A touch, a kiss, the charm was snapped . . . . . . .
And all the long-pent stream of life Dashed downward in a cataract.
I am surprised to find that, when I look back to that happiest and most blessed of days through the haze of upwards of thirty-two years, I do not feel in the least degree disposed to be pathetic over the lapse of life or the near approach of old age. I have found life sweet, bright, glorious. I should dearly like to live again; but I am not afraid, and I hope, when the time comes, I shall not be averse to die."
At this point the autobiographical fragment ceases. I am glad that it has enabled me to use his own words in speaking of his marriage. No one, I think, can doubt their sincerity, nor can anyone who was a witness of his subsequent life think that they over-estimate the results to his happiness. I need only add that the marriage had the incidental advantage of providing him with a new brother and sister; for Henry (now Sir Henry) Stewart Cunningham, and Emily Cunningham (now Lady Egerton), were from this time as dear to him as if they had been connected by the closest tie of blood relationship.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 49: I have quoted a few phrases from it in the previous chapter.]
[Footnote 50: He says the 11th, and mentions more than once a date which afterwards became interesting for another reason. The date given by my mother at the time must be accepted; but this is the only error I have found in my brother"s statements--and it is not of profound importance.]
[Footnote 51: I have to thank Mr. Arthur D. Coleridge, my brother"s schoolfellow and lifelong friend for a letter containing his recollections of this period.]
[Footnote 52: Macvey Napier correspondence.]
[Footnote 53: My father was sworn of H. M. Privy Council October 30, 1847, and on April 15, 1848, appointed by her Majesty in Council Member of the Committee of Privy Council for the consideration of all matters relating to trade and foreign plantations (Sir James Stephen and Sir Edward Ryan were the last two appointed under that form and t.i.tle); made K.C.B. April 27, 1848, and finally retired on pension May 3, 1848, having been on sick leave since October 1847.]
[Footnote 54: Kindly sent to me by Mr. Montague Butler, of Pembroke College, Cambridge.]
[Footnote 55: See an article by W. D. Christie in _Macmillan"s Magazine_ for November 1864.]
[Footnote 56: Maine was born August 22, 1822, and therefore six years and a half older than Fitzjames.]
[Footnote 57: He was proposed by Maine on October 30, and elected November 13, 1847.]
[Footnote 58: _The Life of Julian Fane_, by his intimate friend Lord Lytton, was published in 1871. It includes some account of the "apostles."]
[Footnote 59: It refers, I suppose, to the son"s failure to get into the first cla.s.s in the college examination at Christmas 1848.]
[Footnote 60: Pearson died in 1894, after a career in England and Australia much troubled by ill health. His book upon _National Character_, published in 1803, first made his remarkable abilities generally known, though he had written very ably upon history.]
[Footnote 61: Born November 2, 1826, d. February 9, 1883. See the memoir by C. H. Pearson prefixed to the collection of Smith"s _Mathematical Papers_ (1894).]
[Footnote 62: I guess Dumont"s "Principles."]
CHAPTER III
_THE BAR AND JOURNALISM_
I. INTRODUCTORY
I have traced at some length the early development of my brother"s mind and character. Henceforward I shall have to describe rather the manifestation than the modification of his qualities. He had reached full maturity, although he had still much to learn in the art of turning his abilities to account. His "indolence" and "self-indulgence," if they had ever existed, had disappeared completely and for ever. His life henceforward was of the most strenuous. He had become a strong man--strong with that peculiar combination of mental and moral force which reveals itself in masculine common sense. His friends not unfrequently compared him to Dr. Johnson, and, much as the two men differed in some ways, there was a real ground for the comparison.
Fitzjames might be called pre-eminently a "moralist," in the old-fashioned sense in which that term is applied to Johnson. He was profoundly interested, that is, in the great problems of life and conduct. His views were, in this sense at least, original--that they were the fruit of his own experience, and of independent reflection.
Most of us are so much the product of our surroundings that we accept without a question the ordinary formulae which we yet hold so lightly that the principles which nominally govern serve only to excuse our spontaneous instincts. The stronger nature comes into collision with the world, disputes even the most current commonplaces, and so becomes conscious of its own idiosyncrasies, and accepts only what is actually forced upon it by stress of facts and hard logic. The process gives to the doctrines which, with others, represent nothing but phrases, something of the freshness and vividness of personal discoveries.
Probably ninety-nine men in a hundred a.s.sume without conscious inconsistency the validity both of the moral code propounded in the Sermon on the Mount, and of the code which regulates the actual struggle for life. They profess to be at once gentlemen and Christians, and when the two codes come into conflict, take the one which happens to sanction their wishes. They do not even observe that there is any conflict.
Fitzjames could not take things so lightly. Even in his infancy he had argued the first principles of ethics, and worked out his conclusions by conflicts with schoolboy bullies. It is intelligible, therefore, that, as Mr. Davies reports, the Sermon on the Mount should be his great difficulty in accepting Christianity. Its spirit might be, in a sense, beautiful; but it would not fit the facts of life. So, he observes, in his autobiographical fragment, that one of his difficulties was his want of sympathy for the kind of personal enthusiasm with which his father would speak of Jesus Christ. He tried hard to cultivate the same feelings, but could not do so with perfect sincerity.
A man with such distinct and vivid convictions in the place of mere conventional formulae was naturally minded to utter them. He was constantly provoked by the popular acceptance of what appeared to him shallow and insincere theories, and desired to expose the prevailing errors. But the "little preacher" of three years old had discovered at one and twenty that the pulpit of the ordinary kind was not congenial to him. His force of mind did not facilitate a quick and instinctive appreciation of other people"s sentiments. When he came into contact with a man whose impressions of the world were opposed to his own, he was inclined to abandon even the attempt to account for the phenomenon.
A man incapable of seeing things in the proper light was hardly worth considering at all. Fitzjames was therefore not sympathetic in the sense of having an imagination ready to place him at other men"s point of view. In another sense his sympathies were exceedingly powerful. No man had stronger or more lasting affections. Once attached to a man, he believed in him with extraordinary tenacity and would defend him uncompromisingly through thick and thin. If, like Johnson, he was a little too contemptuous of the sufferings of the over-sensitive, and put them down to mere affectation or feeblemindedness, he could sympathise most strongly with any of the serious sorrows and anxieties of those whom he loved, and was easily roused to stern indignation where he saw sorrow caused by injustice. I shall mention here one instance, to which, for obvious reasons, I can only refer obscurely; though it occupied him at intervals during many years. Shortly after being called to the bar he had agreed to take the place of a friend as trustee for a lady, to whom he was then personally unknown. A year or two later he discovered that she and her husband were the objects of a strange persecution from a man in a respectable position who conceived himself to have a certain hold over them. Fitzjames"s first action was to write a letter to the persecutor expressing in the most forcible English the opinion that the gentleman"s proper position was not among the respectable but at one of her Majesty"s penal settlements. His opinion was carefully justified by a legal statement of the facts upon which it rested, and the effect was like the discharge of the broadside of an old ship of the line upon a hostile frigate. The persecutor was silenced at once and for life.
Fitzjames, meanwhile, found that the money affairs of the pair whose champion he had become were deeply embarra.s.sed. He took measures, which were ultimately successful, for extricating them from their difficulties; and until the lady"s death, which took place only a year or two before his own, was her unwearied counsellor and protector in many subsequent difficulties. Though I can give no details, I may add that he was repaid by the warm grat.i.tude of the persons concerned, and certainly never grudged the thought and labour which he had bestowed upon the case.
Fitzjames having made up his mind that he was a "lawyer by nature," had become a lawyer by profession. Yet the circ.u.mstances of his career, as well as his own disposition, prevented him from being absorbed in professional duties. For the fifteen years which succeeded his call to the bar he was in fact following two professions; he was at once a barrister and a very active journalist. This causes some difficulty to his biographer. My account of his literary career will have to occupy the foreground, partly because the literary story bears most directly and clearly the impress of his character, and partly because, as will be seen, it was more continuous. I must, however, warn my readers against a possible illusion of perspective. To Fitzjames himself the legal career always represented the substantive, and the literary career the adjective. Circ.u.mstances made journalism highly convenient, but his literary ambition was always to be auxiliary to his legal ambition. It would, of course, have been injurious to his prospects at the bar had it been supposed that the case was inverted; and as a matter of fact his eyes were always turned to the summit of that long hill of difficulty which has to be painfully climbed by every barrister not helped by special interest or good fortune. This much must be clearly understood, but I must also notice two qualifications. In the first place, though he became a journalist for convenience, he was in some sense too a journalist by nature. He found, that is, in the press a channel for a great many of the reflections which were constantly filling his mind and demanding some outlet. He wrote for money, and without the least affectation of indifference to money; but the occupation enabled him also to gratify a spontaneous and powerful impulse. And, in the next place, professional success at the bar was in his mind always itself connected with certain literary projects. Almost from the first he was revolving schemes for a great book, or rather for a variety of books.
The precise scheme changed from time to time; but the subject of these books is always to be somewhere in the province which is more or less common to law and ethics. Sometimes he is inclined to the more purely technical side, but always with some reference to the moral basis of law; and sometimes he leans more to philosophical and theological problems, but always with some reference to his professional experience and to legal applications. So, for example, he expresses a desire (in a letter written, alas! after the power of executing such schemes had disappeared) to write upon the theory of evidence; but he points out that the same principles which underlie the English laws of evidence are also applicable to innumerable questions belonging to religious, philosophical, and scientific inquiries. Now the position of a judge or an eminent lawyer appeared to him from the first to be desirable for other reasons indeed, but also for the reason that it would enable him to gain experience and to speak with authority. At moments he had thoughts of abandoning law for literature; although the thoughts disappeared as soon as his professional prospects became brighter. His ideal was always such a position as would enable him to make an impression upon the opinions of his countrymen in that region where legal and ethical speculation are both at home.
II. FIRST YEARS AT THE BAR
I will begin by some general remarks upon his legal career, which will thus be understood as underlying his literary career. Fitzjames was called to the bar of the Inner Temple on January 26, 1854. He had his first brief soon afterwards at the Central Criminal Court, where twenty-five years later he also made his first appearance as a judge. In the same year he joined the Midland Circuit. He had no legal connections upon that or any other circuit. His choice was determined by the advice of Kenneth Macaulay, then leader of the Midland Circuit. He afterwards referred to this as one of the few cases in which good advice had really been of some use. In a letter written in July 1855 he observes that the Midland is the nearest approach to the old circuits as they were before the days of railways. It was so far from London that the barristers had to go their rounds regularly between the different towns instead of coming down for the day. He describes the party who were thus brought together twice a year, gossiping and arguing all day, with plenty of squabbling and of "rough joking and noisy high spirits" among the idler, that is, much the larger part. He admits that the routine is rather wearisome: the same judgments and speeches seem to repeat themselves "like dreams in a fever," and "droves of wretched over-driven heavy people come up from the prison into a kind of churchwardens" pew," when the same story is repeated over and over again. And yet he is profoundly interested. Matters turn up which "seem to me infinitely more interesting than the most interesting play or novel," and you get strange glimpses of the ways of thinking and living among cla.s.ses otherwise unknown to you. These criminal courts, he says in another letter, are a "never-ending source of interest and picturesqueness for me. The little kind of meat-safe door through which the prisoners are called up, and the attendant demon of a gaoler who summons them up from the vasty deep and sends them back again to the vasty deep for terms of from one week to six years, have a sort of mysterious attraction."
Mr. Franklin Lushington, who was my brother"s contemporary on the circuit and ever afterwards an intimate friend, has kindly given me his impressions of this period. It would have been difficult, he says, to find a circuit "on which the first steps of the path that opens on general eminence in the profession were slower to climb than on the Midland." It was a small circuit, "attended by some seventy or eighty barristers and divided into two or three independent and incompatible sets of Quarter Sessions, among which after a year or so of tentative experience it was necessary to choose one set and stand by it. Fitzjames and I both chose the round of the Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire sessions; which involved a good deal of travelling and knocking about in some out-of-the-way country districts, where the sessions bar is necessarily thrown into circ.u.mstances of great intimacy.
Even when a sessions or a.s.size reputation was gained, it was and remained intensely local. The intricate points relative to settlements and poor-law administration, which had provided numerous appeals to the higher courts in a previous generation, had dwindled gradually to nothing. Even the most remarkable success, slowly and painfully won in one county, might easily fail to produce an effect in the next, or to give any occasion for pa.s.sing through the thickset hedge which parts provincial from metropolitan notoriety. The most popular and admired advocate in the Lincolnshire courts for many years was our dear friend F. Flowers, afterwards a police magistrate, one of the wittiest, most ingenious, and most eloquent of the bar. Though year after year he held every Lincolnshire jury in the hollow of his hand, and frequently rose to a strain of powerful and pa.s.sionate oratory which carried away himself and his hearers--not Lincolnshire folk only--in irresistible sympathy with his cause, Flowers remained to his last day on circuit utterly unknown and untried in the adjacent shires of Derby and Nottingham."
A circuit bar, adds Mr. Lushington, "may be roughly divided into three cla.s.ses: those who are determined to make themselves heard; those who wish to be heard if G.o.d calls; and those who without objecting to be heard wish to have their pastime whether they are heard or not.
Fitzjames was in the first category, and from the first did his utmost to succeed, always in the most legitimate way." No attorney, looking at the rows of wigs in the back benches, could fail to recognise in him a man who would give his whole mind to the task before him. "It was natural to him to look the industrious apprentice that he really was; always craving for work of all kinds and ready at a moment"s notice to turn from one task to another. I used to notice him at one moment busy writing an article in complete abstraction and at the next devouring at full speed the contents of a brief just put into his hand, and ready directly to argue the case as if it had been in his hand all day."
Fitzjames not long afterwards expressed his own judgment of the society of which he had become a member. The English bar, he says,[63] "is exactly like a great public school, the boys of which have grown older and have exchanged boyish for manly objects. There is just the same rough familiarity, the same general ardour of character, the same kind of unwritten code of morals and manners, the same kind of public opinion expressed in exactly the same blunt, unmistakable manner." It would astonish outsiders if they could hear the remarks sometimes addressed by the British barrister to his learned brother--especially on circuit. The bar, he concludes, "are a robust, hard-headed, and rather hard-handed set of men, with an imperious, audacious, combative turn of mind,"
sometimes, though rarely, capable of becoming eloquent. Their learning is "multifarious, ill-digested and ill-arranged, but collected with wonderful patience and labour, with a close exactness and severity of logic, unequalled anywhere else, and with a most sagacious adaptation to the practical business of life."
Fitzjames"s position in this bigger public school had at any rate one advantage over his old Etonian days. There was no general prejudice against him to be encountered; and in the intellectual "rough and tumble" which replaced the old school contests his force of mind was respected by everyone and very warmly appreciated by a chosen few. Among his closest intimates were Mr. Lushington and his old schoolfellow Mr.
Arthur Coleridge, who became Clerk of a.s.size upon the circuit. At starting he had also the society of his friend Grant Duff. They walked together in the summer of 1855, and visited the Trappist Monastery in Charnwood Forest. There they talked to a shaven monk in his "dreary white flannel dress," bound with a black strap. They moralised as they returned, and Fitzjames thought on the whole that his own life was wholesomer than the monastic. He hopes, however, that the monk and his companions may "come right," as "no doubt they will if they are honest and true." "I suppose one may say that G.o.d is in convents and churches as well as in law courts or chambers--though not to my eyes so palpably."
Sir M. Grant Duff left the circuit after a year or two; but Fitzjames found a few other congenial companions with whom he could occasionally walk and often argue to his heart"s content. Among his best friends was Kenneth Macaulay, who became a leader on the circuit, and who did his best to introduce Fitzjames to practice. Mr. Arthur Coleridge, too, was able to suggest to the judges that Fitzjames should be appointed to defend prisoners not provided with counsel. This led by degrees to his becoming well known in the Crown Court, although civil business was slow in presenting itself. Several of the judges took early notice of him. In 1856 he has some intercourse with Lord Campbell, then Chief Justice, and with Chief Baron Pollock, both of them friends of his father. He was "overpowered with admiration" at Campbell"s appearance. Campbell was "thickset as a navvy, as hard as nails," still full of vigour at the age of seventy-six, about the best judge on the bench now, and looking fit for ten or twelve years" more of work.[64] Pollock was a fine lively old man, thin as a threadpaper, straight as a ramrod, and full of indomitable vivacity. The judges, however, who formed the highest opinion of him and gave him the most encouragement were Lord Bramwell and Willes.
In 1856 he observes that he was about to take a walk with Alfred Wills of the "High Alps." This was the present Mr. Justice Wills; who has also been kind enough to give me some recollections which are to the purpose in this place. Wills was called to the bar in 1851 and joined the Midland Circuit, but attended a different set of quarter sessions.
He saw a good deal of Fitzjames, however, at the a.s.sizes; and though not especially intimate, they always maintained very friendly relations. The impression made upon Wills in these early years was that Fitzjames was a solitary and rather unsocial person. He was divided from his fellows, as he had been divided from his companions at school and college, by his absorption in the speculations which interested him so profoundly. "He was much more learned, much better read, and had a much more ma.s.sive mind than most of us, and our ways and talks must have seemed petty and trivial to him." Though there were "some well-read men and good scholars among us, even they had little taste for the ponderous reading in which Fitzjames delighted." Wills remembers his bringing Hobbes" "Leviathan"
with him, and recreating himself with studying it after his day"s work.
To such studies I shall have to refer presently, and I will only say, parenthetically, that if Mr. Justice Wills would read Hobbes, he would find, though he tells me that he dislikes metaphysics, that the old philosopher is not half so repulsive as he looks. Still, a constant absorption in these solid works no doubt gave to his a.s.sociates the impression that Fitzjames lived in a different world from theirs. He generally took his walks by himself, Coleridge being the most frequent interrupter of his solitude. He would be met pounding along steadily, carrying, often twirling, a "very big stick," which now and then came down with a blow--upon the knuckles, I take it, of some imaginary blockhead on the other side--muttering to himself, "immersed in thought and with a fierce expression of concentrated study." He did not often come to mess, and when he did found some things of which he did not approve. Barristers, it appears, are still capable of indulging in such tastes as were once gratified by the game of "High Jinks," celebrated in "Guy Mannering." The Circuit Court was the scene of a good deal of buffoonery. It was customary to appoint a "crier"; and Fitzjames, "to his infinite disgust, was elected on account of his powerful voice. He stood it once or twice, but at last broke out in a real fury, and declared he would never come to the Circuit Court again, calling it by very strong names. If he had been a less powerful man I am sure that there would have been a fight; but no one cared to tackle that stalwart frame, and I am not sure that the a.s.sailant would have come out of the fray alive if he had." The crisis of this warfare appears to have happened in 1864, when Yorkshire was added to the Midland Circuit, and an infusion of barristers from the Northern Circuit consequently took place. It seems that the manners and customs of the northerners were decidedly less civilised than those of their brethren. A hard fight had to be fought before they could be raised to the desired level. In 1867 I find that Fitzjames proposed the abolition of the Circuit Court. He was defeated by twenty votes to fifteen; and marvels at the queer bit of conservatism cropping up in an unexpected place. In spite of these encounters, Fitzjames not only formed some very warm friendships on circuit, but enjoyed many of the social meetings, and often recurred to them in later years. He only despised tomfoolery more emphatically than his neighbours. n.o.body, indeed, could be a more inconvenient presence where breaches of decency or good manners were to be apprehended. I vividly remember an occasion upon which he was one of a little party of young men on a walking tour. A letter read out by one of them had the phrase, "What a pity about Mrs. A.!" Someone suggested a conjectural explanation not favourable to Mrs. A."s character. He immediately came in for a stern denunciation from Fitzjames which reduced us all to awestruck silence, and, I hope, gave the speaker an unforgetable lesson as to the duty of not speaking lightly in matters affecting female reputation. He collapsed; and I do not recollect that he ventured any comment upon a letter of the next morning which proved his conjecture to be correct. The principle was the same.
These characteristics, as I gather both from Mr. Justice Wills and from Mr. Lushington, caused Fitzjames to be the object rather of respect than of general popularity. His friends could not fail to recognise the depth of his real kindness of heart. Mr. Justice Wills refers to one little incident of which my brother often spoke. Fitzjames visited him at the "Eagle"s Nest," in 1862, and there found him engaged in nursing Auguste Balmat, the famous guide, who was dying of typhoid fever. The natives were alarmed, and the whole labour of nursing fell upon Mr. and Mrs.
Wills. Fitzjames, on his arrival, relieved them so far as he could, and enabled them to get some nights" sleep. I remember his description of himself, sitting up by the dying man, with a volume of "Pickwick" and a vessel of holy water, and primed with some pious sentences to be repeated if the last agony should come on. It was a piece of grim tragedy with a touch of the grotesque which impressed him greatly. "I never knew anyone," says Mr. Justice Wills, "to whom I should have gone, if I wanted help, with more certainty of getting it." When Fitzjames was on the bench, he adds, and he had been himself disappointed of reaching the same position under annoying circ.u.mstances, he had to appear in a patent case before his friend. Fitzjames came down to look at a model, and Wills said, "Your Lordship will see," &c. "He got hold of the hand next his own, gave me a squeeze which I did not forget in a hurry, and whispered, "If you ever call me "my lordship" again, I shall say something!"" That hand-grip, indeed, as Wills remarks, was eminently characteristic. It was like the squeeze of a vice, and often conveyed the intimation of a feeling which shrank from verbal expression.
It is plain enough that a man of such character would not find some difficulties smoothed for him. He could not easily learn the lesson of "suffering fools gladly." He formed pretty strong views about a man and could express them frankly. The kind of person whom Carlyle called a windbag, and to whom he applied equally vigorous epithets, was especially obnoxious to him, however dexterous might be such a man"s manipulation of difficult arguments. His talent, too, scarcely lent itself to the art of indirect intimations of his opinions. He remarks himself, in one of his letters, that he is about as clever at giving hints as the elder Osborne in "Vanity Fair"; of whom Thackeray says that he would give what he called a "hint" to a footman to leave his service by kicking the man downstairs. And, therefore, I suspect that when Fitzjames considered someone--even a possible client--to be a fool or a humbug, his views might be less concealed than prudence would have dictated. "When once he had an opportunity of showing his capacities,"
says Mr. Lushington, "the most critical solicitor could not fail to be satisfied of his vigour and perseverance; his quick comprehension of, and his close attention to detail; and his gift in speaking of clear common-sense and forcible expression, free from wearisome redundancy or the suggestion of an irony that might strike above the heads of the jury. He gained the confidence of clients of all sorts--some of curious, impulsive, and not over-strict character, who might, perhaps, have landed a weaker or less rigidly high-principled advocate in serious blunders; and I do not think that he ever lost a client whom he had once gained." But the first step was not easy. His solitary ways, his indifference to the lighter pursuits of his companions, and his frequent absorption in other studies, made him slow to form connections and prevented him from acquiring early, if he ever fully acquired, the practical instinct which qualifies a man for the ordinary walk of law courts. When, says Mr. Justice Wills, "he got you by yourself in a corner--with no opportunity of dancing round him--in a single combat of stroke for stroke, real business, conditions defined and mastered, he was a most formidable antagonist, mercilessly logical, severely powerful, with the hand of a giant." But he was, says the same critic, rather too logical for the common tricks of the trade, which are learnt by a long and persistent handling of ordinary business. He did not understand what would "go down," and what was of "such a character that people would drive a coach and six through precedents and everything else in order to get rid of it." He was irritated by an appeal to practical consequences from what he considered to be established principles. Then, too, his ma.s.sive intellect made him wanting in pliability. "He could not change front in presence of the enemy"; and rather despised the adaptations by which clever lawyers succeed in introducing new law under a pretence of applying old precedents. As I have already said, he was disgusted with the mere technicalities of the law, and the conversion of what ought to be a logical apparatus for the discovery of truth into an artificial system of elaborate and superfluous formalities. His great ambition was (in his favourite expression) to "boil down" the law into a few broad common-sense principles. He was, therefore, not well qualified for some branches of legal practice, and inclined to regard skill of the technical kind with suspicion, if not with actual dislike. Upon this, however, I shall have to dwell hereafter.
Meanwhile, he was deeply interested in the criminal cases, which were constantly presenting ethical problems, and affording strange glimpses into the dark side of human nature. Such crimes showed the crude, brutal pa.s.sions, which lie beneath the decent surface of modern society, and are fascinating to the student of human nature. He often speaks of the strangely romantic interest of the incidents brought to light in the "State Trials"; and in these early days he studied some of the famous cases, such as those of Palmer and Dove, with a professional as well as a literary interest. In later life he avoided such stories; but at this period he occasionally made a text of them for newspaper articles, and was, perhaps, tempted to adopt theories of the case too rapidly. This was thought to be the case in regard to one Bacon, who was tried in Lincoln in the summer of 1857. The case was one to which Fitzjames certainly attached great importance, and I will briefly mention it before pa.s.sing to his literary career.
Bacon and his wife were tried at London in the spring of 1857 for the murder of their two young children. It was sufficiently proved upon that occasion that Mrs. Bacon (who had already been in a madhouse) committed the crime in a fit of insanity. Bacon, however, had endeavoured to manufacture some evidence in order to give countenance to a theory that the murder had been committed by housebreakers during his absence. He thus incurred suspicion, and was placed upon trial with his wife. It also came out that he had been tried (and acquitted) a year before for setting fire to his own house, and reasons appeared for suspecting him of an attempt to poison his mother at Stamford three years previously.
Upon these facts Fitzjames wrote an article in the "Sat.u.r.day Review."[65] He declared that the crime was as interesting, except for the want of dignity of the actors, as the events which gave the plot of some of the tragedies of aeschylus. It reminded him, too, of the terrible story of "Jane Eyre." For we had to suppose either that Bacon suffered by his marriage to a mad woman who had poisoned his mother, burnt his house, and cut his children"s throats; or else that the wife"s last outbreak had been the incidental cause of the discovery of his own previous crimes. In the last case we had an instance of that "retributive vengeance" which, though it cannot be "reduced to a very logical form, speaks in tones of thunder to the imaginations of mankind."
The case came, as it happened, to the Midland Circuit. Bacon was tried in Lincoln on July 25 for poisoning his mother. Fitzjames writes from the court, where he is waiting in the hope that he may be asked by the judge to defend the prisoner. While he writes, the request comes accordingly, and he feels that if he is successful he may make the first step to fortune. He was never cooler or calmer, he says, in his life, and has always, "in a way of his own," "truly and earnestly trusted in G.o.d to help him in all the affairs of life." He made his speech, and suggested the theory already noticed, that the poisoning might have been the act of the mad wife. The judge paid him a high compliment, but summed up for a conviction, which accordingly followed. Fitzjames himself thought, though he was not "quite sure," that the man was guilty. He commented upon the case in another article in the "Sat.u.r.day Review," not, of course, to dispute the verdict, but to draw a characteristic inference. Is it not, he asks, very hard upon a poor prisoner that he should have no better means of obtaining counsel than the request of the judge at the last moment to some junior barrister?
They manage these things, he thinks, better in France; though "we have no reason to speak with disrespect of the gentleman who conducted the case."
Whatever may have been thought of Fitzjames"s judgment in this case, he gradually, as I have said, came to be regularly employed upon similar occasions. By slow degrees, too, more profitable briefs came to him; but he was in the trying position of appearing on a good many occasions which excited much interest, while more regular work still declined to present itself in corresponding proportions. Now and then a puff of wind filled his sails for the moment, but wearying calms followed, and the steady gale which propels to fortune and to the highest professional advancement would not set in with the desired regularity.