WESTMINSTER ABBEY.*
A PRUDENT critic naturally hesitates before he confesses to having felt something of disappointment in reading one of Dr. Stanley's books. There is no living English writer whose literary merits the public more thoroughly appreciates ; he stands unequalled, since Macaulay passed away, in vivid touches of description and in felicitous allusion ; nor could any subject have been found more appropriate to his genius than the story of the Abbey. We shall best express our feeling by saying that we can name no one who could have done the work better, except Dr. Stanley himself. He hints, indeed, that he is scarcely satisfied with his performance. "The pressure of other and more important occupations" is a plea which must per force be admitted, but we cannot but regret that what is certain to become the standard book on the subject should not be more entirely worthy of its author. We should have been content to wait Dr. Stanley's greater leisure, if the delay would have secured greater compression, a more judicious selec- tion of materials, a more discriminating use of authorities, and a more careful elaboration of style.
As a description of the Abbey, in its great character as a national burying-place, the book seems very complete. Indeed it would have been much improved for the purpose of continuous perusal, if some matter, which cannot be said to possess any his- torical interest, had been excluded, or at least relegated to a separate place. In many cases, a simple enumeration of names and dates would have sufficed. We observe that a plan of each chapel with its tombs, and monuments, is given. The utility of the information thus supplied would have been much increased if it had been gathered up in a ground-plan of the whole Abbey. By the way, could not something be done to make a visit to this
• Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D., Dean of Westminster. London: Murray, 1868.
noblest of London sights somewhat more agreeable ? The arrangement which is in force at Hereford, and possibly elsewhere, is well worthy of imitation. The visitor can there purchase a guide-book, which enables him to discover everything for himself, and he is allowed to take his own time in seeing it. In the case of the Abbey there would be a necessity for a strict surveillance, the cost of which might, however, be supplied by a moderate charge for admission, if no other resources are available.. The Dean, who lately asserted the interests of the nation by shutting the Abbey against the Bishops, might thus find a pleasanter opportunity of fulfilling his duty. The benefit to the public would be complete if he would allow some intelligent person to construct a guide-book out of the materials which he has here supplied.
In a book which extends over a period of eight centuries, and includes notices, more or less detailed, of several hundreds of persons, some errors will, of course, be found. Such errors are of little moment when they are the result of carelessness and haste. The public demands rapidity of execution, and must put up with the defects which are scarcely separable from it. The same excuse cannot be made for the graver faults which indicate an inexact and uncritical temper of mind in the writer, though, perhaps, the habit may be accounted for when we remember how he is accustomed to deal with a subject-matter in which exactness and criticism are not always welcome. Dr. Stanley can walk with consummate skill over the cinis &doses of Biblical history. No man knows better how to subordinate, without giving offence, the truth of literal fact to the higher truth of spiritual significance. Such a gift is, at least on some occasions, most useful ; but it has its dangers as well as its uses. It may produce a certain rhetorical, almost allegorizing, and altogether unhistorical mode of dealing with the characters of persons and with events, and a failure to appreciate, or at least to state, the value of authorities. There is a sense in which truth is equally predicable of a parable, a. legend, and a historical narrative ; and there are occasions when a writer may be excused from determining the class to which the materials which he uses should be referred. But it is obvious that this privilege must be very carefully limited, and that in a work which claims to be strictly historical it can hardly be exer- cised at all. When Dr. Stanley states that (p. 148) "the passing cloud of Reforming zeal, which Chichele had feared, had been, as Chichele hoped, diverted by the French wars," he assumes for the famous opening scene of Henry V. a historical value which se trustworthy an authority as Dr. Hook is not at all disposed to allow it. The " conversion " of the same monarch rests on stronger- evidence ; but about this, again, there are doubts which at least demand a notice. In the same way, Sir T. More's account of the interview in the Sanctuary of Westminster between Queen Eliza- beth Woodville and Cardinal Kemp is quoted without any warn- ing that it cannot be considered to have any more of literal truth than belongs to the speeches with which the classical historians were accustomed to adorn their narratives. It is an instance of a. still more exceptionable use of authorities when Dr. Stanley quotes without correction the statement of Speed that Philippa, the Queen of Edward III., founded Queen's College at Oxford.. It is impossible to suppose but that he must be familiar with the fact that Queen's College was-founded by Robert Egleefield, Philippa's chaplain. • In point of style the book hardly equals our expectations. The- writing, though often brilliant and often eloquent, is sometimes- loose in texture, and gives us the impression of having been in- tended for lectures, in which a certain almost verbose fluency, not entirely agreeable to read, is often very effective. Sometimes Dr. Stanley's desire to be graphic leads him into extravagancies of ex- pression. So, contrasting the Conqueror and the Confessor (p. 45), he says. "Before the high altar, standing on the very gravestone of Edward, was the fierce, huge, unwieldy William, the exact con- trast of the sensitive, transparent King who lay beneath his feet." What is a transparent King ? The epithet, as meaning guileless, may be applied to a character, though hardly to a person. But. the contrast is rather of physical qualities, and we are driven to. the odd explanation that an allusion is intended to the appear- ance of Edward, who, as we read a few pages before, had trans- parent hands. It cannot be correct to say that Gray "rendered. the churchyard of Stoke Pogis immortal by his elegy on it and on himself." The elegy was written in not on the churchyard, which, indeed, could hardly be made the subject of an elegy, or- be rendered immortal. A still stranger sentence is the following :— " The close of Lord Palmerston's octogenarian career was laid. amongst the memorials of numerous statesmen, with whom or against whom his public life has been spent." The close cannot stand for closing scene, a statesman's career can hardly be called octogenarian because he lived to be eighty, nor can he be said to spend his life against other statesmen.
We are glad to have now done with fault-finding. Our readers will readily believe that there is much to admire in the volume, many vivid descriptions, many large and liberal judgments on men and events, expressed in vigorous language. Westminster, indeed, presents to the historian no single event possessing at once such historical importance and such dramatic interest as the murder of Becket. Accordingly, we have nothing here that can be matched with the great scene which forms the central picture in the Memorials of Canterbury. The Abbey, again, though high in dignity, was always insignificant as compared with the
great monastery which contended for centuries with Popes and Kings for the right to appoint to the Primacy of England. These points excepted, Dr. Stanley's new subject far surpasses his former in interest. The Abbey represents, as no other build- ing in Christendom does, the whole life of the nation, and has come to represent it by a series of events which it would be pro- fane to call accidents, but which in their undesigned development are singularly characteristic of our history. It symbolizes at once the unconscious growth and the unbroken continuity which distinguish our national life. As Dr. Stanley says :—
" The Norman Church erected by the Saxon King, the new future springing out of the dying past, the institution founded for a special and transitory purpose, expanding till it was co-extensive with the interests of the whole commonwealth through all its stages, are standing monuments -of the continuity by which in England the new has over been inter- twined with the old." (p. 34.) When we come to examine the details of the Abbey history we see the strange want of design in the processes which have given it this representative character. Other nations have set apart, with solemn and well defined purpose, national burying-places for .citizens whom they sought to honour. We have almost "drifted" into the same practice, and then have carried it out with a grandeur and a liberality in which no other nation can equal us. Poets' Corner seems to owe its existence to the fact that Chaucer, its first occupant, was once Clerk of the Works to Richard II., and gained by this connection with the Court the privileges of burial within the precincts of the Abbey. But having once onconsciously admitted our poet, we have proceeded to surround him with such a galaxy of great names as no other nation has ever gathered together. This is no singular instance ; it is in this way that "the ashes of the great citizens of England have pressed into the sepulchre of the Kings, and surrounded them, as with a guard of honour, after their death." The Abbey has honoured every kind of distinction in the arts of peace and of war, has opened its doors to almost every variety of opinions and of faith. It is in this part of his subject that Dr. Stanley has found special oppor- tunities of showing the high qualities of mind and temper for -which his countrymen most honour him, the catholicity of his views, the largeness of his sympathies, intellectual and religious. We .cannot, indeed, always assent to his judgments. Once, at least, he seems to err on the side of an undue severity, when he speaks of Prior's "despicable life and inferior poetry." But, in general, the tone of his comments commands our highest respect. No- thing could be better than this :— "Observe how magnificently the strange conjunction of tombs in what has been truly called this Temple of Silence and Reconciliation .exemplifies the wide toleration cf Death—may we not add, the com- prehensiveness of the true religion of the Church of England ? Not .only does Elizabeth lie in the same vault with Mary, her persecutor, and in the same chapel with Mary, her victim ; not only does Pitt lie side by side with Fox, and Macpherson with Johnson, and Outram with -Clyde ; but those other deeper differences, which are often thought to part more widely asunder than any political, or literary, or military jealousy, here have sank into abeyance. Goldsmith, in his visit to the Abbey, puts into the mouth of his Chinese philosopher an exclamation a wonder that the guardianship of a national temple should be con- fided to a college of priests.' It is not necessary to claim for the Deans of Westminster any exemption from the ordinary infirmities of their profession ; but the variety of the monuments, in country and in creed, as well as in taste and in politics, is a proof that the successive chiefs who have held the keys of St. Peter's Abbey have, on the whole, risen to the greatness of their situation, and have endeavoured to embrace, within the wide sympathy of their consecrated precincts, those whom a narrow and sectarian spirit might have excluded, but whom the precepts of their common master, no less than the instincts of their common humanity, should have bid them welcome. The exclusiveness of Englishmen has given way before the claims of the French Casaubon, the Swiss Spanheim, the Corsican Paoli. The exclusiveness of Church- men has allowed the entrance of the Nonconformist Watts, of the Roman Catholic Dryden. Courayer the French latitudinarian, Ephraim Chambers the sceptic of the humbler, and Sheffield the sceptic of the higher ranks, were buried with all respect and honour by the college of priests' at Westminster, who thus acknowledged that the bruised reed was not to be broken, nor the smoking flax quenched The
god-like gift of genius was recognized, the baser earthly part was left to the merciful judgment of its Creator. So long as Westminster Abbey maintains its hold on the affections and respect of the English church and nation, so long will it remain a standing proof that there is in the truest feelings of human nature, and in the noblest aspirations of religion, something deeper and broader than the partial judgments of the day and the technical distinctions of sects,—even than the just, though it may for the moment be misplaced, indignation against the errors and sins of our brethren."
We cannot refrain from quoting another very interesting illustra- tion of the sentiments here expressed :—
" Sheffield's epitaph on himself is an instructive memorial at once of his own history and of the strange turns of human thought and character. Pro Rage scepe, pro Republica' semper,' well sums up his political career under the three last Stuarts. Then comes the expres- sion of his belief :—
Dubins sad non improbus vial; Ineertus morior, non perturbatus. Human= est neseire et errare, Deo confldo Omnipotentl benevolentIssimo: Ens entlum, miserere met.
Many a reader has paused before this inscription. Many a one has been touched by the sincerity through which a profound and mournful scepticism is combined with a no less profound and philosophic faith in the power and goodness of God. In spite of the false boast of a purer life than Sheffield, unhappily, could assert, there is in the final ex- pression a pathos amounting almost to true penitence. 'If any heathen could be found,' says even the austere John Newton, who sees the vanity of the world, and says from his heart, "Ens entiwn naiserere mei!" I believe he would be heard.' He adds, But I never found such, though I have known many heathens.' Perhaps he had never seen this monument, but quoted the words from hearsay. The expression is supposed to have been suggested by the traditional last prayer of Aristotle, who earnestly implored the mercy of the Great First Cause.' But many readers also have been pained by the omission of any directly Christian sentiment, and have wondered how an inscription breathing a spirit so exclusively drawn from natural religion found its way unrebuked and uncorrected into a Christian church. Their wonder will be increased when they hear that it once contained that very expression of awestruck affection for the Redeemer which would fill up the void ; that it originally stood, Christen adveneroy, Deo confide.' The wonder will be heightened yet more when they learn that this expression was erased not by any too liberal or philosophic layman, but by the episcopal champion of the High- Church party—Atterbury, to whom, as Dean of Westminster, the in- scription was submitted. And this marvel takes the form of a signifi- cant lesson in ecclesiastical history, when we are told the grounds of the objection—that the word 'adveneror " was not full enough as applied to Christ.' How like is this criticism to the worldly theologian who made it, but how like also to the main current of theological sentiment for many ages, which, rather than tolerate a shade of suspected heresy, will admit absolute negation of Christianity—which refuses to take the half unless it can have the whole."
We must remark that "Dubius sed non improbus vini" ahould-rather be taken not as a boast of a pure life, but as meaning that 'he wavered between vice and virtue, but was not wholly givento evil.'
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