Ionica

WILLIAM CORY (Johnson) was born at Torrington in Devonshire, on January 9, 1823. He was the son of Charles William Johnson, a merchant, who retired at the early age of thirty, with a modest competence, and married his cousin, Theresa Furse, of Halsdon, near Torrington, to whom he had long been attached. He lived a quiet, upright, peaceable life at Torrington, content with little, and discharging simple, kindly, neighbourly duties, alike removed from ambition and indolence. William Cory had always a deep love of his old home, a strong sense of local sanctities and tender associations. "I hope you will always feel," his mother used to say, "wherever you live, that Torrington belongs to you." He said himself, in later years, "I want to be a Devon man and a Torrington man." His memory lingered over the vine-shaded verandah, the jessamine that grew by the balustrade of the steps, the broad-leaved myrtle that covered the wall of the little yard.

The boy was elected on the foundation at Eton in 1832, little guessing that it was to be his home for forty years. He worked hard at school, became a first-rate classical scholar, winning the Newcastle Scholarship in 1841, and being elected Scholar of King's in 1842. He seems to have been a quiet, retiring boy, with few intimate friends, respected for his ability and his courtesy, living a self-contained, bookish life, yet with a keen sense of school patriotism--though he had few pleasant memories of his boyhood.

Honours came to him fast at Cambridge. He won the Chancellor's English Medal with a poem on Plato in 1843, the Craven Scholarship in 1844. In those days Kingsmen did not enter for the Tripos, but received a degree, without examination, by ancient privilege. He succeeded to a Fellowship in 1845, and in the same year was appointed to a Mastership at Eton by Dr. Hawtrey. At Cambridge he seems to have read widely, to have thought much, and to have been interested in social questions. Till that time he had been an unreflecting Tory and a strong High Churchman, but he now adopted more Liberal principles, and for the rest of his life was a convinced Whig. The underlying principle of Whiggism, as he understood it, was a firm faith in human reason. Thus, in a letter of 1875, he represents the Whigs as saying to their adversaries, "You are in a majority now: if I were an ultra-democrat or counter of noses, I should submit to you as having a transcendental --sometimes called divine--right; if I were a redcap, I should buy dynamite and blow you up; if I were a Tory, I should go to church or to bed; as it is, I go to work to turn your majority into a minority. I shall do it by reasoning and by attractive virtue." He intended in his university days, and for some time after, to take Anglican Orders, though he had also some thought of going to the Bar; but he accepted a Mastership with much relief, with the hope, as he wrote in an early letter, "that before my time is out, I may rejoice in having turned out of my pupil-room perhaps one brave soldier, or one wise historian, or one generous legislator, or one patient missionary." The whole of his professional life, a period of twenty-seven years, was to be spent at Eton.

No one who knew William Cory will think it an exaggeration to say that his mind was probably one of the most vigorous and commanding minds of the century. He had a mental equipment of the foremost order, great intellectual curiosity, immense vigour and many-sidedness, combined with a firm grasp of a subject, perfect clearness of thought, and absolute lucidity of expression.

He never lost sight of principles among a crowd of details; and though he had a strong bias in certain directions, he had a just and catholic appreciation even of facts which told against his case. Yet his knowledge was never dry or cold; it was full to the brim of deep sentiment and natural feeling.

He had a wide knowledge of history, of politics, both home and foreign, of political economy, of moral science. Indeed, he examined more than once in the Moral Science Tripos at Cambridge.

He had a thorough acquaintance with and a deep love of literature; and all this in spite of the fact that he lived a very laborious and wearing life as a school-teacher, with impossibly large classes, and devoted himself with whole-hearted enthusiasm to his profession. His knowledge was, moreover, not mere erudition and patient accumulation. It was all ready for use, and at his fingers' ends. Moreover, he combined with this a quality, which is not generally found in combination with the highly-developed faculties of the doctrinaire, namely an intense and fervent emotion. He was a lover of political and social liberty, a patriot to the marrow of his bones; he loved his country with a passionate devotion, and worshipped the heroes of his native land, statesmen, soldiers, sailors, poets, with an ardent adoration; the glory and honour of England were the breath of his nostrils. Deeds of heroism, examples of high courage and noble self-sacrifice, were the memories that thrilled his heart. As a man of fifty he wept over Lanfrey's account of Nelson's death; he felt our defeat at Majuba Hill like a keen personal humiliation; his letter on the subject is as the words of one mourning for his mother.

But his was not a mere poetical emotion, supplying him with highly-coloured rhetoric, or sentimental panegyric. He had a technical and minute acquaintance with the detailed movement of wars, the precise ships and regiments engaged, the personalities and characters of commanders and officers, the conduct of the rank and file.

Many delightful stories remain in the memories of his friends and hearers to attest this. His pupil-room at Eton, in what was formerly the old Christopher Inn, was close to the street, and the passage of the Guards through Eton, to and from their Windsor quarters, is an incident of constant occurrence. When the stately military music was heard far off, in gusty splendour, in the little town, or the fifes and drums of some detachment swept blithely past, he would throw down his pen and go down the little staircase to the road, the boys crowding round him. "Brats, the British army!" he would say, and stand, looking and listening, his eyes filled with gathering tears, and his heart full of proud memories, while the rhythmical beat of the footsteps went briskly echoing by.

Again, he went down to Portsmouth to see a friend who was in command of a man-of-war; he was rowed about among the hulks; the sailors in the gig looked half contemptuously at the sturdy landsman, huddled in a cloak, hunched up in the stem-sheets, peering about through his spectacles. But contempt became first astonishment, and then bewildered admiration, when they found that he knew the position of every ship, and the engagements in which each had fought.

He was of course a man of strong preferences and prejudices; he thought of statesmen and patriots, such as Pitt, Nelson, Castlereagh, Melbourne, and Wellington, with an almost personal affection. The one title to his vehement love was that a man should have served his country, striven to enhance her greatness, extended her empire, and safeguarded her liberty.

It was the same with his feeling for authors. He loved Virgil as a friend; he almost worshipped Charlotte Bronte. He spoke of Tennyson as "the light and joy of my poor life." In 1868 he saw Sir W. Scott's portrait in London, and wrote: "Sir Walter Scott, shrewd yet wistful, boyish yet dry, looking as if he would ask and answer questions of the fairies--him I saw through a mist of weeping. He is my lost childhood, he is my first great friend. I long for him, and hate the death that parts us."

In literature, the first claim on his regard was that a writer should have looked on life with a high-hearted, generous gaze, should have cared intensely for humanity, should have hoped, loved, suffered, not in selfish isolation, but with eager affection. Thus he was not only a philosophical historian, nor a mere technical critic; he was for ever dominated by an intense personal fervour. He cared little for the manner of saying a thing, so long as the heart spoke out frankly and freely; he strove to discern the energy of the soul in all men; he could forgive everything except meanness, cowardice, egotism and conceit; there was no fault of a generous and impulsive nature that he could not condone.

Thus he was for many boys a deeply inspiring teacher; he had the art of awakening enthusiasm, of investing all he touched with a mysterious charm, the charm of wide and accurate knowledge illuminated by feeling and emotion. He rebuked ignorance in a way which communicated the desire to know. There are many men alive who trace the fruit and flower of their intellectual life to his generous and free-handed sowing. But in spite of the fact that the work of a teacher of boys was intensely congenial to him, that he loved generous boyhood, and tender souls, and awakening minds with all his heart, he was not wholly in the right place as an instructor of youth. With all his sympathy for what was weak and immature, he was yet impatient of dullness, of stupidity, of caution; much that he said was too mature, too exalted for the cramped and limited minds of boyhood. He was sensitive to the charm of eager, high-spirited, and affectionate natures, but he had also the equable, just, paternal interest in boys which is an essential quality in a wise schoolmaster. Yet he was apt to make favourites; and though he demanded of his chosen pupils and friends a high intellectual zeal, though he was merciless to all sloppiness and lack of interest, yet he forfeited a wider influence by his reputation for partiality, and by an obvious susceptibility to grace of manner and unaffected courtesy. Boys who did not understand him, and whom he did not care to try to understand, thought him simply fanciful and eccentric. It is perhaps to be regretted that unforeseen difficulties prevented his being elected Tutor of his old College, and still more that in 1860 he was passed over in favour of Kingsley, when the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, submitted his name to the Queen for the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge. Four men were suggested, of whom Blakesley and Venables refused the post. Sir Arthur Helps was set aside, and it would have been offered to Johnson, if the Prince Consort had not suggested Kingsley. Yet Johnson would hardly have been in his right place as a teacher of young men. He would have been, on the one hand, brought into contact with more vigorous and independent minds, capable of appreciating the force and width of his teaching, and of comprehending the quality and beauty of his enthusiasms. But, on the other hand, he was too impatient of any difference of opinion, and, though he loved equal talk, he hated argument. And after all, he did a great work at Eton; for nearly a quarter of a century he sent out boys who cared eagerly and generously for the things of the mind.