III. THE 'SATURDAY REVIEW.'
Here therefore I leave the story of his main profession to take up his work in other capacities. When he left Cambridge, the 'Morning Chronicle' was passing through a short phase of unprofitable brilliancy. It had been bought by the 'Peelites,' who are reported to have sunk as [much] as 200,000l. upon it. John Douglas Cook was editor, and among his contributors were Maine and others of Fitzjames's college friends. Naturally he was anxious to try his hand. He wrote several articles in the winter of 1851-2. 'The pay,' says Fitzjames, 'was very high—3l. 10s. an article, and I thought that I was going to make a fortune. I was particularly pleased, I remember, with my smartness and wit, but, alas and alas! Cook found me out and gradually ceased to put in my articles. I have seldom felt much keener disappointment, for I was ardently desirous of standing on my own legs and having in my pocket a little money of my own earning. I took heart, however, and decided to try elsewhere. I wrote one or two poor little articles in obscure places, and at last took (as already stated) to the "Christian Observer." 'I took great pains,' he says, 'with my articles, framing my style upon conveyancing and special pleading, so that it might be solid, well-connected, and logical, and enable me to get back to the Paradise of 3l. 10s. an article, from which, as I strongly suspected, my flippancy had excluded me.' 'Flippancy' was clearly not in his line. Besides the 'Christian Observer,' I find that the 'Law Magazine' took a few articles from him, but there is no trace of other writings until 1855. In that year was published the first number of 'Cambridge Essays,' which, in alliance with a series of 'Oxford Essays,' lived for a couple of years and contained some very good work. Maine became first known to the public by an article upon Roman Law contributed in 1856, and a study of Coleridge's philosophy by Professor Hort, another apostle, is one of the best extant discussions of a difficult subject. Fitzjames, in 1855, wrote a characteristic article upon 'The Relation of Novels to Life,' and in 1857 one upon 'Characteristics of English Criminal Law.' The articles roused some interest and helped to encourage him.
Meanwhile the 'Morning Chronicle' had changed hands, and its previous supporters set up the 'Saturday Review,' of which the first number appeared on November 3, 1855. John Douglas Cook, who took command of the new adventure and brought some followers from the 'Morning Chronicle,' was a remarkable man in his way. He was one of the innumerable young Scots who go out to seek their fortune abroad. He had received some appointment in India, quarrelled with his employers, and came home on foot, or partly on foot, for his narratives of this period were generally, it was thought, marked rather by imaginative fervour than by a servile adherence to historic accuracy. He found work on the 'Times,' supported Mr. Walter in an election, was taken up by the Duke of Newcastle, and was sent by him to inquire into the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall. He then appeared as an editor, and, if he failed in the 'Morning Chronicle,' made ample amends by his guidance of the 'Saturday Review.' He was a man of no particular education, and apparently never read a book. His language and manners were such as recalled memories of the old days of Maginn and other Bohemians whose portraits are drawn in 'Pendennis.' But besides other qualities which justified the friendship and confidence of his supporters, Cook had the faculty of recognising good writing when he saw it. Newspapers have occasionally succeeded by lowering instead of raising the standard of journalism, but the 'Saturday Review' marked at the time as distinct an advance above the previous level as the old 'Edinburgh Review.' In his fifteen years' editorship of the 'Saturday Review,' Cook collected as distinguished a set of contributors as has ever been attracted to an English newspaper. Many of them became eminent in other ways. Maine and Sir W. Harcourt were, I believe, among the earliest recruits, following Cook from the 'Morning Chronicle.' Others, such as Professor Freeman, Mark Pattison, Mr. Goldwin Smith, Mr. John Morley, the late Lord Justice Bowen, and many other well-known writers, joined at different periods and with more or less regularity, but from the first the new journal was wanting neither in ability nor audacity.[66] Two of the chief contributors who became close friends of Fitzjames's enjoyed a reputation among their friends altogether out of proportion to their public recognition. The first was George Stovin Venables. He was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had been a first-classman in the Classical Tripos of 1832, when he was placed next to W. H. Thompson, afterwards Master of Trinity. He too was an apostle and an intimate both of Tennyson and Thackeray. Indeed, the legend ran that it was his fist which, at Charterhouse School, had disfigured Thackeray's nose for life. He was tall, strikingly handsome, and of singularly dignified appearance. Though recognised as an intellectual equal by many of the ablest men of his time, he chose paths in which little general reputation could be won. He made a large income at the parliamentary bar, and amused himself by contributing regularly to the 'Saturday Review.'[67] Stories used to be current of the extraordinary facility with which he could turn out his work, and I imagine that the style of the new periodical was determined more by his writing than by that of any of his colleagues. The political utterances were supposed to be supercilious, and were certainly not marked by any fiery enthusiasm. Venables had an objection to the usual editorial 'we,' and one result was that the theories of the paper were laid down with a certain impersonal pomp, as gnomic utterances of an anonymous philosopher. I need not, however, discuss their merit. Venables wrote, if I am not mistaken, some admirable literary criticisms, and claimed to have been one of the first to recognise the poetical merits of his friend Tennyson, and, after a long interval, those of Mr. Swinburne, whom he regarded as the next legitimate heir to the throne. Venables was warmly beloved by his intimates, and Fitzjames through life frequently declared that he felt for him a kind of filial affection.
The other Saturday reviewer with whom he became specially intimate was Thomas Collett Sandars. He was a Balliol scholar and a Fellow of Oriel, and is known as an editor (1853) of Justinian's 'Institutes.' It is, I am told, a useful textbook, but the editor makes no special pretensions to original research. Sandars was at one time a professor of Constitutional Law in the Inns of Court, but he was much occupied in various financial undertakings and did little to make himself known to the outside world. He was a man, however, of great literary taste, and overflowing with humorous and delightful conversation. He survived my brother by a few months only, and in the interval spoke to me with great interest of his memories of the old 'Saturday Review' days. He was in early days on most intimate terms with Fitzjames; they discussed all manner of topics together and were for some time the two principal manufacturers of what were called 'middles'—the articles which intervened between the political leaders and the reviews of books. These became gradually one of the most characteristic facts of the paper, and, as I shall presently explain, gave an opportunity of which Fitzjames was particularly glad to avail himself.
The first contribution from Fitzjames appeared in the second number of the paper. For a short time its successors are comparatively rare, but in the course of the following spring he begins to contribute regularly two articles a week, and before long there are sufficient indications that the editor looks upon him with favour. Articles running to a length of four columns, for example, show that he was not only pouring himself out pretty freely, but that his claims upon space were not grudgingly treated. In March 1856 he says that he is 'very nervous' about his articles and doubtful of Cook's approval, but in the same month he is greatly cheered by a conversation upon the subject with Maine, and begins to perceive that he has really got a permanent footing. He used to tell a story which I cannot perfectly recollect, but which was to the following effect. He had felt very doubtful of his own performances; Cook did not seem at first to be cordial, and possibly his attempts to 'form a style' upon the precedents of conveyancing were not altogether successful. Feeling that he did not quite understand what was the style which would win approval, he resolved that, for once, he would at least write according to his own taste and give vent to his spontaneous impulses, even though it might be for the last time of asking. To his surprise, Cook was delighted with his article, and henceforward he was able to write freely, without hampering himself by the attempt to satisfy uncongenial canons of journalism.[68]
However this may be, he was certainly writing both abundantly and vigorously during the following years. The 'Saturday Review,' like the old 'Edinburgh,' was proud beyond all things of its independence. It professed a special antipathy to popular humbugs of every kind, and was by no means backward in falling foul of all its contemporaries for their various concessions to popular foibles.
The writers were for the most part energetic young men, with the proper confidence in their own infallibility, and represented faithfully enough the main current of the cultivated thought of their day. The paper had occasionally to reflect the High Church proclivities of its proprietor, but the articles showing that tendency were in odd contrast to the general line of argument, which more naturally expressed the contempt of the enlightened for every popular nostrum. Fitzjames, in particular, found occasions for energetically setting forth his own views. He had, of course, a good many chances of dealing with legal matters. He writes periodical articles upon 'the assizes' or discusses some specially interesting case. He now and then gets a chance of advocating a codification of the laws, though he admits the necessity of various preliminary measures, and especially of a more philosophical system of legal education. He denounces the cumbrous and perplexed state of the law in general so energetically, that the arguments have to be stated as those of certain reformers with whom the paper does not openly identify itself.
As became a good Saturday reviewer, he fell foul of many popular idols. One regular chopping-block for irreverent reviewers was Dr. Cumming, who was then proving from the Apocalypse that the world would come to an end in 1865. His ignorance of Greek and of geography, his audacious plagiarisms from E. B. Elliott (a more learned though not a much wiser interpreter), and his insincerity, are denounced so unsparingly as to suggest some danger from the law of libel. Dr. Cumming, however, was wise in his generation, and wrote a letter of such courteous and dignified remonstrance that the 'Saturday Review' was forced to reply in corresponding terms, though declining to withdraw its charges. The whole world of contemporary journalism is arraigned for its subserviency to popular prejudices. The 'Record' is lashed for its religious rancour, and the 'Reasoner' for its vapid version of popular infidelity, though it is contemptuously preferred, in point of spirit, to the 'Record.' Fitzjames flies occasionally at higher game. The 'Times,' if he is to be believed, is conspicuous for the trick of spinning empty verbiage out of vapid popular commonplaces, and, indeed, good sense and right reason appear to have withdrawn themselves almost exclusively to the congenial refuge of the 'Saturday Review.'
There is, however, no shrine sacred to the vulgar in which the writer delights in playing the part of iconoclast so heartily as in that represented by the comic literature of the day. This sentiment, as I have said, had grown up even in Eton schooldays. There was something inexpressibly repugnant to Fitzjames in the tone adopted by a school of which he took Dickens and Douglas Jerrold to be representatives. His view of the general literary question comes out oddly in the article upon 'The Relation of Novels to Life,' contributed to the 'Cambridge Essays.' He has no fear of modern æsthetes before his eyes. His opinion is that life is too serious a business for tomfoolery and far too tragic for needless ostentation of sentiment. A novel should be a serious attempt by a grave observer to draw a faithful portrait of the actual facts of life. A novelist, therefore, who uses the imaginary facts, like Sterne and Dickens, as mere pegs on which to hang specimens of his own sensibility and facetiousness, becomes disgusting. When, he remarks, you have said of a friend 'he is dead,' all other observations become superfluous and impertinent. He, therefore, considers 'Robinson Crusoe' to represent the ideal novel. It is the life of a brave man meeting danger and sorrow with unflinching courage, and never bringing his tears to market. Dickens somewhere says, characteristically, that 'Robinson Crusoe' is the only very popular work which can be read without a tear from the first page to the last. That is precisely the quality which commends it to this stern reader, who thought that in fiction as in life a man should keep his feelings under lock and key. In spite of his rather peculiar canons of taste, Fitzjames was profoundly interested, even in spite of himself, in some novels constructed on very different principles. In these early articles he falls foul of 'Mdme. de Bovary,'[69] from the point of view of the simple-minded moralist, but he heartily admires Balzac, whom he defends against a similar charge, and in whose records of imaginary criminals—records not so famous in England at that time as they now are—he found an interest almost equal to that of the 'State Trials' and Palmer's case. He could also, I must add, enjoy Dickens's humour as heartily as any one. He was well up in 'Pickwick,' though I don't know whether he would have been equal to Calverley's famous examination-paper, and he had a special liking for the 'Uncommercial Traveller.' But when Dickens deserted his proper function Fitzjames was roused to indignation. The 'little Nell' sentimentalism and the long gallery of melodramatic deathbeds disgusted him, while the assaults upon the governing classes generally stirred his wrath. The satire upon individuals may be all very well in its place, but a man, he said, has no business to set up as the 'regenerator of society' because he is its most 'distinguished buffoon.' He was not picking his words, and 'buffoon' is certainly an injudicious phrase; but the sentiment which it expressed was so characteristic and deeply rooted that I must dwell a little upon its manifestation at this time.
The war between the Saturday reviewers and their antagonists was carried on with a frequent use of the nicknames 'prig' and 'cynic' upon one side, and 'buffoon' and 'sentimentalist' upon the other. Phrases so employed soon lose all definite meaning, but it is, I think, easy to see what they meant as applied either by or to Fitzjames. The 'comic writers' for him were exponents of the petty and vulgar ideals of the lower middle classes of the day. The world of Dickens's novels was a portrait of the class for which Dickens wrote. It was a world of smug little tradesmen of shallow and half-educated minds, with paltry ambitions, utter ignorance of history and philosophy, shrinking instinctively from all strenuous thought and resenting every attack upon the placid optimism in which it delighted to wrap itself. It had no perception of the doubts and difficulties which beset loftier minds, or any consciousness of the great drama of history in which our generation is only playing its part for the passing hour. Whatever lay beyond its narrow horizon was ignored, or, if accidentally mentioned, treated with ignorant contempt. This was the spirit which revealed itself in the pæans raised over the Exhibition of 1851, accepted by the popular voice of the day as the inauguration of a millennium of peace and free trade. But all its manifestations were marked by the same narrowness. The class had once found a voice for its religious sentiments in Puritanism, with stern conceptions of duty and of a divine order of the universe. But in its present mood it could see the Puritan leaders represented by a wretched Stiggins—a pothouse Tartufe just capable of imposing upon the friends of Mrs. Gamp. Its own religion was that kind of vapid philanthropic sentiment which calls itself undenominational; a creed of maudlin benevolence from which all the deeper and sterner elements of religious belief have been carefully purged away, and which really corresponds to the moods which Mr Pickwick stimulated by indulgence in milk-punch. When it came face to face with death, and sin, and suffering, it made them mere occasions for displays of sentimentalism, disgusting because such trifling with the most awful subjects shows a hopeless shallowness of nature. Dickens's indulgence in deathbeds meant an effeminate delight in the 'luxury of grief,' revolting in proportion to the solemnity of the topic. This was only another side of the levity with which he treated serious political and social problems. The attitude of mind represented is that of the ordinary newspaper correspondent, who imagines that a letter to the 'Times' is the ultimate remedy for all the evils to which flesh is heir. Dickens's early novels, said Fitzjames, represented an avatar of 'chaff'; and gave with unsurpassable vivacity the genuine fun of a thoroughbred cockney typified by Sam Weller. Sam Weller is delightful in his place; but he is simply impertinent when he fancies that his shrewd mother wit entitles him to speak with authority upon great questions of constitutional reform and national policy. Dickens's later assaults upon the 'Circumlocution Office,' the Court of Chancery, were signal instances of this impatient, irritable, and effeminate levity. Fitzjames elaborated this view in an article upon 'the license of novelists' which appeared in the 'Edinburgh Review' for July 1857. He fell foul of 'Little Dorrit'; but the chief part of the article referred to Charles Reade's 'Never Too Late to Mend.' That novel was briefly a travesty of a recent case in which a prisoner had committed suicide in consequence, as was suggested, of ill-treatment by the authorities of the gaol. The governor had been tried and punished in consequence. Fitzjames gives the actual facts to show how Reade had allowed himself, as a writer of fiction, to exaggerate and distort them, and had at the same time taken the airs of an historian of facts and bragged of his resolution to brand all judges who should dare to follow the precedent which he denounced. This article, I may notice, included an injudicious reference to the case of the Post Office and Rowland Hill, which was not, I believe, due to Fitzjames himself, and which enabled Dickens to reply with some effect in 'Household Words.' Dickens's attacks upon the 'Circumlocution Office' and its like were not altogether inconsistent with some opinions upon the English system of government to which, as I shall have to show, Fitzjames himself gave forcible expression in after years. They started, however, from a very different point of view, and for the present he criticised both Dickens and some of the similar denunciations contained in Carlyle's 'Past and Present,' and 'Latter-day Pamphlets.' The assault upon the 'Circumlocution Office' was, I doubt not, especially offensive because 'Barnacle Tite,' and the effete aristocrats who are satirised in 'Little Dorrit,' stood for representatives of Sir James Stephen and his best friends. In fact, I think, Dickens took the view natural to the popular mind, which always embodies a grievance in a concrete image of a wicked and contemptible oppressor intending all the evils which result from his office. A more interesting and appropriate topic for art of a serious kind would be the problem presented by a body of men of the highest ability and integrity who are yet doomed to work a cumbrous and inadequate system. But the popular reformer, to whom everything seems easy and obvious, explains all abuses by attributing them to the deliberate intention of particular fools and knaves. This indicates Fitzjames's position at the time. He was fully conscious of the administrative abuses assailed, and was as ardent on law reform as became a disciple of Bentham. But he could not accept the support of men who thought that judicious reform could be suggested by rough caricatures, and that all difficulties could be appreciated by the first petty tradesmen who encountered an incidental grievance or by such summary remedies as were to be suggested off-hand by anonymous correspondents. The levity, the ignorance, the hasty and superficial irritability of these reformers, their enormous conceit and imperturbable self-complacency revolted him. English life he declared in the 'Edinburgh Review' is 'too active, English spheres of action too wide, English freedom too deeply rooted, to be endangered by a set of bacchanals drunk with green tea and not protected by petticoats. Boundless luxury,' he thought, 'and thirst for excitement, have raised a set of writers who show a strong sympathy for all that is most opposite to the very foundations of English life.' The 'Saturday Review' articles enlarge upon the same theme. He will not accept legislators whose favourite costume is the cap and bells, or admit that men who 'can make silly women cry can, therefore, dictate principles of law and government.' The defects of our system are due to profound historical causes. 'Freedom and law and established rules have their difficulties,' not perceptible to 'feminine, irritable, noisy minds, always clamouring and shrieking for protection and guidance.' The end to which Dickens would really drive us would be 'pure despotism. No debates to worry effeminate understandings, no laws to prevent judges from deciding according to their own inclination, no forms to prevent officials from dealing with their neighbours as so many parcels of ticketed goods.'[70]