Liddon, Henry Parry
LIDDON, HENRY PARRY (1829-1890), English divine, was the son of a naval captain and was born at North Stoneham, Hampshire, on the 20th of August 1829. He was educated at King's College School, London, and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated, taking a second class, in 1850. As viceprincipal of the theological college at Cuddesdon (1854-1859) he wielded considerable influence, and, on returning to Oxford as vice-principal of St Edmund's Hall, became a growing force among the undergraduates, exercising his influence in strong opposition to the liberal reaction against Tractarianism, which had set in after Newman's secession in 1845. In 1864 the bishop of Salisbury (W. K. Hamilton), whose examining chaplain he had been, appointed him prebendary of Salisbury cathedral. In 1866 he delivered his Bampton Lectures on the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. From that time his fame as a preacher, which had been steadily growing, may be considered established. In 1870 he was made canon of St Paul's Cathedral, London. He had before this published Some Words for God, in which, with great power and eloquence, he combated the scepticism of the day. His preaching at St Paul's soon attracted vast crowds. The afternoon sermon, which fell to the lot of the canon in residence, had usually been delivered in the choir, but soon after Liddon's appointment it became necessary to preach the sermon under the dome, where from 3000 to 4000 persons used to gather to hear the preacher. Few orators belonging to the Church of England have acquired so great a reputation as Liddon. Others may have surpassed him in originality, learning or reasoning power, but for grasp of his subject, clearness of language, lucidity of arrangement, felicity of illustration, vividness of imagination, elegance of diction, and above all, for sympathy with the intellectual position of those whom he addressed, he has hardly been rivalled. In the elaborate arrangement of his matter he is thought to have imitated the great French preachers of the age of Louis XIV. In 1870 he had also been made Ireland professor of exegesis at Oxford. The combination of the two appointments gave him extensive influence over the Church of England. With Dean Church he may be said to have restored the waning influence of the Tractarian school, and he succeeded in popularizing the opinions which, in the hands of Pusey and Keble, had appealed to thinkers and scholars. His forceful spirit was equally conspicuous in his opposition to the Church Discipline Act of 1874, and in his denunciation of the Bulgarian atrocities of 1876. In 1882 he resigned his professorship and utilized his thus increased leisure by travelling in Palestine and Egypt, and showed his interest in the Old Catholic movement by visiting Dollinger at Munich. In 1886 he became chancellor of St Paul's, and it is said that he declined more than one offer of a bishopric. He died on the 9th of September 1890, in the full vigour of his intellect and at the zenith of his reputation. He had undertaken and nearly completed an elaborate life of Dr Pusey, for whom his admiration was unbounded; and this work was completed after his death by Messrs Johnston and Wilson. Liddon's great influence during his life was due to his personal fascination and the beauty of his pulpit oratory rather than to any high qualities of intellect. As a theologian his outlook was that of the 16th rather than the 19th century; and, reading his Bampton Lectures now, it is difficult to realize how they can ever have been hailed as a great contribution to Christian apologetics. To the last he maintained the narrow standpoint of Pusey and Keble, in defiance of all the developments of modern thought and modern scholarship; and his latter years were embittered by the consciousness that the younger generation of the disciples of his school were beginning to make friends of the Mammon of scientific unrighteousness. The publication in 1889 of Lux Mundi, a series of essays attempting to harmonize Anglican Catholic doctrine with modern thought, was a severe blow to him, for it showed that even at the Pusey House, established as the citadel of Puseyism at Oxford, the principles of Pusey were being departed from. Liddon's importance is now mainly historical. He was the last of the classical pulpit orators of the English Church, the last great popular exponent of the traditional Anglican orthodoxy. Besides the works mentioned, Liddon published several volumes of Sermons, a volume of Lent lectures entitled Some Elements of Religion (1870), and a collection of Essays and Addresses on such themes as Buddhism, Dante, etc.
See Life and Letters, by J. O. Johnston (1904); G. W. E. Russell, H. P. Liddon (1903); A. B. Donaldson, Five Great Oxford Leaders (1900), from which the life of Liddon was reprinted separately in '90S- LIE, JONAS LAURITZ EDEMIL (1833-1908), Norwegian novelist, was born on the 6th of November 1833 close to Hougsund (Eker), near Drammen. In 1838, his father being appointed sheriff of Tromso, the family removed to that Arctic town. Here the future novelist enjoyed an untrammelled childhood among the shipping of the little Nordland capital, and gained acquaintance with the wild seafaring life which he was afterwards to describe. In 1846 he was sent to the naval school at Frederiksvaern, but his extreme near-sight unfitted him for the service, and he was transferred to the Latin school at Bergen. In 1851 he went to the university of Christiania, where Ibsen and Bjornson were among his fellow-students. Jonas Lie, however, showed at this time no inclination to literature. He pursued his studies as a lawyer, took his degrees in law in 1858, and settled down to practice as a solicitor in the little town of Kongsvinger. In 1860 he married his cousin, Thomasine Lie, whose collaboration in his work he acknowledged in 1893 in a graceful article in the Samtiden entitled " Min hustru." In 1866 he published his first book, a volume of poems. He made unlucky speculations in wood, and the consequent financial embarrassment induced him to return to Christiania to try his luck as a man of letters. As a journalist he had no success, but in 1870 he published a melancholy little romance, Den Fremsynte (Eng. trans., The Visionary, 1894), which made him famous. Lie proceeded to Rome, and published Tales in 1871 and Tremasteren " Fremtiden " (Eng. trans., The Barque " Future," Chicago, 1879), a novel, in 1872. His first great book, however, was Lodsen og hans Hustru (The Pilot and his Wife, 1874), which placed him at the head of Norwegian novelists; it was written in the little town of Rocca di Papa in the Albano mountains. From that time Lie enjoyed, with Bjornson and Ibsen, a stipend as poet from the Norwegian government. Lie spent the next few years partly in Dresden, partly in Stuttgart, with frequent summer excursions to Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian highlands. During his exile he produced the drama in verse called Faustina Strozzi (1876). Returning to Norway, Lie began a series of romances of modern life in Christiania, of which Thomas Ross (1878) and Adam Schroder (1879) were the earliest. He returned to Germany, and settled first in Dresden again, then in Hamburg, until 1882, when he took up his abode in Paris, where he lived in close retirement in the society of Scandinavian friends. His summers were spent at Berchtesgaden in Tirol. The novels of his German period are Rutland (1881) and Gaa paa ("Go Ahead!" 1882), tales of life in the Norwegian merchant navy. His subsequent works, produced with great regularity, enjoyed an immense reputation in Norway. Among the best of them are: Livsslaven (1883, Eng. trans., " One of Life's Slaves," 1895); Familjen paa Gilje (" The Family of Gilje," 1883); Malstroem (1885), describing the gradual ruin of a Norwegian family; Et Samliv (" Life in Common," 1887), describing a marriage of convenience. Two of the most successful of his novels were The Commodore's Daughters (1886) and Niobe (1894), both of which were presented to English readers in the International library, edited by Mr Gosse. In 1891-1892 he wrote, under the influence of the new romantic impulse, twenty-four folk-tales, printed in two volumes entitled Trold. Some of these were translated by R. N. Bain in Weird Tales (1893), illustrated by L. Housman. Among his later works were the romance Naar Sol gaar ned (" When the Sun goes down," 1895), the powerful novel of Dyre Rein (1896), the fairy drama of Lindelin (1897), Paste Forland (1899), a romance which contains much which is autobiographical, When the Iron Curtain falls (1901), and The Consul (1904). His Samlede Vaerker were published at Copenhagen in 14 vols. (1902-1904). Jonas Lie left Paris in 1891, and, after spending a year in Rome, returned to Norway, establishing himself at Holskogen, near Christiansand. He died at Christiania on the 5th of July 1908. As a novelist he stands with those minute and unobtrusive painters of contemporary manners who defy arrangement in this or that school. He is with Mrs Gaskell or Ferdinand Fabre ; he is not entirely without relation with that old-fashioned favourite of the public, Fredrika Bremer.
His son, Erik Lie (b. 1868), published a successful volume of stories, Med Blyanten, in 1890; and is also the author of various works on literary history. An elder son, Mons Lie (b. 1864), studied the violin in Paris, but turned to literature in 1894. Among his works are the plays Tragedier om Kjaerlighed (1897) ; Lombardo and Agrippina (1898); Don Juan (1900); and the novels, Siofareren (1901); Adam Ravn (1903) and /. Kvindensnet (1904). (E. G.)
Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
