He can the tendency of the whole of Mr. Stevenson's work. tell in detail the story of an isolated episode, or he can study minutely the characters of a single person or a very small group of persons; but he has not yet given us the great and comprehensive masterpiece to which all these studies should lead us on. In this limitation of the field within which he chooses to work Mr. Stevenson somewhat resembles Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, like the stories just enumerated, are elaborate studies of a small group of characters within a closely circumscribed area. But except for this fact, and for a certain literary flavour which attends all that Hawthorne wrote, as it does everything of Mr. Stevenson's, there is little resemblance between the methods of the two novelists. Hawthorne confines himself for the most part to description, and rarely ventures to reproduce a conversation; while with Mr. Stevenson the characters unfold themselves very largely by means of speech a method which undoubtedly possesses greater life and implies a higher power of imagination and creation. Further, Hawthorne rather avoids striking incidents, while Mr. Stevenson abounds in them, touching, as has been said already, the school of sensational adventure on the one side, while on the other he belongs to the school of psychological anatomy. It is this comprehensiveness of genius that constitutes one of the chief grounds of the high expectations that have been formed of Mr. Stevenson. With all these powers in him he ought to produce something great and permanent, if he has the force to combine all his faculties to work in one field of adequate proportions. The danger is lest he should continue to follow now one, now the other side of his genius, continuing to give us delightful and masterly studies instead of the great work; and lest the artist in him, which takes pleasure in this minute and finished craftsmanship, should overpower the creative imagination which he has shown himself to possess in a very signal manner. It is time that we had a new great writer. The period of Victorian literature is passing away, with its brilliant record of great names in all departments of art, and we have as yet nothing to take its place. Each year now takes from us one of the men who have made the Victorian period what it has been. Browning is gone, and Newman is gone, and Matthew Arnold is gone, and Tennyson and Ruskin are old and cannot, in the course of nature, be left to us for long. In poetry and prose alike the outlook is somewhat gloomy. We seem to have reached one of those intervals which separate great periods of literary production from one another, in which the genius of the nation seems to rest and recover itself before making another effort of its many-sided energy. We look back as matters of history to the time when each year brought forth a new volume of Wordsworth or Byron, and when the mails were besieged by eager readers expecting a new Waverley; or to that later period, within our own age, when each succeeding month might be placing before us instalments of a Pickwick or a Vanity Fair, and when any publishing season might produce an Esmond or a Romola, a fresh contribution to Bells and Pomegranates or a new Idyll of the King. 'Ah, the great time! Had I been there to taste! Who carves Promachos? Who writes the Oresteia?' We live in no such age of great and original production now, but seem to be only gathering in the gleanings of that which is past; and therefore our eyes are naturally open for the signs of the coming of another wearer of the mantle of the prophets. With all its apparatus of criticism this age ought not to miss discerning anyone who has the notes of greatness upon him. In the realm of fiction we know of no one who possesses these notes in any adequate degree, unless it be the author of whom we have been speaking in this article. Mr. Stevenson is no longer a young writer, it is true, and he is unfortunately burdened by ill-health; but we hope and trust that he has many years of work yet before him. We owe him much already for amusement, for interest, and for profit; but we hope to owe him still more before the record of his work is closed. And we hope that the debt will not be confined to us of this present day alone. He has earned the gratitude and admiration of his contemporaries; let him earn also the gratitude and admiration of posterity. In Memoriam. HENRY PARRY LIDDON. OUR readers, we think, will not accuse us of exaggeration if we say that the death of Dr. Liddon, at a time when he seemed to be on the way to recovery from a very severe illness, is the greatest loss which the Church of England has sustained for several years. As far as we have observed, the tone of the secular press, in commenting upon his ecclesiastical career, has been marked by respect and kindness, except in a certain quarter where, presumably, he could not be forgiven for setting Christianity and the Church above all party politics. Of course one could not expect his name to evoke such a chorus of fervid homage as arose on all sides, a few weeks earlier, in honour of 'the great Cardinal.' But had Newman been merely a greater Liddon-had the Church which he once did so much to awaken and to 'transform' retained to the end her hold on that high and solitary spirit which, as was said in 1864, passed through us without being really one of us 1—had he not ceased to be within that Church a resisting force against Puritanism and Rationalism-perhaps we may add, had he not, in 'beautiful and revered old age,' 2 received from a wise Pope that crowning Roman honour which reflected honour on England herself-the newspapers would hardly have filled their columns with panegyrics on his life, or with the details of his stately funeral. Requiescat in pace. He did us, in the early Tractarian period, so much good that we have no heart to dwell on the mischief wrought by his Romeward movement, and by the shock of its longdelayed consummation. . It is of another, who was all our own, ever faithful to his Church, ever 'good at need' in her cause, and in the cause of the faith as she holds and teaches it-one whose course, it has been well said, never needed explanation or 'apologia '—that we would now say a few words; and if, for lack of space, we limit ourselves to his work as a preacher and writer, we know full well how much that limitation excludes. For Henry Liddon was much more than a preacher or a writer. We have lost by this great public bereavement one of those strong and beautiful personalities which ordinary people encounter but twice or thrice in a lifetime. To be acquainted with him was to admire him from the outset ; intercourse, as it advanced towards intimacy, brought with it a series of vivid impressions of recollections at once instructive and inspiriting; there was nothing in him of that vagueness, thinness, inexpressiveness, which makes conversation so unfruitful and so vapid: and those whom he honoured with his friendship had before them an exemplar of tender and generous fidelity, of pathetic warmheartedness, of unlimited selfsuppression where service or help could be rendered, which might well 'leave them mourning' as if in shame. There was also in Liddon a peculiar nobleness of aim and motive, which made men feel that whoever else might drift into self-seeking, or worship the golden 1 Christian Remembrancer, xlviii. 169: Dr. Newman's Apology?' 2 Shairp's Aspects of Poetry, p. 440. image of the world, that would he never; and this assurance may have been the real ground of the lifting and exhilarating effect of his presence, even when, as was of late years the case, his sense of 'the logic of events''-a sense which, perhaps, was more adapted to French than to English conditions of life-acting upon a highly sensitive nature, disposed him to take unhopeful views of the prospects of religion in a 'revolutionized' Oxford, and proportionately impaired his influence over her younger sons. That influence had been at its height when he held the chair of Exegesis, and when, independently of any official duties, he used to give on Sunday evenings, during many continuous terms, those masterly expositions of the Epistles which did so much to bring home to young men the grandeur and comprehensiveness of New Testament study, and also to train them in habits of accurate distinction. Many will remember how much they learned from the delicately-worded suggestion to draw a line along that verse,' or to 'put a "I" or "2" in the margin.' It is very much to be lamented that he could never find time, amid the stress of later work, to put these comments into a permanent form. But we are outstepping the bounds which we have traced. Liddon had begun life, so to speak, as curate to Mr. Butler, the present Dean of Lincoln, at Wantage. He early made his mark as a preacher; and it was, we believe, soon after a difference of 'theological standing place '2 between himself and Bishop Wilberforce, accentuated in the Bishop's mind by Mr. C. P. Golightly's denunciations, constrained him to resign the vice-principalship of Cuddesdon College, that he gave promise of future pre-eminence as a University preacher by delivering in the cathedral at Oxford a brilliant Ascension Day sermon, which exhibits, in a somewhat pronounced form, the early characteristics of his 'manner.' He was then only in his thirty-first year. Afterwards the rhetorical efflorescence which had resulted from his study of great French models became perceptibly restrained, while the impression of power, of a reserve force of underlying thought, was deepened. The first volume of his University sermons, originally entitled Some Words for God, included discourses ranging between the years. 1860 and 1868; and among these are some which might well be consulted by young preachers who have to bring home the teaching of the great anniversary solemnities; we might especially indicate 'The Lessons of the Holy Manger' and 'The Divine Victim.' The second volume, not unnaturally, is still richer and more suggestive than the first. Anyone who seriously considers it will feel the amplitude and splendour of the mind with which he is thus far brought into contact. We would recommend particularly three sermons on 'Sacerdotalism,' on 'The Prophecy of the Magnificat,' 1 There was, no doubt, a certain absoluteness in his intellectual temperament which might sometimes dispose him to overlook qualifying considerations. And he was somewhat disposed to contract the range of open questions. 2 The Bishop's own phrase, Life of Wilberforce, ii. 366. But the Bishop had been, at the outset, informed by Mr. Butler as to Liddon's sacramental beliefs (Guardian, September 17, p. 1453). on 'The Worth of Faith in a Life to come.' And as we have alluded to differences of theological tone which separated him to some extent-though never in affection-from that great prelate, 'the remodeller of the English Episcopate,' who, however, was hardly to to be called a divine, we will place together two sentences which will exhibit, on one main point, a substantial unity of idea. Preaching at St. Mary's in 1875, Liddon said: "That which is really objected to [as sacerdotalism] would seem to be the claim to speak and act in the things of God under a Divine commission . . . to be part of the Divine plan of reconciliation, as actually given to the world, however humble and subordinate a part.'1 Eight years before, Bishop Wilberforce had written: Most of those who speak of sacerdotalism mean only a real belief in the kingdom of grace.' 2 We can but briefly refer to the published volumes of sermons preached at St. Paul's during Advent, Easter, and Christmastide.3 They exhibit the same elaborateness and fulness of exposition or of argument, but under forms better suited to a non-academic audience, and more frequently relieved by vivid references to the actual trials of London life, by pithy anecdotes, by a wealth of illustration, and even increasingly by delightful touches of humour. No London preacher was ever more resolutely practical, less afraid of touching real problems and stating plain facts. Perhaps the inevitable reiteration, in successive years, of the topics belonging to the sacred seasons in their recurrence makes the reader conscious of a certain degree of monotony. But Dr. Liddon would have said, as St. Athanasius used to say, 'One must not be tired of repeating.' He preached as one who had a message which must be delivered the old truths had to be enforced and re-enforced they were ever fresh, ever vital and vitalising, all-satisfying, inexhaustible. Why should we waste words about a fact so universally acknowledged as that Liddon's preaching in St. Paul's, carried on with calamitous results to health and strength for twenty years, was a literally unexampled power, a peerless instance, in our modern English experience, of the efficacy of this great ministration in the hands of one whose cultivated gift of 'sacred oratory' is united with the fire of enthusiasm for God and for souls? Nor should it be forgotten, as an element of his influence over thoughtful hearers, that his enthusiasm was always combined with a steady grasp of his subject in all its parts, producing an excellence of arrangement which makes his sermons so good to 'analyze.' 5 : 1 Univ. Sermons, ii. 192. 2 Life, iii. 233. for him 3 Of course we do not forget the numerous sermons preached on special occasions, and published at the time. A collection of these would form a liber aureus. Nor do we lose sight of the volume on Church Troubles, with its very opportune Preface, nor of that latest volume on the Magnificat, published when he had begun to entertain the foreboding that his days on earth were drawing towards their close.' See Adv. Serm. i. 279; Easter Serm. ii. 273. 5 Dr. Clifford, a Baptist minister, spoke of the 'fire' which 'enforced his masculine reasoning' (Guardian, September 17). |