Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
Your obedient servant,
_Sept. 6, 1910._ GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL.
II
HARROW
Not to River nor Royal Keep,
Low Meads nor level Close,
Up to the sturdy wind-worn steep,
_Levavi oculos_;
To four red walls on a skyward climb,
Towering over the fields and Time.
E. MILNER-WHITE.
When Dr. Vaughan re-created Harrow School, after its long decadence
under Longley and Wordsworth, he wished that the number should never
exceed five hundred. Of late years the school has been greatly enlarged,
but in my time we were always just about the number which, in Vaughan's
judgment, was the largest that a Head-master could properly supervise.
That number is embalmed in Edward Howson's touching song:--
"Five hundred faces, and all so strange!
Life in front of me, Home behind--
I felt like a waif before the wind,
Tossed on an ocean of shock and change."
Some of those faces I shall presently describe; but, in reviewing my
life at Harrow, my first tribute must be paid to my Head-master--for
forty-five years the kindest, most generous, and most faithful of
friends. Henry Montagu Butler, youngest son of Dr. George Butler, Dean
of Peterborough and sometime Head-master of Harrow, was born in 1833,
and educated at Harrow. He was Head of the School, made the cock-score
in the Eton match at Lords, was Scholar and Fellow of Trinity, and
Senior Classic in 1855. He was elected to the Head-mastership of Harrow,
in succession to Dr. Vaughan, when he was only a few months over 26, and
entered on his reign in January, 1860. It is not easy to describe what a
graceful and brilliant creature he seemed to my boyish eyes, when I
first saw him in 1867, nor how unlike what one had imagined a
Head-master to be. He was then just thirty-four and looked much younger
than he was. Gracefulness is the idea which I specially connect with
him. He was graceful in shape, gesture, and carriage; graceful in
manners and ways, graceful in scholarship, graceful in writing,
pre-eminently graceful in speech. It was his custom from time to time,
if any peculiar enormity displayed itself in the school, to call us all
together in the Speech-Room, and give us what we called a "Pi-jaw." One
of these discourses I remember as well as if I had heard it yesterday.
It was directed against Lying, as not only un-Christian but
ungentlemanlike. As he stood on the dais, one hand grasping his gown
behind his back and the other marking his points, I felt that, perhaps
for the first time, I was listening to pure and unstudied eloquence,
suffused with just as much scorn against base wrongdoing as makes speech
pungent without making it abusive. It should be recorded to Butler's
credit that he was thoroughly feared. A Head-master who is not feared
should be at once dismissed from his post. And, besides being feared, he
was profoundly detested by bad boys. The worse the boy's moral
character, the more he hated Butler. But boys who were, in any sense or
degree, on the right side; who were striving, however imperfectly, after
what is pure and lovely and of good report, felt instinctively that
Butler was their friend. His preaching in the School Chapel (though
perhaps a little impeded by certain mannerisms) was direct, interesting,
and uplifting in no common degree. Many of his sermons made a lifelong
impression on me. His written English was always beautifully pellucid,
and often adorned by some memorable anecdote or quotation, or by some
telling phrase. But once, when, owing to a broken arm, he could not
write his sermons, but preached to us extempore three Sundays in
succession, he fairly fascinated us. As we rose in the School and came
into close contact with him, we found ever more and more to admire. It
would be impertinent for me to praise the attainments of a Senior
Classic, but no one could fail to see that Butler's scholarship was
unusually graceful and literary. Indeed, he was literary through and
through. All fine literature appealed to him with compelling force, and
he was peculiarly fond of English oratory. Chatham, Burke, Canning,
Sheil, and Bright are some of the great orators to whom he introduced
us, and he was never so happy as when he could quote them to illustrate
some fine passage in Cicero or Demosthenes. One other introduction which
I owe to him I must by no means forget--Lord Beaconsfield's novels. I
had read _Lothair_ when it came out, but I was then too inexperienced to
discern the deep truths which underlie its glittering satire. Butler
introduced me to _Sybil_, and thereby opened up to me a new world of
interest and amusement. When Butler entertained boys at breakfast or
dinner, he was a most delightful host, and threw off all magisterial
awfulness as easily as his gown. His conversation was full of fun and
sprightliness, and he could talk "Cricket-shop," ancient and modern,
like Lillywhite or R. H. Lyttelton. In time of illness or failure or
conscience-stricken remorse, he showed an Arthur-like simplicity of
religion which no one could ignore or gainsay.
Next to Dr. Butler, in my list of Harrow masters, must be placed Farrar,
afterwards Dean of Canterbury, to whom I owed more in the way of
intellectual stimulus and encouragement than to any other teacher. I
had, I believe, by nature, some sense of beauty; and Farrar stimulated
and encouraged this sense to the top of its bent. Himself inspired by
Ruskin, he taught us to admire rich colours and graceful
forms--illuminated missals, and Fra Angelico's blue angels on gold
grounds--and to see the exquisite beauty of common things, such as
sunsets, and spring grass, and autumn leaves; the waters of a shoaling
sea, and the transparent amber of a mountain stream. In literature his
range was extremely wide. Nothing worth reading seemed to have escaped
him, and he loved poetry as much as Butler loved oratory. When he
preached in Chapel his gorgeous rhetoric, as yet not overwrought or
over-coloured, held us spellbound; and though, or perhaps because, he
was inclined to spoil the boys who responded to his appeals, and to rate
them higher than they deserved, we loved and admired him as, I should
think, few schoolmasters have been loved and admired.
When I speak of masters who were also friends, I should be ungrateful
indeed if I omitted Arthur George Watson, in whose House I was placed as
soon as the doctors were satisfied that the experiment could be tried
without undue risks. Mr. Watson was a Fellow of All Souls, and was in
all respects what we should have expected a member of that Society
(elected the same day as the late Lord Salisbury) to be. It was said of
C. P. Golightly at Oxford that, when he was asked his opinion of Dr.
Hawkins, Provost of Oriel, he replied: "Well, if I were forced to choose
the epithet which should be least descriptive of the dear Provost, I
should choose _gushing_." Exactly the same might be said of Mr. Watson;
but he was the most high-minded and conscientious of men, a thorough
gentleman, inflexibly just, and a perfect House-Master. The days which
I spent under his roof must always be reckoned among the happiest of my
life.
Among masters who were also friends I must assign a high place to the
Rev. William Done Bushell, who vainly endeavoured to teach me
mathematics, but found me more at home in the sphere (which he also
loved) of Ecclesiology. And not even the most thoughtless or
ill-conditioned boy who was at Harrow between 1854 and 1882 could ever
forget the Rev. John Smith, who, through a life-time overshadowed by
impending calamity, was an Apostle to boys, if ever there was one, and
the Guardian Angel of youthful innocence. Dr. Vaughan, no lover of
exaggerated phrases, called him, in a memorial sermon, "the Christ of
Harrow;" and there must be many a man now living who, as he looks back,
feels that he owed the salvation of his soul to that Christ-like
character.
During my first two years at Harrow, Dr. Westcott, afterwards Bishop of
Durham, was one of the masters, and it has always been a matter of deep
regret to me that I had no opportunity of getting to know him. He was
hardly visible in the common life of the School. He lived remote, aloof,
apart, alone. It must be presumed that the boys who boarded in his
House knew something of him, but with the School in general he never
came in contact. His special work was to supervise the composition,
English and classical, of the Sixth Form, and on this task he lavished
all his minute and scrupulous scholarship, all his genuine enthusiasm
for literary beauty. But, until we were in the Sixth, we saw Westcott
only on public occasions, and one of these occasions was the calling
over of names on half-holidays, styled at Eton "Absence," and at Harrow
"Bill." To see Westcott performing this function made one, even in those
puerile days, feel that the beautifully delicate instrument was
eminently unfitted for the rough work of mere routine on which it was
employed. We had sense enough to know that Westcott was a man of
learning and distinction altogether outside the beaten track of
schoolmasters' accomplishments; and that he had performed achievements
in scholarship and divinity which great men recognized as great.
"Calling Bill" was an occupation well enough suited for his
colleagues--for Huggins or Buggins or Brown or Green--but it was
actually pathetic to see this frail embodiment of culture and piety
contending with the clamour and tumult of five hundred obstreperous
boys.
It was not only as a great scholar that we revered Westcott. We knew,
by that mysterious process by which school-boys get to know something of
the real, as distinct from the official, characters of their masters,
that he was a saint. There were strange stories in the School about his
ascetic way of living. We were told that he wrote his sermons on his
knees. We heard that he never went into local society, and that he read
no newspaper except _The Guardian_. Thus when Liddon, at the height of
his fame as the author of the great Bampton Lectures, came to Harrow to
preach on Founder's Day, it was reported that Westcott would not dine
with the Head-master to meet him. He could not spare three hours from
prayer and study; but he came in for an hour's conversation after
dinner.
All that we saw and heard in Chapel confirmed what we were told. We saw
the bowed form, the clasped hands, the rapt gaze, as of a man who in
worship was really _solus cum Solo_, and not, as the manner of some of
his colleagues was, sleeping the sleep of the just, or watching for the
devotional delinquencies of the Human Boy. His sermons were rare events;
but some of us looked forward to them as to something quite out of the
common groove. There were none of the accessories which generally
attract boyish admiration--no rhetoric, no purple patches, no
declamation, no pretence of spontaneity. His anxious forehead crowned a
puny body, and his voice was so faint as to be almost inaudible. The
language was totally unadorned; the sentences were closely packed with
meaning; and the meaning was not always easy. But the charm lay in
distinction, aloofness from common ways of thinking and speaking, a wide
outlook on events and movements in the Church, and a fiery enthusiasm
all the more telling because sedulously restrained. I remember as if I
heard it yesterday a reference in December, 1869, to "that august
assemblage which gathers to-morrow under the dome of St. Peter's," and I
remember feeling pretty sure at the moment that there was no other
schoolmaster in England who would preach to his boys about the Vatican
Council. But by far the most momentous of Westcott's sermons at Harrow