HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND.* MR. STEPHEN PAGET has edited this memoir

and arranged the letters with exceptional skill ; he has kept his book within

manageable dimensions because he has a true gift of selection. There is not a page that does not add a lineament to the features of Scott Holland as the reader sees him. Mr. Paget is a modest showman, for he always remains in the background, but those who read biographies know perfectly well when they are in the lands of a proficient showman, and if Mr. Paget's proficiency had not been proved before—as it has been—this book would prove it.

Henry Scott Holland was that type of man who, while he makes fast and furious friendships, is bound to excite corre- sponding enmities. Mr. Paget says that " some of his con- temporaries misjudged him, and believed this or that against him.". It is easy to see how that happened. Holland never dealt in half-measures ; the placating whitey-grey argument or studiously reasoned compromise was to him anathema. Those who had thought out a problem with extreme care were sometimes astonished to find that their solution excited the indignation of Holland, who opposed to the solution precipitate and exuberant overstatements inspired by a passion of feeling. Yet Holland made such overstatements with a sincerity transparently equal to that of his opponents. He dealt in a luscious riot of language ; he himself spoke of his " gush of naked humanity." No wonder that he was often misunderstood ! His enthusiasm for a more generous sharing of the goods of this world was sometimes spoiled by his injudicious treatment of economic principle. The present writer was a frequent reader of the Commtmwealth, which Holland founded and edited, and though he was invariably attracted by its brilliance, he was simultaneously alarmed by the dangers of Holland's political and industrial creed. Holland was indeed not blessed with the gift of judgment. As Mr. Paget points out, in 1914, when Germany was actually moving her armies, Holland was still writing about the " German scare " and the peaceful intentions of the Kaiser. Although Mr. Paget makes this admission it must not be thought that in his opinion Holland's force and influence were in general overpowered by his defect of judgment. On the contrary, Mr. Paget is convinced that Holland's influence will be permanent and that it will be found in the years ahead to be a steadily growing quantity.

For twenty-six years Holland was a Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral, and he ended as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. Throughout his career his ambition was to relate both the Church and Oxford to the realities of life, which meant in practice social and industrial politics. He was never so much move i as when addressing a great assembly of working men in the north of England or speaking about the administration of the Poor Law. He founded the Christian Social Union in 1888.

We have now mentioned the chief landmarks in Holland's life, and for the rest we must quote some of the best passages out of the excellent reading which this book provides. At Eton Holland came under the teaching of William Johnson, who afterwards took the name of Cory, the author of Ionics.

Holland wrote of him in 1897 :-

" The old tutor who was our genius and our inspiration has been brought back by the printing of his letters and journal, just out this week ; with touching pathetic memories, and delicate flashes of insight, and lovely allusions, all flocking back upon our hearts out of the records. He was a poet, and a lover, and a man of genius, all three."

Tohnson was impatient of all talking-down to boys, as he explained to Holland in a letter d ted June, 1868. " We had a clerical rough here yesterday, preaching to the boys about ` coming forward,' carrying weight,' and similar athletic slang." Hol- land's letters, even when he was a boy at Eton, displayed his exuberance and also a remarkable and touching frankness when he writes to his mother, again and again accusing himself of wealness which was the result, as he believed, of a love of popularity. Popular he certainly was. He revelled in his friends. At Oxford he took a third in " Mods." which was a grotesquely lower place than was due to his abilities, but in the final schools he triumphed. Mr. Paget says :-

" He did more than get a first class ; he startled the examiners • Henry Said Holland : Memoir and Letters. By Stephen Paget. London : John "Murray. lair. net.J . on their thrones he beat them at their own game : as if hit had gone up against them to avenge the wrong which they had done to Nettleship the year before."

This allusion to R. L. Nettleship—who died on Mont Blanc in 1892—makes it necessary to explain that when it was announced that Nettleship had only got a second in Greats in 1869, Jowett asked the examiners for an explanation. " They said he had not done well in philosophy ; Jowett told them that Nettleship knew more philosophy than all of them together."

Nettleahip's letters, with their intimate discussions of faith and conduct, are extraordinarily interesting. Mr. Paget ex- presses half a doubt whether he should have published them, but we are sure that he did right. Jowett did not stir Holland at all. Here is Holland's opinion of Jowett'a religion written in a letter in 1869 :—

" Jowler (Jowett] preached yesterday in Chapel amidst intense excitement, 110 people in Chapel. He looked so fatherly and beautiful and brought out the best bell-like silvern voice with quite rich tones that he had hitherto hidden in the depth of his stomach, and preached the most lovely little practical sermon in a quite perfect style with the most wonderful grace. I have only said all this laud in anticipation of having to confess that though I felt how beautiful it was in its way it was most unsatisfying to me. It was just Platonism flavoured with a little Christian charity : Christianity is gutted by him : it becomes perfectly meaningless, if it is only an attempt to take some useful moral hints from just what happens to strike you in a very good, perhaps I may be excused in saying ' a Divine life. He is perfectly self-sufficient ; self-dependent, without any consciousness of anything beyond a certain human wealaies3 in carrying out his ideal ; there is not an atom of the feeling of prayer, of communication with God, of reliance on any one but self. He even begs pardon for using as vague an expression sharing in the spirit of God.' I admire the Symposium with all my heart and soul ; but I must have something more to have brought God down to death to procure for me."

Among the men who really influenced Holland, T. H. Green was prominent. Green's tutorial letters to Holland are so good that we wish there were more of them. In one letter criticizing an essay by Holland, he says :-

" Your discourse pleases me very much. I think you really have the ' speculative ' intelligence, and if you care to attend to such subjects at all continuously, you may got an unusual hold of them. My only fear is lest you should not work your thoughts out with sufficient clearness, and for lack of this should take refuge in tropes (which you work exceedingly well) or in prostration before a ' Principality or Power ' which is not the true Oeds no r l s. (God to be found in thought]. I trust you not to take this last remark amiss. Of course you must follow your own leading ; but it can scarcely be helped that a special regard for any one should result in an involuntary and unreasonable desire to bring him to one's own way of looking at things. . . . When you are a ' parson,' I trust that you will possess your soul in seclusion from Congresses. The pro- ceedings at Liverpool elicit all my dangerous nature against Anglican Churchmen. It will require a long pull at St. Paul to get over the effects of it."

Green and Nettleship were both haunted by a fear that growing differences of faith between themselves and Holland might drive them apart. Here is Nettleship on the subject :-

" I have thought a great deal latterly (and I suppose you must have too) on what are called our religious differences. Indeed after what we said together that night this term there needs no more to be said, but it is a relief to me to say it more fully. It would be a terrible thought, it has sometimes been a terrible thought with me, that we who are so knit together in all else should have that one link in the chain missing on which all the others must really hang. As I have said, I think our only choice lies between absolute separation and absolute communion ; we cannot endure anything between : and we have made our choice. All I want to do is to look the worst in the face. I cannot help seeing that my historical view of Christianity, as it gets more formed (if it ever decal get) will almost necessarily differ in some points from yours. I also cannot help seeing that we may very likely be forced into parties which look upon each other as enemies, for this seems to be the way with Chris- tians nowadays. And so it may be that outsiders will say our friendship is temporising and a compromise. There—now I have put the worst, and all I want to say is this, that I know and am sure and you know and are sure that we shall always have a bond of communion, which all this and more than this cannot weaken, but must rather strengthen. We know, I say, that our love is its own sufficient warrant for its truth. We know that in whatever glances and glitter it began, it has gone on steadily widening and deepening, and is still going on. And we know above all that it finds its highest satisfaction in tho common love of Christ and God."

In 1870 Green also wrote a letter providing against the dissi- pation of friendship under the stress of religious differences :- " All that I desire is that you should not become a clerical partisan—that you should keep in view the distinction between what is temporarily edifying and what is true ; between the eternal ideas on which the religious life rests, and theological dodges. That you will do this essentially, tho' not exactly in my way, I don't doubt : and if, while so doing, you can avoid those antagonisms to orthodoxy' which to me are inevitable, but which greatly limit present usefulness, so much the better. These antagonisms on my part, if ever I am to utter myself to the public, will have to be stated more explicitly : and some- times when I have imagined in the future myself a professed heretic and you a working ' priest,' I have feared what would be to me a terrible calamity—that our friendship, instead of becoming more full and equal with time, should tend to dis- appear. But I have only feared this when we have been some- time apart. Whenever we are together, I always feel that there is an essential harmony which is good for both and will survive differences of opinion."

While we are thinking about Green's religion let ua quote from another of his letters written in the early seventies :— " But tho' I reckon religion and morality properly identical and religion and philosophy to be in such different planes that they cannot compete, I do recognise a competition between philosophy and dogmatic theology each claiming to be the true rationale of religion ; and for my own part (tho' I am in no hurry to persuade others so) I have definitely rejected dog- matic theology for a certain sort of philosophy. This does not to my own consciousness easentiaUy separate me from orthodox Xtians, but I fear it must (if known) do so to theirs. The posi- tion of dogmatic theology is that true ideas about God and things spiritual are derived from miraculous events. Now on the matter of the truth of the ideas I don't essentially differ from it, except that the way in which it derives them limits the scope of the ideas. It is the derivation from miraculous events that I reject, holding that the belief in the events was derived from the ideas (of which philosophy is the true intellectual expression), not the ideas from the real happening of the events. The result is that from ortho- dox Christianity, as expressed in prayer, and in the ordinances of Protestant worship, I find no alienation, while I could not subscribe to one of the creeds."

In 1870 Holland described the eloquence of Ruskin, some of whose lectures at Oxford he attended :- " He has raised audiences that would have made Mat Arnold's head a foot higher : the whole theatre crammed : it really is the most gorgeous eloquence it is possible to hear ; it makes one perspire, it is so beautiful ; and Green was fascinated by watching a man who became perfectly hysterical, waving his head to the beat of the sentences, and bursting into inarticulate roars as each came to an end. I was disappointed in what he said, though ; he has, I think, left his old ground a good deal, and he delighted in putting things in an almost spitefully revo- lutionary way. He divorced religion and art altogether : and seemed to think they could only do harm to each other : I was away at the one on morals : but on the use of art, he was feeble : he kept harping on what art had begun in, domestic use, etc., and all the time we wanted to know what it ended in. Art is not for use : a spire is developed out of a simple roof, but when it is at Salisbury, it is a spire, and not a roof, nor anything like it ; and I don't see that it helps one to tell one that it is for use. You begin with a pfp : but you live for 76 a v : and what I want to understand is the ` a.' " We will end by quoting Mr. Paget's description of Holland as a preacher in St. Paul's :— " Voice for voice, hed even Liddon. St. Paul's is a grand place for echoes, asratrveias not afraid of them : his voice had moments of slashing vehemence, undescribable and inimit- able : but he seldom overstrained it, and he never seemed to be using up the reserve of its force : neither did he habitually shout, though he would now and again give out some essential word or name with a cry that wont up into the dome and halfway down the nave. In gesture, he was swift and impulsive, not clumsy or purposeless : it was not for nothing that he had been a good athlete. Men preaching for the first time in St. Paul's are likely to be warned to direct their voices toward the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds : but Holland, with admirable effect, swinging now this way now that, brought all of us together. His move- ments were as natural, as apt to his preaching, as the swaying of a tree in a high wind : it would have looked grotesque, if he had stood still, while the rush and fire of his voice were tearing round all the space under the dome."

We have already mentioned Mr. Paget's modesty, but some- times we deplore this admirable quality, for without it we might have had more of Mr. Paget.