The instinct which leads a young man to provide himself with a good set of dogmatic first principles is very natural; and the free and full discussion of them with his fellows, however crude their opinions may be, is among the very best means of education. I need only remark that the apostles appear to have refrained from discussion of immediate politics, and to have been little concerned in some questions which were agitating the sister University. They have nothing to say about Apostolical Succession and the like; nor are there any symptoms of interest in German philosophy, which Hamilton and Mansel were beginning to introduce. At Cambridge the young gentlemen are content with Locke and Mill; and at most know something of Coleridge and Maurice. Mr. Watson compares these meetings to those at Newman's rooms in Oxford as described by Mark Pattison. There a luckless advocate of ill-judged theories might be crushed for the evening by the polite sentence, Very likely. At the Cambridge meetings, the trial to the nerves, as Mr. Watson thinks, was even more severe. There was not the spell of common reverence for a great man, in whose presence a modest reticence was excusable. You were expected to speak out, and failure was the more appalling. The contests between Stephen and Harcourt were especially famous. Though, says Mr. Watson, your brother was 'not a match in adroitness and chaff' for his great 'rival,' he showed himself at his best in these struggles. 'The encounters were veritable battles of the gods, and I recall them after forty years with the most vivid recollection of the pleasure they caused.' When Sir William Harcourt entered Parliament, my brother remarked to Mr. Llewelyn Davies, 'It does not seem to be in the natural order of things that Harcourt should be in the House and I not there to criticise him.'
Fitzjames's position in regard both to theology and politics requires a little further notice. At this time my brother was not only a stern moralist, but a 'zealous and reverential witness on behalf of dogma, and that in the straitest school of the Evangelicals.' Mr. Watson mentions the death at college of a fellow-student during the last term of my brother's residence. In his last hours the poor fellow confided to his family his gratitude to Fitzjames for having led him to think seriously on religious matters. I find a very minute account of this written by my brother at the time to a common friend. He expresses very strong feeling, and had been most deeply moved by his first experience of a deathbed; but he makes no explicit reflections. Though decidedly of the evangelical persuasion at this period, and delighting in controversy upon all subjects, great and small, his intense aversion to sentimentalism was not only as marked as it ever became, but even led to a kind of affectation of prosaic matter of fact stoicism, a rejection of every concession to sentiment, which he afterwards regarded as excessive.
The impression made upon him by contemporary politics was remarkable. The events of 1848 stirred all young men in one way or the other; and although the apostles were discussing the abstract problems of freewill and utilitarianism, they were no doubt keenly interested in concrete history. No one was more moved than Fitzjames. He speaks of the optimistic views which were popular with the Liberals after 1832, expounded by Cobden and Bright and supposed to be sanctioned by the Exhibition of 1851. It was the favourite cant that Captain Pen 'had got the best of Captain Sword, and that henceforth the kindly earth would slumber, lapt in universal law. I cannot say how I personally loathed this way of thinking, and how radically false, hollow and disgusting it seemed to me then, and seems to me now.' The crash of 1848 came like a thunderbolt, and 'history seemed to have come to life again with all its wild elemental forces.' For the first time he was aware of actual war within a small distance, and the settlement of great questions by sheer force. 'How well I remember my own feelings, which were, I think, the feelings of the great majority of my age and class, and which have ever since remained in me as strong and as unmixed as they were in 1848. I feel them now (1887) as keenly as ever, though the world has changed and thinks and feels, as it seems, quite differently. They were feelings of fierce, unqualified hatred for the revolution and revolutionists; feelings of the most bitter contempt and indignation against those who feared them, truckled to them, or failed to fight them whensoever they could and as long as they could: feelings of zeal against all popular aspirations and in favour of all established institutions whatever their various defects or harshnesses (which, however, I wished to alter slowly and moderately): in a word, the feelings of a scandalised policeman towards a mob breaking windows in the cause of humanity. I should have liked first to fire grapeshot down every street in Paris, till the place ran with blood, and next to try Louis Philippe and those who advised him not to fight by court martial, and to have hanged them all as traitors and cowards. The only event in 1848 which gave me real pleasure was the days of June, when Cavaignac did what, if he had been a man or not got into a fright about his soul, or if he had had a real sense of duty instead of a wretched consciousness of weakness and a false position, Louis Philippe would have done months before.' He cannot, he admits, write with calmness to this day of the king's cowardice; and he never passed the Tuileries in later life without feeling the sentiment about Louis XVI. and his 'heritage splendid' expressed by Thackeray's drummer, 'Ah, shame on him, craven and coward, that had not the heart to defend it!'
'I have often wondered,' adds Fitzjames, 'at my own vehement feelings on these subjects, and I am not altogether prepared to say that they are not more or less foolish. I have never seen war. I have never heard a shot fired in anger, and I have never had my courage put to any proof worth speaking of. Have I any right to talk of streets running with blood? Is it not more likely that, at a pinch, I might myself run in quite a different direction? It is one of the questions which will probably remain unanswered for ever, whether I am a coward or not. But that has nothing really to do with the question. If I am a coward, I am contemptible: but Louis Philippe was a coward and contemptible whether I am a coward or not; and my feelings on the whole of this subject are, at all events, perfectly sincere, and are the very deepest and most genuine feelings I have.' Fitzjames's only personal experience of revolutionary proceedings was on the famous 10th of April, when he was in London, but saw only special constables. The events of the day confirmed him in the doctrine that every disorganised mob is more likely to behave in the spirit of the lowest and most contemptible units than in the spirit of what is highest in them.
I can only add one little anecdote of those days. A friend of my brother's rushed into his rooms obviously to announce some very exciting piece of news. Is the mob triumphant in Paris? 'I don't know,' was the reply, 'but a point has been decided in the Gorham case.' Good evangelical as Fitzjames then was, he felt that there were more important controversies going on than squabbles over baptismal regeneration. A curious set of letters written in his first vacation to his friend Dr. Kitchin show, however, that he then took an eager interest in this doctrine. He discusses it at great length in the evangelical sense, with abundant quotations of texts.
While interested in these matters, winning fame at the Union and enjoying the good opinion of the apostles, Fitzjames was failing in a purely academical sense. He tried twice for a scholarship at Trinity, and both times unsuccessfully, though he was not very far from success. The failure excluded him, as things then were, from the possibility of a fellowship, and a degree became valueless for its main purpose. He resolved, therefore, to go abroad with my father, who had to travel in search of health. He passed the winter of 1850-1 in Paris, where he learnt French, and attended sittings of the Legislative Assembly, and was especially interested by proceedings in the French law-courts. He kept the May term of 1851 at Cambridge, and went out in the 'Poll.' Judging from the performances of his rivals, he would probably have been in the lower half of the first class in the Classical Tripos. Although his last months at Cambridge were not cheering, he retained a feeling for the place very unlike his feeling towards Eton. He had now at least found himself firmly on his own legs, measured his strength against other competitors, and made lasting friendships with some of the strongest. It had been, he says, 'my greatest ambition to get a fellowship at Trinity, but I got it at last, however, for I was elected an honorary Fellow in the autumn of 1885. I have had my share of compliments, but I never received one which gave me half so much pleasure.' He visited Cambridge in later years and was my guest, and long afterwards the guest of his friend Maine, at certain Christmas festivities in Trinity Hall. He speaks in the warmest terms of his appreciation of the place, 'old and dignified, yet fresh and vigorous.' Nearly his last visit was in the autumn of 1885, when he gave a dinner to the apostles, of whom his son James was then a member.
Fitzjames's friends were naturally surprised at his throwing up the game. Most of them set, as I have intimated, a higher value upon academical honours, considered by themselves, than he ever admitted to be just. Possibly they exaggerated a little the disgust which was implied by his absolute abandonment of the course. And yet, I find the impression among those who saw most of him at the time, that the disappointment was felt with great keenness. The explanation is given, I think, in some remarks made by my father to Mr Watson. My father held that the University system of distributing honours was very faulty. Men, he said, wanted all the confidence they could acquire in their own powers for the struggle of life. Whatever braced and stimulated self-reliance was good. The honour system encouraged the few who succeeded and inflicted upon the rest a 'demoralising sense of failure.' I have no doubt that my father was, in fact, generalising from the case of Fitzjames. What really stung the young man was a more or less dim foreboding of the difficulties which were to meet him in the world at large. He was not one of the men fitted for easy success. The successful man is, I take it, the man with an eye for the line of least resistance. He has an instinct, that is, for the applying his strength in the direction in which it will tell most. And he has the faculty of so falling in with other men's modes of thinking and feeling that they may spontaneously, if unconsciously, form a band of supporters. Obstacles become stepping-stones to such men. It was Fitzjames's fate through life to take the bull by the horns; to hew a path through jungles and up steep places along the steepest and most entangled routes; and to shoulder his way by main strength and weight through a crowd, instead of contriving to combine external pressures into an agency for propulsion. At this time, the contrast between his acceptance with the ablest of his contemporaries in private and his inability to obtain the public stamp of merit perplexed and troubled him. Maine and Thompson could recognise his abilities. Why could not the examiners? Might not his ambition have to struggle with similar obstacles at the bar or in the pulpit?
I quote from a letter written by my father during Fitzjames's academical career to show what was the relation at this time between the two men. My father dictates to my mother a letter to Fitzjames, dated January 19, 1849.[59] 'You well know,' he says, 'that I have long since surmounted that paternal ambition which might have led me to thirst for your eminence as a scholar. It has not pleased God to give you that kind of bodily constitution and mental temperament which is essential to such success.' He proceeds to say that, although success in examinations is 'not essential to the great ends of Fitzjames's existence, it is yet very desirable that he should become a good scholar from higher motives—such,' he adds, 'as are expounded in Bacon's "De Augmentis."' He solemnly recommends regular prayer for guidance in studies for which the lower motives may be insufficient. It then occurs to my mother that the advice may be a little discouraging. 'I am reminded by my amanuensis that I have left you in the dark as to my opinion of your probable success in the literary labours to which I have exhorted you. You must be a very mole if the darkness be real. From your childhood to this day I have ever shown you by more than words how high an estimate I entertain both of the depth and the breadth of your capacity. I have ever conversed with you as with a man, not as with a child; and though parental partiality has never concealed from me the fact of your deficiency in certain powers of mind which are essential to early excellence in learning, yet I have never been for a moment distrustful of your possessing an intellect which, if well disciplined and well cultured, will continue to expand, improve, and yield excellent fruit long after the mental faculties of many of your more fortunate rivals will have passed from their full maturity into premature decay. Faith in yourself (which is but one of the many forms of faith in God) is the one thing needful to your intellectual progress; and if your faith in yourself may but survive the disappointment of your academical ambition, that disappointment will be converted into a blessing.'
The letter shows, I think, under the rather elaborate phraseology, both the perspicuity with which the father had estimated his son's talents and the strong sympathy which bound them together. The reference to Fitzjames's 'want of faith in himself' is significant. If want of faith is to be measured by want of courage in tackling the difficulties of life, no man could be really less open to the charge than Fitzjames. But my father, himself disposed to anticipate ill fortune, had certain reasons for attributing to his son a tendency in the same direction. Fitzjames's hatred of all exaggeration, his resolute refusal to be either sentimental or optimistic, led him to insist upon the gloomy side of things. Moreover, he was still indolent; given to be slovenly in his work, and rather unsocial in his ways, though warmly attached to a few friends. My father, impressed by these symptoms, came to the conclusion that Fitzjames was probably unsuited for the more active professions for which a sanguine temper and a power of quickly attaching others are obvious qualifications. He therefore looked forward to his son's adoption of the clerical career, which his own deep piety as well as his painful experience of official vexations had long made him regard as the happiest of all careers. Circumstances strengthened this feeling. My father's income had been diminished by his resignation, while the education of his two sons became more expensive, and he had to contribute to the support of his brother George. No human being could have made us feel more clearly that he would willingly give us his last penny or his last drop of blood. But he was for a time more than usually vexed and anxious; and the fact could not be quite concealed.
Fitzjames's comparative failure at Cambridge suggests to him a significant remark. After speaking of his 'unteachableness,' he observes that his mind was over-full of thoughts about religion, about politics, about morals, about metaphysics, about all sorts of subjects, except art, literature, or physical science. For art of any kind I have never cared, and do not care in the very least. For literature, as such, I care hardly at all. I like to be amused and instructed on the particular things I want to know; but works of genius, as such, give me very little pleasure, and as to the physical sciences, they interest me only so far as they illustrate the true method of inquiry. They, or rather some of them, have the advantage of being particularly true, and so a guide in the pursuit of moral and distinctively human truth. For their own sake, I care very little about them.'