III. KING'S COLLEGE

On October 1, 1845, he entered King's College, London. Lodgings were taken for him at Highgate Hill, within a few doors of his uncle, Henry Venn. He walked the four miles to the college, dined at the Colonial Office at two, and returned by the omnibus. He was now his own master, the only restriction imposed upon him being that he should every evening attend family prayers at his uncle's house. The two years he spent at King's College were, he says, 'most happy.' He felt himself changed from a boy to a man. The King's College lads, who, indeed called themselves 'men,' were of a lower social rank than the Etonians, and, as Fitzjames adds, unmistakably inferior in physique. Boys who had the Strand as the only substitute for the playing-fields were hardly likely to show much physical prowess. But they had qualities more important to him. They were industrious, as became the sons of professional and business men. Their moral tone was remarkably good; he never knew, he says, a more thoroughly well-behaved set of lads, although he is careful to add that he does not think that in this respect Eton was bad. His whole education had been among youths 'singularly little disposed to vice or a riot in any form.' But the great change for him was that he could now find intellectual comradeship. There was a debating society, in which he first learnt to hear his own voice, and indeed became a prominent orator. He is reported to have won the surname 'Giant Grim.' His most intimate friend was the present Dr. Kitchin, Dean of Durham. The lads discussed politics and theology and literature, instead of putting down to affectation any interest outside of the river and the playing-fields. Fitzjames not only found himself in a more congenial atmosphere, but could hold his own better among youths whose standard of scholarship was less exalted than that of the crack Latin versemakers at Eton, although the average level was perhaps higher. In 1846 he won a scholarship, and at the summer examination was second in classics. In 1847 he was only just defeated for a scholarship by an elder boy, and was first, both in classics and English literature, in the examinations, besides winning a prize essay.

Here, as elsewhere, he was much interested by the theological tone of his little circle, which was oddly heterogeneous. There was, in the first place, his uncle, Henry Venn, to whom he naturally looked up as the exponent of the family orthodoxy. Long afterwards, upon Venn's death, he wrote, 'Henry Venn was the most triumphant man I ever knew.' 'I never,' he adds, 'knew a sturdier man.' Such qualities naturally commanded his respect, though he probably was not an unhesitating disciple. At King's College, meanwhile, which prided itself upon its Anglicanism, he came under a very different set of teachers. The principal, Dr. Jelf, represented the high and dry variety of Anglicanism. I can remember how, a little later, I used to listen with wonder to his expositions of the Thirty-nine Articles. What a marvellous piece of good fortune it was, I used dimly to consider, that the Church of England had always hit off precisely the right solution in so many and such tangled controversies! But King's College had a professor of a very different order in F. D. Maurice. His personal charm was remarkable, and if Fitzjames did not become exactly a disciple he was fully sensible of Maurice's kindness of nature and loftiness of purpose. He held, I imagine, in a vague kind of way, that here might perhaps be the prophet who was to guide him across the deserts of infidelity into the promised land where philosophy and religion will be finally reconciled. Of this, however, I shall have more to say hereafter.

I must now briefly mention the changes which took place at this time in our family. In 1846 my brother Herbert made a tour to Constantinople, and on his return home was seized by a fever and died at Dresden on October 22. My father and mother had started upon the first news of the illness, but arrived too late to see their son alive. Fitzjames in the interval came to Windsor, and, as my mother records, was like a father to the younger children. The journey to Dresden, with its terrible suspense and melancholy end, was a severe blow to my father. From that time, as it seems to me, he was a changed man. He had already begun to think of retiring from his post, and given notice that he must be considered as only holding it during the convenience of his superiors.[52] He gave up the house at Windsor, having, indeed, kept it on chiefly because Herbert was fond of the place. We settled for a time at Wimbledon. There my brother joined us in the early part of 1847. A very severe illness in the autumn of 1847 finally induced my father to resign his post. In recognition of his services he was made a privy councillor and K.C.B. His retirement was at first provisional, and, on recovering, he was anxious to be still employed in some capacity. The Government of the day considered the pension to which he was entitled an inadequate reward for his services. There was some talk of creating the new office of Assessor to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, to which he was to be appointed. This proved to be impracticable, but his claim was partly recognised in his appointment to succeed William Smyth (died June 26, 1849) as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.[53] I may as well mention here the later events of his life, as they will not come into any precise connection with my brother's history. The intimacy between the two strengthened as my brother developed into manhood, and they were, as will be seen, in continual intercourse. But after leaving King's College my brother followed his own lines, though for a time an inmate of our household.

The Kensington house having been let, we lived in various suburban places, and, for a time, at Cambridge. My father's professorship occupied most of his energies in later years. He delivered his first course in the May term of 1850. Another very serious illness, threatening brain fever, interrupted him for a time, and he went abroad in the autumn of 1850. He recovered, however, beyond expectation, and was able to complete his lectures in the winter, and deliver a second course in the summer of 1851. These lectures were published in 1852 as 'Lectures on the History of France.' They show, I think, the old ability, but show also some failure of the old vivacity. My father did not possess the profound antiquarian knowledge which is rightly demanded in a professor of the present day; and, indeed, I think it is not a little remarkable that, in the midst of his absorbing work, he had acquired so much historical reading as they display. But, if I am not mistaken, the lectures have this peculiar merit—that they are obviously written by a man who had had vast practical experience of actual administrative work. They show, therefore, an unusual appreciation of the constitutional side of French history; and he anticipated some of the results set forth with, of course, far greater knowledge of the subject, in Tocqueville's 'Ancien Régime.' Tocqueville himself wrote very cordially to my father upon the subject; and the lectures have been valued by very good judges. Nothing, however, could be more depressing than the position of a professor at Cambridge at that time. The first courses delivered by my father were attended by a considerable number of persons capable of feeling literary curiosity—a class which was then less abundant than it would now be at Cambridge. But he very soon found that his real duty was to speak to young gentlemen who had been driven into his lecture-room by well-meant regulations; who were only anxious to secure certificates for the 'poll' degree, and whose one aim was to secure them on the cheapest possible terms. To candidates for honours, the history school was at best a luxury for which they could rarely spare time, and my father had to choose between speaking over the heads of his audience and giving milk and water to babes. The society of the Cambridge dons in those days was not much to his taste, and he soon gave up residence there.

About the beginning of 1853 he took a house in Westbourne Terrace, which became his headquarters. In 1855 he accepted a professorship at Haileybury, which was then doomed to extinction, only to hold it during the last three years of the existence of the college. These lectures sufficiently occupied his strength, and he performed them to the best of his ability. The lectures upon French history were, however, the last performance which represented anything like his full powers.

IV. CAMBRIDGE

In October 1847 my brother went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge. 'My Cambridge career,' he says, 'was not to me so memorable or important a period of life as it appears to some people.' He seems to have extended the qualification to all his early years. 'Few men,' he says, 'have worked harder than I have for the last thirty-five years, but I was a very lazy, unsystematic lad up to the age of twenty-two.' He would sometimes speak of himself as 'one of a slowly ripening race,' and set little value upon the intellectual acquirements attained during the immature period. Yet I have sufficiently shown that in some respects he was even exceptionally developed. From his childhood he had shared the thoughts of his elders; he had ceased to be a boy when he had left Eton at sixteen; and he came up to Cambridge far more of a grown man than nine in ten of his contemporaries. So far, indeed, as his character was concerned, he had scarcely ever been a child: at Cambridge, as at Eton, he regarded many of the ambitions of his contemporaries as puerile. Even the most brilliant undergraduates are sometimes tempted to set an excessive value upon academical distinction. A senior wranglership appears to them to be the culminating point of human glory, instead of the first term in the real battle of life. Fitzjames, far from sharing this delusion, regarded it, perhaps, with rather too much contempt. His thoughts were already upon his future career, and he cared for University distinctions only as they might provide him with a good start in the subsequent competition. But this marked maturity of character did not imply the possession of corresponding intellectual gifts, or, as I should rather say, of such gifts as led to success in the Senate House. Fitzjames had done respectably at Eton, and had been among the first lads at King's College. He probably came up to Cambridge with confidence that he would make a mark in examinations. But his mind, however powerful, was far from flexible. He had not the intellectual docility which often enables a clever youth to surpass rivals of much greater originality—as originality not unfrequently tempts a man outside the strait and narrow path which leads to the maximum of marks. 'I have always found myself,' says Fitzjames, in reference to his academical career, 'one of the most unteachable of human beings. I cannot, to this day, take in anything at second hand. I have in all cases to learn whatever I want to learn in a way of my own. It has been so with law, with languages, with Indian administration, with the machinery I have had to study in patent cases, with English composition—in a word, with everything whatever.' For other reasons, however, he was at a disadvantage. He not only had not yet developed, but he never at any time possessed, the intellectual qualities most valued at Cambridge.

The Cambridge of those days had merits, now more likely to be overlooked than overvalued. The course was fitted to encourage strenuous masculine industry, love of fair play, and contempt for mere showy displays of cleverness. But it must be granted that it was strangely narrow. The University was not to be despised which could turn out for successive senior wranglers from 1840 to 1843 such men as Leslie Ellis, Sir George Stokes, Professor Cayley, and Adams, the discoverer of Neptune, while the present Lord Kelvin was second wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in 1845. During the same period the great Latin scholar, Munro (1842), and H. S. Maine (1844), were among the lights of the Classical Tripos. But, outside of the two Triposes, there was no career for a man of any ability. To parody a famous phrase of Hume's, Cambridge virtually said to its pupils, 'Is this a treatise upon geometry or algebra? No. Is it, then, a treatise upon Greek or Latin grammar, or on the grammatical construction of classical authors? No. Then commit it to the flames, for it contains nothing worth your study.' Now, in both these arenas Fitzjames was comparatively feeble. He read classical books, not only at Cambridge but in later life, when he was pleased to find his scholarship equal to the task of translating. But he read them for their contents, not from any interest in the forms of language. He was without that subtlety and accuracy of mind which makes the born scholar. He was capable of blunders surprising in a man of his general ability; and every blunder takes away marks. He was still less of a mathematician. 'I disliked,' as he says himself, 'and foolishly despised the studies of the place, and did not care about accurate classical scholarship, in which I was utterly wrong. I was clumsy at calculation, though I think I have, and always have had, a good head for mathematical principles; and I utterly loathed examinations, which seem to me to make learning all but impossible.'

A letter from his friend, the Rev. H. W. Watson, second wrangler in 1850, who was a year his senior, has given me a very interesting account of impressions made at this time. The two had been together at King's College. Fitzjames's appearance at Trinity was, writes Mr. Watson, 'an epoch in my college life. A close intimacy sprung up between us, and made residence at Cambridge a totally different thing from what it had been in my first year. Your brother's wide culture, his singular force of character, his powerful but, at that time, rather unwieldy intellect, his Johnsonian brusqueness of speech and manner, mingled with a corresponding Johnsonian warmth of sympathy with and loyalty to friends in trouble or anxiety, his sturdiness in the assertion of his opinions, and the maintenance of his principles, disdaining the smallest concession for popularity's sake ... all these traits combined in the formation of an individuality which no one could know intimately and fail to be convinced that only time was wanting for the achievement of no ordinary distinction.' 'Yet,' says Mr. Watson, 'he was distanced by men immeasurably his inferiors.' Nor can this, as Mr. Watson rightly adds, be regarded as a condemnation of the system rather than of my brother. 'I attempted to prepare him in mathematics, and the well-known Dr. Scott, afterwards headmaster of Westminster, was his private tutor in classics; and we agreed in marvelling at and deploring the hopelessness of our tasks. For your brother's mind, acute and able as it was in dealing with matters of concrete human interest, seemed to lose grasp of things viewed purely in the abstract, and positively refused to work upon questions of grammatical rules and algebraical formulæ.' When they were afterwards fellow-students for a short time in law, Mr. Watson remarked in Fitzjames a similar impatience of legal technicalities. He thinks that the less formal system at Oxford might have suited my brother better. At that time, however, Cambridge was only beginning to stir in its slumbers. The election of the Prince Consort to the Chancellorship in 1847 (my brother's first year of residence) had roused certain grumblings as to the probable 'Germanising' of our ancient system; and a beginning was made, under Whewell's influence, by the institution of the 'Moral Sciences' and 'Natural Sciences' Triposes in 1851. The theory was, apparently, that, if you ask questions often enough, people will learn in time to answer them. But for the present they were regarded as mere 'fancy' examinations. No rewards were attainable by success; and the ambitious undergraduates kept to the ancient paths.