Lowes Dickinson
By J. T. SHEPPARD This book is first of all a portrait, simply and beautifully drawn by a close friend. It is a personal impression and it is all the better for that. The lines are truly drawn. The picture lives and is delightful. Here and there our memories sometimes suggest a slightly different emphasis, a different shade of colour to background or interpretation, lay- ing more stress, for instance, on the influence Dickinson had on every sort of pupil—including "toughs and hearties" who loved and revered him and in whom, when they crossed his path, he found wonder and delight.
We might speak also of the way in which his sympathy and understanding made him a critic and reformer of the old bad system of employment for our College servants, a reformer also of the terms on which we hold our Fellowships : it was his faith which moved King's to incorporate into its Statutes, long before a Royal Commission laid the obligation on us all, the principle that Fellowships imply not only privilege but duty. Though all that Mr. Forster says of his mistrust of " that other Cambridge," the Cambridge of the organizers and researchers, is authentic and important, we find in the pattern of our memories, not as a contradiction but a com- plement, a vivid recollection of the sympathy and eager curiosity with which he, more than any other representative of " the humanities," would question men of science and encourage them to talk, on the assumption, as one used to feel, that somehow some day what they all were after must, however far removed apparently from his own human interests, turn out relevant and—since they were so much in earnest and were really such good fellciws—probably important, if one only had the clue.
Of this, I think, he became, like many of the pioneers of science, less and less hopeful, more distrustful of the specialist, more apprehensive of the use to which, when facts are taken as a substitute for a true sense of values, learning may be put. But he was able more, I think, than any other don that I have known to reconcile with his clear apprehension of the function of the University the training of leaders, the nourishing of their imagination, the setting of the spirit free that they may help their fellows, the hope (which helped us all to hope) that all the many-elements which make up Cambridge may or might, if only we have patience, faith and charity, serve ultimately the one, all-important pur- pose.
Also I think that some of us would find a rather more robust note in his humour, and a more frequent lifting in high spirits of the burden which we know he had to bear. But there I am not sure. The more this book is read, the more grateful will the reader feel not only for the writer's skill but for his scrupulous regard for truth, the loving care, the candour and restraint which make it, as a personal impression, of inestimable value. The extracts from Dickinson's own reminiscences and letters by which Mr. Forster supplements and checks his own close, sympathetic vision would by themselves make the book remarks' le for vividness and frankness. The portrait is true. It enriches our own memories and does not, as so many biographical sketches do, perplex and disappoint.
But there is more here than a portrait. There is the story of a life which was from first to last a spiritual quest
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. By E. M. Forster. (Edwin Arnold. 10s. 6d.)
and an heroic life of service. It is the story of the growth in pilgrimage of a spirit abnormally sensitive, searching always and rewarded often, though not always, by the glad discovery and full enjoyment of the things which are the spirit's life, beauty in nature and in music, poetry and prose, above all, friends and friendship. It is also a record of the discipline by which not circumstances merely but his own high standard, his unselfishness and steadfastness of purpose, made it possible for him to dedicate and to subordinate his own enjoyment of these things to the high impulse to help others, never shirking, as so many of us find it easy to do, the vision of the evil and the pain of this mysterious world, but understanding suffering and feeling it by sympathy acutely, and yet not fainting but still working hard to help.
Such dedication entailed sacrifice and suffering. But it was so perfeci and the high endeavour was so nobly con- ceived, so bravely sustained, that we are heartened, not dis- couraged, as we follow Mr. Foriter's story frdm the mid- Victorian garden where Goldie's mother would sit sewing under the cherry tree to the prison-house of school, and again from the free and happy growing-time of Cambridge to the visions Shelley, Plato, Goethe gave, and then to those false starts, all touching and amusing and, as Mr. Forster shows us, in the long run fruitful—the service as a labourer on Harold Cox's farm, the shocks administered to ladies in Cathedral towns by a young lecturer too careful of the truth, the volunteering, the brave effort to become a doctor and to serve both knowledge and the healing of affliction so. And then the opportunity to teach - and study history in Cambridge, which seemed, but only seemed to be, the final consummation.
Success came to him as a writer and a lecturer. He was a teacher who made history a means of finding out .and then enjoying and then sharing all the best things that have been achieved, and also learning how mistakes that hinder have been made and ought to be avoided. Then the War came, and it seemed the end of happiness and the frustration of his hopes, but proved, beethise his idealism stood the test, the opportunity for his most noble, most disinterested service. Under a 'stress 'of suffering and strain incalculably great, with a growing sense of isolation in a world that seemed to have gone mad with hatred, he worked modestly and quietly, keeping his spirit generous and absolutely free from rancour or self-righteousness, for a more stable, juster peace.
Everyone knows he worked hard for the League of Nations. How great a part- he played in its first conception many will learn foi the first time from this book. Beautiful as were his early books and profound as were the speculative essays of his latest years, he never wrote better or to better purpose than in that tragic time, and there is no book which does greater honour to his University than his International Anarchy. Its wonderful fairness and freedom froth all bitterness, its vision. of the urgent need of humanity; its reflexion of his passionate desire to disentangle truth 'and to persuade and help without the aid of sophistry, make it a masterpiece. Whether or not the League fails in its present form, this life, so well and truly told by Mr. Forster, and the writings *which, as Mr. Balfour's admirable bible- grUphy reminds us, were the mirror of the life, forbid us to despair.
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