I had run down to Oxford once to see Jowett, and a friend asked me, had I ever heard the boys sing in Magdalen College Chapel; he told me that some one had left a large sum to get the boys perfectly trained, and I know that boys' voices were the most beautiful in the world, so we made an appointment and in due course took our seats.
From the first moment I sat entranced; the boys not only sang divinely, but the music itself was extraordinarily beautiful, and I found out afterwards that it was the best music produced in England in three centuries; a cantata, I think by Purcell, brought tears to my eyes-I had a divine, unforgettable hour with those minstrels of God.
It was then given to me for the first time to catch a glimpse of the highest soul-beauty in the English character, and there is no higher on earth. How the same people who can train those boys to sing such heavenly music should be able to fight the miners and condemn their working-poor to destitution and misery is one of the most hideous puzzles of life to me. They have still in this twentieth century prisons and hospitals side by side; after a Casement has served them loyally for twenty-five years and been ennobled by and for his services to them, they can murder him in cold blood for his obedience to the highest instincts in him: the poor, purblind creatures could not see that "pardon's the word for all" and forgiveness is nobler than punishment. Yet I still hear those boy voices choiring like young-eyed cherubim!
Curiously enough, I always think of science when music is much in my mind; they are two of my greatest joys, though I don't pretend to know a great deal about them. Still, Wagner to me had a rival in Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the best and wisest of men; and I can't talk of Sullivan as a musician without thinking of William Thomson, f another great and lovable and simply sincere soul who stands with Newton himself and is curiously related to him in his prodigious mastery of mathematics.
Perhaps the greatest scientist of the nineteenth century, and the twentieth has not yet produced his equal, was William Thomson, afterwards Lord Kelvin. His only rival, Helmholtz, put Kelvin on a pedestal by himself. Every one knows how he made the first Atlantic cable a success; it was an instrument which he had discovered that sent the first telegram between England and America in '58. He was the first, too, to light his own house with electricity.
In the last days of the century I was introduced to him by Alfred Russel Wallace, and was very much surprised to find that he was lame, the result of a skating accident in youth; but in spite of his lameness he had a wonderful presence-no one could forget the domed head and the kindly, frank eyes and grey beard. Two things I remember him by peculiarly: he talked of Joule as his master because he was the first to prove that heat was a mode of motion; Kelvin then went on to say that in every transformation of energy from one form to another, a certain proportion changes into heat, and the heat thus produced becomes diffused by radiation. This gradual transformation of energy into heat is perpetually going on and must sooner or later put an end to all life.
Almost before his death his whole theory was thrown overboard. His gloomy predictions of a degeneration of energy, ending in stagnation, are no longer justified. His conception of atoms and atomic energies has been entirely superseded by the electronic view of matter, and we now look forward to an endless and boundless unfolding, not of energy and power alone, but of life itself.
Kelvin was the first, I suppose, to point out that the amount of time now required by the advocates of the Darwinian theory, and upholders of the process of evolution, couldn't be conceded without assuming the existence of a different set of natural laws from those with which we are acquainted. I understood him to speak of Darwinism somewhat contemptuously. He seemed to say: "We know nothing of creation. They talk of life beginning in seething marshes and say this earth has gradually cooled, and is cooling."
Kelvin declared positively that if at any time the earth was hotter on the surface by even fifty degrees Fahrenheit than it is now, all life would have been impossible.
I have never known so strenuous a worker. If he had five minutes to wait at any time, he pulled out a little notebook and began to make notes or solve some problem. The only time I seem to have moved him was when I spoke of the "weary weight of this unintelligible world."
"Oh, how true," he said, "I want to take that down"; and out came the notebook. "We know nothing," he went on, "and I am much afraid we never shall know anything but appearances; the meaning of it all, the purpose, if purpose there be, is hidden from us; of essentials, we know nothing."
Kelvin always struck me as perfectly simple and unaffected. He made a great fortune; everything he touched seemed to succeed. He lived till over eighty and went through life with perfect simplicity, not a trace of pose or snobbishness-probably in the twenty years from 1890 to 1910, the wisest man in the world.
We are gradually moving away from the attitude of mind engendered by religion to the attitude born of science. Then we accepted statements and believed; now we question all things and doubt.
Will the scientific habit of mind produce as great masterpieces in art and literature as the religious habit? There are no messiahs of science; a Kelvin is superseded almost in his own lifetime; yet the masterpieces of art will surely be built on our emotions and sexual desires, which grow in strength as we grow in health and knowledge of living.
Kelvin knew nothing, I think, of the marvelous discoveries of J. C. Bose in Calcutta. Bose has proved that plants live and feel as we do, are exhilarated by caffeine and killed by chloroform; he has shown, too, that metals respond to stimuli, are prone to fatigue and react to poisons; in fact, he has extended the realm of life and feeling to infinity.
One result is that we fear and tremble less; but hope and marvel and enjoy more.
CHAPTER VIII
In 1892 two men died-Tennyson, the poet, in England, and Renan, the great prose writer, in France. The sensation caused by the death of Tennyson in England was unparalleled: he was treated like a demi-god: on all sides one heard that he was the greatest English poet of the nineteenth century. The Quarterly Review affirmed that "no English poet has possessed a more complete command of his genius in its highest form. No crudities of image like those of Byron, nor cloudy word-phantasms such as those of Shelley, nor fanciful affectations like those of Keats, nor versified prose, such as that of Wordsworth, mar his equality of treatment." A well known writer declared that "the marvellous island held nothing more glorious than this man, nothing more holy, wonderful and dear." Swinburne published a threnody on him of lyrical adoration, and in the press many compared him with Shakespeare. Renan, too, was overpraised by the French, but to nothing like the same extent: they recognized that he was a master of prose, a really great writer, but no Frenchman would have thought of putting him with Montaigne.
Or let us take Victor Hugo, whose life has more points of resemblance with that of Tennyson: he was a greater singer and his genius was far more widely recognized; he was as peculiarly French as Tennyson was English; he, too, lived to a great age and was accorded a public state funeral which was turned into a great ceremony. But there were no such dithyrambs of praise in the French press over Hugo: there was far more measure, more reason; the best heads did not hesitate to qualify their admiration for a great poet and master of musical French.
Tennyson's last day was described by a journalist on the Pall Mall Gazette with a fervor of admiration that made him a sacred memory to thousands who had never seen him or read a line of his finer work. I quote the account because it was peculiarly characteristic of English sentiment.