Chapter IV: Part 4

"Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even
when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of
imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of
the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be
no large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of God,
sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the
attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or
creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent
thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a
teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity
itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical
powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those
who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others
to feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which
exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions.

"Such are the lineaments of the ethical character which the
cultivated intellect will form apart from religious principle."

Surely this is a wonderful utterance from a Cardinal of the Church of Rome, full of urbanity and the wisdom of the world.

Your loving old G.P.

[Footnote 1: Pp. 52-57.]

26

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I have in a former letter quoted a short but noble passage from Lord Macaulay on the great Lord Chatham.

But I feel that the writer who was perhaps the greatest essayist that England has ever produced must not in these letters be fobbed off with so slight a notice and quotation.

What has always seemed to me the supremest passage that flowed from his wonderful pen is to be found in his paper on Warren Hastings which appeared originally in the _Edinburgh Review_.

His description in that essay of the opening of the great impeachment, has given all succeeding generations a vision of one of the most majestic scenes in the whole history of man.

"There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more
gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, more attractive to
grown-up children, than that which was then exhibited at
Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well
calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an
imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong
to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past,
were collected on one spot and in one hour. All the talents and
all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and
civilisation were now displayed, with every advantage that could
be derived both from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in
the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many
troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our
constitution were laid; or far away, over boundless seas and
deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshipping
strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left.
The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed
down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused
of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares,
and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude.

"The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of
William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at
the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the
just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall
where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted
a victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where
Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid
courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor
civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers.
The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold
and ermine, were marshalled by the heralds under Garter
King-at-Arms. The judges in their vestments of state attended to
give advice on points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords,
three-fourths of the Upper House as the Upper House then was,
walked in solemn order from their usual place of assembling to the
tribunal. The junior Baron present led the way, George Eliot, Lord
Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defence of
Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The
long procession was closed by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of
the realm, by the great dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons
of the King. Last of all came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by
his fine person and noble bearing. The grey old walls were hung
with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such
as has rarely excited the fears or the emulation of an orator.
There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free,
enlightened, and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness,
wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of
every art. There were seated round the Queen the fair-haired young
daughters of the House of Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of
great Kings and Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle
which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons,
in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a
scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the
historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero
pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a
senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus
thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side
by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age.
The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has
preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and
statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had
induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine
from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition, a
treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with
injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious,
massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her
to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith.
There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the
Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and
music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the
members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticised, and
exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs.
Montague. And there the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than
those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against
palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

"The Serjeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar,
and bent his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that
great presence. He had ruled an extensive and populous country,
had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and
pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne
himself, that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and
that hatred itself could deny him no title to glory, except
virtue. He looked like a great man, and not like a bad man. A
person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage
which, while it indicated deference to the court, indicated also
habitual self-possession and self-respect, a high and intellectual
forehead, a brow pensive, but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible
decision, a face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written,
as legibly as under the picture in the council-chamber at
Calcutta, _Mens æqua in arduis_; such was the aspect with which
the great Proconsul presented himself to his judges."

Such a scene can only find its appropriate enactment at the centre of a great empire and amid a people with an august history behind them, conscious of present magnificence and confident of future glory.

We are now far into the second century since that memorable spectacle filled to the walls the great Hall of Westminster.

What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and adorned by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been superseded by a socialistic democracy under which personal freedom suffers frequent curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by the mandates of trade unions, the prohibitions of urban potentates, and the usurpations of medicine men.

Under these cramping and crippling deprivations we have lost the collective sense of greatness as a race that infused every participator in the splendid pageant of such an event as the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. One has but to imagine an impeachment to-day with the dominant personages in it chosen from the strike leaders and labour delegates of the proletariat, assisted by promoted railway porters and ennobled grocers, to perceive what a distance, and down what a declivity we have travelled since those days when it was impossible for any great public function to take place without its becoming naturally and without conscious effort the occasion for a manifestation of the pomp, circumstance, and splendour inseparable from the solemn acts of a great people performed by their greatest men.

But I am one, Antony, who look forward with steadfast hope and belief to a reaction from our present vulgarity, and to a reascension of England to a greater dignity, honour, and nobleness both in its public and private life than is observable to-day.

Your loving old G.P.

27

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I have not in my letters to you travelled beyond our own islands in search of great English prose, but I propose now to make one divergence from this rule and quote a very great and deservedly far-famed speech, uttered on a memorable occasion, of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.

At the present time, I think, the name of Lincoln lies closer to the hearts of the American people than that of any other, not even excepting Washington and Hamilton. The latter, though they established American independence, remained in a personal sense English gentlemen till their death. Lincoln was born in the backwoods in rude poverty, received no education but what he acquired by his own unaided efforts, and lived and died a man of the people, the ideal type of native-born American.

He rose from the lowest to the highest position in the State, borne upwards by the simple nobility of his character, by the stainless purity of his actions, and the splendid motive of all his endeavours. His speeches and writings derive their power and distinction from no tricks of oratory, felicity of diction, or nimbleness of mind. They are the vocal results of the beatings of his great heart.

He led his people to war in the manner of a prophet of Israel; with an awful austerity, majestic, invincible, and with hand uplifted in sure appeal to the God of battles. On the field of Gettysburg, where was waged the most tremendous of all combats of the war, he came to dedicate a cemetery to the innumerable dead, and these were his few and noble words:--

"Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have
come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place
for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add of
detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say
here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us,
the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is
rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure
of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new
birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the
people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Few are the opportunities in the history of the world when the time, the place, the occasion, and the words spoken, have combined so poignantly to move the hearts of men.

One can imagine the vast concourse standing awestruck and uncovered before the solemn splendour of this noble dedication, every phrase of which will remain for generations a treasured and sacred memory in countless thousands of homes of the great continent in the West.

Your loving old G.P.

28

MY DEAR ANTONY,

The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.

This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the general decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with the rise of the modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy even to our thoughts. Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have discussed at the dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn, what is now set down for free debate at ladies' clubs, and canvassed in the correct columns of the _Guardian_.

This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature deeply and diversely. In the hands of the really great masters such as Carlyle, Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the throbbings of their hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal of their inmost souls crying in the market-place, take forcible possession of our affections, and bring them into closer touch with each one of us than was ever possible with the older restrained writers.

But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy; and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's hand, has unlocked for us the doors of an Aladdin's palace! But even if the restraint of the ancient writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity.

"This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament;
and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of
these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate
Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook,
the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,' 'He doth set
His bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every
drooping swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love. 'In them
hath He set a _tabernacle_ for the sun,' whose burning ball,
which, without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable
and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that
firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by
mediatorial ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden
pavement is spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the
firmament of clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill
with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is
closed at evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of
the firmament his implacable light is divided and its separated
fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of
distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains
burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this
tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows
of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His
own majesty to men, upon the _throne_ of the firmament.

"As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity,
we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the
Preserver of men those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place.
'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by
earth, for it is His footstool.'

"And all those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and
grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built
about the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening
thunders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to
deepen in our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and dearness
of the simple words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven!'"

The description of the first approach to Venice before the days of railways will always be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's work as one of his most characteristic and memorable utterances:--

"In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate survey of
the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the
happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last
hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village,
where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its
valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty
perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers
of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful
and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the
railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to
be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
successive halting place than a new arrangement of glass roofing
and iron girder--there were few moments of which the recollection
was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which, as I
endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought
him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open
lagoon from the canal of Mestre.

"Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this
direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of
the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly
disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange
rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of
the deep sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could
at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water
which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north
and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the
east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of
black weed separating and disappearing gradually in knots of
heaving shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed
it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so
calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the
Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of
Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of northern waves, yet
subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry
pallor into a field of burnished gold as the sun declined behind
the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named 'St
George of the Sea-weed.'

"As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the
traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low,
sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows;
but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Argua
rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright
mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill
extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning
with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded
the whole horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here and
there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its
snow into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the
barred clouds of evening one after another, countless, the crown
of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them,
to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and
on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as
the quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.

"And at last when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its
untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded
rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the
Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long
ranges of columned palaces--each with its black boat moored at the
portal, each with its image cast down beneath its feet upon that
green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich
tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the
shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind
the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so
adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just
bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen,
the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the ear, and
the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over
the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and
loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and when at
last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across
which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine
veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was
no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the
visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to
forget the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well
might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to
the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the
waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her
state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all
which in Nature was wild or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as
the waves and tempests--had been won to adorn her instead of to
destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty
which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the
hour-glass as well as of the sea."

It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the sea on a September morning as I sailed towards it across the Adriatic from Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its loveliness was slowly and exquisitely unveiled under the slanting beams of the early sun.

In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision so enchanting and unsurpassable! May you live to see it, Antony, before the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its beauty.

Your loving old G.P.

29

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Born in Devon at the same time--within a year--as Ruskin, James Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same sanguine and poetical characteristics. His historical writings have, I believe, been somewhat discredited of late years owing to the permission he is alleged to have given himself to warp his account of events in order to buttress some prejudice or contention of his own.

But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once restore him to our regard as a lord of visionary language:--

"Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping, mellow
autumn of a rich, glorious summer. In the old man Nature has
fulfilled her work; she leads him with her blessings; she fills
him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to
the grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we
should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most
beautiful.

"There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with
bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the
symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side of the grave;
which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won;
and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of
man.

"Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose
life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to
do the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or
Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers,
priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has been
the same--the same bitter cup has been given them to drink."

Another passage of deep and melancholy beauty cannot be omitted from this volume. It records in language of haunting loveliness the passing away of feudalism and chivalry and of a thousand years of the pageantry of faith:--

"The great trading companies were not instituted for selfish
purposes, but to ensure the consumer of manufactured articles that
what he purchased was properly made and of a reasonable price.
They determined prices, fixed wages, and arranged the rules of
apprenticeship. But in time the companies lost their healthy
vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the reign
of Elizabeth hastening away. There were no longer tradesmen to be
found in sufficient number who were possessed of the necessary
probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon
with the deep melancholy which, in those days, settled down on
Elizabeth herself.

"For indeed a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and
direction of which even is still hidden from us--a change from era
to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up;
old things were passing away, and the faith and life of ten
centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the
abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and
all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were
passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond
the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk
back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm
earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a
small atom in the awful vastness of the Universe.

"In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for
themselves, mankind was to remain no longer. And now it is all
gone--like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and the
old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the
historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us,
and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among
the aisles of the cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent
figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float
before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps
in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval
age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."

The sound of church bells, being entirely the creation of man, forms perhaps a more touching link with the past for us than the eternal sounds of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the waves of the sea forms a bond between us and the unplumbed depths of time, as they

"Begin and cease, and then again begin
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring,
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery."

So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is the sound of wind in the trees, and the voice of falling waters and rippling streams which must have fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore-runners as they do upon our own. These eternal sounds about us take no note of our brief coming and going, and will be the same when you and I, Antony, and all the millions that come after us in the world have returned to dust.

Your loving old G.P.

30

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Though I do not myself rank Matthew Arnold among the great prose writers of England, yet, like all true poets--and he indeed was one of them,--he wrote excellent English prose.

It is true that he turned to poetry to express his finest emotions and thoughts, and he himself alludes to his prose writings thus: "I am a mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, and I talk an artless, unstudied, everyday familiar language. But, after all, this is the language of the mass of the world."

The chief note of all his teaching was urbanity. "The pursuit of perfection," he said, "is the pursuit of sweetness and light." "Culture hates hatred: culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness and light."

This teaching, no doubt, leads to fields of pleasantness and charm, and not at all to the high places of self-sacrifice, or the austere peaks of martyrdom. Burning indignation against intolerable things, fierce denunciation of the cruelties and abominations of the world find no encouragement or sympathy from this serene, detached, and therefore somewhat ineffectual, teaching.

Sweetness and light would never have interfered with the slave trade, or fiercely fought beside Plimsoll for the load-line on the sides of ships.

We did not fight the Germans under the doctrine of sweetness and light.

It was a beautiful and edifying adornment for the drawing-room in times of Victorian self-satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour for the battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword for combating wrong.

I am not sure that Matthew Arnold would not have called those who wrathfully slash about them at abominable evils, Philistines.

After all, the great men of action and the great writers of the world have been capable of harbouring great enthusiasms and deep indignations in their hearts; and these emotions do not emerge from a "passion for sweetness and light."

A better doctrine, Antony, is, I think, to try to push things along cheerfully but strenuously in the right direction wherever and whenever you can.

As a writer I think Matthew Arnold's best passage is to be found in the Preface to his _Essays in Criticism_:--

"Oxford. Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by
the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!

"There are our young barbarians, all at play!

"And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens
to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last
enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her
ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of
us, to the ideal, to perfection,--to beauty, in a word, which is
only truth seen from another side?--nearer perhaps than all the
science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so
romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to
sides and heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of
lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and
impossible loyalties!... Apparitions of a day, what is our puny
warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which
this Queen of Romance has been waging against them for centuries,
and will wage after we are gone?"

As a man and a companion,[1] if you expected nothing but delightful humour, brilliant discourse, and urbane outlook upon everything, few could rival his personal charm; but he would never really join you in a last ditch to defend the right, or actually charge with you against the wrong, although in his poem "The Last Word," while not participating himself in such strenuous doings, he seems to yield a reluctant admiration to him who does so charge, and who leaves his "body by the wall."

Much has happened since Matthew Arnold poured his scorn upon the unregenerate Philistines; but let us remember, Antony, that thousands and thousands of these contemned neglecters of sweetness and light stood unflinchingly and died upon the plains of France that our country and its freedom should survive.

Your loving old G.P.

[Footnote 1: See my _Memories_, pp. 46-52 and 55.]

31

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Like the author of the _Peninsular War_, Sir William Butler was great both as a soldier and as a writer. His autobiography sparkles with humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it was in his _Life of Gordon of Khartoum_ that he rose to his full stature as a contributor to the glory of English prose.

The spell of Gordon seems to have, as it were, transfigured all who approached him, and raised them out of themselves. One man alone, of all those whose lives touched his, has shown that his own pinched and narrow mediocrity was proof against the radiance of Gordon's spirit, and has feebly attempted to belittle the soldier saint for his own justification. But he has failed even to project a spot upon the sun of Gordon's fame, and he is already forgotten, while the great soldier's name will endure in the hearts of his countrymen till England and its people fail.

If Sir William Butler's final noble periods, which I here reproduce, do not deeply move him who reads them, then must that reader have a heart of stone:--

"Thus fell in dark hour of defeat a man as unselfish as Sidney, of
courage dauntless as Wolfe, of honour stainless as Outram, of
sympathy wide-reaching as Drummond, of honesty straightforward as
Napier, of faith as steadfast as More. Doubtful indeed is it if
anywhere in the past we shall find figure of knight or soldier to
equal him, for sometimes it is the sword of death that gives to
life its real knighthood, and too often the soldier's end is
unworthy of his knightly life; but with Gordon the harmony of life
and death was complete, and the closing scenes seem to move to
their fulfilment in solemn hush, as though an unseen power watched
over the sequence of their sorrow.

"Not by the blind hazard of chance was this great tragedy
consummated; not by the discord of men or from the vague
opposition of physical obstacle, by fault of route or length of
delay, was help denied to him. The picture of a wonderful life had
to be made perfect by heroic death. The moral had to be cut deep,
and written red, and hung high, so that its lesson could be seen
by all men above strife and doubt and discord. Nay, the very
setting of the final scenes has to be wrought out in such contrast
of colour that the dullest eye shall be able to read the meaning
of it all. For many a year back this soldier's life has been a
protest against our most cherished teaching. Faith is weakness,
we have said. He will show us it is strength. Reward is the right
of service. Publicity is true fame. Let us go into action with a
newspaper correspondent riding at our elbow, or sitting in the
cabin of the ship, has been our practice. He has told us that the
race should be for honour, not for 'honours,' that we should 'give
away our medal,' and that courage and humility, mercy and
strength, should march hand in hand together. For many a year we
have had no room for him in our councils. Our armies knew him not;
and it was only in semi-savage lands and in the service of remote
empires he could find scope for his genius. Now our councils will
be shamed in his service, and our armies will find no footing in
our efforts to reach him. We have said that the Providence of God
was only a calculation of chances; now for eleven months the
amazing spectacle will be presented to the world of this solitary
soldier standing at bay, within thirty days' travel of the centre
of Empire, while the most powerful kingdom on the earth--the
nation whose wealth is as the sands of the sea, whose boast is
that the sun never sets upon its dominions--is unable to reach
him--saving _he_ does not want--but is unable to reach him even
with one message of regret for past forgetfulness.

"No; there is something more in all this than mistake of
Executive, or strife of party, or error of Cabinet, or fault of
men can explain. The purpose of this life that has been, the
lesson of this death that must be, is vaster and deeper than these
things. The decrees of God are as fixed to-day as they were two
thousand years ago, but they can be worked to their conclusion by
the weakness of men as well as by the strength of angels.

"There is a grey frontlet of rock far away in Strathspey--once the
Gordons' home--whose name in bygone times gave a rallying-call to
a kindred clan. The scattered firs and wind-swept heather on the
lone summit of Craig Ellachie once whispered in Highland
clansmen's ear the warcry, 'Stand fast! Craig Ellachie.' Many a
year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon last heard from
Highland hilltop the signal of battle, but never in Celtic hero's
long record of honour has such answer been sent back to Highland
or to Lowland as when this great heart stopped its beating, and
lay 'steadfast unto death' in the dawn at Khartoum. The winds that
moan through the pine trees on Craig Ellachie have far-off
meanings in their voices. Perhaps on that dark January night there
came a breath from heaven to whisper to the old Highland rock, 'He
stood fast! Craig Ellachie.'

"The dust of Gordon is not laid in English earth, nor does even
the ocean, which has been named Britannia's realm, hold in 'its
vast and wandering grave' the bones of her latest hero. Somewhere,
far out in the immense desert whose sands so often gave him rest
in life, or by the shores of that river which was the scene of so
much of his labour, his ashes now add their wind-swept atoms to
the mighty waste of the Soudan. But if England, still true to the
long line of her martyrs to duty, keep his memory precious in her
heart--making of him no false idol or brazen image of glory, but
holding him as he was, the mirror and measure of true
knighthood--then better than in effigy or epitaph will his life be
written, and his nameless tomb become a citadel to his nation."

The statue of Gordon stands in noble reverie in Trafalgar Square, at the centre of the Empire for whose honour he died.

In St. Paul's Cathedral he lies in effigy, and engraven upon the cenotaph can be seen the most splendid epitaph in the world.

His true greatness has been recorded by Sir William Butler in resounding and glorious English; and his last great act of stainless nobility has received a deathless tribute.

Your loving old, G.P.

32

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I have now come down, at last, to a great writer of English prose who is still with us.

Lord Morley at the present day is, I think, universally recognised as the greatest living man of letters in the British Empire; he has crowned a long record of distinguished literary achievement with his _Life of Gladstone_, which has taken its place among the noblest biographies of the world, where it is destined to remain into the far future acclaimed as a masterpiece. In his description of the veteran statesman launching in the House of Commons his great project of Home Rule for Ireland, he has surprised himself out of his own reserve, and painted the scene for succeeding generations in colours that can never die:--

"No such scene has ever been beheld in the House of Commons.
Members came down at break of day to secure their places; before
noon every seat was marked, and crowded benches were even arrayed
on the floor of the House from the Mace to the Bar. Princes,
ambassadors, great peers, high prelates, thronged the lobbies. The
fame of the orator, the boldness of his exploit, curiosity as to
the plan, poignant anxiety as to the party result, wonder whether
a wizard had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting out
the baleful spirits that had for so many ages made Ireland our
torment and our dishonour--all these things brought together such
an assemblage as no minister before had ever addressed within
those world-renowned walls.

"The Parliament was new. Many of its members had fought a hard
battle for their seats, and trusted they were safe in the haven
for half a dozen good years to come. Those who were moved by
professional ambition, those whose object was social advancement,
those who thought only of upright public service, the keen party
of men, the men who aspire to office, the men with a past and the
men who looked for a future, all alike found themselves adrift on
dark and troubled waters. The secrets of the Bill had been well
kept. To-day the disquieted host were first to learn what was the
great project to which they would have to say that Aye or No on
which for them and for the State so much would hang.

"Of the chief comrades or rivals of the minister's own generation,
the strong administrators, the eager and accomplished debaters,
the sagacious leaders, the only survivor now comparable to him, in
eloquence or in influence, was Mr. Bright. That illustrious man
seldom came into the House in those distracted days; and on this
memorable occasion his stern and noble head was to be seen in dim
obscurity.

"Various as were the emotions in other regions of the House, in
one quarter rejoicing was unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt
and no misgiving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish
leader, whose hard insight, whose patience, energy, and spirit of
command, had achieved this astounding result, and done that which
he had vowed to his countrymen that he would assuredly be able to
do. On the benches round him genial excitement rose almost to
tumult. Well it might. For the first time since the Union the
Irish case was at last to be pressed in all its force and
strength, in every aspect of policy and of conscience by the most
powerful Englishman then alive.

"More striking than the audience was the man; more striking than
the multitude of eager onlookers from the shore was the rescuer,
with deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash him down;
the veteran Ulysses, who, after more than half a century of
combat, service, toil, thought it not too late to try a further
'work of noble note,' In the hands of such a master of the
instrument the theme might easily have lent itself to one of those
displays of exalted passion which the House had marvelled at in
more than one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches on the Turkish question,
or heard with religious reverence in his speech on the Affirmation
Bill in 1883.

"What the occasion now required was that passion should burn low,
and reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate
scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained
and vindicated. Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses
with declamation this was a fine and sustained example. There was
a deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of arguments, exposition,
exhortation. Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. Now and
again a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts. But
political oratory is action, not words--action, character, will,
conviction, purpose, personality. As this eager muster of men
underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance
and modulation, the compulsion of his flashing glance and animated
gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recollection of
national service, the thought of the speaker's mastering purpose,
his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength of thew
and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, his
unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail. Few are
the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but this was
one."

I will not trench upon politics in these letters; but I may hazard the belief that could those who rejected this noble effort, by the greatest statesman of the age, to assuage the everlasting Irish conflict, have looked into the future, few of them but would have supported it with relief and thanksgiving.

It is generally perhaps a blessing that the curtain that covers the future is impenetrable; but in this case, had it been lifted for us to gaze upon the appalling future, Gladstone's last effort for the peace of his country would surely not have been permitted to miscarry.

Your loving old G.P.

33

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Two other living writers I will now commend to you, and then I shall have done.

The parents of Mr. Belloc, with a happy prevision, anticipated by some decades the _entente cordiale_, and their brilliant son felicitously manifests in his own person many of the admirable qualities of both races. In England he is reported to be forcefully French, and it may be surmised that when in France he is engagingly British. Fortunately for our literature, it is in the language of his mother that he has found his expression. Many are the beautiful utterances scattered through his charming works: two of the most picturesque deal with the greatness of France; the subject of one is the Ancient Monarchy, and of the other the Great Napoleon:--

"So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out
and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and
recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Thermæ echoed
heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings.

"Look up the vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see the
gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white
beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand the
globe, and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword. There
also are the short strong horsemen of the Robertian House, half
hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before them
growing in vestment and majesty and taking on the pomp of the
Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip, the
Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they
stand in a widening, interminable procession, this great crowd of
kings; they loose their armour, they take their ermine on, they
are accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last, in
their attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves
the pride and the achievement of the French nation.

"But Time has dissipated what it could not tarnish, and the
process of a thousand years has turned these mighty figures into
unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of
darkness, like a pageant, all standing still. You look again, but
with the growing light, and with the wind that rises before
morning, they have disappeared."

* * * * *

"There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain
sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that
passed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him
move along their snows, through the long mysterious twilights of
the northern autumn, in silence, with the head bent and the reins
in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching
towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was Napoleon.

"After him there trailed for days the shadows of the soldiery,
vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was
as though the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the light west
wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years
of combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of
the year over the endless plains.

"But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the
Guard, and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French
drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the
army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence
which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they
sleep in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords."

Time and circumstances have changed our ancient enemies into our honoured friends, and the race that fought against us at Waterloo has cemented its friendship towards us with its blood; and as we look back over the century that divides us from Waterloo we can now with Mr. Belloc salute the sombre figure of the defeated conqueror.

Your loving old G.P.

34

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I will now quote to you one other master of splendid English.

Not every temporal sovereign of these realms has deserved a throne among the kings of literature. James the First was a poet of some merit; Charles the First wrote and spoke with a fine distinction; Queen Victoria's letters to her subjects were models of dignified and kindly simplicity; but to King George the Fifth by the grace of God it has been reserved to give utterance to what I believe to be the most noble and uplifting address ever delivered by a king to his people.

From the day of his accession King George has been confronted with trials and troubles enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and none of us can plumb the depth of anguish that must have been his through the awful years of the Great War. He has been tried and proved in the fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged ennobled by pain, and dowered by sorrow with a gift of expression that has placed him among the masters of the glory of English prose.

On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a tour of the cemeteries in France at Terlinchthun, where there stands on the cliffs over-looking the Channel a monument to Napoleon and his Grand Army, and around it now lie the innumerable English dead.

Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and Lord Haig had in his presence clasped hands, and the King with a fine gesture had placed his own right hand upon their clasped ones and said, "Amis toujours!" We are told that, "going up to the Cross of Sacrifice, the King looked out over the closely marshalled graves to the sea, and back towards the woods and fields of the Canche Valley where Montreuil stands, and seemed reluctant to leave."

At last he turned, and, standing before the great Cross of Sacrifice, he spoke from his heart words that those of us, Antony, who love our country and the glory of its language will cherish while we live:--

"For the past few days I have been on a solemn pilgrimage in
honour of a people who died for all free men.

"At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I followed ways already
marked by many footsteps of love and pride and grief, I should
like to send a message to all who have lost those dear to them in
the Great War, and in this the Queen joins me to-day, amidst these
surroundings so wonderfully typical of that single-hearted
assembly of nations and of races which form our Empire. For here,
in their last quarters, lie sons of every portion of that Empire,
across, as it were, the threshold of the Mother Island which they
guarded, that Freedom might be saved in the uttermost ends of the
earth.