The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I Part 5

and the present Canon Holland. Old members--Monckton Milnes, James Spedding, Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, and W. H. Thompson (the tutor)--occasionally attended meetings. The late Professor Hort and the great physicist, Clerk Maxwell, joined about the time of my brother's departure. He records one statement of Maxwell's which has, I suspect, been modified in transmission. The old logicians, said Maxwell, recognised four forms of syllogism. Hamilton had raised the number to 7, but he had himself discovered 135. This, however, mattered little, as the great majority could not be expressed in human language, and even if expressed were not susceptible of any meaning.

This specimen would give a very inaccurate notion of the general line of discussion. By the kindness of Professor Sidgwick, I am enabled to give some specimens of the themes supported by my brother, which may be of interest, not merely in regard to him, but as showing what topics occupied the minds of intelligent youths at the time. The young gentlemen met every Sat.u.r.day night in term time and read essays. They discussed all manner of topics. Sometimes they descended to mere commonplaces--Is a little knowledge a dangerous thing? Is it possible _ridentem dicere verum_? (which Fitzjames is solitary in denying)--but more frequently they expatiate upon the literary, poetical, ethical, and philosophical problems which can be answered so conclusively in our undergraduate days. Fitzjames self-denyingly approves of the position a.s.signed to mathematics at Cambridge. In literary matters I notice that he does not think the poetry of Byron of a 'high order'; that he reads some essays of Sh.e.l.ley, which are unanimously voted 'unsatisfactory'; that he denies that Tennyson's 'Princess' shows higher powers than the early poems (a rather ambiguous phrase); that he considers Adam, not Satan, to be the hero of 'Paradise Lost'; and, more characteristically, that he regards the novels of the present day as 'degenerate,' and, on his last appearance, maintains the superiority of Miss Austen's 'Emma'

to Miss Bronte's 'Jane Eyre.' 'Jane Eyre' had then, I remember, some especially pa.s.sionate admirers at Cambridge. His philosophical theories are not very clear. He thinks, like some other people, that Locke's chapter on 'Substance' is 'unsatisfactory'; and agrees with some 'strictures' on the early chapters of Mill's 'Political Economy.' He writes an essay to explode the poor old social contract. He holds that the study of metaphysics is desirable, but adds the note, 'not including ontological inquiries under the head of metaphysics.' He denies, however, the proposition that 'all general truths are founded on experience.' He thinks that a meaning can be attached to the term 'freewill'; but considers it impossible 'to frame a satisfactory hypothesis as to the origin of evil.' Even the intellect of the apostles had its limits. His ethical doctrines seem to have inclined to utilitarianism. The whole society (four members present) agrees that the system of expediency, 'so far from being a derogation from the moral dignity of man, is the only method consistent with the conditions of his action.' He is neutral upon the question whether 'self-love is the immediate motive of all our actions,' and considers that question unmeaning, 'as not believing it possible that a man should be at once subject and object.' He writes an essay to show that there is no foundation 'for a philosophy of history in the a.n.a.logy between the progressive improvement of mankind and that of which individuals are capable,' and he holds (in opposition to Maine) that Carlyle is a 'philosophic historian.' The only direct reference to contemporary politics is characteristic. Fane had argued that 'some elements of socialism' should be 'employed in that reconstruction of society which the spirit of the age demands.' Maine agrees, but Fitzjames denies that any reconstruction of society is needed.

Theological discussions abound. Fitzjames thinks that there are grounds independent of revelation for believing in the goodness and unity of an intelligent First Cause. He reads an essay to prove that we can form a notion of inspiration which does not involve dictation. He thinks it 'more agreeable to right reason' to explain the Biblical account of the creation by literal interpretation than 'on scientific principles,' but adds the rider, 'so far as it can be reconciled with geological facts.'

He denies that the Pentateuch shows 'traces of Egyptian origin.' He thinks that Paley's views of the 'essential doctrines of Christianity'

are insufficient. He approves the 'strict observance of the Sabbath in England,' but notes that he does not wish to 'confound the Christian Sunday with the Jewish Sabbath.'

The instinct which leads a young man to provide himself with a good set of dogmatic first principles is very natural; and the free and full discussion of them with his fellows, however crude their opinions may be, is among the very best means of education. I need only remark that the apostles appear to have refrained from discussion of immediate politics, and to have been little concerned in some questions which were agitating the sister University. They have nothing to say about Apostolical Succession and the like; nor are there any symptoms of interest in German philosophy, which Hamilton and Mansel were beginning to introduce. At Cambridge the young gentlemen are content with Locke and Mill; and at most know something of Coleridge and Maurice. Mr.

Watson compares these meetings to those at Newman's rooms in Oxford as described by Mark Pattison. There a luckless advocate of ill-judged theories might be crushed for the evening by the polite sentence, _Very likely_. At the Cambridge meetings, the trial to the nerves, as Mr.

Watson thinks, was even more severe. There was not the spell of common reverence for a great man, in whose presence a modest reticence was excusable. You were expected to speak out, and failure was the more appalling. The contests between Stephen and Harcourt were especially famous. Though, says Mr. Watson, your brother was 'not a match in adroitness and chaff' for his great 'rival,' he showed himself at his best in these struggles. 'The encounters were veritable battles of the G.o.ds, and I recall them after forty years with the most vivid recollection of the pleasure they caused.' When Sir William Harcourt entered Parliament, my brother remarked to Mr. Llewelyn Davies, 'It does not seem to be in the natural order of things that Harcourt should be in the House and I not there to criticise him.'

Fitzjames's position in regard both to theology and politics requires a little further notice. At this time my brother was not only a stern moralist, but a 'zealous and reverential witness on behalf of dogma, and that in the straitest school of the Evangelicals.' Mr. Watson mentions the death at college of a fellow-student during the last term of my brother's residence. In his last hours the poor fellow confided to his family his grat.i.tude to Fitzjames for having led him to think seriously on religious matters. I find a very minute account of this written by my brother at the time to a common friend. He expresses very strong feeling, and had been most deeply moved by his first experience of a deathbed; but he makes no explicit reflections. Though decidedly of the evangelical persuasion at this period, and delighting in controversy upon all subjects, great and small, his intense aversion to sentimentalism was not only as marked as it ever became, but even led to a kind of affectation of prosaic matter of fact stoicism, a rejection of every concession to sentiment, which he afterwards regarded as excessive.

The impression made upon him by contemporary politics was remarkable.

The events of 1848 stirred all young men in one way or the other; and although the apostles were discussing the abstract problems of freewill and utilitarianism, they were no doubt keenly interested in concrete history. No one was more moved than Fitzjames. He speaks of the optimistic views which were popular with the Liberals after 1832, expounded by Cobden and Bright and supposed to be sanctioned by the Exhibition of 1851. It was the favourite cant that Captain Pen 'had got the best of Captain Sword, and that henceforth the kindly earth would slumber, lapt in universal law. I cannot say how I personally loathed this way of thinking, and how radically false, hollow and disgusting it seemed to me then, and seems to me now.' The crash of 1848 came like a thunderbolt, and 'history seemed to have come to life again with all its wild elemental forces.' For the first time he was aware of actual war within a small distance, and the settlement of great questions by sheer force. 'How well I remember my own feelings, which were, I think, the feelings of the great majority of my age and cla.s.s, and which have ever since remained in me as strong and as unmixed as they were in 1848. I feel them now (1887) as keenly as ever, though the world has changed and thinks and feels, as it seems, quite differently. They were feelings of fierce, unqualified hatred for the revolution and revolutionists; feelings of the most bitter contempt and indignation against those who feared them, truckled to them, or failed to fight them whensoever they could and as long as they could: feelings of zeal against all popular aspirations and in favour of all established inst.i.tutions whatever their various defects or harshnesses (which, however, I wished to alter slowly and moderately): in a word, the feelings of a scandalised policeman towards a mob breaking windows in the cause of humanity. I should have liked first to fire grapeshot down every street in Paris, till the place ran with blood, and next to try Louis Philippe and those who advised him not to fight by court martial, and to have hanged them all as traitors and cowards. The only event in 1848 which gave me real pleasure was the days of June, when Cavaignac did what, if he had been a man or not got into a fright about his soul, or if he had had a real sense of duty instead of a wretched consciousness of weakness and a false position, Louis Philippe would have done months before.' He cannot, he admits, write with calmness to this day of the king's cowardice; and he never pa.s.sed the Tuileries in later life without feeling the sentiment about Louis XVI. and his 'heritage splendid'

expressed by Thackeray's drummer, 'Ah, shame on him, craven and coward, that had not the heart to defend it!'

'I have often wondered,' adds Fitzjames, 'at my own vehement feelings on these subjects, and I am not altogether prepared to say that they are not more or less foolish. I have never seen war. I have never heard a shot fired in anger, and I have never had my courage put to any proof worth speaking of. Have I any right to talk of streets running with blood? Is it not more likely that, at a pinch, I might myself run in quite a different direction? It is one of the questions which will probably remain unanswered for ever, whether I am a coward or not. But that has nothing really to do with the question. If I am a coward, I am contemptible: but Louis Philippe was a coward and contemptible whether I am a coward or not; and my feelings on the whole of this subject are, at all events, perfectly sincere, and are the very deepest and most genuine feelings I have.' Fitzjames's only personal experience of revolutionary proceedings was on the famous 10th of April, when he was in London, but saw only special constables. The events of the day confirmed him in the doctrine that every disorganised mob is more likely to behave in the spirit of the lowest and most contemptible units than in the spirit of what is highest in them.

I can only add one little anecdote of those days. A friend of my brother's rushed into his rooms obviously to announce some very exciting piece of news. Is the mob triumphant in Paris? 'I don't know,' was the reply, 'but a point has been decided in the Gorham case.' Good evangelical as Fitzjames then was, he felt that there were more important controversies going on than squabbles over baptismal regeneration. A curious set of letters written in his first vacation to his friend Dr. Kitchin show, however, that he then took an eager interest in this doctrine. He discusses it at great length in the evangelical sense, with abundant quotations of texts.

While interested in these matters, winning fame at the Union and enjoying the good opinion of the apostles, Fitzjames was failing in a purely academical sense. He tried twice for a scholars.h.i.+p at Trinity, and both times unsuccessfully, though he was not very far from success.

The failure excluded him, as things then were, from the possibility of a fellows.h.i.+p, and a degree became valueless for its main purpose. He resolved, therefore, to go abroad with my father, who had to travel in search of health. He pa.s.sed the winter of 1850-1 in Paris, where he learnt French, and attended sittings of the Legislative a.s.sembly, and was especially interested by proceedings in the French law-courts. He kept the May term of 1851 at Cambridge, and went out in the 'Poll.'

Judging from the performances of his rivals, he would probably have been in the lower half of the first cla.s.s in the Cla.s.sical Tripos.

Although his last months at Cambridge were not cheering, he retained a feeling for the place very unlike his feeling towards Eton. He had now at least found himself firmly on his own legs, measured his strength against other compet.i.tors, and made lasting friends.h.i.+ps with some of the strongest. It had been, he says, 'my greatest ambition to get a fellows.h.i.+p at Trinity, but I got it at last, however, for I was elected an honorary Fellow in the autumn of 1885. I have had my share of compliments, but I never received one which gave me half so much pleasure.' He visited Cambridge in later years and was my guest, and long afterwards the guest of his friend Maine, at certain Christmas festivities in Trinity Hall. He speaks in the warmest terms of his appreciation of the place, 'old and dignified, yet fresh and vigorous.'

Nearly his last visit was in the autumn of 1885, when he gave a dinner to the apostles, of whom his son James was then a member.

Fitzjames's friends were naturally surprised at his throwing up the game. Most of them set, as I have intimated, a higher value upon academical honours, considered by themselves, than he ever admitted to be just. Possibly they exaggerated a little the disgust which was implied by his absolute abandonment of the course. And yet, I find the impression among those who saw most of him at the time, that the disappointment was felt with great keenness. The explanation is given, I think, in some remarks made by my father to Mr Watson. My father held that the University system of distributing honours was very faulty. Men, he said, wanted all the confidence they could acquire in their own powers for the struggle of life. Whatever braced and stimulated self-reliance was good. The honour system encouraged the few who succeeded and inflicted upon the rest a 'demoralising sense of failure.' I have no doubt that my father was, in fact, generalising from the case of Fitzjames. What really stung the young man was a more or less dim foreboding of the difficulties which were to meet him in the world at large. He was not one of the men fitted for easy success. The successful man is, I take it, the man with an eye for the line of least resistance. He has an instinct, that is, for the applying his strength in the direction in which it will tell most. And he has the faculty of so falling in with other men's modes of thinking and feeling that they may spontaneously, if unconsciously, form a band of supporters.

Obstacles become stepping-stones to such men. It was Fitzjames's fate through life to take the bull by the horns; to hew a path through jungles and up steep places along the steepest and most entangled routes; and to shoulder his way by main strength and weight through a crowd, instead of contriving to combine external pressures into an agency for propulsion. At this time, the contrast between his acceptance with the ablest of his contemporaries in private and his inability to obtain the public stamp of merit perplexed and troubled him. Maine and Thompson could recognise his abilities. Why could not the examiners?

Might not his ambition have to struggle with similar obstacles at the bar or in the pulpit?

I quote from a letter written by my father during Fitzjames's academical career to show what was the relation at this time between the two men.

My father dictates to my mother a letter to Fitzjames, dated January 19, 1849.[59] 'You well know,' he says, 'that I have long since surmounted that paternal ambition which might have led me to thirst for your eminence as a scholar.

It has not pleased G.o.d to give you that kind of bodily const.i.tution and mental temperament which is essential to such success.' He proceeds to say that, although success in examinations is 'not essential to the great ends of Fitzjames's existence, it is yet very desirable that he should become a good scholar from higher motives--such,' he adds, 'as are expounded in Bacon's "De Augmentis."' He solemnly recommends regular prayer for guidance in studies for which the lower motives may be insufficient. It then occurs to my mother that the advice may be a little discouraging. 'I am reminded by my amanuensis that I have left you in the dark as to my opinion of your probable success in the literary labours to which I have exhorted you. You must be a very mole if the darkness be real. From your childhood to this day I have ever shown you by more than words how high an estimate I entertain both of the depth and the breadth of your capacity. I have ever conversed with you as with a man, not as with a child; and though parental partiality has never concealed from me the fact of your deficiency in certain powers of mind which are essential to early excellence in learning, yet I have never been for a moment distrustful of your possessing an intellect which, if well disciplined and well cultured, will continue to expand, improve, and yield excellent fruit long after the mental faculties of many of your more fortunate rivals will have pa.s.sed from their full maturity into premature decay. Faith in yourself (which is but one of the many forms of faith in G.o.d) is the one thing needful to your intellectual progress; and if your faith in yourself may but survive the disappointment of your academical ambition, that disappointment will be converted into a blessing.'

The letter shows, I think, under the rather elaborate phraseology, both the perspicuity with which the father had estimated his son's talents and the strong sympathy which bound them together. The reference to Fitzjames's 'want of faith in himself' is significant. If want of faith is to be measured by want of courage in tackling the difficulties of life, no man could be really less open to the charge than Fitzjames. But my father, himself disposed to antic.i.p.ate ill fortune, had certain reasons for attributing to his son a tendency in the same direction.

Fitzjames's hatred of all exaggeration, his resolute refusal to be either sentimental or optimistic, led him to insist upon the gloomy side of things. Moreover, he was still indolent; given to be slovenly in his work, and rather unsocial in his ways, though warmly attached to a few friends. My father, impressed by these symptoms, came to the conclusion that Fitzjames was probably unsuited for the more active professions for which a sanguine temper and a power of quickly attaching others are obvious qualifications. He therefore looked forward to his son's adoption of the clerical career, which his own deep piety as well as his painful experience of official vexations had long made him regard as the happiest of all careers. Circ.u.mstances strengthened this feeling. My father's income had been diminished by his resignation, while the education of his two sons became more expensive, and he had to contribute to the support of his brother George. No human being could have made us feel more clearly that he would willingly give us his last penny or his last drop of blood. But he was for a time more than usually vexed and anxious; and the fact could not be quite concealed.

Fitzjames's comparative failure at Cambridge suggests to him a significant remark. After speaking of his 'unteachableness,' he observes that his mind was over-full of thoughts about religion, about politics, about morals, about metaphysics, about all sorts of subjects, except art, literature, or physical science. For art of any kind I have never cared, and do not care in the very least. For literature, as such, I care hardly at all. I like to be amused and instructed on the particular things I want to know; but works of genius, as such, give me very little pleasure, and as to the physical sciences, they interest me only so far as they ill.u.s.trate the true method of inquiry. They, or rather some of them, have the advantage of being particularly true, and so a guide in the pursuit of moral and distinctively human truth. For their own sake, I care very little about them.'

V. READING FOR THE BAR

My brother had definitely to make the choice of a profession upon which he had been reflecting during his college career. He set about the task in an eminently characteristic way. When he had failed in the last scholars.h.i.+p examination, he sat down deliberately and wrote out a careful discussion of the whole question. The result is before me in a little ma.n.u.script book, which Fitzjames himself re-read and annotated in 1865, 1872, and 1880. He read it once more in 1893. Both text and commentary are significant. He is anxious above all things to give plain, tangible reasons for his conduct. He would have considered it disgraceful to choose from mere impulse or from any such considerations as would fall under the d.a.m.natory epithet 'sentimental.' He therefore begins in the most prosaic fas.h.i.+on by an attempt to estimate the pecuniary and social advantages of the different courses open to him.

These are in reality the Church and the Bar; although, by way of exhibiting the openness of his mind, he adds a more perfunctory discussion of the merits of the medical profession. Upon this his uncle, Henry Venn, had made a sufficient comment. 'There is a providential obstacle,' he said, 'to your becoming a doctor--you have not humbug enough.' The argument from these practical considerations leads to no conclusion. The main substance of the discussion is therefore a consideration of the qualities requisite for the efficient discharge of clerical or legal duties. A statement of these qualities, he says, will form the major of his syllogism. The minor will then be, 'I possess or do not possess them'; and the conclusion will follow, 'I ought to be a clergyman or a lawyer.' Although it is easy to see that the 'major' is really constructed with a view to its applicability to his own character, he does not explicitly give any opinions about himself. He digested the results of the general discussions into thirteen questions which are not stated, though it is clear that they must have amounted to asking, Have I the desirable apt.i.tudes? He has, however, elaborately recorded his answers, 'Yes' or 'No,' and noted the precise time and place of answering and the length of time devoted to considering each. He began the inquiry on June 16, 1850. On September 23 he proceeds to answer the questions which he, acting (as he notes) as judge, had left to himself as jury. Questions 1 and 2 can be answered 'immediately'; but No. 3 takes two hours. The 8th, 9th, and 10th were considered together, and are estimated to have taken an hour and a half, between 7 and 11.30 P.M.; though, as he was in an omnibus for part of the time and there fell asleep, this must be conjectural. The 13th question could not be answered at all; but was luckily not important. He had answered the 11th and 12th during a railway journey to Paris on October 2, and had thereupon made up his mind.

One peculiarity of this performance is the cramped and tortuous mode of expressing himself. His thoughts are entangled, and are oddly crossed by phrases clearly showing the influence of Maurice and Coleridge, and, above all, of his father. 'Maurice's books,' he notes in 1865, 'did their utmost to make me squint intellectually about this time, but I never learnt the trick.' A very different writer of whom he read a good deal at college was Baxter, introduced to him, I guess, by one of his father's essays. 'What a little prig I was when I made all these ant.i.theses!' he says in 1865. 'I learnt it of my daddy' is the comment of 1880. 'Was any other human being,' he asks in 1880, 'ever constructed with such a clumsy, elaborate set of principles, setting his feelings going as if they were clockwork?' This is the comment upon a pa.s.sage where he has twisted his thoughts into a c.u.mbrous and perfectly needless syllogism. He makes a similar comment on another pa.s.sage in 1865, but 'I think,' he says in 1880, 'that I was a heavy old man thirty years ago.

Fifteen years ago I was at the height of my strength. I am beginning to feel now a little more tolerant towards the boy who wrote this than the man who criticised it in 1865; but he was quite right.' The critic of 1865, I may note, is specially hard upon the lad of 1850 for his ignorance of sound utilitarian authorities. He writes against an allusion to Hobbes, 'Ignorant blasphemy of the greatest of English philosophers!' The lad has misstated an argument from ignorance of Bentham and Austin. 'I had looked at Bentham at the period (says 1865), but felt a holy horror of him.' Harcourt, it is added, 'used to chaff me about him.' 1880 admits that '1865, though a fine fellow, was rather too hot in his Benthamism; 1880 takes it easier, and considers that 1850 was fairly right, and that his language if not pharisaically accurate, was plain enough for common-sense purposes.' In fact, both critics admit, and I fully agree with them, that under all the crabbed phraseology there was a very large substratum of good sense and sound judgment of men, to which I add of high principle. Among the special qualifications of a lawyer, the desire for justice takes a prominent place in his argument.

Looking at the whole doc.u.ment from the vantage-ground of later knowledge, the real, though unconscious, purpose seems to be pretty evident. Fitzjames had felt a repugnance to the clerical career, and is trying to convince himself that he has reasonable grounds for a feeling which his father would be slow to approve. There is not the least trace of any objection upon grounds of dissent from the Articles; though he speaks of responsibility imposed by the solemn profession required upon ordination. His real reason is explained in a long comparison between the 'simple-minded' or 'sympathetic' and the 'casuistical' man. They may both be good men; but one of them possesses what the other does not, a power of at once placing himself in close relations to others, and uttering his own thoughts eloquently and effectively without being troubled by reserves and perplexed considerations of the precise meaning of words. He thinks that every clergyman ought to be ready to undertake the 'cure of souls,' and to be a capable spiritual guide. He has no right to take up the profession merely with a view to intellectual researches. In fact, he felt that he was without the qualifications which make a man a popular preacher, if the word may be used without an offensive connotation. He could argue vigorously, but was not good at appealing to the feelings, or offering spiritual comfort, or attracting the sympathies of the poor and ignorant. Substantially I think that he was perfectly right not only in the conclusion but in the grounds upon which it was based. He was a lawyer by nature, and would have been a most awkward and cross-grained piece of timber to convert into a priest. He points himself to such cases as Swift, Warburton, and Sydney Smith to show the disadvantage of a secular man in a priest's vestments.

When his mind was made up, Fitzjames communicated his decision to his father. The dangerous illness of 1850 had thrown his father into a nervous condition which made him unable to read the quaint treatise I have described. He appears, however, to have argued that a man might fairly take orders with a view to literary work in the line of his profession. Fitzjames yielded this ground but still held to the main point. His father, though troubled, made no serious objection, and only asked him to reconsider his decision and to consult Henry Venn. Henry Venn wrote a letter, some extracts from which are appended to the volume with characteristic comments. Venn was too sensible a man not to see that Fitzjames had practically made up his mind. I need only observe that Fitzjames, in reply to some hints in his uncle's letter, observes very emphatically that a man may be serving G.o.d at the bar as in the pulpit. His career was now fixed. 'I never did a wiser thing in my life,' says 1865, 'than when I determined not to be a clergyman.'

'Amen!' says 1880, and I am sure that no other year in the calendar would have given a different answer. 'If anyone should ever care to know what sort of man I was then,' says Fitzjames in 1887, 'and, _mutatis mutandis_, am still, that paper ought to be embodied by reference in their recollections.'

Fitzjames took a lodging in London, for a year or so, and then joined my father at Westbourne Terrace. He entered at the Inner Temple, and was duly called to the bar on January 26, 1854. His legal education, he says, was very bad. He was for a time in the chambers of Mr. (now Lord) Field, then the leading junior on the Midland Circuit, but it was on the distinct understanding that he was to receive no direct instruction from his tutor. He was also in the chambers of a conveyancer. I learnt, he says, 'a certain amount of conveyancing, but in a most mechanical, laborious, wooden kind of way, which had no advantage at all, except that it gave me some familiarity with deeds and abstracts. My tutor was a pure conveyancer; so I saw nothing of equity drafting. I worked very hard with him, however, but I was incapable of being taught and he of teaching.' The year 1852 was memorable for the Act which altered the old system of special pleading. 'The new system was by no means a bad one.... I never learnt it, at least not properly, and while I ought to have been learning, I was still under the spell of an unpractical frame of mind which inclined me to generalities and vagueness, and had in it a vast deal of laziness. When I look back on these times, I feel as if I had been only half awake or had not come to my full growth, though I was just under twenty-five when I was called. How I ever came to be a moderately successful advocate, still more to be a rather distinguished judge, is to me a mystery. I managed, however, to get used to legal ways of looking at things and to the form and method of legal arguments.' He was at the same time going through an apprentices.h.i.+p to journalism, of which it will be more convenient to speak in the next chapter. It is enough to say for the present that his first efforts were awkward and unsuccessful. After he was called to the bar, he read for the LL.B.

examination of the University of London; and not only obtained the degree but enjoyed his only University success by winning a scholars.h.i.+p.

One of his compet.i.tors was the present Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff. This performance is connected with some very important pa.s.sages in his development.

He had made some intimate friends.h.i.+ps beyond the apostolic circle, of whom Grant Duff was one of the first. They had already met at the rooms of Charles Henry Pearson, one of my brother's King's College friends.[60] Grant Duff was for a long time in very close intimacy, and the friends.h.i.+p lasted for their lives, uninterrupted by political differences. They were fellow-pupils in Field's chambers, were on circuit together for a short time till Grant Duff gave up the profession; and their marriages only brought new members into the alliance. I must confine myself to saying that my brother's frequent allusions prove that he fully appreciated the value of this friends.h.i.+p.

Another equally intimate friends.h.i.+p of the same date was with Henry John Stephen Smith.[61] Smith was a G.o.dson of my uncle, Henry John Stephen.

He and his sister had been from very early years on terms of especial intimacy with our cousins the Diceys. Where and when his friends.h.i.+p with my brother began I do not precisely know, but it was already very close.

As in some later cases, of which I shall have to speak, the friends.h.i.+p seemed to indicate that Fitzjames was attracted by complementary rather than similar qualities in the men to whom he was most attached. No two men of ability could be much less like each other. Smith's talents were apparently equally adapted for fine cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p and for the most abstract mathematical investigations. If it was not exactly by the toss of a s.h.i.+lling it was by an almost fortuitous combination of circ.u.mstances that he was decided to take to mathematics, and in that field won a European reputation. He soared, however, so far beyond ordinary ken that even Europe must be taken to mean a small set of competent judges who might almost be reckoned upon one's fingers. But devoted as he was to these abstruse studies, Smith might also be regarded as a typical example of the finest qualities of Oxford society.

His mathematical powers were recognised by his election to the Savilian professors.h.i.+p in 1860, and the recognition of his other abilities was sufficiently shown by the attempt to elect him member for the University in 1878. He would indeed have been elected had the choice been confined to the residents at Oxford. Smith could discourse upon nothing without showing his powers, and he would have been a singular instance in the House of Commons of a man respected at once for scholars.h.i.+p and for profound scientific knowledge, and yet a chosen mouthpiece of the political sentiments of the most cultivated const.i.tuency in the country.

The recognition of his genius was no doubt due in great part to the singular urbanity which made him the pride and delight of all Oxford common rooms. With the gentlest of manners and a refined and delicate sense of humour, he had powers of launching epigrams the subtle flavour of which necessarily disappears when detached from their context. But it was his peculiar charm that he never used his powers to inflict pain.

His hearers felt that he could have pierced the thickest hide or laid bare the ignorance of the most pretentious learning. But they could not regret a self-restraint which so evidently proceeded from abounding kindness of heart. Smith's good nature led him to lend too easy an ear to applications for the employment of his abilities upon tasks to which his inferiors would have been competent. I do not know whether it was to diffidence and reserve or to the gentleness which shrinks from dispelling illusions that another peculiarity is to be attributed. On religious matters, says his biographer, he was 'absolutely reticent'; he would discuss such topics indeed, but without ever mentioning his own faith.

I mention this because it is relevant to his relations with my brother.

Fitzjames was always in the habit of expressing his own convictions in the most downright and uncompromising fas.h.i.+on. He loved nothing better than an argument upon first principles. His intimacy with Smith was confirmed by many long rambles together; and for many years he made a practice of spending a night at Smith's house at Oxford on his way to and from the Midland Circuit. There, as he says, 'we used to sit up talking ethics and religion till 2 or 3 A.M.' I could not however, if I wished, throw any light upon Smith's views; Smith, he says in 1862, is a most delightful companion when he has got over his 'reserve'; and a year later he says that Smith is 'nearly the only man who cordially and fully sympathises with my pet views.' What were the pet views is more than I can precisely say. I infer, however, from a phrase or two that Smith's conversation was probably sceptical in the proper sense; that is, that he discussed first principles as open questions, and suggested logical puzzles. But my brother also admits that he never came to know what was Smith's personal position. He always talked 'in the abstract' or 'in the historical vein,' and 'seemed to have fewer personal plans, wishes and objects of any kind than almost any man I have ever known.'

These talks at any rate, with distinguished Oxford men, must have helped to widen my brother's intellectual horizon. They had looked at the problems of the day from a point of view to which the apostles seem to have been comparatively blind. Another influence had a more obvious result. Fitzjames had to read Stephen's commentaries and Bentham[62]

for the London scholars.h.i.+p. Bentham now ceased to be an object of holy horror. My brother, in fact, became before long what he always remained, a thorough Benthamite with certain modifications. It was less a case of influence, however, than of 'elective affinity' of intellect. The account of Fitzjames's experience at Cambridge recalls memories of the earlier group who discussed utilitarianism under the leaders.h.i.+p of Charles Austin and looked up to James Mill as their leader. The hatred for 'sentimentalism' and 'vague generalities' and the indifference to mere poetical and literary interests were common to both. The strong points of Benthamism may, I think, be summed up in two words. It meant reverence for facts. Knowledge was to be sought not by logical jugglery but by scrupulous observation and systematic appeals to experience.

Whether in grasping at solid elements of knowledge Benthamists let drop elements of equal value, though of less easy apprehension, is not to my purpose. But to a man whose predominant faculty was strong common sense, who was absolutely resolved that whatever paths he took should lead to realities, and traverse solid ground instead of following some will-o'-the-wisp through metaphysical quagmires amidst the delusive mists of a lawless imagination, there was an obvious fascination in the Bentham mode of thought. It must be added, too, that at this time J. S.

Mill, the inheritor of Bentham's influences, was at the height of his great reputation. The young men who graduated in 1850 and the following ten years found their philosophical teaching in Mill's 'Logic,' and only a few daring heretics were beginning to pick holes in his system.

Fitzjames certainly became a disciple and before long an advocate of these principles.

I find one or two other indications of disturbing studies. He says in a letter that Greg's 'Creed of Christendom' (published in 1851) was the first book of the kind which he read without the sense that he was trespa.s.sing on forbidden ground. He told me that he had once studied Lardner's famous 'Credibility of the Gospel History,' to which Greg may not improbably have sent him. The impression made upon him was (though the phrase was used long afterwards) that Lardner's case 'had not a leg to stand upon.' From the Benthamite point of view, the argument for Christianity must be simply the historical evidence. Paley, for whom Fitzjames had always a great respect, put the argument most skilfully in this shape. But if the facts are insufficient to a lawyer's eye, what is to happen? For reasons which will partly appear, Fitzjames did not at present draw the conclusions which to many seem obvious. It took him, in fact, years to develope distinctly new conclusions. But from this time his philosophical position was substantially that of Bentham, Mill, and the empiricists, while the superstructure of belief was a modified evangelicism.

My father's liberality of sentiment and the sceptical tendencies which lay, in spite of himself, in his intellectual tendencies, had indeed removed a good deal of the true evangelical dogmatism. Fitzjames for a time, as I have intimated, seems to have sought for a guide in Maurice.

He had been attracted when at King's College by Maurice's personal qualities, and when, in 1853, Maurice had to leave King's College on account of his views about eternal punishment, Fitzjames took a leading part in getting up a testimonial from the old pupils of his teacher.

When he became a law student he naturally frequented Maurice's sermons at Lincoln's Inn. Nothing could be more impressive than the manner of the preacher. His voice often trembled with emotion, and he spoke as one who had a solemn message of vast importance to mankind. But what was the message which could reach a hard-headed young 'lawyer by nature'

with a turn for Benthamism? Fitzjames gives a kind of general form of Maurice's sermons. First would come an account of some dogma as understood by the vulgar. Tom Paine could not put it more pithily or expressively. Then his hearers were invited to look at the plain words of Scripture. Do they not mean this or that, he would ask, which is quite different to what they had been made to mean? My answer would have been, says Fitzjames, that his questions were 'mere confused hints,'

which required all kinds of answers, but mostly the answer 'No, not at all.' Then, however, came Maurice's own answers to them. About this time his hearer used to become drowsy, with 'an indistinct consciousness of a pathetic quavering set of entreaties to believe what, when it was intelligible, was quite unsatisfactory.' Long afterwards he says somewhere that it was 'like watching the struggles of a drowning creed.'

Fitzjames, however, fancied for a time that he was more or less of a Mauricean.

From one of his friends, the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, I have some characteristic recollections of the time. Mr. Davies was a college friend, and remembers his combativeness and his real underlying warmth of feeling. He remembers how, in 1848, Fitzjames was confident that the 'haves' could beat the 'have nots,' 'set his teeth' and exclaimed, 'Let them come on.' Mr. Davies was now engaged in clerical work at the East-end of London. My brother took pleasure in visiting his friend there, learnt something of the ways of the district, and gave a lecture to a Limehouse audience. He attended a coffee-house discussion upon the existence of G.o.d, and exposed the inconclusiveness of the atheistic conclusions. On another occasion he went with 'Tom,' now Judge Hughes, to support Mr. Davies, who addressed a crowd in Leman Street one Sunday night. Hughes endeavoured to suppress a boy who was disposed for mischief. The boy threw himself on the ground, with Hughes holding him down. Fitzjames, raising a huge stick, plunged into the thick of the crowd. No one, however, stood forth as a champion of disorder; and Mr.

Davies, guarded by his stalwart supporters, was able to speak to a quiet audience. Fitzjames, says Mr. Davies, was always ready for an argument in those days. He did not seek for a mere dialectical triumph; but he was resolved to let no a.s.sumption pa.s.s unchallenged, and, above all, to disperse sentiment and to insist upon what was actual and practical. He wrote to Mr. Davies in reference to some newspaper controversies: 'As to playing single-stick without being ever hit myself, I have no sort of taste for it; the harder you hit the better. I always. .h.i.t my hardest.'

'Some people profess,' he once said to the same friend, 'that the sermon on the Mount is the only part of Christianity which they can accept. It is to me the hardest part to accept.' In fact, he did not often turn the second cheek. He said in the same vein that he should prefer the whole of the Church service to be made 'colder and less personal, and to revive the days of Paley and Sydney Smith.' (The Church of the eighteenth century, only without the disturbing influence of Wesley, was, as he once remarked long afterwards, his ideal.) 'After quoting these words,' says Mr. Davies in conclusion, 'I may be permitted to add those with which he closed the note written to me before he went to India (November 4, 1869), "G.o.d bless you. It's not a mere phrase, nor yet an unmeaning or insincere one in my mouth--affectionately yours."'

I shall venture to quote in this connection a letter from my father, which needs a word of preface. Among his experiments in journalism, Fitzjames had taken to writing for the 'Christian Observer,' an ancient, and, I imagine, at the time, an almost moribund representative of the evangelical party. Henry Venn had suggested, it seems, that Fitzjames might become editor. Fitzjames appears to have urged that his theology was not of the desired type. He consulted my father, however, who admitted the difficulty to be insuperable, but thought for a moment that they might act together as editor and sub-editor. My father says in his letters (August 4 and 8, 1854): 'I adhere with no qualifications of which I am conscious to the theological views of my old Clapham friends.

You, I suppose, are an adherent of Mr. Maurice. To myself it appears that he is nothing more than a great theological rhetorician, and that his only definite and appreciable meaning is that of wedding the gospel to some form of philosophy, if so to conceal its baldness. But Paul of Tarsus many ages ago forbade the banns.' In a second letter he says that there does not seem to be much real difference between Fitzjames's creed and his own. 'It seems to me quite easy to have a theological theory quite complete and systematic enough for use; and scarcely possible to reach such a theory with any view to speculation--easy, I mean, and scarcely possible for the unlearned cla.s.s to which I belong. The learned are, I trust and hope, far more fixed and comprehensive in their views than they seem to me to be, but if I dared trust to my own observation I should say that they are determined to erect into a science a series of propositions which G.o.d has communicated to us as so many detached and, to us, irreconcilable verities; the common link or connecting principle of which He has not seen fit to communicate. I am profoundly convinced of the consistency of all the declarations of Scripture; but I am as profoundly convinced of my own incapacity to perceive that they are consistent. I can receive them each in turn, and to some extent I can, however feebly, draw nutriment from each of them. To blend them one with another into an harmonious or congruous whole surpa.s.ses my skill, or perhaps my diligence. But what then? I am here not to speculate but to repent, to believe and to obey; and I find no difficulty whatever in believing, each in turn, doctrines which yet seem to me incompatible with each other. It is in this sense and to this extent that I adopt the whole of the creed called evangelical. I adopt it as a regulator of the affections, as a rule of life and as a quietus, not as a stimulant to inquiry. So, I gather, do you, and if so, I at least have no right to quarrel with you on that account. Only, if you and I are unscientific Christians, let us be patient and reverent towards those whose deeper minds or more profound inquiries, or more abundant spiritual experience, may carry them through difficulties which surpa.s.s our strength.'

My brother's reverence for his father probably prevented him from criticising this letter as he would have criticised a similar utterance from another teacher. He has, however, endorsed it--I cannot say whether at the time--with a tolerably significant remark. 'This,' he says, 'is in the nature of a surreb.u.t.ter; only the parties, instead of being at issue, are agreed. My opinion as to his opinions is that they are a sort of humility which comes so very near to irony that I do not know how to separate them. Fancy old Venn and Simeon having had more capacious minds than Sir James (_credat Christia.n.u.s_).'

The 'Christian Observer' was at this time edited by J. W. Cunningham, vicar of Harrow, who was trying to save it from extinction. He had been educated at Mr. Jowett's, at Little Dunham and at Cambridge, and had been a curate of John Venn, of Clapham. He belonged, therefore, by right, to the evangelical party, and had been more or less known to my father for many years. His children were specially intimate with my aunt, Mrs. Batten, whose husband was a master at Harrow. Emelia Batten, now Mrs. Russell Gurney, was a friend of Cunningham's children, and at this time was living in London, and on very affectionate terms with Fitzjames. He used to pour out to her his difficulties in the matter of profession choosing. There were thus various links between the Cunninghams and ourselves. Mr. Cunningham happened to call upon my father at Norwich, in the summer of 1850. With him came his eldest daughter by his second wife, Mary Richenda Cunningham, and there my brother saw her for the first time. He met her again in company with Miss Batten, on March 2, 1851, as he records, and thereupon fell in love, 'though in a quiet way at first. This feeling has never been disturbed in the slightest degree. It has widened, deepened, and strengthened itself without intermission from that day to this' (January 3, 1887).

The connection with the 'Christian Observer' was of value, not for the few guineas earned, but as leading to occasional visits to Harrow.

Fitzjames says that he took great pains with his articles, and probably improved his style, though 'kind old Mr. Cunningham' had to add a few sentences to give them the proper tone. They got him some credit from the small circle which they reached, but that was hardly his main object. 'This period of my life closed by my being engaged on November 11, 1854, at Brighton, just eighteen years to the day after I went to school there, and by my being married on April 19, 1855, at Harrow church, where my father and mother were married forty years before.' The marriage, he says, 'was a blessed revelation to me. It turned me from a rather heavy, torpid youth into the happiest of men, and, for many years, one of the most ardent and energetic. It was like the lines in Tennyson--