ANOTHER. BIOGRAPHY OF PENN.* No one would iay, after reading
the works published by Dr. Stoughton, including his, in many respects, excellent volumes on Religion it England from the Opening of the Long Parlia- ment to the End of the Eighteenth Century, that he is profound, or even pr &madly erudite, either as a historian or a theologian. Be strikes one rather as, in the Emersonian sense, a reporter,
• 'Validly' Poor, the Fobtider of Peurryirawia. By John Stoughton, DO. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1983. though a very agreeable and even skilful reporter. He can read the ordinarily available literature on any subject in which he is interested, and make a very readable pr6cie of it. A Nonconformist, with much sympathy for Nonconformists in their historical struggles, his reading has been far too catholic to allow his writing to degenerate into bitterness. His style may notreach the high amenity that has marked some of the more thoughtful and artistic utterances of that other literary Congregationalist, Dr. Allon ; yet, in his latest writings, Nonconformity, in the partisan seuse, is a pleasant though quite decided aroma, rather than anything else. Dr. Stoughton's Life of the Pounder of Pennsylvania, published in connection with the two-hundredth anniversary of his landing in America, is deserving of notice even quite as much for the writer's sake as for Penn's. It was, of course, hardiy possible for Dr. Stoughton to bring to light facts bearing on Penn's life that have escaped the notice of Clarkson and Hepworth Dixon on this side of the Atlantic, or of the various historians of Penn and Pennsylvania in America itself. He has, however, come across and utilised some unpublished correspondence ; and a visit he paid to the United States ten years ago, and inquiries he made, there, have evidently helped him much, by freshening and mellowing his views. But if Dr. Stoughton has little that is positively new to tell us of Penn, his repetition of the old story is excellent in spirit and tone. His style is, however, somewhat unequal. Is there not the ring of the pulpit, if not of the platform of the Sunday-school "social meeting," in this account of Penn's birth P—" In the autumn of that year, October 14th, 1644, a little boy was born in the court adjoining London Wall, filling the house with joy and glad- ness." What can we say of the "little boy," or "filling the house with joy and gladness," but that it is literary " gag " Take, again, such an expression of opinion as this :—" In review- ing the history of religious opinion, surely we should appreciate whatever may be true and good in forms of conviction and feeling which we are far from adopting entirely as our own. It is not requisite that people should be Roman Catholics in order to see what was beautiful in the character of Francis of Assisi, or Lutherans to see what was grand in the Saxon reformer, or Quakers to see what was profoundly spiritual in the founder of the Society." How very true, but then how very common- place ! Besides, why should Dr. Stoughton adopt a half- apologetic tone in defending catholicity of view, at least in days like the present, when we are tolerant enough to have satisfied even Jacobi, who contended that true tolerance consists in our being tolerant of each other's intolerance. On the other hand, take this, on Giulielma Maria, Penn's first wife, who seems, indeed, to have been as charming as she was pious and refined :—" A portrait of her exists, in which she appears with sweet face, light hair, a little black hood, a white kerchief, a deep, graceful stomacher, a silken dress with short sleeves, and delicate hands, the whole realising Charles Lamb's ideal of the shining ones.'" As a sketch, conceived in Burns's spirit —and a better spirit there cannot be—of "gently scanning your brother-man," still gentlier, sister-woman—this is perfect, and nothing could be happier than the introduction of Lamb's ideal. It somehow recalls the only two genuinely poetical lines in Hobbes's version of Homer, those which describe the infant Astyanax at the scene of the parting of Hector and Andro- mache, in the Sixth Book of the Iliad: — "And like a star upon her bosom lay
His beautiful and shining golden head."
But it would be alike uncharitable and unfair to suggest that the felicity of Dr. Stoughton's description is, like Hobbes's, but a lucky accident.
In once more championing Penn, as the friend and adviser of James II., against the attacks of Macaulay and smaller critics, Dr. Stoughton displays much judgment. He is thoroughly im- partial. While he shows the absolute absurdity of explaining Penn's conduct at a crisis in the history of British liberties, alike political and religious, by the theory that he was a Jesuit, while he demonstrates that it must have been George, not William, Penn, that played "the broker lackey" in the scandalous Court transactions in which both the Maids of Honour and "the maids of Taunton" were mixed up, he allows that to say the least, his hero may have been imprudent in his interference between James and the Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford. The truth, no doubt, is that Macaulay was as incapable of under- standing Penn's character, with its mysticism, its inward- ness, its tenacity of purpose dissociated from dogmatic fanaticism, as Penn's own father, the irascible Admiral. Penn, indeed, predicted his own fate, if he did not reveal his own character and creel, when, in 1678, he pleaded before a Com- -mittee of the House of Commons in favour of the right of 'Quakers to make an affirmation instead of taking the oath, with a view to their sharing in the relief then proposed to be granted to English Dissenters. "Reading, travel, and observation," he then said, "made the religion of my education the religion of say judgment. My alteration has brought none to that belief ; and though the posture I am in may seem odd or strange to you, yet I am conscientious; and till you know me better, I hope your charity will call it rather my unhappiness than my crime." Pena was a sincere Friend and mystic ; what he did, still more what he wished to do, for Fox and other of the brethren, and his own family ostracism, sufficiently prove this. But study and travel, while they left the religion of Penn's judgment substantially the same as the religion of his "conversion," seem to have rubbed off fanaticism to a remarkable, if not incalculable, extent ; he was a mystic, perhaps, much as Carlyle was, or at least as he wished his wife to be when he wrote her, with almost grotesque intensity, "Be a mystic, dearest." Penn may be said to have been a fanatical devotee of perfect freedom of conscience, much as the late Dean Stanley may be said to have been a fanatical devotee of latitudinarianism. Although the ruling Quakers of Pennsylvania, in formulating their final scheme of religious toleration, drew the line at Christianity, and so fell short of the religious fearlessness of the charter-makers of Rhode Island, Penn as Proprietor took different and higher ground. In one of his letters—if Dr. Stoughton has noticed this letter, the fact has escaped us—he said, "I went thither to lay the foundation of a free colony for all mankind that should go thither, more especially those of my own profession ; not that I would lessen the civil liberties of others because of their per- suasion, but screen and defend our own from any infringement on that account." It is at least possible that when Penn returned from America to England, he sought to turn James's Roman Catholicism and personal liking for himself to good account, by securing through them a victory for perfect toleration. If instead of James becoming his tool, he became James's, that should surely be considered, in his own words, as his unhappi- ness, rather than his crime.
Dr. Stoughton gives, as the frontispiece to his biography, a copy of the original picture of Penn, painted from life in the year 1666, when he was twenty-two years of age. His face must have been a very fine one, yet the large eyes suggest an Aurelian or melancholy thoughtfulness—derived, perhaps, from his Dutch mother—rare at such a period in life, and prophetic of trouble to come. And, in truth, Penn was a man of many sorrows. They began with his quarrels with his father over his Quakerism, and even his last years were clouded by the pecuniary misfortunes consequent on the misconduct of his son and the rascality of his agent, in the great colony which owes so much—its prosperity no less than its constitutional freedom —to his wisdom. Be was familiar with prisons, he was for years in hiding, and there can he little question that the trouble he fell into as the result of his dealings with James, and from which he did not emerge till 1692, hastened the end of his devoted Giulielma Maria. That same year, "she gently expired in my arms, her head upon my bosom, with a sensible and devout resignation of her soul to Almighty God." But, until his son "fell off," Penn appears to have been happy in his domestic life. His eminently practical second wife played her part as well, and was, in her way, as devoted to him as even Giulielma Maria ; lie, in turn, was a model husband, if not also father. Penn took a genuine delight, too, in his work in Pennsylvania, in framing a Constitution, in negotiating with Indians, in doing a good and lasting, even if a necessarily imperfect, work in the interests of toleration. Above all, he had much more than the ordinary Englishman's, or even the ordinary politician's, share of "that ancient English dower of inward happiness," which, let as hope, exists in fact, and not merely in the patriotic imagination of Wordsworth. A subtle inwardness—a very dif- ferent thing from the heart on-the-sleeve subjectivity which was willing to stand and deliver at the somewhat brusque bidding of a Macaulay—was Penn's secret. It was more, and better,—it was his support, his stimulus, his religion.
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