Читать книгу A Bundle of Memories - Henry Scott Holland - Страница 12

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It was difficult, in later years, to persuade people to believe the memories of the frolic and the fun that were associated, in my mind, with the name of Francis Paget in the early ’eighties. They looked at the sad strained eyes, at the set face, they felt alarmed at the careful and deliberate reserve of his manner: they were aware of a certain over-wrought anxiety, of an austerity of discipline, that gave a melancholy touch of depression to the tone of his voice. Here was a stricken man who took life seriously and even hardly. That was plain. And how could they accept my report that never had I laughed so long and so freely as I had laughed with him in the first days of our friendship, as I found him the leader of the little band of scholars reading for Greats, when I went to Christ Church as a student in 1870? Yet for me the memory is always of evenings that were one continuous carousal, in which we never stopped laughing. He was in the full swing of that undergraduate time when words are the toys that we play with. The delight is to exercise all the swiftness of wits released from restraint in making fun out of everything: in turning everything topsy-turvy: in tossing words about like balls: in evoking and provoking the unexpected. A young Don, free as yet of all responsibilities, and fresh from the schools, is only an undergraduate writ large: and this rollicking logomachy was entirely to my mind. I enjoyed myself to my heart’s bent with this young group. And there was no limit to Frank Paget’s capacity of keeping up the game. He was charged with intellectual electricity. He had the wit that revels in surprises. He could let himself go. He was nimble, alert, spontaneous, with an infinite felicity of epigrammatic speech. He loved the play of happy companionship. He was a master in the art of personal chaff. And all was so clean, and delicate, and fastidious, and good-tempered. There was never a shadow upon our joy in being together. We had only to meet, and the merry business began at once.

And this joy of comradeship was carried on, with ever-deepening satisfaction, into endless reading parties, in spring and summer. Hidden away, with a half-dozen, or even a dozen, undergraduates, in some delicious retreat, far from madding crowds, perhaps on the coast of Brittany, or in a recess of the Vosges Hills, or in a green Alp hollow of the Oberland, or in a Devon combe, or by Dartmouth Harbour, or, again and again, amid the heather and the deep brown pools of North Wales, we spent the days that hold in them the promise and the fragrance of some earthly paradise. We always went together, and we lived in “the glory of flannels and shooting-jackets,” climbing, bathing, reading--and always laughing. Life was all unbuttoned. We knew that we were doing our duty; for did we not read, and read hard? And, yet, it was all a joke: a holiday: a freak: from end to end. There were no invading cares. There were no duties. There were no conventions. There were no social stupidities: there were no obligations to fulfil. We were complete in ourselves: we owed nothing to anybody: we were a band of friends who were sufficient for each other: and we wanted nothing more. Round us the loveliness of some selected fairy spot ringed us in. The hills waited upon us: the rivers ran for us: the great sea laughed as we plunged into its green Cornish waters. Nature was on our side: and we were one with it.

These were the magic hours, that fed our lips with honey-dew. To me they will be always the symbol and the expression of all that can make this earth the joyous home of health, and beauty, and friendship. And into them all came his dear presence: and in them all I hear still the sound of his gaiety and the play of his wit. And, through them all, our intimacy deepened, and the powers of the world beyond began to work, with fuller force, upon the lives that were now together committed to the ministry of the Spirit, and the service of Christ. Out of such days of companionship as these life receives its imperishable endowments, of which no after years, with their harsher obligations and uneasy troubles, can ever rob us.

After the ecstasy of the Reading Party, Paget would come on to the more sober felicities of what we ironically named “the Holy Party.” It was simply the habit of a gang of us young Donlets to occupy some small country parish for a month, do the duty, read, discuss, say our offices and keep our hours together. Talbot, Gore, Illingworth, Richmond, Arthur Lyttelton, J. H. Maude, Robert Moberly, would be there--with Lock, or Cheyne, now and again. We would work, and play, and talk over the possibilities of an Anglican Oratorian Community: and be exceedingly happy. We would think whether anybody could be found to meet Dr. King’s demand and write a new “Summa Theologia.” Who would do it? Perhaps Swallow, the learned Cuddesdon Chaplain? “No,” said Paget, “not quite! It is not every Swallow that can make a Summa!”

Or we would devise an Office to be said in term by weary hard-run tutors. “Yes,” said Paget, “and the antiphon would be ‘She tired her head.’ ”

So, in successive years, the friendship rooted itself in the deeper ground. Only once did some friction begin to appear. Frank Paget more and more surrendered himself to the pessimistic influence of Liddon. He revelled in Liddon’s brilliant aggressions on the new situation. We others, who were struggling to make the best of it, were told that we were but fruitlessly engaged in “combing the hair of a corpse.” So Paget drew away a little from us. He became the special lieutenant of Pusey and Liddon. “Who is this reactionary young man, who writes such excellent Latin?” asked Mark Pattison after Paget had made the Latin speech to the Bodleian Curators. He was chosen to read from St. Mary’s pulpit a sermon of Dr. Pusey’s, which the dear old man’s throat forbade him to attempt. A task to recoil from, Paget thought, and pictured to Liddon the disgust of the University as they looked for a mountain in labour, and only a ridiculous mouse appeared. “On the contrary, dear friend,” said Liddon to cheer him, “they will see a mouse go up into the pulpit, and there be delivered of a very fine mountain.” “Painful for the mouse, you will allow,” pleaded Paget. “Painful, no doubt,” rejoined Liddon, “but glorious.”

At this time Paget was stiffening up a little: the academic crust was creeping over him. Oxford was playing its evil part. When, just in the nick of time, came a tremendous convulsion. He married: and accepted the Cure of Bromsgrove. Three brimming years of intense delight in the new experience of a Parish Priest did their work, and when he came back to Christ Church as Pastoral Professor he was a changed man. The crust was broken. He was free, human, elastic, sympathetic again. The warm friendship of a man like Yorke Powell was an index of how he had won back the confidence of the Common Room.

I cannot speak about the marriage. It was one of those marriages which are revelations of the excellence which waits to be unsealed in our human nature. It gave one a new standard of what the communion of two lives might mean. He had a very deep and diffident reserve, which would have always held him back from his true liberty, if it had not been unlocked and released through the mediation of this unqualified intimacy of soul with soul. It meant everything in the world to him, more especially as the responsibilities and the conventions of public life made it more and more difficult for him to commit himself. His fastidious and tentative diffidence made him politely distrustful of others, in the rougher intercourse of affairs. He could only open out to a few: and he held himself in hand with a tight discipline, which took the outward form of an elaborate courtesy such as served to keep people back behind barriers of civility. It took them long to discover how profoundly sincere he was. Thus he built walls round himself. Only, within, there was ever and always the infinite peace of being absolutely understood in that delicious security of touch which only a perfect marriage can bring into play. So he lived, through his Professorship and Deanery, while six children were born to him. How he drew the divided elements of the House together, and how he broke for ever its old stupid tradition of rowdiness and swagger, is known to all who were inside the secret of that time, and recognized his admirable leadership.

Only, I have said enough to make it clear why, when the blow fell in his last year at the Deanery, and his wife was taken from him, he became the man who, in later years, carried with him, wherever he went, the look of one stricken by some woe that had no remedy. He took up his Bishopric in the following year. He was scrupulously devoted to his work. He laboured with a pertinacity and a thoroughness that were a perpetual reproach to us who dallied through our business with a lighter heart. He spent himself in endless trouble and pain. He had an iron strength of body, and could work far beyond our normal measure. He was quite unflinching in his determination to do everything himself, and to write his own letters, and plod through the grinding details. But he worked as bound by a rigid conscience to his task. “Are there not twelve hours to the day?” He was set his job: and he would see it through. But he looked for no joy any more here. His eyes: his heart--these were elsewhere. The world had nothing in it by which to hold him. I never knew anyone in whom natural ambition was more obviously dead. It had been killed. He had no more of that instinct which comes from the desire to exercise gifts of which you are conscious. It had ceased to be even a temptation. And this was the more remarkable because he had inherited or acquired from his great father, Sir James Paget, an almost inordinate respect for the honour and dignity of established things. They wore for him a special significance. He saw in them the evidence of high worth. This had been his natural scale of valuation. But, though in some degree he retained the scale, the things themselves had totally ceased to affect him. His blood made no more response to their appeals than that of a corpse. He was, in this sense, actually “dead to the world.” In this spirit, he went steadily through with the burden laid upon him. He treated himself hardly. He made his work so predominate over everything, that it hardly allowed for the free play of emotion. Grimly, he set himself to discharge his obligations, until the night, the blessed night, should come to give release.

In the meantime he told more and more on his colleagues, through his power of judgment, and his singular felicity of speech. He made a great impression on the Ritual Commission. He was offered Winchester, but would not go. And every year he became more and more the chosen counsellor and intimate friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

So he toiled at his oar, in the place set him, with pathetic joylessness. This might have been the mood which never yielded, before the end, so desired, should arrive. But something happened, and it broke. A year before the end he underwent a severe operation. It was critical: it was only just in time: he was very near to death: but he pulled through. And, after six months he returned to the Diocese, to find a warmth of welcome from every side, which was to him a surprise and a revelation. It showed that he had won the heart of the Diocese in a way that he had not dreamed of. He himself found a joy in taking up work again, from the very rebound of this joy which greeted his home-coming. The glowing recognition gave him confidence and light. He went through his last year with a springing step, taking his work lightly and gaily, unencumbered and assured. He gave himself more liberty: and was more open in response. In spite of the cloud thrown over it by the death of his second daughter, who had been most happily married to his former chaplain and beloved friend, Campbell Crum, a certain ease and brightness were upon him such as he had not worn for years. He gave a great gathering in Christ Church Hall to his Diocese, a fortnight or so before his death, in which this glad sympathetic intercourse with his clergy and laity culminated.

He came once again to join the “old Gang” of his familiar Oxford allies at Longworth, just before the end. He had missed the annual gathering very often: and it was a peculiar delight to us all to have him back in something like his old gaiety of spirit. He was singularly well: and hopeful. He preached, in impressive simplicity, in the village church. He went off to wind up his last things before the holiday, to which he was looking forward with quite a boyish glee.

Then, the blow fell: and he was gone. He knew everything. He joined, with broken voice but concentrated energy, in the prayers of the last twenty minutes before the heart totally failed. He remembered everybody with a personal keenness. But his heart had already passed over. They spoke to him of the dead whom he would see again. “So soon!” he said. He would know more of what life meant over there: and of what he had yet left unlearned here. His dear friend, the Archbishop, had given him the Sacrament. All was fair, and right, and clear, and clean. May God’s own light and peace be his everlasting refreshment!

He had a gift of felicity in speech which at its best was quite perfect. It was inherited from his father, who was a born orator, of pure and noble style: and it is shared by his brother, the Bishop of Stepney, and by his sister, Miss Paget, one of the most gifted speakers that we have. But with him, it had all the fine polish of the trained scholar. It would appear in phrasing a resolution or a formula, as in the Ritual Commission: or in an after-dinner speech in which he was not to be excelled, unless it were by the Master of Trinity: or in those exquisite Latin inscriptions which he would write for memorials of the dead. He was a real master in the use of that epigrammatic force to which the Latin tongue so supremely lends itself. It is difficult to read without tears the delicate words set on the quiet and beautiful tablet which commemorates his wife in Christ Church Cathedral.

With remarkable swiftness of wit and word he combined a strangely slow judgment. He took very long to come to a decision: and was apt to be over-weighted by his sense of responsibility. He, who could flick and flash with rapid insight, would, on serious occasions, speak with a slowness that was almost oppressive. This was the proof of the severity with which he disciplined his natural self.

Greatly as he enjoyed country sights and country folk, with whom he made close friendships, he was a “Cockney” to his finger-tips. He was steeped in London. He was always feeling with his feet for the beloved pavements. This was part of the fun of our old Reading Parties. He might walk, climb, bathe, with the best of us: but we always knew that Piccadilly held him as its own. The country was a pleasant adventure for him: a strange land. Animals were possessed of fearsome and unaccountable possibilities. He could never make himself look as if he really belonged to horse or cow. There was London in reserve, all the time.

He was a man of intense prayerfulness: he had his eyes set on the unseen. And this had, somehow, the effect of making one feel as if, in spite of home and friends, he was a very lonely man. There was a loneliness in his self-restraint and reserve, a loneliness in the tone that had come into his voice. He had his secret to himself, behind all the lighter moods. The last year of his life brought relief and light: and he rounded off his days with a very happy memory. But, after all, he was dead and his life was hid: and now he has passed to where, in Christ, his treasure had long lain.