Life and Letters of Dean Church
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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from University of Toronto http://www.archive.org/details/lifelettersOOchur !t3' LIFE AND LETTERS OF DEAN CHURCH LIFE AND LETTEES DEAN CHURCH EDITED BY HIS DAUGHTER MARY C. CHURCH WITH A PREFACE BY THE DEAN OF CHRIST CHURCH ILontion MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1894 All rights reserved NOTICE In putting together this volume of my father's corre- spondence, it has been my aim to make it a book of letters rather than in any sense a complete biography. My father's life, from the time his boyhood ended, fell naturally into three periods, curiously near to equality in point of time. Eighteen years were passed at Oxford ; then came nineteen years at Whatley ; and these again were followed by nineteen years at St. Paul's. These divisions of time I have made use of, grouping together the series of letters belonging to each period, and prefixing to each group an intro- ductory sketch, so that the letters might stand with only such a setting of narrative as is needed to prevent obscurity in subject or allusion. Only in the Oxford period, where material was more scanty, has it seemed necessary to make the narrative rather more continuous in order that the letters which remain may be fully intelligible. It is the defect of such a method that the treat- ment of the subjects referred to in the letters is so often slight and fragmentary. As the letters follow vi DEAN CHURCH'S LIFE AND LETTERS each other with their constant and wide variation of allusion and interest, subject after subject seems to rise only to die away without receiving anything like a complete or adequate treatment. But while something: of this is doubtless due to a want of skill in editing, it is hard to see how such effect of slightness could to any great extent have been avoided without allowing the volume to grow to the dimensions of a biography, a result which would have defeated the primary object of the book. I feel that a word of explanation may be needed to account for the large number of letters written from abroad which are included in the volume, and in- particular for the series of letters written during a visit to Greece in 1847. It was only after some hesitation, and after finding that they could be included without excluding other letters of general interest, that I decided to give them. The letters of 1847 are so characteristic in themselves, and are so vivid and suggestive in the sketches they contain both of Greek scenery, and of the political state of things in Athens at the time of my father's visit, that even at the risk of a certain want of proportion in the volume, I have given them almost in their completeness. Among the many friends whose kindness in lending letters must be acknowledged, my thanks are specially due to Lady Blachford, Mrs. Asa Gray, Miss Mozley, NOTICE vii Canon Church, and Dr. Talbot. From my uncle I have also received help in matters concerning my father's family and early life abroad, while without my mother's aid it would have been impossible to put together so fully the sketch of Whatley life. I must also acknowledge Dr. Barrett's kindness in allowing me to reprint his interesting paper of recollections. I cannot conclude without expressing my gratitude to Canon Scott Holland, and to my brother-in-law, the Dean of Christ Church, for contributions to the volume, which have brought out certain aspects of my father's mind and character and influence more clearly and forcibly than they could have been con- veyed by the letters alone. MARY C. CHURCH. CONTENTS PAGE xi • • . Preface . PAKT I Early Life, Oxford, Foreign Travel . 1 PAET II • .137 Whatley • PART III • .204 St. Paul's . PEEFACE It is hoped that an attempt may, without impertin- ence, be here made to put before the reader of these letters some sketch, however slight and faint, of the mind that may be found in them. The letters, with their setting, tell the story of their writer's life : what he was, in the depth of character and personality, must be left untold. But between the outward course of a life and the inner depth, (yet interfused with both), there is that broad space in which it is the task of criticism to think out as justly as it can the dis- tinctive notes of a man's mind and work. It is this task that will be here essayed, with the hope of suggesting a few lines of observation, a few points that may be marked in the reading of the book. It must be owned that the case is one in which criticism cannot move without reverence and gratitude attend- ing it. But reverence and gratitude are not a sheer hindrance to criticism in its proper work ; and the intimacy in which they were learnt may countervail, perhaps, whatever loss of mere impartiality they may involve. ; xii DEAN CHURCH'S LIFE AND LETTERS (i) There was in the mind of the late Dean of St. Paul's an unusual combination of certain traits and habits which are generally regarded as characteristic of separate and special studies ; of scholarship, of natural science, and of history. He had the delicate sense of appropriateness, the abhorrence of all that was flaunting and slipshod, the love of neatness and finish, that gave charm and taught reserve to the scholars of his day. Nor did he ever drop the pursuits for which these scholarly gifts enabled him. He loved his classics as real friends : one volume after another in his library bears his tidy and discriminating notes, as witnesses to the width and care with which he read while the great authors who were closest to his heart. Homer, Sophocles, Lucretius, Virgil, went with him on his holidays, and bear many dates in Switzerland and Italy, with Alpine flowers between their leaves. Far on in life a tour through Northern Italy made him think he had never before done full justice to the Georgics, though still he kept for Lucretius a throne apart. He was working steadily at the Ethics when he Avas past seventy : he had Homer by him in his last illness. And thus behind that scholarly grace and insight which were felt in his essays on Dante and on Spenser, there was always the sustained interest and work of a true scholar. —He himself might have laughed if any one had treated him as a real student of natural science. But there was no PREFACE mistaking the scientific character of his mind, and it can hardly fail to be noticed in his letters. He wrote the article on the discovery of Neptune which caught Le Verrier's attention and first set the Guardian in its consistent attitude towards the achievements of natural science. His eager and painstaking interest in botany gave to his friendship with Dr. Asa Gray a peculiar intimacy and delightfulness. His prompt and frank appreciation of Mr. Darwin's great work, at a time when such appreciation was far less general than it is now, was the outcome of a mind that knew at all events what that work meant, and knew enough about it to be neither timorous nor hasty. One feels that such a mind was not likely to blunder about scientific points, nor to imagine that it understood them unless it really did so. It was at least in such sympathy with the distinctive excellences of the man of science as could hardly be attained without some share in them. —But, strong as were the scholarly and scientific elements in the mind, it was in the field of history that its largest and most characteristic and most brilliant powers came to the front. The study of human nature, in its variety, its strangeness, its com- movements into their plexity ; the analysis of broad component forces, or the tracing of them to their appraising of good many causes ; the severance and and bad in the mixed actions of famous men; the redressing of unjust judgments ; the patient observa- xiv DEAN CHURCH'S LIFE AND LETTERS tion and description of great courses of policy or action : —these were tasks to which the Dean brought his very keenest interest, on which he spent his most serious and concentrated work, in which he seemed to know no weariness. And for these tasks he had rare gifts — gifts which stood him in the same stead whether he set them to summon up and portray the scenes, the struggles, the characters of St. Anselm's day, or to tell the deeds and sufferings of that vast drama through which the Ottoman power moved to its stupendous triumph and the exhausted Empire to its doom, or to achieve what will surely last as the most adequate and justly balanced presentation of the Oxford Movement. (ii) It was probably through this diversity of gifts and studies that he gained a peculiar breadth of thought in deliberation and in judgment. He saw things largely, with an ample and appreciative survey of their conditions : that which would especially appeal to the scholar or the man of science, neither displacing nor being displaced by the dominant in- terest of the historian. And, scanning thus the richness of the view, he was apt to take with him, in judging the affairs and cases of ordinary life, a broader volume of thought, a greater multitude of considerations, than most men bear in mind.