Speaking to the Laity
tree courtesy calls in the City of York. He tIIed on the Lord Mayor, the Stationmaster,
tr
eeting for the reporters, which was always the the Yorkshire Evening News. In the news- kPer offices he first saw the editor, and then he laired all the departments. When he had wished lerybody a Happy Christmas, he had his special ERY Christmas Eve Archbishop Garbett paid „Tie. 'I hope that my long speeches throughout i`n last twelve months have not given you gentle- Ptn too much trouble.' In fact he had probably IL4ubled them much less than anyone else they IN reported, for, whatever the extra work it cost tikl, he always provided them with a written , 4 tement of what he had said. He was generally l'tilous to be reported, but he wanted the report be accurate : so he took pains to make reporters' task easy and his own position r. This skilful management of press relations " had laboriously to acquire. It was not origin- in the nature of a man whose instinct was
to shy away from all publicity. When, years re, he was a young vicar at Portsea, he gave his curates a standing order that if the press ed for information about any parish matter were not so much as to answer, but must ring at once. That is nearer to the normal Anglican tinet, and Garbett was first and foremost a rough Church of England man.
It was only when he came to York that he gan to see that his deepest aims could not be teved without a full use of publicity. So he himself to learn to use it rightly, and, charac- istically, he ended by becoming the prelate who managed the dangerous arts of publicity so well that they always served his purposes and never harmed them. And what were these purposes of his? While he still lived it was not hard to guess them, and his biographer, Canon Smyth, who has made of his task one of the very best biographies of recent times, having had access to Garbett's diaries, letters and papers, confirms the guess which many of us made at the time. He was an archbishop who ran in harness first with Temple, and then with Dr. Fisher, at Lambeth. Like them, he was a devoted son of the Church of England, who gloried in the fact that it is a national Church. But he could do one thing better than either of them, and that was to speak acceptably and plainly to the laity. So he envisaged his task as ,bringing the Church of England point of view to bear upon those whose occupations in the 'secular' world made it hard for them to see what relevance the Church could have to the fields in which they lived and worked. He saw that 'Sacred' and 'Secular' formed two worlds, dangerously sundered, and he determined to use his position to build a bridge across the chasm.
For this mammoth task, he had what it takes. There was his reputation for courageous speech, coupled with the further reputation of never speaking without being sure of his facts. There was his insatiable curiosity about all ways of • living, and all people, for he was a man who never ceased learning. There was his wide, varied read- ing, and his wonderful memory for what he had read and seen. But beyond all that lay another and a much rarer piece of natural equipment. He was a synthesist of real genius. He was no original thinker, but for this task he did not have to be, and better, perhaps, if he were not. He dealt not in ideas but in facts, not in theories but in people. His big books, and his speeches, collected facts from every conceivable source, and .arranged them in new patterns of relationship. But to use all that to build this bridge, he must above all learn to accept the uses of publicity, and to manage them creatively. He did this admirably, and so he became the spokesman, of the Church of England to the nation " on every kind of non- ecclesiastical issue, from housing to malnutrition, from road accidents to rural preservation.
All this is endorsed by Canon Smyth. but naturally his biography is not concerned with this aspect alone. He has to present a rounded picture of a very great and conspicuously fearless ecclesiastic in action in every field in which falls to a vicar and a bishop to have his being. It is perhaps the chief merit of a particularly meritori- ous book that he gives real balance to each of the many sides of a very long and crowded life. How he managed his personal relationships, so awk- wardly at first and so confidently in the end; how he dealt with the ecclesiastical and national prob- lems—Church Reform, the H-bomb, Zionism, the scandal of Guernica,.and others—the sort of diocesan bishop he was at Southwark, Win- chester and York; all these and many other matters are all set out with the clarity and dis- tinction which so distinguished an historian has taught us to expect from .him, together with his
facility of holding his reader's attention through- out. In all these pages there is not a single
one which is dull. There have been a.good many episcopal biographies in the last ten years. This, with Lockhart's life of C'osmo Gordon Lang, stands supreme on a special eminence of artistry.
But there has to be judgment. No biographer can escape that. By what standard, then, must he judge? Canon Smyth is an admirer, so he asserts baldly that Garbett was a very great man, and few would be inclined to question that. But that is judging as the world judges, and by standards far less austerely exacting than Garbett adopted for himself. He tried always to see himself as he supposed that God saw him, and this is the prin- ciple of interpretation which his biographer adopts throughout, and the spiritual band which holds all the parts and episodes of the book together. His tale is essentially that of a soul on pilgrimage. It is the hardest way to write it, but also the best, and the way Garbett himself would most have wished. Judging himself by no less a standard than this, Garbett thought and wrote in the last pages of his diary that his life had been an utter failure. Canon Smyth acknowledges that the standards of judgment are just, in fact the only ones any Christian can adopt as he faces death. But he questions the verdict. An utter failure? He had not built the whole bridge him- self. What man could? But he had made it easier for others to take his place and carry on with this vital work than they would have found it had he never lived. He explained the Church to many who had no inkling of its purpose in history. He nourished its clergy and laity, travelling far round the world to do so. He bettered every diocese he ruled. He left behind him a tradition of heroic self- discipline, and faultless devotion to exacting duty. For such as he the Psalms have the right epitaph. For what is said at the end of the historical Psalm 78 as the summary of God's dealings with Israel was true of every day of Garbett's long ministry, 'He fed them with a faithful and true heart : and he ruled them prudently with all his power.'
ROGER LLOYD
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