R. H. Hutton F OR nearly forty years the Spectator, on
its literary side was the mouthpiece of Richard Holt Hutton. The fact that the Notes of the Week were always a joint production and that occasionally Hutton wrote a political, and Townsend a literary, article merely showed the strange fusion of their friendship. It did not confuse the parts which the two men had cast for themselves.
Certainly during his lifetime Richard Hutton was the better known of the two editors. Indeed, outside the intimate circle of the Spectator's friends he often passed for sole editor in spite of his frequent assertion that " the best part was t'other fellow's."
Hutton as ," one of the nepheiVs, think, Sir."
In talk he was very humorous, a quality he lost with his pen in his hand.. His was the very best brand of mid- Victorian dinner-table humour and being without bitterness, satire or scorn, it made little appeal to the memory.: This generation has to take most of the spoken fun ,of their grandfathers on trust, Hutton used to quote with . great . pleasure a humorous little speech which he said belonged to another man but which was certainly very typical of his own little jests. " Destiny itself has often been thwarted in the attempt to get me out to dinner.", But whoever said it, so far as Hutton was concerned dt was a_ joke only for he loved his fellow creatures and liked his dinner. There are still old men, " nephews," some of them, who remember with joy both the champagne and the company at Richard Ilutton's parties.
In a manner rather unusual in those days he mixed old and young, the starters and the men who had arrived. Shyness wa,s unknown to him and except so far as personal matters were concerned he was without reserve. His thoughts, like his money, he gave to him that asked, talking as readily of immortality as of the exceedingly naughty dogs who stood to him in the relation of spoilt children, he liked to know the men of letters and science who stood out in his day, he liked to give young people the pleasure of seeing and hearing them, but for those who ran after what were then called " the great " he had an unfeigned contempt. He believed that climbers rode for a fall, frankly warned them if he knew them well enough, and was rather amused than sympathetic as he watched them brushing off the dust after being " dropped."
When Hutton was a boy, the Universities were closed to conscientious Unitarians. Had he gone to Oxford, his intel- lectual and spiritual career would probably have not been exactly what it was. As things were, it was perhaps inevitable that criticism should have been the channel into which his literary gifts ran. The definitely creative work which was in him to do he never did, and the obvious goal of his spiritual pilgrimage he never reached.
Besides his literary essays he wrote several small books, notably two very short biographies—a life of Scott, a life of Cardinal Newman. The first contains none of his best work. The latter, written only a few years before his death, is full of interesting pages, but they are largely quoted pages. He hid as it were behind his hero and when he appears, what he says is indeterminate, and gives an impression of mental distress.
Most of Hutton's literary criticisms concerned his contemporaries, or at least those who had died in his lifetime and their cataclysmic change of literary fortune he could not, of course, foresee. Yet his judgments haVe something of prophetic light and even if the verdict of time prove some.of them erroneous, they reflect so clearly an original mind and are so interestingly expressed that they will always make part of the history of criticism. Preserved at length in the two short volumes of his essays we cannot do more here than indicate their quality. What he says. of the " piercing " nature of Browning's mentality, of the fact- that he is a " ventriloquist " of genius rather than a dramatist, cannot, we think, be ignored when the final summing up comes. He made no mistake about George Eliot's power to preach her readers to sleep, as well as to give them ears to hear the marvellous narrative of common life. He saw that Tennyson's power of thought came short of his poetic gifts, that Shelley's intellect and imagination were without " grip," however perfectly his inspired melody, expressed the pangs of his insatiable heart and mind. Of music as an art Richard Hutton knew nothing, but his delight in the metrical beauty of words, in what he called " the inborn music which beats a natural accompaniment to the creative toil of the imagination," was intense. Occasionally both diffuse and careless, at his best his own style added to the value of his matter. In his essay on Wordsworth which ends thus " in his poems there will ever be a spring of something even fresher than poetic life—a pure deep well of solitary joy " he reaches his height so far as mere writing is concerned.
In Richard Hutton's day religious men of all shades of opinion were obsessed by the importance of what was called the higher criticism of the Bible. They were ready to stake their souls upon a date, an authorship, an interpolation. He himself was deeply interested but not carried away by the furore. " He can afford to dispense with a minute history of His life who has power to turn every human conscience into a new witness to His truth," he wrote.
Again, he saw that it was not in the direction of science that men must look, were already stealthily looking, for the great enemy of Christianity. " The secret panic which besets the faith of England," he wrote, " is that theology might be absorbed into a department of morbid psychology." That this form of doubt would go far, he foresaw, and boldly warned his readers that disbelief cannot empty Heaven—even to harbour such a fear is, he said, of the nature of Atheism.
No one attempting to make a sketch of Richard Hutton can do more than sketch his mind. His life was uneventful as outward things go. He wanted, as in those quieter days people did want, a pleasant home with books in it, kind friends, and love, not forgetting the love of animals. All these things he had during most of his years. His adventures were his sorrows, his spiritual progresses, and the ups and downs of " The Paper." Greatest among his sorrows was the well-nigh unbearable grief of watching mental decay. For eight long years his wife remained in his home without her mind, the object of his most loving solicitude. He had no children, but his courage was supported by the devotion of a niece, a daughter after the spirit, without whom he could hardly have endured the sadness of his home. At the time of Newman's death he wrote, " I cannot adopt for myself his later conception of the Church of Christ, hardly even that earlier conception which led so inevitably to the later." Truly a naive sentence. Whatever its significance, during his last sad years he attended a Roman Catholic Church and heard Mass with unfailing regularity—He had come a long way from his first religious position, resting at more than one turn of the road. He died at his last place of halt, the topmost heights of the Anglican Church. C. T.
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