BOOKS.
CANON BARNETT.•
IT is to be regretted that this Memoir, essentially wide-reaching in its appeal, must by reason of its length, minuteness, and costli- ness inevitably be restricted to a limited eirclo of readers. Yet if we allow for a certain exuberance of treatment and the inclusion —deprecated by severe critics of biography--of "friends," Mrs. Barnett has admitted little that is foreign to her purpose of giving a full and true picture of her husband and his multifarious and bene- ficent activities. And again, inasmuch as they were collaborators throughout, the record was bound to be a joint biography, and there- fore of greater than normal length. But it has few longueurs, though much space is devoted to education, a subject of immense importance, but too often made excruciatingly dull in the works of professional "educationists." Mrs. Barnett has a vivacious pen, and a. happy knack of anecdotal illustration. Best of all, she has surmounted the chief obstacle in the way of the family biographer by her resolute refusal to paint her husband as a saint or a paragon ; and she has been rewarded for her honesty, for her book enables one to under- stand how a man of insignificant and homely presence, who was neither a great preacher nor endowed with any commanding gifts of person or intellect., was yet enabled to achieve a great work. From his mother he inherited his championship of the weak ; his maternal grandfather, a shipowner, was a pioneer of co-partnership, and another ancestor on the same side withdrew his ships from the slave trade at great personal loss. The home atmosphere was Evangelical in religion, ultra-Tory in politics. Samuel Barnett never went to a school after early youth, but was educated by tutors, and took a Second in History at Oxford, where he graduated from Wadham, then a home of Evangelicalism. A trip to America "knocked the Toryism" out of him ; he was ordained in 1867; served as a curate for five years at St. Mary's, Marylebone ; was appointed to St. Jude's, Whitechapel, by Bishop Jackson in 1873; worked as an East End Vicar for twenty years ; was made Canon of Bristol in 1893, and Canon of Westminster in 1906.
So much for the brief outlines of an indefatigable life of active benevolence. What gave him his strength was a mixture of humility and courage, patience and combativeness. His apparent inconsistencies are well explained by his wife as stages of growth. His chief aims remained unaltered, though in regard to method his views were considerably modified, and at the back of all the movements with which he was associated was the idea that "the main duty of humanity was to raise itself to its birthright." From early youth he was self-destined to the ministry ; he does not seem to have ever been seriously troubled with doubts ; theological disputations did not interest him, and he seldom talked about religion, though religion was at the • Canon Barnet 1 • kis Life Work and Friend,. By his Wife. 3 vols. With 89 Illustrations. London: John Murray. 1285. net.] core of his being. He felt an overpowering call to assist the poor, but he was the life-long foe of indiscriminate almsgiving, and one of the earliest supportersof the C.O.S. In later life he was converted to a belief in universal old-age pensions and State assistance in certain directions—labour colonies, free breakfasts for elementary- school children, &a What strikes one most in the record of all the movements in which he was associated as an originator or helper Is his capacity for enlisting people of all creeds, classes, and polities to work for a common end. He did for the East End what Sir Horace Plunkett has done for Ireland. Where he did not actually originate, he was rich in practical suggestions, lending impetus to movements without interfering in details, finding suitable jobs for the most eccentric as well as the most able of his followers, always accessible, but never intrusive. He had a genius for delegating respon- sibility and a "business acumen" seldom found in clerical philan- thropists. He will be perhaps remembered longest for giving reality to his idea that the rich and educated should raise and help the poor by their personal service. He was the parent and the unceasing advocate of University Settlements, the founder and first Warden of Toynbee Hall, the first to organize the fraternization of the West and East End on a residential basis. He was the first, again, to realize the need of scientific accuracy in bringing home to the public the condition of the poor. Early in his ministry at St. Jude's he set a worker to inquire into and tabulate all the facts concerning the entire population of a single street. (Mr. Charles Booth told a Toy-nbee Hall audience that the first impulse which led him to the colossal work which culminated in his great book on the Life and Labour of the People came from Canon Barnett.) He was, we may note in this context, a determined foe of all sensationalism in philanthropy. He believed, within limits, in publicity, but strongly condemned the practice of newspapers constituting themselves almoners. Tho Press method of raising money increased poverty, because through it poverty came to be regarded as a domestic asset ; it degraded the poor, because people so advertised lose their self-respect : they beg and are not ashamed, they ara content to be pitied ; and lastly, "it hardens the common conscience. A far-reaching effect of these tales of suffering heaped on suffering is that the public demands more and more sensation to move it to benevolence." Canon Barnett also deserves to be held in grateful remembrance for what ho accomplished, to use his wife's phrase, in "democratizing higher education, or idealizing elementary education." The value of art in humanizing the East End was with him a constant preoccupation ; he enlisted the aid of Morris and Watts, started exhibitions and flower shows, and personally conducted visits of East-Enders to public galleries. In music as a handmaid of religion and a refining social influence he was a firm believer. Yet he was colour-blind and tune- deaf. In grappling with the housing problem he was the pupil of Octavio. Hill, and her indefatigable seconder in raising funds to buy up slum property and replace it by decent dwellings. The Garden Suburb and the Children's Holiday Fund were his wife's ideas, but found in him an enthusiastic supporter, though he was no believer in Nature Study ; he revelled in the beauties of Nature, but had no sympathy for what he called dissecting them. Mrs. Barnett includes in her account of the C.H.F. some diverting and pathetic extracts from the letters written by children in reply to printed questions as to their experiences :—
" . . . One of the sheep was called Lord Kitchener. Wherever it went the other sheep would follow it.' . . . I have heard of a small bird which had a very large appetite. In one day it ate ono hundred and forty-four insects, assorted, twelve grasshoppers, twelve meal-worms, one caterpillar and fifteen flies.' . . . The pig whose body is made of pork, bacon and dripping.' . . . The stream in our village was very happy, jumping from ledge to ledge.' . . . We sang in the train coming home to keep ourselves from crying because we were so sorry to leave the nice country.'"
The limits of our space prevent our dwelling on many other phases of Canon Barnett's life as a reformer—his work as a Guardian, especially in connexion with pauper schools ; his support of " scat- tered homes" as opposed to " barracks " ; his views on labour colonies ; his endless benevolence as unofficial mentor, consoler, and reconciler. Few men of our time have appealed to a wider constituency. His tolerance exposed him at times to bitter attacks from ultra-clericals. An independent and advanced Liberal, anxious to get out of Egypt, contemplating with equanimity the cutting of the painter with the Colonies, and an impenitent Pro-Boer, he yet never allowed his political views to affect his personal friendship with those who differed from him, or to interfere with their co-oper- ation in his schemes. Many of his judgments and predictions— notably in regard to the Germans—have been falsified by events. But in the realm of practical benevolence, or "Practicable Socialism,"' to borrow the title of the book he wrote with his wife, he made few mistakes and achieved many abiding triumphs. His humanitarian- - ism was tempered with sagacity, void of fanaticism, and refreshed with a saving sense of humour. He was an excellent letter-writer, and the account of his experiences of Herbert Spencer as a fellow- traveller in Egypt is not only extraordinarily amusing, but full of acute criticism of the limitations of that " Casaubon without even a Dorothea." As he says, "there is nothing like personal contact with a philosopher for showing one the strength of one's oppositioa to his views."
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