Studies in Contemporary Biography. Viscount James Bryce Bryce
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historical tolerance—the sin of intolerance. So there was one sin only which ever led him to speak severely of any of his contemporaries—the sin of untruthfulness. Being himself so simple and straightforward as to feel his inability to cope with deceitful men, deceit incensed him. But he did not resent the violence of his adversaries, for though he suffered much at their hands he knew many of them to be earnest, unselfish, and conscientious men.
His pictures of historical scenes are admirable, for with his interest in the study of 74 character there went a large measure of dramatic power. Nothing can be better in its way than the description of the murder of St. Thomas of Canterbury given in the Memorials of Canterbury, which, after Sinai and Palestine and the Life of Arnold, may be deemed the best of Stanley’s books. Whether he could, with more leisure for careful thought and study, have become a great historian, was a question which those of us who were dazzled by his Public Lectures at Oxford used often to discuss. The leisure never came, for he was throughout life warmly interested in every current ecclesiastical question, and ready to bear a part in discussing it, either in the press—for he wrote in the Edinburgh Review, and often sent letters to the Times under the signature of “Anglicanus”—or in Convocation, where he had a seat during the latter part of his career. These interruptions not only checked the progress of his studies, but gave to his compositions an air of haste, which made them seem to want system and finish. The habit of rapid writing for magazines or other ephemeral purposes is alleged to tell injuriously upon literary men: it told the more upon Stanley because he was also compelled to produce sermons rapidly. Now sermon-writing, while it breeds a tendency to the making of rhetorical points, subordinates the habit of dispassionate inquiry to the 75 enforcement of a moral lesson. Stanley, who had a touch of the rhetorical temperament, and was always eager to improve an occasion, certainly suffered in this way. When he brings out a general truth he is not content with it as a truth, but seeks to turn it also to edification, or to make it illustrate and support some view for which he is contending at the time. When he is simply describing, he describes rather as a dramatic artist working for effect than as a historian solely anxious to represent men and events as they were. Yet if we consider how much a historian gains, not only from an intimate knowledge of his own time, but also, and even more largely, from playing an active part in the events of his own time, from swaying opinion by his writings and his speeches, from sitting in assemblies and organising schemes of attack and defence, we may hesitate to wish that Stanley’s time had been more exclusively given to quiet investigation. The freshness of his historical portraits is notably due to the sense he carried about with him of moving in history and being a part of it. He never mounted his pulpit in the Abbey or walked into the Jerusalem Chamber when Convocation was sitting without feeling that he was about to do something which might possibly be recorded in the annals of his country. I remember his mentioning, to illustrate undergraduate ignorance, that once when he was 76 going to give a lecture to his class, he suddenly recollected that Mr. Goldwin Smith, then Regius Professor of Modern History, was announced to deliver a public lecture at the same hour. Telling the class that they would be better employed in hearing Mr. Goldwin Smith than himself, he led them all there. The next time the class met, one of them, after making some acute comments on the lecture, asked who the lecturer was. “I was amazed,” said Stanley, “that an intelligent man should ask such a question, and then it occurred to me that probably he did not know who I was either.” There was nothing of personal vanity or self-importance in this. All the men of mark among whom he moved were to him historical personages, and he would describe to his friends some doing or saying of a contemporary statesman or ecclesiastic with the same eagerness, the same sense of its being a fact to be noted and remembered, as the rest of us feel about a personal anecdote relating to Oliver Cromwell or Cardinal Richelieu.
His sermons, like nearly all good sermons, will be inadequately appreciated by those who now peruse them, not only because they were composed for a given audience with special reference to the circumstances of the time, but also because the best of them gained so much by his impassioned delivery. They were all read from manuscript, and his handwriting was so illegible that it was a marvel 77 how he contrived to read them. I once asked him, not long after he had been promoted to the Deanery of Westminster, whether he found it easy to make himself heard in the enormous nave of the Abbey church. His frame, it ought to be stated, was spare as well as small, and his voice not powerful. He answered: “That depends on whether I am interested in what I am saying. If the sermon is on something which interests me deeply I can fill the nave; otherwise I cannot.” When he had got a worthy theme, or one which stimulated his own emotions, the power of his voice and manner was wonderful. His tiny body seemed to swell, his chest vibrated as he launched forth glowing words. The farewell sermon he delivered when quitting Oxford for Westminster lives in the memory of those who heard it as a performance of extraordinary power, the power springing from the intensity of his own feeling. No sermon has ever since so moved the University.
He was by nature shy and almost timid, and he was not supposed to possess any gift for extempore speaking. But when in his later days he found himself an almost solitary champion in Convocation of the principles of universal toleration and comprehension which he held, he developed a debating power which surprised himself as well as his friends. It was to him a matter of honour and conscience to defend his principles, and to defend 78 them all the more zealously because he stood alone on their behalf in a hostile assembly. His courage was equal to the occasion, and his faculties responded to the call his courage made.
In civil politics he was all his life a Liberal, belonging by birth to the Whig aristocracy, and disposed on most matters to take rather the Whiggish than the Radical view, yet drawn by the warmth of his sympathy towards the working classes, and popular with them. One of his chief pleasures was to lead parties of humble visitors round the Abbey on public holidays. Like most members of the Whig families, he had no great liking for Mr. Gladstone, not so much, perhaps, on political grounds as because he distrusted the High Churchism and anti-Erastianism of the Liberal leader. However, he never took any active part in general politics, reserving his strength for those ecclesiastical questions which seemed to lie within his peculiar province.[17] Here he had two leading ideas: one, that the Church of England must at all hazards continue to be an Established Church, in alliance with, or subjection to, the State (for his Erastianism was unqualified), and recognising the Crown as her head; the other, that she must be a comprehensive 79 Church, finding room in her bosom for every sort or description of Christian, however much or little he believed of the dogmas contained in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Prayer-Book, to which she is bound by statute. The former view cut him off from the Nonconformists and the Radicals; the latter exposed him to the fire not only of those who, like the High Churchmen and the Evangelicals, attach the utmost importance to these dogmas, but of those also among the laity who hold that a man ought under no circumstances to sign any test or use any form of prayer which does not express his own convictions. Stanley would, of course, have greatly preferred that the laws which regulate the Church of England should be so relaxed as to require little or no assent to any doctrinal propositions from her ministers. He strove for this; and he continued to hope that this might be ultimately won. But he conceived that in the meantime it was a less evil that men should be technically bound by subscriptions they objected to than that the National Church should be narrowed by the exclusion of those whose belief fell short of her dogmatic standards. It was remarkable that not only did he maintain this unpopular view of his with unshaken courage on every occasion, pleading the cause of every supposed heretic against hostile majorities with a complete forgetfulness of his own peace and ease, but that no 80 one ever thought of attributing the course he took to any selfish or sinister motive. It was generally believed that his own opinions were what nine-tenths of the Church of England would call unorthodox. But the honesty and uprightness of his character were so patent that nobody supposed that this fact made any difference, or that it was for the sake of keeping his own place that he fought the cause of others.
What his theological opinions were it might have puzzled Stanley himself to explain. His mind was not fitted to grasp abstract propositions. His historical imagination and his early associations attached him to the doctrines of the Nicene Creed; but when he came to talk of Christianity, he laid so much more stress on its ethics than on its dogmatic side that his clerical antagonists thought he held no creed at all. Dr. Pusey once said that he and Stanley did not worship the same God. The point of difference