Читать книгу A Bundle of Memories - Henry Scott Holland - Страница 9

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Can it be that the memory and reputation of James Mozley are passing away? Is he really forgotten and unread? Yet he was a man who, according to Mr. Gladstone’s enthusiastic verdict, combined the clear form of Cardinal Newman with the profundity of Bishop Butler. Pretty strong, that! And some may remark the solemn passages at the close of Dean Church’s book on the Oxford Movement, in which he tells how, amid the panic that followed Newman’s conversion to Rome, one man rose to his full strength under the blow, and headed the rally, and stemmed the flight. That man was James Mozley. Church, evidently, felt that there was no one to whom he looked more confidently in the black hour. With him, and with Frederick Rogers, he felt that the Cause was not lost, but that, now, for the first time he, and these two, went behind their old fighting ground, and dug their way down to a deeper foundation. They saw the peril of pitting the Roman Ideal against the mixed, concrete confusions of Anglicanism. They, now, went behind the Roman Ideal. They read all History in its concrete reality: and they learned how intricate was the confusion that beclouded every case, Rome’s as much as Canterbury’s. The man who would read History as it is, must be prepared for a heavy strain on his Faith. Nobody who appeals to History can ride off on a cocksure hobby-horse. You must be able to get down behind the confusion. You must touch deeper things. So alone will you stand. And as Church set himself to his own task on the historical field, he felt that he had in James Mozley the one dauntless champion who could bring a strong philosophy into play, adequate for the work set them, and sufficient to bear the strain of life. Newman’s departure “left wrecks on every shore,” as Mr. Gladstone used to be fond of saying: and, especially, it broke those who had been his intimates. But here was one as intimate as any, within the inner circle of friends, knit by relationship to Newman’s family: and he, far from breaking, rose again the stronger man: and found his full power.

A curious incident made me aware of Mozley’s greatness earlier than I should, otherwise, have learned news of it. For while Mozley was buried in the vicarage of Shoreham, unknown to the younger University, some of us undergraduates at Balliol who were worshipping at the shrine of T. H. Green, noticed, with amazement and awe, that our guide, philosopher and friend would go off on a very rare visit to St. Mary’s whenever a certain clergyman of the name of Mozley was preaching a ’Varsity Sermon. Drawn by this strange spectacle, we thought that we would go too, and see why it was that Green made this unwonted effort. We found a nearly empty church: and a very odd old gentleman, blinking rather helplessly through his glasses, reading his MS. monotonously with a very thin voice, blowing his nose in the middle of a sentence, stopping to sniff at unexpected moments, and performing generally every feat that a preacher ought not to perform if he expects to be heard. Still, we noticed that the group of Dons, who had joined Green in making up the scanty congregation, represented the talent of Oxford, and were of those who knew. So we listened on in faith. And thus it was that I happened to hear most of those brilliant and masterly Sermons which make up his first volume.

When, at last, he reappeared at Oxford, as Regius Professor of Divinity, we, younger Dons, were all ready to sit at his feet. We knew, now, all about the early Littlemore days with Newman; and we had read not only his University Sermons, but, also, those fascinating Essays which represented the fruitage of the days when he was editing the chief Tractarian Review, and doing an immense deal of the literary warfare by which the Movement had won its way. And there were the Bamptons, too, which Mill and Huxley had felt to be a criticism that must be recognized. We venerated, therefore. We knew that we had a seer among us. He was a man to whom you could take problems that asked for a philosophic answer. Liddon happily described the process of consulting the oracle which he himself adopted. He used, whenever he had a problem on his mind, to take Mozley a walk, and, at the opening, after the weather had been dealt with, he would insert the problem in at the slot, as it were. He would, then, wait in silence while certain contortions went on, and, at last, by a violent motion, Mozley would thrust his stick into the hedge. Liddon would then inquire the result: and would obtain his problem exactly reversed. That meant that the process was only half completed. So he passed on in silence, till there came another thrust of the stick into the hedge, and, on inquiry, he obtained his proper answer. He, then, proceeded to insert another problem, with the like happy result.

Now, this was all very well for Liddon: but what about the unhappy Undergraduates? They were compelled, if they were going to take Orders, to attend his lectures. They had no tradition, by which to discount the oddities of speech. He blinked: he sniffed: he blew his nose. They had no notion that they were in the presence of a Master. They read their novels. They were hopeless. How was this dreadful wastage to be arrested? Could not we induce him to lecture to us, and then we might convey to those poor innocents his milk out of our bottles? So we schemed. And we asked him to dine with us. And he was immensely pleased. And, after dinner, in full flutter of success, we propounded our plan. He professed to accept it with enthusiasm: but always in the form of our reading papers, while he sat in the Chair. In vain, we pleaded over and over again, “No! You will read the paper. We will do the questions and talk.” “Exactly,” he still repeated. “Capital. Three meetings a term: and I will take the Chair: and you will read the paper.” So he smiled: and blinked: and beamed. Finally, we screwed out the desperate compromise that, at two of the three meetings, we should read papers to him: if at the third he would read a paper to us. So it happened. And our scheming produced those papers of our own, by which we bought, as with our blood, the final reward.

Still, in old buried notebooks in my cupboards, I have a suspicion that two or three of these efforts of my own could be found. And if anyone, after my death, drops on them, and cries aloud, “What rot is this?”: he should be told, “Yes; pure rot! But it was the price paid for Mozley’s book on Old Testament Morality.” For that volume was the result of the papers that we forced the dear old man to produce. It is a volume exceedingly characteristic: full of strong positions that can never be forgotten: full of impossible and paradoxical positions which, nevertheless, are supported by strangely stimulating work.

He was very cordial to the advances of the younger men. Once, when we wanted Liddon to do something that we knew he would not like, we asked Mozley to approach him deftly. He was delighted at undertaking the character of the arch-diplomatist: and took Liddon out for a walk. On our keen inquiries as to how he had fared, he only blinked, and said: “Well! you know; there are subjects at which Liddon, you know, shies! Yes! Liddon shies! Shies like a horse! Yes! Just like a horse!” We knew well what the illuminative picture meant. Liddon’s quick eyes had detected, at once, from afar, the object of this cautious and diplomatic approach: and had absolutely refused to be drawn anywhere near it. “He shies--shies like a horse!” That catches the very gleam that we knew so well in Liddon’s eyes, as his nose scented danger.

Dr. Mozley used to ask us to dinner, in his kindly way, and would lead us up in the general direction of four nice interesting nieces, daughters of Observer Johnson at whose house Newman had spent his last days of farewell to Oxford, who lay crouching like fawns in the window. “My niece,” he would say. “My niece, Amy. You will take her down to dinner.” And so he would leave us anxiously smiling towards the white mass of calico fluff, until some one portion of it would detach itself from the rest, and assure us that it was the specified Amy.

He was stricken down, some time before his death, and was afflicted with a certain aphasia. But his mind was evidently hard at work, behind the hindrance. He could not recall the name, one day, of a certain great Finance Minister. So he called him. He rejected all suggestions. Gladstone? No! No! Goschen? No! Great Finance Reformer! Was it something about Egypt made those round him try “Disraeli” and the Suez Canal shares? Oh no! Not at all. Great Land Reformer! Who was it? A niece, by inspiration, said “Joseph.” Exactly! That was it. Joseph! So, in the freshness of his intelligence, he was vivifying the old biblical problems.

There are, perhaps, three stages of interest in his writings. First, the Essays written during the heat of the fierce fight for the Movement. These are young: somewhat audacious, but exceedingly brilliant. They are rare good reading, even though the judgments given bear the mark of being written for a living Cause, and would sound a bit one-sided, read in cold blood. There is the famous one on Laud and Strafford, one of the first attempts to present the Policy of “Thorough” in the light which commended it to its author. Mozley makes one feel the keen passion of Strafford for good Government, for Law and Order: and his readiness to use any instrument of power, and especially the Crown, just to get a country well governed, and corruption and rottenness and obstruction swept out of the way. Then, there is the naughty one on Dr. Arnold, who had this one irritating fault--that he was too optimistic: too happy with this world. It was positively “juicy.” He was like a dog whose tail was always wagging. It was in contrast to Dr. Arnold that he drew his splendid picture of that other type of character, of which Hurrell Froude had been for him the fascinating embodiment.

“Arnold, gushing with the richness of domestic life, the darling of nature, and overflowing receptacle and enjoyer, with strong healthy gusto, of all her endearments and sweets--Arnold, the representative of high, joyous Lutheranism, is describable--Mr. Froude hardly. His intercourse with earth and nature seemed to cut through them, like uncongenial steel, rather than mix and mingle with them. Yet the polished blade smiled as it went through. The grace and spirit with which he adorned this outward world, and seemed to an undiscerning eye to love it, were but something analogous in him to the easy tone of men in high life, whose good-nature to inferiors is the result either of their disinterested benevolence or sublime unconcern. In him the severe sweetness of the life divine not so much rejected as disarmed those potent glows and attractions of the life natural; a high good temper civilly evaded and disowned them. The monk by nature, the born aristocrat of the Christian sphere, passed them clean by with inimitable ease; marked his line and shot clear beyond them, into the serene ether, toward the far-off light, toward that needle’s point on which ten thousand angels and all heaven move.”

Mozley wrote a very fine palinode long afterwards: in the form of a beautiful sermon on Arnold’s real influence. Again, in his rather truculent review of Carlyle, there is the comparison of Cromwell’s speeches to the pink folds of a hippopotamus’s mouth, into which, if you place a pebble, it disappears, and then emerges for a moment, only to disappear again, as the vast arrangement of jaws and gums rolls it up and down and over and over. So it was with the real intention with which the great Protector spoke. The speech rolled and shook in helpless involutions, amid which a wary eye could just now and again detect what it was at which he was driving.

Then, in mid-life, following this literary period, came his stronger and more deliberate work. There was his very serious and rather heavy book on Baptism, which had the effect of severing him, a little, from his old companions, the typical Tractarian leaders. He rode off on a tack of his own: and showed himself to be an independent thinker. After this came the Bampton Lectures on the Miracles, in which he took up the average sceptical position of the Experientialists of the day, and, with extraordinary acuteness, exhibited its weakness and its lack of logical authority. It was a serious attempt to explode John Stuart Mill’s prevailing ascendancy from within. It is a remarkable instance of Mozley’s power to stimulate and charm, even when you are least of all in agreement with his case.

Then, in his later years, as Professor, he put together the great volume of University Sermons, followed by another volume of general Sermons, in which he showed himself to be one of the masters of his generation, whose power of thought and of expression were surpassed by very few. He is not, indeed, to be credited with a Philosophy. He had not an organized system of thought to which the high name could be applied. But he brought to bear upon the deep problems of life the remarkable intellectual energy to which he was singularly ready to give himself away. He would allow it perfectly free and frank play: and would let it carry him whither it would, in the true Socratic spirit. This is why he often takes perilous directions and discharges himself down very doubtful tracts: he is prepared to try any road that reason suggests. His thought works like a hound after a lost scent, picking up any cue that might help, making brave experiments, knocking round until it hits the right road. His quick intellectual courage makes him, often, just as good reading when he is right as when he is wrong. He is always sincere: suggestive: unhampered: illuminative: and bold.

Let us take a sample of his finest work. Here is the opening of the famous Sermon on Nature:--

“Nature has two great revelations,--that of use and that of beauty; and the first thing we observe about these two characteristics of her is, that they are bound together, and tied to each other. It would not be true, indeed, to say that use was universally accompanied by beauty; still, upon that immense scale upon which nature is beautiful, she is beautiful by the selfsame material and laws by which she is useful. The beauty of nature is not, as it were, a fortunate accident, which can be separated from her use; there is no difference in the tenure upon which these two characteristics stand; the beauty is just as much a part of nature as the use; they are only different aspects of the selfsame facts. Take a gorgeous sunset; what is the substance of it? only a combination of atmospheric laws and laws of light and heat; the same laws by which we are enabled to live, see, and breathe. But the solid means of life constitute also a rich sight; the usefulness on one side is on the other beauty. It is not that the mechanism is painted over, in order to disguise the deformity of machinery, but the machinery is itself the painting; the useful laws compose the spectacle. All the colours of the landscape, the tints of spring and autumn, the hues of twilight and the dawn--all that might seem the superfluities of Nature, are only her most necessary operations under another view; her ornament is but another aspect of her work; and in the very act of labouring as a machine, she also sleeps as a picture” (“University and Other Sermons,” pp. 138, 139).

That last sentence used to haunt us, like a refrain. We murmured it to ourselves when out on a walk: we repeated it in our sermons. “Nature, in the act of labouring at her work, sleeps as a picture.” Let anyone read the Sermon on the Reversal of Human Judgment: or on our Duty to Equals: and they will understand why Mr. Gladstone spoke of the temper of Butler combined with the form of Newman. Still, for quotation, we may perhaps find most reward from out of the earlier writings. There is, for instance, the historic passage, from the book on Newman’s Theory of Development, which every English Churchman, troubled by antinomies, ought to wear as a charm next his skin. It contrasts the Roman claim for logic with the Anglican confession of opposites. And finds, in the first, the note of all Heresies.

“Be logical, said the Sabellian: God is one, and therefore cannot be three. Be logical, said the Manichean: evil is not derived from God, and therefore must be an original substance independent of Him. Be logical, said the Gnostic: an infinite Deity cannot really assume a finite body. Be logical, said the Novatian: there is only one baptism for the remission of sins; there is therefore no remission for sin after baptism. Be logical, to come to later times, said the Calvinist: God predestinates, and therefore man has not free will. Be logical, said the Anabaptist: the Gospel bids us to communicate our goods, and therefore does not sanction property in them. Be logical, says the Quaker: the Gospel enjoins meekness, and therefore forbids war. Be logical, says every sect and school: you admit our premises; you do not admit our conclusions. You are inconsistent. You go a certain way, and then arbitrarily stop. You admit a truth, but do not push it to its legitimate consequences. You are superficial; you want depth. Thus on every kind of question in religion has human logic from the first imposed imperially its own conclusions; and encountered equally imperial counter ones. The truth is that human reason is liable to error; and to make logic infallible we must have an infallible logician.”

“To the intellectual imagination of the great heresiarchs of the early ages, the doctrine of our Lord’s nature took boldly some one line, and developed continuously and straight-forwardly some one idea; it demanded unity and consistency. The creed of the Church, steering between extremes and uniting opposites, was a timid artificial creation, a work of diplomacy. In a sense they were right. The explanatory creed of the Church was a diplomatic work; it was diplomatic because it was faithful. With a shrewdness and nicety like that of some ablest and most sustained course of statecraft and cabinet policy, it went on adhering to a complex original idea, and balancing one tendency in it by another. One heresiarch after another would have infused boldness into it; they appealed to one element and another in it, which they wanted to be developed indefinitely. The creed kept its middle course, rigidly combining opposites; and a mixed and balanced erection of dogmatic language arose. One can conceive the view which a great heretical mind, like that of Nestorius, e.g., would take of such a course; the keen, bitter, and almost lofty contempt which,--with his logical view of our Lord inevitably deduced and clearly drawn out in his own mind,--he would cast upon that creed which obstinately shrank from the call, and seemed to prefer inconsistency, and refuse to carry out truth” (“The Theory of Development,” pp. 43, 44).

And, to close this slight remembrance of this most remarkable man, let us recall the noble close to the article on Blanco White, in which he contrasts the tone of the man who enjoys the search for Truth, with the tone of him whom Truth seeks out and finds.

“Not as the function of his own activities, the triumph of his own penetration, the offspring of his mind, not in the subterranean regions, where Nature’s fallen machinery and emulous exertion is at work, and the begrimed intellect labours in its own smoke and exults in its difficulties, does the disciple of Christ search for truth. He searches and he penetrates, but not in this way. Truth penetrates into him, rather than he into Truth; Truth finds him out, and not he It. He looks out for Its approach, waits for It, prepares himself for Its reception. He knows the signs of Its approach, and can tell Its features through the distance; he is alive to the slightest stir of the air, to a whisper, to a breath. But he looks on It all the while as something without himself, as something to advance and act upon him. The tender wax expects its impress, the air its motion. Upon all his activities sits an awful passiveness, and the mind adores with pure devotion an Object above itself. From the invisible realm above us a Form comes, too vast for our eyes’ comprehension, majestically slow the heavenly clouded weight descends, and bears an impress with it. The soul awaits in stillness the awful contact and embrace; and while, with meekest pliableness and unresisting faith and trust, she commits herself to it, she fears it too.... Change is awful; Truth changes us. It is not a mere discovery, and then over and done with, a goal reached, a prize won; but a power that reacts and operates upon ourselves. It is a new visitant that we are introduced to; we know it not at first; we get to know it after we have become acquainted with it.... This is an awful aspect which Christian Truth has, and which mere intellectual truth has not. Let those who make it a dead thing and a philosophical reflection deal with it lightly.... He who really deifies Truth cannot. He sees in it no plaything, no invention, no curiosity of science, no mineral from the mine, but a living, Omnipotent and Heavenly Form. All nature sobers at Its faintest step; the very skirt of Its robe turns all things cold; the distant hills look iron; the horizon hardens, and repels the gaze; nature is treacherous, her colour fades; this blue concave is but a sepulchre; ‘the earth mourneth and languisheth, the world languisheth and fadeth away, all the merry-hearted do sigh, the mirth of tabrets ceaseth, the noise of them that rejoice endeth, the joy of the harp ceaseth.’ The mighty form of Truth that the heavens just dimly disclose is spectral to our earthly eye, and a veil must be pierced through before we get within Its genial home and sanctuary. Sad and sepulchral in Its omnipotence, weak helpless nature fears Truth while she invokes It; and as the mountain moves, and the overshadowing form bends over, and the arch of heaven closes in upon the human soul, she breathes, not without a touch of mortal tremor, her mute prayer: Oh! Image Omnipotent, Eternal Pattern, fain would I love while I secretly dread Thee.... Come down upon me, and be my living Mould. Yet not without some tender condescension, some mercy and unutterable love, impress Thy awful stamp upon my poor and trembling being. I am weak, and Thou art mighty; I am small, and Thou art Infinite. Crush me not by Thy force, Thy magnitude divine, but come in gentleness, in pity. For Thou art ‘kind to man, steadfast, sure, free from care, having all power, overseeing all things, and going through all pure spirits--holy, one, only, manifold, subtle, lively, clear, undefiled. Thou being but one canst do all things, and remaining in Thyself, makest all things new; and in all ages Thou enterest into holy souls, and makest them friends of God.’ Thou hast appeared upon earth, and man has seen Thee in visible form; and we know that Thou art the Way, the Truth, and the Life; the Door and the Shepherd; Thy sheep hear Thy Voice, and Thou gently leadest them, and carriest them in Thine arms. Thou didst suffer for them; and now, being made higher than the heavens, intercedest for them; an High Priest that art touched with the feeling of our infirmities, Jesus Christ our Lord” (“Essays Historical and Theological,” Vol. II, pp. 146-8).

That is young: redundant: audacious. Yes! But it reveals the exuberant capacities that were controlled and disciplined into the fine workmanship of the Sermons. And it was a joy to us, young things, in those days, to recognize how daring and excessive this dear old gentleman in the mild spectacles had been, before he became wholly wise. And it will be my comfort, in old age, if I have at all succeeded, through these brilliant passages, in persuading some men of a younger generation to turn again and recapture the rich heritage that is theirs in the fine and enkindling work of James Mozley.