The reference just quoted to improved prospects is to be explained by an influx of parliamentary business which took place at this time. He was leading counsel in the session of 1874 for the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company, and appeared for them in several cases. The impression which he made upon professional observers has been reported to me by more than one competent witness. It is such as may be foreseen. 'You are bringing your steam hammer to crack a nut again,' was the remark made to one of them by a friend. Admiration for his 'close reasoning, weighty argument, and high tone of mind,' is cordially expressed. He never threw a word away, always got to the core of a question, and drove his points well home. And yet he did not seem to be in the field best adapted for his peculiar gifts. He was too judicial, too reluctant to put a good face upon a bad cause, not enough of a rhetorician, and not sufficiently alert in changing front, or able to handle topics with the lightness of touch suitable to the peculiar tastes of a parliamentary Committee. Thus, though he invariably commanded respect, he failed to show the talent necessary for the more profitable, if not more exalted lines of professional success. Business still continued to present itself in the most tantalising form; it came in gushes and spurts, falling absolutely dead at one moment and then unexpectedly reviving. He had occasionally successful circuits; but failed to step into the vacant place made by the elevation to the bench of his old tutor, Lord Field, in 1875, and gradually went his rounds less regularly. Meanwhile a good deal of business of a different kind presented itself. At the end of 1874, I find him mentioning that he had eleven cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He appeared in a good many colonial and Indian appeals, and afterwards, as I shall have occasion to notice, in certain ecclesiastical cases. I do not think, however, that I need dwell upon this part of his career.
One remark must be made. Fitzjames was still doomed to be an illustration of the curious disproportion which may exist between a man's intrinsic power and his fitness for professional success. Still, as at college, he was distanced in the race by men greatly his inferiors in general force of mind, but better provided with the talent for bringing their gifts to market. Such a position was trying, for it was inevitable that he should be himself more conscious of his abilities than of his limitations. His incapacity for acquiring the dexterities by which men accommodate themselves to their neighbours' wants implied a tendency rather to under-estimate the worth, whatever it may be, of such dexterities. The obstacle to his success was just the want of appreciation of certain finer shades of conduct, and therefore remained unintelligible to himself. He was like a painter of very keen and yet narrowly limited vision, who could not see the qualities which lead people to prefer the work of a long-sighted man. Yet he not only never lost heart, but, so far as I can discover, was never for a moment querulous or soured. He was never for an instant in danger of becoming a 'man with a grievance.' He thought, of course, that his views were insufficiently appreciated; but he complained, not of individuals, but of general causes which were practically irremovable, and against which it was idle to fret. If, in writing to his closest friends, he indulges in a momentary grumble over the 'bursting of a bubble,' he always adds that he is ashamed of himself for the feeling, and emphatically declares himself to be one of the happiest and most fortunate of men. When, therefore, I report his various disappointments, I must be understood to imply that they never lowered his courage even in the most trifling degree, or threw over his course more than such passing fits of shadow as even the strongest man must sometimes traverse. Nobody could have been cheerier, more resolute, or more convinced that his lines had fallen in pleasant places.
V. THE METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY
Here I shall notice some of the employments in which he found distraction from the various worries of his career. In the first place, he had a boundless appetite for books. When he returned from India he rubbed up his old classical knowledge; and, though he had far too much sense to despise the help of 'cribs,' he soon found himself able to get on pretty well without them. He mentions a number of authors, Homer, for example, and Æschylus, who supplied a motto for 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity '; he reads Demosthenes, partly with a view to Greek law; dips into Plato and Aristotle, and is intensely interested by Cicero's 'De Natura Deorum.' He declares, as I have said, that he cared little for literature in itself; and it is no doubt true that he was generally more interested in the information to be got from books than in the mode of conveying it. This, however, increases his appetite for congenial works. He admires Gibbon enthusiastically; he has read the 'Decline and Fall' four or five times, and is always wishing to read it again. He can imagine no happier lot than to be able to devote oneself to the completion of such a book. He found it hard, indeed, to think of a novel or a poem as anything but a trifling though fascinating amusement. He makes an unfavourable criticism upon a novel written by a friend, but adds that it is 'not really unfavourable.' 'A great novel,' he explains, 'a really lasting work of art, requires the whole time and strength of the writer, ... and X. is too much of a man to go in for that.' After quoting Milton's 'Lycidas' and 'Christmas Hymn,' which he always greatly admired, he adds that he is 'thankful that he is not a poet. To see all important things through a magnifying glass of strange brilliant colours, and to have all manner of tunes continually playing in one's head, and I suppose in one's heart too, would make one very wretched.' A good commonplace intellect satisfied with the homely food of law and 'greedily fond of pastry in the form of novels and the like, is—well, it is at all events, thoroughly self-satisfied, which I suppose no real poet or artist ever was.' Besides, genius generally implies sensitive nerves, and is unfavourable to a good circulation and a thorough digestion. These remarks are of course partly playful, but they represent a real feeling. A similar vein of reflection appears to have suggested a comment upon Las Casas' account of Napoleon at St. Helena. It is 'mortifying' to think that Napoleon was only his own age when sent to St. Helena. 'It is a base feeling, I suppose, but I cannot help feeling that to have had such gifts and played such a part in life would be a blessing and a delight greater than any other I can think of. I suppose the ardent wish to be stronger than other people, and to have one's own will as against them, is the deepest and most general of human desires. If it were a wish which fulfilled itself, how very strong and how very triumphant I should be;—but it does not.' For this atrocious wish, I must add, he apologises amply in a later letter. It is merely a passing velleity. In truth it represents his version of Carlyle's doctrine about the superiority of silence to speech, or rather of the active to the contemplative life. The career of a great conqueror, a great legislator, a man who in any capacity has moulded the doctrines of the race, had a charm for his imagination which he could not find in the pleasant idlers, who beguile our leisure by singing songs and telling stories.
Men who affect the religions of mankind belong rather to the active than the contemplative class. Nobody could estimate more highly the importance of philosophical speculations upon the great problems of life. To write a book which should effectively present his own answer to those problems was his permanent ambition. Even in going to India, he said, he had been moved partly by the desire of qualifying himself by fresh experience for such a work, which had been consciously before him ever since he left college. He was never able to carry out the plan which was very frequently in his thoughts. Certain articles, however, written about this time, sufficiently indicate his general conclusions, and I therefore shall here give some account of them. They were all more or less connected with that curious body called the 'Metaphysical Society.'
A description of this institution was given in the 'Nineteenth Century' for August 1885 by Mr. R. H. Hutton, who represents the discussions by an imaginary conversation between the chief debaters. Mr. Knowles prefixed a brief historical account. The Society was founded in consequence of a conversation between Tennyson and Mr. Knowles, and held its first meeting on April 21, 1869. Fitzjames joined it after his return from India. The scheme of the founders was to provide an arena in which the most important religious problems should be discussed with the same freedom with which other problems are, or ought to be discussed in the learned and scientific societies. Perhaps some light might be thrown upon the question whether we have immortal souls, in which Tennyson was much interested. Many very distinguished men became members, and after a friendly dinner discussed papers which had been circulated for consideration. Cardinal Manning, W. G. Ward, and Father Dalgairns were the chief representatives of Catholicism; Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and W. K. Clifford of a scientific agnosticism; Mr. Frederic Harrison of Positivism; and Dr. Martineau, Mr. Ruskin, Mr. R. H. Hutton, of various shades of rational theology. There were others, such as Mark Pattison and Professor Henry Sidgwick, whom I should shrink from putting into any definite class. Mr. Gladstone, Lord Selborne, and Fitzjames may perhaps be described as intelligent amateurs, who, though occupied with more practical matters, were keenly interested in philosophical speculations. These names are enough to show that there was no lack of debating talent.
Fitzjames took the liveliest interest in these discussions, to which at various times he contributed papers upon 'necessary truths,' 'mysteries,' the 'proof of miracles,' the 'effect upon morality of a decline in religious faith,' and the 'utility of truth.' He enjoyed some vigorous encounters with various opponents: and according to Mr. Hutton his 'mighty bass' exercised 'a sort of physical authority' over his hearers. The meetings were of course strictly private; and reports of the debates, had reports been possible, would have been a breach of confidence. Yet as the Society has excited a certain interest, I will venture to record part of my impressions. I was not a member of the Society in its early, and, as I take it, most flourishing days; and I only once, for example, heard a few words from W. G. Ward, who was then one of the more conspicuous interlocutors. But I had the honour of membership at a later period, and formed a certain estimate of the performances.
I remarked, in the first place, what was not strange, that nobody's preconceived opinions were changed, nor even, so far as I know, in the smallest degree affected by the discussions. Nor were they calculated to affect any serious opinions. Had any young gentleman been present who had sat at the feet of T. H. Green or of Professor Sidgwick, and gained a first class at either University, he would, as I always felt, have remarked that the debaters did not know what they were talking about. So far as the discussions were properly metaphysical, the remark would have been more than plausible. With certain conspicuous exceptions, which I shall not specify, it was abundantly clear that the talk was the talk of amateurs, not of specialists. I do not speak from conjecture when I say, for example, that certain eminent members of the Society had obviously never passed that 'asses' bridge' of English metaphysics, the writings of Bishop Berkeley, and considered his form of idealism, when it was mentioned, to be a novel and startling paradox. It was, I fancy, a small minority that had ever really looked into Kant; and Hegel was a name standing for an unknown region wrapped in hopeless mist. This would be enough to disenchant any young gentleman fresh from his compendiums of philosophy. Persons, he would think, in so hopeless a state of ignorance could no more discuss metaphysics to any purpose than men who had never heard of the teaching of Newton or Darwin could discuss astronomy or biology. It was, in fact, one result of the very varying stages of education of these eminent gentlemen that the discussions became very ambiguous. Some of the commonest of technical terms convey such different meanings in different periods of philosophy that people who use them at random are easily set at hopelessly cross-purposes.... 'Object' and 'subject,' 'intuition,' 'experience,' and so forth, as used by one set of thinkers, are to others like words in an unknown language which they yet do not know to be unknown.
If metaphysics were really a separate and independent science upon which experts alone had a right to speak, this remark would be a sufficient criticism of the Society. It called itself metaphysical, and four out of five of its members knew nothing of metaphysics. A defence, however, might be fairly set up. Some of the questions discussed were independent of purely metaphysical inquiries. And it may be denied, as I should certainly deny, that experts in metaphysics have any superiority to amateurs comparable to that which exists in the established sciences. Recent philosophers have probably dispersed some fallacies and cleared the general issues; but they are still virtually discussing the old problems. To read Plato, for example, is to wonder almost equally at his entanglement in puerile fallacies and at his marvellous perception of the nature of the ultimate and still involved problems. If we could call up Locke or Descartes from the dead in their old state of mind, we might still be instructed by their conversation, though they had never heard of the later developments of thought. And, for a similar reason, there was a real interest in the discussion of great questions by political, or legal, or literary luminaries, who had seen men and cities and mixed in real affairs and studied life elsewhere than in books, even though as specialists they might be probably ignorant. The difference was rather, perhaps, a difference of dialect than of substance. Their weapons were old-fashioned; but the main lines of attack and defence were the same.
Another criticism, however, was obvious, and is, I think, sufficiently indicated in Mr. Hutton's imaginary conversation. The so-called discussions were necessarily in the main a series of assertions. Each disputant simply translated the admitted facts into his own language. The argument came to saying, I say ditto to Hume, or to Comte, or to Thomas Aquinas. After a brief encounter, one man declared that he believed in God, and his opponent replied, I don't. It was impossible really to get further. It was not a difference between two advocates agreed upon first principles and disputing only some minor corollary, but a manifestation of different modes of thought, and of diverging conceptions of the world and of life, which had become thoroughly imbedded in the very texture of the speaker's mind. When it is a question of principles, which have been the battle-ground of generations; when every argument that can be used has been worked out by the subtlest thinkers of all times, a dispute can really come to nothing but saying, I am of this or that turn of mind. The real discussion of such questions is carried on by a dialectical process which lasts through many generations, and is but little affected by any particular champion. Thus the general effect necessarily was as of men each securely intrenched in his own fastness, and, though they might make sallies for a little engagement in the open, each could retreat to a position of impregnable security, which could be assaulted only by long siege operations of secular duration.