No Public opinion is a shifting abstraction; it is the passing impression on passing events of a miscellaneous crowd of persons whose main preoccupation is not with public affairs. How many people were there, during the weeks in which Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues were cowering before an imaginary blast of popular resentment, who knew or cared what Zobeir Pasha was ? Possibly, if the appointment had been made, there would have been some violent speeches in Parlia ment (there were plenty of them as it was), and some angry leading articles in the press. In three days the newspapers would have been writing about something else; in three months, if the measure had proved successful, everybody would have approved--and probably forgotten-it. Public opinion is so uncertain, so transient, and, above all, so difficult to condense, that Ministers, who set their sails by it, are blown from day to day to all quarters of the compass. wonder in such circumstances they run upon the rocks. They cannot steer straight if they are always watching these flickering currents. There is only one definite test of public opinion, and that is the verdict of the constituencies deliberately recorded at a general election. When that is given the Cabinet can discover whether it has or has not been acting in accordance with the ideas of the majority of voters. And until it is given they are responsible for the national executive, and have no right to devolve their responsibility on the press or the platform, or even the House of Commons. That seems the true moral of Lord Cromer's chapters on Gordon, with their plainly told story of national misfortune and administrative weakness. It has not lost its applice. tion. Disaster and disgrace are as likely, as in Mr. Gladstone's time, to dog the steps of Ministers who allow their policy to be shaped for them from day to day by that confused hubbub of conflicting voices which they choose to regard as Public Opinion. SIDNEY LOW. JAMES KNOWLES A TRIBUTE FROM SOME FRIENDS I It is one of the most difficult tasks in the world to write an appreciation of a friend, honoured and beloved, who has passed away. Such an appreciation, if it were to satisfy everybody else, would of necessity prove unsatisfactory to the writer himself. For it is just the essential quality which makes friendship possible and makes it delightful that escapes analysis; it is too subtle, too ethereal, too spiritual; it can no more be imprisoned in a form of words than can the charm of music or the fragrance of a flower. The late Sir James Knowles possessed a genius for friendship. No one perhaps among his contemporaries was so rich as he was in the number and variety of his friends. Not to know him was at one time of his life, it may almost be said, to be unknown; and to know him well during his best years was to know all the people who were most worth knowing in London. For he touched life on many sidesArt, Literature, Society, Politics, Science, Religion; he was interested in all; and each one of his many interests he so treated that it told with singular effect upon the others. There was something in him which won the confidence of men. Nobody but he could have originated the Metaphysical Society and kept it alive so long. The secret of his attractive power was not so much anything that he did or wrote or said; it was himself. I have sometimes sat at luncheon or dinner in his house, wondering how he who spoke so few words, and even those in a tone so gentle as to be all but inaudible, could have gathered such a company of friends about him, and held them by such intimate ties of friendship to himself. But it was his selfeffacingness that was the magnet of his personality. He shone in society by not wishing to shine. He was (if I may borrow a figure from physics) the best possible conductor of social intercourse. He said little; but had he not been present, the guests would not have said so much, still less would such guests have said it one to another. He drew men together-even the most different and divergent of menand he drew the best out of them all. If it were necessary to ask what was his contribution to the bright and often brilliant talk in which he delighted, the answer could only be that he unsealed the lips of others, if he seldom opened or only half opened his own. He dealt with literature much in the same way as with conversation. Although he might have been a forcible writer, he wrote little or nothing. But he was the author of many compositions not his own. It has often been alleged of him that he set as much store upon the celebrity attaching to the names of the persons from whom he obtained articles for his Review as upon the merits of the articles themselves. But it is at least equally true that, if he thought an unknown writer was capable of doing good literary work in any subject of interest or importance to the public at any time, he would afford him unstinted encouragement. I doubt if he ever knew a keener pleasure than in the discovery of new talent. But whether his contributors were veteran writers who had long since won their spurs in the field of letters or recruits coming for the first time under the fire of criticism, he set himself to elicit from all the best service which it was in their power to render. I used to think of him as one whose literary office in life might not unsuitably have been defined in the well-known passage of Horace fungar vice cotis acutum Reddere quae ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi. It was almost a necessary condition of such an office that he should cultivate what it is almost a paradox to describe as the habit of sympathetic detachment. In all, or in nearly all, the questions of the day he showed a deep concern; but upon none would he express himself as a partisan. If he uttered a strong opinion of his own, it was generally designed to extract an opinion from somebody else. The Socratic irony,' as it is called, which was natural to him led him in general to aim at seeking information rather than at giving it. If he impressed the stamp of his own individuality upon his Review, the spirit which he held to be necessary for his Review reacted upon his own mental temper. Anyhow, it was only on rare occasions and only when he felt that a political question might vitally affect the welfare of the nation at large, as in the instance of the Channel Tunnel, that he would suffer his Review to become the vehicle of public agitation. N One who allows and invites persons of all political and religious creeds to express their sentiments in writing under the shelter of his name comes naturally, if not inevitably, to realise the good in all. He cannot well be, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, a good hater.' His business is to attract all sorts and conditions of men, and not to repel any. Partisanship evokes both strong affection and strong dislike. Yet the role which Sir James Knowles played among the varied and almost motley group of contributors to his Review sat easily upon him. He was naturally comprehensive and not exclusive in his sympathies. Hardly anything, I think, created aversion in him but vulgarity; of that he was wholly intolerant. But the interest which never rises to enthusiasm is itself a form of detachment. He would smile almost unconsciously at people who cared so much for matters which were in his eyes not much worth caring for. If I may criticise him at all, he was not perhaps altogether free from that curious spirit of the age which leads many persons in the present day to insist upon making themselves out to be worse than they are, to affect an indifference which they do not feel upon the highest subjects, and, while professing themselves to be Agnostics in religion, to spend their time and strength in the practical philanthropy which religion encourages and sanctifies. I have heard him argue that the world would grow to care less and less for Theology; but he was at heart, I think, a truly religious man. It was characteristic of his nature that, in spite of his real or professed impartiality, he gave an unmistakable character to his Review. Everybody knew or felt that the Nineteenth Century, or as it subsequently became the Nineteenth Century and After, stood for culture, for enlightenment, for social, political, and religious progress. It was impossible that a man such as he was should be a reactionary or an obscurantist. Rather than consent to an editorial policy which would, as he thought, shut out the light of new truth from men's eyes he sacrificed at a critical moment of his life not only his pecuniary interests, but the personal associations which he valued far more highly. And the new Review-his own Review-which he then originated became a potent source of illuminative influence upon the world. Of the high repute which his Review enjoyed he was constantly jealous. About the Nineteenth Century there was always a note of distinction. To write for it was a coveted honour. For, however opinions might differ as to the merits of particular articles, it was beyond question that the Nineteenth Century in his hands maintained a high level of intellectual excellence. It was his conception of the responsibility belonging to a well-known Review which made him insist upon publishing none but articles signed with their authors' names. He was wont at times to speak of the articles which he had lost or refused to publish because their authors would not let them appear, unless anonymously. So, too, he always printed his own name on the cover of his magazine. For he was strongly convinced that whatever a writer said in his pages should be said frankly and openly. Anything like a stab in the dark, or a charge which could not bear the light of day, or a half-truth told by one who was not in a position to know what the truth was, was alien from the spirit alike of the Nineteenth Century and of its editor. Sir James Knowles was a many-sided man. He was an architect, a critic of the fine arts and of painting especially, a well-known figure in society, an earnest and enlightened patriot, a philanthropist whose many kindnesses were not less deeply prized for being often so scrupulously concealed; but as an editor, and the editor of a monthly Review, he was supreme. His judgment of a literary article was intuitive. He appeared to know at once whether it would be a success or a failure; nay, he knew how to convert what might have been a failure into a success. Upon this point one of his contributors may appeal to personal experience; for although I wrote a good many articles for him at different times, and some of them he asked me to modify or abbreviate, and one he asked me wholly to reconstruct, I always felt, if not at once yet in the end, that his judgment was unerring, and that whatever might be the faults of the article as it appeared in print, it was at all events the better for his suggestions. But the world is as little likely to know all the story of his literary influence as of his personal kindness. It seems that, as we grow older and the shadows close around us, we come to estimate the friends who have been taken from us not so much by their eminence in the eyes of the world as by the sense of loss arising in our own hearts. It is not putting Sir James Knowles above his true worth to say that he was one of those friends whose death makes the deepest, painfullest wound in many lives. He occupied somehow a unique position in the English world. I do not mean that it was the highest position, as the world counts distinction; but it was one which nobody else can fill like him. Some of the most famous of men are they whose places are easily and speedily taken by others. There are other men, not so famous, who leave an unspeakable void. It was not of a man best known to the Roman world that the ancient poet wrote the pathetic stanza: Ergo Quintilium perpetuus sopor In English society the chair of Sir James Knowles remains, and will remain, unfilled. But they who knew him of old and now look upon that vacant chair with feelings akin to tears will, I think, be moved by their reverence for his memory to a deeper sense of all that is beautiful in life and a purer faith in the final victory of truth and love. J. E. C. WELLDON. |