Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/622

Rh 598 ROBERTSON leaders. He was at this time a moderate Calvinist in doc- trine and enthusiastically evangelical. Ordained in July 1840 by the bishop of Winchester, he at once entered on ministerial work in that city, and during his ministry there and under the influence of Martyn and Brainerd, whose lives he affectionately studied, he carried devotional asceticism to an injurious length, rising early, refraining from meat, subduing his nature by self-imposed austerities, and binding himself to a system of prayer. In less than a year he was compelled to seek relaxation ; and going to Switzerland he there met and married Helen, third daughter of Sir George William Denys, Bart. Early in 1842, after a few months' rest, he accepted a curacy in Cheltenham, which he retained for upwards of four years. " It was during this period that the basis of his theological science was entirely changed ; his principles of thought attained, but not as yet systematized ; his system of inter- preting the Bible reduced to order ; his whole view of the relation of God to man and man to God built up into a new temple on the ruins of the old." The questioning spirit was first aroused in him by the disappointing fruit of evangelical doctrine which he found in Cheltenham, as well as by intimacy with men of varied reading. But, if we are to judge from his own statement, the doubts which now actively assailed him had long been latent in his mind: "a man who had read theological and philosophical controversy long before with painful interest a man who at different times had lived in the atmosphere of thought in which Jonathan Edwards, Plato, Lucretius, Thomas Brown, Carlyle, Emerson, and Fichte lived who has steeped his soul and memory in Byron's strongest feel- ings who has walked with Newman years ago to the brink of an awful precipice, and chosen rather to look upon it calmly, and know the worst of the secrets of the darkness, than recoil with Newman, in fear and tender- ness, back to the infallibility of Romanism such a man is not likely to have been influenced by a few casual state- ments of difficulties which he had read of a thousand iimes before." This was written from Heidelberg in 1846. The crisis of his mental conflict had just been passed in Tyrol, and he was now beginning to let his creed grow again from the one fixed point which nothing had availed to shift : " the one great certainty to which, in the midst of the darkest doubt, I never ceased to cling the entire symmetry and loveliness and the unequalled nobleness of the humanity of the Son of Man." After this mental revolution he felt unable to return to Cheltenham, but after doing duty for two months at St Ebbe's, Oxford, he entered in August 1847 on his famous ministry at Trinity Chapel, Brighton. Here he stepped at once into the foremost rank as a preacher. His church was thronged with thoughtful men of all classes in society and of all shades of religious belief, with those also who relished brilliant and sometimes impassioned oratory, and with those who felt their need of sympathetic and helpful teach- ing. But his closing years were full of sadness. His sensi- tive nature was subjected to extreme suffering, partly from the misconstruction and hatred of the society in which he lived, partly from his inability to accomplish the heavy work of his position. He was crippled by incipient disease of the brain, which at first inflicted unconquerable lassitude and depression, and latterly agonizing pain. On the 5th June 1853 he preached for the last time; and on the 15th August of the same year, at the age of thirty-seven, he found relief in death. The causes of his success as a preacher are obvious. His fine ap- pearance, his flexible and sympathetic voice, his manifest sincerity, the perfect lucidity and artistic symmetry of his address, and the brilliance with which he illustrated his points would have attracted hearers even had he had little to say. But he had much to say. No sermons were ever more compact. They were the utterance of a full, vivid, and penetrating mind. He was not, indeed, i scientific theologian ; but his insight into the principles of the spiritual life is unrivalled ; and for men approaching the truth from the same side as himself he is an invaluable guide. His own lonely and in- dependent struggle had taught him where foothold was secure, and had enabled him to throw light on many a forgotten stepping-stone of truth. As his biographer says, thousands have found in his sermons " a living source of impulse, a practical direction of thought, a key to many of the problems of theology, and above all a path to spiritual freedom." In his hands spiritual facts assume an aspect of reasonableness which is irresistible. Religion is felt to be no longer a mystery for the exercise of professional minds, nor an extravagance suitable for enthusiastic temperaments, but an essen- tial of life for all, and in line with the order of things in which we now are. For his sermons obtained their large circulation partly because they were new in kind. They marked the transition from the period in which religion was treated as a series of propositions to that in which it is presented as an essence penetrating the whole of human life. The accusations of heretical and dangerous teaching which were persistently brought against him, though possibly not so malignant as he himself supposed, were certainly more mis- chievous than the teaching against which they were levelled. Few men have ever more perfectly understood the spirit of Christ, and few have so fully made that spirit their own. Robertson's literary remains include five volumes of sermons, two volumes of expositoiy lectures, on Genesis and on the Epistles to the Corinthians, a volume of miscellaneous addresses, and a Key to 'In Memoriam.' Robertson's Life has been written by Stopford A. Brooke. (M. D.) ROBERTSON, THOMAS WILLIAM (1829-1871), English dramatist, was born on 9th January 1829. As a dramatist he had a brief but very brilliant career. It is not too much to say that he was the most successful and distin- guished writer of plays in his generation. The son of a provincial actor and manager, chief of a " circuit " that ranged from Bristol to Cambridge, Robertson was familiar with the stage from his childhood ; but it was not till the last seven years of his life that he made his mark. He was never, as he admitted himself, very successful as an actor. He tried his hand also at writing plays, and a farcical comedy by him, A Night's Adventure, was produced at the Olympic under Farren's management as early as 1851. But this did not make good his footing, and he remained for some years longer in the provinces, varying his work as an actor with miscellaneous contributions to newspapers. In 1860 he went to London with the inten- tion, it is said, of making his living by journalism and light literature. He edited a mining journal and con- tributed to it a novel afterwards dramatized with the title Skadmv Tree Shaft. He wrote a farce entitled A Cantah, which was played at the Strand in 1861. Then, in 1864,. came his first marked success, David Gar-rick, produced at the Haymarket with Sothern in the principal character. It was not, however, till the production of Society at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1865, under the management of Miss Marie Wilton, afterwards Mrs Bancroft, that the originality and cleverness of the dramatist were fully recognized. Play-writer and company were exactly suited one to another } the plays and the acting together the small size of the playhouse being also in their favour were at once recognized as a new thing, and, while some critics sneered at the " cup-and-saucer comedy," voted it absurdly realistic, said there was nothing in it but commonplace life represented without a trace of Sheridanian wit and sparkle, all London flocked to the little house in Totten- ham Street, and the stage was at once inundated with imi- tations of the new style of acting and the new kind of play. Robertson, although his health was already undermined, followed up Society in quick succession with the series of characteristic plays which made the reputation of himself, the company, and the theatre. Ours was produced in 1866, Caste in 1867, Play in 1868, School in 1869, J/./'. in 1870. For twenty years there probably has not been a week, hardly a night, in which some one of Robertson's plays has not been produced somewhere in Great Britain,.