Continuing our popular series we now take up cudgel against two of our favorite authors, Lord Tweedsmuir and Charles Dickens. First Tweedsmuir.
Each time I pick up Pilgrim's Way, which I do more frequently than any other book on my shelves, I go to my favorite passages first, one of which is an amusing anecdote concerning Lord Haldane, later Secretary of War, Lord High Chancellor, and Leader of the House of Lords, and in 1903 lawyer for the Free Church of Scotland in the case of "General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland against Overtoun and Others." M'Lud, introduce yourself please.
Thankk you! Lordy, it does not appear that Lord Haldane would be the cause of amusement; however appearances can sometimes be deceiving and in fact Lord Haldane was cause of amusement in his advocacy on behalf of the Free Church of Scotland in 1903 but Lord Tweedsmuir got it all wrong. Tweedsmuir, tell it your way and then I shall cudgel.
Haldane led for that Church, and his argument fell into two parts--one historical and the other philosophical. The historical argument was simply that a Scottish Church...must be assumed to have the right to change its tenets within certain broad limits and to retain its endowments, unless the instruments creating such endowments contained specific words to the contrary. To that argument I believe there was no answer, and had it been really pressed, the court could not have resisted it. But Haldane was not an historian, and he concentrated on the philosophical argument based on the familiar Hegelian formulas--that identify exists through change and difference, that a thing is itself only because it is also in some sense its opposite, and so forth. It was a remarkable piece of dialectic, but it was an impossible argument to present to a court of justice, and it had the most disastrous effect upon various members of the House of Lords. One, I remember, became fatally confused between the philosophic term 'antinomy' and the metal 'antimony.'
Oh mirthiful heaven. The undersigned became so mirthsome upon a tenth or eleventh or twelfth reading of that passage a couple of years ago that he looked up the case. Had some degree of difficulty finding it but eventually did
Free Church of Scotland Case; read more of that case than any normal person in the 21st century should; searched the damn text for antinomy and antimony and was shocked to discover that no one on the House of Lords became fatally confused between the two terms that day on accounta the metallic antimony was never used! Frowny face there. BIG frowny face. The undersigned became a wee bit irritated with Tweedsmuir. There is such mirth to be gained from reading the exchanges among the various Lords and Haldane, e.g.--
Mr. Haldane.--...your Lordship is assuming, if I may respectfully say so, an anthropomorphic conception of the Supreme Being. It is very difficult to discuss these things, but I must say your Lordship is really assuming that the Supreme Being stands to a particular man in the relation of another man--a cause eternal to Him in space and time acting on space and time and separate from Him as one thing is separate from another. The whole point of the speculative teaching has been that that is not so; the whole point of the Church has been that that is a totally inadequate conception, and that, at any rate without resorting to any explanation, they have to hold the two things as in harmony and reconcilable.
Lord James of Hereford.--Mr. Haldane, till you told me so I had not the slightest idea that I was conceiving that.
Mr. Haldane.--I am afraid, my Lord, theologians would deal severely with your Lordship's statement.
Lord James of Hereford.--I am much obliged to you.
--that it was completely unnecessary of Tweedsmuir to add to it with slapstick confusion. However, and this in some fairness to Tweedsmuir, Pilgrim's Way is sub-titled "An Essay in Recollection." Perhaps Tweedsmuir recollected incorrectly? And the book was published posthumously. So, he did not have the opportunity to check his recollection for correction? Perhaps. But it was published. Did Houghton Mifflin not check it for accuracy? Is not that the purpose of a Houghton Mifflin? Did Tweedsmuir's estate not notify the publisher that there was this error so that perhaps a footnote could be inserted?
No, it was not faulty memory. The more the undersigned thought about it the more convinced he became that this was deliberate poetic license by Tweedsmuir. You mean to tell me the House of Lords, in the midst of legal argument, truly thought Haldane was referencing a metal? The context completely belies such an absurd notion. Haldane used antinomy several times; the Lord Chancellor and Lord Alverstone questioned him specifically about it. Haldane did not have to disabuse them of understanding the metal.
Is this nit picking? No, I hold decidedly not. Not to the undersigned anyway, who has relied upon this book so many times and has benefited in his soul and his funny bone so many times that this disagreeable discovery made him then consider if other of Tweedsmuir's soul-lifting, tickling recollections were incorrectly recollected or, and this the rub, invented. The fact is Tweedsmuir knew better. This was a case of singular importance to him, a proud Presbyterian Scot. Everything else Tweedsmuir wrote in that passage is accurate. "I remember" the fatal confusion between antinomy and antimony? No sir. No and hell no. You made it up.
Be that as it may, perhaps the undersigned has so jeopardized the popularity of this series with this overlong post that he should treat of Dickens another time? Yes.
