Chapter II: Early Life (3)

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--

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 title); 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 class 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.']