Chapter VI: Part 6

Of course there are some CONSPICUOUS novelists. There is George Meredith, though he has now almost ceased to write; to speak candidly, though I recognise his genius, his creative power, his noble and subtle conception of character, yet I do not feel the reality of his books; or rather I feel that the reality is there, but disguised from me by a veil--a dim and rich veil, it is true--which is hung between me and the scene. The veil is George Meredith's personality. I confess that it is a dignified personality enough, the spirit of a grand seigneur. But I feel in reading his books as if I were staying with a magnificent person in a stately house; but that, when I wanted to go about and look at things for myself, my host, with splendid urbanity, insisted on accompanying me, pointed out objects that interested himself, and translated the remarks of the guests and the other people who appeared upon the scene into his own peculiar diction. The characters do not talk as I think they would have talked, but as George Meredith would have talked under the given circumstances. There is no repose about his books; there is a sense not only of intellectual but actually of moral effort about reading them; and further, I do not like the style; it is highly mannerised, and permeated, so to speak, with a kind of rich perfume, a perfume which stupefies rather than enlivens. Even when the characters are making what are evidently to them perfectly natural and straightforward remarks, I do not feel sure what they mean; and I suffer from paroxysms of rage as I read, because I feel that I cannot get at what is there without a mental agility which seems to me unnecessarily fatiguing. A novel ought to be like a walk; George Meredith makes it into an obstacle race.

Then, again, Henry James is an indubitably great writer; though you amused me once by saying that you felt you really had not time to read his later books. Well, for myself, I confess that his earlier books, such as Roderick Hudson and the Portrait of a Lady, are books that I recur to again and again. They are perfectly proportioned and admirably lucid. If they have a fault, and I do not readily admit it, it is that the characters are not quite full-blooded enough. Still, there is quite enough of what is called "virility" about in literature; and it is refreshing to find oneself in the company of people who preserve at all events the conventional decencies of life. But Henry James has in his later books taken a new departure; he is infinitely subtle and extraordinarily delicate; but he is obscure where he used to be lucid, and his characters now talk in so allusive and birdlike a way, hop so briskly from twig to twig, that one cannot keep the connection in one's mind. He seems to be so afraid of anything that is obvious or plain-spoken, that his art conceals not art but nature. I declare that in his conversations I have not unfrequently to reckon back to see who has got the ball; then, too, those long, closely printed pages, such as one sees in The Wings of a Dove, without paragraphs, without breathing places, pages of minute and refined analysis--there is a high intellectual pleasure in reading them, but there is a mental strain as well. It is as though one wandered in tortuous passages, full of beautiful and curious things, without ever reaching the rooms of the house. What I want, in a work of imagination, is to step as simply as possible into the presence of an emotion, the white heat of a situation. With Henry James I do not feel certain what the situation is. At the same time his books are full of fine things; he has learnt a splendid use of metaphor, when the whole page seems, as it were, stained with some poetical thought, as though one had shut a fruit into the book, and its juice had tinted the whole of a page. But that is not sufficient; and I confess I close one of his later volumes in a condition of admiring mystification. I do not know what it has all been about; the characters have appeared, have nodded and smiled inscrutably, have let fall sentences which seem like sparkling fragments of remarks; I feel that there is a great conception behind, but I am still in the dark as to what it is.

There are two or three other authors whose books I read with interest. One of these is John Oliver Hobbes. Her books do not seem to me to be exactly natural; it is all of the nature of a scenic display. But there is abundance of nobility and even of passion; and the style is original, nervous, and full of fine aphorisms. There is a feeling of high and chivalrous courage about her characters; they breathe perhaps too lofty an air, and are, if anything, too true to themselves. But it is a dignified romance, rather mediaeval than modern, and penetrated with a pungent aromatic humour which has a quality of its own.

Mrs. Humphry Ward is another writer whose books I always read. I am constantly aware of a great conscientiousness in the background. The scenery, the people, are all studied with the most sedulous and patient care; but I somehow feel, at all events in the earlier works, that the moral attitude of the writer, a kind of Puritan agnosticism, interferes with the humanity of the books; they seem to me to be as saturated with principle as Miss Yonge's books, written from a very different standpoint, were. I feel that I am not to be allowed my own preferences, and that to enjoy the books I must be in line with the authoress. Mrs. Ward's novels, in fact, seem to me the high-water mark of what great talent, patient observation, and faithful work can do; but the light does not quite shine through. Yet it is only just to say that every book Mrs. Ward writes seems an improvement on the last. There is a wider, larger, freer conception of life; more reality, more humanity, as well as more artistic handling; and they are worth careful reading; I shall certainly include one or two in my consignment.

George Moore seems to me to be one of the best writers on the stage. Esther Waters, Evelyn Innes, and Sister Theresa, are books of the highest quality. I have a sense in these books of absolute reality. I may think the words and deeds of the characters mysterious, surprising, and even sometimes disgusting; but they surprise and disgust me just as the anomalies of human beings affect me. I may not like them, but I do not question the fact that the characters spoke and behaved as they are supposed to behave. Moreover, Evelyn Innes and Sister Theresa are written in a style of matchless lucidity and precision; they have passages of high poetry. Old Mr. Innes, with his tiresome preoccupations, his pedantic taste, his mediaeval musical instruments, affects me exactly as an unrelenting idealist does in actual life. The mystical Ulick has a profound charm; the Sisters in the convent, all preoccupied with the same or similar ideas, have each a perfectly distinct individuality. Evelyn herself, even with all her frank and unashamed sensuality, is a deeply attractive figure; and I know no books which so render the evasive charm of the cloistered life. But George Moore has two grave faults; he is sometimes vulgar and he is sometimes brutal. Evelyn's worldly lover is a man who makes one's flesh creep, and yet one feels he is intended to represent the fascination of the world. Then it does not seem to me to be true realism to depict scenes of frank animalism. Such things may occur; but the actors in such a carnival could not speak of them, even to each other; it may be prudish, but I cannot help feeling that one ought not to have represented in a book what could not be repeated in conversation or depicted in a picture. One may be plain-spoken enough in art, but one ought not to have the feeling that one would be ashamed, in certain passages, to catch the author's eye. If it were not for these lapses, I should put George Moore at the head of all contemporary novelists; and I am not sure that I do not do so as it is. Do give them another trial; I always thought you were too easily discouraged in your attempt to grapple with his books; probably my admiration for them only aroused your critical sense; and I admit that there is much to criticise.

Then there is another writer, lately dead, alas, whose books I used to read with absorbing interest, George Gissing. They had, when he treated of his own peculiar stratum, the same quality of hard reality which I value most of all in a work of fiction. The actors were not so much vulgar as underbred; their ambitions and tastes were often deplorable. But one felt that they were real people. The wall of the suburban villa was gently removed, and the life was before your eyes. The moment he strayed from that milieu, the books became fantastic and unreal. But in the last two books, By the Ionian Sea and the Papers of Henry Rycroft, Gissing stepped into a new province, and produced exquisitely beautiful and poetical idealistic literature.

Thomas Hardy is a poetical writer. But his rustic life, dreamy, melancholy, and beautiful as it is, with the wind blowing fragrant out of the heart of the wood, or the rain falling on the down, seems to me to be no more real than the scenes in As You Like It or The Tempest. The figures are actors playing a part. And then there is through his books so strong a note of sex, and people under the influence of passion seem to me to behave in so incomprehensible a way, in a manner so foreign to my own experience, that though I would not deny the truth of the picture, I would say that it is untrue for me, and therefore unmeaning.

I have never fallen under the sway of Rudyard Kipling. Whenever I read his stories I feel myself for the time in the grip of a strong mind, and it becomes a species of intoxication. But I am naturally sober by inclination, and though I can unreservedly admire the strength, the vigour, the splendid imaginativeness of his conceptions, yet the whole note of character is distasteful to me. I don't like his male men; I should dislike them and be ill at ease with them in real life, and I am ill at ease with them in his books. This is purely a matter of taste; and as to the animal stories, terrifically clever as they are, they appear to me to be no more true to life than Landseer's pictures of dogs holding a coroner's inquest or smoking pipes. The only book of his that I re-read is The Light that Failed, for its abundant vitality and tragicalness; but the same temperamental repugnance overcomes me even there.

For pure imagination I should always fly to a book by H. G. Wells. He has that extraordinary power of imagining the impossible, and working it out in a hard literal way which is absolutely convincing. But he is a teller of tales and not a dramatist.

Well, you will be tired of all these fussy appreciations. But what one seems to miss nowadays is the presence of a writer of superlative lucidity and humanity, for whose books one waits with avidity, and orders them beforehand, as soon as they are announced. For one thing, most people seem to me to write too much. The moment a real success is scored, the temptation, no doubt adroitly whispered by publishers, to produce a similar book on similar lines, becomes very strong. Few living writers are above the need for earning money; but even that would not spoil a genius if we had him.

These writers whom I have mentioned seem to me all like little bubbling rivulets, each with a motion, a grace, a character of its own. But what one craves for is a river deep and wide, for some one, with a great flood of humanity like Scott, or with a leaping cataract of irrepressible humour like Dickens, or with a core of white-hot passion like Charlotte Bronte, or a store of brave and wholesome gaiety and zest, such as Stevenson showed.

Well, we must wait and hope. Meanwhile I will write to my great book-taster; one of the few men alive with great literary vitality, who has never indulged the temptation to write, and has never written a line. I will show him the manner of man you are, and a box of bright volumes shall be packed for you. The one condition is that you shall write me in return a sheet of similar appreciations. The only thing is to know what one likes, and strike out a line for oneself; the rest is mere sheep-like grazing--forty feeding like one.--Ever yours,

T. B.

ASHFIELD,
SETTLE,
Sept. 4, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have been reading FitzGerald's pretty essay Euphranor. It is Platonic both in form and treatment, but I never feel that it is wholly successful. Most of the people who express admiration for it know nothing of the essay except a delicious passage at the end, like a draught of fragrant wine, about the gowned figures evaporating into the twilight, and the nightingale heard among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus. But the talk itself is discursive and somewhat pompous. However, it is not of that that I wish to speak, it is rather of the passage from Digby's Godefridus which is read aloud by the narrator, which sets out to analyse the joyful and generous temperament of Youth. "They [the young] are easily put to Shame" (so runs the script), "for they have no resources to set aside the precepts which they have learned; and they have lofty souls, for they have never been disgraced or brought low, and they are unacquainted with Necessity; they prefer Honour to Advantage, Virtue to Expediency; for they live by Affection rather than by Reason, and Reason is concerned with Expediency, but Affection with Honour."

All very beautiful and noble, no doubt; but is it real? was I, were you, creatures of this make? Could these fine things have been truthfully said of us? Perhaps you may think it of yourself, but I can only regretfully say that I do not recognise it.

My boyhood and youth were, it seems to me, very faulty things. My age is faulty still, more's the pity. But without any vain conceit, and with all the humility which is given by a knowledge of weakness, I can honestly say that in particular points I have improved a little. I am not generous or noble-hearted now; but I have not lost these qualities, for I never had them. As a boy and a young man I distinctly preferred Advantage to Honour; I was the prey of Expediency, and seldom gave Virtue a thought. But since I have known more of men, I have come to know that these fine powers, Honour and Virtue, do bloom in some men's souls, and in the hearts of many women. I have perceived their fragrance; I have seen Honour raise its glowing face like a rose, and Virtue droop its head like a pure snowdrop; and I hope that some day, as in an early day of spring, I may find some such tender green thing budding in the ugly soil of my own poor spirit.

Life would be a feeble business if it were otherwise; but the one ray of hope is not that one steadily declines in brightness from those early days, but that one may learn by admiration the beauty of the great qualities one never had by instinct.

I see myself as a boy, greedy, mean-spirited, selfish, dull. I see myself as a young man, vain, irritable, self-absorbed, unbalanced. I have not eradicated these weeds; but I have learnt to believe in beauty and honour, even in Truth. . . .--Ever yours,

T. B.

MONK'S ORCHARD,
UPTON,
Sept. 13, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have just come back after a long, vague holiday, feeling well and keen about my work. The boys are not back yet, and I have returned to put things ready for next half. But my serene mood has received a shock this morning.

I wonder if you ever get disagreeable letters? I suppose that a schoolmaster is peculiarly liable to receive them. The sort of letter I mean is this. I come down to breakfast in good spirits; I pick up a letter and open it, and, all of a sudden, it is as if a snake slipped out and bit me. I close it and put it away, thinking I will read it later; there it lies close by my plate, and takes away the taste of food, and blots the sunshine. I take it upstairs, saying that it will want consideration. I finish my other letters, and then I take it out again. Out comes the snake again with a warning hiss; but I resist temptation this time, read it through, and sit staring out of the window. A disagreeable letter from a disagreeable man, containing anxious information, of a kind that I cannot really test. What is the best way to deal with it? I know by experience; answer it at once, as dispassionately as one can; extract from it the few grains of probable truth it holds, and keep them in mind for possible future use; then deliberately try and forget all about it. I know now by experience that the painful impression will gradually fade, and, meanwhile, one must try to interpret the whole matter rightly. What is there in one's conduct which needs the check? Is it that one grows confident and careless? Probably! But the wholesome thing to do is to deal with it at once; otherwise it means anxious and feverish hours, when one composes a long and epigrammatic answer, point by point. The letter is over-stated, gossipy, malicious; if one lets it soak into the mind, it makes one suspicious of every one, miserable, cowardly. It is useless in the first hours, when the sting is yet tingling, to remind oneself philosophically that the suggestion is exaggerated and malignant; one does not get any comfort that way. No, the only thing is to plunge into detail, to work, to read--anything to recover the tone of the mind.

It is a comfort to write to you about it, for to-day I am in the sore and disquieted condition which is just as unreal and useless as though I were treating the matter with indifference. Indifference indeed would be criminal, but morbidity is nearly as bad.

I once saw a very dramatic thing take place in church. It was in a town parish near my old home. The clergyman was a friend of mine, a wonderfully calm and tranquil person. He went up to the pulpit while a hymn was being sung. When the hymn concluded, he did not give out his text, but remained for a long time silent, so long that I thought he was feeling ill; the silence became breathless, and the attention of every one in the church became rivetted on the pulpit. Then he slowly took up a letter from the cushion, and said in a low, clear voice: "A fortnight ago I found, on entering the pulpit, a letter addressed to me in an unknown hand; I took it out and read it afterwards; it was anonymous, and its contents were scandalous. Last Sunday I found another, which I burnt unread. To-day there is another, which I do not intend to read"--he tore the letter across as he said the words, in the sight of the congregation--"and I give notice that, if any further communications of the kind reach me, I shall put the matter into the hands of the police. I am willing to receive, if necessary, verbal communications on such subjects, though I do not think that any good purpose can be served by them. But to make vague and libellous accusations against members of the congregation in this way is cowardly, dishonourable, and un-Christian. I have a strong suspicion"--he looked steadily down the church--"of the quarter from which these letters emanate; and I solemnly warn the writer that, if I have to take action in the matter, I shall take measures to make that action effective."

I never saw a thing better done; it was said without apparent excitement or agitation; he presently gave out his text and preached as usual. It seemed to me a supremely admirable way of dealing with the situation. Need I add that he was practical enough to take the pieces of the letter away with him?

I once received an anonymous letter, not about myself, but about a friend. I took it to a celebrated lawyer, and we discovered the right way to deal with it. I remember that, when we had finished, he took up the letter--a really vile document--and said musingly: "I have often wondered what the pleasure of sending such things consists in! I always fancy the sender taking out his watch, and saying, with malicious glee, 'I suppose so-and-so will be receiving my letter about now!' It must be a perverted sense of power, I think."

I said, "Yes, and don't you think that there is also something of the pleasure of saying 'Bo' to a goose?" The great man smiled, and said, "Perhaps."

Well, I must try to forget, but I don't know anything that so takes the courage and the cheerfulness out of one's mind as one of these secret, dastardly things. My letter this morning was not anonymous; but it was nearly as bad, because it was impossible to use or to rely upon the information; and it was, moreover, profoundly disquieting.

Tell me what you think! I suppose it is good for one to know how weak one's armour is and how vulnerable is one's feeble self.--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
Sept. 20, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have been reading lately, not for the first time, but with increased interest, the Memoir of Mark Pattison. It was, you will remember, dictated by himself towards the end of his life, and published after his death with a few omissions. It was not favourably received, and was called cowardly, cynical, bitter, a "cry in the dark," treacherous, and so forth. It is very difficult not to be influenced by current opinion in one's view of a book; one comes to it prepared to find certain characteristics, and it is difficult to detach one's mind sufficiently to approach a much-reviewed volume with perfect frankness. But I have read the book several times, and my admiration for it increases. It does not reveal a generous or particularly attractive character, and there are certain episodes in it which are undoubtedly painful. But it is essentially a just, courageous, and candid book. He is very hard on other people, and deals hard knocks. He shows very clearly that he was deficient in tolerance and sympathy, but he is quite as severe on himself. What I value in the book is its absolute sincerity. He does not attempt to draw an ideal picture of his own life and character at the expense of other people. One sees him develop from the shy, gauche, immature boy into the mature, secluded, crabbed, ungracious student. If he had adopted a pose he might have sketched his own life in beautiful subdued colours; he might have made himself out as misrepresented and misunderstood. He does none of these things. He shows clearly that the disasters of his life were quite as much due to his own temperamental mistakes as to the machinations of others. He has no illusions about himself, and he does not desire that his readers should have any. The sadness of the book comes from his failure, or rather his constitutional inability, to see other people whole. After all, our appreciations for other people are of the nature of a sum. There is a certain amount of addition and subtraction to be done; the point is whether the sum total is to the credit of the person concerned. But with Mark Pattison the process of subtraction was more congenial than the process of addition. He saw and felt the weakness of those who surrounded him so keenly that he did not do justice to their good qualities. This comes out very clearly when he deals with Newman and Pusey. Pattison was a member for a time of the Tractarian set, but he must have been always at heart a Liberal and a Rationalist, and the spell which Newman temporarily cast over him appeared to him in after life to have been a kind of ugly hypnotism, to which he had limply submitted. Certainly the diary which he quotes concerning his own part in the Tractarian movement, the conversations to which he listened, the morbid frame of mind to which he succumbed are deplorable reading. Indeed the reminiscences of Newman's conversation in particular, the pedantry, the hankering after miracles, the narrowness of view, are an extraordinary testimony to the charm with which Newman must have invested all he did or said. Pattison is even more severe on Pusey, and charges him with having betrayed a secret which he had confided to him in confession. It does not seem to occur to Pattison to consider whether he did not himself mention the fact, whatever it was, to some other friend.

On the other hand the book reveals an extraordinary intellectual ideal. It holds up a standard for the student which is profoundly impressive; and I know no other book which displays in a more single-minded and sincere way the passionate desire of the savant for wide, deep, and perfect knowledge, which is to be untainted by any admixture of personal ambition. Indeed, Pattison speaks of literary ambition as being for the student not an amiable weakness, but a defiling and polluting sin.

Of course it is natural to feel that there is a certain selfish aridity about such a point of view. The results of Mark Pattison's devotion are hardly commensurate with his earnestness. He worked on a system which hardly permitted him to put the results at the disposal of others; but there is at the same time something which is both dignified and stately in the idea of the lonely, laborious life, without hope and without reward, sustained only by the pursuit of an impossible perfection.

It is not, however, as if this was all that Mark Pattison did. He was a great intellectual factor at Oxford, especially in early days; in later days he was a venerable and splendid monument. But as tutor of his college, before his great disappointment--his failure to be elected to the Rectorship--he evidently lived a highly practical and useful life. There is something disarming about the naive way in which he records that he became aware that he was the possessor of a certain magnetic influence to which gradually every one in the place, including the old Rector himself, submitted.

The story of his failure to be elected Rector is deeply pathetic. Pattison reveals with terrible realism the dingy and sordid intrigues which put an unworthy man in the place which he himself had earned. But it may be doubted whether there was so much malignity about the whole matter as he thought; and, at all events, it may be said that men do not commonly make enemies without reason. It does not seem to occur to him to question whether his own conduct and his own remarks may not have led to the unhappy situation; and indeed, if he spoke of his colleagues in his lifetime with the same acrimony with which his posthumous book speaks of them, the mystery is adequately explained.

His depression and collapse, which he so mercilessly chronicles, after the disaster, do not appear to me to be cowardly. He was an over-worked, over-strained man, with a strong vein of morbidity in his constitution; and to have the great prize of a headship, which was the goal of his dearest hopes, put suddenly and evidently quite unexpectedly in his hands, and then in so unforeseen a manner torn away, must have been a terrible and unmanning catastrophe. What is ungenerous is that he did not more tenderly realise that eventually it all turned out for the best. He recognises the fact somewhat grudgingly. Yet he was disengaged by the shock from professional life. He gained bodily strength and vigour by the change; he began his work of research; and then, just at the time when his ideal was consolidated, the Rectorship came to him--when it might have seemed that by his conduct he had forfeited all hopes of it.

In another respect the book is admirable. Mark Pattison attained high and deserved literary distinction; but there is no hint of complacency on this subject, rather, indeed, the reverse; for he confesses that success had upon him no effect but to humiliate him by the consideration that the completed work might have been so much better both in conception and execution than it actually was.

I feel, on closing the book, a great admiration for the man, mingled with infinite pity for the miseries which his own temperament inflicted on him; it gives me, too, a high intellectual stimulus; it makes me realise the nobility and the beauty of knowledge, the greatness of the intellectual life. One may regret that in Pattison's case this was not mingled with more practical power, more sympathy, more desire to help rather than to pursue. But here, again, one cannot have everything, and the life presents a fine protest against materialism, against the desire of recognition, against illiberal and retrograde views of thought. Here was a great and lonely figure haunted by a dream which few of those about him could understand, and with which hardly any could sympathise. He writes pathetically: "I am fairly entitled to say that, since the year 1851, I have lived wholly for study. There can be no vanity in making this confession, for, strange to say, in a university ostensibly endowed for the cultivation of science and letters, such a life is hardly regarded as a creditable one."

The practical effect of such a book on me is to make me realise the high virtue of thoroughness. It is not wholly encouraging, because at a place like this one must do a good deal of one's work sloppily and sketchily; but it makes me ashamed of my sketchiness; I make good resolutions to get up my subjects better, and, even if I know that I shall relapse, something will have been gained. But that is a side-issue. The true gain is to have been confronted with a real man, to have looked into the depth of his spirit, to realise differences of temperament, to be initiated into a high and noble ambition. And at the same time, alas! to learn by his failures to value tact and sympathy and generosity still more; and to learn that noble purpose is ineffective if it is secluded; to try resolutely to see the strong points of other workers, rather than their feeblenesses; and to end by feeling that we have all of us abundant need to forgive and to be forgiven--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
Sept. 26, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I am much exercised in my mind about school sermons. It seems to me that we ought to make more of them than we do. We have our sermons here, very wisely, I think, at the evening service. The boys are more alert, the preacher is presumably in a more genial mood, the chapel is warm and brightly lighted, the music has had a comforting and stimulating effect upon the mind; it is exactly the time when the boys are ready and disposed to be interested in themselves, their lives and characters; they are hopeful, serious, ardent. The iron is hot, and it is just the moment to strike.

Well, it seems to me that the opportunity is often missed. In the first place, all the clerical members of the staff are asked to preach in turn--"given a mount," as the boys say. The headmaster preaches once a month, and a certain number of outside preachers, old Uptonians, local clergy, and others are imported.

Now the first point that strikes me is that to suppose that every clergyman is ipso facto capable of preaching at all is a great mistake. I suppose that every thoughtful Christian must have enough materials for a few sermons; there must be some aspects of truth that come home to every individual in a striking manner, some lessons of character which he has learnt. But he need not necessarily have the art of expressing himself in a penetrating and incisive way. It seems to me a mistaken sort of conscientiousness which makes it necessary for every preacher to compose his own sermons. I do not see why the sermons of great preachers should not frankly be read; one hears a dull sermon by a tired man on a subject of which Newman has treated with exquisite lucidity and feeling in one of his parochial sermons. Why is it better to hear tedious considerations on the same point expressed in a commonplace way than to listen to the words of a master of the art, and one too who saw, like Newman, very deep into the human heart? I would have a man frankly say at the beginning of his sermon that he had been thinking about a particular point, and that he was going to read one of Newman's sermons on the subject. Then, if any passage was obscure or compressed, he might explain it a little.

Again, I want more homeliness, more simplicity, more directness in sermons; and so few people seem to be aware that these qualities of expression are not only the result of being a homely, simple, and direct character, but are a matter of long practice and careful art.

Then, again, I want sermons to be more shrewd and incisive. Holiness, saintliness, and piety are virtues which are foreign to the character of boys. If any proof of it is needed, it is only too true that if a boy applies any of the three adjectives holy, saintly, or pious to a person, it is not intended to be a compliment. The words in their mouths imply sanctimonious pretension, and a certain Pharisaical and even hypocritical scrupulousness. It is a great mistake to overlook this fact; I do not mean that a preacher should not attempt to praise these virtues, but if he does, he ought to be able to translate his thoughts into language which will approve itself to boys; he ought to be able to make it clear that such qualities are not inconsistent with manliness, humour, and kindliness. A school preacher ought to be able to indulge a vein of gentle satire; he ought to be able to make boys ashamed of their absurd conventionalism; he ought to give the impression that because he is a Christian he is none the less a man of the world in the right sense. He ought not to uphold what, for want of a better word, I will call a feminine religion, a religion of sainted choir-boys and exemplary death-beds. A boy does not want to be gentle, meek, and mild, and I fear I cannot say that it is to be desired that he should. But if a man is shrewd and even humorous first, he can lift his audience into purer and higher regions afterwards; and he will then be listened to, because his hearers will feel that the qualities they most admire--strength, keenness, good humour--need not be left behind at the threshold of the Christian life, but may be used and practised in the higher regions.

Then, too, I think that there is a sad want of variety. How rarely does one hear a biographical sermon; and yet biography is one of the things to which almost all boys will listen spellbound. I wish that a preacher would sometimes just tell the story of some gallant Christian life, showing the boys that they too may live such lives if they have the will. Preachers dwell far too much on the side of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation. Those, it seems to me, are much more mature ideals. I wish that they would dwell more upon the enjoyment, the interest, the amusement of being good in a vigorous way.

What has roused these thoughts in me are two sermons I have lately heard here. On Sunday week a great preacher came here, and spoke with extraordinary force and sense upon the benefits to be derived from making the most of chapel services. I never heard the thing better done. He gave the simplest motives for doing it. He said that we all believed in goodness in our hearts, and that a service, if we came to it in the right way, was a means of hammering goodness in. That it was a good thing that chapel services were compulsory, because if they were optional, a great many boys would stay away out of pure laziness, and lose much good thereby. And as they were compulsory, we had better make the most we could of them. He went on to speak of attention, of posture, and so forth. There are a certain number of big boys here, who have an offensive habit of putting their heads down upon their arms on the book-board during a sermon, and courting sleep. The preacher made a pause at this point, and said that it was, of course, true that an attitude of extreme devotion did not always mean a corresponding seriousness of mind. There was a faint ripple of mirth at this, and then, one by one, the boys who were engaged in attempting to sleep raised themselves slowly up in a sheepish manner, trying to look as if they were only altering their position naturally. It was intensely ludicrous; but so good for the offenders! And then the preacher rose into a higher vein, and said how the thought of the school chapel would come back to the boys in distant days; that the careless would wish in vain that they had found the peace of Christ there, and that those who had worshipped in spirit and truth would be thankful that it had been so. And then he drew a little picture of a manly, pure, and kind ideal of a boy's life in words that made all hearts go out to him. Boys are heedless creatures; but I am sure that many of them, for a day or two at all events, tried to live a better life in the spirit of that strong and simple message.

Well, yesterday we had a man of a very different sort; earnest enough and high-minded, I am sure, but he seemed to have forgotten, if he had ever known, what a boy's heart and mind were like. The sermon was devoted to imploring boys to take Orders, and he drew a dismal picture of the sacrifices the step entailed, and depicted, in a singularly unattractive vein, the life of a city curate. Now the only way to make the thought of such a life appeal to boys is to indicate the bravery, the interest of it all, the certainty that you are helping human beings, the enjoyment which always attaches to human relationship.

The result was, I confess, extremely depressing. He made a fervent appeal at the end; "The call," he said, "comes to you now and to-day." I watched from my stall with, I am sorry to say, immense amusement, the proceedings of a great, burly, red-faced boy, a prominent football player, and a very decent sort of fellow. He had fallen asleep early in the discourse; and at this urgent invitation, he opened one eye and cast it upon the preacher with a serene and contented air. Finding that the call did not appear to him to be particularly imperative, he slowly closed it again, and, with a good-tempered sigh, addressed himself once more to repose. I laughed secretly, hoping the preacher did not observe his hearer.

But, seriously, it seemed to me a lamentable waste of opportunities. The Sunday evening service is the one time in the week when there is a chance of putting religion before the boys in a beautiful light. Most of them desire to be good, I think; their half-formed wishes, their faltering hopes, their feeble desires, ought to be tenderly met, and lifted, and encouraged. At times, too, a stern morality ought to be preached and enforced; wilful transgression ought to be held up in a terrible light. I do not really mind how it is done, but the heart ought somehow to be stirred and awakened. There is room for denunciation and there is room for encouragement. Best of all is a due admixture of both; if sin can be shown in its true colours, if the darkness, the horror, the misery of the vicious life can be displayed, and the spirit then pointed to the true and right path, the most is done that can be done.

But we grow so miserably stereotyped and mannerised. My cautious colleagues are dreadfully afraid of anything which they call revivalistic, and, indeed, of anything which is unconventional. I should like to see the Sunday sermon made one of the most stirring events of the week, as Arnold made it at Rugby. I should like preachers to be selected with the utmost care, and told beforehand what they were to preach about. No instruction is wanted in a school chapel--the boys get plenty of that in their Divinity lessons. What is wanted is that the heart should be touched, and that faint strivings after purity and goodness should be enforced and helped. To give the spirit wings, that ought to be the object. But so often we have to listen to a conscientious discourse, in which the preacher, after saying that the scene in which the narrative is laid is too well known to need description, proceeds to paint an ugly picture out of The Land and the Book or Farrar's Life of Christ. The story is then tediously related, and we end by a few ethical considerations, taken out of the footnotes of the Cambridge Bible for Schools or Homiletical Hints, which make even the most ardent Christian feel that after all the pursuit of perfection is a very dreary business.

But a brave, wise-hearted, and simple man, speaking from the heart to the heart, not as one who has attained to a standard of impossible perfection, but as an elder pilgrim, a little older, a little stronger, a little farther on the way--what cannot such an one do to set feeble feet on the path, and turn souls to the light? Boys are often pathetically anxious to be good; but they are creatures of impulse, and what they need is to feel that goodness is interesting, beautiful, and desirable. . . . Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
Oct. 5, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--It is autumn now with us, the sweetest season of the year to a polar bear like myself. Of course, Spring is ravishingly, enchantingly beautiful, but she brings a languor with her, and there are the hot months to be lived through, treading close on her heels. But now the summer is over and done; the long firelit evenings are coming, and, as if to console one for the loss of summer beauty, the whole world blazes out into a rich funeral pomp. I walked to-day with a friend to a place not far away, a great, moated house in a big, ancient park. We left the town, held on through the wretched gradations of suburbanity, and then, a few hundred yards from the business-like, treeless high-road, the coverts came in sight. There is always a dim mystery about a close-set wood showing its front across the fields. It always seems to me like a silent battalion guarding some secret thing. We left the high-road and soon were in the wood--the dripping woodways, all strewn with ruinous gold, opening to right and left; and soon the roofs and towers of the big house--Puginesque Gothic, I must tell you--came in sight. But those early builders of the romantic revival, though they loved stucco and shallow niches, had somehow a sense of mass. It pleases me to know that the great Sir Walter himself had a hand in the building of this very house, planned the barbican and the water-gate. All round the house lies a broad moat of black water, full of innumerable carp. The place was breathlessly still; only the sharp melancholy cries of water-birds and the distant booming of guns broke the silence. The water was all sprinkled with golden leaves, that made a close carpet round the sluices; the high elms were powdered with gold; the chestnuts showed a rustier red. A silent gardener, raking leaves with ancient leisureliness, was the only sign of life--he might have been a spirit for all the sound he made; while the big house blinked across the rich clumps of Michaelmas daisies, and the dark windows showed a flicker of fire darting upon the walls. Everything seemed mournful, yet contented, dying serenely and tranquilly, with a great and noble dignity. I wish I could put into words the sweet solemnity, the satisfying gravity of the scene; it was like the sight of a beautiful aged face that testifies to an inner spirit which has learnt patience, tenderness, and trustfulness from experience, and is making ready, without fear or anxiety, for the last voyage.

I say gratefully that this is one of the benefits of growing older, that these beautiful things seem to speak more and more instantly to the mind. Perhaps the faculty of eager enjoyment is somewhat blunted; but the appeal, the sweetness, the pathos, the mystery of the world, as life goes on, fall far oftener and with far more of a magical spell upon the heart.

We walked for a while by a bridge, where the stream out of the moat ran hoarsely, choked with drift, in its narrow walls. That melancholy and sobbing sound seemed only to bring out more forcibly the utter silence of the tall trees and the sky above them; light wreaths of mist lay over the moat, and we could see far across the rough pasture, with a few scattered oaks of immemorial age standing bluff and gnarled among the grass. The time of fresh spring showers, of sailing clouds, of basking summer heat, was over--so said the grey, gentle sky--what was left but to let the sap run backward to its secret home, to rest, to die? With such sober and stately acquiescence would I await the end, not grudgingly, not impatiently, but in a kind of solemn glory, with gratitude and love and trust.

My companion of that day was Vane, one of my colleagues, and we had discussed a dozen of the small interests and problems that make up our busy life at this restless place; but a silence fell upon us now. The curtain of life was for a moment drawn aside, the hangings that wrap us round, and we looked for an instant into the vast and starlit silences, the formless, ancient dark, where a thousand years are but as yesterday, and into which the countless generations of men have marched, one after another. That is a solemn, but hardly a despairing thought; for something is being wrought out in the silence, something of which we may not be conscious, but which is surely there. Could we but lay that cool and mighty thought closer to our spirits! That impenetrable mystery ought to give us courage, to let us rest, as it were, within a mighty arm. Behind and beyond the precisest creed that great mystery lies; the bewildering question as to how it is possible for our own atomic life to be so sharply defined and bounded from the life of the world--why the frail tabernacle in which we move should be thus intensely our own, and all outside it apart from us.

Yet in days like this calm autumn day one seems to draw a little closer to the mystery, to take a nearer share in the great and wide inheritance, to be less of ourselves and more of God.--Ever yours,

T. B.

MONK'S ORCHARD,
UPTON,
Oct. 12, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have nothing but local gossip to tell you. We have been having a series of Committee meetings lately about our Chapel services; I am a member of the Committee, and as so often happens when one is brought into close contact with one's colleagues upon a definite question, I find myself lost in bewilderment at the views which are held and advanced by sensible and virtuous men. I don't say that I am necessarily right, and that those who disagree with me are wrong; I daresay that some of my fellow-members think me a tiresome and wrong-headed man. But in one point I believe I am right; in things of this kind, the only policy seems to me to try to arrive at some broad principle, to know what you are driving at; and then, having arrived at it, to try and work it out in detail. Now two or three of my friends seem to me to begin at the wrong end; to have got firmly into their heads certain details, and to fight with all their power to get these details accepted, without attempting to try and develop a principle at all. For instance, Roberts, one of the members of the Committee, is only anxious for what he calls the maintenance of liturgical tradition; he says that there is a science of liturgy, and that it is of the utmost importance to keep in touch with it. The sort of detail that he presses is that at certain seasons the same hymn ought to be sung on Sunday morning and every morning throughout the week, because of the mediaeval system of octaves. He calls this knocking the same nail on the head, and, as is common enough, he is led to confuse a metaphor with an argument. Again, he is very anxious to have the Litany twice a week, that the boys may be trained, as he calls it, in the habit of continuous prayerful attention. Another member, Randall, is very anxious that the services should be what he calls instructive; that courses, for instance, of sermons should be preached on certain books of the Old Testament, on the Pauline Epistles, and so forth. He is also very much set on having dogmatic and doctrinal sermons, because dogma and doctrine are the bone and sinew of religion. Another man, old Pigott, says that the whole theory of worship is praise, and he is very anxious to avoid all subjective and individual religion.

I find myself in hopeless disagreement with these three worthy men; my own theory of school services is, to put it shortly, that they should FEED THE SOUL, and draw it gently to the mysteries of Love and Faith. The whole point is, I believe, to rouse and sustain a pure and generous emotion. Most boys have in various degrees a religious sense. That is to say, that they have moments when they are conscious of the Fatherhood of God, of redemption from sin, of the indwelling of a Holy Spirit. They have moments when they see all that they might be and are not--moments when they would rather be pure than impure, unselfish rather than self-absorbed, kind rather than unkind, brave rather than cowardly; moments when they perceive, however dimly, that happiness lies in activity and kindliness, and when they would give much never to have stained their conscience with evil. It seems to me that school services ought to aim at developing these faint and faltering dreams, at increasing the sense of the beauty and peace of holiness, at giving them some strong and joyful thought that will send them back to the world of life resolved to try again, to be better and worthier.