Chapter I · (continued 2)

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]