CANON LIDDON ON BISHOP WILBERFORCE.
PANEGYRICS satisfy too universal an instinct and serve too good a purpose to make it expedient, even if it were possible, to dispense with them. If the objects of them had always to wait for the slow-footed judgment of history to de- termine their titles to admiration, and to assign the their proper place in the estimation of mankind, those who are most likely to profit by their example would have passed away in their turn. The majority of reputations are like light wines ; they mature soon, and must be appreciated as soon as they are matured. Their value and interest is for their contemporaries, and it is to contemporaries that panegyrics are addressed. Assuming, then, that panegyrics have their place in literature and oratory, to what extent is it permissible to the panegyrist to drape the rigid truth ? Cases in which praise goes the length of attributing to its object virtues to which in life he could lay no claim may be passed over. Panegyrics of this sort are so faulty as works of art that no speaker or writer worth taking into account is likely to be guilty of them. The temptation and the difficulty present themselves in another shape. Amidst the many elements which make up human character, may not the panegyrist use his discretion which he shall introduce into his picture ? So long as he mentions no virtue which is not honestly present to his hand, is he bound to mention failings also? May he not assume that the memory of these has been effaced by death, and plead that, in leaving them unnoticed, he trusted to his hearers to supply the quali- fications and deductions which human frailty necessarily demands? The feeling which suggests these inquiries is
natural and reasonable, but the inducement to yield to I it is so great that indulgence in it requires to be fenced
round with very jealous care. After all, the final cause of panegyrics is not to give pleasure to the friends of the dead, so much as to move the living to imitation, and in proportion as they become unmeasured they incur the risk of not answering their end. In the first place, they lose the per- sonal and distinctive character which marks them off from mere general orations in praise of virtue. The lesson of a great life often lies in the relation between its merits and its faults,—in the fight which its merits carried on with its faults, and in the victory which they, on the whole, gained over them. In proportion as the chiaroscuro of the character is omitted, the special significance of this lesson is lost. In the next place, there is a danger that what is really admirable in the character may be misunderstood. Contemporaries do not de- pend for their knowledge of what the dead man was upon the words of the panegyrist. They have formed their own con- ception of him, and if the praise is unmixed, they will be led, in so for as they are influenced at all, to think that all that is included in that conception is equally praiseworthy. Few even of the best of our public men can safely be held up to in- discriminating admiration. In most of them there is some- thing to be avoided, as well as something to be copied. It must be remembered, too, that in a critical age there will always be some minds which will not be influenced by pane- gyrics, and upon these the effect of unmixed praise will be seen in a confirmed distrust alike of those who render it and of those to whose memory it is rendered. Happily for England, there is commonly enough in the characters of men who have become famous to make them worthy objects of study. But then to ensure their being studied in the proper temper, there must be a readiness to trust to the testimony of those who have known them best, and it is a necessary con- dition of this readiness that such testimony should not be obviously one-sided. The only time when all reference to a man's failings may fairly be omitted from a commentary on his character is immediately after his death. At that moment the praises of friends are accepted not as the expression of a deliberate judgment, but simply as so many contributions to a judgment ultimately to be formed.
When we say that these remarks have been suggested by Dr. Liddon's sermon at the reopening of Graffham Church, we think it needless to disclaim any imputation of dishonesty on the preacher. The sermon was an eloquent and also a just tribute to Bishop Wilberforce's many virtues, and we feel sure that once embarked on the full stream of his oratory, Dr. Liddon forgot that there was any other side to the picture. And it is but just to Bishop Wilberforce to say that in that friendship of twenty years upon which Dr. Liddon founded part of his praise, the best side of the Bishop's character would naturally become the side most present to his friend's recollection. After all, the Bishop's faults lay near the surface, and those who best knew the quick- ness and versatility of his sympathies will be the most disposed to forget the insincerities in which the exercise of those sym- pathies from time to time involved him. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the Bishop's faults were more than commonly the faults of his position. We have no doubt that Dr. Liddon is right in repudiating with indignation the charge that the Bishop was a consummate actor. But a consummate power of acting is almost inseparable from such a character as that which Dr. Liddon himself has drawn, and against the tempta- tion to be an actor Bishop Wilberforce was protected—speaking intellectually—by his admirable sense of humour. No man who realised the ludicrous side of things so vividly as he did could easily be led into complete unreality. The sense that you are doing or saying what, if done or said by other men', you could satirise with so much effect, is often an effectual protection against the dishonesty into which men of ready and versatile sympathies are often unconsciously led on. But the humour which was the salt of the Bishop's character could only be indulged in, so to say, by stealth. It might light up every sen- tence of his conversation, but it could hold but a subordinate place in his set speeches, and had to be all but banished from his sermons. If Bishop Wilberforce's correspondence is ever pub- lished in its integrity, it will probably be found to contain an admirable series of episcopal portraits. But in the House of Lords or in Convocation, the bishop of whom he had, perhaps, been writing of that morning with a kind of lucid contempt became "the most reverend prelate," or "my right reverend brother," and had to be spoken of and to with the meekness which is conventionally supposed to characterise the mutual
intercourse of the successors of the Apostles. No doubt Bishop Wilberforce sometimes forgot these customary restraints, but his public lapses into frankness only confirmed the opinion that in his mouth things were not what they seemed. To this same accident of position may be attributed a certain want of fairness which marked his management of con- troversy. Bishop Wilberforce was not a professed historian, but he knew enough of the evidence which historians have brought to light to be aware that the Anglican Reformation was a very different movement from what it is described as being by popular Anglican authorities. But it is part of the role of an Anglican Bishop to treat the Church of England as a sinless institution, free alike from actual and from original guilt, as immaculate in her conception as in her life. This official view shaped Bishop Wilberforce's attitude towards seceders to Rome and towards extreme Ritualists under his own charge. Had he been a layman holding precisely the opinions which he held as a Bishop, he would probably have been a fair controversialist. Being a Bishop, he often signally failed in this respect, because he did not allow his natural humour to warn him when he was talking or writing un- realities. It was the same thing as regards his writings and speeches against scepticism. Under no circumstances, probably, would his voice have had much influence on what Dr. Liddon happily calls the "disintegrated chaos" of opinion amid which the University pulpit lifts its head ; but if anything could be more likely than another to send an honest young man in the direction in which the Bishop did not wish him to go, it was the apparatus of flimsy defences with which the preacher equipped orthodoxy. Bishop Wilberforce was not honest in facing difficulties,—we do not mean as regards his own mind, which may never have been troubled by them, but as regards the minds of others. He must have sus- pected that many of his answers to attacks on religion were of the nature of Don Quixote's helmet, but the sus- picion only made him the more careful not to put them to the test. If he had been a little less anxious to make himself all things to all men, he would have avoided altogether the function of defender of the faith, for which none of his many gifts had fitted him. Yet, after all this has been said, there remains a fact which excuses, if it does not justify, the unconscious exaggerations of Dr. Liddon's panegyric. Bishop Wilberforce's place has remained unoccupied, and in certain follies of which his brethren have been guilty since his death, we see how much of the prudence usually attributed to the Anglican Episcopate was due to his restraining hand. If Bishop Wilberforce had lived, we should have been spared the Public Worship Act.
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