BOOKS.
THE LATE F. D. MAURICE.* [SECOND NOTICE.'
ONE happy feature of this admirable biography is the con- densation of the leading feature of each chapter in the passages prefixed to it by the editor,—passages not rarely drawn. from Mr. Maurice's own writings, though more often. from the writings of others. These, with the terse running, headings of the pages, constitute a sort of epitome of the life,. and certainly lend additional significance to the story instead, of distracting attention from it. We do not hesitate to say that any one already familiar with the life and writings of Maurice will find a very vivid outline—an artistic etching, one; might call it—of his career in these mottoes and page-headings even taken alone, and that they materially help the reader to- catch more effectually the focus of interest in the extended_ narrative. And they are all the more welcome that what we have. ventured to term the litany-like monotone of Maurice's letters. receives, by the help of these hints and generalising suggestions of his son, its true connection with the analogies of other lives and. times. To illustrate our meaning, we would ask our readers to turn to the headings of chapter v, Volume II., in which the story of Mr. Maurice's expulsion from King's College for his doctrine on the subject of eternal punishments is related, and to observe the quotation from Xenophon's Memorabilia, the quotation from Dr. Jelf, and the quotation from Maurice's own "Theological Essays," by which it is preceded ; and then to read the headings- along the pages, with their lively suggestiveness. "I ive and. demand change for phrases," is the heading of one page, which draws the attention of the reader to Maurice's dislike to con- ventionalisms of language which have lost their meaning, and to his resolve to make himself and his friends consider precisely what they mean by the words they use. "Attack of F. D. M.'s cholera of resignations," is another heading, which chronicles one of those numerous attempts to resign positions of authority by which Maurice was always signalising his belief that he was, in. God's hands, of infinitely more use when employed in suffering some humiliation, than in any other earthly occupation. "If it be- put,' Jelf objects to you,' I go gladly," is the heading of another page, immediately followed by this still more characteristic. heading, " Jelf's phrases force me to fight." Dr. Jelf, we may explain to our younger readers, was the Principal of King's. College, who was so much scandalised by Maurice's emphatic distinction between eternal' and everlasting,' that he regarded, Manrice's resignation as essential to save the College from the- imputation of infidelity. To hold that any divine quality was in. itself more significant than could be expressed in terms of mere duration, was, in the eves of the orthodox of those days, a sure sign of failing faith in Christ. It must have required great insight and no little humour to summarise the story of these letters as Colonel Maurice has summarised it, and we think we may say that he has succeeded uniformly in drawing the attention of his readers to the essential point of the text itself.
• Ths Life of Frederirk Denison Maurice, chiefly told in his own Letter: Edited by his Bon, Frederick Maurice. With Pcrrtraite. 2 rola. Londin Macmillan. and 00.
And this remark reminds us that nothing is more notable in this Life than the melancholy and sometimes rather bitter humour which it reveals, even at the heart of Maurice's most sweet and genial nature. To Mr. Kingsley, Maurice describes himself (VoL IL, p. 261) as "a hard Puritan, almost incapable of enjoyment, though, on principle, justifying enjoyment as God's gift to his creatures,"—a caricature of himself, we need hardly say, but a caricature founded in truth, so far as the central melancholy was concerned. Yet like most men of melancholy turn in their heart of hearts, there was the frequent flash of a smile in the midst of his gravest thought, a smile that lights up the context and makes its intense earnestness all the more striking. Thus, in a letter to the lady to whom he was engaged, in which he earnestly deprecates the notion, so fashionable in the last century, of moulding a wife to suit his own ideal, he says : —" God forbid that I should have anything to do with any one who was my handiwork. If he had been judicious, Pygmalion would sooner have fallen in love with the work of some other artist, even if it were only of stone, than with his own." And again, laughing at his own cloudiness of style, and referring, of course, to Polonius's willingness to see in the shape of the cloud whatever Hamlet wished him to see, he remarks of his introduc- tion to Law's answer to Mandeville,—"I wished, without alluding to Sewell's book, to undermine as far as I could all the maxims on which it rests, and to show what kind of Rationalism I conceived to be not only compatible with Christianity, but essential to it. But I suppose few will see the whale, even if they look at the cloud." Again, it would be difficult, we fancy, to compress more sad satire into a single sentence than is con- tained in that in which Maurice quietly remarks that Dr. Jell has proved Christianity to be a religion of mercy, by show- ing that "the phrases about salvation a..e to the phrases about damnation as 57 to 8,—the Bible being a great betting-book, in which the odds on the favourite are marked as at Doncaster or Newmarket." One can see, through the whole course of these letters, that with all his profound tenderness of nature, Maurice's satirical vein would have been active enough, if he had not severely reprehended himself for the mood in which satire oftenest emerges. There is keen satire against himself, in this delightful passage of a letter to Mr. Ludlow, on his position as President of the Co-operative Council :—" A little boy, whose elder brother had set him up on a great heap of stools, to act Gamaliel, whilst he sat at his feet as Paul, when the stools came down and he fell on his head, cried out, won't be 'Maiiel any more !' I have often made the same resolution, having as little right as the little boy to my insecure position, and tumbling as awkwardly."
The chapter on "Home Life and Personal Characteristics" (chapter viii., in the second volume) is full of charm, and gives us a picture of Maurice in his own home which increases ten- fold the fascination of his writings :—
" That of which," writes Colonel Maurice, "it is hardest to give any adequate impression, is the 'stealth' of his doing good in all kinds of little ways, all day long, in the small details of daily life. If anything went wrong, he was sure, by some ingenious process or other, to make out that he himself was the only person to blame for it. Always he was contriving to leave an impression favourable to one member of the household of some act which another was disposed to resent, or he was arranging some special kindness of his own, the whole credit of which be con- trived to leave to some one else. It was the continual tendency to take the heaviest load on his own shoulders, and to assign the light- est to others, all the while pretending, and really persuading him- self, that he was not doing his fair share, that one knows not how to illustrate, because it happened always and in everything." "An acquaintance whom he did not know to be present, records how one pouring wet day, when my father was sitting in a crowded omnibus, some old applewoman came to the door looking for a seat, and how my father, an old man at the time, instantly got out on to the roof. It is certain that he would have done so at any time, but he would also have carefully demonstrated, if any one had detected him in the act, that there were excellent reasons why it was the most natural thing in the world that he should get out into the rain, rather than some much younger man, who had no notion of doing so."
Here, again, is a lively and vivid picture of Maurice's fervour in composition :—
"It was a very great relief to him to compose his books by dicta- tion, and to avoid the labour of mechanical writing. His usual manner of dictation was to sit with a pillow on his knees, bugged tightly in his arms, or to walk up and down the room still clutching the pillow, or suddenly sitting down, or standing before the fire, with the pillow still on his knees or under his left arm, to seize a poker and violently attack the fire, then to walk away from it to the furthest end of the room, return, and poke violently at the fire, not nnfrequently, in .complete unconsciousness of what he was doing, poking the whole contents of the fire-place through the bars into the fender. The habit of holding the pillow whenever he was engaged in excited talk, dates from such early days, that one of his under- graduate Cambridge friends used to say that a black horse-hair pillow, which he then had, always followed him about of itself. My mother, in the Gay's days, used to call such an one his 'black wife.' All the while he poured forth a continuous stream of words."
Such traits would be interesting in any man, but they are more than interesting when they give the finishing touches to. the picture of one who lived to witness to a great truth. That truth can hardly be more succinctly expressed than in this passage of a letter written in 1852 :—
"You remember probably a saying of Dr. Arnold's that the Early Church was utterly wrong and foolish in making the nature of God, which is so far out of our reach, the ground of its belief and con- fession; whereas some doctrine directly concerning our own humao life ought to be the uniting bond. A. more plausible statement was never made, nor, I think, one more direotly at variance with experi- ence, reason, and Scripture. Experience shows us that confused and partial notions about God have been the root of all the divisions, superstitions, plagues of the world. Our highest human reason asks for the knowledge of God as the ground of itself, as that which is to deliver us from the notions, conceits, and imperfect apprehensions which belong to us as individuals. Scripture is either the grades) unveiling of God, or it is nothing. On the other hand, all experience testifies that what Dr. Arnold would call the religious truths that concern our souls are apprehended by us as individuals (e.g., our personal evil, our need of a justifier, the fact of justification), and that wherever they are made the grounds of fellowship, they lose their meaning and acquire a new and false character. Reason says that what refers to each man (as each) cannot be the foundation for humanity to rest upon ; Scripture is addressed to nations, to. Churches, to man. Here, then, is my justification of the old Church, or, rather, of that which the history of the Church shows not to have been its work at all, but the necessity of its existence. Because it was for man, and had a gospel coming from God to man, its creeds were declarations of His nature ; they could be nothing else."
There you have the kernel of the truth concerning revelation for the diffusion of which Maurice lived and worked from his twenty- fifth year to his death. It is, we believe, a great and living truth, and one which this biography will enable the world to appre- hend even better than his books alone, without the commentary of his Life, would ever have enabled the world to apprehend it.
The book is a finished biography in the best sense, con- cerned solely about the subject of it, and not about the writer. It is illustrated by two fine engravings from pictures by Law- rence and by Dickinson, the one earlier, the other later ; both vivid and characteristic, though the engraving of Mr. Dickinson's picture gives to our eyes the effect of Mr. Maurice's expression a. little overblown. Finally, there is a very full and admirable index, which greatly increases the usefulness of the Life.
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