating.” Those who knew him best declared that his roughly imperious manner concealed a kind heart. But there was no cross-examiner at the Bar whose very personality was more likely to strike awe into the heart of a witness with something on his conscience. His strong features—there was something a little sinister in their expression, the effect, so far as I remember him, of a very decisive nose just a little out of the straight—could wear a positively terrifying expression; it was hard to say whether his voice was most deadly when it sank to a menacing whisper or when it boomed out in tones of thunder; but above all there was the sense almost of an elemental force, as resistless and unrelenting as the bog which engulfs the incautious traveller.

There is no need to describe in detail how the wretched Pigott, entrapped and bedevilled till there was no possible escape, broke down under that pitiless torture, made confession during the adjournment of the court, fled the country, and finally ended his earthly troubles with a suicide’s bullet. But those two days, in the words of Lord Rosebery, brought Russell at a bound “from a solid reputation to supreme eminence.” Russell was not exaggerating when, in his subsequent speech for Parnell, he claimed to have reversed the whole position, placing in the dock those who had so far been the prosecutors. “When I opened this case, my lords,” he began in low conversational tones, “I represented the accused.” Then, suddenly allowing his voice to reach its full volume, and pointing a minatory finger to the place occupied by the Attorney-General—Sir Richard Webster—he cried, “Now we are the accusers, and the accused are there.” It was a moment of intense drama. There was little in what was said. But the manner and the effect were marvellous; the whole thing was a triumph, not of eloquence, or of intellect, but of that mysterious force we call personality. Russell, indeed, was no great orator, even in the law courts, and as a political speaker he was very far from successful. But he was, in his own proper way, a great person, and something akin to genius enabled him to achieve, with less obvious endowments than many other lawyers—for he was wholly deficient in wit, and was not exceptionally subtle, or exceptionally learned, or exceptionally gifted in words—a position as an advocate unequalled in his time. During the Nineties his earning capacity was far beyond that of any other lawyer. As early as 1874, when little more than forty, he was making an income of over ten thousand a year; after the triumph of the Parnell Commission the value put on his services mounted abruptly, and in his last full year of practice at the Bar his fees amounted to over £22,000.

It was a weakness of Russell to boast that he was a pure “Celt,” by which he probably meant a pure Irishman. But he was really of Anglo-Norman ancestry, the descendant of one Robert de Rosel who accompanied Strongbow on the expedition which brought Ireland under the English Crown. His family was in comfortable circumstances, devoutly Catholic, and inclined to things of the mind. Of the children only Charles followed a secular career. His brother Matthew rose to distinction in the Society of Jesus; his three sisters became nuns. There is a story that the two boys were once cut off by the rising tide in Carlingford Lough. Matthew prayed; Charles whistled. The whistle was heard, and the boys were rescued. But Charles Russell would at no time have suggested that the appeal to human aid was more efficacious than the prayer. For he was, in his own way, not less devout than his brother the Jesuit. The great advocate, gorged with suitors’ gold, the politician for whom Mr. Gladstone strained every nerve to secure the Lord Chancellorship, the man of pleasure so well known wherever horses ran or cards were played, was in many ways a very different person from the Belfast solicitor of the Fifties and the struggling barrister of the early Sixties. But his religion remained a constant with Russell, and, though it was a shock to him to find his daughter, like her aunts, determined to take the veil, he accepted the situation with grace, and his letter yielding to her wishes was as tender and delicately expressed a renunciation of a father’s natural hopes as can be found in the language. His religious bias was rather quaintly illustrated in his views on divorce, not so much on the thing itself as on the attitude of parties towards it. He had no objection to a woman seeking relief from the Courts; but he thought she ought to wear black when doing so. He was always annoyed by a gaily dressed petitioner. “They may not be sorry,” he used to say, “but they should at least pretend they are sorry.”

Russell’s fame as an advocate wholly overshadowed his reputation as a politician. He was twice Attorney-General; he had a place of importance in the inner councils of the Liberal Party; and he spoke with industry and intelligence wherever he was wanted to speak. But he was not at his happiest either in the House of Commons or on the platform. With fellow-members of Parliament he was too haughty, and with popular audiences too cold and formal, and his mind had neither the breadth nor the geniality for the part either of a statesman or a demagogue. But as Lord Chief Justice he notably falsified the saying that a great advocate seldom makes a great judge. Some of his faults of manner remained. He was sometimes a little arbitrary, and often not a little rough. But he had the one great quality of getting straight, through all kinds of incidental and irrelevant matter, at the heart of a case; and the trial of Dr. Jameson showed his iron disregard for mere popularity. Standing between the Jury and public opinion, he permitted them no loophole for a verdict of acquittal. Four years afterwards he said: “Public opinion was apparently exasperated because any sentence had been passed at all. When I tried them people said I was too hard on them. Now people say I was not hard enough.” Lord Russell as a judge and a Peer turned to account the considerable knowledge of the seamy side of business life he acquired in his early years as a solicitor and as an advocate appearing chiefly in commercial suits, and one of his latest acts was the introduction of a Bill to deal with the evil of secret commissions. “He was struck down,” wrote a great lawyer after his death, “before the full measure of his powers as a law reformer and administrator could be felt.”

Essentially a man of action, finding little solace in literature or art, his amusements were of the more frivolous kind. He was fond of racing, boxing, theatres, and billiards, and had a passion for cards that sometimes made him indifferent in what company he played. On one occasion this habit exposed him to a cutting retort. A young Guardsman staying at the same hotel had been asked to make one of a hand at whist. But Russell, whose partner he was, soon found that the soldier was very drunk indeed. He bore for a while the erratic play, but at last threw down his hand, exclaiming, “This is not whist; it is tomfoolery.” The Guardsman, quite unabashed, told him to “keep his hair on.” Any kind of familiarity was intolerable to Russell, and this insolence at once threw him into a towering rage. “Do you know who I am, sir?” he demanded, with that savage glare that had frightened so many reluctant witnesses. But the soldier faced him as coolly as he would have done a battery. “Know you! Of course I do. But remember, my man, you’re not in your silly old police court now.” This was precisely the kind of answer which left Russell helpless. For, though his tastes were a little ordinary and his manner rather rough, he was incapable of the verbal coarseness which is in some cases the only rational alternative to silence. Anything savouring of brutality or looseness was intolerable to him, and it is said that nobody ever dared twice to tell a doubtful story in his presence. He contributed little to the jollity of the Bar mess on circuit, and in ordinary society was inclined to silence, though he could occasionally tell well enough a story of the kind he liked.

Mr. Balfour is credited with saying once that if he and Lord Randolph Churchill had gone to the Bar they must have made forty thousand a year instead of the twenty thousand or so which then represented the high-watermark of forensic success. Few would go so far as to make such a claim. But most people must sometimes have wondered, in watching the great barrister in an unfamiliar environment, how much of his eminence is due to sheer intellect. Certainly very few high reputations in the Courts are increased in politics, and those barristers who do succeed in the House of Commons are generally rather lightly regarded in the Law Courts. Lord Russell was an example of the great lawyer who is also a great personality but is hardly a man of great general elevation. His mind, though vigorous and acute, was essentially narrow; the sap of his intellect was directed almost exclusively to things immediate and practical. On all general questions he lagged behind the opinion of his time. Thus, though he early took a keen interest in Irish politics, and in his later years seldom spoke on anything but Home Rule, his conversion to that cause did not ante-date Mr. Gladstone’s. He had always held that, if Home Rule was necessary, it must come gradually through extensions of local government, but he did not regard it as necessary. Yet he had no difficulty in following Mr. Gladstone when the split came. The truth was that, considered from a worldly point of view, he was mainly a professional man, with professional ambitions and professional thoughts, and politics were to him, rather more than to most lawyers, a means of rounding off his career as an advocate. At the same time, he had no small share of the temperament that made so many of his family embrace a religious life. Money and position were realities; so was religion; other things were less real. It is a temperament puzzling to people in Protestant countries, who understand neither the griping materialism of the Papist peasant nor the scarcely less materialistic mysticism of the Papist peasant’s brother who happens to be a saint. But it is a temperament very Irish, and Russell, though his frigidity made him most unlike the “typical” Irishman of our conceptions, was an Irishman to the core.

Lord Russell’s contemporary and rival, Sir Richard Webster, who succeeded him as Lord Chief Justice under the title of Lord Alverstone, was in every way his opposite. Russell had personality and a touch of genius; Webster was wholly destitute of atmosphere. Russell often carried judge and jury with him by sheer momentum; with Webster it was dogged that did it. Russell, if not excessively Irish on the surface, was, for good or ill, wholly un-English in any part of him; Webster was a most authentic specimen of the Englishman in his least exciting aspect. He was the kind of man who has always been a source of splendid strength to this country—the man who can ever be depended on to do good, honest, sterling work, and is never under suspicion of dangerous brilliance. Whether the task be trying a murderer, or ruling an Eastern province, or running a civil service department, or writing a column for Punch, it is to men like Webster that our confidence is mainly given, and we are never really easy unless they are in a majority. Webster happened to go in for law, his family circumstances tending that way. But when Lord Salisbury suddenly brought him into politics, making him a law officer before he had a seat in the House of Commons, he at once attained the same sort of success in Parliament that he had achieved at the Bar. If he had gone from Trinity College, Cambridge, to Trichinopoly, it would have been the same. Such men as Webster never fail, even as comic singers. Webster sang a very excellent comic song, and would often do so in congenial company, even after he had reached the Bench. And he ran a capital mile race, was great over hurdles, played a good game of cricket, cycled much when the bicycle was out of fashion, and to the end of his life read the sporting papers with at least as much interest as the Law Times.

In a word, there was much health in him, and quite as much ability as he wanted for his purpose. The one thing he lacked was a touch of distinction. That horrible word “level-headed” was not inapplicable to him. If Webster was never, in any circumstances, below a certain standard, he paid the penalty of never rising above it. Nobody ever said, nobody ever did, fewer notable things. He had some very big jobs as an advocate: he led for the Crown before the Parnell Commission; he prosecuted Jabez Balfour, the Liberator swindler; he prosecuted the authors of the Jameson Raid; he served as junior to Russell in the Behring Sea arbitration; and he was leading counsel for this country in the Venezuela arbitration. The praise showered on him for his conduct of these great international cases was undoubtedly deserved. But the quality of the praise is worth notice. “The care and preciseness with which he prepared the cases,” says an authority, “bore traces of tremendous labour. Unlike the American lawyers, who dealt principally in general propositions, Webster advanced no point that could not be legally supported and defended.” Webster was, in fact, an almost perfect specimen of the matter-of-fact British lawyer who, having a complete contempt for first principles, and a vast reverence for precedent and punctilio, is “greatly trusted and respected by solicitors.” He was helped by a ponderously earnest and almost prayerful manner, which suggested that a certain moral obliquity, and an element not quite English, you know, resided with the side opposed to him.

If Sir Richard Webster had been just a little more “English,” a good deal less able, and far less learned, he might have made another Mr. Justice Grantham. There was just the sort of resemblance between the two men that obtains between a first-rate portrait and a very wild and wicked caricature. Both were intensely Conservative, intensely respectable, intensely unimaginative, intensely moral and well-meaning. But Mr. Justice Grantham, like necessity, knew no law, while Lord Alverstone knew a great deal; and Lord Alverstone had the judicial temperament in full measure, while Mr. Justice Grantham could not, without severe mental discomfort, listen to more than one side of a case. His ordinary course was to take a glance at both litigants; that was generally sufficient, but if both seemed equally objectionable he might be impelled to take sides according as he liked or disliked counsel. Taking a side was quite necessary to him. I remember one case in which he suffered, for quite a little time, the agonies of choice. The issue lay between an Englishman who had become some sort of heathen and a naturally black and heathen man. As an intensely religious English gentleman Sir William Grantham was bound to disapprove very strongly of anybody who threw away the advantages of having been born a “happy English child.” But at least equally he did not like colour. For about a quarter of an hour his bosom was torn by conflicting feelings; then he made up his mind that the calls of blood were paramount, and for the rest of the hearing went strongly against the hapless dark-skinned litigant. Judicially Sir William Grantham was simply the Great Reversible. Personally he was an extraordinarily good-hearted man, and those who had least respect for his judicial qualities were among his warmest friends. There was not a dry eye in the Law Courts when it became known that he had been called before the highest of all tribunals.

A very different type of lawyer was Sir Francis Jeune, the famous President of the Divorce Court. A handsome, bearded man, with features of a slightly Semitic cast, and courtly manners not quite English—he was born in Jersey, though little of his life had been spent there—he was, both professionally and socially, one of the best-known figures of the Nineties. His wife, the widow of a Peer’s younger son, was a great entertainer, and her fondness for everything either “smart” or intellectual was a considerable factor in breaking down the barriers which still existed between “the classes” and mere talent or mere money. Judges seldom make much figure in society; and in the Nineties there still clung to them as a class much of that Bohemian character which derived from the days when Circuit duty implied a lengthy banishment from London and a rough bachelor life in the Assize towns. Mr. Justice Hawkins, later Lord Brampton, was not perhaps quite typical of his brethren, and the exaggerated untidiness of Lord Justice Vaughan Williams was exceptional. But not less exceptional was the combination of scholarliness and mondaine aplomb of Sir Francis Jeune. As a divorce judge he had a perfect style; it could hardly have been beaten by the bedside manner of a Royal physician. It was a delight to hear him interpreting the degree of affection implied in a wife’s reference to her husband as “my dear little black piggie.” No man was more apt in discussing the psychology of sex. In one case he showed, by a wealth of refined analysis and historical allusion, how while it was quite possible for a man to be in love with two women at the same time, and leave each in the belief that she was the sole mistress of his heart, no woman was capable of such liberality or such dissimulation. He was a great advocate of temporary separation as a possible cure for ills matrimonial; “absence,” he held, “often made the heart grow wiser.” A rigid moralist might have ventured the criticism that the delightful man-of-the-world way in which Sir Francis dealt with suits and suitors was prejudicial to the interests of marriage; a divorce as managed by him seemed so entirely ordinary and innocent an affair. But, suave as he was, he could be strong on occasion, and he once committed a Duchess to prison with the most perfect and relentless good breeding. Ordinarily he shunned the rôle of judicial humorist; Mr. Justice Darling was then a very young judge, and the older jesters were of the coarser genre. But occasionally a good thing came out accidentally. Thus it was once pointed out that he had joined in prayers at the Archbishops’ Court, whose competence was impugned in the case then being argued. “Yes,” said Sir Francis, “but I prayed without prejudice.”

The name of Lord Coleridge has a very far-away sound; yet, though he was born in 1820 and called in 1847, he was still a great figure in the early Nineties. It was a majestic sight to see him rise sweepingly from the Bench at the close of a sitting. He was six feet three in height, erect and sturdy, though not corpulent, and this tall column of manhood was crowned by an appropriately noble capital; his head was large and finely shaped, and his features, while strong and significant, were suffused with a benignancy of expression which might be occasionally misleading. For he could say very nasty things in his gentle and delicately modulated voice—a voice the beauty of which Sir Charles Russell had never known surpassed. As a cross-examiner he had shown deadly power in his days of advocacy. The smashing of the Tichborne pretender had been one of his great forensic feats; during the larger part of the cross-examination his drift was not generally appreciated, but when he sat down the fraud was completely unmasked, and at the subsequent trial for perjury it was found that Coleridge had, in the words of a commentator, “stopped all the earths.” He died in the spring of 1894, after over twenty years in the great post of Lord Chief Justice. He was undoubtedly a very great judge, but, being on a large scale all round, his faults were not exactly small. His temper was despotic, his language could be bitter, he had many dislikes, and was at once subtle and indiscreet. A fondness for society, going with a disposition to fall foul of many units in society, naturally led to many collisions, and he was as constant in his feuds as in his friendships. Even in his old age he could, if the matter were of sufficient importance, rouse himself to great mental efforts. But those who saw him presiding over his Court in the early Nineties were chiefly conscious of dignified somnolence, and the alertness and vitality of his successor, Russell, seemed almost indecent after the repose that had reigned so long.

Lord Coleridge was one of those lawyers who retain their political prejudices in unmitigated form after translation to the Bench; he was to the last as dogmatic a Liberal as Grantham was a Conservative. Thus in 1892 he wrote to a correspondent, “I am out of politics, of course, but I would go far and do much to destroy the Unionists. To them and them alone is due coercion and all the train of evils and the denial of obvious and safe improvements in England and Scotland. I have no feeling against the Tories; there must be such people in every old-established and aristocratic country, and they at least are honest and act steadily on principle. But a Unionist who pretends to be and calls himself a Liberal, and who for seven long years has voted for everything reactionary and entirely opposed to his creed—I have no patience with these men.” We hear much now about the degradation of the Press. Lord Coleridge thought the solemn London papers of the early Nineties, though “rather better educated” than the American, “to the full as vile,” and “with a swagger and insufferable pretence and self-assertion” from which American journalism was free. Moreover, the “Court and aristocracy degrade the independence and corrupt the manners of the vast numbers who are brought within their influence.” It can be well understood that a man holding such opinions, and expressing them with such vigour, was only popular among those who thought with him. For the rest, Lord Coleridge was fond of good pictures, good music, good living, and good stories. He was not himself the hero of many anecdotes, but one may serve. He was sitting in Court with Mr. Justice Groves one day when a slip of paper was handed up to the Bench conveying the news of a most unexpected judicial appointment. Groves exclaimed, “Well, I am damned.” “My learned brother,” said Coleridge, “I do not indulge in profane language myself, but if you would repeat that word it would really relieve my mind.”

No survey of the legal landscape of the Nineties would be complete without some reference to that most individual figure, Sir Frank Lockwood. Of middle-class Yorkshire birth, Lockwood inherited from his father a facility in caricature and from his mother a keen sense of humour. He was meant for the Church, and sent to Cambridge with orders in view. But his lively nature rebelled against this decorous career, and after he had taken his degree and spent a little time in tutoring he decided to go to the Bar. His first case was a formal appearance to give consent on the part of a certain corporation; the fee was three guineas for the brief and one guinea for consultation. A rather testy judge remarked on the unnecessarily large number of counsel appearing. “You, sir,” he demanded, turning to Lockwood, “what are you here for?” “Three and one, m’lud; merely three and one,” was the soft answer, which did not turn away judicial wrath, but did attract professional attention to the young barrister.

Lockwood is a singular and almost unique example of a barrister making a very creditable success by abandoning himself frankly to the very side of his temperament which would seem least likely to help him in so grave a profession. He throve on a studied light-heartedness. His parts were not specially quick; he had a fundamental common-sense, but little more, and if he had taken himself quite seriously it is likely the legal world would have taken him quite lightly. But it was not easy for judges or witnesses or jurymen to resist the fascination of his cheery presence and genial humour. His jokes were always cracked with a shrewd eye to business, and many of them would not have sounded very amusing outside a court of justice. But they were above the ordinary level of forensic humour, and there came to be a recognised “Lockwood brief.” The character of a jester was also useful as leading to a wide journalistic renown. “Lockwood’s latest” went the rounds as merrily as the sparkling witticisms of the facetious lodger of Mrs. Todgers. The paragraphists were delighted to narrate how Lockwood, seeing a Scottish host sign for himself and his wife in the traditional Highland way, “Cluny and Mrs. McPherson,” himself wrote, “26, Lennox Gardens, S.W., and Mrs. Lockwood.” With equal glee they told how Mr. Lockwood went to a chapel where his Nonconformist friend, Mr. Samuel Danks Waddy, Q.C., was advertised to give a brief, bright, and brotherly address, and how Waddy turned the tables on him by solemnly giving out that “Brother Lockwood would now lead in prayer.”

“It amuses my friends very much,” said Mr. Peter Magnus when telling Mr. Pickwick that his initials were P.M., and that in notes to intimate friends he sometimes signed himself “Afternoon.” Mr. Pickwick was secretly “envious of the ease with which Mr. Magnus’s friends were amused,” and no doubt a professional merry-maker must have sighed over the inexpensive triumphs of Sir Frank Lockwood. But the thing did what it was intended to do, and on the strength of his caricatures and his jokes, far more than by any conspicuous ability, Lockwood climbed to a Recordership, a seat in Parliament, a good social position, and finally the Solicitor-Generalship.

His early death seemed the more pathetic because of his intense enjoyment of life and the unusual bounty with which Fate had so far treated one who was after all but a light-weight. He had always been a little nervous about his physical health and not a little anxious lest his professional standing should diminish. Thinking thus, he had his eye on the Bench. Lord Halsbury, whose professional sympathies were even stronger than his political prejudices, was favourable, and called on him during the last month of his life. But it was too plainly evident that Lockwood’s course was run, and the well-meaning visit could have no result. “He must have felt,” said Lockwood to Mr. Birrell a day or two later, glancing at his own wasted frame, “that I should make an excellent puisne judge.”

Lockwood’s personal opinion of litigation is perhaps worth quotation. “Never by any chance,” he wrote to a relative, “become involved in any difficulties which will bring you into a court of law of higher jurisdiction than a police court. An occasional drunk and disorderly will do you no harm and only cost you five shillings. Beyond a little indulgence of this kind—beware.”