Synopses & Reviews
JOHN, VISCOUNT MOR EY AN APPRECIATION AND SOME REMINISCENCES BY JOHN H. MORGAN The nobler a soul is, the more objects of compassion it hath. WITH PHOTOGRAVURE FRONTISPIECE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON M1FFLIN COMPANY 1924 TO THOMAS HARDY, O. M. PREFACE A WORD as to the origin and purpose of the follow ing pages. Three out of the four chapters dealing exclusively with Lord Morleys published works were written, and duly appeared in periodicals, in his own lifetime. They were fortunate in winning from him words of commendation, and he at one time expressed a desire for their republication. One of them Chapter VII. was, indeed, as is ex plained on page 62, to have been the starting-point in a common literary venture of his and mine. So much may be said by way of excuse, if excuse be needed, for their republication in the present book. The three chapters of reminiscences stand on a different footing. They were written and, in the case of two of them, published some months after Lord Morleys death, and would probably never have been written at all, had I not been impressed by the one-sided and partial character of the many appreciations written by others after that mournful event. And by partial I mean either idolatrous or iconoclastic. Untempered I except the felicitous study by Mr. Birrell which appeared in the pages of the Empire Review, a study by an intimate friend which maintained an admirable equipoise of judgment. VII vili PREFACE eulogy was followed, as was perhaps inevitable, by intemperate blame. There has been too much of both. It seemed to me that the time had arrived for one who had the privilege of belong ing to the inner circle of his friends to try to hold the balance evenbetween the two extremes, and to attempt to show him as he really was. Some of those who knew him best are good enough to think I have succeeded. His nephew and executor, Mr. Guy Morley, has written to me, with a kindness of which I am only too sensible, to say that the result is a most just and friendly portrait of the original. If I had had any doubts, and I have had none, as to the propriety of these two chapters, his words would be with me, for obvious reasons decisive. With Lord Morleys private life I have not dealt at alL Had I done so, I could, as I have said in the pages that follow, have told a tale of singular devotion, a tale of one whose whole life was a noble comment on the text, Bear ye one anothers bur dens, and who, living, fulfilled the law of Christ. But this is an appreciation, not a biography. It is, however, an appreciation suffused with personal reminiscence. Oblivion blindly scat tereth her poppy, and there may be some who will be glad to have these recollections before the memory of him who recollects has begun to fade. I have followed Lord Morley s own practice in the obituary essay he wrote upon his friend and master, John Stuart Mill, and in his Life of Gladstone namely that of reproducing conversa tions with the subject of my discourse, for it is in PREFACE ix a mans conversation, as in his work, that, in the words of Ruskin, you find him to the uttermost or not at all. These conversations are merely a selection, and in making it I have excluded all purely personal talk, except in so far as it was concerned with and illuminated the public actions of public men. I have also published a portion it is but a small portion of the many letters he addressed to me. Imight easily have published more, but the solicitude, in my own regard, of some, and the intimacy of others, are such as to preclude me. The first chapter is here printed for the first time. The second and third chapters have already appeared in the pages of the Quarterly Review. They have, however, undergone some revision and considerable expansion, the latter the harvest of further research in the writers diaries and correspondence. In these chapters II. and III...