Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/600

 consisting of aphorisms, Biblical notes and sketches, a brilliant analysis of the book of Job, and some short stories which exhibit the poetic quality and delicate texture of his prose writing.

Hale White was a man of varied intellectual equipment, a scholar, an amateur astronomer, and an exact and painstaking literary critic. His work as a translator and exponent of Spinoza's ethical philosophy, as a student of Wordsworth's MSS. and his champion against the charge of political and religious apostasy, was of excellent quality, and his political journalism as London letter-writer for the Scotsman and many provincial journals was shrewd and broadly human. But his thought on life and literature received its deepest colouring through the religious and philosophic thinkers whose minds interested and fertilised his own, Spinoza and Wordsworth, with the great puritans, Milton and Bunyan. Spinoza drew him away from the ‘artificial God of the churches’ to a rational and also a transcendental view of religion, to which Wordsworth gave poetic expression, at the same time quickening his deep love of natural beauty. But throughout his passage from the theological to the philosophic position Hale White remained a puritan in temper and inclination.

The distinction of Hale White's writing lies in its intimate spiritual quality. Its main theme is that of provincial dissent in the early and middle nineteenth century; its setting the quiet scenery of his native Bedford and the eastern Midlands. Half dreamer, half thinker, his special appeal is to the lonely and the sensitive, and to the devout sceptic whose will is at issue with his intelligence. Under the veil of fiction, his work is essentially one of self-disclosure. In that respect the Autobiography and the Deliverance are as penetrating as Rousseau's Confessions, save that ‘Mark Rutherford’ is a reticent Englishman, and his more disturbing adventures are of the soul, not of the body. Slight as is their form, his novels impress the imagination by their sincerity and depth of feeling, touched and relieved with ironic humour, and by their still, if rather sombre, beauty of atmosphere; while as studies of nonconformist England they take high, and almost solitary, rank in Victorian literature.

Hale White wrote under his own name: translations of Spinoza's Ethic (1883) and Emendation of the Intellect (1895), ''A Description of the Wordsworth and Coleridge MSS. in the possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman (1897), Examination of the Charge of Apostasy against Wordsworth (1898), and John Bunyan'' (1905).  WHITE, WILLIAM HENRY (1845–1913), naval architect, born at Devonport 2 February 1845, was the youngest child of Richard White, a currier, of Devonport, by his wife, Jane, daughter of W. Matthews, of Lostwithiel, Cornwall. He was educated at a private school at Devonport and apprenticed as a shipwright in the royal dockyard there. In 1864 he and seven fellow-apprentices were appointed by the Admiralty to the then newly-founded royal school of naval architecture at South Kensington to undergo a training in naval architecture, higher mathematics, physics, and chemistry; and in 1867 he passed out from this school, obtaining its highest honours. He and five others were at once appointed to the Admiralty staff by Sir Edward James Reed [q.v.], the chief constructor of the navy, White being engaged as a professional secretary to Sir Edward. Many warships with iron hulls were then building, in private yards as well as in the royal dockyards, in succession to vessels with wooden hulls. New methods of construction were therefore being devised, and numerous structural features were under discussion. It was desirable to collate and publish these. Reed did this in his book, Shipbuilding in Iron and Steel, published in 1869; in the preparation of this White was given a large share, as also in Reed's Our Iron Clad Ships (1869), and in the paper On the Stresses of Ships contributed by Reed to Philosophical Transactions (1871). In 1870 Reed retired from the position of chief constructor of the navy, when the office was put into commission with Mr. (afterwards Sir) Nathaniel Barnaby [q.v.] as president of the council of construction. This council appointed White as its secretary (1872).

Shortly after Reed's retirement, H.M.S. Captain, a fully-rigged, low-freeboard turret ship, designed by Captain Cowper Phipps Coles [q.v.] and built by a private firm, capsized, most of her crew being drowned. Amongst the ships then building from Reed's designs were the ‘all big gun’ battleships Devastation and Thunderer, of comparatively low freeboard but with no sail. The loss of the Captain drew especial 574