The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I.
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Title: The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I.
Author: Leslie Stephen
Release date: May 28, 2009 [eBook #28980]
Language: English
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SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN
[Illustration: _Walker & Boutalls Ph. Sc._
J F Stephen
_From a drawing by G. F. Watts. R. A. 1863._]
London. Published by Smith Elder & C^o. 15 Waterloo Place.
THE LIFE OF SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN, BART., K.C.S.I.
A Judge of the High Court of Justice
by his brother
LESLIE STEPHEN
With Two Portraits
London
Smith, Elder, & Co., 15 Waterloo Place
1895
[All rights reserved]
PREFACE
In writing the following pages I have felt very strongly one
disqualification for my task. The life of my brother, Sir J. F. STEPHEN,
was chiefly devoted to work which requires some legal knowledge for its
full appreciation. I am no lawyer; and I should have considered this
fact to be a sufficient reason for silence, had it been essential to
give any adequate estimate of the labours in question. My purpose,
however, is a different one. I have wished to describe the man rather
than to give any history of what he did. What I have said of the value
of his performances must be taken as mainly a judgment at second hand.
But in writing of the man himself I have advantages which, from the
nature of the case, are not shared by others. For more than sixty years
he was my elder brother; and a brother in whose character and fortunes I
took the strongest interest from the earliest period at which I was
capable of reflection or observation. I think that brothers have
generally certain analogies of temperament, intellectual and moral,
which enable them, however widely they may differ in many respects, to
place themselves at each other's point of view, and to be so far
capable of that sympathetic appreciation which is essential to
satisfactory biography. I believe that this is true of my brother and
myself. Moreover, as we were brought up under the same roof, I have an
intimate knowledge--now, alas! almost peculiar to myself--of the little
home circle whose characteristics had a profound influence upon his
development. I have thought it desirable to give a fuller account of
those characteristics, and of their origin in previous circumstances,
than can well be given by any one but myself. This is partly because I
recognise the importance of the influence exerted upon him; and partly,
I will admit, for another reason. My brother took a great interest, and,
I may add, an interest not unmixed with pride, in our little family
history. I confess that I share his feelings, and think, at any rate,
that two or three of the persons of whom I have spoken deserve a fuller
notice than has as yet been made public. What I have said may, I hope,
serve as a small contribution to the history of one of the rivulets
which helped to compose the great current of national life in the
earlier part of this century.
I could not have attempted to write the life of my brother without the
approval and the help of my sister-in-law, Lady Stephen. She has
provided me with materials essential to the narrative, and has kindly
read what I have written. I am, of course, entirely responsible for
everything that is here said; and I feel the responsibility all the more
because I have had the advantage of her suggestions throughout. I have
also to thank my brother's children, who have been in various ways very
helpful. My nephews, in particular, have helped me in regard to various
legal matters. To my sister, Miss Stephen, I owe a debt of gratitude
which--for reasons which she will understand--I shall not attempt to
discharge by any full acknowledgment.
I have especially to thank Sir H. S. Cunningham and Lady Egerton, Lady
Stephen's brother and sister, for permitting me to read my brother's
letters to them, and for various suggestions. Some other correspondence
has been placed in my hands, and especially two important collections.
Lady Grant Duff has been good enough to show me a number of letters
written to her, and Lady Lytton has communicated letters written to the
late Lord Lytton. I have spoken of these letters in the text, and have
in the last chapter given my reasons for confining my use of them to
occasional extracts. They have been of material service.
I have acknowledged help received from other persons at the points where
it has been turned to account. I will, however, offer my best thanks to
them in this place, and assure them of my sincere gratitude. Mr. Arthur
Coleridge, the Rev. Dr. Kitchin, dean of Durham, the Rev. H. W. Watson,
rector of Berkeswell, Coventry, the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, vicar of
Kirkby Lonsdale, Prof. Sidgwick and Mr. Montagu S. D. Butler, of
Pembroke College, Cambridge, have given me information in regard to
early years. Mr. Franklin Lushington, Mr. Justice Wills, Lord Field, Mr.
Justice Vaughan Williams, Sir Francis Jeune, Sir Theodore Martin, the
Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, Mr. H. F. Dickens, and the late Captain
Parker Snow have given me information of various kinds as to the legal
career. Sir John Strachey, Sir Robert Egerton, and Sir H. S. Cunningham
have given me information as to the Indian career. Mr. George Murray
Smith, Mr. James Knowles, Mr. Frederick Greenwood, and Mr. Longman have
given me information as to various literary matters. I have also to
thank Mrs. Charles Simpson, Mr. F. W. Gibbs, Mrs. Russell Gurney, Mr.
Horace Smith, Sir F. Pollock, Prof. Maitland, Mr. Voysey, and Mr. A. H.
Millar, of Dundee, for help on various points.
LESLIE STEPHEN.
1 MAY, 1895.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
FAMILY HISTORY
PAGE
I. JAMES STEPHEN, WRITER ON IMPRISONMENT FOR DEBT 1
II. JAMES STEPHEN, MASTER IN CHANCERY 8
III. MASTER STEPHEN'S CHILDREN 25
IV. THE VENNS 33
V. JAMES STEPHEN, COLONIAL UNDER-SECRETARY 41
CHAPTER II
EARLY LIFE
I. CHILDHOOD 66
II. ETON 77
III. KING'S COLLEGE 86
IV. CAMBRIDGE 91
V. READING FOR THE BAR 114
CHAPTER III
THE BAR AND JOURNALISM
I. INTRODUCTORY 131
II. FIRST YEARS AT THE BAR 136
III. THE 'SATURDAY REVIEW' 148
IV. EDUCATION COMMISSION AND RECORDERSHIP 165
V. PROGRESS AT THE BAR 173
VI. 'ESSAYS BY A BARRISTER' 177
VII. DEFENCE OF DR. WILLIAMS 184
VIII. 'VIEW OF THE CRIMINAL LAW' 203
IX. THE 'PALL MALL GAZETTE' 212
X. GOVERNOR EYRE 227
XI. INDIAN APPOINTMENT 231
CHAPTER IV
INDIA
I. PERSONAL HISTORY 237
II. OFFICIAL WORK IN INDIA 246
III. INDIAN IMPRESSIONS 282
IV. LAST MONTHS IN INDIA 291
CHAPTER V
LAST YEARS AT THE BAR
I. FIRST OCCUPATIONS IN ENGLAND 298
II. 'LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY' 306
III. DUNDEE ELECTION 340
IV. CODIFICATION IN ENGLAND 351
V. THE METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY 358
VI. THE CRIMINAL CODE 375
VII. ECCLESIASTICAL CASES 381
VIII. CORRESPONDENCE WITH LORD LYTTON 386
IX. APPOINTMENT TO A JUDGESHIP 401
NOTE ON RESIDENCE IN IRELAND 405
CHAPTER VI
JUDICIAL CAREER
I. HISTORY OF CRIMINAL LAW 410
II. 'NUNCOMAR AND IMPEY' 428
III. JUDICIAL CHARACTERISTICS 437
IV. MISCELLANEOUS OCCUPATIONS 450
V. JAMES KENNETH STEPHEN 468
VI. CONCLUSION 477
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 483
INDEX 487
* * * * *
_ILLUSTRATIONS_
PORTRAIT FROM A DRAWING BY G. F. WATTS, R.A., 1863 _Frontispiece_
" " PHOTOGRAPH BY BASSANO, 1886 _to face p. 410_
LIFE
OF
SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN
CHAPTER I
_FAMILY HISTORY_
I. JAMES STEPHEN, WRITER ON IMPRISONMENT FOR DEBT
During the first half of the eighteenth century a James Stephen, the
first of the family of whom I have any knowledge, was tenant of a small
farm in Aberdeenshire, on the borders of Buchan.[1] He was also engaged
in trade, and, though it is stated that smuggler would be too harsh a
name to apply to him, he had no insuperable objection to dealing in
contraband articles. He was considered to belong to the respectable
class, and gave his sons a good education. He had nine children by his
wife, Mary Brown. Seven of these were sons, and were said to be the
finest young men in the country. Alexander, the eldest, was in business
at Glasgow; he died when nearly seventy, after falling into distress.
William, the second son, studied medicine, and ultimately settled at St.
Christopher's, in the West Indies, where he was both a physician and a
planter. He probably began life as a 'surgeon to a Guineaman,' and he
afterwards made money by buying 'refuse' (that is, sickly) negroes from
slave ships, and, after curing them of their diseases, selling them at
an advanced price. He engaged in various speculations, and had made
money when he died in 1781, in his fiftieth year. His career, as will be
seen, was of great importance to his relations. The other sons all took
to trade, but all died before William. The two sisters, Mrs. Nuccoll and
Mrs. Calder, married respectably, and lived to a great age. They were
able to be of some service to nephews and nieces.
My story is chiefly concerned with the third son, James, born about
1733. After studying law for a short time at Aberdeen, he was sent
abroad, when eighteen years old, to Holland, and afterwards to France,
with a view to some mercantile business. He was six feet three inches in
height, and a man of great muscular power. Family traditions tell of his
being attacked by two footpads, and knocking their heads together till
they cried for mercy. Another legend asserts that when a friend offered
him a pony to carry him home after dinner, he made and won a bet that he
would carry the pony. In the year 1752 this young giant was sailing as
supercargo of a ship bound from Bordeaux to Scotland, with wine
destined, no doubt, to replenish the 'blessed bear of Bradwardine,' and
its like. The ship had neared the race of Portland, when a storm arose,
and she was driven upon the cliffs of Purbeck Island. James Stephen,
with four of the crew, escaped to the rocks, the rest being drowned.
Stephen roped his companions to himself, and scaled the rocks in the
dark, as Lovel, in the 'Antiquary,' leads the Wardours and Edie
Ochiltree up the crags of the Halket Head. Next day, the outcasts were
hospitably received by Mr. Milner, Collector of Customs at Poole.
Stephen had to remain for some time on the spot to look after the
salvage of the cargo. The drowned captain had left some valuable papers
in a chest. He appeared in a dream to Stephen, and gave information
which led to their recovery. The news that his ghost was on the look-out
had, it is said, a wholesome effect in deterring wreckers from
interference with the cargo.
Mr. Milner had six children, the youngest of whom, Sibella, was a lovely
girl of fifteen. She had a fine voice, and had received more than the
usual education of the times. She fell in love with the gallant young
stranger, and before long they were privately married. This event was
hastened by their desire to anticipate the passage of the Marriage Act
(June 1753), which was expected to make the consent of parents
necessary. The poor girl, however, yielded with much compunction, and
regarded the evils which afterwards befell her as providential
punishments for her neglect of filial duty.
James Stephen was a man of many prepossessing qualities, and soon became
reconciled to his wife's family. He was taken into partnership by one of
his brothers-in-law, a William Milner, then a merchant at Poole. Here
his two eldest children were born, William on October 27, 1756, and
James on June 30, 1758. Unfortunately the firm became bankrupt; and the
bankruptcy led to a lifelong quarrel between James Stephen and his elder
brother, William, who had taken some share in the business. James then
managed to start in business in London, and for some time was fairly
prosperous. Unluckily, while at Poole he had made a great impression
upon Sir John Webbe, a Roman Catholic baronet, who had large estates in
the neighbourhood. Sir John had taken up a grand scheme for developing
his property at Hamworthy, close to Poole. Stephen, it seems, had
discovered that there were not only brick earth and pipeclay but mineral
springs and coal under the barren soil. A town was to be built; a trade
started with London; Sir John's timber was to be turned into ships; a
colliery was to be opened--and, in short, a second Bristol was to arise
in Dorsetshire. Sir John was to supply the funds, and Stephen's energy
and ability marked him out as the heaven-sent manager. Stephen accepted
the proposals, gave up his London business, and set to work with energy.
Coal was found, it is said, 'though of too sulphureous a kind for use;'
but deeper diggings would, no doubt, lay bare a superior seam. After a
year or two, however, affairs began to look black; Sir John Webbe became
cool and then fell out with his manager; and the result was that, about
1769, James Stephen found himself confined for debt in the King's Bench
prison.[2]
Stephen, however, was not a man to submit without knowing the reason
why. He rubbed up his old legal knowledge, looked into the law-books,
and discovered that imprisonment for debt was contrary to Magna Charta.
This doctrine soon made converts in the King's Bench. Three of his
fellow prisoners enjoy such immortality as is conferred by admission to
biographical dictionaries. The best known was the crazy poet,
Christopher Smart, famous for having leased himself for ninety-nine
years to a bookseller, and for the fine 'Song of David,' which Browning
made the text of one of his later poems.[3] Another was William Jackson,
an Irish clergyman, afterwards known as a journalist on the popular
side, who was convicted of high treason at Dublin in 1795, and poisoned
himself in the dock.[4] A third was William Thompson, known as
'Blarney,' a painter, who had married a rich wife in 1767, but had
apparently spent her money by this time.[5] Mrs. Stephen condescended to
enliven the little society by her musical talents. The prisoners in
general welcomed Stephen as a champion of liberty. A writ of 'Habeas
Corpus' was obtained, and Stephen argued his case before Lord Mansfield.
The great lawyer was naturally less amenable to reason than the
prisoners. He was, however, impressed, it is reported, by the manliness
and energy of the applicant. 'It is a great pity,' he said, 'but the
prisoner must be remanded.' James Stephen's son, James, a boy of twelve,
was by his side in court, and a bystander slipped five shillings into
his hand; but the father had to go back to his prison. He stuck to his
point obstinately. He published a pamphlet, setting forth his case. He
wrote letters to the 'Public Advertiser,' to which Junius was then
contributing. He again appealed to the courts, and finally called a
meeting of his fellow prisoners. They resolved to break out in a body,
and march to Westminster, to remonstrate with the judges. Stephen seized
a turnkey, and took the keys by force; but, finding his followers
unruly, was wise enough to submit. He was sent with three others to the
'New Jail.' The prisoners in the King's Bench hereupon rose, and
attacked the wall with a pickaxe. Soldiers were called in, and the riot
finally suppressed.[6]
Stephen, in spite of these proceedings, was treated with great humanity
at the 'New Jail;' and apparently without much severity at the King's
Bench to which he presently returned. 'Blarney' Thompson painted his
portrait, and I possess an engraving with the inscription, 'Veritas à
quocunque dicitur à Deo est.' Not long ago a copy of this engraving was
given to my brother by a friend who had seen it in a shop and recognised
the very strong family likeness between James and his great-grandson,
James Fitzjames.
Stephen soon got out of prison. Sir John Webbe, at whose suit he had
been arrested, agreed to pay the debts, gave him 500_l._ and settled an
annuity of 40_l._ upon Mrs. Stephen. I hope that I may infer that Sir
John felt that his debtor had something to say for himself. The question
of making a living, however, became pressing. Stephen, on the strength,
I presume, of his legal studies, resolved to be called to the bar. He
entered at the Middle Temple; but had scarcely begun to keep his terms
when the authorities interfered. His letters to the papers and attacks
upon Lord Mansfield at the very time when Junius was at the height of
his power (I do not, I may observe, claim the authorship of the letters
for James Stephen) had, no doubt, made him a suspicious character. The
benchers accordingly informed him that they would not call him to the
bar, giving as their reasons his 'want of birth, want of fortune, want
of education, and want of temper.' His friend, William Jackson, hereupon
printed a letter,[7] addressing the benchers in the true Junius style.
He contrasts Stephen with his persecutors. Stephen might not know Law
Latin, but he had read Bracton and Glanville and Coke; he knew French
and had read Latin at Aberdeen; he had been educated, it was true, in
some 'paltry principles of honour and honesty,' while the benchers had
learnt 'more useful lessons;' he had written letters to Wilkes copied in
all the papers; he had read Locke, could 'harangue for hours upon social
feelings, friendship, and benevolence,' and would trudge miles to save a
family from prison, not considering that he was thereby robbing the
lawyers and jailors of their fees. The benchers, it seems, had sworn the
peace against him before Sir John Fielding, because he had made a
friendly call upon a member of the society. They mistook a card of
introduction for a challenge. Jackson signs himself 'with the
profoundest sense of your Masterships' demerits, your Masterships'
inflexible detestor,' and probably did not improve his friend's
position.
Stephen, thus rejected, entered the legal profession by a back door,
which, if not reputable, was not absolutely closed. He entered into a
kind of partnership with a solicitor who was the ostensible manager of
the business, and could be put forward when personal appearance was
necessary. Stephen's imposing looks and manner, his acquaintance with
commercial circles and his reputation as a victim of Mansfield brought
him a certain amount of business. He had, however, to undertake such
business as did not commend itself to the reputable members of the
profession. He had a hard struggle and was playing a losing game. He
became allied with unfortunate adventurers prosecuting obscure claims
against Government, which, even when admitted, did not repay the costs
incurred. He had to frequent taverns in order to meet his clients, and
took to smoking tobacco and possibly to other indulgences. His wife, who
was a delicate woman, was put to grievous shifts to make both ends meet.
Her health broke down, and she died at last on March 21, 1775. She had
brought him six children, of whom the eldest was nineteen and the
youngest still under four.[8] I shall speak directly of the two eldest.
Two daughters were taken in charge by their grandmother Stephen, who was
still living in Scotland; while the two little ones remained with their
father at Stoke Newington, where he now lived, ran about the common and
learnt to ride pigs. James Stephen himself lived four years more,
sinking into deeper difficulties; an execution was threatened during his
last illness, and he died in 1779, leaving hardly enough to pay his
debts.[9]
II. JAMES STEPHEN, MASTER IN CHANCERY
I have now to tell the story of the second son, James, my grandfather,
born in 1758. His education, as may be anticipated, was desultory. When
four or five years old, he was sent to a school at Vauxhall kept by
Peter Annet (1693-1769), the last of the Deists who (in 1763) was
imprisoned for a blasphemous libel. The elder Stephen was then living
at Lambeth, and the choice of a schoolmaster seems to show that his
opinions were of the free-thinking type. About 1767 the boy was sent to
a school near his mother's family at Poole. There at the early age of
ten he fell desperately in love with his schoolmaster's daughter, aged
fifteen, and was hurt by the levity with which his passion was treated.
At the same period he became a poet, composed hymns, and wrote an
epigram upon one of his father's creditors. He accompanied his father to
the King's Bench Prison, and there Christopher Smart and others petted
the lad, lent him books, and encouraged his literary aspirations. During
his father's later troubles he managed to keep up a subscription to a
circulating library and would read two volumes a day, chiefly plays and
novels, and, above all, the 'Grand Cyrus' and other old-fashioned
romances. His mother tried to direct him to such solid works as Rapin's
History, and he learnt her favourite Young's 'Night Thoughts' by heart.
He had no schooling after leaving Poole, until, about 1772, he was sent
to a day school on Kennington Green, kept by a cheesemonger who had
failed in business, and whose sole qualifications for teaching were a
clerical wig and a black coat. Here occurred events which profoundly
affected his career. A schoolfellow named Thomas Stent, son of a
stockbroker, became his warm friend. The parent Stents forbade the
intimacy with the son of a broken merchant. Young Stephen boldly called
upon Mrs. Stent to protest against the sentence. She took a liking to
the lad and invited him to her house, where the precocious youth fell
desperately in love with Anne Stent, his schoolfellow's sister, who was
four months his senior. The attachment was discovered and treated with
ridicule. The girl, however, returned the boy's affection and the
passion ran its course after the most approved fashion. The hero was
forbidden the house and the heroine confined to her room. There were
clandestine meetings and clandestine correspondence, in which the
schoolboy found the advantage of his studies in the 'Grand Cyrus.' At
last in 1773 the affair was broken off for the time by the despatch of
James Stephen to Winchester, where one of his Milner uncles boarded him
and sent him to the school. His want of preparation prevented him from
profiting by the teaching, and after the first half year his parents'
inability to pay the bills prevented him from returning. He wrote again
to Miss Stent, but received a cold reply, signifying her obedience to
parental authority. For the next two years he learnt nothing except from
his studies at the circulating library. His mother, sinking under her
burthens, did what she could to direct him, and he repaid her care by
the tenderest devotion. Upon her death he thought for a moment of
suicide. Things were looking black indeed. His elder brother William now
took a bold step. His uncle and godfather, William, who had quarrelled
with the family after the early bankruptcy at Poole, was understood to
be prospering at St. Christopher's. The younger William, who had been
employed in a mercantile office, managed to beg a passage to the West
Indies, and threw himself upon the uncle's protection. The uncle
received the boy kindly, promised to take him into partnership as a
physician, and sent him back by the same ship in order to obtain the
necessary medical training at Aberdeen. He returned just in time. James
had been thinking of volunteering under Washington, and had then
accepted the offer of a 'book-keeper's' place in Jamaica. He afterwards
discovered that a 'book-keeper' was an intermediate between the black
slave-driver and the white overseer, and was doomed to a miserable and
degrading life. It was now settled that he should go with William to
Aberdeen, and study law. He entered at Lincoln's Inn, and looked forward
to practising at St. Christopher's. The uncle refused to extend his
liberality to James; but a student could live at Aberdeen for 20_l._ a
year; the funds were somehow scraped together; and for the next two
sessions, 1775-76 and 1776-77, James was a student at the Marischal
College. The town, he says, was filthy and unwholesome; but his Scottish
cousins were cordial and hospitable, the professors were kindly; and
though his ignorance of Latin and inability even to read the Greek
alphabet were hindrances, he picked up a little mathematics and heard
the lectures of the great Dr. Beattie. His powers of talk and his
knowledge of London life atoned for his imperfect education. He saw
something of Aberdeen society; admired and danced with the daughters of
baillies, and was even tempted at times to forget his passion for Anne
Stent, who had sent a chilling answer to a final appeal.
In 1777, Stephen returned to London, and had to take part of his
father's dwindling business. He thus picked up some scraps of
professional knowledge. On the father's death, kind Scottish relations
took charge of the two youngest children, and his brother William soon
sailed for St. Christopher's. James was left alone. He appealed to the
uncle, George Milner, with whom he had lived at Winchester, and who,
having married a rich wife, was living in comfort at Comberton, near
Cambridge. The uncle promised to give him 50_l._ a year to enable him to
finish his legal education. He took lodgings on the strength of this
promise, and resolved to struggle on, though still giving an occasional
thought to Washington's army.
Isolation and want of money naturally turn the thoughts of an energetic
young man to marriage. James Stephen resolved once more to appeal to
Anne Stent. Her father's doors were closed to him; but after long
watching he managed to encounter her as she was walking. He declared his
unaltered passion, and she listened with apparent sympathy. She showed a
reserve, however, which was presently explained. In obedience to her
parents' wishes, she had promised to marry a young man who was on his
return from the colonies. The avowal led to a pathetic scene: Anne Stent
wept and fainted, and finally her feelings became so clear that the
couple pledged themselves to each other; and the young gentleman from
the colonies was rejected. Mr. Stent was indignant, and sent his
daughter to live elsewhere.
The young couple, however, were not forbidden to meet, and found an ally
in James Stephen's former schoolfellow, Thomas Stent. He was now a
midshipman in the royal navy; and he managed to arrange meetings between
his sister and her lover. Stent soon had to go to sea, but suggested an
ingenious arrangement for the future. A lovely girl, spoken of as Maria,
was known to both the Stents and passionately admired by the sailor. She
lived in a boarding-house, and Stent proposed that Stephen should lodge
in the same house, where he would be able both to see Anne Stent and to
plead his friend's cause with Maria. This judicious scheme led to
difficulties. When, after a time, Stephen began to speak to Maria on
behalf of Stent, the lady at last hinted that she had another
attachment, and, on further pressure, it appeared that the object of the
attachment was Stephen himself. He was not insensible, as he then
discovered, to Maria's charms. 'I have been told,' he says, 'that no man
can love two women at once; but I am confident that this is an error.'
The problem, however, remained as to the application of this principle
to practice. The first consequence was a breach with the old love. Miss
Stent and her lover were parted. Maria, however, was still under age,
and Stephen was under the erroneous impression that a marriage with her
would be illegal without the consent of her guardians, which was out of
the question. While things were in this state, Thomas Stent came back
from a cruise covered with glory. He hastened at once from Portsmouth to
his father, and persuaded the delighted old gentleman to restore his
daughter to her home and to receive James Stephen to the house as her
acknowledged suitor. He then sent news of his achievement to his friend;
and an interview became necessary, to which James Stephen repaired about
as cheerfully, he says, as he would have gone to Tyburn tree. He had to
confess that he had broken off the engagement to his friend's sister
because he had transferred his affections to his friend's mistress.
Stent must have been a magnanimous man. He replied, after reflection,
that the news would break his father's heart. The arrangement he had
made must be ostensibly carried out. Stephen must come to the elder
Stent's house and meet the daughter on apparently cordial terms. Young
Stent's friendship was at an end; but Stephen felt bound to adopt the
prescribed plan.
Meanwhile Stephen's finances were at a low ebb. His uncle, Milner, had
heard a false report, that the nephew had misrepresented the amount of
his father's debts. He declined to pay the promised allowance, and
Stephen felt the insult so bitterly that, after disproving the story, he
refused to take a penny from his uncle. He was once reduced to his last
sixpence, and was only kept afloat by accepting small loans, amounting
to about 5_l._, from an old clerk of his father's. At last, towards the
end of 1780 a chance offered. The 'fighting parson,' Bate, afterwards
Sir Henry Bate Dudley, then a part proprietor of the 'Morning Post,'
quarrelled with a fellow proprietor, Joseph Richardson, put a bullet
into his adversary's shoulder and set up a rival paper, the 'Morning
Herald.' A vacancy was thus created in the 'Morning Post,' and
Richardson gave the place to Stephen, with a salary of two guineas a
week. Stephen had to report debates on the old system, when paper and
pen were still forbidden in the gallery. At the trial of Lord George
Gordon (February 5 and 6, 1781) he had to be in Westminster Hall at four
in the morning; and to stand wedged in the crowd till an early hour the
next morning,[10] when the verdict was delivered. He had then to write
his report while the press was at work. The reporters were employed at
other times upon miscellaneous articles; and Stephen acquired some
knowledge of journalism and of the queer world in which journalists then
lived. They were a rough set of Bohemians, drinking, quarrelling, and
duelling, and indulging in coarse amusements. Fortunately Stephen's
attendance upon the two ladies, for he still saw something of both, kept
him from joining in some of his fellows' amusements.
In 1781 there came a prospect of relief. The uncle in St. Christopher's
died and left all his property to his nephew William. William at once
sent home supplies, which enabled his brother James to give up
reporting, to be called to the bar (January 26, 1782) and in the next
year to sail to St. Christopher's. His love affair had unravelled
itself. He had been suspended between the two ladies, and only able to
decide that if either of them married he was bound to marry the other.
Miss Stent seems to have been the superior of Maria in intellect and
accomplishments, though inferior in beauty. She undoubtedly showed
remarkable forbearance and good feeling. Ultimately she married James
Stephen before he sailed for the West Indies. Maria not long afterwards
married someone else, and, to the best of my belief, lived happily ever
afterwards.
My grandfather's autobiography, written about forty years later, comes
to an end at this point. It is a curious document, full of the strong
religious sentiment by which he came to be distinguished; tracing the
finger of Providence in all that happened to him, even in the good
results brought out of actions for which he expresses contrition; and
yet with an obvious pleasure in recalling the vivid impressions of his
early and vigorous youth. I omit parts of what is at times a confession
of error. This much I think it only right to say. Although he was guilty
of some lapses from strict morality, for which he expresses sincere
regret, it is also true that, in spite of his surroundings and the
temptations to which a very young man thrown upon the London world of
those days was exposed, he not only showed remarkable energy and
independence and a strong sense of honour, but was to all appearance
entirely free from degrading vices. His mother's influence seems to have
impressed upon him a relatively high standard of morality, though he was
a man of impetuous and ardent character, turned loose in anything but a
pure moral atmosphere.
James Stephen had at this time democratic tendencies. He had sympathised
with the rebellious colonists, and he had once covered himself with
glory by a speech against slavery delivered in Coachmakers' Hall in
presence of Maria and Miss Stent. He had then got up the subject for the
occasion. He was now to make practical acquaintance with it. His ship
touched at Barbadoes in December 1783; and out of curiosity he attended
a trial for murder. Four squalid negroes, their hands tied by cords,
were placed at the bar. A planter had been found dead with injuries to
his head. A negro girl swore that she had seen them inflicted by the
four prisoners. There was no jury, and the witnesses were warned in 'the
most alarming terms' to conceal nothing that made against the accused.
Stephen, disgusted by the whole scene, was glad to leave the court. He
learnt afterwards that the prisoners were convicted upon the unsupported
evidence of the girl. The owner of two of them afterwards proved an
_alibi_ conclusively, and they were pardoned; but the other two,
convicted on precisely the same evidence, were burnt alive.[11] Stephen
resolved never to have any connection with slavery. During his stay at
St. Christopher's he had free servants, or, if he hired slaves, obtained
their manumission. No one who had served him long remained in slavery,
except one man, who was so good and faithful a servant that his owner
refused to take even the full value when offered by his employer.[12]
Other facts strengthened his hatred of the system. In 1786 he was
engaged in prosecuting a planter for gross cruelty to two little negroes
of 6 and 7 years of age. After long proceedings, the planter was fined
40_s._
A lawyer's practice at St. Christopher's was supposed to be profitable.
The sugar colonies were flourishing; and Nelson, then captain of the
'Boreas,' was giving proof of his character, and making work for the
lawyers by enforcing the provisions of the Navigation Act upon
recalcitrant American traders and their customers.
Stephen earned enough to be able to visit England in the winter of
1788-9. There he sought the acquaintance of Wilberforce, who was
beginning his crusade against the slave trade. Information from a shrewd
observer on the spot was, of course, of great value; and, although
prudence forbade a public advocacy of the cause, Stephen supplied
Wilberforce with facts and continued to correspond with him after
returning to St. Christopher's. The outbreak of the great war brought
business. During 1793-4 the harbour of St. Christopher's was crowded
with American prizes, and Stephen was employed to defend most of them in
the courts. His health suffered from the climate, and he now saved
enough to return to England at the end of 1794. He then obtained
employment in the Prize Appeal Court of the Privy Council, generally
known as the 'Cockpit.' He divided the leading business with Dallas
until his appointment to a Mastership in Chancery in 1811.
Stephen was now able to avow his anti-slavery principles and soon became
one of Wilberforce's most trusted supporters. He was probably second
only to Zachary Macaulay, who had also practical experience of the
system. Stephen's wife died soon after his return, and was buried at
Stoke Newington on December 10, 1796. He was thrown for a time into the
deepest dejection. Wilberforce forced himself upon his solitude, and
with the consolations of so dear a friend his spirits recovered their
elasticity. Four years later the friendship was drawn still closer by
Stephen's marriage to the only surviving sister of Wilberforce, widow of
the Rev. Dr. Clarke, of Hull. She was a rather eccentric but very
vigorous woman. She spent all her income, some 300_l._ or 400_l._ a
year, on charity, reserving 10_l._ for her clothes. She was often to be
seen parading Clapham in rags and tatters. Thomas Gisborne, a light of
the sect, once tore her skirt from top to bottom at his house, Yoxall
Lodge, saying 'Now, Mrs. Stephen, you _must_ buy a new dress.' She
calmly stitched it together and appeared in it next day. She made her
stepchildren read Butler's 'Analogy' before they were seven.[13] But in
spite of her oddities and severities, she seems to have been both
respected and beloved by her nearest relations.
The marriage probably marked Stephen's final adhesion to the Evangelical
party. He maintained till his death the closest and most affectionate
alliance with his brother-in-law Wilberforce. The nature of their
relations may be inferred from Wilberforce's 'Life and Letters.'
Wilberforce owed much of his influence to the singular sweetness of his
disposition and the urbanity of his manners. His wide sympathies
interested him in many causes, and even his antagonists were not
enemies. Stephen, on the other hand, as Mr. Henry Adams says, was a
'high-minded fanatic.' To be interested in any but the great cause was
to rouse his suspicions. 'If you,' he once wrote to Wilberforce, 'were
Wellington, and I were Masséna, I should beat you by distracting your
attention from the main point.' Any courtesies shown by Wilberforce to
his opponents or to his old friend Pitt seemed to his ardent coadjutor
to be concessions to the evil principle. The Continental war, he held,
was a Divine punishment inflicted upon England for maintaining the slave
trade; and he expounded this doctrine in various pamphlets, the first of
which, 'The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies,' appeared in 1802.
Yet Stephen owes a small niche in history to another cause, upon which
he bestowed no little energy. His professional practice had made him
familiar with the course of the neutral trade. In October 1805, almost
on the day of the battle of Trafalgar, he published a pamphlet called
'War in Disguise.' The point of this, put very briefly, was to denounce
a practice by which our operations against France and Spain were
impeded. American ships, or ships protected by a fraudulent use of the
American flag, sailed from the hostile colonies, ostensibly for an
American port, and then made a nominally distinct but really continuous
voyage to Europe. Thus the mother countries were still able to draw
supplies from the colonies. The remedy suggested in Stephen's pamphlet
was to revive the claims made by England in the Seven Years' War which
entitled us to suppress the trade altogether. The policy thus suggested
was soon embodied in various Orders in Council. The first was made on
January 7, 1807, by the Whig Government before they left office and a
more stringent order followed in November. The last was drawn by
Perceval, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. Perceval was a friend of
Wilberforce and sympathised both with his religious views and his hatred
of the slave trade. He soon became intimate with Stephen, to whose
influence the Orders in Council were generally attributed. Brougham, the
chief opponent of the policy, calls 'War in Disguise' 'brilliant and
captivating,' and says that its statement of facts was undeniable. I
cannot say that I have found it amusing, but it is written with vigour
and impressive earnestness. Brougham calls Stephen the 'father of the
system'; and, whether the system were right or wrong, it had undoubtedly
a great influence upon the course of events. I fear that my grandfather
was thus partly responsible for the unfortunate war with the United
States; but he clearly meant well. In any case, it was natural that
Perceval should desire to make use of his supporter's talents. He found
a seat in Parliament for his friend. Stephen was elected member for
Tralee on Feb. 25, 1808, and in the Parliament which met in 1812 was
returned for East Grimstead.
Stephen thus entered Parliament as an advocate of the Government policy.
His revolutionary tendencies had long vanished. He delivered a speech
upon the Orders in Council on May 6, 1809, which was reprinted as a
pamphlet.[14] He defended the same cause against the agitation led by
Brougham in 1812. A Committee of the whole House was granted, and
Stephen was cross-examining one of Brougham's witnesses (May 11, 1812),
when a shot was heard in the lobby, and Perceval was found to have been
murdered by Bellingham. Stephen had just before been in Perceval's
company, and it was thought, probably enough, that he would have been an
equally welcome victim to the maniac. He was made ill by the shock, but
visited the wretched criminal to pray for his salvation.
Stephen, according to Brougham, showed abilities in Parliament which
might have given him a leading position as a debater. His defective
education, his want of tact, and his fiery temper, prevented him from
rising to a conspicuous position. His position as holding a Government
seat in order to advocate a particular measure, and the fact that
politics in general were to him subsidiary to the one great end of
abolishing slavery, would also be against him. Two incidents of his
career are characteristic. The benchers of Lincoln's Inn had passed a
resolution--'after dinner' it was said by way of apology--that no one
should be called to the bar who had written for hire in a newspaper. A
petition was presented to the House of Commons upon which Stephen made
an effective speech (March 23, 1810). He put the case of a young man
struggling against difficulties to obtain admission to a legal career
and convicted of having supported himself for a time by reporting. Then
he informed the House that this was no imaginary picture, but the case
of 'the humble individual who now addresses you.' Immense applause
followed; Croker and Sheridan expressed equal enthusiasm for Stephen's
manly avowal, and the benchers' representatives hastened to promise that
the obnoxious rule should be withdrawn. When the allied sovereigns
visited London in 1814 another characteristic incident occurred. They
were to see all the sights: the King of Prussia and Field-Marshal
Blücher were to be edified by hearing a debate; and the question arose
how to make a debate conducted in so august a presence anything but a
formality. 'Get Whitbread to speak,' suggested someone, 'and Stephen
will be sure to fly at him.' The plan succeeded admirably. Whitbread
asked for information about the proposed marriage of the Princess
Charlotte to the Prince of Orange. Stephen instantly sprang up and
rebuked the inquirer. Whitbread complained of the epithet 'indecent'
used by his opponent. The Speaker intervened and had to explain that the
epithet was applied to Mr. Whitbread's proposition and not to Mr.
Whitbread himself. Stephen, thus sanctioned, took care to repeat the
phrase; plenty of fire was introduced into the debate, and Field-Marshal
Blücher had the pleasure of seeing a parliamentary battle.[15]
Whitbread was obnoxious to Stephen as a radical and as an opponent of
the Orders in Council. Upon another question Stephen was still more
sensitive. When the topic of slavery is introduced, the reporters
describe him as under obvious agitation, and even mark a sentence with
inverted commas to show that they are giving his actual words. The
slave-trade had been abolished before he entered Parliament; but
Government was occasionally charged with slackness in adopting some of
the measures necessary to carry out the law, and their supporters were
accused of preserving 'a guilty silence.' Such charges stung Stephen to
the quick. 'I would rather,' he exclaimed (June 15, 1810), 'be on
friendly terms with a man who had strangled my infant son than support
an administration guilty of slackness in suppressing the slave trade.'
'If Lord Castlereagh does not keep to his pledges,' he exclaimed (June
29, 1814, when Romilly spoke of the 'guilty silence'), 'may my God not
spare me, if I spare the noble lord and his colleagues!' The Government
declined to take up a measure for the registration of slaves which
Stephen had prepared, and which was thought to be necessary to prevent
evasions of the law. Thereupon he resigned, in spite of all entreaties,
accepting the Chiltern Hundreds, April 14, 1815.
Brougham warmly praises his independence, and wishes that those who had
spoken slightingly of his eloquence would take to heart his example.
Stephen had in 1811 been rewarded for his support of the Orders in
Council by a Mastership in Chancery. Romilly observes that the
appointment was questionable, because Stephen, though he was fully
qualified by his abilities, was not sufficiently versed in the law. His
friends said that it was no more than a fair compensation for the
diminution of the prize business which resulted from the new
regulations. He held the office till 1831, when failing health caused
his retirement. He lived for many years at Kensington Gore on the site
of the present Lowther Lodge; and there from 1809 to 1821 Wilberforce
was his neighbour. His second wife, Wilberforce's sister, died in
October 1816. After leaving Parliament, he continued his active crusade
against slavery. He published, it is said, four pamphlets in 1815; and
in 1824 brought out the first volume of his 'Slavery of the British West
India Colonies delineated.' This is an elaborate digest of the slave
laws; and it was followed in 1830 by a second volume describing the
actual working of the system. From about 1819 Stephen had a small
country house at Missenden, Bucks.[16] Here he was occasionally visited
by his brother-in-law, and a terrace upon which they used to stroll is
still known as 'Wilberforce's Walk.' Stephen had a keen love of country
scenery and had inherited from his father a love of long daily walks. I
record from tradition one story of his prowess. In the early morning of
his seventieth birthday, it is said, he left Missenden on foot, walked
twenty-five miles to Hampstead, where he breakfasted with a son-in-law,
thence walked to his office in London, and, after doing his day's work,
walked out to Kensington Gore in the evening. It was a good performance,
and I hope not injurious to his health, nor can I accept the suggestion
that the old gentleman may have taken a lift in a pony carriage by which
he used to be followed in his walks. He certainly retained his vigour,
although he had suffered from some serious illnesses. He was attacked by
yellow fever in the West Indies, when his brother William and another
doctor implored him to let them bleed him. On his obstinate refusal,
they turned their backs in consultation, when he suddenly produced a
bottle of port from under his pillow and took it off in two draughts.
Next day he left his bed and defended a disregard of professional advice
which had been suggested by previous observations. He became a staunch
believer in the virtues of port, and though he never exceeded a modest
half-bottle, drank it steadily till the last. He was, I am told, and a
portrait confirms the impression, a very handsome old man with a
beautiful complexion, masses of white hair, and a keen thoughtful face.
He died at Bath, October 10, 1832. He was buried at Stoke Newington by
the side of his mother. There Wilberforce had promised to be buried
by his friend; but for him Westminster Abbey was a fitter
resting-place.[17]
The Master and his elder brother had retrieved the fortunes of the
family. William returned to England, and died about 1807. He left a
family by his wife, Mary Forbes, and his daughter Mary became the wife
of Archdeacon Hodson and the mother of Hodson of 'Hodson's Horse.' The
Master's younger brother, John, also emigrated to St. Christopher's,
practised at the bar, and ultimately became Judge of the Supreme Court
of New South Wales in 1825. He died at Sydney in 1834. John's fourth
son, Alfred, born at St. Christopher's, August 20, 1802, was called to
the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1823, became in 1825 Solicitor-General of
Tasmania, in 1839 judge, and in 1843 Chief Justice, of New South Wales.
He retired in 1873, and was for a time Lieutenant-Governor of the
Colony. He received many honours, including the Grand Cross of the Order
of St. Michael and St. George, and a seat in the Privy Council; and,
from all that I have heard, I believe that he fully deserved them. He
took an important part in consolidating the criminal law of the
colonies, and near the end of his long career (at the age of 89) became
conspicuous in advocating a change in the law of divorce. The hardships
suffered by women who had been deserted by bad husbands had excited his
sympathy, and in spite of much opposition he succeeded in obtaining a
measure for relief in such cases. Sir Alfred died on October 15, 1894.
He was twice married, and had five sons and four daughters by one
marriage and four sons and five daughters by the other. One of his sons
is a judge in the colony, and I believe that at the period of his death
he had considerably more than a hundred living descendants in three
generations. He was regarded with universal respect and affection as a
colonial patriarch, and I hope that his memory may long be preserved and
his descendants flourish in the growing world of Australia. To the very
end of his life, Sir Alfred maintained his affectionate relations with
his English relatives, and kept up a correspondence which showed that
his intellectual vigour was unabated almost to the last.
III. MASTER STEPHEN'S CHILDREN
I have now to speak of the generation which preceded my own, of persons
who were well known to me, and who were the most important figures in
the little world in which my brother and I passed our infancy. James
Stephen, the Master, was survived by six children, of whom my father was
the third. I will first say a few words of his brothers and sisters. The
eldest son, William, became a quiet country clergyman. He was vicar of
Bledlow, Bucks (for nearly sixty years), and of Great Stagsden, Beds,
married a Miss Grace, but left no children, and died January 8, 1867. I
remember him only as a mild old gentleman with a taste for punning, who
came up to London to see the Great Exhibition of 1851, and then for the
first time had also the pleasure of seeing a steamboat. Steamboats are
rare in the Buckinghamshire hills, among which he had vegetated ever
since their invention.
Henry John, the second son, born January 18, 1787, was at the Chancery
bar. He married his cousin, Mary Morison, and from 1815 till 1832 he
lived with his father at Kensington Gore. A nervous and retiring temper
prevented him from achieving any great professional success, but he was
one of the most distinguished writers of his time upon legal subjects.
His first book, 'Treatise on the Principles of Pleading in Civil
Actions,' originally published in 1824, has gone through many editions
both in England and America. Chancellor Kent, as Allibone's dictionary
informs me, calls it 'the best book that ever was written in explanation
of the science,' and many competent authorities have assured me that it
possesses the highest merits as a logical composition, although the law
of which it treats has become obsolete. The reputation acquired by this
book led to his appointment to a seat in the Common Law Commission
formed in 1828; and in the same year he became serjeant-at-law. His
brother commissioners became judges, but his only promotion was to a
commissionership of bankruptcy at Bristol in 1842.[18] In 1834 he
published a 'Summary of the Criminal Law,' which was translated into
German. His edition of Blackstone's Commentaries first appeared in 1841.
It contained from the first so much of his own work as to be almost an
independent performance. In later editions he introduced further changes
to adapt it to later legislation, and it is still a standard book.
He lived after the Bristol appointment at Cleevewood in the parish of
Mangotsfield. He retired in February 1854, and lived afterwards in
Clifton till his death on November 28, 1864. I remember him as a gentle
and courteous old man, very shy, and, in his later years, never leaving
his house, and amusing himself with speculating upon music and the
prophecies. He inherited apparently the nervous temperament of his
family with less than their usual dash of the choleric.[19] My uncle,
Sir George, declares that the serjeant was appointed to a judgeship by
Lord Lyndhurst, but immediately resigned, on the ground that he felt
that he could never bear to pass a capital sentence.[20] I record the
anecdote, not as true (I have reasons for thinking it erroneous), but as
indicating the impression made by his character.
The fourth brother, George, born about 1794, was a man of very different
type. In him appeared some of the characteristics of his irascible and
impetuous grandfather. His nature was of coarser fibre than that of his
sensitive and nervous brothers. He was educated at Magdalene College,
Cambridge; and was afterwards placed in the office of the Freshfields,
the eminent firm of solicitors. He had, I have been told, an offer of a
partnership in the firm, but preferred to set up for himself. He was
employed in the rather unsavoury duty of procuring evidence as to the
conduct of Queen Caroline upon the Continent. In 1826 he undertook an
inquiry ordered by the House of Commons in consequence of complaints as
to the existence of a slave trade in Mauritius. He became acquainted
with gross abuses, and resolved thereupon to take up the cause with
which his family was so closely connected. He introduced himself to
O'Connell in order to learn some of the secrets of the great art of
agitation. Fortified by O'Connell's instructions, he proceeded to
organise the 'celebrated Agency Committee.' This committee, headed by
Zachary Macaulay, got up meetings and petitions throughout the country,
and supported Buxton in the final assault upon slavery. For his services
in the cause, George Stephen was knighted in 1838. He showed a versatile
ability by very miscellaneous excursions into literature. He wrote in
1837 'Adventures of a Gentleman in search of a Horse,' which became
popular, and proved that, besides understanding the laws relating to the
subject, he was the only one, as I believe, of his family who could
clearly distinguish a horse from a cow. A very clever but less judicious
work was the 'Adventures of an Attorney in search of Practice,' first
published in 1839, which gave or was supposed to give indiscreet
revelations as to some of his clients. Besides legal pamphlets, he
proved his sound Evangelicalism by a novel called 'The Jesuit at
Cambridge' (1847), intended to unveil the diabolical machinations of the
Catholic Church. An unfortunate catastrophe ruined his prospects. He had
founded a society for the purchase of reversions and acted as its
solicitor. It flourished for some years, till misunderstandings arose,
and Sir George had to retire, besides losing much more than he could
afford. He then gave up the profession which he had always disliked, was
called to the bar in 1849 and practised for some years at Liverpool,
especially in bankruptcy business. At last he found it necessary to
emigrate and settled at Melbourne in 1855. He found the colonists at
least as perverse as the inhabitants of his native country. He wrote a
'Life of Christ' (not after the plan of Renan) intended to teach them a
little Christianity, and a (so-called) life of his father, which is in
the main an exposition of his own services and the ingratitude of
mankind. The state of Australian society seemed to him to justify his
worst forebodings; and he held that the world in general was in a very
bad way. It had not treated him too kindly; but I fear that the
complaints were not all on one side. He was, I suppose, one of those
very able men who have the unfortunate quality of converting any
combination into which they enter into an explosive compound. He died at
Melbourne, June 20, 1879.[21]
The Master's two daughters were Sibella, born 1792, and Anne Mary, whose
birth caused the death of her mother in December 1796. Sibella married
W. A. Garratt, who was second wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in
1804. He was a successful barrister and a man of high character, though
of diminutive stature. 'Mr. Garratt,' a judge is reported to have said
to him, 'when you are addressing the court you should stand up.' 'I am
standing up, my lord.' 'Then, Mr. Garratt, you should stand upon the
bench.' 'I am standing upon the bench, my lord.' He had been
disinherited by his father, I have heard, for preferring a liberal
profession to trade, but upon his father's death his brothers made over
to him the share which ought to have been left to him. He was for many
years on the Committee of the Church Missionary Society, and wrote in
defence of Evangelical principles.[22]
His houses at Hampstead and afterwards at Brighton were among our
youthful resorts; and my aunt remains in my memory as a gentle, kindly
old lady, much afflicted by deafness. Mr. Garratt died in 1858, aged 77,
and his wife at the same age on February 7, 1869.
Anne Mary, my other aunt, married Thomas Edward Dicey. He was a
schoolfellow and college friend of my father. I may observe, for the
sake of Cambridge readers, that, after passing his first year of
university life at Oxford, he came to Cambridge ignorant of mathematics
and in delicate health, which prevented him from reading hard. In spite
of this, he was senior wrangler in 1811--a feat which would now be
impossible for a Newton. He was the calmest and gentlest of human
beings, and to his calmness was attributable the fact that he lived till
1858, although when he was twenty the offices refused to insure his life
for a year on any terms. Those who knew him best regarded him as a man
of singular wisdom and refinement. He lived, till he came to London for
the later education of his boys, in a small country house at Claybrook,
near Lutterworth, and was proprietor of the 'Northampton Mercury,' one
of the oldest papers in England, founded, I believe, by his grandfather.
This Claybrook house was the scene of some of our happiest childish
days. My aunt was a most devoted mother of four sons, whose early
education she conducted in great part herself. In later years she lived
in London, and was the most delightful of hostesses. Her conversation
proved her to possess a full share of the family talents, and although,
like her sister, she suffered from deafness, a talk with her was, to my
mind at least, as great a treat as a talk with the most famous
performers in the social art. After her husband's death, she was
watched by her youngest son, Frank, who had become an artist, with a
tender affection such as is more frequently exhibited by a daughter to
an infirm father. She died on October 28, 1878, and has been followed by
two of her sons, Henry and Frank. The two surviving sons, Edward and
Albert Venn Dicey, Vinerian professor of Law at Oxford, are both well
known in the literary and political world.
I must now tell so much as I know, and is relevant to my purpose, of my
father's life. James Stephen, fourth at least of the name, and third son
of the Master, was born January 3, 1789, at Lambeth, during his father's
visit to England. He had an attack of small-pox during his infancy,
which left a permanent weakness of eyesight. The Master's experience had
not taught him the evils of desultory education. James, the younger,
was, I believe, under various schoolmasters, of whom I can only mention
John Prior Estlin, of St. Michael's Hill, Bristol, a Unitarian, and the
Rev. H. Jowett, of Little Dunham, Norfolk, who was one of the adherents
to Evangelicalism. The change probably marks the development of his
father's convictions. He entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1806. At
that time the great Evangelical leader at Cambridge was Isaac Milner,
the President of Queens' College. Milner's chief followers were William
Farish, of Magdalene, and Joseph Jowett, of Trinity Hall, both of them
professors. Farish, as I have said, married my grandfather's sister, and
the colleges were probably selected for my father and his brother George
with a view to the influence of these representatives of the true faith.
The 'three or four years during which I lived on the banks of the Cam,'
said my father afterwards,[23] 'were passed in a very pleasant, though
not a very cheap, hotel. But had they been passed at the Clarendon, in
Bond Street, I do not think that the exchange would have deprived me of
any aids for intellectual discipline or for acquiring literary and
scientific knowledge.' That he was not quite idle I infer from a copy of
Brotier's 'Tacitus' in my possession with an inscription testifying that
it was given to him as a college prize. He took no university honours,
took the degree of LL.B. in 1812, and was called to the bar at Lincoln's
Inn November 11, 1811. His father had just become Master in Chancery,
and was able to transfer some of his clients to the son. James the
younger thus gained some experience in colonial matters, and 'employed
himself in preparing a digest of the colonial laws in general.'[24] He
obtained leave from the third Earl Bathurst, then and for many years
afterwards the head of the Colonial Department, to examine the official
records for this purpose. In 1813 Lord Bathurst, who was in general
sympathy with the opinions of the Clapham sect, appointed James Stephen
Counsel to the Colonial Department. His duties were to report upon all
acts of colonial legislature. He received a fee of three guineas for
each act, and the office at first produced about 300_l._ a year. After a
time the post became more laborious. He was receiving 1,000_l._ a year
some ten years after his appointment, with, of course, a corresponding
increase of work.[25] The place was, however, compatible with the
pursuit of the profession, and my father in a few years was making
3,000_l._ a year, and was in a position which gave him as fair a
prospect of obtaining professional honours as was enjoyed by any man of
his standing. The earliest notice which I have found of him from an
outsider is a passage in Crabb Robinson's diaries.[26] Robinson met him
on July 10, 1811, and describes him as a 'pious sentimentalist and
moralist,' who spoke of his prospects 'with more indifference than was
perhaps right in a layman.' The notice is oddly characteristic. From
1814 my father was for nine years a member of the committee of the
Church Missionary Society, after which time his occupations made
attendance impossible. I have already indicated the family connection
with the Clapham sect, and my father's connection was now to be drawn
still closer. On December 22, 1814, he married Jane Catherine Venn,
second daughter of the Rev. John Venn, of Clapham.
IV. THE VENNS
My brother was of opinion that he inherited a greater share of the Venn
than of the Stephen characteristics. I certainly seem to trace in him a
marked infusion of the sturdy common sense of the Venns, which tempered
the irritable and nervous temperament common to many of the Stephens.
The Venns were of the very blue blood of the party. They traced their
descent through a long line of clergymen to the time of Elizabeth.[27]
The troubles of two loyalist Venns in the great rebellion are briefly
commemorated in Walker's 'Sufferings of the Clergy.' The first Venn who
is more than a name was a Richard Venn, who died in 1739. His name
occasionally turns up in the obscurer records of eighteenth-century
theology. He was rector of St. Antholin's, in the city of London, and
incurred the wrath of the pugnacious Warburton and of Warburton's friend
(in early days) Conyers Middleton. He ventured to call Middleton an
'apostate priest'; and Middleton retorted that if he alluded to a priest
as the 'accuser,' everyone would understand that he meant to refer to
Mr. Venn. In fact, Venn had the credit of having denounced Thomas
Bundle, who, according to Pope, 'had a heart,' and according to Venn was
a deist in disguise. Bundle's reputation was so far damaged that his
theology was thought too bad for Gloucester, and, like other pieces of
damaged goods, he was quartered upon the Irish Church.
Richard Venn married the daughter of the Jacobite conspirator John
Ashton, executed for high treason in 1691. His son Henry, born March 2,
1724, made a more enduring mark and became the chief light of the
movement which was contemporaneous with that led by Wesley and
Whitefield, though, as its adherents maintained, of independent origin.
He was a sturdy, energetic man. As a boy he had shown his principles by
steadily thrashing the son of a dissenting minister till he became the
terror of the young schismatic. He played (his biographer says) in 1747
for Surrey against all England, and at the end of the match gave his bat
to the first comer, saying, 'I will never have it said of me, Well
struck, Parson!' He was ordained a few days later, and was 'converted by
Law's "Serious Call."' While holding a curacy at Clapham he became a
friend of John Thornton, father of the better known Henry Thornton. John
was a friend of John Newton and of the poet Cowper, to whom he allowed
money for charitable purposes, and both he and his son were great lights
at Clapham. From 1759 to 1771 Venn was vicar of Huddersfield, and there
became famous for eloquence and energy. His 'Complete Duty of Man'--the
title is adopted in contrast to the more famous 'Whole Duty of Man'--was
as the sound of a trumpet to the new party. For three generations it was
the accepted manual of the sect and a trusted exposition of their
characteristic theology. Venn's health suffered from his pastoral
labours at Huddersfield; and from 1771 till near his death (June 24,
1797) he was rector of Yelling, in Huntingdonshire. There his influence
extended to the neighbouring University of Cambridge. The most eminent
Cambridge men of the day, Paley, and Watson, and Hey, were tending to a
theology barely distinguishable from the Unitarianism which some of them
openly adopted. But a chosen few, denounced by their enemies as
methodistical, sought the spiritual guidance of Henry Venn. The most
conspicuous was Charles Simeon (1759-1836), who for many years was the
object of veneration and of ridicule for his uncouth eloquence in the
pulpit of Trinity Church. Even to my own day, his disciples and
disciples' disciples were known to their opponents as 'Sims.'[28]
John Venn, son of this Henry Venn, born at Clapham in 1759, was brought
up in the true faith. He was a pupil of Joseph Milner, elder brother of
the more famous Isaac Milner, and was afterwards, like his father, at
Sidney Sussex College. Simeon was one of his intimate friends. In 1792
Venn became rector of Clapham; and there provided the spiritual food
congenial to the Thorntons, the Shores, the Macaulays, the Wilberforces,
and the Stephens. The value of his teaching may be estimated by any one
who will read three volumes of sermons published posthumously in 1814.
He died July 1, 1813; but his chief claim to remembrance is that he was
the projector and one of the original founders of the Church Missionary
Society, in 1799, which was, as it has continued to be, the most
characteristic product of the evangelical party.'[29]
John Venn's children were of course intimate with the Stephens. In later
life the sons, Henry and John, had a great influence upon my father;
Henry in particular was a man of very remarkable character. He was
educated by his father till 1813, when he was sent to live with Farish,
then Lucasian professor and resident at Chesterton, close to Cambridge.
He was at Queen's College, then flourishing under the patronage of
evangelical parents attracted by Milner's fame; was nineteenth wrangler
in 1818, and for a time was fellow and tutor of his college. In 1827
Wilberforce gave him the living of Drypool, a suburb of Hull, and there
in 1829 he married Martha, fourth daughter of Nicholas Sykes, of
Swanland, Yorkshire. In 1834 he became vicar of St. John's, Holloway, in
the parish of Islington. About 1838 he became subject to an affection of
the heart caused mainly by his efforts in carrying his wife upstairs
during her serious illness. The physician told him that the heart might
possibly adapt itself to a new condition, but that the chances were
greatly in favour of a fatal end to the illness. He was forced to retire
for two years from work, while his wife's illness developed into a
consumption. She died March 21, 1840. Venn's closest relations used to
speak with a kind of awe of the extraordinary strength of his conjugal
devotion. He was entreated to absent himself from some of the painful
ceremonials at her funeral, but declined. 'As if anything,' he said,
'could make any difference to me now.' His own health, however,
recovered contrary to expectation; and he resolutely took up his duties
in life. On October 5, 1841 he was appointed honorary secretary to the
Church Missionary Society, having been on the Committee since 1819, and
he devoted the rest of his life to its service with unflagging zeal. He
gave up his living of 700_l._ a year and refused to take any
remuneration for his work. He was appointed by Bishop Blomfield to a
prebend at St. Paul's, but received and desired no other preferment. He
gradually became infirm, and a few months before his death, January 12,
1873, was compelled to resign his post. Henry Venn laboured through life
in the interests of a cause which seemed to him among the highest, and
which even those who hold entirely different opinions must admit to be a
worthy one, the elevation that is, moral and spiritual, of the lower
races of mankind. He received no rewards except the approval of his
conscience and the sympathy of his fellows; and he worked with an energy
rarely paralleled by the most energetic public servant. His labours are
described in a rather shapeless book[30] to which I may refer for full
details. But I must add a few words upon his character. Venn was not an
eloquent man either in the pulpit or on paper; nor can I ascribe him any
power of speculative thought. He had been from youth steeped in the
evangelical doctrine, and was absolutely satisfied with it to the last.
'I knew,' he once said, 'as a young man all that could be said against
Christianity, and I put the thoughts aside as temptations of the devil.
They have never troubled me since.' Nor was he more troubled by the
speculative tendencies of other parties in the Church. His most obvious
mental characteristic was a shrewd common sense, which one of his
admirers suggests may have been caught by contagion in his Yorkshire
living. In truth it was an innate endowment shared by others of his
family. In him it was combined with a strong sense of humour which is
carefully kept out of his writing, and which, as I used to fancy, must
have been at times a rather awkward endowment. The evangelical party has
certain weaknesses to which, so far as I know, my uncle contrived to
shut his eyes. The humour, however, was always bubbling up in his talk,
and combined as it was with invariable cheeriness of spirit, with a
steady flow of the strongest domestic affection, and with a vigorous and
confident judgment, made him a delightful as well as an impressive
companion. Although outside of the paths which lead to preferment or to
general reputation, he carried a great weight in all the counsels of his
party. His judgment, no doubt, entitled him to their respect. Though a
most devoted clergyman, he had some of the qualities which go to make a
thoroughly trustworthy lawyer. He was a marked exception to the famous
observation of Clarendon that 'the clergymen understand the least, and
take the worst measure of human affairs of all mankind that can write
and read.' Henry Venn's example showed that the clergyman's gown need
not necessarily imply disqualification for a thorough man of business.
He was a man to do thoroughly whatever he undertook. 'What a mercy it
is,' said his sister Emelia, 'that Henry is a good man, for good or bad
he could never repent.'
His younger brother, John, was a man of much less intellectual force but
of singular charm of character. In 1833 he became incumbent of a church
at Hereford in the gift of the Simeon trustees, and lived there till his
death in 1890, having resigned his living about 1870. He had the
simplicity of character of a Dr. Primrose, and was always overflowing
with the kindliest feelings towards his relatives and mankind in
general. His enthusiasm was, directed not only to religious ends but to
various devices for the physical advantage of mankind. He set up a steam
corn mill in Hereford, which I believe worked very successfully for the
supply of pure flour to his parishioners, and he had theories about the
production of pigs and poultry upon which he could dilate with amusing
fervour. He showed his principles in a public disputation with a Roman
Catholic priest at Hereford. I do not know that either of them converted
anybody; but John Venn's loveableness was not dependent upon dialectical
ability. He was accepted, I may say, as the saint of our family; and
Aylstone Hill, Hereford, where he lived with his unmarried sister
Emelia, (a lady who in common sense and humour strongly resembled her
brother Henry), was a place of pilgrimage to which my father frequently
resorted, and where we all found a model of domestic happiness.
The youngest sister, Caroline, married the Rev. Ellis Batten, a master
at Harrow School. He died young in 1830, and she was left with two
daughters, the elder of whom, now Mrs. Russell Gurney, survives, and was
in early years one of the most familiar members of our inner home
circle.
I must now speak of my mother. 'In one's whole life,' says Gray, 'one
can never have any more than a single mother'--a trite observation, he
adds, which yet he never discovered till it was too late. Those who have
made the same discovery must feel also how impossible it is to
communicate to others their own experience, and indeed how painful it is
even to make the attempt. Almost every man's mother, one is happy to
observe, is the best of mothers. I will only assert what I could prove
by evidence other than my own impressions. My mother, then, must have
been a very handsome young woman. A portrait--not a very good
one--shows that she had regular features and a fine complexion, which
she preserved till old age. Her beauty was such as implies a thoroughly
good constitution and unbroken health. She was too a rather romantic
young lady. She knew by heart all such poetry as was not excluded from
the sacred common; she could repeat Cowper and Wordsworth and Campbell
and Scott, and her children learnt the 'Mariners of England' and the
'Death of Marmion' from her lips almost before they could read for
themselves. She accepted, of course, the religious opinions of her
family, but in what I may call a comparatively mild form. If she had not
the humour of her brother Henry and her sister Emelia, she possessed an
equal amount of common sense. Her most obvious characteristic as I knew
her was a singular serenity, which indicated a union of strong affection
and sound judgment with an entire absence of any morbid tendencies. Her
devotion to her husband and children may possibly have influenced her
estimate of their virtues and talents. But however strong her belief in
them, it never betrayed her to partiality of conduct. We were as sure of
her justice as of her affection. Her servants invariably became attached
to her. Our old nurse, Elizabeth Francis, lived with us for forty-three
years, and her death in 1865 was felt as a deep family sorrow. The
quaint Yorkshire cook, whose eccentricities had given trouble and whose
final parting had therefore been received with equanimity on the eve of
a journey abroad, was found calmly sitting in our kitchen when we
returned, and announcing, truly as it turned out, that she proposed to
stay during the rest of my mother's life. But this domestic loyalty was
won without the slightest concession of unusual privileges. Her
characteristic calmness appeared in another way. She suffered the
heaviest of blows in the death of her husband, after forty-five years
of unbroken married happiness, and of her eldest son. On both occasions
she recovered her serenity and even cheerfulness with marked rapidity,
not certainly from any want of feeling, but from her constitutional
incapacity for dwelling uselessly upon painful emotions. She had indeed
practised cheerfulness as a duty in order to soothe her husband's
anxieties, and it had become part of her character. The moral
equilibrium of her nature recovered itself spontaneously as wounds cure
by themselves quickly in thoroughly sound constitutions. She devoted her
spare time in earlier years and almost her whole time in later life to
labours among the poor, but was never tempted to mere philanthropic
sentimentalism. A sound common sense, in short, was her predominant
faculty; and, though her religious sentiments were very strong and deep,
she was so far from fanatical that she accepted with perfect calmness
the deviations of her children from the old orthodox faith. My brother
held, rightly as I think, that he inherited a large share of these
qualities. To my father himself, the influence of such a wife was of
inestimable value. He, the most nervous, sensitive of men, could always
retire to the serene atmosphere of a home governed by placid common
sense and be soothed by the gentlest affection. How necessary was such a
solace will soon be perceived.
V. JAMES STEPHEN, COLONIAL UNDER-SECRETARY
The young couple began prosperously enough. My father's business was
increasing; and after the peace they spent some summer vacations in
visits to the continent. They visited Switzerland, still unhackneyed,
though Byron and Shelley were celebrating its charms. Long afterwards I
used to hear from my mother of the superlative beauties of the Wengern
Alp and the Staubbach (though she never, I suspect, read 'Manfred'), and
she kept up for years a correspondence with a monk of the hospital on
the St. Bernard. Her first child, Herbert Venn Stephen, was born
September 30, 1822; and about this time a change took place in my
father's position. He had a severe illness, caused, it was thought, by
over-work. He had for a time to give up his chancery business and then
to consider whether he should return to it and abandon the Colonial
Office, or give up the bar to take a less precarious position now
offered to him in the office. His doubts of health and his new
responsibilities as a father decided him. On January 25, 1825, he was
appointed Counsel to the Colonial Office, and on August 2 following
Counsel to the Board of Trade, receiving 1,500_l._ a year for the two
offices, and abandoning his private practice. A daughter, Frances
Wilberforce, was born on September 8, 1824, but died on July 22
following. A quaint portrait in which she is represented with her elder
brother, in a bower of roses, is all that remains to commemorate her
brief existence. For some time Herbert was an only son; and a delicate
constitution made his education very difficult. My father hit upon the
most successful of several plans for the benefit of his children when,
at the beginning of 1829, he made arrangements under which Frederick
Waymouth Gibbs became an inmate of our family in order to give my
brother a companion. Although this plan was changed three years later,
Frederick Gibbs became, as he has ever since remained, a kind of adopted
brother to us, and was in due time in the closest intimacy with my
brother James Fitzjames.
After his acceptance of the permanent appointment my father's energies
were for twenty-two years devoted entirely to the Colonial Office. I
must dwell at some length upon his character and position, partly for
his sake and partly because it is impossible without understanding them
to understand my brother's career.
My brother's whole life was profoundly affected, as he fully recognised,
by his father's influence. Fitzjames prefixed a short life of my father
to a posthumous edition of the 'Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography.' The
concluding sentence is significant of the writer's mood. 'Of Sir James
Stephen's private life and character,' he says, 'nothing is said here,
as these are matters with which the public has no concern, and on which
the evidence of his son would not be impartial.' My brother would, I
think, have changed that view in later years. I, at any rate, do not
feel that my partiality, whatever it may be, is a disqualification for
attempting a portrait. And, though the public may have no right to
further knowledge, I think that such part of the public as reads these
pages may be the better for knowing something more of a man of whom even
a son may say that he was one of the conspicuously good and able men of
his generation.
The task, however, is no easy one. His character, in the first place, is
not one to be defined by a single epithet. 'Surely,' said his friend Sir
Henry Taylor to him upon some occasion, 'the simple thing to do is so
and so.' He answered doubtfully, adding, 'The truth is I am _not_ a
simple man.' 'No,' said Taylor, 'you are the most composite man that I
have met with in all my experience of human nature.'[31] Taylor entered
the Colonial Office in the beginning of 1824, and soon formed an
intimate and lifelong friendship with his colleague. His autobiography
contains some very vivid records of the impression made by my father's
character upon a very fine observer in possession of ample opportunities
for knowledge. It does something, though less than I could wish, to
diminish another difficulty which encounters me. My father's official
position necessarily throws an impenetrable veil over the work to which
his main energies were devoted. His chief writings were voluminous and
of great practical importance: but they repose in the archives of the
Colonial Office; and even such despatches of his as have seen the light
are signed by other names, and do not necessarily represent his
opinions. 'The understanding,' says my brother in the 'Life,' 'upon
which permanent offices in the civil service of the Crown are held is
that those who accept them shall give up all claim to personal
reputation on the one hand and be shielded from personal responsibility
on the other.' Of this compact, as Fitzjames adds, neither my father nor
his family could complain. His superiors might sometimes gain credit or
incur blame which was primarily due to the adoption of his principles.
He was sometimes attacked, on the other hand, for measures attributed to
his influence, but against which he had really protested, although he
was precluded from any defence of his conduct. To write the true history
of our colonial policy in his time would be as much beyond my powers as
it is outside my purpose; to discriminate his share in it would probably
be now impossible for anyone. I can only take a few hints from Sir Henry
Taylor and from my brother's account which will sufficiently illustrate
some of my father's characteristics.
'For a long period,' says Taylor,[32] 'Stephen might better have been
called the "Colonial Department" itself than "Counsel to the Colonial
Department."' During Lord Glenelg's tenure of office (1835-1839), and
for many years before and after, 'he literally ruled the Colonial
empire.'[33] This involved unremitting labour. Taylor observes that
Stephen 'had an enormous appetite for work,' and 'rather preferred not
to be helped. I,' he adds, humorously, 'could make him perfectly welcome
to any amount of it.' For years he never left London for a month, and,
though in the last five years preceding his retirement in 1847, he was
absent for rather longer periods, he took a clerk with him and did
business in the country as regularly as in town.
His duties were of the most various kind. The colonies, as my brother
observes, were a collection of states varying from youthful nations like
Canada down to a small settlement of Germans on the rock of Heligoland;
their populations differed in race, laws, religion, and languages; the
authority of the Crown varied from absolute power over an infant
settlement to supremacy over communities in some essential respects
independent. My father's duty was to be familiar with every detail of
these complicated relations, to know the state of parties and local
politics in each colony, and to be able to advise successive Secretaries
of State who came without special preparation to the task. He had to
prepare drafts of all important despatches and of the numerous Acts of
Parliament which were required during a period of rapid and important
changes. 'I have been told,' says my brother, elsewhere,[34] that 'he
was a perfectly admirable Under-Secretary of State, quick, firm,
courageous, and a perfect master of his profession and of all the
special knowledge which his position required, and which, I believe, no
other man in England possessed to anything like the same extent.'
A man of long experience, vast powers of work, and decided views
naturally obtained great influence with his superiors; and that such an
influence was potent became generally believed among persons interested
in and often aggrieved by the policy of the Government. Stephen was
nicknamed as 'King Stephen,' or 'Mr. Over-Secretary Stephen,' or 'Mr.
Mother-Country Stephen.' The last epithet, attributed to Charles Buller,
meant that when the colonies were exhorted to pay allegiance to the
mother country they were really called upon to obey the irrepressible
Under-Secretary. I dimly divine, though I am not much of a politician,
that there is an advantage in criticising the permanent official in a
department. He cannot answer an attack upon him, and it is also an
attack upon the superior who has yielded to his influence. At any rate,
though my father received the warmest commendation from his official
superiors, he acquired a considerable share of unpopularity. For this
there were other reasons, of which I shall presently speak.
Little as I can say of the details of this policy in which he was
concerned, there are one or two points of which I must speak. My father
had accepted the appointment, according to Taylor, partly with the view
of gaining an influence upon the slavery question. In this, says Taylor,
he was eminently successful, and his success raised the first outcry
against him.[35] His family and friends were all, as I have shown,
deeply engaged in the anti-slavery agitation. As an official he could of
course take no part in such action, and his father had to give solemn
assurances that the son had given him no information. But the power of
influencing the Government in the right direction was of equal
importance to the cause. The elaborate Act, still in force, by which
previous legislation against the slave trade was finally consolidated
and extended was passed in 1824 (5 George IV. cap. 113). It was drawn
by my father and dictated by him in one day and at one sitting.[36] It
fills twenty-three closely printed octavo pages. At this time the
Government was attempting to adopt a middle course between the
abolitionists and the planters by passing what were called 'meliorating
Acts,' Acts, that is, for improving the treatment of the slaves. The
Colonial Assemblies declined to accept the proposals. The Colonial
Office remonstrated, obtained reports and wrote despatches, pointing out
any abuses discovered: the despatches were laid before Parliament and
republished by Zachary Macaulay in the 'Anti-slavery Reporter.'
Agitation increased. An insurrection of slaves in Jamaica in 1831,
cruelly suppressed by the whites, gave indirectly a death blow to
slavery. Abolition, especially after the Reform Bill, became inevitable,
but the question remained whether the grant of freedom should be
immediate or gradual, and whether compensation should be granted to the
planters. The problem had been discussed by Stephen, Taylor, and Lord
Howick, afterwards Earl Grey (1802-1894), and various plans had been
considered. In March 1833, however, Mr. Stanley, afterwards Lord Derby,
became head of the Colonial Office; and the effect was at first to
reduce Stephen and Taylor to their 'original insignificance.' They had
already been attacked in the press for taking too much upon themselves,
and Stanley now prepared a measure without their assistance. He found
that he had not the necessary experience for a difficult task, and was
soon obliged to have recourse to Stephen, who prepared the measure which
was finally passed. The delay had made expedition necessary if slavery
was not to continue for another year. My father received notice to draw
the Act on Saturday morning. He went home and completed his task by the
middle of the day on Monday. The Act (3 & 4 William IV. c. 73) contains
sixty-six sections, fills twenty-six pages in the octavo edition of the
Statute-book, and creates a whole scheme of the most intricate and
elaborate kind. The amanuensis to whom it was dictated used to tell the
story as an illustration of his own physical powers. At that time, as
another clerk in the office tells my brother, 'it was no unusual thing
for your father to dictate before breakfast as much as would fill thirty
sides of office folio paper,' equal to about ten pages of the 'Edinburgh
Review,' The exertion, however, in this instance was exceptional: only
upon one other occasion did my father ever work upon a Sunday; it cost
him a severe nervous illness and not improbably sowed the seed of later
attacks.[37]
I can say little of my father's action in later years. On September 17,
1834, he was appointed to the newly created office of Assistant
Under-Secretary of State. He had, says Taylor, for many years done the
work of the Under-Secretary, and he objected to doing it any longer on
the same terms. The Under-Secretary complained to Lord Melbourne that
his subordinate desired to supplant him, and got only the characteristic
reply, 'It looks devilishly like it.'[38] In 1836 he had to retire, and
my father became Under-Secretary in his place, with a salary of
2,000_l._ a year, on February 4 of that year, and at the same time gave
up his connection with the Board of Trade. He was actively concerned in
the establishment of responsible government in Canada. The relations
with that colony were, as my brother says, 'confused and entangled in
every possible way by personal and party questions at home and by the
violent dissensions which existed in Canada itself.' The difficulty was
aggravated, he adds, by the fact that my father, whatever his personal
influence, had no authority whatever; and although his principles were
ultimately adopted he had constantly to take part in measures which he
disapproved. 'Stephen's opinions,' says Taylor, 'were more liberal than
those of most of his chiefs, and at one period he gave more power than
he intended to a Canadian Assembly from placing too much confidence in
their intentions.'[39] Upon this matter, however, Taylor admits that he
was not fully informed. I will only add that my father appears to have
shared the opinions then prevalent among the Liberal party that the
colonies would soon be detached from the mother country. On the
appointment of a Governor-General of Canada, shortly before his
resignation of office, he observes in a diary that it is not unlikely to
be the last that will ever be made.[40]
I have already noticed my father's unpopularity. It was a not unlikely
result of exercising a great and yet occult influence upon a department
of Government which is likely in any case to be more conspicuous for its
failures than for its successes. There were, however, more personal
reasons which I think indicate his peculiar characteristics. I have said
enough to illustrate his gluttony of work. I should guess that, without
intending it, he was also an exacting superior. He probably
over-estimated the average capacity for work of mankind, and condemned
their indolence too unsparingly. Certainly his estimate of the quantity
of good work got out of officials in a public office was not a high one.
Nor, I am sure, did he take a sanguine view of the utility of such work
as was done in the Colonial Office. 'Colonial Office being an Impotency'
(as Carlyle puts it in his 'Reminiscences,' 'as Stephen inarticulately,
though he never said or whispered it, well knew), what could an earnest
and honest kind of man do but try to teach you how not to do it?'[41] I
fancy that this gives in Carryle's manner the unpleasant side of a true
statement. My father gave his whole life to work, which he never thought
entirely satisfactory, although he did his duty without a word of
complaint. Once, when advising Taylor to trust rather to literature than
to Government employment, he remarked, 'You may write off the first
joints of your fingers for them, and then you may write off the second
joints, and all that they will say of you is, "What a remarkably
short-fingered man!"'[42] But he had far too much self-respect to
grumble at the inevitable results of the position.
My father, however, was a man of exquisitely sensitive nature--a man, as
my mother warned his children, 'without a skin,' and he felt very keenly
the attacks of which he could take no notice. In early days this had
shown itself by a shyness 'remarkable,' says Taylor, beyond all 'shyness
that you could imagine in anyone whose soul had not been pre-existent in
a wild duck.'[43] His extreme sensibility showed itself too in other
ways. He was the least sanguine of mankind. He had, as he said in a
letter, 'a morbidly vivid perception of possible evils and remote
dangers.' A sensitive nature dreads nothing so much as a shock, and
instinctively prepares for it by always anticipating the worst. He
always expected, if I may say so, to be disappointed in his
expectations. The tendency showed itself in a general conviction that
whatever was his own must therefore be bad. He could not bear to have a
looking-glass in his room lest he should be reminded of his own
appearance. 'I hate mirrors vitrical and human,' he says, when wondering
how he might appear to others. He could not bear that his birthday
should be even noticed, though he did not, like Swift, commemorate it by
a remorseful ceremonial. He shrank from every kind of self-assertion;
and in matters outside his own province often showed to men of abilities
very inferior to his own a deference which to those who did not know him
might pass for affectation. The life of a recluse had strong attractions
for him. He was profoundly convinced that the happiest of all lives was
that of a clergyman, who could devote himself to study and to the quiet
duties of his profession. Circumstances had forced a different career
upon him. He had as a very young man taken up a profession which is not
generally supposed to be propitious to retiring modesty; and was ever
afterwards plunged into active business, which brought him into rough
contact with politicians and men of business of all classes. The result
was that he formed a manner calculated to shield himself and keep his
interlocutors at a distance. It might be called pompous, and was at any
rate formal and elaborate. The natural man lurked behind a barrier of
ceremony, and he rarely showed himself unless in full dress. He could
unbend in his family, but in the outer world he put on his defensive
armour of stately politeness, which even for congenial minds made
familiarity difficult if it effectually repelled impertinence. But
beneath this sensitive nature lay an energetic and even impetuous
character, and an intellect singularly clear, subtle, and decisive. His
reasons were apt to be complicated, but he came to very definite
results, and was both rapid and resolute in action. He had 'a strong
will,' says Taylor, 'and great tenacity of opinion. When he made a
mistake, which was very seldom considering the prodigious quantity of
business he despatched, his subordinates could rarely venture to point
it out; he gave them so much trouble before he could be evicted from his
error.' In private life, as Taylor adds, his friends feared to suggest
any criticisms; not because he resented advice but because he suffered
so much from blame.
Another peculiarity was oddly blended with this. Among his topics of
self-humiliation, sufficiently frequent, one was his excess of
'loquacity.' A very shy man, it is often remarked, may shrink from
talking, but when he begins to talk he talks enormously. My father, at
any rate, had a natural gift for conversation. He could pour out a
stream of talk such as, to the best of my knowledge, I have never heard
equalled. The gift was perhaps stimulated by accidents. The weakness of
his eyes had forced him to depend very much upon dictation. I remember
vividly the sound of his tread as he tramped up and down his room,
dictating to my mother or sister, who took down his words in shorthand
and found it hard to keep pace with him. Even his ordinary conversation
might have been put into print with scarcely a correction, and was as
polished and grammatically perfect as his finished writing. The flow of
talk was no doubt at times excessive. Taylor tells of an indignant
gentleman who came to his room after attempting to make some
communication to the Under-Secretary. Mr. Stephen, he said, had at once
begun to speak, and after discoursing for half an hour without a
moment's pause, courteously bowed the gentleman out, thanking him for
the valuable information which still remained unuttered. Sir James
Stephen, said Lord Monteagle to Carlyle, 'shuts his eyes on you and
talks as if he were dictating a colonial despatch.'[44] This refers to a
nervous trick of shyness. When talking, his eyelids often had a
tremulous motion which concealed the eyes themselves, and gave to at
least one stranger the impression that he was being addressed by a blind
man.
The talk, however, was always pointed and very frequently as brilliant
as it was copious. With all the monotony of utterance, says Taylor,
'there was such a variety and richness of thought and language, and
often so much wit and humour, that one could not help being interested
and attentive.' On matters of business, he adds, 'the talk could not be
of the same quality and was of the same continuity.' He gives one
specimen of the 'richness of conversational diction' which I may quote.
My father mentioned to Taylor an illness from which the son of Lord
Derby was suffering. He explained his knowledge by saying that Lord
Derby had spoken of the case to him in a tone for which he was
unprepared. 'In all the time when I saw him daily I cannot recollect
that he ever said one word to me about anything but business; and _when
the stupendous glacier, which had towered over my head for so many
years, came to dissolve and descend upon me in parental dew, you may
imagine, &c., &c._[45] My brother gives an account to which I can fully
subscribe, so far as my knowledge goes. Our father's printed books, he
says, show his mind 'in full dress, as under restraint and subject to
the effect of habitual self-distrust. They give no idea of the vigour
and pungency and freedom with which he could speak or let himself loose
or think aloud as he did to me. Macaulay was infinitely more eloquent,
and his memory was a thing by itself. Carlyle was striking and
picturesque, and, after a fashion, forcible to the last degree. John
Austin discoursed with the greatest dignity and impressiveness. But my
father's richness of mind and union of wisdom, good sense, keenness and
ingenuity, put him, in my opinion, quite on the same sort of level as
these distinguished men; and gave me a feeling about him which attuned
itself with and ran into the conviction that he was also one of the very
kindest, most honourable, and best men I ever knew in my whole life.'
From my recollection, which is less perfect than was my brother's, I
should add that one thing which especially remains with me was the stamp
of fine literary quality which marked all my father's conversation. His
talk, however copious, was never commonplace; and, boy as I was when I
listened, I was constantly impressed by the singular skill with which
his clear-cut phrases and lively illustrations put even familiar topics
into an apparently new and effective light.
The comparison made by my brother between my father's talk and his
writings may be just, though I do not altogether agree with it. The
'Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography,' by which he is best known, were
written during the official career which I have described.
The composition was to him a relaxation, and they were written early in
the morning or late at night, or in the intervals of his brief holidays.
I will not express any critical judgment of their qualities; but this I
will say: putting aside Macaulay's 'Essays,' which possess merits of an
entirely different order, I do not think that any of the collected
essays republished from the 'Edinburgh Review' indicate a natural gift
for style equal to my father's. Judging from these, which are merely the
overflowing of a mind employed upon other most absorbing duties, I think
that my father, had he devoted his talents to literature, would have
gained a far higher place than has been reached by any of his
family.[46]
My father gave in his Essays a sufficient indication of his religious
creed. That creed, while it corresponded to his very deepest emotions,
took a peculiar and characteristic form. His essay upon the 'Clapham
Sect'[47] shows how deeply he had imbibed its teaching, while it yet
shows a noticeable divergence. All his youthful sympathies and aims had
identified him with the early evangelicals. As a lad he had known
Granville Sharp, the patriarch of the anti-slavery movement; and till
middle life he was as intimate as the difference of ages permitted with
Wilberforce and with Thomas Gisborne, the most refined if not most
effective preacher of the party. He revered many of the party from the
bottom of his heart. His loving remembrance of his intercourse with them
is shown in every line of his description, and to the end of his life he
retained his loyalty to the men, and, as he at least thought, to their
creed. The later generation, which called itself evangelical,
repudiated his claim. He was attacked in their chief organ. When some
remonstrance was made by his brother-in-law, Henry Venn, he wrote to the
paper (I quote from memory), 'I can only regret that any friend of mine
should have stooped to vindicate me from any censure of yours'; and
declined further controversy.
The occasion of this was an attack which had been made upon him at
Cambridge, where certain learned dons discovered on his appointment to
the professorship of history that he was a 'Cerinthian.' I do not
pretend to guess at their meaning. Anyhow he had avowed, in an
'epilogue' to his Essays, certain doubts as to the meaning of eternal
damnation--a doctrine which at that time enjoyed considerable
popularity. The explanation was in part simple. 'It is laid to my
charge,' he said, 'that I am a Latitudinarian. I have never met with a
single man who, like myself, had passed a long series of years in a free
intercourse with every class of society who was not more or less what is
called a Latitudinarian.' In fact, he had discovered that Clapham was
not the world, and that the conditions of salvation could hardly include
residence on the sacred common. This conviction, however, took a
peculiar form in his mind. His Essays show how widely he had sympathised
with many forms of the religious sentiment. He wrote with enthusiasm of
the great leaders of the Roman Catholic Church; of Hildebrand and St.
Francis, and even of Ignatius Loyola; and yet his enthusiasm does not
blind him to the merits of Martin Luther, or Baxter, or Wesley, or
Wilberforce. There were only two exceptions to his otherwise universal
sympathy. He always speaks of the rationalists in the ordinary tone of
dislike; and he looks coldly upon one school of orthodoxy. 'Sir James
Stephen,' as was said by someone, 'is tolerant towards every Church
except the Church of England.' This epigram indicated a fact. Although
he himself strenuously repudiated any charge of disloyalty to the Church
whose ordinances he scrupulously observed, he was entirely out of
sympathy with the specially Anglican movement of later years. This was
no doubt due in great part to the intensely strong sympathies of his
youth. When the Oxford movement began he was already in middle life and
thoroughly steeped in the doctrines which they attacked. He resembled
them, indeed, in his warm appreciation of the great men of Catholicism.
But the old churchmen appealed both to his instincts as a statesman and
to his strong love of the romantic. The Church of the middle ages had
wielded a vast power; men like Loyola and Xavier had been great
spiritual heroes. But what was to be said for the Church of England
since the Reformation? Henry Martyn, he says, in the 'Clapham Sect,' is
'the one heroic name which adorns her annals since the days of
Elizabeth. Her apostolic men either quitted or were cast out of her
communion. Her _Acta Sanctorum_ may be read from end to end with a dry
eye and an unquickened pulse.' He had perhaps heard too many sermons.
'Dear Mother Church,' he says after one such experience, 'thy spokesmen
are not selected so as to create any danger that we should be dazzled by
human eloquence or entangled by human wisdom.' The Church of England, as
he says elsewhere ('Baxter'), afforded a refuge for three centuries to
the great, the learned, and the worldly wise, but was long before it
took to the nobler end of raising the poor, and then, as he would have
added, under the influence of the Clapham Sect. The Church presented
itself to him mainly as the religious department of the State, in which
more care was taken to suppress eccentricity than to arouse enthusiasm;
it was eminently respectable, but at the very antipodes of the heroic.
Could he then lean to Rome? He could not do so without damning the men
he most loved, even could his keen and in some ways sceptical intellect
have consented to commit suicide. Or to the Romanising party in the
Church? The movement sprang from the cloister, and he had breathed the
bracing air of secular life. He was far too clear-headed not to see
whither they were tending. To him they appeared to be simply feeble
imitations of the real thing, dabbling with dangerous arguments, and
trying to revive beliefs long sentenced to extinction.
And yet, with his strong religious beliefs, he could not turn towards
the freethinkers. He perceived indeed with perfect clearness that the
Christian belief was being tried by new tests severer than the old, and
that schools of thought were arising with which the orthodox would have
to reckon. Occasional intimations to this effect dropped from him in his
conversations with my brother and others. But, on the whole, the simple
fact was that he never ventured to go deeply into the fundamental
questions. His official duties left him little time for abstract
thought; and his surpassingly ingenious and versatile mind employed
itself rather in framing excuses for not answering than in finding
thorough answers to possible doubts. He adopted a version of the
doctrine _crede ut intelligas_, and denounced the mere reasoning
machines like David Hume who appealed unequivocally to reason. But what
the faculty was which was to guide or to overrule reason in the search
for truth was a question to which I do not think that he could give any
distinct answer. He was too much a lover of clearness to be attracted by
the mysticism of Coleridge, and yet he shrank from the results of seeing
too clearly.
I have insisted upon this partly because my father's attitude greatly
affected my brother, as will be presently seen. My brother was not a man
to shrink from any conclusions, and he rather resented the humility
which led my father, in the absence of other popes, to attach an
excessive importance to the opinions of Henry and John Venn--men who, as
Fitzjames observes, were, in matters of speculative inquiry, not worthy
to tie his shoes. Meanwhile, as his health became weaker in later years,
my father seemed to grow more weary of the secular world, and to lean
more for consolation under anxiety to his religious beliefs. Whatever
doubts or tendencies to doubt might affect his intellect, they never
weakened his loyalty to his creed. He spoke of Christ, when such
references were desirable, in a tone of the deepest reverence blended
with personal affection, which, as I find, greatly impressed my brother.
Often, in his letters and his talk, he would dwell upon the charm of a
pious life, free from secular care and devoted to the cultivation of
religious ideals in ourselves and our neighbours. On very rare occasions
he would express his real feelings to companions who had mistaken his
habitual reserve for indifference. We had an old ivory carving, left to
him in token of gratitude by a gentleman whom he had on some such
occasion solemnly reproved for profane language, and who had at the
moment felt nothing but irritation.
The effect of these tendencies upon our little domestic circle was
marked. My father's occupations naturally brought him into contact with
many men of official and literary distinction. Some of them became his
warm friends. Besides Henry Taylor, of whom I have spoken, Taylor's
intimate friends, James Spedding and Aubrey de Vere, were among the
intimates of our household; and they and other men, younger than
himself, often joined him in his walks or listened to his overflowing
talk at home. A next-door neighbour for many years was Nassau Senior,
the political economist, and one main author of the Poor Law of 1834.
Senior, a very shrewd man of the world, was indifferent to my father's
religious speculations. Yet he and his family were among our closest
friends, and in habits of the most familiar intercourse with us. With
them was associated John Austin, regarded by all the Utilitarians as the
profoundest of jurists and famous for his conversational powers; and
Mrs. Austin, a literary lady, with her daughter, afterwards Lady Duff
Gordon. I think of her (though it makes me feel old when I so think) as
Lucy Austin. She was a brilliant girl, reported to keep a rifle and a
skull in her bedroom. She once startled the sense of propriety of her
elders by performing in our house a charade, in which she represented a
dying woman with a 'realism'--to use the modern phrase--worthy of Madame
Sarah Bernhardt. Other visitors were occasionally attracted. My father
knew John Mill, though never, I fancy, at all intimately. He knew
politicians such as Charles Greville, the diarist, who showed his
penetration characteristically, as I have been told, by especially
admiring my mother as a model of the domestic virtues which he could
appreciate from an outside point of view.
We looked, however, at the world from a certain distance, and, as it
were, through a veil. My father had little taste for general society. It
had once been intimated to him, as he told me, that he might find
admission to the meetings of Holland House, where, as Macaulay tells us,
you might have the privilege of seeing Mackintosh verify a reference to
Thomas Aquinas, and hearing Talleyrand describe his ride over the field
of Austerlitz. My father took a different view. He declined to take
advantage of this opening into the upper world, because, as he said, I
don't know from what experience, the conversation turned chiefly upon
petty personal gossip. The feasts of the great were not to his taste. He
was ascetic by temperament. He was, he said, one of the few people to
whom it was the same thing to eat a dinner and to perform an act of
self-denial. In fact, for many years he never ate a dinner, contenting
himself with a biscuit and a glass of sherry as lunch, and an egg at
tea, and thereby, as the doctors said, injuring his health. He once
smoked a cigar, and found it so delicious that he never smoked again. He
indulged in snuff until one day it occurred to him that snuff was
superfluous; when the box was solemnly emptied out of the window and
never refilled. Long sittings after dinner were an abomination to him,
and he spoke with horror of his father's belief in the virtues of port
wine. His systematic abstemiousness diminished any temptation to social
pleasures of the ordinary kind. His real delight was in quieter meetings
with his own family--with Stephens, and Diceys, and Garratts, and above
all, I think, with Henry and John Venn. At their houses, or in the
country walks where he could unfold his views to young men, whose
company he always enjoyed, he could pour out his mind in unceasing
discourse, and be sure of a congenial audience.
Our household must thus be regarded as stamped with the true evangelical
characteristics--and yet with a difference. The line between saints and
sinners or the Church and the world was not so deeply drawn as in some
cases. We felt, in a vague way, that we were, somehow, not quite as
other people, and yet I do not think that we could be called Pharisees.
My father felt it a point of honour to adhere to the ways of his youth.
Like Jonadab, the son of Rechab, as my brother observes, he would drink
no wine for the sake of his father's commandments (which, indeed, is
scarcely a felicitous application after what I have just said). He wore
the uniform of the old army, though he had ceased to bear unquestioning
allegiance. We never went to plays or balls; but neither were we taught
to regard such recreations as proofs of the corruption of man. My father
most carefully told us that there was nothing intrinsically wrong in
such things, though he felt strongly about certain abuses of them. At
most, in his favourite phrase, they were 'not convenient.' We no more
condemned people who frequented them than we blamed people in Hindostan
for riding elephants. A theatre was as remote from us as an elephant.
And therefore we grew up without acquiring or condemning such tastes.
They had neither the charm of early association nor the attraction of
forbidden fruit. To outsiders the household must have been pervaded by
an air of gravity, if not of austerity. But we did not feel it, for it
became the law of our natures, not a law imposed by external sanctions.
We certainly had a full allowance of sermons and Church services; but we
never, I think, felt them to be forced upon us. They were a part, and
not an unwelcome part, of the order of nature. In another respect we
differed from some families of the same creed. My father's fine taste
and his sensitive nature made him tremblingly alive to one risk. He
shrank from giving us any inducement to lay bare our own religious
emotions. To him and to our mother the needless revelation of the deeper
feelings seemed to be a kind of spiritual indelicacy. To encourage
children to use the conventional phrases could only stimulate to
unreality or actual hypocrisy. He recognised, indeed, the duty of
impressing upon us his own convictions, but he spoke only when speaking
was a duty. He read prayers daily in his family, and used to expound a
few verses of the Bible with characteristic unction. In earlier days I
find him accusing himself of a tendency to address 'homiletical
epistles' to his nearest connections; but he scrupulously kept such
addresses for some adequate occasion in his children's lives. We were,
indeed, fully aware, from a very early age, of his feelings, and could
not but be continuously conscious that we were under the eye of a father
governed by the loftiest and purest motives, and devoting himself
without stint to what he regarded as his duty. He was a living
'categorical imperative.' 'Did you ever know your father do a thing
because it was pleasant?' was a question put to my brother, when he was
a small boy, by his mother. She has apparently recorded it for the sake
of the childish answer: 'Yes, once--when he married you.' But we were
always conscious of the force of the tacit appeal.
I must not give the impression that he showed himself a stern parent. I
remember that when his first grandchild was born, I was struck by the
fact that he was the most skilful person in the family at playing with
the baby. Once, when some friends upon whom he was calling happened to
be just going out, he said, 'Leave me the baby and I shall be quite
happy.' Several little fragments of letters with doggerel rhymes and
anecdotes suited for children recall his playfulness with infants, and
as we grew up, although we learnt to regard him with a certain awe, he
conversed with us most freely, and discoursed upon politics, history,
and literature, and his personal recollections, as if we had been his
equals, though, of course, with a width of knowledge altogether beyond
our own. The risk of giving pain to a 'skinless' man was all that could
cause any reserve between us; but a downright outspoken boy like my
brother soon acquired and enjoyed a position on the most affectionate
terms of familiarity. We knew that he loved us; that his character was
not only pure but chivalrous; and that intellectually he was a most
capable guide into the most delightful pastures.
I will conclude by a word or two upon his physical characteristics. No
tolerable likeness has been preserved. My father was rather above middle
height, and became stout in later years. Though not handsome, his
appearance had a marked dignity. A very lofty brow was surmounted by
masses of soft fine hair, reddish in youth, which became almost white
before he died. The eyes, often concealed by the nervous trick I have
mentioned, were rather deeply set and of the purest blue. They could
flash into visibility and sparkle with indignation or softer emotion.
The nose was the nose of a scholar, rather massive though well cut, and
running to a sharp point. He had the long flexible lips of an orator,
while the mouth, compressed as if cut with a knife, indicated a nervous
reserve. The skull was very large, and the whole face, as I remember
him, was massive, though in youth he must have been comparatively
slender.
His health was interrupted by some severe illnesses, and he suffered
much at times from headache. His power of work, however, shows that he
was generally in good health; he never had occasion for a dentist. He
was a very early riser, scrupulously neat in dress, and even fanatical
in the matter of cleanliness. He had beautiful but curiously incompetent
hands. He was awkward even at tying his shoes; and though he liked
shaving himself because, he said, that it was the only thing he could do
with his hands, and he shaved every vestige of beard, he very often
inflicted gashes. His handwriting, however, was of the very best. He
occasionally rode and could, I believe, swim and row. But he enjoyed no
physical exercise except walking, a love of which was hereditary. I do
not suppose that he ever had a gun or a fishing-rod in his hand.
And now, having outlined such a portrait as I can of our home, I begin
my brother's life.[48]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: I learn by the courtesy of Mr. James Young Stephen that
this James Stephen was son of a previous James Stephen of Ardenbraught,
whose brother Thomas was provost of Dundee and died in 1728. James
Stephen of Ardenbraught had a younger son John, who was
great-grandfather of the present Mr. Oscar Leslie Stephen. Mr. O. L.
Stephen is father of Mr. James Young Stephen, Mr. Oscar Leslie Stephen,
junior, and Sir Alexander Condie Stephen, K.C.M.G.]
[Footnote 2: My friend, Professor Bonney, kindly refers me to Conybeare
and Philips' _Outlines of Geology of England and Wales_, p. 13, where
there is an account of certain beds of lignite, or imperfect coal, in
the neighbourhood of Poole. They burn with an odour of bitumen, and, no
doubt, misled my great-grandfather. Geology was not even outlined in
those days.]
[Footnote 3: 'Parleyings with Certain People'--_Works_ (1889) xvi.
148-160.]
[Footnote 4: See _Dictionary of National Biography_.]
[Footnote 5: Redgrave's _Dictionary of Painters_.]
[Footnote 6: I have copies of two pamphlets in which these proceedings
are described:--One is entitled 'Considerations on Imprisonment for
Debt, fully proving that the confining of the bodies of debtors is
contrary to Common Law, Magna Charta, Statute Law, Justice, Humanity,
and Policy; and that the practice is more cruel and oppressive than is
used in the most arbitrary kingdoms in Europe, with an account of
various applications, &c.; by James Stephen, 1770.' The other pamphlet,
to which is prefixed a letter by W. Jackson, reprints some of Stephen's
letters from the New Jail, wants a title and is imperfect. See also the
_Annual Register_ for 1770 (Chronicle), November 19, for 1771
(Chronicle), January 31.]
[Footnote 7: That mentioned in the previous note. See also the
'Chronicle' of the _Annual Register_ for November 19, 1770, and January
31 and November 2, 1771.]
[Footnote 8: The children were William and James (already mentioned);
Sibella, born about 1765, afterwards married to William Maxwell Morison,
editor of _Decisions of Court of Session_ (1801-1818); Hannah, born
about 1767, afterwards married to William Farish (1759-1837), Jacksonian
professor at Cambridge; Elizabeth, born about 1769, afterwards married
to her cousin, William Milner, of Comberton, near Cambridge; and John,
born about 1771.]
[Footnote 9: The parish register records his burial on September 9,
1779.]
[Footnote 10: See the trial reported by Gurney in 21 _State Trials_, pp.
486-651. It lasted from 8 A.M. on Monday till 5.15 A.M. on Tuesday
morning.]
[Footnote 11: See _Slavery Delineated_ (preface to vol. i.), where other
revolting details are given.]
[Footnote 12: _Slavery Delineated_, i. 54, 55.]
[Footnote 13: Sir George Stephen's _Life of J. Stephen_, p. 29.]
[Footnote 14: Reprinted in 13 _Hansard's Debates_, App. xxv.-cxxii.]
[Footnote 15: _Hansard's Debates_, June 20, 1814; and _Abbot's Diary_,
ii. 503.]
[Footnote 16: It is now occupied by my friend Dr. Robert Liveing.]
[Footnote 17: For the life of my grandfather, I have relied upon his
autobiography and upon the following among other works: _Life of the
late James Stephen_ by his son, Sir George Stephen, Victoria, 1875 (this
little book, written when the author's memory was failing, is full of
singular mistakes, a fact which I mention that I may not be supposed to
have overlooked the statements in question but which it is needless to
prove in detail); _Jottings from Memory_ (two interesting little
pamphlets privately printed by Sir Alfred Stephen in 1889 and 1891); and
Wilberforce's _Life and Letters_ (containing letters and incidental
references). In Colquhoun's _Wilberforce, his Friends and his Times_
(1886), pp. 180-198, is an account of Stephen's relations to
Wilberforce, chiefly founded upon this. See also Roberts' _Hannah More_
(several letters); Brougham's _Speeches_ (1838), i. pp. 402-414 (an
interesting account partly quoted in Sir J. Stephen's _Clapham Sect_, in
_Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography_); Henry Adam's _History of the
United States_ (1891), iii. pp. 50-52 and elsewhere; Walpole's _Life of
Perceval_.]
[Footnote 18: He served also in 1842 upon a Commission of Inquiry into
the forgery of Exchequer bills.]
[Footnote 19: Serjeant Stephen's wife and a daughter died before him. He
left two surviving children: Sarah, a lady of remarkable ability, author
of a popular religious story called _Anna; or, the Daughter at Home_,
and a chief founder of the 'Metropolitan Association for Befriending
Young Servants,' who died unmarried, aged 79, on January 5, 1895; and
James, who edited some of his father's books, was judge of the County
Court at Lincoln, and died in November 1894. A short notice of the
serjeant is in the _Law Times_ of December 24, 1894.]
[Footnote 20: _Life of James Stephen_, p. 36.]
[Footnote 21: By his wife, a Miss Ravenscroft, he had seven children,
who all emigrated with him. The eldest, James Wilberforce Stephen, was
fourth wrangler in 1844 and Fellow of St. John's College, and afterwards
a judge in the colony of Victoria.]
[Footnote 22: His _Constitution of a Christian Church_ (1846) was
republished, in 1874, as _Churches the Many and the One_, with
additional notes by his son, the Rev. Samuel Garratt, now rector of St.
Margaret's, Ipswich, and canon of Norwich.]
[Footnote 23: _Lectures_, vol. i. preface.]
[Footnote 24: Preface to _Slavery Delineated_, i. pp. lix.-lxx. My
grandfather takes some trouble to show--and, as I think, shows
conclusively--that the appointment mentioned in the text was not a job,
and that it involved a considerable saving of public money. But this
matter will interest no one at present.]
[Footnote 25: I have to thank Mr. Bryce, now President of the Board of
Trade, for kindly procuring me the dates of my father's official
appointments.]
[Footnote 26: Communicated by my friend Mr. J. Dykes Campbell.]
[Footnote 27: My cousin, Dr. John Venn, informs me that the first
traceable Venn was a farmer in Broad Hembury, Devonshire, whose son,
William Venn, was vicar of Otterton from 1599 to 1621.]
[Footnote 28: _Henry Venn's Life_, published by his grandson, Henry
Venn, in 1834, has gone through several editions.]
[Footnote 29: A short life of John Venn is prefixed to his _Sermons_. He
married Catherine King on October 22, 1789, and left seven children:--
1. Catherine Eling, born Dec. 2, 1791, died unmarried,
April 22, 1827.
2. Jane Catherine, Lady Stephen, b. May 16, 1793,
d. February 27, 1875.
3. Emelia, b. April 20, 1795, d. Feb. 1881.
4. Henry, b. February 10, 1796, d. January 13, 1873.
5. Caroline, Mrs. Ellis Batten, b. 1799, d. Jan. 26, 1870.
6. Maria, who died in infancy.
7. John, b. April 17, 1801, d. May 12, 1890.]
[Footnote 30: _Missionary Secretariat of Henry Venn, B.D._, by the Rev.
William Knight, with introductory chapter by his sons the Rev. John Venn
and the Rev. Henry Venn, 1880.]
[Footnote 31: Sir H. Taylor's _Autobiography_ (1885), ii. 303. Taylor
was b. October 18, 1800, and d. October 31, 1886.]
[Footnote 32: _Autobiography_, i. 136.]
[Footnote 33: P. 233.]
[Footnote 34: Autobiographical fragment.]
[Footnote 35: _Taylor_, ii. 301.]
[Footnote 36: Stephen's _History of the Criminal Law_, iii. 256. My
brother was generally accurate in such statements, though I cannot quite
resist the impression that he may at this time have been under some
confusion as to the time employed upon this occasion and the time
devoted to the Bill of 1833 to be mentioned directly.]
[Footnote 37: _Taylor_, i. 121-127. Sir Henry Taylor says that Stanley
prepared a measure with Sir James Graham which was introduced into the
House of Commons and 'forthwith was blown into the air.' I can find no
trace of this in Hansard or elsewhere, and as Stanley only became
Colonial Secretary (March 28) six weeks before introducing the measure
which passed, and no parliamentary discussion intervened, I fancy that
there must be some error. The facts as stated above seem to be at any
rate sufficiently proved by Taylor's contemporary letter. According to
Taylor, Stanley's great speech (May 14, 1833) upon introducing the
Government measure was founded upon my father's judicious cramming, and
the success of the measure was due to Stephen's putting his own design
into enactments and Mr. Stanley's into a preamble. Taylor at the time
thought that my father had been ill treated, but I have not the
knowledge necessary to form any opinion. My brother's _Life_ is the
authority for the circumstances under which the measure was prepared,
and rests on sufficient evidence.]
[Footnote 38: _Taylor_, i. 233.]
[Footnote 39: _Ibid._ ii. 303.]
[Footnote 40: I think it right to notice that in the first edition of T.
Mozley's _Reminiscences_ (1882), i. 111, there appeared an anecdote of
my father in his official capacity which was preposterous on the face of
it. It was completely demolished in a letter written by my brother which
appeared in the _Times_ of July 6, 1882, and withdrawn in a later
edition.]
[Footnote 41: _Reminiscences_, ii. 224.]
[Footnote 42: _Taylor_, i. 235.]
[Footnote 43: _Taylor_, ii. 304.]
[Footnote 44: _Reminiscences_, ii. 223.]
[Footnote 45: _Taylor_, ii. 302.]
[Footnote 46: Some of my father's letters are given in Macvey Napier's
correspondence. I think that they are the best in a collection which
includes letters from many of the most eminent men of the time. A few
others are in the collection of Sir H. Taylor's correspondence, edited
by Professor Dowden in 1888.]
[Footnote 47: The title, of course, was given by Sydney Smith.]
[Footnote 48: My father's children were:--
1. Herbert Venn, b. September 30, 1822, d. October 22, 1846.
2. Frances Wilberforce, b. September 8, 1824, d. July 22, 1825.
3. James Fitzjames, b. March 3, 1829, d. March 11, 1894.
4. Leslie, born November 28, 1832.
5. Caroline Emelia, born December 8, 1834.]
CHAPTER II
_EARLY LIFE_
I. CHILDHOOD
In the beginning of 1829 my father settled in a house at Kensington
Gore--now 42 Hyde Park Gate. There his second son, James Fitzjames, was
born on March 3, 1829. James was the name upon which my grandfather
insisted because it was his own. My father, because the name was his
own, objected as long as he could, but at last compounded, and averted
the evil omen, by adding Fitzjames. Two other children, Leslie and
Caroline Emelia, were born in 1832 and 1834 at the same house. The
Kensington of those days was still distinctly separate from London. A
high wall divided Kensington Gardens from the Hounslow Road; there were
still deer in the Gardens; cavalry barracks close to Queen's Gate, and a
turnpike at the top of the Gloucester Road. The land upon which South
Kensington has since arisen was a region of market gardens, where in our
childhood we strolled with our nurse along genuine country lanes.
It would be in my power, if it were desirable, to give an unusually
minute account of my brother's early childhood. My mother kept a diary,
and, I believe, never missed a day for over sixty years. She was also in
the habit of compiling from this certain family 'annals' in which she
inserted everything that struck her as illustrative of the character of
her children. About 1884 my brother himself began a fragment of
autobiography, which he continued at intervals during the next two or
three years. For various reasons I cannot transfer it as a whole to
these pages, but it supplies me with some very important
indications.[49] A comparison with my mother's contemporary account of
the incidents common to both proves my brother's narrative to be
remarkably accurate. Indeed, though he disclaimed the possession of
unusual powers of memory in general, he had a singularly retentive
memory for facts and dates, and amused himself occasionally by
exercising his faculty. He had, for example, a certain walking-stick
upon which he made a notch after a day's march; it served instead of a
diary, and years afterwards he would explain what was the particular
expedition indicated by any one of the very numerous notches.
Although I do not wish to record trifles important only in the eyes of a
mother, or interesting only from private associations, I will give
enough from these sources to illustrate his early development; or rather
to show how much of the later man was already to be found in the infant.
It requires perhaps some faith in maternal insight to believe that
before he was three months old he showed an uncommon power of 'amusing
himself with his own thoughts,' and had 'a calm, composed dignity in his
countenance which was quite amusing in so young a creature.' It will be
more easily believed that he was healthy and strong, and by the age of
six months 'most determined to have his own way.' On August 15, 1830,
Wilberforce was looking at the baby, when he woke up, burst into a
laugh, and exclaimed 'Funny!' a declaration which Wilberforce no doubt
took in good part, though it seems to have been interpreted as a
reflection upon the philanthropist's peculiar figure. My brother himself
gives a detailed description of his grandfather from an interview which
occurred when the old gentleman was seventy-six and the infant very
little more than three years old. He remembers even the room and the
precise position of the persons present. He remembers too (and his
mother's diary confirms the fact) how in the same year he announced that
the Reform Bill had 'passed.' It was 'a very fine thing,' he said, being
in fact a bill stuck upon a newsboy's hat, inscribed, as his nurse
informed him, with the words 'Reform Bill.'
Although his memory implies early powers of observation, he did not show
the precocity of many clever children. He was still learning to read
about his fifth birthday, and making, as his mother complains, rather
slow progress. But if not specially quick at his lessons, he gave very
early and, as it seems to me, very noticeable proofs of thoughtfulness
and independence of character. He was, as he remained through life,
remarkable for that kind of sturdy strength which goes with a certain
awkwardness and even sluggishness. To use a modern phrase, he had a
great store of 'potential energy,' which was not easily convertible to
purposes of immediate application. His mind swarmed with ideas, which
would not run spontaneously into the regulation moulds. His mother's
influence is perceptible in an early taste for poetry. In his third year
he learnt by heart 'Sir John Moore's Burial,' 'Nelson and the North,'
Wordsworth's 'Address to the Winds,' and Lord F. L. Gower's translation
of Schiller ('When Jove had encircled this planet with light') from
hearing his brother's repetition. He especially delighted in this bit of
Schiller and in 'Chevy Chase,' though he resisted Watts' hymns. In the
next two or three years he learns a good deal of poetry, and on
September 5, 1834, repeats fifty lines of Henry the Fifth's speech
before Agincourt without a fault. 'Pilgrim's Progress' and 'Robinson
Crusoe' are read in due course as his reading improves, and he soon
delights in getting into a room by himself and surrounding himself with
books. His religious instruction of course began at the earliest
possible period, and he soon learnt by heart many simple passages of the
Bible. He made his first appearance at family prayers in November 1830,
when the ceremony struck him as 'funny,' but he soon became interested
and was taught to pray for himself. In 1832 his elder brother has
nicknamed him the 'little preacher,' from his love of virtuous
admonitions. In 1834 he confides to his mother that he has invented a
prayer for himself which is 'not, you know, a childish sort of
invention'; and in 1835 he explains that he has followed the advice
given in a sermon (he very carefully points out that it was only
_advice_, not an order) to pray regularly. Avowals of this kind,
however, have to be elicited from him by delicate maternal questioning.
He is markedly averse to any display of feeling. 'You should keep your
love locked up as I do' is a characteristic remark at the age of four to
his eldest brother. The effect of the religious training is apparently
perceptible in a great tendency to self-analysis. His thoughts sometimes
turn to other problems;--in October, 1835, for example, he asks the
question which has occurred to so many thoughtful children,'How do we
know that the world is not a dream?'--but he is chiefly interested in
his own motives. He complains in January 1834 that he has naughty
thoughts. His father tells him to send them away without even thinking
about them. He takes the advice, but afterwards explains that he is so
proud of sending them away that he 'wants to get them that he may send
them away.' He objects to a reward for being good, because it will make
him do right from a wrong motive. He shrinks from compliments. In
October 1835 he leaves a room where some carpenters were at work because
they had said something which he was sorry to have heard. They had said,
as it appeared upon anxious inquiry, that he would make a good
carpenter, and he felt that he was being cajoled. He remarks that even
pleasures become painful when they are ordered, and explains why his
sixth birthday was disappointing; he had expected too much.
His thoughtfulness took shapes which made him at times anything but easy
to manage. He could be intensely obstinate. The first conflict with
authority took place on June 28, 1831, when he resolutely declared that
he would not say the 'Busy Bee.' This event became famous in the
nursery, for in September 1834 he has to express contrition for having
in play used the words 'By the busy bee' as an infantile equivalent to
an oath. One difficulty was that he declined to repeat what was put into
his mouth, or to take first principles in ethics for granted. When his
mother reads a text to him (May 1832), he retorts, 'Then I will not be
like a little child; I do not want to go to heaven; I would rather stay
on earth.' He declines (in 1834) to join in a hymn which expresses a
desire to die and be with God. Even good people, he says, may prefer to
stay in this world. 'I don't want to be as good and wise as Tom
Macaulay' is a phrase of 1832, showing that even appeals to concrete
ideals of the most undeniable excellence fail to overpower him. He
gradually developed a theory which became characteristic, and which he
obstinately upheld when driven into a logical corner. A stubborn
conflict arose in 1833, when his mother was forced to put him in
solitary confinement during the family teatime. She overhears a long
soliloquy in which he admits his error, contrasts his position with that
of the happy who are perhaps even now having toast and sugar, and
compares his position to the 'last night of Pharaoh.' 'What a barbarian
I am to myself!' he exclaims, and resolves that this shall be his last
outbreak. On being set at liberty, he says that he was naughty on
purpose, and not only submits but requests to be punished. For a short
time he applies spontaneously for punishments, though he does not always
submit when the request is granted. But this is a concession under
difficulties. His general position is that by punishing him his mother
only 'procures him to be much more naughty,' and he declines as
resolutely as Jeremy Bentham to admit that naughtiness in itself
involves unhappiness, or that the happiness of naughtiness should not be
taken into account. He frequently urges that it is pleasanter while it
lasts to give way to temper, and that the discomfort only comes
afterwards. It follows logically, as he argues in 1835, that if a man
could be naughty all his life he would be quite happy. Some time later
(1838) he is still arguing the point, having now reached the conclusion
to which the Emperor Constantine gave a practical application. The
desirable thing would be to be naughty all your life, and to repent just
at the end.
These declarations are of course only interpolations in the midst of
many more edifying though less original remarks. He was exceedingly
conscientious, strongly attached to his parents, and very kind to his
younger brother and sister. I note that when he was four years old he
already thought it, as he did ever afterwards, one of the greatest of
treats to have a solitary talk with his father. He was, however, rather
unsociable and earned the nickname of 'Gruffian' for his occasionally
surly manner. This, with a stubborn disposition and occasional fits of
the sulks, must have made it difficult to manage a child who persisted
in justifying 'naughtiness' upon general principles. He was rather
inclined to be indolent, and his mother regrets that he is not so
persevering as Frederick (Gibbs). His great temptation, he says himself,
in his childhood was to be 'effeminate and lazy,' and 'to justify these
vices by intellectual and religious excuses.' A great deal of this, he
adds, has been 'knocked out of him'; he cannot call himself a sluggard
or a hypocrite, nor has he acted like a coward. 'Indeed,' he says, 'from
my very infancy I had an instinctive dislike of the maudlin way of
looking at things,' and he remembers how in his fifth year he had
declared that guns were not 'dreadful things.' They were good if put to
the proper uses. I do not think that there was ever much real
'effeminacy' to be knocked out of him. It is too harsh a word for the
slowness with which a massive and not very flexible character rouses
itself to action. His health was good, except for a trifling ailment
which made him for some time pass for a delicate child. But the delicacy
soon passed off and for the next fifty years he enjoyed almost unbroken
health.
In 1836 he explains some bluntness of behaviour by an argument learnt
from 'Sandford and Merton' that politeness is objectionable. In August
occurs a fit of obstinacy. He does not want to be forgiven but to be
'happy and comfortable.' 'I do not feel sorry, for I always make the
best of my condition in every possible way, and being sorry would make
me uncomfortable. That is not to make the best of my condition.' His
mother foresees a contest and remarks 'a daring and hardened spirit
which is not natural to him.' Soon after, I should perhaps say in
consequence of, these outbreaks he was sent to school. My mother's first
cousin, Henry Venn Elliott, was incumbent of St. Mary's Chapel at
Brighton and a leading evangelical preacher. At Brighton, too, lived his
sister, Miss Charlotte Elliott, author of some very popular hymns and
of some lively verses of a secular kind. Fitzjames would be under their
wing at Brighton, where Elliott recommended a school kept by the Rev. B.
Guest, at 7 Sussex Square. My mother took him down by the Brighton
coach, and he entered the school on November 10, 1836.[50] The school,
says Fitzjames, was in many ways very good; the boys were well taught
and well fed. But it was too decorous; there was no fighting and no
bullying and rather an excess of evangelical theology. The boys used to
be questioned at prayers. 'Gurney, what's the difference between
justification and sanctification?' 'Stephen, prove the Omnipotence of
God.' Many of the hymns sung by the boys remained permanently in my
brother's memory, and he says that he could give the names of all the
masters and most of the boys and a history of all incidents in
chronological order. Guest's eloquence about justification by faith
seems to have stimulated his pupil's childish speculations. He read a
tract in which four young men discuss the means of attaining holiness.
One says, 'Meditate on the goodness of God'; a second, 'on the happiness
of heaven'; a third, 'on the tortures of hell'; and a fourth, 'on the
love of Christ.' The last plan was approved in the tract; but Fitzjames
thought meditation on hell more to the purpose, and set about it
deliberately. He imagined the world transformed into a globe of iron,
white hot, with a place in the middle made to fit him so closely that he
could not even wink. The globe was split like an orange; he was thrust
by an angel into his place, immortal, unconsumable, and capable of
infinite suffering; and then the two halves were closed, and he left in
hideous isolation to suffer eternal torments. I guess from my own
experience that other children have had similar fancies. He adds,
however, a characteristic remark. 'It seemed to me then, as it seems
now, that no stronger motive, no motive anything like so strong, can be
applied to actuate any human creature toward any line of conduct. To
compare the love of God or anything else is to my mind simply childish.'
He refers to Mill's famous passage about going to hell rather than
worship a bad God, and asks what Mill would say after an experience of a
quarter of an hour. Fitzjames, however, did not dwell upon such fancies.
They were merely the childish mode of speculation by concrete imagery.
He became more sociable, played cricket, improved in health, and came
home with the highest of characters as being the best and most promising
boy in the school. He rose steadily, and seems to have been thoroughly
happy for the next five years and a half.
In 1840 my mother observed certain peculiarities in me which she took at
first to be indications of precocious genius. After a time, however, she
consulted an eminent physician, who informed her that they were really
symptoms of a disordered circulation. He added that I was in a fair way
to become feeble in mind and deformed in body, and strongly advised that
I should be sent to school, where my brain would be in less danger of
injudicious stimulation. He declared that even my life was at stake. My
father, much alarmed, took one of his prompt decisions. He feared to
trust so delicate a child away from home, and therefore resolved to take
a house in Brighton for a year or two, from which I might attend my
brother's school. The Kensington house was let, and my mother and sister
settled in Sussex Square, a few doors from Mr. Guest. My father, unable
to leave his work, took a lodging in town and came to Brighton for
Sundays, or occasionally twice a week. In those days the journey was
still by coach. When the railway began running in the course of 1841, I
find my father complaining that it could not be trusted, and had yet
made all other modes of travelling impossible. 'How many men turned of
fifty,' asks my brother, 'would have put themselves to such
inconvenience, discomfort, and separation from their wives for the sake
of screening a delicate lad from some of the troubles of a carefully
managed boarding school?' My brother was not aware of the apparent
gravity of the case when he wrote this. Such a measure would have pushed
parental tenderness to weakness had there been only a question of
comfort; but my father was seriously alarmed, and I can only think of
his conduct with the deepest gratitude.
To Fitzjames the plan brought the advantage that he became his father's
companion in Sunday strolls over the Downs. His father now found, as my
mother's diary remarks, that he could already talk to him as to a man,
and Fitzjames became dimly aware that there were difficulties about Mr.
Guest's theology. He went with my father, too, to hear Mr. Sortaine, a
popular preacher whose favourite topic was the denunciation of popery.
My father explained to the boy that some able men really defended the
doctrine of transubstantiation, and my brother, as he remarks, could not
then suspect that under certain conditions very able men like nonsense,
and are even not averse to 'impudent lying,' in defence of their own
authority. Incidentally, too, my father said that there were such people
as atheists, but that such views should be treated as we should treat
one who insulted the character of our dearest friend. This remark,
attributed to a man who was incapable of insulting anyone, and was a
friend of such freethinkers as Austin and J. S. Mill, must be regarded
as representing the impression made upon an inquisitive child by an
answer adapted to his capacity. The impression was, however, very
strong, and my brother notes that he heard it on a wettish evening on
the cliff near the south end of the old Steine.
Fitzjames had discussed the merits of Mr. Guest's school with great
intelligence and had expressed a wish to be sent to Rugby. He had heard
bad accounts of the state of Eton, and some rumours of Arnold's
influence had reached him. Arnold, someone had told him, could read a
boy's character at a glance. At Easter 1841, my father visited the
Diceys at Claybrook, and thence took his boy to see the great
schoolmaster at Rugby. Fitzjames draws a little diagram to show how
distinctly he remembers the scene. He looked at the dark, grave man and
wondered, 'Is he now reading my character at a glance?' It does not
appear that he was actually entered at Rugby, however, and my father had
presently devised another scheme. The inconveniences of the Brighton
plan had made themselves felt, and it now occurred to my father that he
might take a house in Windsor and send both Fitzjames and me to Eton. We
should thus, he hoped, get the advantages of a public school without
being exposed to some of its hardships and temptations. He would himself
be able to live with his family, although, as things then were, he had
to drive daily to and from the Slough station, besides having the double
journey from Paddington to Downing Street. We accordingly moved to
Windsor in Easter 1842. Fitzjames's last months at school had not been
quite so triumphant as the first, partly, it seems, from a slight
illness, and chiefly for the characteristic reason, according to his
master, that he would occupy himself with 'things too high for him.' He
read solid works (I find mention of Carlyle's 'French Revolution') out
of school hours and walked with an usher to whom he took a fancy,
discoursing upon absorbing topics when he should have been playing
cricket. Fitzjames left Brighton on the day, as he notes, upon which one
Mister was hanged for attempting murder--being almost the last man in
England hanged for anything short of actual murder. He entered Eton on
April 15, 1842, and was placed in the 'Remove,' the highest class
attainable at his age.
II. ETON
The Eton period[51] had marked effects. Fitzjames owed, as he said, a
debt of gratitude to the school, but it was for favours which would have
won gratitude from few recipients. The boys at a public school form, I
fancy, the most rigidly conservative body in existence. They hate every
deviation from the accepted type with the hatred of an ancient orthodox
divine for a heretic. The Eton boys of that day regarded an 'up-town
boy' with settled contempt. His motives or the motives of his parents
for adopting so abnormal a scheme were suspect. He might be the son of a
royal footman or a prosperous tradesman in Windsor, audaciously aspiring
to join the ranks of his superiors, and if so, clearly should be made to
know his place. In any case he was exceptional, and therefore a Pariah,
to associate with whom might be dangerous to one's caste. Mr. Coleridge
tells me that even the school authorities were not free from certain
suspicions. They wisely imagined, it appears, that my father had come
among them as a spy, instigated, no doubt, by some diabolical design of
'reforming' the school and desecrating the shrine of Henry's holy shade.
The poor man, already overpowered by struggling with refractory
colonists from Heligoland to New Zealand, was of malice prepense
stirring up this additional swarm of hornets. I can hardly suppose,
however, that this ingenious theory had much influence. Mr. Coleridge
also says that the masters connived at the systematic bullying of the
town boys. I can believe that they did not systematically repress it. I
must add, however, in justice to my school-fellows, that my personal
recollections do not reveal any particular tyranny. Such bullying as I
had to endure was very occasional, and has left no impression on my
memory. Yet I was far less capable than Fitzjames of defending myself,
and can hardly have forgotten any serious tormenting. The truth is that
the difference between me and my brother was the difference between the
willow and the oak, and that I evaded such assaults as he met with open
defiance.
My brother, as has been indicated, was far more developed in character,
if not in scholarship, than is at all common at his age. His talks with
my father and his own reading had familiarised him with thoughts lying
altogether beyond the horizon of the average boyish mind. He was
thoughtful beyond his years, although not conspicuously forward in the
school studies. He was already inclined to consider games as childish.
He looked down upon his companions and the school life generally as
silly and frivolous. The boys resented his contempt of their ways; and
his want of sociability and rather heavy exterior at the time made him a
natural butt for schoolboy wit. He was, he says, bullied and tormented
till, towards the end of his time, he plucked up spirit to resist. Of
the bullying there can be no doubt; nor (sooner or later) of the
resistance. Mr. Coleridge observes that he was anything but a passive
victim, and turned fiercely upon the ringleaders of his enemies.
'Often,' he adds, 'have I applauded his backhanders as the foremost in
the fray. He was only vanquished by numbers. His bill for hats at
Sanders' must have amounted to a stiff figure, for my visions of
Fitzjames are of a discrowned warrior, returning to Windsor bareheaded,
his hair moist with the steam of recent conflict.' My own childish
recollections of his school life refer mainly to pugilism. In October
1842, as I learn from my mother's diary, he found a big boy bullying me,
and gave the boy such a thrashing as was certain to prevent a repetition
of the crime. I more vividly recollect another occasion, when a strong
lad was approaching me with hostile intent. I can still perceive my
brother in the background; when an application of the toe of his boot
between the tails of my tyrant's coat disperses him instantaneously into
total oblivion. Other scenes dimly rise up, as of a tumult in the
school-yard, where Fitzjames was encountering one of the strongest boys
in the school amidst a delighted crowd, when the appearance of the
masters stopped the proceedings. Fitzjames says that in his sixteenth
year (i.e. 1844-5) he grew nearly five inches, and instead of outgrowing
his strength became a 'big, powerful young man, six feet high,'--and
certainly a very formidable opponent.
Other boys have had similar experiences without receiving the same
impression. 'I was on the whole,' he says, 'very unhappy at Eton, and I
deserved it; for I was shy, timid, and I must own cowardly. I was like a
sensible grown-up woman among a crowd of rough boys.' After speaking of
his early submission to tyranny, he adds: 'I still think with shame and
self-contempt of my boyish weakness, which, however, did not continue
in later years. The process taught me for life the lesson that to be
weak is to be wretched, that the state of nature is a state of war, and
_Væ Victis_ the great law of Nature. Many years afterwards I met R. Lowe
(Lord Sherbrooke) at dinner. He was speaking of Winchester, and said
with much animation that he had learnt one great lesson there, namely,
that a man can count on nothing in this world except what lies between
his hat and his boots. I learnt the same lesson at Eton, but alas! by
conjugating not _pulso_ but _vapulo_.' As I have intimated, I think that
his conscience must have rather exaggerated his sins of submission;
though I also cannot doubt that there was some ground for his
self-humiliation. In any case, he atoned for it fully. I must add that
he learnt another lesson, which, after his fashion, he refrains from
avowing. The 'kicks, cuffs, and hat smashing had no other result,' says
Mr. Coleridge, 'than to steel his mind for ever against oppression,
tyranny, and unfairness of every kind.' How often that lesson is
effectually taught by simple bullying I will not inquire. Undoubtedly
Fitzjames learnt it, though he expressed himself more frequently in
terms of indignation against the oppressor than of sympathy for the
oppressed; but the sentiment was equally strong, and I have no doubt
that it was stimulated by these acts of tyranny.
The teaching at Eton was 'wretched'; the hours irregular and very
unpunctual; the classes were excessively large, and the tutorial
instruction supposed to be given out of school frequently neglected. 'I
do not believe,' says my brother, 'that I was ever once called upon to
construe at my tutor's after I got into the fifth form.' An absurd
importance, too, was already attached to the athletic amusements.
Balston, our tutor, was a good scholar after the fashion of the day and
famous for Latin verse; but he was essentially a commonplace don.
'Stephen major,' he once said to my brother, 'if you do not take more
pains, how can you ever expect to write good longs and shorts? If you do
not write good longs and shorts, how can you ever be a man of taste? If
you are not a man of taste, how can you ever hope to be of use in the
world?'--a _sorites_, says my brother, which must, he thinks, be
somewhere defective.
The school, however, says Fitzjames, had two good points. The boys, in
the first place, were gentlemen by birth and breeding, and did not
forget their home training. The simple explanation of the defects of the
school was, as he remarks, that parents in this class did not care about
learning; they wished their children to be gentlemen, and to be 'bold
and active, and to make friends and to enjoy themselves, and most of
them had their wish.'
The second good point in the school is more remarkable. 'There was,'
says Fitzjames, 'a complete absence of moral and religious enthusiasm.
The tone of Rugby was absolutely absent.' Chapel was simply a kind of
drill. He vividly remembers a sermon delivered by one of the Fellows, a
pompous old gentleman, who solemnly gave out the bidding prayer, and
then began in these words, 'which ring in my ears after the lapse of
more than forty years.' 'The subject of my discourse this morning, my
brethren, will be the duties of the married state.' When Balston was
examined before a Public Schools Commission, he gave what Fitzjames
considers 'a perfectly admirable answer to one question.' He had said
that the Provost and Fellows did all the preaching, and was asked
whether he did not regret that he could not, as headmaster, use this
powerful mode of influencing the boys? 'No,' he said; 'I was always of
opinion that nothing was so important for boys as the preservation of
Christian simplicity.' 'This put into beautiful language,' says my
brother, 'the truth that at Eton there was absolutely no nonsense.' The
masters knew that they had 'nothing particular to teach in the way of
morals or religion, and they did not try to do so.'
The merits thus ascribed to Eton were chiefly due, it seems, to the
neglect of discipline and of teaching. My brother infers that good
teaching at school is of less importance than is generally supposed. I
shall not enter upon that question; but it is necessary to point out
that whatever the merits of an entire absence of moral and religious
instruction, my brother can hardly be taken as an instance. At this time
the intimacy with his father, already close, was rapidly developing. On
Sunday afternoons, in particular, my father used to walk to the little
chapel near Cumberland Lodge, in Windsor Park, and on the way would
delight in the conversations which so profoundly interested his son. The
boy's mind was ripening, and he was beginning to take an interest in
some of the questions of the day. It was the time of the Oxford
movement, and discussions upon that topic were frequent at home.
Frederick Gibbs held for a time a private tutorship at Eton while
reading for a fellowship at Trinity, and brought news of what was
exciting young men at the Universities. A quaint discussion recalled by
my brother indicates one topic which even reached the schoolboy mind. He
was arguing as to confirmation with Herbert Coleridge (1830-1861) whose
promising career as a philologist was cut short by an early death. 'If
you are right,' said Fitzjames, 'a bishop could not confirm with his
gloves on.' 'No more he could,' retorted Coleridge, boldly accepting the
position. Political questions turned up occasionally. O'Connell was
being denounced as 'the most impudent of created liars,' and a belief in
Free Trade was the mark of a dangerous radical. To the Eton time my
brother also refers a passionate contempt for the 'sentimental and
comic' writers then popular. He was disgusted not only by their
sentimentalism but by their vulgarity and their ridicule of all that he
respected.
One influence, at this time, mixed oddly with that exerted by my father.
My eldest brother, Herbert, had suffered from ill health, due, I
believe, to a severe illness in his infancy, which had made it
impossible to give him a regular education. He had grown up to be a
tall, large-limbed man, six feet two-and-a-half inches in height, but
loosely built, and with a deformity of one foot which made him rather
awkward. The delicacy of his constitution had caused much anxiety and
trouble, and he diverged from our family traditions by insisting upon
entering the army. There, as I divine, he was the object of a good deal
of practical joking, and found himself rather out of his element. He
used to tell a story which may have received a little embroidery in
tradition. He was at a ball at Gibraltar, which was attended by a naval
officer. When the ladies had retired this gentleman proposed pistol
shooting. After a candelabrum had been smashed, the sailor insisted upon
taking a shot at a man who was lying on a sofa, and lodged a bullet in
the wall just above his head. Herbert left the army about 1844 and
entered at Gray's Inn. He would probably have taken to literature, and
he wrote a few articles not without promise, but his life was a short
one. He was much at Windsor, and the anxiety which he had caused, as
well as a great sweetness and openness of temper, made him, I guess, the
most tenderly loved of his parents' children. He had, however, wandered
pretty widely outside the limits of the Clapham Sect. He became very
intimate with Fitzjames, and they had long and frank discussions. This
daring youth doubted the story of Noah's flood, and one phrase which
stuck in his brother's mind is significant. 'You,' he said, 'are a good
boy, and I suppose you will go to heaven. If you can enjoy yourself
there when you think of me and my like grilling in hell fire, upon my
soul I don't envy you.' One other little glance from a point of view
other than that of Clapham impressed the lad. He found among his
father's books a copy of 'State Trials,' and there read the trial of
Williams for publishing Paine's 'Age of Reason.' The extracts from Paine
impressed him; though, for a time, he had an impression from his father
that Coleridge and other wise men had made a satisfactory apology for
the Bible; and 'in his inexperience' he thought that Paine's coarseness
implied a weak case. 'There is a great deal of truth,' he says, 'in a
remark made by Paine. I have gone through the Bible as a man might go
through a wood, cutting down the trees. The priests can stick them in
again, but they will not make them grow.' For the present such thoughts
remained without result. Fitzjames was affected, he says, by the
combined influence of his father and brother. He thought that something
was to be said on both sides of the argument. Meanwhile the anxiety
caused to his father by Herbert's unfortunately broken, though in no
sense discreditable, career impressed him with a strong sense of the
evils of all irregularities of conduct. He often remembered Herbert in
connection with one of his odd anniversaries. 'This day eighteen years
ago,' he says (September 16, 1857), 'my brother Herbert and I killed a
snake in Windsor Forest. Poor dear fellow! we should have been great
friends, and please God! we shall be yet.'
Meanwhile Fitzjames had done well, though not brilliantly, at school. He
was eighth in his division, of which he gives the first twelve names
from memory. The first boy was Chenery, afterwards editor of the
'Times,' and the twelfth was Herbert Coleridge. With the exception of
Coleridge, his cousin Arthur, and W. J. Beamont (1828-1868), who at his
death was a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had hardly any
intimates. Chitty, afterwards his colleague on the Bench, was then
famous as an athlete; but with athletics my brother had nothing to do.
His only amusement of that kind was the solitary sport of fishing. He
caught a few roach and dace, and vainly endeavoured to inveigle pike.
His failure was caused, perhaps, by scruples as to the use of live bait,
which led him to look up some elaborate recipes in Walton's 'Compleat
Angler.' Pike, though not very intelligent, have long seen through those
ancient secrets.
One of these friendships led to a characteristic little incident. In the
Christmas holidays of 1844 Fitzjames was invited to stay with the father
of his friend Beamont, who was a solicitor at Warrington. There could
not, as I had afterwards reason to know, have been a quieter or simpler
household. But they had certain gaieties. Indeed, if my memory does not
deceive me, Fitzjames there made his first and only appearance upon the
stage in the character of Tony Lumpkin. My father was alarmed by the
reports of these excesses, and, as he was going to the Diceys, at
Claybrook, wrote to my brother of his intentions. He hinted that
Fitzjames, if he were at liberty, might like a visit to his cousins.
Upon arriving at Rugby station he found Fitzjames upon the platform. The
lad had at once left Warrington, though a party had been specially
invited for his benefit, having interpreted the paternal hint in the
most decisive sense. My father, I must add, was shocked by the results
of his letter, and was not happy till he had put himself right with the
innocent Beamonts.
Under Balston's advice Fitzjames was beginning to read for the
Newcastle. Before much progress had been made in this, however, my
father discovered his son's unhappiness at school. Although the deep
designs of reform with which the masters seem to have credited him were
purely imaginary, my father had no high opinion of Eton, and devised
another scheme. Fitzjames went to the school for the last time about
September 23, 1845, and then tore off his white necktie and stamped upon
it. He went into the ante-chapel and scowled, he says, at the boys
inside, not with a benediction. It was the close of three years to which
he occasionally refers in his letters, and always much in the same
terms. They were, in the main, unhappy, and, as he emphatically
declared, the only unhappy years of his life, but they had taught him a
lesson.
III. KING'S COLLEGE
On October 1, 1845, he entered King's College, London. Lodgings were
taken for him at Highgate Hill, within a few doors of his uncle, Henry
Venn. He walked the four miles to the college, dined at the Colonial
Office at two, and returned by the omnibus. He was now his own master,
the only restriction imposed upon him being that he should every evening
attend family prayers at his uncle's house. The two years he spent at
King's College were, he says, 'most happy.' He felt himself changed from
a boy to a man. The King's College lads, who, indeed called themselves
'men,' were of a lower social rank than the Etonians, and, as Fitzjames
adds, unmistakably inferior in physique. Boys who had the Strand as the
only substitute for the playing-fields were hardly likely to show much
physical prowess. But they had qualities more important to him. They
were industrious, as became the sons of professional and business men.
Their moral tone was remarkably good; he never knew, he says, a more
thoroughly well-behaved set of lads, although he is careful to add that
he does not think that in this respect Eton was bad. His whole education
had been among youths 'singularly little disposed to vice or a riot in
any form.' But the great change for him was that he could now find
intellectual comradeship. There was a debating society, in which he
first learnt to hear his own voice, and indeed became a prominent
orator. He is reported to have won the surname 'Giant Grim.' His most
intimate friend was the present Dr. Kitchin, Dean of Durham. The lads
discussed politics and theology and literature, instead of putting down
to affectation any interest outside of the river and the playing-fields.
Fitzjames not only found himself in a more congenial atmosphere, but
could hold his own better among youths whose standard of scholarship was
less exalted than that of the crack Latin versemakers at Eton, although
the average level was perhaps higher. In 1846 he won a scholarship, and
at the summer examination was second in classics. In 1847 he was only
just defeated for a scholarship by an elder boy, and was first, both in
classics and English literature, in the examinations, besides winning a
prize essay.
Here, as elsewhere, he was much interested by the theological tone of
his little circle, which was oddly heterogeneous. There was, in the
first place, his uncle, Henry Venn, to whom he naturally looked up as
the exponent of the family orthodoxy. Long afterwards, upon Venn's
death, he wrote, 'Henry Venn was the most triumphant man I ever knew.'
'I never,' he adds, 'knew a sturdier man.' Such qualities naturally
commanded his respect, though he probably was not an unhesitating
disciple. At King's College, meanwhile, which prided itself upon its
Anglicanism, he came under a very different set of teachers. The
principal, Dr. Jelf, represented the high and dry variety of
Anglicanism. I can remember how, a little later, I used to listen with
wonder to his expositions of the Thirty-nine Articles. What a marvellous
piece of good fortune it was, I used dimly to consider, that the Church
of England had always hit off precisely the right solution in so many
and such tangled controversies! But King's College had a professor of a
very different order in F. D. Maurice. His personal charm was
remarkable, and if Fitzjames did not become exactly a disciple he was
fully sensible of Maurice's kindness of nature and loftiness of purpose.
He held, I imagine, in a vague kind of way, that here might perhaps be
the prophet who was to guide him across the deserts of infidelity into
the promised land where philosophy and religion will be finally
reconciled. Of this, however, I shall have more to say hereafter.
I must now briefly mention the changes which took place at this time in
our family. In 1846 my brother Herbert made a tour to Constantinople,
and on his return home was seized by a fever and died at Dresden on
October 22. My father and mother had started upon the first news of the
illness, but arrived too late to see their son alive. Fitzjames in the
interval came to Windsor, and, as my mother records, was like a father
to the younger children. The journey to Dresden, with its terrible
suspense and melancholy end, was a severe blow to my father. From that
time, as it seems to me, he was a changed man. He had already begun to
think of retiring from his post, and given notice that he must be
considered as only holding it during the convenience of his
superiors.[52] He gave up the house at Windsor, having, indeed, kept it
on chiefly because Herbert was fond of the place. We settled for a time
at Wimbledon. There my brother joined us in the early part of 1847. A
very severe illness in the autumn of 1847 finally induced my father to
resign his post. In recognition of his services he was made a privy
councillor and K.C.B. His retirement was at first provisional, and, on
recovering, he was anxious to be still employed in some capacity. The
Government of the day considered the pension to which he was entitled an
inadequate reward for his services. There was some talk of creating the
new office of Assessor to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,
to which he was to be appointed. This proved to be impracticable, but
his claim was partly recognised in his appointment to succeed William
Smyth (died June 26, 1849) as Regius Professor of Modern History at
Cambridge.[53] I may as well mention here the later events of his life,
as they will not come into any precise connection with my brother's
history. The intimacy between the two strengthened as my brother
developed into manhood, and they were, as will be seen, in continual
intercourse. But after leaving King's College my brother followed his
own lines, though for a time an inmate of our household.
The Kensington house having been let, we lived in various suburban
places, and, for a time, at Cambridge. My father's professorship
occupied most of his energies in later years. He delivered his first
course in the May term of 1850. Another very serious illness,
threatening brain fever, interrupted him for a time, and he went abroad
in the autumn of 1850. He recovered, however, beyond expectation, and
was able to complete his lectures in the winter, and deliver a second
course in the summer of 1851. These lectures were published in 1852 as
'Lectures on the History of France.' They show, I think, the old
ability, but show also some failure of the old vivacity. My father did
not possess the profound antiquarian knowledge which is rightly demanded
in a professor of the present day; and, indeed, I think it is not a
little remarkable that, in the midst of his absorbing work, he had
acquired so much historical reading as they display. But, if I am not
mistaken, the lectures have this peculiar merit--that they are obviously
written by a man who had had vast practical experience of actual
administrative work. They show, therefore, an unusual appreciation of
the constitutional side of French history; and he anticipated some of
the results set forth with, of course, far greater knowledge of the
subject, in Tocqueville's 'Ancien Régime.' Tocqueville himself wrote
very cordially to my father upon the subject; and the lectures have been
valued by very good judges. Nothing, however, could be more depressing
than the position of a professor at Cambridge at that time. The first
courses delivered by my father were attended by a considerable number of
persons capable of feeling literary curiosity--a class which was then
less abundant than it would now be at Cambridge. But he very soon found
that his real duty was to speak to young gentlemen who had been driven
into his lecture-room by well-meant regulations; who were only anxious
to secure certificates for the 'poll' degree, and whose one aim was to
secure them on the cheapest possible terms. To candidates for honours,
the history school was at best a luxury for which they could rarely
spare time, and my father had to choose between speaking over the heads
of his audience and giving milk and water to babes. The society of the
Cambridge dons in those days was not much to his taste, and he soon gave
up residence there.
About the beginning of 1853 he took a house in Westbourne Terrace, which
became his headquarters. In 1855 he accepted a professorship at
Haileybury, which was then doomed to extinction, only to hold it during
the last three years of the existence of the college. These lectures
sufficiently occupied his strength, and he performed them to the best of
his ability. The lectures upon French history were, however, the last
performance which represented anything like his full powers.
IV. CAMBRIDGE
In October 1847 my brother went into residence at Trinity College,
Cambridge. 'My Cambridge career,' he says, 'was not to me so memorable
or important a period of life as it appears to some people.' He seems to
have extended the qualification to all his early years. 'Few men,' he
says, 'have worked harder than I have for the last thirty-five years,
but I was a very lazy, unsystematic lad up to the age of twenty-two.' He
would sometimes speak of himself as 'one of a slowly ripening race,' and
set little value upon the intellectual acquirements attained during the
immature period. Yet I have sufficiently shown that in some respects he
was even exceptionally developed. From his childhood he had shared the
thoughts of his elders; he had ceased to be a boy when he had left Eton
at sixteen; and he came up to Cambridge far more of a grown man than
nine in ten of his contemporaries. So far, indeed, as his character was
concerned, he had scarcely ever been a child: at Cambridge, as at Eton,
he regarded many of the ambitions of his contemporaries as puerile.
Even the most brilliant undergraduates are sometimes tempted to set an
excessive value upon academical distinction. A senior wranglership
appears to them to be the culminating point of human glory, instead of
the first term in the real battle of life. Fitzjames, far from sharing
this delusion, regarded it, perhaps, with rather too much contempt. His
thoughts were already upon his future career, and he cared for
University distinctions only as they might provide him with a good start
in the subsequent competition. But this marked maturity of character did
not imply the possession of corresponding intellectual gifts, or, as I
should rather say, of such gifts as led to success in the Senate House.
Fitzjames had done respectably at Eton, and had been among the first
lads at King's College. He probably came up to Cambridge with confidence
that he would make a mark in examinations. But his mind, however
powerful, was far from flexible. He had not the intellectual docility
which often enables a clever youth to surpass rivals of much greater
originality--as originality not unfrequently tempts a man outside the
strait and narrow path which leads to the maximum of marks. 'I have
always found myself,' says Fitzjames, in reference to his academical
career, 'one of the most unteachable of human beings. I cannot, to this
day, take in anything at second hand. I have in all cases to learn
whatever I want to learn in a way of my own. It has been so with law,
with languages, with Indian administration, with the machinery I have
had to study in patent cases, with English composition--in a word, with
everything whatever.' For other reasons, however, he was at a
disadvantage. He not only had not yet developed, but he never at any
time possessed, the intellectual qualities most valued at Cambridge.
The Cambridge of those days had merits, now more likely to be overlooked
than overvalued. The course was fitted to encourage strenuous masculine
industry, love of fair play, and contempt for mere showy displays of
cleverness. But it must be granted that it was strangely narrow. The
University was not to be despised which could turn out for successive
senior wranglers from 1840 to 1843 such men as Leslie Ellis, Sir George
Stokes, Professor Cayley, and Adams, the discoverer of Neptune, while
the present Lord Kelvin was second wrangler and first Smith's prizeman
in 1845. During the same period the great Latin scholar, Munro (1842),
and H. S. Maine (1844), were among the lights of the Classical Tripos.
But, outside of the two Triposes, there was no career for a man of any
ability. To parody a famous phrase of Hume's, Cambridge virtually said
to its pupils, 'Is this a treatise upon geometry or algebra? No. Is it,
then, a treatise upon Greek or Latin grammar, or on the grammatical
construction of classical authors? No. Then commit it to the flames, for
it contains nothing worth your study.' Now, in both these arenas
Fitzjames was comparatively feeble. He read classical books, not only at
Cambridge but in later life, when he was pleased to find his scholarship
equal to the task of translating. But he read them for their contents,
not from any interest in the forms of language. He was without that
subtlety and accuracy of mind which makes the born scholar. He was
capable of blunders surprising in a man of his general ability; and
every blunder takes away marks. He was still less of a mathematician. 'I
disliked,' as he says himself, 'and foolishly despised the studies of
the place, and did not care about accurate classical scholarship, in
which I was utterly wrong. I was clumsy at calculation, though I think I
have, and always have had, a good head for mathematical principles; and
I utterly loathed examinations, which seem to me to make learning all
but impossible.'
A letter from his friend, the Rev. H. W. Watson, second wrangler in
1850, who was a year his senior, has given me a very interesting account
of impressions made at this time. The two had been together at King's
College. Fitzjames's appearance at Trinity was, writes Mr. Watson, 'an
epoch in my college life. A close intimacy sprung up between us, and
made residence at Cambridge a totally different thing from what it had
been in my first year. Your brother's wide culture, his singular force
of character, his powerful but, at that time, rather unwieldy intellect,
his Johnsonian brusqueness of speech and manner, mingled with a
corresponding Johnsonian warmth of sympathy with and loyalty to friends
in trouble or anxiety, his sturdiness in the assertion of his opinions,
and the maintenance of his principles, disdaining the smallest
concession for popularity's sake ... all these traits combined in the
formation of an individuality which no one could know intimately and
fail to be convinced that only time was wanting for the achievement of
no ordinary distinction.' 'Yet,' says Mr. Watson, 'he was distanced by
men immeasurably his inferiors.' Nor can this, as Mr. Watson rightly
adds, be regarded as a condemnation of the system rather than of my
brother. 'I attempted to prepare him in mathematics, and the well-known
Dr. Scott, afterwards headmaster of Westminster, was his private tutor
in classics; and we agreed in marvelling at and deploring the
hopelessness of our tasks. For your brother's mind, acute and able as it
was in dealing with matters of concrete human interest, seemed to lose
grasp of things viewed purely in the abstract, and positively refused to
work upon questions of grammatical rules and algebraical formulæ.' When
they were afterwards fellow-students for a short time in law, Mr. Watson
remarked in Fitzjames a similar impatience of legal technicalities. He
thinks that the less formal system at Oxford might have suited my
brother better. At that time, however, Cambridge was only beginning to
stir in its slumbers. The election of the Prince Consort to the
Chancellorship in 1847 (my brother's first year of residence) had roused
certain grumblings as to the probable 'Germanising' of our ancient
system; and a beginning was made, under Whewell's influence, by the
institution of the 'Moral Sciences' and 'Natural Sciences' Triposes in
1851. The theory was, apparently, that, if you ask questions often
enough, people will learn in time to answer them. But for the present
they were regarded as mere 'fancy' examinations. No rewards were
attainable by success; and the ambitious undergraduates kept to the
ancient paths.
I may as well dispose here of one other topic which seems appropriate to
University days. Fitzjames cared nothing for the athletic sports which
were so effectually popularised soon afterwards in the time of 'Tom
Brown's School Days.' Athletes, indeed, cast longing eyes at his
stalwart figure. One eminent oarsman persuaded my brother to take a seat
in a pair-oared boat, and found that he could hardly hold his own
against the strength of the neophyte. He tried to entice so promising a
recruit by offers of a place in the 'Third Trinity' crew and ultimate
hopes of a 'University Blue.' Fitzjames scorned the dazzling offer. I
remember how Ritson, the landlord at Wastdale Head, who had wrestled
with Christopher North, lamented in after years that Fitzjames had never
entered the ring. He spoke in the spirit of the prize-fighter who said
to Whewell, 'What a man was lost when they made you a parson!' His only
taste of the kind was his hereditary love of walking. His mother
incidentally observes in January 1846, that he has accomplished a walk
of thirty-three miles; and in later days that was a frequent allowance.
Though not a fast walker, he had immense endurance. He made several
Alpine tours, and once (in 1860) he accompanied me in an ascent of the
Jungfrau with a couple of guides. He was fresh from London; we had
passed a night in a comfortless cave; the day was hot, and his weight
made a plod through deep snow necessarily fatiguing. We reached the
summit with considerable difficulty. On the descent he slipped above a
certain famous bergschrund; the fall of so ponderous a body jerked me
out of the icy steps, and our combined weight dragged down the guides.
Happily the bergschrund was choked with snow, and we escaped with an
involuntary slide. As we plodded slowly homewards, we expected that his
exhaustion would cause a difficulty in reaching the inn. But by the time
we got there he was, I believe, the freshest of the party. I remember
another characteristic incident of the walk. He began in the most
toilsome part of the climb to expound to me a project for an article in
the 'Saturday Review.' I consigned that journal to a fate which I
believe it has hitherto escaped. But his walks were always enjoyed as
opportunities for reflection. Occasionally he took a gun or a rod, and I
am told was not a bad shot. He was, however, rather inclined to complain
of the appearance of a grouse as interrupting his thoughts. In sport of
the gambling variety he never took the slightest interest; and when he
became a judge, he shocked a Liverpool audience by asking in all
simplicity, 'What is the "Grand National"?' That, I understand, is like
asking a lawyer, What is a _Habeas Corpus_? He was never seized with the
athletic or sporting mania, much as he enjoyed a long pound through
pleasant scenery. In this as in some other things he came to think that
his early contempt for what appeared to be childish amusements had been
pushed rather to excess.
I return to Cambridge. My brother knew slightly some of the leading men
of the place. The omniscient Whewell, who concealed a warm heart and
genuine magnanimity under rather rough and overbearing manners, had
welcomed my father very cordially to Cambridge and condescended to be
polite to his son. But the gulf which divided him from an undergraduate
was too wide to allow the transmission of real personal influence.
Thompson, Whewell's successor in the mastership, was my brother's tutor.
He is now chiefly remembered for certain shrewd epigrams; but then
enjoyed a great reputation for his lectures upon Plato. My brother
attended them; but from want of natural Platonism or for other reasons
failed to profit by them, and thought the study was sheer waste of time.
Another great Cambridge man of those days, the poetical mathematician,
Leslie Ellis, was kind to my brother, who had an introduction to him
probably from Spedding. Ellis was already suffering from the illness
which confined him to his room at Trumpington, and prevented him from
ever giving full proofs of intellectual powers, rated by all who knew
him as astonishing. I may quote what Fitzjames says of one other
contemporary, the senior classic of his own year: 'Lightfoot's
reputation for accuracy and industry was unrivalled; but it was not
generally known what a depth of humour he had or what general force of
character.' Lightfoot's promotion to the Bishopric of Durham removed
him, as my brother thought, from his proper position as a teacher; and
he suffered 'under the general decay of all that belongs to theology.'
I do not find, however, that Lightfoot had any marked influence upon
Fitzjames.
The best thing that the ablest man learns at college, as somebody has
said, is that there are abler men than himself. My brother became
intimate with several very able men of his own age, and formed
friendships which lasted for life. He met them especially in two
societies, which influenced him as they have influenced many men
destined to achieve eminence. The first was the 'Union.' There his
oratory became famous. The 'Gruffian' and 'Giant Grim' was now known as
the 'British Lion'; and became, says Mr. Watson, 'a terror to the
shallow and wordy, and a merciless exposer of platitudes and shams.' Mr.
Watson describes a famous scene in the October term of 1849 which may
sufficiently illustrate his position. 'There was at that time at Trinity
a cleverish, excitable, worthy fellow whose mind was a marvellous
mixture of inconsistent opinions which he expounded with a kind of
oratory as grotesque as his views.' Tradition supplies me with one of
his flowers of speech. He alluded to the clergy as 'priests sitting upon
their golden middens and crunching the bones of the people.' These
oddities gave my brother irresistible opportunities for making fun of
his opponent. 'One night his victim's powers of endurance gave way. The
scene resembled the celebrated outburst of Canning when goaded by the
invectives of Brougham. The man darted across the room with the obvious
intention of making a physical onslaught, and then, under what impulse
and with what purpose I do not know, the whole meeting suddenly flashed
into a crowd of excited, wrangling boys. They leapt upon the seats,
climbed upon the benches, vociferated and gesticulated against each
other, heedless of the fines and threats of the bewildered President,
and altogether reproduced a scene of the French revolutionary
Assembly.' Mr. Llewelyn Davies was the unfortunate President on this
occasion, and mentions that my brother commemorated the scene in a
'heroic ballad' which has disappeared.
From the minutes of the Society[54] 'I learn further details of this
historic scene. The debate (November 27, 1849) arose upon a motion in
favour of Cobden. His panegyrist made 'such violent interruptions' that
a motion was made for his expulsion, but carried by an insufficient
majority. Another orator then 'became unruly' and was expelled by a
superabundant majority, while the original mover was fined 2_l._ The
motion was then unanimously negatived, 'the opener not being present to
reply.' From the records of other debates I learn that Fitzjames was in
favour of the existing Church Establishment as against advocates of
change, whether high churchmen or liberationists. He also opposed
motions for extension of the suffrage, without regard to education or
property, moved by Sir W. Harcourt. He agrees, however, with Harcourt in
condemning the game laws. His most characteristic utterance was when the
admirer of Cobden had moved that 'to all human appearance we are
warranted in tracing for our own country through the dim perspective of
coming time an exalted and glorious destiny.' Fitzjames moved as an
amendment 'that the House, while it acknowledges the many dangers to
which the country is exposed, trusts that through the help of God we may
survive them.' This amendment was carried by 60 to 0.
The other society was one which has included a very remarkable number of
eminent men. In my undergraduate days we used to speak with bated breath
of the 'Apostles'--the accepted nickname for what was officially called the
Cambridge Conversazione Society. It was founded about 1820, and had
included such men as Tennyson (who, as my brother reports, had to leave
the Society because he was too lazy to write an essay), the two younger
Hallams, Maurice, Sterling, Charles Buller, Arthur Helps, James
Spedding, Monckton Milnes, Tom Taylor, Charles Merivale, Canon
Blakesley, and others whom I shall have to mention. The existence of a
society intended to cultivate the freest discussion of all the great
topics excited some suspicion when, about 1834, there was a talk of
abolishing tests. It was then warmly defended by Thirlwall, the
historian, who said that many of its members had become ornaments of the
Church.[55]
But the very existence of this body was scarcely known to the University
at large; and its members held reticence to be a point of honour. You
might be aware that your most intimate friend belonged to it: you had
dimly inferred the fact from his familiarity with certain celebrities,
and from discovering that upon Saturday evenings he was always
mysteriously engaged. But he never mentioned his dignity; any more than
at the same period a Warrington would confess that he was a contributor
to the leading journals of the day. The members were on the look-out for
any indications of intellectual originality, academical or otherwise,
and specially contemptuous of humbug, cant, and the qualities of the
'windbag' in general. To be elected, therefore, was virtually to receive
a certificate from some of your cleverest contemporaries that they
regarded you as likely to be in future an eminent man. The judgment so
passed was perhaps as significant as that implied by University honours,
and a very large proportion of the apostles have justified the
anticipations of their fellows.
My brother owed his election at an unusually early period of his career
to one of the most important friendships of his life. In the summer
vacation of 1845 F. W. Gibbs was staying at Filey, reading for the
Trinity Fellowship, which he obtained in the following October.
Fitzjames joined him, and there met Henry Sumner Maine, who had recently
(1844) taken his degree at Cambridge, when he was not only 'senior
classic' but a senior classic of exceptional brilliancy. Both Maine and
Gibbs were apostles and, of course, friends. My brother's first
achievement was to come near blowing out his new friend's brains by the
accidental discharge of a gun. Maine happily escaped, and must have
taken a liking to the lad. In 1847 Maine was appointed to the Regius
Professorship of Civil Law in Cambridge. The study which he was to teach
had fallen into utter decay. Maine himself cannot at that time have had
any profound knowledge of the Civil Law--if, indeed, he ever acquired
such knowledge. But his genius enabled him to revive the study in
England--although no genius could galvanise the corpse of legal studies
at the Cambridge of those days into activity. Maine, as Fitzjames says,
'made in the most beautiful manner applications of history and
philosophy to Roman law, and transfigured one of the driest of subjects
into all sorts of beautiful things without knowing or caring much about
details.' He was also able to 'sniff at Bentham' for his ignorance in
this direction. 'I rebelled against Maine for many years,' says
Fitzjames, 'till at last I came to recognise, not only his wonderful
gifts, but the fact that at bottom he and I agreed fundamentally, though
it cost us both a good deal of trouble to find it out.' I quote this
because it bears upon my brother's later development of opinion. For
the present, the personal remark is more relevant. Maine, says
Fitzjames, 'was perfectly charming to me at college, as he is now. He
was most kind, friendly, and unassuming; and, though I was a freshman
and he a young don,[56] and he was twenty-six when I was twenty--one of
the greatest differences of age and rank which can exist between two
people having so much in common--we were always really and effectually
equal. We have been the closest of friends all through life.' I think,
indeed, that Maine's influence upon my brother was only second to that
of my father.
Maine brought Fitzjames into the apostles in his first term.[57] Maine,
says my brother, 'was a specially shining apostle, and in all
discussions not only took by far the first and best part, but did it so
well and unpretentiously, and in a strain so much above what the rest of
us could reach, that it was a great piece of education to hear him.'
Other members of the little society, which generally included only five
or six--the name 'apostles' referring to the limit of possible
numbers--were E. H. Stanley (afterwards Lord Derby), who left in March
1848, Vernon Harcourt (now Sir William), H. W. Watson, Julian Fane,[58]
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 Saturday night in t
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