BOOKS.
FREDERICK YORK POWELL.*
THE Life of York Powell was bound to be written, and it could scarcely have fallen into better hands. Indeed, the only fault we have to find with Professor Elton's work is that it is too good. His comments and supplements are so excellent in themselves that they are apt to distract the reader's atten- tion from the subject of the memoir. York Powell, like the former Master of Balliol, was above all things a personality ; and, like him, he cannot be judged from his published work. For years, as Tutor and Professor, he exercised a great influence over young men at Oxford and in London. His encyclopaedic knowledge was at the disposal of a host of friends, and every year he added to it some new branch of inquiry. He was for ever "scouting the frontiers of know- ledge," an advance-guard of scholarship rather than a labourer in the trenches. The achievement of such a man cannot be estimated by the ordinary rules. He is more the midwife of thought than the thinker, the cause of scholar- ship in others, the personality too large to be expressed in any written work. He was also a most original and lovable character, whose Life was worth writing, though he had never published a line, for the sake of the brilliant human quality in it. Professor Elton has put the justification for his book in words so apt that we cannot refrain from quotation " We do not rate a man by that part only of his doings which bears his signature. The historian of literature and scholarship is not the Recording Angel. A man's life is the whole of his experiences, and is judged by the sum of his actions and by the impression that he leaves. His contributions to pure knowledge
are soon absorbed, and generally forgotten Now Powell had much of the man of science in him, and much of the artist. But he had little of the assertive fame-loving instinct, and of the kind of will and concentration that goes with them. He had the passion for obscurity, as others have that for advertisement. . . . One of his deeper instincts was certainly to distrust the life that is staked upon reading or writing books or winning glory from them. He thought he knew too much about books to suppose that they were worth all that. Hence he cared the less to produce, or to be known to have produced. Other men made books Powell made himself."
A biography, and not a bibliography, is the fitting monument to one who warmed both hands so cheerfully before the fire of life, and every friend of Powell must rejoice that be has found an adequate memorial.
Though he spent most of his life in Oxford, he was very little of the conventional Oxford man. He was more like a scholar of the Middle Ages, omnivorous in his reading, nomadic in his habits, always exploring strange backwaters of letters and life. He began his official career by being Law Lecturer at Christ Church, and ended by succeeding Fronde in the Regius Professorship of History ; but his home and the main centre of his interests was London. " The place," he said of Oxford, " is full of howling jackals and crocodiles, a sort of Nile Valley with evil spirits walking up and down it, and I . . . alone, a kind of hermit of the Thebaid, tempted of the Devil of Respectability." But for all his protests he loved it, for he liked young minds, and the land- scape, on which he has written some charming verses, cast its spell over him as over others. He produced a great mass of
• Frodoriok York Powell a Life and a Selection from his Littera and Occasional. Writings, By Oliver Elton. 2 vole. Oxford at the Clarendon Frew. [21e. net.]
journalism, but few learned works. His little History of England to the Death of Henry VII., which Lord Acton thought the best work on the period, was almost his only piece of purely historical writing. The great editions of Northern poetry—the Stu/flange Saga and the Corpus Poeticum Boreale—which he produced along with Gudbrand Vigfiisson were his chief contributions to scholarship. His true subject was the old life and poetry of the North, for he had much of the Viking in his soul. "He loved detail, he was close to the earth, he took at once to the talk of seafarers and shore-dwellers and yeomen." The story of his labours with Vigfiisson is a fine tale of a scholarly partnership, ended too soon by death. From his master he learned his austere scientific view of history, a creed superinduced upon a nature not otherwise inclined to a rigorous method. He did not love Dryasdust in any of his forms ; but Vigfiisson taught him that ardour in acquiring knowledge must be restrained and directed by a critical and orderly intellect. He never lost his gift of acquiring learning of all sorts readily ; to the end he remained the same person as the undergraduate who read the Taylorian shelf by shelf ; but he bad also a passion for accuracy and form rare indeed in a man of his temperament.
Antipathies are often a good index to character, and Powell's were four,—Americans, Jews, Germane, and learned ladies. Of German ways he was radically intolerant. "I don't know yet whether Germany was worth making; it doesn't produce anything but philology and sentiment ; their only poet is a Jew, and their only writer of real power a soldier." He disliked pedants and people in ruts, having him- self a genius for touching every circle of life. Pugilism, fencing, Norse Sagas, modern Celtic poetry, Socialism, Mr. Kipling's ballads, and the last French novel all appealed alike to his Gargantuan appetite, and he did everything easily, "spreading about him," as one of his friends writes, "a sense of downy comfortable calm, as if there were no such things as work and worry." He had his fixed and immovable beliefs, but they were few, and on most questions be showed a boyish and most attractive scepticism. "The margin of unsolved matters," says Professor Elton, "on which he was open to fresh light was to the day of his death enormous." It was his favourite maxim that there was some truth in everything and some good in everybody. But it was the tolerance, not of anaemia, but of a fierce vitality; and if on one side he had sympathy with the laughing philosopher, on another he was in agreement with the earnest reformer. He " responded deeply and with passion--if alternately—to two different types of thought. His temper was formed just as much by Rabelais and Montaigne as by Alfred and Langland and Ruskin You never knew which would be uppermost in Powell ; only that neither of them ruled out the other," Common-sense, humour, and complete sincerity being the keynotes of his being, he had the courage to be manfully inconsistent. His politics are a good example of his temperament. In his early life, like most generous minds, he dabbled in revolution. We find him writing letters to Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, thanking him for his "noble protest on the Egyptian treason." In 1886 he eulogises Mr. Gladstone, though admitting that "all politics are damned rot." But as time advanced he became more and more intolerant of vague sentiment, more strongly nationalist, until be ended by becoming a very stalwart Tory. The review of the Queen's reign which he was commissioned to write for the Manchester Guardian was too strong for the politics of that paper, and could not be published. In 1897 he is joining vigorously in the cry for Army reform :— " The philanthropist," he writes, "is generally a person seeking excitement in unwholesome and dangerous ways. He had much better go on the Turf or the Stock Exchange. He would do less damage. I dread Philhellenes and PhiLarmenians too of the professional kind."
He found as time went on that he loved not the House of Lords more, but the House of Commons less, and could not persuade himself "that one cannot wish to get healthy houses
and stop pauperism without loving Kruger and desiring to stop capital punishment and the sale of alcohol." "For God's sake," he writes again, "let us not be mealy- mouthed over J. J. Rousseau, is prophets du faux, the eighteenth century Mandi, the begetter of more follies than can be counted." In his " Thoughts on Democracy," written in 1901, he has left a temperate and salutary warning against the unthinking trust in popular government. The truth is that
his politics, like everything else about him, were original. He could never be classed with any party, bolding, on the one hand, that Britain had the same duty as Rome in civilising and administering vast tracts of the world, a duty which no false sentiment could be suffered to obscure; and, on the other, that most things in England needed reform, if clear-eyed and sensible folk would undertake the work. Facts were his only canon, and to blink a truth for the sake of fidelity to an abstract dogma was to him the last and fatalest heresy. We have left ourselves no space to speak of the second volume in which are collected many of Powell's fugitive writings. There can be found, among other good things, his "General Survey of Modern History," his " Thoughts on Democracy," his " Note on Omar," and his tributes to Vig- Mason and "Lewis Carroll." But the real Powell is best seen in the letters from which Professor Elton has made generous quotations in his text. They are full of high spirits, humour, and kindliness, and are studded with memorable phrases, mainly objurgatory. For those who wish to see his epistolary style at its best the letter printed on p. 300 of the first volume is an excellent example, where he draws a picture of that Paradise of Historians in which there are many mansions. Or, in another vein, let them turn to the letter written to a friend on the death of R. A. M. Stevenson, in which is shown that tenderness which is never absent from the truly virile soul :— "He was like the kind keeper of the Enchanted Garden, who let you in to play there, and let you eat the strange, beautiful fruit, and even drink of the charmed springs ; and now the friendly Doorkeeper is gone with his golden key, and I shall never walk in the Enchanted Garden again."
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