And then the portraits-diabolically clever, but rank caricatures. M. Rodin's way to make the portrait of a famous man is to twist his features up into a look which seems to suggest the character he attributes to his sitter. He knows perfectly well that the unlucky victim of his joke never did, or could, look like that. But it symbolises the inner nature of the man; or, like a nickname, it suggests the trait of character that is imputed to him. That is pure caricature; it is what Sir Francis Gould does with us, and what Caran d'Ache did in France. Having got the clay bust into a general resemblance of the features, the cheeks are pinched up and puffed out as if after a prize-fight, and gobbets are stuck on to the forehead and nose to represent scars, seams, wrinkles, and varicose veins. The sitter may have some such marks in his face, but these the sculptor magnifies to double or treble. They 'give character '-and are caricature. Where clothes are shown they have to be carved as if they were sackcloth daubed with tar. Naturally, Puvis de Chavannes did not like his bust; and the Balzac Committee repudiated the GuyFawkes mannikin which was offered to them. One hopes that Dalou, Falguière, and Laurens took it meekly. When Rodin began on a sitter, he likened him to some animal, and impressed on him that type. Falguière was a little bull with an eruptive character, a grumbling moustache, and a visage seamed with furrows.' So his bust appears in the photograph; but the illustrious sculptor looks like a boxer. Rodin seems to associate intellect with pugilism. His famous Penseur is the gladiator of the Municipal Museum of Rome; and the Victor Hugo is a sort of Hercules preparing to overthrow Antaeus. All this is excellent caricature, but it is not high truth.

Morbid exaggeration is the unerring mark of decadence, just as the Pergamenian or Rhodian schools of Hellenistic art exaggerated the athletic type of Lysippus. The example of this is the Farnese Hercules at Naples, which is now recognised as false art, in spite of its anatomical science. And Rodin pushes the decadence of the Hellenistic sculpture till it becomes grotesque.

Augustin Rodin is a man of rare genius, of original imagination, a poet, an orator, a critic-a great sculptor. He has done some grand, some beautiful things, many stimulating things. But with all his audacity and his powers, he has a morbid love for that which is either repulsive or impossible. And he must exert a fatal influence on those who are carried away by his genius and seek to imitate his brilliant gifts.

FREDERIC HARRISON.

THE PASSING OF THE OXFORD

MOVEMENT1

(Continued.)

III. LIDDON THE SAINT

BUT LIDDON was nobler than he knew. The man was greater than his creed. The soul of the Christian rose above the shackles of the slave. Hence, in view of the later developments of the Oxford Movement, which rapidly advanced down its disintegrating course from 'tracts' to 'ritual' and thence from Lux Mundi to modernism,' we must now approach Liddon on this his innermost

side.

2

The life that Liddon chose was not the life we all should choose. He who lives a life in which the daily duties make no call upon the will cuts himself off from the very means of grace by which God, in the manifold experiences of this world, draws us the closer to Himself. It is not good that man should be alone' is a divine decree of fruitful significance and diverse application. Yet from the various pitfalls bred by solitude it is wonderful how comparatively Liddon was able to keep himself free. We believe him to have been a genuinely good and honourable and high-minded man. Surely we may impute the noble traits in his character to that genuine sense of religion which underlay all the wrappings of his mystic and monastic garb. It was his knowledge of the Scriptures that preserved and latterly restored the balance of his mind. In his just resentment of the reckless statements of the Higher

To the catalogue of authorities justifying the above title given in the previous article I should have added two venerable names. The Rev. Mr. Chancellor J. J. Lias in his Canon Liddon, a Retrospect writes: 'Liddon was in sympathy with a religious movement which . . . has never taken hold of the mind of England as a whole'; 'The High Church party as a party. . . appears to me [to] have somewhat lost its savour' (Revue Intern. de Théologie, Oct.-Dec. 1905). Dr. Dorner, in his justly celebrated History of Protestantism, ii. 491, remarks: 'On the whole the English mind has shown an antipathy to a symbolical religion which delights in twilight and sentimental obscurity; and the Puseyite movement is rapidly declining.'

In the sixteenth century Luther and Erasmus warned their age of the evils of solitude.

3

Critics, in his wise caution as to fasting, in his defence of Biblical inspiration, in his analogy from nature to the resurrection of the body, in his Pauline mode of upholding the innocent uses of this world,' in his innate dislike to dancing priests' and to theatrical shows on ecclesiastical subjects he proved himself a genuinely Christian man. In his last will and testament he trusts,' like a sound English Churchman, 'to obtain God's mercy ONLY through the merits of Jesus Christ.' Liddon, in short, was one of those gracious souls who, whatever the perversity of their theological prejudices, are elect vessels that bear, as Macaulay finely says, the visible stamp and superscription of the Most High; and who, whatever may be their shortcomings on earth, belong to that select but often invisible company of men whose hearts God has touched and whose names are already written in heaven.

Let us linger for a few moments over some of the more private characteristics of Liddon's personal life. From the first he was a being apart. His feeble health allowed him only a two months' curacy at Wantage. And yet in that short time such was the charm of his fragrant personality that many of those who scarce knew him in those early days can still recall the winning saintliness of Liddon's noble mind. At the last, when his friends were forsaking him and the newer lights of Oxford learning were arising, and while he himself waited for Death's gentle hand to remove him from the world of which he had been so distinguished an ornament, he left behind him in quiet and confiding conversations his occasional divergences from the school which he had so chivalrously led.

It has long been matter of debate among theologians whether the spiritual conflict described by St. Paul in the seventh chapter of the Romans refers to the Christian, to the unregenerate, or to the half-regenerate man. For those whom the Gospel has truly touched and transformed the answer has never been doubtful. St. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Whitefield, Spurgeon, our own Prayer Book, Pascal and the Jansenists, the great saints of the Middle Ages and of modern times, nay, St. Paul himself in the following chapter,' have interpreted it as true (perhaps) of the

6

5

He heartily echoed Döllinger's comment on Wellhausen's Prolegomena: It is full of unproved assumptions,' and he used to cite with effect our Lord's words : 'If I tell you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you heavenly things?' From which he drew the necessary inference that what is philosophically false cannot be theologically true-thus condemning the religious sophistry of the later Middle Ages.

• Retractationes, lib. i. cap. xxiii. (ed. Bened.).

Art. ix. Also Homilies iv.

Aquinas ad Rom. vii.: Carnalis ratio etiam hominis sub gratiâ constituti,' and consult a very remarkable list of names between Augustine and Aquinas given with citations in Elliott's Horae Apocalypticae, ii. 222 sq. (5th ed.).

Rom. viii. 10, 23.

unregenerate, as true (in part) of the Christian seeker, but as specially and painfully true of the man after God's own heart. Is it not true that

They who fain would serve Him best

Are conscious most of wrong within?

The Tractarian party, like Wesley, like the Papacy, like Laud and the Arminians, like Molinos and the mystics generally, like the early Pelagians and the later Socinians, asserted the opposite view. Liddon for once sided with the Protestants.

Again, in the ninth chapter of the Romans, St. Paul develops a formidable argument of predestination. We know that our moral choice' (Oλnua) is free and that it is God's wish' Onua) that all men should be saved. Yet philosophy must pronounce, after weighing all the evils incident to man's present condition, that our 'wills' (Boúλnua) are not our own and that God's purposes' (Boulevμa) can never be thwarted. Theologians have from this mysterious dilemma raised a question that has baffled all Christian antiquity, and which still remains as interesting as it is insoluble. In the ultimate analysis, whose is the responsibility?-God's (the perfectly free Agent) or man's (the agent at once free and bound)? In other words, is God's sovereign choice one that affects each individual or merely churches and nations? Once more the same parties are divided. Once more Liddon chose the nobler side.

Liddon's wit was very keen and perhaps too restless for its possessor's happiness. The following is one of his best bons mots, and it is not mentioned in the authoritative Life. Seeing a friend in the 'High' at Oxford and being offered a seat in a gig that had the day before overturned the Khedive on to the pavement, Liddon sarcastically smiled and said: Wouldest thou slay me as thou diddest the Egyptian yesterday?' On another occasion he ascribed a prevailing fog to Dr. Westcott's having for the first time in three weeks unbuttoned his study window. Of the Evangelicals he said, with as much point as truth, that they drew all the texts for their sermons from a couple of chapters in the epistle to the Romans.

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These are happy and harmless gibes, but they were not always so harmless. And the cynical habit grew on him in his later years to the terror of his enemies and the anxiety of his friends. Yet his private life was beautiful, tender, and devout. In the peculiar language of his school-his friendships were sacred, sacramental things. For Pusey, for Keble, for Bishop Hamilton, for the great Dr. Döllinger, for the late Bishop King, Liddon's affection bordered on enthusiasm. He rarely missed a daily celebration of

8

This, I am informed, has ceased to be true of them. My authority is Chancellor Lias (see note 1).

the Holy Communion. He never failed to recite the Daily 'Office.' Like Aquinas, half mystic, half metaphysician, he had early dedicated his pure soul to celibacy in defence of the Universal Church, and strove to reconcile with our modern ways of thought and with the findings of modern science

The rigid creed of Athanasius.

For twenty years, he tells us, he used-and apparently without injurious effect-the anodynes of the Confessional. Every Friday was observed, so the rumour at his college ran, with Compline and with candles; while the sight of some old hermit's cave in Wales affected him so strongly that he would gesticulate in forms of prayer and thanksgiving regardless of the present company about him.

We need not bid for cloister'd cell
Our neighbour and our work farewell,
Nor strive to wind ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.

The words are those of dear Mr. Keble.' But they were not for Liddon the counsel of perfection. He fain would hitch his wagon to a star.' He fain would go one step higher than divine wisdom or human nature would approve. If ever there was a man by grace or nature dedicated to the priesthood it was Liddon. We are fortunate in possessing from the pen of Mr. Frederic Harrison an early portrait of his schoolfellow :

I was fond of all sorts of games; he [Liddon] of none. I read all sorts of books; he had even then his own fixed line. . . . He was at seventeen just what he was at twenty-seven or thirty-four or forty-seven-sweet, grave, thoughtful, complete. Others, perhaps, may recall growth. . . . I cannot! As a schoolboy I always thought he looked just what he did as a priest. There was the same expression of sweet, somewhat fatherly, somewhat melancholy, interest. He would reprove, exhort, advise boys just as a young priest does in his own congregation. . . . He was entirely a priest among boys. His school-work was always well done and adequately done, but I do not remember that he won prizes or cared to win any. His interests even then were entirely with theology. . . At seventeen Liddon was just as deeply absorbed in Dr. Pusey and his work as at twenty-seven."

Such an organic unity of purpose is rare in any life. It belongs only to outstanding characters.

IV. LIDDON THE PREACHER

Yet it will not be by his theology so much as by his sermons that Liddon will be remembered. In these he left the sacramental shibboleths behind. In these he is loyal to his own true self and loyal to the language of the Prayer Book.