V. JAMES STEPHEN, COLONIAL UNDER-SECRETARY
The young couple began prosperously enough. My father's business was increasing; and after the peace they spent some summer vacations in visits to the continent. They visited Switzerland, still unhackneyed, though Byron and Shelley were celebrating its charms. Long afterwards I used to hear from my mother of the superlative beauties of the Wengern Alp and the Staubbach (though she never, I suspect, read 'Manfred'), and she kept up for years a correspondence with a monk of the hospital on the St. Bernard. Her first child, Herbert Venn Stephen, was born September 30, 1822; and about this time a change took place in my father's position. He had a severe illness, caused, it was thought, by over-work. He had for a time to give up his chancery business and then to consider whether he should return to it and abandon the Colonial Office, or give up the bar to take a less precarious position now offered to him in the office. His doubts of health and his new responsibilities as a father decided him. On January 25, 1825, he was appointed Counsel to the Colonial Office, and on August 2 following Counsel to the Board of Trade, receiving 1,500l. a year for the two offices, and abandoning his private practice. A daughter, Frances Wilberforce, was born on September 8, 1824, but died on July 22 following. A quaint portrait in which she is represented with her elder brother, in a bower of roses, is all that remains to commemorate her brief existence. For some time Herbert was an only son; and a delicate constitution made his education very difficult. My father hit upon the most successful of several plans for the benefit of his children when, at the beginning of 1829, he made arrangements under which Frederick Waymouth Gibbs became an inmate of our family in order to give my brother a companion. Although this plan was changed three years later, Frederick Gibbs became, as he has ever since remained, a kind of adopted brother to us, and was in due time in the closest intimacy with my brother James Fitzjames.
After his acceptance of the permanent appointment my father's energies were for twenty-two years devoted entirely to the Colonial Office. I must dwell at some length upon his character and position, partly for his sake and partly because it is impossible without understanding them to understand my brother's career.
My brother's whole life was profoundly affected, as he fully recognised, by his father's influence. Fitzjames prefixed a short life of my father to a posthumous edition of the 'Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography.' The concluding sentence is significant of the writer's mood. 'Of Sir James Stephen's private life and character,' he says, 'nothing is said here, as these are matters with which the public has no concern, and on which the evidence of his son would not be impartial.' My brother would, I think, have changed that view in later years. I, at any rate, do not feel that my partiality, whatever it may be, is a disqualification for attempting a portrait. And, though the public may have no right to further knowledge, I think that such part of the public as reads these pages may be the better for knowing something more of a man of whom even a son may say that he was one of the conspicuously good and able men of his generation.
The task, however, is no easy one. His character, in the first place, is not one to be defined by a single epithet. 'Surely,' said his friend Sir Henry Taylor to him upon some occasion, 'the simple thing to do is so and so.' He answered doubtfully, adding, 'The truth is I am not a simple man.' 'No,' said Taylor, 'you are the most composite man that I have met with in all my experience of human nature.'[31] Taylor entered the Colonial Office in the beginning of 1824, and soon formed an intimate and lifelong friendship with his colleague. His autobiography contains some very vivid records of the impression made by my father's character upon a very fine observer in possession of ample opportunities for knowledge. It does something, though less than I could wish, to diminish another difficulty which encounters me. My father's official position necessarily throws an impenetrable veil over the work to which his main energies were devoted. His chief writings were voluminous and of great practical importance: but they repose in the archives of the Colonial Office; and even such despatches of his as have seen the light are signed by other names, and do not necessarily represent his opinions. 'The understanding,' says my brother in the 'Life,' 'upon which permanent offices in the civil service of the Crown are held is that those who accept them shall give up all claim to personal reputation on the one hand and be shielded from personal responsibility on the other.' Of this compact, as Fitzjames adds, neither my father nor his family could complain. His superiors might sometimes gain credit or incur blame which was primarily due to the adoption of his principles. He was sometimes attacked, on the other hand, for measures attributed to his influence, but against which he had really protested, although he was precluded from any defence of his conduct. To write the true history of our colonial policy in his time would be as much beyond my powers as it is outside my purpose; to discriminate his share in it would probably be now impossible for anyone. I can only take a few hints from Sir Henry Taylor and from my brother's account which will sufficiently illustrate some of my father's characteristics.
'For a long period,' says Taylor,[32] 'Stephen might better have been called the "Colonial Department" itself than "Counsel to the Colonial Department."' During Lord Glenelg's tenure of office (1835-1839), and for many years before and after, 'he literally ruled the Colonial empire.'[33] This involved unremitting labour. Taylor observes that Stephen 'had an enormous appetite for work,' and 'rather preferred not to be helped. I,' he adds, humorously, 'could make him perfectly welcome to any amount of it.' For years he never left London for a month, and, though in the last five years preceding his retirement in 1847, he was absent for rather longer periods, he took a clerk with him and did business in the country as regularly as in town.
His duties were of the most various kind. The colonies, as my brother observes, were a collection of states varying from youthful nations like Canada down to a small settlement of Germans on the rock of Heligoland; their populations differed in race, laws, religion, and languages; the authority of the Crown varied from absolute power over an infant settlement to supremacy over communities in some essential respects independent. My father's duty was to be familiar with every detail of these complicated relations, to know the state of parties and local politics in each colony, and to be able to advise successive Secretaries of State who came without special preparation to the task. He had to prepare drafts of all important despatches and of the numerous Acts of Parliament which were required during a period of rapid and important changes. 'I have been told,' says my brother, elsewhere,[34] that 'he was a perfectly admirable Under-Secretary of State, quick, firm, courageous, and a perfect master of his profession and of all the special knowledge which his position required, and which, I believe, no other man in England possessed to anything like the same extent.'
A man of long experience, vast powers of work, and decided views naturally obtained great influence with his superiors; and that such an influence was potent became generally believed among persons interested in and often aggrieved by the policy of the Government. Stephen was nicknamed as 'King Stephen,' or 'Mr. Over-Secretary Stephen,' or 'Mr. Mother-Country Stephen.' The last epithet, attributed to Charles Buller, meant that when the colonies were exhorted to pay allegiance to the mother country they were really called upon to obey the irrepressible Under-Secretary. I dimly divine, though I am not much of a politician, that there is an advantage in criticising the permanent official in a department. He cannot answer an attack upon him, and it is also an attack upon the superior who has yielded to his influence. At any rate, though my father received the warmest commendation from his official superiors, he acquired a considerable share of unpopularity. For this there were other reasons, of which I shall presently speak.
Little as I can say of the details of this policy in which he was concerned, there are one or two points of which I must speak. My father had accepted the appointment, according to Taylor, partly with the view of gaining an influence upon the slavery question. In this, says Taylor, he was eminently successful, and his success raised the first outcry against him.[35] His family and friends were all, as I have shown, deeply engaged in the anti-slavery agitation. As an official he could of course take no part in such action, and his father had to give solemn assurances that the son had given him no information. But the power of influencing the Government in the right direction was of equal importance to the cause. The elaborate Act, still in force, by which previous legislation against the slave trade was finally consolidated and extended was passed in 1824 (5 George IV. cap. 113). It was drawn by my father and dictated by him in one day and at one sitting.[36] It fills twenty-three closely printed octavo pages. At this time the Government was attempting to adopt a middle course between the abolitionists and the planters by passing what were called 'meliorating Acts,' Acts, that is, for improving the treatment of the slaves. The Colonial Assemblies declined to accept the proposals. The Colonial Office remonstrated, obtained reports and wrote despatches, pointing out any abuses discovered: the despatches were laid before Parliament and republished by Zachary Macaulay in the 'Anti-slavery Reporter.' Agitation increased. An insurrection of slaves in Jamaica in 1831, cruelly suppressed by the whites, gave indirectly a death blow to slavery. Abolition, especially after the Reform Bill, became inevitable, but the question remained whether the grant of freedom should be immediate or gradual, and whether compensation should be granted to the planters. The problem had been discussed by Stephen, Taylor, and Lord Howick, afterwards Earl Grey (1802-1894), and various plans had been considered. In March 1833, however, Mr. Stanley, afterwards Lord Derby, became head of the Colonial Office; and the effect was at first to reduce Stephen and Taylor to their 'original insignificance.' They had already been attacked in the press for taking too much upon themselves, and Stanley now prepared a measure without their assistance. He found that he had not the necessary experience for a difficult task, and was soon obliged to have recourse to Stephen, who prepared the measure which was finally passed. The delay had made expedition necessary if slavery was not to continue for another year. My father received notice to draw the Act on Saturday morning. He went home and completed his task by the middle of the day on Monday. The Act (3 & 4 William IV. c. 73) contains sixty-six sections, fills twenty-six pages in the octavo edition of the Statute-book, and creates a whole scheme of the most intricate and elaborate kind. The amanuensis to whom it was dictated used to tell the story as an illustration of his own physical powers. At that time, as another clerk in the office tells my brother, 'it was no unusual thing for your father to dictate before breakfast as much as would fill thirty sides of office folio paper,' equal to about ten pages of the 'Edinburgh Review,' The exertion, however, in this instance was exceptional: only upon one other occasion did my father ever work upon a Sunday; it cost him a severe nervous illness and not improbably sowed the seed of later attacks.[37]
I can say little of my father's action in later years. On September 17, 1834, he was appointed to the newly created office of Assistant Under-Secretary of State. He had, says Taylor, for many years done the work of the Under-Secretary, and he objected to doing it any longer on the same terms. The Under-Secretary complained to Lord Melbourne that his subordinate desired to supplant him, and got only the characteristic reply, 'It looks devilishly like it.'[38] In 1836 he had to retire, and my father became Under-Secretary in his place, with a salary of 2,000l. a year, on February 4 of that year, and at the same time gave up his connection with the Board of Trade. He was actively concerned in the establishment of responsible government in Canada. The relations with that colony were, as my brother says, 'confused and entangled in every possible way by personal and party questions at home and by the violent dissensions which existed in Canada itself.' The difficulty was aggravated, he adds, by the fact that my father, whatever his personal influence, had no authority whatever; and although his principles were ultimately adopted he had constantly to take part in measures which he disapproved. 'Stephen's opinions,' says Taylor, 'were more liberal than those of most of his chiefs, and at one period he gave more power than he intended to a Canadian Assembly from placing too much confidence in their intentions.'[39] Upon this matter, however, Taylor admits that he was not fully informed. I will only add that my father appears to have shared the opinions then prevalent among the Liberal party that the colonies would soon be detached from the mother country. On the appointment of a Governor-General of Canada, shortly before his resignation of office, he observes in a diary that it is not unlikely to be the last that will ever be made.[40]
I have already noticed my father's unpopularity. It was a not unlikely result of exercising a great and yet occult influence upon a department of Government which is likely in any case to be more conspicuous for its failures than for its successes. There were, however, more personal reasons which I think indicate his peculiar characteristics. I have said enough to illustrate his gluttony of work. I should guess that, without intending it, he was also an exacting superior. He probably over-estimated the average capacity for work of mankind, and condemned their indolence too unsparingly. Certainly his estimate of the quantity of good work got out of officials in a public office was not a high one. Nor, I am sure, did he take a sanguine view of the utility of such work as was done in the Colonial Office. 'Colonial Office being an Impotency' (as Carlyle puts it in his 'Reminiscences,' 'as Stephen inarticulately, though he never said or whispered it, well knew), what could an earnest and honest kind of man do but try [to] teach you how not to do [it]?'[41] I fancy that this gives in Carryle's manner the unpleasant side of a true statement. My father gave his whole life to work, which he never thought entirely satisfactory, although he did his duty without a word of complaint. Once, when advising Taylor to trust rather to literature than to Government employment, he remarked, 'You may write off the first joints of your fingers for them, and then you may write off the second joints, and all that they will say of you is, "What a remarkably short-fingered man!"'[42] But he had far too much self-respect to grumble at the inevitable results of the position.
My father, however, was a man of exquisitely sensitive nature—a man, as my mother warned his children, 'without a skin,' and he felt very keenly the attacks of which he could take no notice. In early days this had shown itself by a shyness 'remarkable,' says Taylor, beyond all 'shyness that you could imagine in anyone whose soul had not been pre-existent in a wild duck.'[43] His extreme sensibility showed itself too in other ways. He was the least sanguine of mankind. He had, as he said in a letter, 'a morbidly vivid perception of possible evils and remote dangers.' A sensitive nature dreads nothing so much as a shock, and instinctively prepares for it by always anticipating the worst. He always expected, if I may say so, to be disappointed in his expectations. The tendency showed itself in a general conviction that whatever was his own must therefore be bad. He could not bear to have a looking-glass in his room lest he should be reminded of his own appearance. 'I hate mirrors vitrical and human,' he says, when wondering how he might appear to others. He could not bear that his birthday should be even noticed, though he did not, like Swift, commemorate it by a remorseful ceremonial. He shrank from every kind of self-assertion; and in matters outside his own province often showed to men of abilities very inferior to his own a deference which to those who did not know him might pass for affectation. The life of a recluse had strong attractions for him. He was profoundly convinced that the happiest of all lives was that of a clergyman, who could devote himself to study and to the quiet duties of his profession. Circumstances had forced a different career upon him. He had as a very young man taken up a profession which is not generally supposed to be propitious to retiring modesty; and was ever afterwards plunged into active business, which brought him into rough contact with politicians and men of business of all classes. The result was that he formed a manner calculated to shield himself and keep his interlocutors at a distance. It might be called pompous, and was at any rate formal and elaborate. The natural man lurked behind a barrier of ceremony, and he rarely showed himself unless in full dress. He could unbend in his family, but in the outer world he put on his defensive armour of stately politeness, which even for congenial minds made familiarity difficult if it effectually repelled impertinence. But beneath this sensitive nature lay an energetic and even impetuous character, and an intellect singularly clear, subtle, and decisive. His reasons were apt to be complicated, but he came to very definite results, and was both rapid and resolute in action. He had 'a strong will,' says Taylor, 'and great tenacity of opinion. When he made a mistake, which was very seldom considering the prodigious quantity of business he despatched, his subordinates could rarely venture to point it out; he gave them so much trouble before he could be evicted from his error.' In private life, as Taylor adds, his friends feared to suggest any criticisms; not because he resented advice but because he suffered so much from blame.
Another peculiarity was oddly blended with this. Among his topics of self-humiliation, sufficiently frequent, one was his excess of 'loquacity.' A very shy man, it is often remarked, may shrink from talking, but when he begins to talk he talks enormously. My father, at any rate, had a natural gift for conversation. He could pour out a stream of talk such as, to the best of my knowledge, I have never heard equalled. The gift was perhaps stimulated by accidents. The weakness of his eyes had forced him to depend very much upon dictation. I remember vividly the sound of his tread as he tramped up and down his room, dictating to my mother or sister, who took down his words in shorthand and found it hard to keep pace with him. Even his ordinary conversation might have been put into print with scarcely a correction, and was as polished and grammatically perfect as his finished writing. The flow of talk was no doubt at times excessive. Taylor tells of an indignant gentleman who came to his room after attempting to make some communication to the Under-Secretary. Mr. Stephen, he said, had at once begun to speak, and after discoursing for half an hour without a moment's pause, courteously bowed the gentleman out, thanking him for the valuable information which still remained unuttered. Sir James Stephen, said Lord Monteagle to Carlyle, 'shuts his eyes on you and talks as if he were dictating a colonial despatch.'[44] This refers to a nervous trick of shyness. When talking, his eyelids often had a tremulous motion which concealed the eyes themselves, and gave to at least one stranger the impression that he was being addressed by a blind man.
The talk, however, was always pointed and very frequently as brilliant as it was copious. With all the monotony of utterance, says Taylor, 'there was such a variety and richness of thought and language, and often so much wit and humour, that one could not help being interested and attentive.' On matters of business, he adds, 'the talk could not be of the same quality and was of the same continuity.' He gives one specimen of the 'richness of conversational diction' which I may quote. My father mentioned to Taylor an illness from which the son of Lord Derby was suffering. He explained his knowledge by saying that Lord Derby had spoken of the case to him in a tone for which he was unprepared. 'In all the time when I saw him daily I cannot recollect that he ever said one word to me about anything but business; and when the stupendous glacier, which had towered over my head for so many years, came to dissolve and descend upon me in parental dew, you may imagine, &c., &c.[45] My brother gives an account to which I can fully subscribe, so far as my knowledge goes. Our father's printed books, he says, show his mind 'in full dress, as under restraint and subject to the effect of habitual self-distrust. They give no idea of the vigour and pungency and freedom with which he could speak or let himself loose or think aloud as he did to me. Macaulay was infinitely more eloquent, and his memory was a thing by itself. Carlyle was striking and picturesque, and, after a fashion, forcible to the last degree. John Austin discoursed with the greatest dignity and impressiveness. But my father's richness of mind and union of wisdom, good sense, keenness and ingenuity, put him, in my opinion, quite on the same sort of level as these distinguished men; and gave me a feeling about him which attuned itself with and ran into the conviction that he was also one of the very kindest, most honourable, and best men I ever knew in my whole life.' From my recollection, which is less perfect than was my brother's, I should add that one thing which especially remains with me was the stamp of fine literary quality which marked all my father's conversation. His talk, however copious, was never commonplace; and, boy as I was when I listened, I was constantly impressed by the singular skill with which his clear-cut phrases and lively illustrations put even familiar topics into an apparently new and effective light.
The comparison made by my brother between my father's talk and his writings may be just, though I do not altogether agree with it. The 'Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography,' by which he is best known, were written during the official career which I have described.
The composition was to him a relaxation, and they were written early in the morning or late at night, or in the intervals of his brief holidays. I will not express any critical judgment of their qualities; but this I will say: putting aside Macaulay's 'Essays,' which possess merits of an entirely different order, I do not think that any of the collected essays republished from the 'Edinburgh Review' indicate a natural gift for style equal to my father's. Judging from these, which are merely the overflowing of a mind employed upon other most absorbing duties, I think that my father, had he devoted his talents to literature, would have gained a far higher place than has been reached by any of his family.[46]
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]