The life of Hugh Price Hughes

Front matter

BX8495.H8 H8 1904 Hughes, Dorothea Price Life of Hugh Price Hughes /

Digitized by

504 Hughes (Hugh Price) Life, by jUs daughter, portrait, Second Editi on la' 8vo, cloth, 4s. 6d. 'I904

Preface

This is the story of a prophet wrestling with human nature, first in himself and afterwards in others. The reader will sympathise first with the prophet in that he was human, and secondly with those with whom he wrestled in that they also were human. The struggle was spiritual, manifesting itself in particular measures and forces, but not contained within them. He fought principalities and powers as they hold sway over the inner life of men and women.

So that his memory be honoured, it will be shown that he was in very truth a prophet, criticised, misunderstood, yet fortunate beyond most of his kind in that he had even in his lifetime a great following and rare rewards and consolations. His life was a continuous strife, and to make it appear otherwise would be not to write it ; and perhaps prophets would not be so scarce in the Church if their lives were more frankly written !

Of all that he was, of all that he advocated or sought, the root is always to be found in one of the mysteries of the Christian faith. The mystery of the Incarnation teaches the Church that humanity is to be worshipped, and his humanity has received full oblation. It is sacred, and must be regarded as such. At his death one said of him, " He was the most human saint that ever lived," and that was true.

It is the private consolation of many that the pioneer,

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PREFACE the social reformer or saint, is devoid of humanity, not pulsating as they to a full and varied existence. Some defect in his organisation, they pretend, conduces to his self-sacrifice or his sainthood. Were he more human he would enjoy or tolerate the planet as others do. Now a private opinion concerning a saint is as the very wine of life. Yet it may be salutary to forego the exhilarating draught, and in this case at any rate the reader must be denied its solace.

Few men have ever enjoyed terrestrial life more than did this prophet, and, though his years were years of terrible toil, he managed to find a good deal more pleasure on this planet than many who spend their time in seeking it. Still neither his joys nor his sorrows were planetary, despite the fact that his feet trod firmly and familiarly that earth on which he found himself. For close on the joyous associations of the Incarnation lowers the shadow of the Passion. The world knows prophets by their fruits, but they know themselves by their own straitening, by hourly conformity to a will that is not theirs. To enter at all into the inner life of a prophet is therefore to gain some insight into what must have been part of Christ's Passion.

The mystery of the Atonement also broods over his whole life, since he had a sense of sin, and became reconciled to God, not only finding reconciliation himself but becoming the instrument of the same reconciliation to thousands of others.

The underlying meaning of the mystery of the sacraments also haunted him, making of him a devout sacramentarian who held that the essence of the Christian life lies in constant mystical feeding upon Christ in the heart by faith. Through-

PREFACE ix out life, as he constantly testified, he felt Christ nearer to him than anything mortal, and on the stone above his grave he enjoined that the following words and none other should be engraved as expressive of his faith and experience, " Thou, O Christ, art all I want."

In that mystery of the Church, the one body of Christ, he was a most devout, nay, an impassioned participator, doing all that in him lay towards undoing her dismemberment and establishing within her that godly concord which, while permitting all those divergences essential to diverse humanity and to many orders of mind, yet laid reiterated stress on that which was held in common by all.

In the mystery of the Resurrection he was a participator in that he assumed it. Faith does not pry into the unseen, seeking to remove the veil which God has placed, but busies herself with that eternal life which manifests itself in the present rather than in speculation as to how it will manifest itself in the future.

Lovers of their kind who do not find in the Christian mysteries all that he did will nevertheless find, it is hoped, in this delineation of him that sympathy with their aspirations which he always accorded them in the days of his flesh. One of them wrote at his death, " He made the Church human to me," and as that was so his tale is fittingly told by the following interpreters.

In the character of his ancestors something will be shown of that life, religious and personal, from which he sprang. There are seasons when societies and Churches seem to be falling into decline, but these may be periods of great recuperative power. Of societies as of individuals, it is true that they fall to rise, sleep to wake. b

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PREFACE

The tale will be continued by fellow-students, the observers and critics of his character and powers. Their story will be taken up by those who, feeling the stagnation and low ebb of their life, look upon him as their leader, and under his banner sweep all before them till they attain a return to the age of chivalry. This age is viewed by many classes of persons and understood by two — those living in it, and those whose imagination can transport them to such an epoch. These perceive that the exploits of chivalry are dear, and that personal considerations, like silver in the age of Solomon, are nothing accounted of.

In the latter portion of the Life, that specially concerned with ecclesiastical affairs, a voice which has been the undertone of all the others, the voice of spiritual intimacy, will take the lead, and will seek to reveal his ideals and motives.

Party and denomination have their claims ; but the Church, as he- conceived her, is best served in such an undertaking as the present by unswerving loyalty to an aim higher than party or denomination — by the fearless showing forth of what in all ages she has declared to be the miracle of Nature, a human character.

DOROTHEA PRICE HUGHES.

November 1904.

Chapter I Ancestry And Childhood. /ktat I — 1 3. 1847-1860

" Immense have been the preparations for me, Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me."

Song of Myself, Whitman.

Hugh Price Hughes was born in the ancient town of Carmarthen in the year 1 847. The little house, the quaint old street,1 where his eyes first saw the light, wore a drowsy aspect which vanished on market days, when the countrywomen with their high hats and baskets came clattering into town. For all its dreamy appearance, the city had seen stirring times.

Seventy years after the birth of our Lord, it was an outlying encampment of the Romans when they invaded this island, and in later years the Princes of South Wales built a castle within it, and defied invaders with no mean resistance. In the twelfth century the town fell into the hands of the English, and was the scene of the last desperate struggles for national freedom. Even when the old racial animosity had subsided, the town must needs play battledore and shuttlecock between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, as if it was fated to give birth to battle. But if it were thus fierce in spirit, it was gentle at heart, fostering the institutions of holy religion within its walls, and paying due court to the monks and nuns who lived pious, and I should imagine perturbed, lives within them.

To this day, for all its gentleness of aspect, it seems to sleep beneath the shadow of mighty warriors. The gaol, perched high up above the River Towy, is built on the ruins of the old castle and looks such another. Nursemaids take their charges for an airing in the old parade, and in the western and high quarter of the town stands the monument of General Picton, 1 Number 10 King Street, near to the Post Office.

who died at Waterloo on the 18th of June 1815, "gloriously fighting for his country and the liberties of Europe," as the inscription runs. On the walls of the old church is a tablet inscribed to the memory of another general who died fighting for the same liberties, a bishop of St. David's, who was burnt to death in the reign of Mary, on the 13 th of March 1555. Men are uncertain as to the exact site of the martyrdom, some pointing to the south side of the market cross, and others to a cross in Priory Street, half-way between the priory and St. Peter's Church, but all know how and why he died. I think the memory of him was sweeter to the child who grew up in that little house of which I have spoken than any other of the gallant warriors whose names have been associated with the town. The thought and the memoiy of him crept somehow into the blood after the manner of early impressions, showing how good men never die in vain.

In the loftiest and most wooded of the hills surrounding the town lies the dust, not of a warrior, so the old women in the high hats have handed it down, but of the enchanter Merlin, who cast his spell over Carmarthen as early as the fifth century, a spell which lies heavy upon the place to this day. For a time the Princes of Wales and the warriors who came after dispelled it, but during the last two hundred years or so it has reasserted its ancient force. From time to time, however, a son or daughter of the town arises who breaks it, and, scorning inglorious ease, follows in their train. The most intrepid enter the apostolic succession upheld by Bishop Ferrar, and fight the battles of the spirit either known or unknown to fame.

In the year 1 847 there was no sign of any abatement in the wizard's art. It lurked as ever in the ripple of that winding river over which the fisherman in his coracle glided silently as of yore. It whispered sweetly along Llangunner, where lovers wandered, telling of the coming spring-time and of the swift, mad joys of youth, but changed to sighing in the churchyard over the old riddle that no enchanter can fathom. Down in the narrow streets the spell had crept into the voices of the people, so clear, musical, and sing-song, and in the market-place it was quite rampant, where the women in the high hats spoke the language which the Princes of Wales had spoken. Not a sound could a passer-by have detected to denote that Europe was on the eve of a series of convulsions out of which the latter half of the century was to emerge in new and fuller life.

Kossuth in Austria, Mazzini and Garibaldi in Italy, were preparing insurrection which came to a head in 1848, in which all failed, only to rouse themselves for fresh and successful effort in the sixties. On the other side of the Channel the Bonapartists were meditating the deposition of Louis Philippe, which actually occurred in the eventful year of 1848, and in the final coup a few years later, which resulted in the establishment of their dynasty till the outbreak of the Franco-German War. In soberer England itself, where Queen Victoria had been ten years on the throne, the Chartists were contemplating a united rising, which took place a year after my father's birth, creating little disturbance save in the terrified breasts of good citizens.

A year or two back Carmarthen itself had been agitated by rumours of the Rebecca riots in different parts of the Principality, and though the excitement had been great at the time, it had quickly subsided with the riots. The churches also in which this child was to play a memorable part, partook of the revolutionary character of the epoch, forces bursting to the surface which had long been smouldering beneath. Of all the eras for his birth, my father would have chosen what Englishmen know as the Victorian. Indeed, I have often heard him praise God that he was born in no other. He also praised Him for being born a Welshman, though of his native town and country he was destined to see comparatively little. Yet he loved to refer to them, and would often remind listeners, as if in extenuation of his peculiarities, that he had not a drop of English blood in his veins. This was true.

The Welshman is as superior a person to the Englishman as a Scotchman or Irishman. He knows, as my father was never tired of pouring into the English ear, that it is only through the Celtic intermixture that they have ever risen above the national inertia in all those matters where the divine fire is an essential ingredient. If it be true, as Saxon travellers remark, that the land becomes poorer as you get into Wales, so does the heart become richer and more expansive. The air has the same vivifying qualities as that immediately north of the Cheviots. You breathe at once an alien and more elastic tradition. Class distinction ceases to be vital. Education is regarded as a serious matter, and, strangest of all, people positively enjoy going to chapel. Above all, you are conscious of an all-pervading geniality (so forgiving is the race), and Carmarthen overflowed with the national characteristic. The most diverse persons lived cheek by jowl in the street where my father lived as a boy, and had an intimate knowledge of each other. At one end was the parish church, at the other the county gaol, and houses of all sizes and degrees connected the two.

When my grandfather, Dr. John Hughes, walked down the street, he saluted all who met him after the manner of a general, raising his stick, or his hand, to his head at almost every step he took. He was only known to take his hat off to one person, the bishop of the diocese, Bishop Thirlwall, for whose learning and character he had a profound respect. He was a doctor by profession, and was known in that capacity for miles around. To skill in his profession he united rare administrative ability, and there was scarcely any public or municipal office that he did not fill at one time in his career. He was Coroner, Chairman of the Board of Guardians, Chairman of the School Board, Borough Magistrate, County Magistrate, Income Tax Commissioner, Member of the Board of Conservators, Member of the Burial Board, Certifying Factory Surgeon, Police Surgeon, Governor of the Grammar School, Surgeon of the Railway Provident Societies, and President of the Literary and Scientific Institute. In the discharge of these offices he was feared as well as beloved, for he did not share the Welsh laxity. In certain slack quarters of the town, indeed, he was known as Bismarck, a title which caused amusement among those who knew him and saw into that deep and tender heart, the workings of which he did not often show, but which a chance word or scene would sometimes summon to the surface. Tears always came into his eyes at the mention of his son, and he obstinately refused to hear him preach. " I should be dragged to the penitent form," he would remark, with something between a wry face and a twinkle.

He was especially efficient as Chairman of Committee, insisting on a punctuality and standard of behaviour that surprised its members ; yet for all his great capability he dreaded publicity, and so disliked the noise and commotion of a great city that he could seldom be persuaded to visit London, where his white head and magnificent stature rendered him almost as conspicuous as in his own town. His study, which was separated from the rest of the house by the surgery and a long passage, was a very peaceful, primitive kind of place. A jug of cold tea was always sent to him after meals, and he would sit at his desk smoking in a crownless straw hat and an old coat that he would not have parted with for three times its original value. For furniture there were huge medical volumes and two deep rocking-chairs, in which his granddaughters used to ensconce themselves. Here they related to him their experiences, or endeavoured to assuage the thirst of their minds. An old drawer in the desk contained medals and curios which he occasionally displayed to them. To walk with him, one on either side, in the streets amid the general salute, was an inexpressible delight to the three concerned.

" Why does everybody here know you so well, grandpapa ? "

" Because I see most of them into the world and out of it, my dear."

" We are going home to-morrow, grandpapa. Shall you be sorry ? "

" No, my dear, I shall not."

" Why, grandpapa (in chorus ) ? "

" Because you are two such rascals. I shall be able to walk out in peace. Right turn ! "

" Grandpapa, who lives in that house ? "

" Mr. John Jones, my dear, a very disreputable fellow."

" What is disreputable, grandpapa ? "

" Somebody, my dear, who gets drunk on Sunday instead of going to chapel."

At times the conversation took a literary turn.

" The Welsh have no literature, have they, grandpapa ? "

The deep-set eyes might have been wrathful, so alive were they with lightnings. " No literature ! You don't know what you are talking about, child. We can trace the date of the first Olympiad, but no one knows the date of the first Eisteddfod. The beginnings of our race are lost in the mists of time."

In private life he was retiring and unassertive to a fault. The religion of my grandfather, like his emotion, lay on most occasions too deep for words. He was constant in attendance at the Methodist Chapel, and his love for Methodism grew with the years. On the plain cross that marks his grave his children have written two lines of an old hymn,

" Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling "

— the only inscription he could have tolerated. He was the son of a saint better known to fame than he, for the name of Hugh Hughes is one to conjure with in the Principality. Early Methodism in Wales is associated and hallowed by his name, much as that of St. Francis is connected with the revival of religion in mediaeval Italy. When he finished his wanderings as a Methodist preacher in the year 1843, ar,d settled in Carmarthen as a supernumerary, there was not a man in Wales more beloved than he. His portrait, painted by Jackson, reveals a face in which keenness and kindliness are strangely blended. In Welsh somewhere there is an account of his life and his doings ; but his spirit has been embodied for his descendants in those kindly, tender, humorous blue eyes — the type of man who is so intensely unworldly that he hasn't a care worth thinking about, and whose temperament and work in life are such that he is for ever brimming over with a certain joyousness from on high that temporal affairs cannot quench. Yet his life had not been spent on cushions, by any means.

Though dating back his descent to Llewellyn, Prince of Wales, and past him again to the clan from which Arthur sprang (he took much delight in tracing out the family tree, when he had time for such light matters, in his old age at Carmarthen), in youth he had espoused the original calling of mankind, that of gardener. Princes and their descendants appear ill-starred in Wales, partly of course from the unceremonious treatment which they have received from the sister peninsula, and partly because it is not easy to keep up the princely state in so democratic a country. Vicissitude in fortune does not strike the anguish into the breast that it does into that of less aristocratic races — races that cannot point to national festivals lost in the mists of time. " If you are a good man, now, it doesn't much matter whether you are a prince or gardener — if you are a good man," the true Welshman will tell you, for however great a sinner he is his sentiments always do credit to the national piety.

But though Hugh Price Hughes' grandfather was a gardener, he was not, strange to say, a good man — at least in the full sense of that term. He used to tell his own gardener, as they sat side by side resting themselves after the exercise of their common art, that those fists of his had done strange things in the days gone by when he had been the gardener in that great house over at Bristol. At which David, reverently quaffing his mug of beer by his side, would exclaim, " Indeed, now ! " partly as a tribute to the great house, and partly as an expression of surprise that so gentle and friendly a master should ever have used his fists in unseemly ways. The story of how his master was turned from these ways to holier things is one that never ceased to scintillate in David's memory. He told me it quite recently. It was on a Sunday, of course, at the chapel in Bristol, when the master of the great house was away and the gardener and the butler were free to roam the town and follow their own devices. The butler, who couldn't have been a Welshman, scorned the idea of chapel, and left his young companion to go there alone, preferring the world and the vanity thereof. Who should be preaching now but Hugh Hughes's own brother, though he never knew it till he had got up from the penitent form and was a new man. " Ay, he was a mon," burst out David. Do you think the butler was allowed to proceed with his evil ways and false view of things when there was his dear friend the gardener close by ready to lend him a hand and to show him something of the mind of God ? Or that the under-gardener, or the footman, or the cook, or the housemaid, were not " tur-r-r-ned " every one of them, and so filled with love and joy unspeakable that the master did not know what to think of it all when he came back from abroad ? So the gardener had to explain it to him, and he did it in so simple and enticing a manner that his master had nothing for it but to " tur-r-r-n " too. What a house it must have been ! No wonder that that gardener had that perennial twinkle in his eye. But after two years, the spirit having moved within him the while, he addressed his master as follows : — " I am very sorry indeed to leave, but I must preach the gospel." And his master was very sorry, as indeed he might be, losing such a gardener and with so large a garden, but he wished him God-speed, for he was a new " mon " now too, and knew something of the exigencies of the kingdom of heaven.

And the young Methodist minister had need of his master's benediction. For he went to Wales to tell the good news to his people, the Welsh, who were sinners, many of them, and used to fling rotten eggs in his face, and anything else they could lay their hands on. They were in the habit also of using such language that it was horrible to hear them. One day he bought a white mare, and the white mare took him to all manner of unpronounceable places throughout the Principality, and everywhere the people were falling on their knees and kissing the footprints of the mare, in an agony of repentance that they should ever have reviled or ill-treated its rider. Smiles greeted him wherever he rode, the children running and crying out " Fad," which is being interpreted " Papa," — for this minister of the gospel carried sweets and apples in his pocket, and when he began to preach the sky used to stop raining and give out sunshine instead. The animals loved him too as well as the children, for he " had a way " with them, turning their fierceness and timidity into confidence and love.

One day in Breconshire a very handsome young lady came to hear him preach, with a complexion and a spirit that made three counties her slave. Her handsomeness was of the order that reveals strength of character and decision, and whose features in their open play of force and feeling have nothing to conceal. She was a true daughter of the Prices, who had held their heads high and kept open house for more generations than men cared to count, and she remembered with shame how she had revelled in the good things of this life, in dancing, and in chattering, as if there wasn't such a thing as God's life in the soul and its attendant responsibilities. The greatest honour that ever came into her life was when the Rev. Hugh Hughes asked her to be his wife — at least so she thought, though many a disconsolate swain must have looked on and wondered, for her future husband was considerably her senior. The grandmother of Hugh Price Hughes was of the kind that know no half-measures, and her " tur-r-r-ning " was of the right-about description. Like the prophet Daniel, she was in the habit of praying three times a day, and, unlike him, for his apparently were solitary prayers, she insisted on her household joining in them. She would rather have died than miss attending service at the little Welsh Methodist Chapel, and she would equally rather have died than have been found intimately chatting with gardeners and suchlike, as her husband was in the habit of doing. A Price could never be as others, nor could her children, and there were scarcely any in Carmarthen whom she deemed fit to associate with these. The lack of manners and the art of living generally, on the part of the easy-going townspeople, never ceased to astonish her. On meeting a little girl who did not curtsey to her, she took her by the hand and conducted her homewards as much in grief as in wrath. " Let me beg of you," she said to the amazed mother, " to bring your child up to better manners in future." On Sunday her eagle eye spotted a young girl in colours who should have been attired in mourning. She accosted her at once : " Don't you know

that your uncle So-and-so of L y is dead ? Mind that you

come fittingly attired next Sunday." Acts of charity, in which she was assiduous, had to be performed like all else with due ceremony and in suitable crockery. When she was an old lady, bereft of her " king," as she used to call her husband, and there were no children to sit at the table, her maids had to undergo no little training before they could serve the solitary meal in a becoming manner. She loved her son John so much that she contradicted nearly everything he said to her. " Good-morning, mother," he would say, as he paid a dutiful call in the midst of his rounds ; " a beautiful day, isn't it?" "Very cold and disagreeable, John. It will be snowing before the evening."

Her " king " was the only living being whom she was not known to contradict, for she could no more help her contradictoriness than she could help breathing. She found her match at last in her daughter-in-law, the wife of her adored John and the mother of Hugh Price Hughes. Not enough has been said of this lithe, graceful Jewish mother, of the part that her Semitic blood and tense vitality was to play in the life of her son. The wonder of her cast even her mother-in-law into the shade. She was unique in Carmarthen society, as much an alien to it as if she had dropped from the clouds. Beyond the fact that her grandfather had been a rich Jew at Haverfordwest and a banker, nothing was known of her. This grandfather originally bore the name of Levi, but he changed it to Phillips on becoming a Christian. One of his sons was the father of Mrs. John Hughes. She was still a tiny child and an orphan when this grandfather died, when her uncle sent her to a superior school at Brighton, where her dress and accessories generally won even the admiration of her superior schoolfellows. In other ways the child fended for herself, and she was the last person to support the ordeal of a loveless upbringing. In highly charged natures such a youth often sows a bitterness which the years and happier circumstances cannot eliminate. On a visit to Carmarthen she met young Mr. Hughes, just returned from the hospitals in London, and the beau of the town. She was so beautiful and vivacious that he fell in love with her at first sight ; and though Miss Phillips was on her mettle at first, she succumbed in due course after the manner of women, for the simple reason that none of her other lovers approached this one, laugh at him as she might. Carmarthen, with all its experience in such matters, had never seen a more striking couple. No one had ever walked or dressed or entertained in the town quite as she did.