XIV.
Lambkin’s Open Letter to Churchmen
The noise made by Mr. Lambkin’s famous advice to Archdeacon Burfle will be remembered by all my readers. He did not, however, publish the letter (as is erroneously presumed inGreat Dead Men of the Period),[72]without due discussion and reflection. I did not personally urge him to make it public—I thought it unwise. But Mr. Large may almost be said to have insisted upon it in the long Conversation which he and Josiah had upon the matter. When Lambkin had left Large’s room I took the liberty of going up to see him again, but the fatal missive had been posted, and appeared next day inThe Times, theEcho,and other journals, not to mention theEnglishman’s Anchor. I do not wish to accuse Mr. Large of any malicious purpose or deliberately misleading intention, but I fear that (as he was not an impulsive man) his advice can only have proceeded from a woeful and calculated lack of judgment.
There is no doubt that (from Lambkin’s own point of view), the publication of this letter was a very serious error. It bitterly offended Arthur Bundleton, and alienated all the “Pimlico” group (as they were then called). At the same time it did not satisfy the small but eager and cultured body who followed Tamworthy. It gave a moderate pleasure to the poorer clergy in the country parishes, but I doubt very much whether these are the men from whom social advantage or ecclesiastical preferment is to be expected. I often told Lambkin that the complexity of our English Polity was a dangerous thing to meddle with. “A man,” I would say to him, “who expresses an opinion is like one who plunges a knife into some sensitive part of the human frame. The former may offend unwittinglyby the mere impact of his creed or prejudice, much as the latter may give pain by happening upon some hidden nerve.”
Now Lambkin was essentially a wise man. He felt the obligation—the duty (to give it a nobler name)—which is imposed on all of us of studying our fellows. He did not, perhaps, say where his mind lay in any matter more than half a dozen times in his life, for fear of opposing by such an expression the wider experience or keener emotion of the society around him. He felt himself a part of a great stream, which it was the business of a just man to follow, and if he spoke strongly (as he often did) it was in some matter upon which the vast bulk of his countrymen were agreed; indeed he rightly gave to public opinion, and to the governing classes of the nation, an overwhelming weight in his system of morals; and even at twenty-one he had a wholesome contempt for the doctrinaire enthusiast who neglects his newspaper and hatches an ethical system out of mere blind tradition or (what is worse) his inner conscience.
It is remarkable, therefore, that such a man should have been guilty of one such error. “It was not a crime,” he said cleverly, in speaking of the matter to me, “it was worse; it was a blunder.” And that is what we all felt. The matter can be explained, however, by a reference to the peculiar conditions of the moment in which it appeared. The Deanery of Bury had just fallen vacant by death of Henry Carver, the elder.[73]A Liberal Unionist Government was in power, and Lambkin perhaps imagined that controversy still led—as it had done but a few years before—to the public notice which it merits. He erred, but it was a noble error.
One thing at least we can rejoice in, the letter may have hurt Lambkin in this poor mortal life; but it was of incalculable advantage to the generation immediately succeeding his own. I cannot but believe that from that little source springs all the mightyriver of reform which has left so profound a mark upon the hosiery of this our day.
The letter is as follows:—
AN OPEN LETTER
Burford.St. John’s Eve, 1876.
My Dear Burfle,
You have asked my advice on a matter of deep import, a matter upon which every self-respecting Englishman is asking himself the question “Am I asheepor agoat?” My dear Burfle, I will answer you straight out, and I know you will not be angry with me if I answer also in the agora, “before the people,” as Paul would have done. Are you asheepor agoat? Let us think.
You say rightly that the question upon which all this turns is the question of boots. It is but a symbol, but it is a symbol upon which all England is divided. On the one hand we have men strenuous, determined, eager—men (if I may say so) of true Apostolic quality, to whom the buttoned boot is sacred to a degree some ofus may find it difficult to understand. They are few, are these devout pioneers, but they are in certain ways, and from some points of view, among theéliteof the Nation, so to speak.
On the other hand we have the great mass of sensible men, earnest, devout, practical—what Beeker calls in a fine phrase “Thys corpse and verie bodie of England[74]”—determined to maintain what their fathers had before them, and insisting on the laced boot as the proper foot-gear of the Church.
No one is more sensible than myself (my dear Burfle), I say no one is more sensible than I am, of the gravity of this schism—for schism it threatens to be. And no one appreciates more than I do how much there is to be said on both sides. The one party will urge (with perfect justice), that the buttoned boot is a development. They maintain (and there is much to be said in their favour), that the common practice of wearing buttoned boots, their ornate appearance,and the indication of well-being which they afford, fit them most especially for the Service of the Temple. They are seen upon the feet of Parisians, of Romans, of Viennese; they are associated with our modern occasions of Full Dress, and when we wear them we feel that we are one with all that is of ours in Christendom. In a word, they are Catholic, in the best and truest sense of the word.
Now, my dear Burfle, consider the other side of the argument. The laced boot, modern though it be in form and black and solid, is yet most undoubtedly the Primitive Boot in its essential. That the early Christians wore sandals is now beyond the reach of doubt or the power of the wicked. There is indeed the famous forgery of Gelasius, which may have imposed upon the superstition of the dark ages,[75]there is the doubtful evidence also of the mosaic at Ravenna. But the only solid ground ever brought forward was the passage in the Pseudo-Johannes, which no modern scholarwill admit to refer to buttons. ξύγον means among other things a lace, an absolute lace, and I defy our enemies (who are many and unscrupulous), to deny. The Sandal has been finally given its place as a Primitive Christian ornament; and we can crush the machinations of foreign missions, I think, with the plain sentence of that great scholar, Dr. Junker, “The sandal,” he says, “is the parent of the laced boot.”
So far then, so good. You see (my dear Burfle), how honestly the two sides may differ, and how, with such a backing upon either side, the battle might rage indefinitely, to the final extinction, perhaps, of our beloved country and its most cherished institutions.
Is there no way by which such a catastrophe may be avoided?
Why most certainlyyes. There is a road on which both may travel, a place in which all may meet. I mean the boot (preferably the cloth boot) with elastic sides. Already it is worn by many of our clergy.[76]Itoffends neither party, it satisfies, or should satisfy, both; and for my part, I see in it one of those compromises upon which our greatness is founded. Let us then determine to be in this matter neithersheepnorgoats. It is better, far better, to admit some sheepishness into our goatishness, or (if our extremistswillhave it so), some goatishness into our sheepishness—it is better, I say, to enter one fold and be at peace together, than to imperil our most cherished and beloved tenets in a mere wrangle upon non-essentials. For, after all what is essential to us? Not boots, I think, but righteousness. Righteousness may express itself in boots, it is just and good that it should do so, but to see righteousness in the boot itself is to fall into the gross materialism of the middle ages, and to forget our birthright and the mess of pottage.
Yours (my dear Burfle) in all charity,
Josiah Lambkin.