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 Suss.e.x 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 grat.i.tude.
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 cla.s.s attainable at his age.
II. ETON
The Eton period[51] had marked effects. Fitzjames owed, as he said, a debt of grat.i.tude to the school, but it was for favours which would have won grat.i.tude 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 a.s.sociate 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 a.s.saults 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 b.u.t.t 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 pa.s.sive 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 repet.i.tion 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 _Vae 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 cla.s.ses 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 amus.e.m.e.nts.
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 cla.s.s 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 c.u.mberland 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 pa.s.sionate 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 const.i.tution 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 h.e.l.l 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 coa.r.s.eness 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 G.o.d! 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 subst.i.tute 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 cla.s.sics. In 1847 he was only just defeated for a scholarship by an elder boy, and was first, both in cla.s.sics 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 st.u.r.dier 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 princ.i.p.al, 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. .h.i.t 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 ent.i.tled an inadequate reward for his services. There was some talk of creating the new office of a.s.sessor 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 const.i.tutional side of French history; and he antic.i.p.ated some of the results set forth with, of course, far greater knowledge of the subject, in Tocqueville"s "Ancien Regime." 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 cla.s.s 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 compet.i.tion. 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 surpa.s.s 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 Cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical 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 st.u.r.diness in the a.s.sertion 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 cla.s.sics; 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 formulae." 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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sed 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 "Sat.u.r.day Review." I consigned that journal to a fate which I believe it has. .h.i.therto 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 cla.s.sic 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 plat.i.tudes and shams." Mr.
Watson describes a famous scene in the October term of 1849 which may sufficiently ill.u.s.trate 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 a.s.sembly." 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 G.o.d 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sed was perhaps as significant as that implied by University honours, and a very large proportion of the apostles have justified the antic.i.p.ations 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 cla.s.sic" but a senior cla.s.sic 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 una.s.suming; 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]