Compton Mackenzie

IN the year 1898 what was called ` The Crisis, in the Church of England ' was being proclaimed by some of the news- papers as acute. A preposterous little Tappertit of a purveyor of discreditable books called Kensit had started preaching in various ' ritualistic' churches and his antics had been ponderously supported by Sir William Harcourt in a series of fatuous letters to The Times which with the Daily Telegraph supported the Low Church agitation under the impression that they were following in the footsteps of Disraeli. The Daily Mail, only a couple of years old, was closer in touch with reality and would have nothing to do with the old men and old women of an expiring force in the Church of England; the bishops, of course, sat on their bench as nervously as if it was indeed a fence.

I at fifteen was a fervid supporter of the ' Romarlising ' extremists and at a Protestant demonstration in Queen's Hall was privileged to throw a large cauliflower from the corner of the upper circle which by what could be claimed as a miracle hit Colonel Saunderson, the Grand Master of the Orangemen, as he was making his speech; it was the half-back's dream of a throw-in from touch to a line-out.

Among my friends at school was one of the sons in the large family of a Low Church clergyman, to whom I presented a copy of a devotional book called Catholic Prayers for Church of England People, compiled by the Reverend A. H. Stanton, of St. Alban's, Holborn. My friend's father, who was on the point of departing for Australia for some missionary society, discovered this book, flogged his son severely, and informed him that to save his soul from the diabolic tempta- tions that surrounded it he should take him to Australia.

On hearing of this I urged upon the boy the duty of escaping from such tyranny and with another friend of mine who is now a country parson in England and after consulting another slightly older boy who is now an Anglican archbishop, we sent a telegram to a loveable eccentric called Sandys Wason, who invented the word ` spikes ' for Anglo-Catholics and was then a curate at Ilkley, asking him if he would give shelter to a persecuted Catholic boy.' Wason agreed. I then arranged the escape of the martyr who was to let himself out of the window by knotted sheets. The martyr himself told me he could always get out by the front door, but I insisted on the knotted sheets. We had a four-wheeler waiting at the corner of the road,, in which we drove him to St. Pancras and des- patched him to Ilkley. His father informed the police and a few days later he was back at lime. When this Low Church clergyman and his errant son had left for Australia a two- Column letter from Lord Kinnaird, the President of the Church Association, appeared in The Times, and horrified people with a fantastic account of the methods used by the Jesuits in corrupting thp youth of England. The effect was startling. Old ladies looked under their beds nightly for Guy Fawkes; old gentlemen sat in nervous expectancy of a visit from the familiars of the Inquisition. Finally questions were to be asked in both Houses of Parliament. The explanation of the true facts was entrusted, to H. C. Richards, Q.C., the Con- servative member for Finsbury. I knew Richards and he suggested that I should give the facts to Lord Halifax. So I Went to the House of Lords and told that great and saintly man what exactly had happened. That was fifty-six years ago but the memory of that brief encounter is still vivid. One might suppose that a schoolboy of fifteen taken to the House of Lords like that would have been shy, indeed frightened, but with Lord Halifax I was neither. Frederick Walker, the High Master of St. Paul's, thanks to the private information supplied by his son, that remarkable figure the Reverend R. J. Walker, of whom Sir David Kelly has written so delightfully, was unperturbed by the agitation seething in the Press.

Some eighteen months later I had a brief encounter with Cardinal Vaughan in Bournemouth, and to him I related tho story I have just told, anxious to impress upon His Eminence the mistake he had made in discouraging the efforts of Lord Halifax for reunion by urging a declaration of the invalidity of Anglican orders.

In the spring of 1914 I enjoyed a brief encounter with Maxim Gorky. Neither his Italian nor mine at that date was fluent, but at least it was a language we had in common. His villa half way down to the Piccola Marina had one rectangular window of plate glass framed with small porcelain tiles in a floral design. After we had talked for a while, sitting by this window, which looked away to the Faraglioni, Gorky suggested that we should go to the cinema. He was a tall, loose-boned figure with a drooping fair moustache and a far- away dream in his eyes: he wore a long loose dark-blue blouse with a belt. One of the pictures shown in the dingy cramped little picture-theatre of Capri forty years ago was a short farce about a man who had invented an electric -fan which, after blowing up into the air people walking down the street over the grating of the cellar in which the inventor worked,•finally blew the whole house away, and the film ended with the inventor looking out of the window at a rapidly approaching crescent moon.

Gorky's house in Capri was always crammed with Russians, and among them there must have been many destined to become famous three years later as revolutionaries.

How far away seems that Capri from the chromium-plated Capree of today !

For my last brief encounter I shall go back to June, 1886. I had been presented with a Tennyson Birthday Book a month before and I was taken by my parents to ask Thomas Hughes, who was then a county court judge in Chester, to sign it. TheNdate of his birthday was October 19th and in the space opposite the quotation I read today in faded ink: Tho. Hughes.

But enters his protest against the new clothes doctrine.

(See opposite page.) The doctrine to which Tom Hughes took exception was: Let •never maiden think, however fair, She is not fairer in new clothes than old.

Geraint and Enid

And against this heresy of Tennyson's he wrote: ! oh..

On that June day sixty-eight years ago I was presented with a copy of Tom Brown's Schooldays bound in red morocco and inscribed to me From the author with all good wishes.

At that date Tom Hughes was still preserving the convention of anonymity. This edition was published in 1885 and the title page says: Tom Brown's Schooldays. By an Old Boy.

Did he ever in his lifetime, acknowledge his authorship with his own name on the title-page ?