A Colonial Secretary – Part I

Mr. Arthur Chilton Thomas, in the last number of the Magazine, inaugurates a happy series of articles, designed to show Stonyhurst boys how to enter the various learned professions. Would it not be the complement of his excellently devised scheme to have a parallel series of articles giving the results obtained by typical Stonyhurst boys in such professions?

Why not, in fact, have recorded in the Magazine the lives of students who have, with talents “swordlike or staff-like,” helped to carry on the work of the world? In this way they might act as the definers and map-makers of other Stonyhurst destinies. And how thoroughly in accord with the spirit of the times would such a series be! A modern critic suggests that an artist with his wits about him might, with imagination and industry, distinguish himself on the walls of the Royal Academy by sketching our most popular authors at their desks: Sir Walter Scott turning up the tattered and soiled MS. of Waverley in an old cabinet with his fishing tackle; Dr. Johnson upon his three-legged stool in the Fleet Street garret, throwing off Rasselas to pay the expenses o| his mother’s funeral; Thackeray with the returned MS. of Vanity Fair in his hand, and other equally striking situations of eminent men. The idea is an indirect exemplification of the rage that exists at the present day for biographical detail. All around us we see papers and magazines deriving and maintaining their existence from records such as these—records that are not of greater interest to a general public than our proposed sketches would be to a Stonyhurst audience. In the telling, even of the most commonplace life-story, we are assured, there is something worth listening to, some great lesson that we can store away in the cells of memory for future use; how much more, then, must this be the case when we are hearing of those who have sat upon the same benches, paid. the same penalties, won the same triumphs, who have been our predecessors in the study-place and in the playing-fields. What a wealth, too, of College tradition would such a series, happily completed, hand down to the historian! True touches of boy life in every generation (for no generation is without its heroes) would necessarily abound. Nor need any one be deterred from putting on paper his reminiscences of eminent lawyer or gallant soldier, Stonyhurst-bred, through fear of the taunt of Boswellism. Let him remember, with a due regard to the sliding scale of greatness, how Macaulay has strung together, like so many pearls, Dr. Johnson’s many foibles, his insatiable appetite for veal pie with plums, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his puffings and his gruntings, and what not. Let him, also, not forget with what persistency Walter Scott makes even his courtliest characters dine and sup. “Many a mickle makes a muckle,” says the Scotch proverb. Such facts, petty though they seem to be, have their use in putting flesh upon the heroes of our story.

One of the advantages of such a “Stonyhurst Gallery.” would be its universality. Portraits might be sent in from all quarters, and as many a much vaunted Rubens is at best but the piecemeal production of that master’s scholars, so for our gallery might a portrait of difficult parts be limned by different hands working to an harmonious whole. Those who are willing to help in the good work could sally forth, pen in hand, in search of adventure with the whole world as their questing ground. Admiral Jerningham, in a letter from which we are kindly allowed to quote, after regretting that the names of all the boys that appeared on the ship’s books of “Stonyhurst,” from the date of her first commission to the present time, have not been printed, points away from home sources to the South American Republics as furnishing many bright examples of successful students—men such as John Jackson, of Montevideo, and Leonardo Peyreyra, of Enserada, who did immense service in forwarding the prosperity of their country.

It is not an easy matter to make choice of a name to start such a series with—a name upon: which the changes have not been too often rung, I was, however, lately led to inquire into the history of Miles Gerald Keon, well known to the classical world as the author of Dion and the Sybils, by a curious incident. Hunting one day amongst the treasures of an old book stall in Edinburgh, midst dingy folios and worm-eaten quartos, my eye lit upon a spruce clean copy of Dion, looking for all the world like a patch of emerald upon a dark expanse of heather. The grim guardian of parchment and sheepskin parted with the book for a mere song, and I was quite unconscious of the prize I had secured, till later on in the day, when I opened the volumes and found written in each: “To Lieutenant Henry S. Kerr, R.N., with the kindest regards of the author, M. G. K. Bermuda, 1866.” A display of the precious autograph provoked many questions from Stonyhurst men as to the author’s life and works. Unable to answer them, I sought information and from this base upwards traced the following outline of a literary career.

Miles Gerald Keon^[1] was the last male descendant of an ancient Irish family, the Keons of Keonbrook. He was born in 1821 in a castle^[2] belonging to his father, in Tipperary, on the banks of the Shannon.

Left an orphan at the tender age of four years, his mother having died in 1825 and his father a twelvemonth previously, he in company with a younger sister was committed to the tender care of the Countess Magawly, their grandmother. On the death of that venerable lady not long afterwards, at Temora, the two children were left by her to the charge of her only son, the Count Magawly.^[3] The Count very soon discovered in his little nephew marvellous intelligence, and an unusual appreciation for so young a child of all he told him about the history of different places and countries. He spoke of him as of one qui a la puissance d’entendre et de comprendre, and he was determined that, whatever happened, the boy should go into the world with a first-class training. Of these, his pre-collegiate days, Keon has left us characteristic sketches, “drawn up,” he says, “as a small, perhaps infinitesimal, contribution to psychological science.” They are scarcely within the scope of our present article, or we should be tempted, as they are eminently readable, to make extracts from them. When he was old enough, his guardian determined to send him to the College which had already educated not a few of his kinsmen, the Fitzsimons, Banons, and others. To Stonyhurst, then, he came in, 1832, during the rectorship of Father Parker. From the letters of several of his old school-fellows we are able to build up a description of him as a schoolboy. He was a tall youth, without eventually developing into a large man. He was narrow-chested, with high shoulders, a pale long face, rather prominent nose and mouth. His expression was pleasing and benevolent. He did not play much at the games (partly owing no doubt to one of the fingers of his right hand having been badly crushed) but preferred to walk about, and would often be reading during play-time. He frequently wrote short stories, which he would declaim aloud to a select circle of friends. The subject-matter of these was always interesting and graphic. In the school lists of the period he shows forth with marked distinction. The year after his arrival amongst the nomina eorum qui præmiis pro meritis ornantur, we find E Figuris, in Scriptione Latinâ, Gallicâ et Anglicâ, tulit primum præmium Milesius Keon, and he gains another trophy amongst those who præmiis donantur ob scientiam ter facto periculo probatam. In Rudiments and Grammar he kept the same place; in Syntax he was second; in Poetry his name is missing altogether from the prize list; and in Rhetoric, much to his chagrin, for in his last year he had fought very hard for the red riband, he was second. His master all the way up was the late Bishop Etheridge, and his great rival Father Joseph Howell.^[4] Although he made a regular appearance in the Christmas plays, he did not distinguish himself in any way upon the stage—minor parts falling to him, such as Frederick in the Poor Gentleman, Julian in the Young Reefer, Clarence in Henry VI. In one academy (Syntax, 1836) he presents himself for examination in Livy, Tacitus, Cicero de Amicitia, the Seven Orations, &c., &c. The writing of prologues and odes came to him as a matter of course; he was the poet of his class. In 1838 he wrote the Grand Academy Ode, a brilliant one, “On the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne,” beginning

A summer sky looks down o’er all the land,
A summer sea rolls brightly on our strand,
From shore to shore, thro’ all our hundred plains,
Joy holds her revel sway
And laughs the hours away
And freely peal a thousand loyal strains;
For England crowns a Queen! Ye nations far,
Or where the dimness of the Polar Star
Lights endless winter lone;
Or where the freezy belt invests the sphere,
Or lustres of the Southern cross appear
Oe’r watery deserts strewn;
Or India views its golden fabric piled,
Or Afric savage scours his sultry wild,
Or Andes heaves his sides,
Or Plata’s water rides,
List all! all, all attend! attend and joy,
For England crowns a Queen—the Queen of liberty!

A story has come down to us that he was once sorely. exercised about the composition of a Greek ode for some public occasion. The eve of the academy, or whatever it was, had come and not a word was written. On the morning itself, however, he appeared at the breakfast-table jubilant, saying that he had dreamed the ode, and sure enough down it went to the tune of five stanzas. Those who knew him at Stonyhurst credit him with an extraordinary amount of genius and but a moderate amount of application. He himself, in one of his works, speaking of the three stages of idleness—male agendo, nihil agendo, aliter agendo—makes self-accusation of the last. Long before he reached the classes where rhetoric was professedly taught, he tells us he was deep in its mysteries. A boyish passion for the art of war divided his heart with other more solid tastes. Polybius and Demosthenes, Longinus and Plutarch, Blair and Puysegur, Napier and Hansard, Enfield’s Speaker and the Martial Register, formed a strange and somewhat heterogeneous medley for his school-day studies.

An adventurous inauguration of his youth led him, after quitting college, into France and Algeria. He was abroad for some years; the result of his experiences he gave to the world later in a series of papers which appeared in Colburn’s United Service Magazine, under the title of “Adventures amongst the soldiers and lower orders in French Africa and France.” Coming to London in 1843 he began to eat his terms as a law student at Gray’s Inn, then in fashion, but he soon abandoned all thought of preparing himself for the bar, and adopted by preference the profession of a man of letters. He went into the struggle, a struggle in which his faith and nationality were to tell sorely against him, swayed mainly by the hope of exerting some influence for good on his generation. He measures the step he is about to take in the following words: “For what can the man of letters hope? and as for the Catholic man of letters, what insanity possesses him? It is no insanity. The Catholic man of letters in England depends (I hope) upon the same causes that ensure the success of any other citizen of the literary republic. He has fewer advantages, I grant you; since it is difficult while advocating the cause and enforcing the sentiments of the few, to command the favour of the many. What, then, if the few whom he serves be, of all, the most dead to his labours and the least discerning of the sweat of his brow? Let him rouse them. Such is his vocation. Then there is, in addition to this, the moral influence of the successful author—an influence which would render him, even if he were himself at the starvation point, a man of the utmost importance, a man and an importance before whom the physician and the barrister, before whom the whole companies of apoplectic merchants, whole guilds of busy tradesmen, whole corporations of large-throated aldermen, in frequent fuss and in perpetual perspiration, must ever feel the comparative shortness of their destiny, and the comparative narrowness of their ministrations.” He was then just twenty-three years of age, and he was not long in making his mark in journalism and in the magazines. His first hit was a chivalrous vindication of his old masters in the pages of the Oxford and Cambridge Review, among the contributors to which was his cousin, Hon. George Smythe, afterwards Lord Strangford. So brilliantly written was the article that at first Smythe had the credit of its authorship. An article so resolutely championing the cause of the Jesuits in the ostensible, or at any rate nominal, organ of the two great Anglican universities, created a stir in the literary world. A stormy controversy rose upon the subject. Leading articles were written about it. The paper itself, in pamphlet form, was reprinted. The writer’s name was revealed, and the Editor of the Review was obliged to publish a ukase, declaring that henceforward and for ever the columns of his publication would be closed to Catholic writers. When the excitement of the contention at last died out, the outcome of it all was the announcement by Longmans, as in preparation, of a “History of the Jesuits, by Miles Gerald Keon.”^[5] In 1846 he became editor of Dolman’s Magazine, a position which he held between its first editor, Mr. Digby Beste, also a Saxosylvanian, and its last editor, Rev. Edward Price, of Lincoln’s-inn-Fields. About this time, also, he published his first work, a brief but beautiful monograph on St. Alexis. While rendering eminent services in this way, and by contributions to the Dublin Review, to the cause of religion, he did not shrink from the field of politics. He became intimately associated with the leaders of the Young England party, and securing an appointment on the Morning Post,^[6] he wrote up their cause with the greatest vigour and success. When Lord Lytton discovered who the writer of these articles was, he wrote to him, expressing his great admiration, and invited him at the same time to stay with him at his country seat at Knebworth to meet some literary and scientific celebrities.

Thus commenced the close friendship between the two men—a friendship that stood the young Irishman in good stead, and remained unbroken to the very last.^[7] Had it not been for Lytton, Keon might possibly never have attempted to write a novel, for the work he had laid out for himself was of a higher and more important description. He was, however, led to it in this way. While he was visiting Lord Lytton one morning, the conversation was interrupted by the appearance of the proprietor of the London Journal, Mr. Stiff, then the ruler of many destinies, who had called for the purpose of inducing the author of The Caxtons to contribute a novel to his journal. Lytton was obliged to decline, but introduced Keon as a substitute for him, saying, “Let me introduce my friend here; he is just the man who will do in my stead, and he perhaps will accept your proposal, provided you can make terms amicably with him.” Mr. Stiff gladly availed himself of the great author’s recommendation, and immediately fixed a day to talk the matter over at his office. There liberal terms were proposed and accepted, the result being the appearance of ‘Harding, the Money-Spinner.” It was published in book form by Bentley in 1879, four years after the author’s death.

The rest of Keon’s literary life in London, and his official career at Bermuda, we leave for the next number of the Magazine.