MEMOIR OF A BROTHER.*

IT is the great interest of this memoir to show us the different operation of the very same teaching, domestic and otherwise, when affecting two brothers of very different natural temperament. Perhaps the only uniform influence which Dr. Arnold exerted over the minds of the curiously miscellaneous group of men who were educated by him was to inspire the love of reality, the detestation of all pretence. There were Liberals and there were Conservatives, —Liberals and Conservatives both in relation to politics and in relation to faith,—who came out of that school ; there were eager reformers, like the writer of the present memoir, and strong, sedate Conservatives, like the subject of it ; there were poets and thinkers, like Mr. Clough and Mr. Arnold ; preachers and scholars, like the Dean of Westminster and the late Professor Conington ; but the one common mark of all of them has been the same, a sturdy disdain for the purely conventional modes of appre- ciation and depreciation which are current in the ordinary world, a sincerity and reality which have always striven to pierce beneath the superficial appearances of life to the solid facts beneath. What Mr. Carlyle has so much striven to impress upon this age—not without a certain ostentatious parade that has overshot its own mark, and tempted half-true thinkers into a tone of sentimental devotion to the Veracities and Eternities, and the other favourite abstractions of their master—Dr. Arnold really succeeded in impres- sing on almost all the pupils who were in the least degree reached by his moral genius. Mr. Hughes tells us frankly that while the sentence of Dr. Arnold's which took most hold of himself was this, " If there is one truth short of the highest for which I would gl adly die, it is democracy without Jacobinism,"—the element in Dr. Arnold's teaching which took most hold of his elder brother, the sub- ject of this memoir, was the reverence which all Dr. Arnold's lessons, his historical lessons especially, inculcated for all true national life and the laws, traditions, and customs with which it is interwoven. In other words, while Dr. Arnold was, to the younger brother, mainly one who taught generous faith in the breadth of popular feelings, he was to the elder, one who taught the wisdom of a conservative attachment to inherited institutions. It is obvious enough that the two views, while quite admitting in their application of wide divergence, are also quite compatible, and indeed in perfect inward harmony with each other ; and though in fact they led to a very considerable divergence of view between the brothers, they could hardly have led to any real alienation while there was still that common craving for complete reality of thought, for contact with the truth stripped of all disguises, which we have said that Dr. Arnold managed to impress so power- fully on all those of his pupils who felt the characteristic fascination of his mind. And this craving there was at least as much in MT. George Hughes as in his younger brother. It is very remarkable to notice in one who was so thorough a conservative by nature, the traces of so much uneasiness under• anything that was purely conventional. What he despised even in democracy was much lees its political tendencies, than its social tendency towards an insincere flattery of the mob, its vulgar cowardice before a cry, its disposition to grovel before ignorance and bounce. From such a * Memoir of a Brother. By Thomas Hughes. London: Macmillan and Co. letter as the following, for instance, you would think, as Mr. Hughes justly says, that you were reading the life not of a staunch Conservative who resisted all the blandishments of the school of Liberalism brought closest to him, and put his finger on its weakest points with the most perfect accuracy, but rather that of the Social Radicals themselves :— " I always fool uncomfortable in point-device places, where the foot- man is always brushing your hat, and will insist upon putting out your clothes, and turning your socks ready to put on, and, if you say half a word, will even put them on for you. How I hate being ' valeted l' I should liko to black my own boots, like Mr. —, but then he is (or was) a master of foxhounds, and, being of course on that account a king of men, can do as he pleases, in spite of Mrs. Grundy. I am also a gypsey (is that rightly spelt ? That word, and some others, are stumbling-blocks to me ; I am afraid all my spelling is an affair of memory), a Bohemian at heart. I sometimes feel an almost irresistible desire to doff my breeches and paint myself blue."

And again, which of us could have written on the Emperor's foolish despatch to the Empress about little Louis having passed through his baptism of fire, with bitterer scorn than these verses show ?—

" By 1 baby Bunting, Daddy's gone a hunting, Bath of human blood to win, To float his baby Bunting in.

By, baby Bunting.

"What means this hunting?

Listen ! baby Bunting- Wounds—that you may sleep at ease, Death—that you may reign in peace. • Sweet baby Bunting.

" Ye; baby Bunting!

Jolly fun is hunting!

Jacques in front shall bleed and toil, You in safety gorge the spoil.

Sweet baby Bunting.

" Mount ! baby Bunting, Ride to Daddy's hunting !

On its quiet cocky horse, Two miles in. the rear, of course.

Precious baby Bunting.

"Ah, baby Bunting !

Oftentimes a hunting,

Eag,er riders get a spill—

Let us hope your Daddy will.

Poor little Bunting !

" Perpend, my small friend, After all this hunting,

When the train at last moves on,

Daddy's gingerbread salon'

May get a shunting.

" Poor baby Bunting !

Curse on such a hunting !

Woe to him who bloods a child For ambitious visions wild.

Poor baby Bunting !"

And once more, what is more like the Radical feeling about the re- cent war than Mr. George Hughes's confession that "he would have gone to war with the French to stop the war," and that'. he would have gone to war with the Germans to stop the peace "? Clearly Mr. George Hughes's craving after the real meaning of social and political issues kept him from being the creature of merely technical or conventional views; and though he may have found it very easy to believe that institutions which had come down to us from the past have a value in them beyond what we can explain, and very difficult to believe that brand-new schemes of social or political regeneration could be sound, he was always one who could neither disguise from himself the faults and anomalies of the former, nor the excuses and justifications of the latter. No part of Mr. Hughes's manly memoir is to us more interesting than his account of his failure to obtain his brother's co-operation in the Christian Socialist movement, as the Co-operative movement was at first called, when, under the commanding influence of Mr. Maurice, it first attempted to make its way against the competitive political economy of the day :— " But what really hindered my brother from taking an active share in our work was not these eccentricities, which soon wore off, and were, at the worst, superficial. When he came to look the work fairly in the face, he found that he could not heartily sympathise with it ; and the quality of thoroughness in him, which your grandfather notices, would not let him join half-heartedly. His conclusion was reached somehow in this way: 'It comes to this, then. What you are all aiming at is, the complete overthrow of the present.Trade system, and the substitution of what, you say, will prove a more honest and righteous one. It is not simply a question of setting up, and getting a legal status for, these half-dozen associations of tailors and shoemakers, and these grocery stores. If the principle is good for anything, it must spread everywhere, and into every industrial process. It can't live peaceably aide by side with the present system. They are absolutely antagonistic, and the one must cast out the other. Isn't that so ? ' I, of course,. could not deny the conclusion. 'Well them' his• argument went on, I don't. see my way clearly enough to go on. Your principle I can't object to. It certainly seems truer, and stronger, and more in accord with Christianity, than the other. But, after all, the business of the world has always gone on upon the other, and the world has had plenty of time to get to understand its own business. You may say the results are not satis- factory, are proofs that the world has done nothing but blunder. It may be so : but, after all, experience must count for something, and the practical wear and tear of centuries. Self-interest may be a low motive, but the system founded upon it has managed somehow, with all its faults, to produce a very tolerable kind of world. When yours comes to be tried practically, just as great abuses may be found inseparable from it. You may only get back the old evils under new forms. The long and short of it is, I hate upsetting things, which seems to be your main object. You say that you like to see people discontented with society as it is, and are ready to help to make them so, because it is full of injustice, and abuses of all kinds, and will never be better till men are thoroughly discontented. I don't soo these evils as strongly as you do ; don't believe in heroic remedies ; and would sooner see people con- tented, and making the best of society as they find it. In fact, I was born and bred a Tory, and can't help it.' I remember it all very vividly, because it was a great grief to me at the time, chiefly because I was very anxious to have him with us; but, partly. because I had-made so sure of getting him that I boasted of it to our Council. which included several of our old school and college friends. They were delighted, know- ing what a valuable recruit he would prove, and now I had to make the humiliating confession, that I had reckoned without my host. He con- tinued to pay his subscription, and to get his clothes at our tailors' association till it failed, which was more than some of our number did, for the cut was so bad as to put the sternest principles to a severe test. But I could see that this was done out of kindness to me, and not from sympathy •with what we were doing."

There was at least as much of the true Arnoldian craving for a real bottom to all practical reforms, in Mr. George Hughes's reasons for not identifying himself with the Christian Socialist movement, as there was in Mr. Thomas Hughes's reasons for throwing his whole soul into it. And it is not the least charm of this fascinating little memoir that throughout it you see the reserved, cautious, con- siderate, self-contained chivalry of a truly conservative mind, in the most striking contrast with the frank, eager, impulsive, sociable chivalry of a thoroughly sanguine mind. Mr. Hughes, with his usual literary keenness and his usual unhesitating candour, con- trasts his and his brother's tempers as children, in a passage which is of curious interest, if we accept the old and, within limits, obviously true principle that the child is father to the man :

"But there was another natural difference between us which deserves a few words, as it will bring out his character more clearly to you ; and that was, that he was remarkably quiet and reserved, and shy with strangers, and I tho reverse. When we came down to dessert, after a dinner party, and had to stand by our father's side (as the custom was then in our parts), and say to each guest in turn, 'Your good health, sir, or madam,' while we sipped a little sweet wine and water, the ceremony was a torture to him ; while to me it was quite indifferent, and I was only running my eye over the dishes, and thinking which I should choose when it came to my turn. In looking over his earliest letters, I find in one, written to his mother a few weeks after we first went to school, this passage : ' We are both very well and happy. I find that I like Tom better at school than I do at home, and yet I do not know the reason.' I was surprised for a moment when I came on this sentence. Of course, if love is genuine, the longer people know each other, the deeper it becomes ; and therefore our friendship, like all others, grew richer and deeper art we got older. But this was the first time I ever had an idea that his feelings towards me changed after we went to school. I am not sure that I can give the reason any more than he could; but, on thinking it over, I daresay it had some- thing to do with this difference I am speaking of. I remember an old yeoman, a playfellow of our father's, who lived in a grey-gabled house of his own at the end of the village in those days, and with whom we used to spend a good deal of our spare time, saying to a lady, about her sons, Bring 'em up sarcy (saucy), Marra! I likes to see bwoys brought up sarcy.' I have no doubt that he, and others, used to culti- vate my natural gift of sauciness, and lead me on to give flippant answers, and talk nonsense. In fact, I can quite remember occasions of the kind, and George's quiet steady look at them, as he thought, no doubt, ' What a fool my brother is making of himself, and what a shame of you to encourage him !' Apart altogether from his shyness, he had too much self-command and courtesy himself to run into any danger of this kind. Now, the moment we got to school, my sauciness abated very rapidly on the one hand, and, on the other, I became much more consciously beholden to him."

There is chivalry enough in both the brothers, though in one it is taciturn and grave, in the other frank and sanguine ;—though in the one it led to a rooted distrust of plausible, new-fashioned recipes for curing deep-rooted evils, and a preference for grap- pling with them by slow individual effort, and in the other, it led to an equally deep belief that as the old-fashioned remedies had failed so conspicuously, there must be some better method of grap- pling with them, and that, too, a method more powerful than any of piecemeal individual effort—which his whole social creed com- pelled him to distrust as profoundly as his brother distrusted the ambitions social crusades. Mr. George Hughes was a man whose personality was enveloped in an atmosphere of its own ; his biographer is one whose personality essentially attracts and is attracted by that of others, and works through the reciprocal in- fluence of the various units of a group, rather than through single grooves of individual influence.

Mr. George Hughes was one of the great athletes of his period, —the period when athletics first came into notice as something more than mere amusements, and when we first began to hear of

muscular Christianity. His brother tells us, with his usual graphic power, the history of Mr. George Hughes's greatest achievement of this kind, when in 1843, as stroke of a seven-oar boat which had lost by illness its stroke oar, and was not even allowed to fill its place by one chosen for the occasion, he beat a Cambridge crew of eight oars, not, it is true, a regularly trained crew, but still one composed of the picked oars of two fine crews. Mr. Hughes adds that as far as he remembers, his brother never.once lost a race in which he pulled stroke. If we add that Mr. George Hughes's early letters to his father from Rugby (as well, by the way, as his father's letters to him), and his letters, given at the end of the little memoir, to his sons, then at Rugby, are full of charac- ter, and that in every page of the memoir there is some touch or other that makes the story typical of the most manly and cultivated stratum of our county squirearchy, we shall have said enough to show that Mr. Hughes has laid a great many readers under a real obligation by this simple and graphic ' memoir of a brother.'