Chapter II · (continued 2)

When his mind was made up, Fitzjames communicated his decision to his father. The dangerous illness of 1850 had thrown his father into a nervous condition which made him unable to read the quaint treatise I have described. He appears, however, to have argued that a man might fairly take orders with a view to literary work in the line of his profession. Fitzjames yielded this ground but still held to the main point. His father, though troubled, made no serious objection, and only asked him to reconsider his decision and to consult Henry Venn. Henry Venn wrote a letter, some extracts from which are appended to the volume with characteristic comments. Venn was too sensible a man not to see that Fitzjames had practically made up his mind. I need only observe that Fitzjames, in reply to some hints in his uncle's letter, observes very emphatically that a man may be serving God at the bar as in the pulpit. His career was now fixed. 'I never did a wiser thing in my life,' says 1865, 'than when I determined not to be a clergyman.' 'Amen!' says 1880, and I am sure that no other year in the calendar would have given a different answer. 'If anyone should ever care to know what sort of man I was then,' says Fitzjames in 1887, 'and, mutatis mutandis, am still, that paper ought to be embodied by reference in their recollections.'

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

He had made some intimate friendships beyond the apostolic circle, of whom Grant Duff was one of the first. They had already met at the rooms of Charles Henry Pearson, one of my brother's King's College friends.[60] Grant Duff was for a long time in very close intimacy, and the friendship lasted for their lives, uninterrupted by political differences. They were fellow-pupils in Field's chambers, were on circuit together for a short time till Grant Duff gave up the profession; and their marriages only brought new members into the alliance. I must confine myself to saying that my brother's frequent allusions prove that he fully appreciated the value of this friendship. Another equally intimate friendship of the same date was with Henry John Stephen Smith.[61] Smith was a godson of my uncle, Henry John Stephen. He and his sister had been from very early years on terms of especial intimacy with our cousins the Diceys. Where and when his friendship with my brother began I do not precisely know, but it was already very close. As in some later cases, of which I shall have to speak, the friendship seemed to indicate that Fitzjames was attracted by complementary rather than similar qualities in the men to whom he was most attached. No two men of ability could be much less like each other. Smith's talents were apparently equally adapted for fine classical scholarship and for the most abstract mathematical investigations. If it was not exactly by the toss of a shilling it was by an almost fortuitous combination of circumstances that he was decided to take to mathematics, and in that field won a European reputation. He soared, however, so far beyond ordinary ken that even Europe must be taken to mean a small set of competent judges who might almost be reckoned upon one's fingers. But devoted as he was to these abstruse studies, Smith might also be regarded as a typical example of the finest qualities of Oxford society. His mathematical powers were recognised by his election to the Savilian professorship in 1860, and the recognition of his other abilities was sufficiently shown by the attempt to elect him member for the University in 1878. He would indeed have been elected had the choice been confined to the residents at Oxford. Smith could discourse upon nothing without showing his powers, and he would have been a singular instance in the House of Commons of a man respected at once for scholarship and for profound scientific knowledge, and yet a chosen mouthpiece of the political sentiments of the most cultivated constituency in the country. The recognition of his genius was no doubt due in great part to the singular urbanity which made him the pride and delight of all Oxford common rooms. With the gentlest of manners and a refined and delicate sense of humour, he had powers of launching epigrams the subtle flavour of which necessarily disappears when detached from their context. But it was his peculiar charm that he never used his powers to inflict pain. His hearers felt that he could have pierced the thickest hide or laid bare the ignorance of the most pretentious learning. But they could not regret a self-restraint which so evidently proceeded from abounding kindness of heart. Smith's good nature led him to lend too easy an ear to applications for the employment of his abilities upon tasks to which his inferiors would have been competent. I do not know whether it was to diffidence and reserve or to the gentleness which shrinks from dispelling illusions that another peculiarity is to be attributed. On religious matters, says his biographer, he was 'absolutely reticent'; he would discuss such topics indeed, but without ever mentioning his own faith.

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

These talks at any rate, with distinguished Oxford men, must have helped to widen my brother's intellectual horizon. They had looked at the problems of the day from a point of view to which the apostles seem to have been comparatively blind. Another influence had a more obvious result. Fitzjames had to read Stephen's commentaries and Bentham[62] for the London scholarship. Bentham now ceased to be an object of holy horror. My brother, in fact, became before long what he always remained, a thorough Benthamite with certain modifications. It was less a case of influence, however, than of 'elective affinity' of intellect. The account of Fitzjames's experience at Cambridge recalls memories of the earlier group who discussed utilitarianism under the leadership of Charles Austin and looked up to James Mill as their leader. The hatred for 'sentimentalism' and 'vague generalities' and the indifference to mere poetical and literary interests were common to both. The strong points of Benthamism may, I think, be summed up in two words. It meant reverence for facts. Knowledge was to be sought not by logical jugglery but by scrupulous observation and systematic appeals to experience. Whether in grasping at solid elements of knowledge Benthamists let drop elements of equal value, though of less easy apprehension, is not to my purpose. But to a man whose predominant faculty was strong common sense, who was absolutely resolved that whatever paths he took should lead to realities, and traverse solid ground instead of following some will-o'-the-wisp through metaphysical quagmires amidst the delusive mists of a lawless imagination, there was an obvious fascination in the Bentham mode of thought. It must be added, too, that at this time J. S. Mill, the inheritor of Bentham's influences, was at the height of his great reputation. The young men who graduated in 1850 and the following ten years found their philosophical teaching in Mill's 'Logic,' and only a few daring heretics were beginning to pick holes in his system. Fitzjames certainly became a disciple and before long an advocate of these principles. I find one or two other indications of disturbing studies. He says in a letter that Greg's 'Creed of Christendom' (published in 1851) was the first book of the kind which he read without the sense that he was trespassing on forbidden ground. He told me that he had once studied Lardner's famous 'Credibility of the Gospel History,' to which Greg may not improbably have sent him. The impression made upon him was (though the phrase was used long afterwards) that Lardner's case 'had not a leg to stand upon.' From the Benthamite point of view, the argument for Christianity must be simply the historical evidence. Paley, for whom Fitzjames had always a great respect, put the argument most skilfully in this shape. But if the facts are insufficient to a lawyer's eye, what is to happen? For reasons which will partly appear, Fitzjames did not at present draw the conclusions which to many seem obvious. It took him, in fact, years to develope distinctly new conclusions. But from this time his philosophical position was substantially that of Bentham, Mill, and the empiricists, while the superstructure of belief was a modified evangelicism.

My father's liberality of sentiment and the sceptical tendencies which lay, in spite of himself, in his intellectual tendencies, had indeed removed a good deal of the true evangelical dogmatism. Fitzjames for a time, as I have intimated, seems to have sought for a guide in Maurice. He had been attracted when at King's College by Maurice's personal qualities, and when, in 1853, Maurice had to leave King's College on account of his views about eternal punishment, Fitzjames took a leading part in getting up a testimonial from the old pupils of his teacher. When he became a law student he naturally frequented Maurice's sermons at Lincoln's Inn. Nothing could be more impressive than the manner of the preacher. His voice often trembled with emotion, and he spoke as one who had a solemn message of vast importance to mankind. But what was the message which could reach a hard-headed young 'lawyer by nature' with a turn for Benthamism? Fitzjames gives a kind of general form of Maurice's sermons. First would come an account of some dogma as understood by the vulgar. Tom Paine could not put it more pithily or expressively. Then his hearers were invited to look at the plain words of Scripture. Do they not mean this or that, he would ask, which is quite different to what they had been made to mean? My answer would have been, says Fitzjames, that his questions were 'mere confused hints,' which required all kinds of answers, but mostly the answer 'No, not at all.' Then, however, came Maurice's own answers to them. About this time his hearer used to become drowsy, with 'an indistinct consciousness of a pathetic quavering set of entreaties to believe what, when it was intelligible, was quite unsatisfactory.' Long afterwards he says somewhere that it was 'like watching the struggles of a drowning creed.' Fitzjames, however, fancied for a time that he was more or less of a Mauricean.

From one of his friends, the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, I have some characteristic recollections of the time. Mr. Davies was a college friend, and remembers his combativeness and his real underlying warmth of feeling. He remembers how, in 1848, Fitzjames was confident that the 'haves' could beat the 'have nots,' 'set his teeth' and exclaimed, 'Let them come on.' Mr. Davies was now engaged in clerical work at the East-end of London. My brother took pleasure in visiting his friend there, learnt something of the ways of the district, and gave a lecture to a Limehouse audience. He attended a coffee-house discussion upon the existence of God, and exposed the inconclusiveness of the atheistic conclusions. On another occasion he went with 'Tom,' now Judge Hughes, to support Mr. Davies, who addressed a crowd in Leman Street one Sunday night. Hughes endeavoured to suppress a boy who was disposed for mischief. The boy threw himself on the ground, with Hughes holding him down. Fitzjames, raising a huge stick, plunged into the thick of the crowd. No one, however, stood forth as a champion of disorder; and Mr. Davies, guarded by his stalwart supporters, was able to speak to a quiet audience. Fitzjames, says Mr. Davies, was always ready for an argument in those days. He did not seek for a mere dialectical triumph; but he was resolved to let no assumption pass unchallenged, and, above all, to disperse sentiment and to insist upon what was actual and practical. He wrote to Mr. Davies in reference to some newspaper controversies: 'As to playing single-stick without being ever hit myself, I have no sort of taste for it; the harder you hit the better. I always hit my hardest.' 'Some people profess,' he once said to the same friend, 'that the sermon on the Mount is the only part of Christianity which they can accept. It is to me the hardest part to accept.' In fact, he did not often turn the second cheek. He said in the same vein that he should prefer the whole of the Church service to be made 'colder and less personal, and to revive the days of Paley and Sydney Smith.' (The Church of the eighteenth century, only without the disturbing influence of Wesley, was, as he once remarked long afterwards, his ideal.) 'After quoting these words,' says Mr. Davies in conclusion, 'I may be permitted to add those with which he closed the note written to me before he went to India (November 4, 1869), "God bless you. It's not a mere phrase, nor yet an unmeaning or insincere one in my mouth—affectionately yours."'

I shall venture to quote in this connection a letter from my father, which needs a word of preface. Among his experiments in journalism, Fitzjames had taken to writing for the 'Christian Observer,' an ancient, and, I imagine, at the time, an almost moribund representative of the evangelical party. Henry Venn had suggested, it seems, that Fitzjames might become editor. Fitzjames appears to have urged that his theology was not of the desired type. He consulted my father, however, who admitted the difficulty to be insuperable, but thought for a moment that they might act together as editor and sub-editor. My father says in his letters (August 4 and 8, 1854): 'I adhere with no qualifications of which I am conscious to the theological views of my old Clapham friends. You, I suppose, are an adherent of Mr. Maurice. To myself it appears that he is nothing more than a great theological rhetorician, and that his only definite and appreciable meaning is that of wedding the gospel to some form of philosophy, if so to conceal its baldness. But Paul of Tarsus many ages ago forbade the banns.' In a second letter he says that there does not seem to be much real difference between Fitzjames's creed and his own. 'It seems to me quite easy to have a theological theory quite complete and systematic enough for use; and scarcely possible to reach such a theory with any view to speculation—easy, I mean, and scarcely possible for the unlearned class to which I belong. The learned are, I trust and hope, far more fixed and comprehensive in their views than they seem to me to be, but if I dared trust to my own observation I should say that they are determined to erect into a science a series of propositions which God has communicated to us as so many detached and, to us, irreconcilable verities; the common link or connecting principle of which He has not seen fit to communicate. I am profoundly convinced of the consistency of all the declarations of Scripture; but I am as profoundly convinced of my own incapacity to perceive that they are consistent. I can receive them each in turn, and to some extent I can, however feebly, draw nutriment from each of them. To blend them one with another into an harmonious or congruous whole surpasses my skill, or perhaps my diligence. But what then? I am here not to speculate but to repent, to believe and to obey; and I find no difficulty whatever in believing, each in turn, doctrines which yet seem to me incompatible with each other. It is in this sense and to this extent that I adopt the whole of the creed called evangelical. I adopt it as a regulator of the affections, as a rule of life and as a quietus, not as a stimulant to inquiry. So, I gather, do you, and if so, I at least have no right to quarrel with you on that account. Only, if you and I are unscientific Christians, let us be patient and reverent towards those whose deeper minds or more profound inquiries, or more abundant spiritual experience, may carry them through difficulties which surpass our strength.'

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

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

The connection with the 'Christian Observer' was of value, not for the few guineas earned, but as leading to occasional visits to Harrow. Fitzjames says that he took great pains with his articles, and probably improved his style, though 'kind old Mr. Cunningham' had to add a few sentences to give them the proper tone. They got him some credit from the small circle which they reached, but that was hardly his main object. 'This period of my life closed by my being engaged on November 11, 1854, at Brighton, just eighteen years to the day after I went to school there, and by my being married on April 19, 1855, at Harrow church, where my father and mother were married forty years before.' The marriage, he says, 'was a blessed revelation to me. It turned me from a rather heavy, torpid youth into the happiest of men, and, for many years, one of the most ardent and energetic. It was like the lines in Tennyson—

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.