And what was the attraction, what was the magnet in this character that so touched all who knew her and made her disciples loyally enthusiastic to the end?  It was not only a wish to serve, but it was the absolute sincerity of her life and purpose, and the humility with which she served her time.  She avoided notoriety; she disliked fuss; she sought no applause; she cared neither for riches nor honour.  Whenever she spoke of the work, or wrote of it, as she did in her annual letter, she put herself absolutely in the background, and gave all thanks and all praise to her fellow-workers.  And yet she ruled by right divine.  If ever there was a Queen’s garden, wherein with lily for sceptre she moved amongst loving subjects to command as well as to dispense blessing, it was the garden of her life’s work, the kingdom of high spiritual purpose, of which she was the great-hearted Queen.  It was a fortunate thing she found in early life a King who could inspire the queenliness of her purpose, a King who believed in service, believed not only in hearing the word of God, but in doing it.  “The greatest of all the miseries of life,” wrote John Ruskin, “the most terrible is the corruption of even the sincerest religion which is not daily founded on rational, effective, humble, and helpful action.”  And it was a happy chance that led the Master to pour out his heart to his pupil on that day in Denmark Hill in 1867, when Ruskin lamented the dreariness of life without an object other than the usual daily round.  I paint, take my mother for a drive, dine with friends, or answer these correspondents,” said he, drawing a heap of letters from his pocket with rueful face, “but one longs to be doing something more satisfying.”  “Most of us feel like that at times,” said his pupil.  “Well, what would you like to be doing?” asked Ruskin.  “Something to provide better homes for the poor,” said Octavia Hill, and turning sharp round in his chair, Ruskin asked her how it could be done—“Have you a business plan?” (pp. 7-8)

The friend in whose memory we are met to-day, with long family traditions of help to the poor in London, whose mind from early childhood had been called to think upon social reform, had a plan which appealed to her master; and the wisest and most practical way of helping the poor of our great cities to a sense of decent surroundings and the happiness of home, and the worth of friendship and sympathy between class was born for London that day. (p. 9)

But the whole secret of the success of the housing schemes, identified not only here but in other cities and in foreign lands with the name of Miss Octavia Hill and her helpers, lay in its simplicity.  There was no vast clearance of ground, and the building up of palatial blocks of tenements; but instead of it there was a determination to see that the best that could be made of what existed should be made, and that not only the houses should be repaired and cleaned, but that the broken hearts of the tenants should be repaired, and that the moral life and daily happiness of the lodger should be cleaned and purified; but all this could only be done by the constant personal pressure of a higher life upon the lower life with which it came in contact. (p. 9)

Those who dwelt in these tenements soon found that behind the inflexible will there was a heart of love.  When she spoke to them, she spoke “with authority and not as the scribes,” and the common people heard  her gladly. (p. 9)

She was a many-gifted woman, a woman of far sight and just judgment.  A woman of tender heart with the courage of a man, a woman with a woman’s power of sentiment with the practical wisdom and business capacity of a man, and this combination helped no doubt to give her her strong personality; but I always think that, side by side with this, her sense of humour helped her throughout life; but most of all what helped her was a belief in the immortality of good work.  She often spoke to me of her faith in the future as helping her in the present; and nothing was a surer part of her creed, than that all that is of God and goodness in this world shall endure for a thousand generations. (pp. 9-10)

It was my fortune to know her for nearly forty years—from the time whan as a young layman in a London slum, I helped her colleague, Miss Cons, as a rent-collector, until the last day when I saw her in the Committee Room of the National Trust—and I found this undying hopefulness of her creed a help in much of the public work that I myself have endeavoured to do; very often, after the hard labour necessary in the collecting of funds for one or other of our National Trust properties, she would write a cheery letter, the keynote of which was joy in the thought that when we were all dead and gone, the people whom she loved to far-off generations would feel the joy of it. Doomed to live in the great city, the countryside “haunted her like a passion;” she saw and felt its restful and inspiring beauty with the eye and heart of an artist. (p. 10)

Her love of the work of the National Trust, of which she was one of the founders, as of the Kyrle Society, whose beginning she inspired, her interest in the Commons Preservation Society, were all dictated by one thought—the need of bringing the people out of unlovely surroundings into the presence of healthy and helpful nature.  She saw the King in His beauty in the land that is very far off, revealed in field and flower, on misty moorland or blue-grey fell, in gleaming purple plain, and her last dying moments were made happy to her by the thought that to Mariner’s Hill, for all time, the people in unlovely London pent, might from time to time escape to the Kentish height, and be brought nearer unto the Giver of all the beauty that is there revealed. (p. 10)

(The Power of Personal Service: A Sermon in Memory of Octavia Hill (Keswick, 1912))

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Sir,—On Tuesday next, the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, founded 31 years ago as an Anti-Plumage-Wearing League, will be held….  It is sincerely hoped that the outcome of that meeting will bring such pressure of public opinion to bear on our legislators as to urge them to spare an hour of their valuable time to pass a Bill which has already passed through Committee and was only dropped at the outbreak of war in 1914.  Mr Hobhouse’s Bill prohibited the importation of the plumage of all wild birds.  In 1917 the Board of Trade prohibited such importation, but relaxed its restrictions in September of last year.  A Bill, therefore, has again been drafted, and only awaits the will of Parliament to give it force.  Of course, if the women of Great Britain would impose a self-denying ordinance upon themselves a Bill would not be necessary; but they are either too ignorant of the facts of the “murderous millinery” they encourage, or too careless of the joy of bird life on earth for future generations, and nothing but an Act of Parliament can stop the scandal.  Prohibition laws exist in America, Australia, and India, but London is the greatest feather market in the world.  The number of skins imported annually has been reckoned at 35,000,000.  The British public does not appear to realize the savage cruelty exercised in the trade.  For example, nests of young egrets are left to die under a tropical sun, because, for the sake of the nuptial feathers which have been torn from their mothers’ wings, the bodies of those mothers lie festering on the ground beneath the nests; 150,000 albatrosses are left to die of haemorrhage because their glorious wings have been cut off by one band of raiders.  What troubles us is not only the mixture of silliness and wickedness that goes hand in hand; it is the abominable catering for vanity at the price of innocent blood.  What causes us deep indignation is that several of the most beautiful species of bird-life on earth have already been wiped out.  Many of the loveliest living jewels God ever sent on earth to our eyes delight and our hearts reverence have been quenched in the double darkness of the trade’s greed and selfish fashion.

(Times, 16 March 1920, p. 12)

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(Denderah)

When Cleopatra’s proud victorious face
    Smiled from the stone on Hathor’s temple wall,
Did not the sculptor’s hand, with trembling, trace
    The form that held her Anthony in thrall?

Not as Augustus Caesar, unconcerned
    Of soul, with passion passionlessly cold,
His heart within his hand must needs have burned
    Who wrought the beauty that our eyes behold.

The vulture head-dress, horns, and plaits of hair,
    The stately neck that pearls of price adorn,
These had he graved for goddesses as fair,
    Yet never carved such lips of love and scorn.

(Idylls and Lyrics of the Nile, p. 106)

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But we had not yet seen one of the greatest of Della Robbia’s works.  This was the large altar-piece in the tiny chapel opposite the monastery gate.  The brothers were at prayer there, and we had scruples.  These were waived as ridiculous by our cicerone, who, unlocking the gate, escorted us into the dark inner chapel, and, lighting a huge candle, gave us sight of this exquisite and precious work.  It is an Assumption of the Virgin with attendant saints and angels – St. Bonaventura receiving from the Virgin the measure for the making of the chapel.  A curious adaptation, probably, of the gift of the holy girdle.  The spirituality of the faces and the tenderness of the whole terra-cotta made one feel that the artist, Andrea della Robbia, was determined, from love of St. Francis, to excel himself in this work.  But I could hardly give my mind to the white faces against the blue ground before me, for other faces almost as moveless against their brown background all round about me.  There, with countenances expressionless, vacant, sullen, and sometimes coarse, knelt in silence, as they had knelt for the best part of an hour, the young Franciscans, each in his allotted place, each a prisoner of the Lord, who seemed a prisoner of man, for they were under lock and key.  Some had pulled their brown hoods over their heads for warmth’s sake, and I saw nothing of their countenances; others gazed upwards as if in a kind of trance; others stared straight into vacancy.  This prayer-hour was part of each monkish day’s work – one of the rules of the order; but it was painful to witness – tragic in its non-fulfilment of the essential reasonableness of prayer, and pathetic in its apparent failure to obtain its end.  The sullenness of these young men’s faces, the sort of caged wild-beast look in their eyes, gave one the feeling that here was fanaticism of a certain order, doubtless, but that the love and sympathy for all living creatures which St. Francis taught could not take root in such soil, nor find food-time nor flower-time in such sunless air. (p. 417)

We issued from the chapel, the jailer locked his silent prisoners to their prayers, and we went out into the chill afternoon air.  We would seek the liberty of the forest; we would climb the mountain-ridge; we would wander where St. Francis had wandered, where Massco had seen his visions, and where Brother John of Fermo had in his sorrow met the Lord.  A servant of the monastery, with a fox-looking face and a broken spirit, wobbled along in front of us as guide; took us by a difficult path for an hour’s walk through a forest of beech and pine, whose quiet was broken only by the thud of the wood-cutter’s axe, and now and again by the cry of a woodpecker.  We climbed 1200 feet: so dense and airless was the forest that it was tiring work.  The path was cut up deeply by wheels of the woodman’s waggon, and we were scarcely rewarded for our trudge.  There was no wide expanse of view when we gained the broken tower or outlook 4165 feet above sea-level.  Far down below us grey and green lay the furrow of the lonely vale, the cradle of the Arno, without sign of man’s habitation; a troubled sea of ridges of violet grey rolled towards the north and east, featureless and grim, and hid from sight the birthplace of the Tiber.  We left off gazing and walked along the ridges in a westerly direction, and in twenty minutes’ time looked down over precipitous crags that gave us a wider view of the more open country east of the monastery cliff.  A falcon was seen to leave a ledge below us, and we heard a blackbird’s voice.  Thence back through the dark woods we came, back through the monastery farm-buildings, in time to find that the faithful monk Cleto had spread his coarse cloth in the little refectory, and was anxiously waiting for us to take our seats that he might bring in the soup. (pp. 417-8)

The dinner cannot be described; for after the soup of bread sopped in saltish water had disappeared, a strange dish was served.  Cleto was proud of it, but could not explain it; only as he sighed deeply he would with his finger indicate with pride the choicest morsel, and urge us to gird up the loins of our appetite thereto.  One of my friends believes to this day that the dish was “monastery mice in batter.”  Certainly there were little tailed creatures mixed up with what, after all, may have been artichoke fragments fried in pasta.  We stuck to our coarse bread and the coarser wine, which was part of some poor neighbouring farmer’s offering to the monastery, and waited till the next course.  It was the last: it seemed to consist of fragments of a pickled shoulder of mutton which had on some former occasion been shorn of most of its meat.  Tough, stringy, knobby bits of muscle and fibre were scraped away and laid by the side of the bone and handed round.  We took it, for by the light in Cleto’s face and his deeper sigh this was something special – a treat only for princes.  Poor Cleto! as he sighed I remembered that here at Alvernia St. Francis had sighed before him, and, much tempted in the body of the devil, had lost his accustomed cheerfulness.  What form of temptation poor Cleto was undergoing I know not; but sight of mice in batter, and the last fragments of the last mutton bone in a monastery where meat is forbidden, may have been a sorrow’s crown of sorrow. (p. 418)….

At eight o’clock the monk with the lantern came to escort the ladies beyond the precincts, and at nine another monk came to lead us of the sterner sex down through the cloisters at the back of the chapel that served as the resting-place of baggage-mules, and smelt of the stable, on to a second or interior cloister, in the upper corridor of which our resting-place was found.  We stumbled on over sledges and ploughs and cart apparatus, and gained the stairway; thence entered a corridor hung with cheap prints of scenes in the French Revolution, and were ushered to an apartment that was next door to a similar one which had sheltered royalty.  The key was given to us, the candle was lit, and we saw the two huge piles of balloon-like mattress and blanketing, and the two tiny basins and towels, which, with six inches of mirror, was the furniture of the best spare room the monastery could afford.  We were soon asleep, grateful for the simple cleanliness and chance of warmth, and too tired to be waked by the sound of the midnight bell that called our friends from their slumbers for their procession to the Chapel of the Stigmata. (p. 419)

Next morning the swifts screamed so loud as to rouse us from sleep.  We went into the cold cloud that hung in drizzle of fine rain upon the monastery court.  We envied the monks their great frieze gown sleeves as we took our seats in the chill refectory.  That morning was occupied in watching the ordinary life of the brotherhood.  It was a festa, and peasants came crowding up the steep stone stairway for the dole of bread that would certainly be theirs.  I never quite realised the worth of a loaf of coarse bread as joy-maker till I saw the light come into the faces of some of the women at the monastery gate, and watched them scamper back down the steep stairs to bear it to their dwelling far away.  Blessed Francis, how his sad face would have been a moment less sad to see that sight, and to know that, more than six and a half centuries after he left La Verna for ever, La Verna still cares for the poor and fills the hungry with bread! (p. 419)….

No wonder St. Francis found many devils to fight at that mountain retreat, though he fought them well.  Brother Leo has chronicled for us how “at that time when in the sacred mountain of Alvernia he received the stigmata of the Lord, St. Francis suffered such temptations in his body and tribulations that he was not able to appear as cheerful as was his wont”; and he said to his friend, “If the brethren knew what and how great tribulations and afflictions the demons make for me, there is not one of them who would not be moved with compassion and pity concerning me.”  I did not know what troubles Brother Cleto had to endure, but from the depths of my heart I pitied that man; and his joyless and careworn face haunts me still.  Nor could one get rid of the thought that there in that mountain-hold—“that devout and solitary place,” as Count Orlando called it, where, as the chronicler Thomas de Celano tells us, St. Francis learned “that through much anguish and many struggles he should enter the kingdom,”—there had been once born noble thoughts to help the world, and noble thoughts that might still help it, for the call to holy poverty is as loud to-day as ever.  But the great souls that there first received the holy fire of their consecration to the pattern of Christ, these had passed away.  There was no Francis now, no Brother Leo, no Frate Angelo, no James of Massa nor John of Fermo, to go from their fortress of prayer to make a dead religion stand upon its feet and shake Europe into spiritual being.  Yes, as in thought one stands once again upon that high convent terrace of La Verna, it is not only the sad face of Cleto that haunts one, it is the music of the past that saddens,

 
                                    Vague and forlorn,
            As from an infinitely distant land,
            Come airs and floating echoes, and
                convey
            A Melancholy into all our day. (p. 421)

(Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 164 (September 1898), 410-21)

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