Chapter XII: Conclusion: 2 (2)

I am here to-night to tell you what I can from my own experience of this great life’s work. First, however, let me give it you in the words of his poet son, from the lines on Rugby Chapel, which I hope are well known to most of you:

“O strong soul, by what shore
Tarriest thou now? For that force,
Surely, has not been left vain!
Somewhere, surely, afar,
In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being, is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm!

Yes, in some far-shining sphere,
Conscious or not of the past,
Still thou performest the word
Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live—
Prompt, unwearied, as here!
Still thou upraisest with zeal
The humble good from the ground,
Sternly repressest the bad!
Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse
Those who with half-open eyes
Tread the border-land dim,
’Twixt vice and virtue; reviv’st,
Succourest!—this was thy work,
This was thy life upon earth.”

And surely such is the work still of such as he, the born leaders of men; and in the darkest hour, again and again will such as they come to our minds when our need is sorest.

“Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, reinspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.”

Such prosaic details of personal experience as I can give you, my boys, will fall flat enough after a trumpet call like this; but they are what I am come here to give you, and I will try to give them as simply and truthfully as I can.

Nearly forty years ago, when I first came across, in Stanley’s _Life of Arnold_, a passage in one of his letters to a friend as to the treatment of unpromising pupils, describing it as “very often like kicking a football up hill,” the truth as well as the humour of the saying came home to me very vividly—“You kick it onwards,” he says, “twenty yards, and it rolls back nineteen: still you have gained one yard, and thus in a good many kicks you make some progress.”

Now I don’t believe that any boy had more reason than I to be thankful for this kicking-up process, and for the Doctor’s patient use of it. As long as you didn’t roll back _more_ than the nineteen yards he stuck to you, and used whatever germ he could detect of intellectual activity in you to rouse you, and hinder the fatal rolling back over the twentieth yard of the descent.

I will illustrate this by my own case. I went up to Rugby at ten from a preparatory school for Winchester, where a different grammar from the Rugby one was in use, and we were taught a different pronunciation of Greek. Partly owing to discouragement at first from this cause, but more to my inaptitude for languages and excessive fondness for games, I soon lost any real interest in the form work, and only did just enough to get my yearly remove. On the other hand I was fond of reading history and current literature, and knew more of both than most of my form-fellows. So for three years I was kicked slowly up the school hill, in no small danger all the time of rolling back over the twentieth yard, and so ending my school career. However, I managed to arrive safely in the Shell, though I fear with the character of a boy who took little interest in his work, and never did more than he could help.

In those days the Doctor used to come round once a month and examine each form in some book they had been reading, an ordeal which all but the brightest and best boys looked forward to with no little uneasiness. I was very low in the Shell when he came round to examine us in the first book of Horace’s Odes, and towards the end of the terrible hour asked the head of the form, who was construing the 11th Ode, what made the Romans so especially grateful to Augustus in his dealings with the Parthians. He and some other boys made shots, but the Doctor shook his head, and the question came slowly down past some thirty boys to me, when I timidly ventured “the recovery of the eagles and standards taken from Crassus.” “Quite right! Go up!” the Doctor said, evidently pleased; and I marched up for the first time to the top of my form. My stay in that exalted region was short, but from that time I felt his manner to me changed. He may have noticed, too, that I had taken a volume of Sir W. Raleigh’s _History of the World_ out of the school library, and found out that I was familiar with Scott’s poetry and novels. At any rate, from that time I used to fancy he always gave me an easy piece to construe, and instead of horrid questions on grammar and scholarship, would ask for some illustration of the passage from an English classic.

I will give the last instance I remember of this method in the Doctor’s teaching. It was in my last half at school when I had reached the lower bench of the sixth. We were reading the second book of Aristotle’s _Rhetorica_, and had come to the chapter on old men, whom that disagreeable philosopher describes as μικρόψυχοι—“small-souled”—caring about nothing great, but only what tends to the ease of their own lives. “Do you remember a striking illustration of this in one of Scott’s novels?” the Doctor asked the head of the school, Theodore Walrond.—No answer, and the question came all round the form,—when it came to me he paused for several seconds and seemed disappointed (so at least I thought) when he had to pass on. I shall remember the pang of self-reproach which shot through me to the last day of my life. No one answered, so he referred us to the end of the Abbot, where in her flight after the defeat of Langside, Queen Mary with her small band of devoted followers pause at the convent garden on the Border, where the old monk is digging. He leans on his spade watching them, as they ride off, and mutters, “I could pity this poor Queen and these men. But what are these things to a man of fourscore? and it’s a fine dropping morning for the young kale wort.”

As I have just told you, I shall always remember the sore feeling at having disappointed him whom of all men I most wished to please, when that question passed me. But this after all was only an intellectual failure. I wish I could stop here, but as I have come to make a clean breast to you my young schoolfellows, I have a further confession to make which I hope may be of use as a warning to some of you. I was captain of Big-Side in my last year, which, as you all know, involves the practical control of the Cricket and Football Funds. Now there was a custom in those days to have a School House supper on the last day before the Christmas holidays, the cost of which was paid out of the Big-Side fund. The Doctor’s leave had to be asked, but it was looked upon as a matter of course, and so, great and sore was the surprise and indignation, when on the eve of the Christmas holidays 1841, a message came from the Doctor that there was to be no house supper. There can be no doubt he was perfectly in the right, as “Big-Side fund” belonged to the whole school, and it was a misappropriation of trust funds to spend any part of it for the benefit of a single house. But this objection I don’t think occurred to any one, and the indignant athletes determined, as there could be no house supper, there should be a smaller one of select men for which no leave should be asked. The necessary funds could not have been reached except with my consent, and this I gave without thought, as I rather sympathised with the rebels; and I not only let them have the money but went to the supper. As old Thomas would of course give out no beer, several bottles of wine and spirits were smuggled into the house, with the result that some half-dozen of the wilder spirits got uproariously drunk, and besides destroying some of the Library books, made a serious row in the bed-rooms and damaged some of the furniture. I went off by an early train next morning, but was so thoroughly ashamed that I wrote, on reaching home, to the Doctor to tell him I had been at the party. I transcribe a part of his answer from the old yellow sheet which I have kept religiously from that day.

“FOX HOWE, Dec. 18, 1840.

“MY DEAR HUGHES—I did not know nor should I probably ever
have known of your share in the business of Friday last had
it not been for your own letter. Officially, therefore, I do
not know it now—for of course it would be utterly out of the
question to use your own letter as evidence against you. The
matter therefore being set at rest so far as any public
notice of your conduct is concerned, I have the less
difficulty in writing to you fully and plainly, not as
master of Rugby school, but as an old acquaintance of your
father’s, and as a man who feels very sincerely interested
about yourself. I cannot deny that your letter gave me a
very great and unexpected shock; for I had no notion that
you or any one else in the sixth form was concerned with the
party. I have been so accustomed on these points to feel
confidence in the sixth form, that I really am apt to have
no suspicion whatever of them in such matters; and I am
quite sure that if I am obliged to resign this confidence
the school must speedily go to ruin. Farther, I think that
according to my school recollections, good and steady
fellows at Winchester would have taken no part in such a
business, and it would grieve me very much to think that at
Rugby such characters could not equally be depended
upon—that companionship or any other motives might lead into
mischief those on whom I ought to be able to rely.”

I will not quote further from this and another later letter; but, though no eye but mine has seen them till to-day, I felt that I could not honestly speak to you to-night without alluding to this matter. Perhaps some of you may have noticed in the anonymous dedication of _Tom Brown’s Schooldays_ to Mrs. Arnold, the words “who owes more than he can ever acknowledge or repay to her and her’s.” You will now perhaps understand them. It may also, perhaps, encourage some one here or there to take heart again, on seeing how a moral breakdown in early life, if wisely handled by a master like Arnold, may become a source of strength in later years.

These few memories of Arnold as headmaster may fitly close with his parting words to a favourite pupil, “Whatever profession you choose doesn’t much matter if you follow steadily our great common profession, Christ’s service.” I believe that our loyalty to his memory in this place would be as genuine if his work had begun and ended here, as our great Headmaster and second founder; but a crowd of the foremost of living Englishmen would not be going to meet in the Jerusalem Chamber to-morrow, to arrange for a worthy memorial to him in the Abbey, fifty years after his death, if he had not been a great benefactor to England outside these walls.

Let me in conclusion, then, glance shortly at his work for the nation. As an historian I believe there is not one of the brilliant group of writers of history in the last half-century but would acknowledge their debt to his example and his method; but I am not an expert, and so will say no more on this point. To some extent, however, I can speak as an expert as to the movement which has revolutionised the social and industrial life of England in the last fifty years; and with the exceptions, perhaps, of Mr. Maurice’s and Lord Shaftesbury’s, I know of no name which can be put before Dr. Arnold’s amongst those who, in the first rank, have helped to tide our country over the dangerous time of that crisis, which came to a head in Europe in 1848, and is still trying and proving every nation in Christendom.

After watching for years the condition into which the Corn Laws on the one hand, and the orthodox dogma of the Economists of that day (of salvation by _laissez-faire_—or by buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest markets)—he was convinced in 1831, to put it in his own words, that a time was at hand “when the devil will fight his best in good earnest.” In the October of that year he wrote to a friend, after describing his field of wholesome and happy labour in his family and the school, “but my sense of the evils of the times, and to what prospects I am bringing up my children, is overwhelmingly bitter. All in the moral and physical world appears so exactly to announce the coming of the “great day of the Lord,” _i.e._ a period of fearful visitation to terminate the existing state of things—whether to terminate the whole existence of the human race neither man nor angel knows—that no entireness of private happiness can possibly close my mind against the sense of it.”

And so, as he could not close his eyes to the danger but was haunted by it, he set to work to combat “the two great opposite forms of human wickedness”—priestcraft and Benthamism—or, as he called them, “white and red Jacobinism”—and went into the fight with all the thoroughness and independence which made him such a power in whatever he undertook. He could find no place in which he could speak out in the Press, and so started a weekly journal of his own, _The Englishman’s Register_, without any illusion as to its prospects. “Every selfish motive,” he writes, “would deter me from the _Register_: it will be a pecuniary loss, it will bring me no credit, but much trouble and probably abuse, and some of my dearest friends look on it not only coldly, but with aversion. But I _do_ think it a most solemn duty to make the attempt.” He put his nephew, Mr. Ward, in as editor, writing the principal leaders himself and giving a general supervision. “The difficulty of the undertaking,” he soon found, “is indeed most serious. All the Tories turn from me as a Liberal, whilst the strong Reformers think me timid and half corrupt.” And again, “If I had two necks I should think I had a good chance of being hanged by both sides, as I think I shall by the one that gets the better if it comes to a fight; there is not a man in England who is less a party man than I am, for in fact no party would own me.” A year later he writes, “_Experto crede_, it is expensive work to push an infant journal up hill.”

The life of the _Register_ was short, but it did good work, and by introducing him to the _Sheffield Courant_ gave him the opening he wanted for the future. He was, I think, scarcely prepared for the flood of angry and scurrilous abuse and ridicule which the _Register_ drew on him (notably from Theodore Hook in the _John Bull_), but he was splendidly indifferent to it all. “It is an immense blessing,” was his answer to indignant friends, “to be perfectly callous to ridicule, or, which comes to the same thing, to be thoroughly conscious that what we have in us of noble and delicate is not ridiculous to any but fools, and that, if fools will laugh, wise men will do well to let them.” And again, “I have lived for many years in entire indifference to the opinion of people, unless I have reason to think them good and wise; and I wish my friends would share this indifference as far as I am concerned.”

It would be out of place here to go into any detail as to these political writings, or to do more than glance at his long struggle on the council of the London University for the necessity of maintaining a Christian character in national education. With astonishing patience he tried again and again to find a common ground with his colleagues, and only left them when convinced that it was hopeless, thereby drawing on himself more suspicion and attacks from quite a different quarter. “Better go on as we are than set up national education on any but a Christian basis,” was his final decision; for “the moment you enter on moral subjects—history or philosophy—you must be Christian or Antichristian.” And again, “What is the impartiality talked of? That a man shall be neither a Christian, nor yet not a Christian? The fact is, that religious veneration is inconsistent with what is called impartiality, which means that you see some good and some evil on both sides, and so identify yourselves with neither, and can judge of both. That is true of all persons and things human; not of what is divine. If Christ was no more than Socrates, I can speak of Him impartially: can judge Him: but if I believe in Him, I am not His judge, but His servant and creature. He claims the devotion of my whole nature, for He is identical with goodness, wisdom, holiness.”

And thus I come naturally to the last part of our subject, the influence of Arnold on the spiritual or religious life of England. In his last years the time of a great revival had come, which would cast that life, as it were, in a new mould—into what mould was the vital question. The decisive crisis was in its most acute phase when he passed away fifty years ago. How well I remember it, for I was at its very centre from 1842 to 1845, at Oriel, Arnold’s own college, and that of the foremost men in the Tractarian movement—of Newman, Keble, and Hurrell Froude, of Pusey, and Marriott, and Church—when Tract Ninety was dividing Oxford common-rooms into hostile camps, and its author was spending the last sad years at Littlemore before leaving the church of his fathers, and dragging with or after him some of the brightest and best of my contemporaries. It was a time of sore rebuke and distress to our church, and to none of its sons sorer than to Arnold, scores of whose pupils were in residence.

At Oxford in those years, Bishop Cotton, my last tutor here, had given me, when I left school, the volume of _Sermons on Christian Life_, published in 1841, and I had read the famous introduction again and again in the Christmas holidays before I went up to Oriel. The pathos of that appeal came right home to me, and I think, even if my reason and conscience had remained unconvinced, I could not have resisted it. “Mr. Newman’s system,” he wrote, “is now at its flood; it is daily making converts; it is daily swelled by many of those who neither love it nor understand it, but who hope to make it serve their purpose, or like to swim with the stream. A strong profession therefore of an opposite faith at the present moment must expect to meet with little favour; nor indeed have I any hope of turning the tide, which will flow for its appointed season, and its ebb does not seem to be at hand. But whilst the hurricane rages, those exposed to it may well encourage one another to hold fast their own foundations against it; and many are exposed to it in whose welfare I naturally have the deepest interest, and in whom old impressions may be supposed to have still so much force that I may claim for them, at least, a patient hearing.” But far from remaining unconvinced, both my reason and conscience went frankly and cordially with him when he urged, “Christ’s church is absolutely without a human earthly priesthood, for it has the eternal priesthood of Christ which leaves no place for any other; there is no priesthood without mediation, and we have one mediator, the man Christ Jesus. Do we want the priest for sacrifice? Nay, there is no place for him at all; for our one atoning sacrifice has been once offered, and by its virtue we are enabled to offer daily our spiritual sacrifices of ourselves, which no other man can offer for us. Do we want him for intercession? Nay, there is one who ever liveth to make intercession for us, through whom we have access to the Father, and for whose sake Paul, Apollos and Peter, and things present and things to come, are ours already.”

And so I and many others passed through that time unscathed, and all the more easily because he had also taught us that all there is of good, or noble, or self-denying, in this system is altogether independent of the doctrine of the priesthood—that there are many good practices in the Romish Church which it would be most desirable to restore among ourselves, such as “daily church services, frequent communions, memorials of our Christian calling continually presented to our notice, in crosses and wayside oratories, commemorations of holy men of all times and all countries; the doctrine of the communion of saints practically taught; religious orders, especially of women, of different kinds, and under different rules, delivered only from the snare and sin of perpetual vows.” So he pleaded in 1841. Half a century has gone by since those words were written. The movement which was to remould the Church, and human society through the Church, is still with us; several of the good practices which Arnold approved have established themselves already, the rest seem to be on the way. But how stands the crucial question of the priesthood? Is the Church Arnold loved so well and served so faithfully destined to lose all truly courageous faith, and to teach her children cowardly to crave for some man, as liable to sin as themselves, to stand between them and Christ, who has redeemed them, and bidden them to come straight to Him? Upon the answer which your generation will give to that question depends, I believe, more than upon anything else, the future of England. May it be that for which Arnold pleaded half a century ago, and which the brave old Poet Laureate has voiced for us of this generation who are passing away, in his latest words,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

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WILLIAM COTTON OSWELL
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT RUGBY SCHOOL ON 24TH JUNE 1894

I HOPE you boys in this last decade of the century are as great hero-worshippers as we were in the fourth. Speech-day, 1834, was the first I was at, as I had come as a new boy in February of that year, just sixty years ago. It was held at Easter then, in the middle of the long half-year, which lasted for five months with only a break of three days. That year, 1834, was a famous one for Rugby. At Oxford, Arthur Stanley had got a Balliol, and at Cambridge, Dean Vaughan a Trinity scholarship, while still sixth-form boys, and the reputation of the school was going up by leaps and bounds at the universities and in the country. But though we small boys were proud in a way of Stanley and Vaughan, of Clough and Burbidge, and other scholars and poets, we looked on them more as providential providers of extra half-holidays than with the enthusiasm of hero-worship. This we reserved for the kings of the Close, round whom clustered legends of personal encounters with drovers at the monthly cattle-fairs (which were then held in High Street, and came right up to the school gates, tempting curious yokels to trespass on the sacred precincts), or the navvies who were laying down the first line of the London and North-Western Railway, or the gamekeepers of a neighbouring squire with whom the school was in a state of open war over the right of fishing in the Avon.

I did not myself share this rather indiscriminate enthusiasm; for the kings of the Close were, as a rule, a rough and hard set of taskmasters, who fagged us for whole afternoons, and were much too ready with the cane. But for this very reason I had all the more to bestow on the one who, to my boyish imagination, stood out from the rest as Hector from the ruck of the Trojan princes; and this hero was William Cotton Oswell, whose portrait took its honoured place yesterday on the walls of our Rugby Valhalla. It was not from any personal knowledge of or contact with him, for we were at different boarding-houses and at opposite ends of the school; and I doubt whether he ever spoke to me in his life, though I often shared his kindly nod and smile when we met in the Close or quadrangle. It was the rare mixture of kindliness and gentleness with marvellous strength, activity, and fearlessness, which made him _facile princeps_ among his contemporaries. I don’t believe he ever struck a small boy here, or even spoke to one, in anger.

And so there was no drawback to the enthusiasm with which one watched him leading a charge at football, or bowling in a Big-Side match, or jumping two or three pegs higher on the gallows than any other boy. He cleared eighteen feet nine inches of water in Clifton brook, which means, as you know, at least twenty-one feet from take-off to landing. No doubt his good looks added to the fascination. You can see from the portrait what a noble face his must have been even in boyhood, and his figure was quite as striking. He stood six feet in his stockings when he left school at eighteen, but did not look his height from the perfection of his figure; broad in shoulder, thin in flank, and so well developed that he was called “the Muscleman.” I must not dwell on that time, so will give you one instance only of his early prowess in athletics. I don’t know what the record has been in late years, but in my time Parr was the only man who was ever known to have thrown a cricket-ball a hundred yards both ways. No record was kept here, but this I saw Oswell do. From a group of boys at a wicket on Little-Side ground, as it then was, he threw a cricket-ball, over as I believe, or at any rate through, the great elms (which were then standing in a close row at right angles to the school buildings) into the Doctor’s garden, for there it was picked up. Measure it how you will, that throw must have been considerably over a hundred yards.

He left a great blank in the school life in 1836. We heard he had gone to Haileybury for a year on his way to India, where he had got an appointment as writer. In those days there was no telegraph, no cheap post, no overland passage, and no penny papers to spread every scrap of news, true or false, over the whole kingdom. No one thought of a pleasure trip to India for a month or two in the winter to look up friends or young relations, for the voyage round the Cape even in the Company’s finest ships took from three to four months. The two worlds were wide apart, and the young subaltern or civilian was lucky who managed to get a run home once in ten years. So a curtain fell between Oswell and his old schoolfellows, which was not lifted, for me at any rate, for more than a generation. Now and again, at long intervals, thinking over schooldays, his figure would rise up as attractive as ever, and I would wonder what had become of him, and that no heroic rumour of him had floated back from the other side of the world.

You may fancy, then, the shock of joy which I felt when the lift came at last. I, like every one else, had rushed to get Livingstone’s first book on South Africa, and was deep in the second chapter, in which he details the drought at his station, the threats of the Boers, and the rumours of a lake and rivers and a rich country to the north that had determined him to attempt the crossing of the Kalahari desert which lay between, when I came on this passage: “I communicated my intention to an African traveller, Colonel Steele, and he made it known to another gentleman, a Mr. Oswell. He undertook to defray the entire expense of guides, and fully executed his generous intention.” Surely, thought I, that must be “the Muscleman,” or “handsome Oswell,” as we used sometimes to call him; that’s just what he would have done. I was not long in doubt; it was my boyhood’s hero sure enough. “Oswell was one of Arnold’s Rugby boys,” Livingstone wrote; “one could see his training in always doing what was brave, and true, and right.” Now let us see how it was that he managed to turn up in Africa at this critical moment.

In India he spent ten years, rising rapidly to the post of collector and judge. His station was thirty miles from the nearest English doctor, so he added the study of medicine to his regular work. This was heavy enough, but did not hinder him from joining any young Englishman who came to hunt. In one of these hunts he saved the life of the then Lord Gifford, shooting a tiger which his lordship, who was short-sighted, had not noticed, and which was in the act of springing. On another of these excursions the party encamped on ground full of malaria, and were struck with jungle fever, of which several died. Oswell, thanks to his splendid constitution, struggled through, after being insensible for several days. No sooner had he recovered consciousness than he set to work on a pile of his district papers—complaints from villages, reports of gang-robberies, etc.—with a wet towel round his head. He cleared his table at the cost of a dangerous relapse, the effects of which he could not shake off; so he was sent to the Cape on sick-leave, those who saw him embark doubting if he would ever reach the Cape alive.

Once landed, however, the dry warm air revived him, and in a few months he was away to the north, exploring and elephant-shooting, in which pursuits he came across Dr. Moffat, the great missionary Livingstone’s father-in-law, and Captain Steele, the hunter of big game, who directed him to Livingstone’s station, Kolabeng, two hundred miles to the north on the borders of the Kalahari desert. He had with him a brother sportsman, Mr. Murray, and they at once joined eagerly in Livingstone’s project to attempt to cross the Kalahari desert. “Mr. Oswell,” to repeat his words, “at once undertook to defray the whole cost of guides, and fully executed his generous intention.” They started on the 1st of June 1849, and reached Lake Ngami in two months, on the 1st of August, the first white men who had ever seen it. The story of their journey has been told both by Livingstone in his first book, and by Oswell in the chapter he wrote for the Badminton volume on _Big Game Shooting_, published after his death in 1893. I know no reading of more absorbing interest, but you should all read it for yourselves. And when you are reading, remember that the whole of Central Africa was a blank then on our school atlases, while every lake and river and mountain range is now laid down, right away to the Red Sea, the South Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. Here I can only give you the estimate that Livingstone formed of his companion before they got back to Kolabeng. “When my men wished to flatter me,” he wrote, “they would say, ‘If you were not a missionary you would be just like Oswell; you would not hunt with dogs.’ They declare he is the greatest hunter that ever came into the country.” His method was to get within twenty or thirty yards of his game—lion, elephant, or rhinoceros—whereas most men fired at fifty or sixty. Of course this doubled the danger while it made surer work, and his marvellous escapes were frequent. One I will content myself with on this journey, an encounter with a rhinoceros, which he killed at last, but which had tossed him and torn the scalp of his head almost off. Murray went to look for him, and told Livingstone, “I found that beggar Oswell sitting under a bush and holding on his head.” He had in fact adjusted his scalp, and the blood was streaming through his fingers. Let me here cite another witness or two as to his character as a hunter. Mr. Horace Waller, of the Oxford Mission, writes: “Livingstone, who knew no fear himself, spoke of Oswell’s desperate courage in hunting as quite wonderful; not but what he suffered from it to the day of his death, the result of an engagement with a rhinoceros. Oswell would, for instance, ride up alongside of a hyæna, and, unloosing his stirrup leather while at full gallop, brain the beast with the heavy stirrup.” Again, Sir Samuel Baker says: “His extreme gentleness, utter recklessness of danger, and complete unselfishness, made him friends everywhere, but attracted the native mind to a degree of adoration. He was the Nimrod of South Africa, without a rival and without an enemy, the greatest hunter ever known in modern times, the truest friend and most thorough example of an English gentleman.”

In April 1851 Livingstone started again from Kolabeng, this time with his wife and children, on the invitation of Sebituane, the great chief of the Makololo, who offered him a settlement wherever he might choose. Oswell was again with him, and went ahead of the waggons to dig wells and provide water; but even with this precaution the party, which included Mrs. Livingstone and the children, were at one point four days without it, and nearly perishing. Leaving Mrs. Livingstone and the children as the guests of Sebituane, Livingstone and Oswell explored north and east, and discovered the Zambesi River, and the great Victoria Falls from which it becomes navigable for ships to the Indian Ocean. For this he was voted the gold medal of the French Geographical Society. On their return Sebituane was attacked by inflammation of the lungs, and died in a few days. His death altered all Livingstone’s plans, and probably the subsequent history of the continent; for now Livingstone resolved to send his family home, and return alone the next year to find a way either to the west or east coast. He had already drawn his whole salary for 1852 and half that for 1853, and so would have been quite unable to start on the career which opened Africa and gained him a tomb in Westminster Abbey, but for Oswell; but _he_ proved the friend who “sticketh closer than a brother.” He accompanied them to Cape Town, and in Livingstone’s words “made all comfortable,” giving the children who were in rags a new outfit which cost £200, and enabling Livingstone to start once more for the north. He answered all remonstrances by laughingly protesting that it all came from ivory, and that the Doctor and his wife had as good a right as he to the money drawn from the preserves on their estates.

Before leaving his African career I must give shortly a characteristic story which was told incidentally by him in “South Africa Fifty Years ago,” and unconsciously, as though he were quite unaware of what I cannot but call its beauty and pathos. It is of his relations with an Africander who bore the (to us rather comic) name of John Thomas, one of the men he hired at the Cape to accompany him and Livingstone on their first expedition. The contract was that these men should be bound to go as far as the Lake Ngami, but no farther. When therefore Oswell and Livingstone determined to go on to the north, they called the men together and told them they need not go any farther, but could choose between waiting for their return or accompanying them. At first the men hesitated, and seemed likely to refuse to go farther, when Bono Johnny (as he was called by this time) jumped up, and in Dutch, which he spoke when excited, said, “What you eat I can eat, where you sleep I can sleep, where you go I will go; I will come with you.” The others paused for a moment or two, and then chorused, “We will go.” “Do you think after that,” Oswell writes, “it was much matter to us whether our brother was black or white?” Johnny stayed with him through four years, at the end of which Oswell wrote of him, “as a grand specimen of manhood, good nature, faithfulness, and cheerful endurance I have never met his equal, white or black.” Johnny at the last moment begged his master to take him over to see England, which he did, and got him a temporary place as coachman to his brother, a country parson. A few weeks later Oswell met Johnny in the village with the cook on one arm and the lady’s maid on the other, and found that they were going on with his education, which Oswell had begun in the bush, the cook undertaking his reading and the lady’s maid his writing. At the end of six months Johnny had to return to Africa, and Oswell lost sight of him. It was eighteen months before they met again. Oswell, who had volunteered on the outbreak of the war with Russia, was carrying secret service money for Government in the East, and came across the camp of the Sixtieth Rifles. He was talking to an officer from horseback, when he felt a hand laid on his off stirrup, and looking round found Johnny there, who had become messman to the regiment and was in high favour. He jumped down, and they had a long African talk, and from that time till Johnny’s death Oswell kept his eye on him, and got him at last a place as butler to a friend in England, where, as everywhere else, he made himself indispensable by cheerful and faithful service. There Johnny was struck by a fatal illness, and died in a few hours. “I heard of his illness,” Oswell writes, “too late to see him on earth; but I trust master and man may yet meet as brothers in heaven.”

The modesty and self-depreciation of his character were strong to the end. Looking back at his relations with Livingstone, he writes in “South Africa Fifty Years ago”: “He could talk to the Kaffir ears and hearts, we only to their stomachs; but I would fain believe his grand work was made a little smoother by our guns.” I should rather think it was. Thus, when a tribe in Livingstone’s district was on the point of starvation from the long drought, and the people reduced to mere walking skeletons, he and Murray took more than six hundred men, women, and children with them, fed them for several months till they were “all fat and shining,” and sent them back with a store of dried meat enough to last for months, without one missing, sick, or feeble.

How one wishes that England were still represented by Oswells in South and Central Africa! Happily Rugby again has sent one such in Mr. Selous, who has sustained the high type set by Oswell in early days. But I much question whether the ordinary type of African sportsman of to-day will benefit Africa, or raise the native enthusiasm or admiration for Englishmen. A few days ago I was reading a review of the last book published by two of them on African sport. They would seem to have taken with them a staff of trained servants, and horses and donkeys loaded with supplies sufficient to have made the adventure at any rate quite comfortable. Small blame to them for that, you will say, if they could afford it; and I agree. But what shall we say as to their method of shooting lions? It seems to have been, to tether an unfortunate donkey in a clearing, and leave him there for hours till a lion sprang on the poor shuddering jackass and had taken a good suck at his blood, and then to shoot him from a neighbouring place of safety. Well, we will say at any rate that Oswell would probably have as soon thought of tethering his black brother Bono Johnny for bait to a lion as a poor jackass.

To go back to our story. After sending off Mrs. Livingstone and the children, Oswell followed to England for family reasons, and was at home when the Crimean War broke out a year later. He at once volunteered, as I have already told you, went out to Constantinople, and was employed by Lord Raglan to carry despatches and secret service money to Sir Lintorn Simmons at Shumla, and on other missions. On the fall of Sebastopol he returned to England, and at once, without waiting for the shower of titles and decorations which came when peace was made, the old longing for wandering and adventure being still strong, sailed for South America, in November 1855. On board the mail-steamer he met his future wife, who was going out to her sister, Lady Lees, the wife of the Chief Justice of the Bahamas. After wandering through Chili, the West Indies, and the United States, he came home, renewed his acquaintance with Miss Agnes Rivaz, who had also returned, and they were married. From that time he settled down to the quiet life of an English country gentleman, built himself a house at Groombridge, near Tunbridge Wells, which he filled with his African trophies, and found a sphere for his energy in his parish and neighbourhood. Every neighbour who needed him became his special care. To the poor he was not a mere benefactor, but each man’s and woman’s and child’s personal friend. His Indian experience here came into play. Every little ailment or accident was a certain summons to “the Master,” as he was generally called; and if remonstrated with he would smile and say, “there was something in being able to send for a doctor whom they had not to pay.” He was an enthusiastic gardener, and the whole neighbourhood was stocked with plants and flowers from Hillside. His great strength remained to the end. One day calling at an old friend’s he found him very ill, and his wife and son consulting how he could be moved. In a moment he was in Oswell’s arms, carried and placed gently in the place they had prepared for him. The Paris Geographical Society, as has been said, had sent him their gold medal, and he was made a Fellow of the English Society; but, writes Francis Galton, another African explorer and admirer of Oswell, “he was too shy and modest, and could not be induced to take that prominent share in those stirring times of the Geographical Society which was his right, and which he was often urged to take.” In the same way, though an excellent recounter to friends of his exploring and sporting experiences, he steadily resisted the offers of publishers and the persuasion of friends to take the public into his confidence in print.

It was only in the last year of his life that he was induced to put pen to paper as to his hunting and exploring work. Happily the editor of the Badminton Library persuaded him to write in the volume on _Big Game Shooting_. The result was the chapters on “South Africa Fifty Years ago” in that volume, which in my judgment stand quite foremost in our sporting literature. Read them, and, while the interest is absorbing, you will not find a trace of that delight in and relish for mere slaughter which is so offensive in most books of sport. Here is a short characteristic quotation, which will give you the mood in which the mighty hunter looked back on his own exploits. “I am sorry now for all the fine old beasts I have killed: but I was young then; there was excitement in the work; I had large numbers of men to feed, and every animal _except three elephants_ was eaten by man, and so put to good use.[5] I filled their stomachs, and thus in some mysterious way, as they assured me, made their hearts white.”

On the other hand, the zest for the old desert life of his early manhood comes back even as he writes: “There is a fascination to me in the remembrance of the free life, the self-dependence, the feeling as you lay under your kaross that you were looking at the stars from a point on the earth whence no other European eye had ever seen them; these are with me still, and were I not a married man, with children and grandchildren, I believe I should head back to Africa again and end my days in the open air. Take the word of one who has tried both; there is a charm in the wild life; the ever-increasing never-satisfied needs of the tame my soul cannot away with.”

I could call a dozen well-known witnesses to confirm everything I have said as to the charm of a character to which Lamartine’s saying, “Rien n’est si doux que ce qui est fort,” applies more truly than to any one I can remember. I will cite one only whose testimony will, I know, be of special interest here, as it comes from an intimate friend of Oswell, but not a Rugbeian, Lord Rendel. “He carried, as well as deepened, the stamp of Rugby at its best; fearless of soul and body, yet tender, kindly, gay; wise with a large experience, but utterly unworldly, I would, as an Etonian, give all the mere gentlemen Eton could breed for a handful of such men as Oswell. Manliness without coarseness, polish without complacency, nobility without caste! May Rugby keep the mould, and multiply the type!” Amen!

-----

Footnote 5:

These three elephants, which he regrets were not eaten by man, were
shot by him away from camp in order to send the valuable ivory to an
Englishman who was shooting in the neighbourhood, to buy a supply of
lead, Oswell having run short, and the nearest store at which he could
buy being fourteen hundred miles away to the south. Mr. Webb, of
Newstead Abbey, the sportsman in question, sent the ivory back to
Oswell with a liberal gift of bars of lead, and they became intimate
friends.

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