MARY AND PHILIP CARPENTER.*
Is it over-fanciful to find in the lives of many who were born in the south-west of England, some resemblance to the career of -the south-west wind P With the same union of softness and force, they are strong almost to the removing of mountains, and again "weak as is the breaking wave;" cherishing a bank of • The Life and Work of Mary Carpenter. By J. Baffin Carpenter, MA. London: Macmillan and Co. 1879.
Manoirs of the Life and Work of Philip Pearsall Carpenter. By Russell Lent Carpenter, BA. London Began, Paid, and Co. 1880. primroses, or whirling obstacles from the path ; but ever incap- able of acting long in concert with anything but the one. invisible law of attraction which determines their course. It may seem strange to say that this was so with Mary and Philip Carpenter, seeing that both were untiring workers, who accom- plished much, and much, too, in fellow-work with others; nor is it equally true of both, nor wholly true of either. In both, the restlessness, the south-west-windiness—if the word might be allowed—of nature was strongly and sternly controlled. But it was there; and among many remarkable features, its presence and effects form, perhaps, the most noteworthy char- acteristic in the two lives. The fervent religion, which prevented the brother and sister from breaking any bounds recognised by them as marked out by duty, helped them, and especially him, to surmount the fences which keep most of 122 mainly to one sphere of work, and one set of helpers. Their characteristics were utter unworldliness, a growing habit of living with the things that are unseen rather than the things that are seen, combined with in- tense belief in the convictions of the moment, and with a certain natural untameableness ; and these qualities rendered them unfit for the subordination, the compromises, the allowances for pre- judice and weakness in others, the preference for slower, but united, rather than quicker and isolated advance, which are necessary to most of those who have a large share in enduring work. This is not said by way of criticism, and would equally apply to others besides these two, who, like them, were of the true salt of the earth. They were, if we may venture upon a military comparison for two such nnwarlike people, glorious leaders of a forlorn hope, but not generals, nor yet quite in harmony with themselves or others when in a subordinate command.
Born in the beautiful West, Mary at Exeter and Philip at Bristol, they retained all their lives an eager love of natural beauty. For Philip, this found expression chiefly in music and shells. Conchology was his favourite science, which he pursued by no means as a mere amateur, but with scientific patience and exactness. Yet shells were not to him a means for verifying theories. Rather he had a passion for the things themselves and. a delight in handling them, from his boyhood. When his sister Mary was teaching him Greek, he would render xrrhy, tunic, by chiton,7a, kind of shell—possibly, with curious results• in some passages. In later life, he enjoyed the work of classifying col- lections. His natural bent was towards mathematics, and he cared little for any classical authors except "his favourite Tacitus." Yet he was by no means destitute of imagination, and a shell was for him much more than a pretty but inanimate object, "void of the little living will that made it stir on the shore." He might occupy himself in assigning to it a "clumsy name ;" but shells told him a long and fascinating history of geological epochs, as well as of the soft-bodied creatures of which they had formed part. Philip Carpenter had the tem- perament and tastes of a scientific man. He was at first appren- ticed to a manufacturing optician, and might have been "earthly happier" had science been the main plot of the piece, instead of the interlude in his life. His sister Mary never understood his devotion to shells. With her, an outlet for the love of natural beauty was found in painting, but in this she rarely allowed herself to indulge. When Philip was busy with his collections, she protested against his being "exiled from human beings ;" and he, too, almost wanted to bury himself "among poor Lancashire opera- tives, or Canadian fugitive slaves, and smash Up all shells." But, he immediately added, "it would not be honest." He could not have left other work, had he not believed that his mission to "keep West-Coast shells right" was, for the moment, his clearest duty. It was well for him that he thought so. The Sturm mid Drang of his other life would have rained his health and warped his mind, but for the intervals spent in the calmer atmosphere of the museum.
It was not, however, his shells that in the end parted him from the work of the Ministry. His love of music had more to do with the apparent failure. Philip and Mary Carpenter in herited from their father a Unitarian creed of that kind which includes among its articles the traditional view of the Scrip- tures ; and for Dr. Lant Carpenter, their father, a Harmony- of the Gospels seemed a natural and necessary work. His children started from this point. Mary Carpenter accepted his teach- ing, without, as it seems, ever bringing her acute intellect to bear upon it, in a critical sense. Her work lay in a different sphere. Her business was organising ragged and industrial schools, and teaching in them. The romance of her life was India ; first started by Rammohnn Roy, when she was quite young, and partially realised in the last years of her life. Neither of them had the disposition which seeks religious difficulties, and. her occupations kept her out of them. With her brother it was otherwise. His early wish was for the Ministry, upon which he entered, when he found that family objections existed only in his own imagination. But from his student days causes were at work weakening his con- nection with the religions body in which he had been reared. Already, at York, the Cathedral and its organ attracted him with irresistible power. Emotional worship was a necessity to him ; and if this were expressed through music and grand surroundings, so much the better. Thus, on the one hand, he was drawn towards the Church of England, and even towards one side of Catholicism, and could join with pleasure in the services of both. But in the other direction he found himself in accord with many who did not belong to the Unitarian Church, and he soon declined to call himself a Unitarian minister. Hie religious sympathies were, if we may borrow a phrase originally employed for a different purpose, like a circle whose circumference is everywhere, and whose centre is nowhere. He was not content to send out infinite sympathy from a fixed point, but wanted to be at home wherever the sentiment existed which was dominant with himself. He would be the minister of a religion, but not of a sect.
So long as he found what seemed to him the essentials of religion, he could endure all forms of its expression. As his sister in her special work braved all ghastly horrors of misery and vice, so he prevailed upon himself to take part in revival meetings and other forms of religions service, which must have been profoundly distasteful. She found her reward in the good that might be brought into sight, even from below the most hideous crust; he, in the genuine love of one divine object, which was not disguised from him even by rant, or by " groan- ings which can be uttered" and were. Asthetic worship ultimately prevailed with him, though he seems always to have retained the faculty of sharing in a simpler ritual. He continued to conduct the services of congregations, first in Stand and. then at Warrington, until the scruples of a portion of his flock justified the step which he was by that time anxious to take. But it must be observed that the motives which usually influence those who give up ministerial duties did not at all apply to him. He sympathised, indeed, with those in the Unitarian and in some other Churches who were then departing from the more orthodox position, and in this way he brought himself into difficulties with his own people. But he sym- pathised with these heretics, not on account of their heresy, in which he did not share, but because he looked upon them as representatives of that Christian liberty which he had so much at heart. He thought of them as helping to break down those fences which divide those whose main hope and aspiration are one. His own tendency was to accept all forms by means of which the spirit of worship could find true expression ; but in- quiries and criticism which seemed to touch upon sacred ground were repulsive to him. Miss Carpenter wrote of Dr. Colenso's
book,—" I do not mind about the Creation being cut up but I do not mean to read anything against that exquisite narrative of Joseph." In precisely the same spirit, her brother wrote some ten years later to a friend, then at work upon the Gospels, that he did not much mind criticism as to the formation of the first three; they contain "all I know of the Lord's outward teaching, and a vast deal more than I can as yet live up to ; therefore, there's food enough for me. But pray don't touch John's Gospel, and show that it was not written till the second century; I can't stand that !" But whether it were that a portion of his congregation failed to appreciate properly his catholicity, or whether they were justified in thinking that party has its uses both in ecclesiastical and political matters, and that the widest charity may find a centre in a group of like-minded men, troubles arose, representations were made, and Dr. Car- penter resigned his charge, never to take another. He liked now to use the title which an American University had bestowed upon him, since it made it easier to some of his friends to drop the " Reverend." The scruple about addressing worship directly to Christ, with some other doctrinal peculiarities, gradually melted away in his mind. He was always ready to conduct worship and preach whenever and wherever asked to do so; but as a rule, he attended Church of England services, except on
"Damnation Sundays," as he called them, when the Athanasian Creed was read.
About the same time, Miss Carpenter went to India, and Philip to Canada. In either case, this was the fulfilment of a. long-cherished wish, which perhaps had something in common with the craving of certain natures to exchange a landscape bounded by the second hedge-row for the "blue breath of sea without a break." Not that either he or she despised a narrow sphere of duty ; on the contrary, they threw intense energy into the performance of every detail. But for her, the wide field of India had a strong attraction ; and he yearned to carry his enthusiasm for the abolition of slavery and for the abolition of disease by sanitary reform into the great Now World, where new ideas, once rooted, grew apace, and on a grand scale. In his case, also, the greater variety of American character would make those peculiarities of opinion which here are accounted eccentricities, less painful to him. In everything, he carried individualism to the extreme, perhaps to excess. He would have nothing to do with party, either in politics or religion. He- believed too intensely in whatever opinion he held to care for the ordinary means of propagating it. In America, he was in the- laud of individual opinion; and his total abstinence, his vegetarianism, and his spiritualism would scarcely be remarked. He had by this time married, and he settled, with his wife and adopted son, in Montreal, where he devoted himself to shells and sanitary reform chiefly, until he died, a few weeks before his sister.
We have devoted most of this review to Dr. Carpenter, rather than to his more celebrated sister ; partly because she is more celebrated, and therefore her life is more likely to be read. She was undoubtedly the stronger of the two, and her work is pro- bably the more enduring. Yet, whether because Mr. Russell Carpenter has given us more extracts from his brother's writings,. and thus followed a more instructive method than that adopted in the other volume, or for what other reason, we cannot say ; but certainly we seem to have a more lively and lifelike impres- sion of the brother than of the sister, after reading the two lives. Perhaps, also, while the two characters had much in common, the gentler, and possibly weaker, is the more instruc- tive to the student of human nature. But enough, we may hope,. has been said to send our readers to these biographies. What- ever else they may find in them, they will assuredly meet with the records of two pure, noble, and self-sacrificing lives.
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