CHAPTER II
EARLY LIFE
I. CHILDHOOD
In the beginning of 1829 my father settled in a house at Kensington Gore—now 42 Hyde Park Gate. There his second son, James Fitzjames, was born on March 3, 1829. James was the name upon which my grandfather insisted because it was his own. My father, because the name was his own, objected as long as he could, but at last compounded, and averted the evil omen, by adding Fitzjames. Two other children, Leslie and Caroline Emelia, were born in 1832 and 1834 at the same house. The Kensington of those days was still distinctly separate from London. A high wall divided Kensington Gardens from the Hounslow Road; there were still deer in the Gardens; cavalry barracks close to Queen's Gate, and a turnpike at the top of the Gloucester Road. The land upon which South Kensington has since arisen was a region of market gardens, where in our childhood we strolled with our nurse along genuine country lanes.
It would be in my power, if it were desirable, to give an unusually minute account of my brother's early childhood. My mother kept a diary, and, I believe, never missed a day for over sixty years. She was also in the habit of compiling from this certain family 'annals' in which she inserted everything that struck her as illustrative of the character of her children. About 1884 my brother himself began a fragment of autobiography, which he continued at intervals during the next two or three years. For various reasons I cannot transfer it as a whole to these pages, but it supplies me with some very important indications.[49] A comparison with my mother's contemporary account of the incidents common to both proves my brother's narrative to be remarkably accurate. Indeed, though he disclaimed the possession of unusual powers of memory in general, he had a singularly retentive memory for facts and dates, and amused himself occasionally by exercising his faculty. He had, for example, a certain walking-stick upon which he made a notch after a day's march; it served instead of a diary, and years afterwards he would explain what was the particular expedition indicated by any one of the very numerous notches.
Although I do not wish to record trifles important only in the eyes of a mother, or interesting only from private associations, I will give enough from these sources to illustrate his early development; or rather to show how much of the later man was already to be found in the infant. It requires perhaps some faith in maternal insight to believe that before he was three months old he showed an uncommon power of 'amusing himself with his own thoughts,' and had 'a calm, composed dignity in his countenance which was quite amusing in so young a creature.' It will be more easily believed that he was healthy and strong, and by the age of six months 'most determined to have his own way.' On August 15, 1830, Wilberforce was looking at the baby, when he woke up, burst into a laugh, and exclaimed 'Funny!' a declaration which Wilberforce no doubt took in good part, though it seems to have been interpreted as a reflection upon the philanthropist's peculiar figure. My brother himself gives a detailed description of his grandfather from an interview which occurred when the old gentleman was seventy-six and the infant very little more than three years old. He remembers even the room and the precise position of the persons present. He remembers too (and his mother's diary confirms the fact) how in the same year he announced that the Reform Bill had 'passed.' It was 'a very fine thing,' he said, being in fact a bill stuck upon a newsboy's hat, inscribed, as his nurse informed him, with the words 'Reform Bill.'
Although his memory implies early powers of observation, he did not show the precocity of many clever children. He was still learning to read about his fifth birthday, and making, as his mother complains, rather slow progress. But if not specially quick at his lessons, he gave very early and, as it seems to me, very noticeable proofs of thoughtfulness and independence of character. He was, as he remained through life, remarkable for that kind of sturdy strength which goes with a certain awkwardness and even sluggishness. To use a modern phrase, he had a great store of 'potential energy,' which was not easily convertible to purposes of immediate application. His mind swarmed with ideas, which would not run spontaneously into the regulation moulds. His mother's influence is perceptible in an early taste for poetry. In his third year he learnt by heart 'Sir John Moore's Burial,' 'Nelson and the North,' Wordsworth's 'Address to the Winds,' and Lord F. L. Gower's translation of Schiller ('When Jove had encircled this planet with light') from hearing his brother's repetition. He especially delighted in this bit of Schiller and in 'Chevy Chase,' though he resisted Watts' hymns. In the next two or three years he learns a good deal of poetry, and on September 5, 1834, repeats fifty lines of Henry the Fifth's speech before Agincourt without a fault. 'Pilgrim's Progress' and 'Robinson Crusoe' are read in due course as his reading improves, and he soon delights in getting into a room by himself and surrounding himself with books. His religious instruction of course began at the earliest possible period, and he soon learnt by heart many simple passages of the Bible. He made his first appearance at family prayers in November 1830, when the ceremony struck him as 'funny,' but he soon became interested and was taught to pray for himself. In 1832 his elder brother has nicknamed him the 'little preacher,' from his love of virtuous admonitions. In 1834 he confides to his mother that he has invented a prayer for himself which is 'not, you know, a childish sort of invention'; and in 1835 he explains that he has followed the advice given in a sermon (he very carefully points out that it was only advice, not an order) to pray regularly. Avowals of this kind, however, have to be elicited from him by delicate maternal questioning. He is markedly averse to any display of feeling. 'You should keep your love locked up as I do' is a characteristic remark at the age of four to his eldest brother. The effect of the religious training is apparently perceptible in a great tendency to self-analysis. His thoughts sometimes turn to other problems;—in October, 1835, for example, he asks the question which has occurred to so many thoughtful children,'How do we know that the world is not a dream?'—but he is chiefly interested in his own motives. He complains in January 1834 that he has naughty thoughts. His father tells him to send them away without even thinking about them. He takes the advice, but afterwards explains that he is so proud of sending them away that he 'wants to get them that he may send them away.' He objects to a reward for being good, because it will make him do right from a wrong motive. He shrinks from compliments. In October 1835 he leaves a room where some carpenters were at work because they had said something which he was sorry to have heard. They had said, as it appeared upon anxious inquiry, that he would make a good carpenter, and he felt that he was being cajoled. He remarks that even pleasures become painful when they are ordered, and explains why his sixth birthday was disappointing; he had expected too much.
His thoughtfulness took shapes which made him at times anything but easy to manage. He could be intensely obstinate. The first conflict with authority took place on June 28, 1831, when he resolutely declared that he would not say the 'Busy Bee.' This event became famous in the nursery, for in September 1834 he has to express contrition for having in play used the words 'By the busy bee' as an infantile equivalent to an oath. One difficulty was that he declined to repeat what was put into his mouth, or to take first principles in ethics for granted. When his mother reads a text to him (May 1832), he retorts, 'Then I will not be like a little child; I do not want to go to heaven; I would rather stay on earth.' He declines (in 1834) to join in a hymn which expresses a desire to die and be with God. Even good people, he says, may prefer to stay in this world. 'I don't want to be as good and wise as Tom Macaulay' is a phrase of 1832, showing that even appeals to concrete ideals of the most undeniable excellence fail to overpower him. He gradually developed a theory which became characteristic, and which he obstinately upheld when driven into a logical corner. A stubborn conflict arose in 1833, when his mother was forced to put him in solitary confinement during the family teatime. She overhears a long soliloquy in which he admits his error, contrasts his position with that of the happy who are perhaps even now having toast and sugar, and compares his position to the 'last night of Pharaoh.' 'What a barbarian I am to myself!' he exclaims, and resolves that this shall be his last outbreak. On being set at liberty, he says that he was naughty on purpose, and not only submits but requests to be punished. For a short time he applies spontaneously for punishments, though he does not always submit when the request is granted. But this is a concession under difficulties. His general position is that by punishing him his mother only 'procures him to be much more naughty,' and he declines as resolutely as Jeremy Bentham to admit that naughtiness in itself involves unhappiness, or that the happiness of naughtiness should not be taken into account. He frequently urges that it is pleasanter while it lasts to give way to temper, and that the discomfort only comes afterwards. It follows logically, as he argues in 1835, that if a man could be naughty all his life he would be quite happy. Some time later (1838) he is still arguing the point, having now reached the conclusion to which the Emperor Constantine gave a practical application. The desirable thing would be to be naughty all your life, and to repent just at the end.
These declarations are of course only interpolations in the midst of many more edifying though less original remarks. He was exceedingly conscientious, strongly attached to his parents, and very kind to his younger brother and sister. I note that when he was four years old he already thought it, as he did ever afterwards, one of the greatest of treats to have a solitary talk with his father. He was, however, rather unsociable and earned the nickname of 'Gruffian' for his occasionally surly manner. This, with a stubborn disposition and occasional fits of the sulks, must have made it difficult to manage a child who persisted in justifying 'naughtiness' upon general principles. He was rather inclined to be indolent, and his mother regrets that he is not so persevering as Frederick (Gibbs). His great temptation, he says himself, in his childhood was to be 'effeminate and lazy,' and 'to justify these vices by intellectual and religious excuses.' A great deal of this, he adds, has been 'knocked out of him'; he cannot call himself a sluggard or a hypocrite, nor has he acted like a coward. 'Indeed,' he says, 'from my very infancy I had an instinctive dislike of the maudlin way of looking at things,' and he remembers how in his fifth year he had declared that guns were not 'dreadful things.' They were good if put to the proper uses. I do not think that there was ever much real 'effeminacy' to be knocked out of him. It is too harsh a word for the slowness with which a massive and not very flexible character rouses itself to action. His health was good, except for a trifling ailment which made him for some time pass for a delicate child. But the delicacy soon passed off and for the next fifty years he enjoyed almost unbroken health.
In 1836 he explains some bluntness of behaviour by an argument learnt from 'Sandford and Merton' that politeness is objectionable. In August occurs a fit of obstinacy. He does not want to be forgiven but to be 'happy and comfortable.' 'I do not feel sorry, for I always make the best of my condition in every possible way, and being sorry would make me uncomfortable. That is not to make the best of my condition.' His mother foresees a contest and remarks 'a daring and hardened spirit which is not natural to him.' Soon after, I should perhaps say in consequence of, these outbreaks he was sent to school. My mother's first cousin, Henry Venn Elliott, was incumbent of St. Mary's Chapel at Brighton and a leading evangelical preacher. At Brighton, too, lived his sister, Miss Charlotte Elliott, author of some very popular hymns and of some lively verses of a secular kind. Fitzjames would be under their wing at Brighton, where Elliott recommended a school kept by the Rev. B. Guest, at 7 Sussex Square. My mother took him down by the Brighton coach, and he entered the school on November 10, 1836.[50] The school, says Fitzjames, was in many ways very good; the boys were well taught and well fed. But it was too decorous; there was no fighting and no bullying and rather an excess of evangelical theology. The boys used to be questioned at prayers. 'Gurney, what's the difference between justification and sanctification?' 'Stephen, prove the Omnipotence of God.' Many of the hymns sung by the boys remained permanently in my brother's memory, and he says that he could give the names of all the masters and most of the boys and a history of all incidents in chronological order. Guest's eloquence about justification by faith seems to have stimulated his pupil's childish speculations. He read a tract in which four young men discuss the means of attaining holiness. One says, 'Meditate on the goodness of God'; a second, 'on the happiness of heaven'; a third, 'on the tortures of hell'; and a fourth, 'on the love of Christ.' The last plan was approved in the tract; but Fitzjames thought meditation on hell more to the purpose, and set about it deliberately. He imagined the world transformed into a globe of iron, white hot, with a place in the middle made to fit him so closely that he could not even wink. The globe was split like an orange; he was thrust by an angel into his place, immortal, unconsumable, and capable of infinite suffering; and then the two halves were closed, and he left in hideous isolation to suffer eternal torments. I guess from my own experience that other children have had similar fancies. He adds, however, a characteristic remark. 'It seemed to me then, as it seems now, that no stronger motive, no motive anything like so strong, can be applied to actuate any human creature toward any line of conduct. To compare the love of God or anything else is to my mind simply childish.' He refers to Mill's famous passage about going to hell rather than worship a bad God, and asks what Mill would say after an experience of a quarter of an hour. Fitzjames, however, did not dwell upon such fancies. They were merely the childish mode of speculation by concrete imagery. He became more sociable, played cricket, improved in health, and came home with the highest of characters as being the best and most promising boy in the school. He rose steadily, and seems to have been thoroughly happy for the next five years and a half.
In 1840 my mother observed certain peculiarities in me which she took at first to be indications of precocious genius. After a time, however, she consulted an eminent physician, who informed her that they were really symptoms of a disordered circulation. He added that I was in a fair way to become feeble in mind and deformed in body, and strongly advised that I should be sent to school, where my brain would be in less danger of injudicious stimulation. He declared that even my life was at stake. My father, much alarmed, took one of his prompt decisions. He feared to trust so delicate a child away from home, and therefore resolved to take a house in Brighton for a year or two, from which I might attend my brother's school. The Kensington house was let, and my mother and sister settled in Sussex Square, a few doors from Mr. Guest. My father, unable to leave his work, took a lodging in town and came to Brighton for Sundays, or occasionally twice a week. In those days the journey was still by coach. When the railway began running in the course of 1841, I find my father complaining that it could not be trusted, and had yet made all other modes of travelling impossible. 'How many men turned of fifty,' asks my brother, 'would have put themselves to such inconvenience, discomfort, and separation from their wives for the sake of screening a delicate lad from some of the troubles of a carefully managed boarding school?' My brother was not aware of the apparent gravity of the case when he wrote this. Such a measure would have pushed parental tenderness to weakness had there been only a question of comfort; but my father was seriously alarmed, and I can only think of his conduct with the deepest gratitude.
To Fitzjames the plan brought the advantage that he became his father's companion in Sunday strolls over the Downs. His father now found, as my mother's diary remarks, that he could already talk to him as to a man, and Fitzjames became dimly aware that there were difficulties about Mr. Guest's theology. He went with my father, too, to hear Mr. Sortaine, a popular preacher whose favourite topic was the denunciation of popery. My father explained to the boy that some able men really defended the doctrine of transubstantiation, and my brother, as he remarks, could not then suspect that under certain conditions very able men like nonsense, and are even not averse to 'impudent lying,' in defence of their own authority. Incidentally, too, my father said that there were such people as atheists, but that such views should be treated as we should treat one who insulted the character of our dearest friend. This remark, attributed to a man who was incapable of insulting anyone, and was a friend of such freethinkers as Austin and J. S. Mill, must be regarded as representing the impression made upon an inquisitive child by an answer adapted to his capacity. The impression was, however, very strong, and my brother notes that he heard it on a wettish evening on the cliff near the south end of the old Steine.
Fitzjames had discussed the merits of Mr. Guest's school with great intelligence and had expressed a wish to be sent to Rugby. He had heard bad accounts of the state of Eton, and some rumours of Arnold's influence had reached him. Arnold, someone had told him, could read a boy's character at a glance. At Easter 1841, my father visited the Diceys at Claybrook, and thence took his boy to see the great schoolmaster at Rugby. Fitzjames draws a little diagram to show how distinctly he remembers the scene. He looked at the dark, grave man and wondered, 'Is he now reading my character at a glance?' It does not appear that he was actually entered at Rugby, however, and my father had presently devised another scheme. The inconveniences of the Brighton plan had made themselves felt, and it now occurred to my father that he might take a house in Windsor and send both Fitzjames and me to Eton. We should thus, he hoped, get the advantages of a public school without being exposed to some of its hardships and temptations. He would himself be able to live with his family, although, as things then were, he had to drive daily to and from the Slough station, besides having the double journey from Paddington to Downing Street. We accordingly moved to Windsor in Easter 1842. Fitzjames's last months at school had not been quite so triumphant as the first, partly, it seems, from a slight illness, and chiefly for the characteristic reason, according to his master, that he would occupy himself with 'things too high for him.' He read solid works (I find mention of Carlyle's 'French Revolution') out of school hours and walked with an usher to whom he took a fancy, discoursing upon absorbing topics when he should have been playing cricket. Fitzjames left Brighton on the day, as he notes, upon which one Mister was hanged for attempting murder—being almost the last man in England hanged for anything short of actual murder. He entered Eton on April 15, 1842, and was placed in the 'Remove,' the highest class attainable at his age.