Why, man, we're all in one boat, as everyone can see,
Bishops, and priests, and deacons, and poor little ranters like me.
There's hell in the Church of England and hell in the Church of Rome,
And in all other Christian Churches, abroad as well as at home.
The part of my creed you dislike may be too stern for you,
Many brave men believe it—aye, and enjoy life, too.
The know-nothing books may alarm you; but many a better man
Knows he knows nothing and says so, and lives the best life he can.
If there is a future state, face its hopes and terrors gravely;
The best path to it must be to bear life's burthens bravely.
And even if there be none, why should you not live like a man,
Enjoying whatever you have as much and as long as you can?
In the world in which we are living there's plenty to do and to know;
And there's always something to hope for till it's time for us to go.
'Despair' is the vilest of words, unfit to be said or thought,
Whether there is a God and a future state or not.
If you really are such a wretch, that you're quite unfit to live,
And ask my advice, I'll give you the best that I have to give:
Drown yourself by all means; I was wrong and you were right.
I'll not pull you out any more; but be sure you drown yourself quite.
'Despair is the vilest of words.' That expresses Fitzjames's whole belief and character. Faiths may be shaken and dogmas fade into meaningless jumbles of words: science may be unable to supply any firm ground for conduct. Still we can quit ourselves like men. From doubt and darkness he can still draw the practical conclusion, 'Be strong and of a good courage.' And, therefore, Fitzjames could not be a pessimist in the proper sense; for the true pessimist is one who despairs of the universe. Such a man can only preach resignation to inevitable evil, and his best hope is extinction. Sir Alfred Lyall's fine poem describes the Hindoo ascetic sitting by the bank of the sacred stream and watching the legions as they pass while cannon roar and bayonets gleam. To him they are disturbing phantoms, and he longs for the time when they will flicker away like the smoke of the guns on the windswept hill. He meanwhile sits 'musing and fasting and hoping to die.' Fitzjames is the precise antithesis: his heart was with the trampling legions, and for the ascetic he might feel pity, but certainly neither sympathy nor respect. He goes out of his way more than once to declare that he sees nothing sublime in Buddhism. 'Nirvana,' he says in a letter, 'always appeared to me to be at bottom a cowardly ideal. For my part I like far better the Carlyle or Calvinist notion of the world as a mysterious hall of doom, in which one must do one's fated part to the uttermost, acting and hoping for the best and trusting' that somehow or other our admiration of the 'noblest human qualities' will be justified. He had thus an instinctive dislike not only for Buddhism, but for the strain of similar sentiment in ascetic versions of Christianity. He had a great respect for Mohammedanism, and remarks that of all religious ceremonies at which he had been present, those which had most impressed him had been a great Mohammedan feast in India and the service in a simple Scottish kirk. There, as I interpret him, worshippers seem to be in the immediate presence of the awful and invisible Power which rules the universe; and without condescending to blind themselves by delusive symbols and images and incense and priestly magic, stand face to face with the inscrutable mystery. The old Puritanism comes out in a new form. The Calvinist creed, he says in 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,' was the 'grain on which the bravest, hardiest, and most vigorous race of men that ever trod the earth were nourished.' That creed, stripped of its scholastic formulas, was sufficient nourishment for him. He sympathises with it wherever he meets it. He is fond of quoting even a rough blackguard, one Azy Smith, who, on being summoned to surrender to a policeman, replied by sentencing 'Give up' to a fate which may be left to the imagination. Fitzjames applied the sentiment to the British Empire in India. He was curiously impressed, too, by some verses which he found in an Australian newspaper and was afterwards given to quoting. They turned out to be written by Adam Lindsay Gordon (the 'Sick Stockrider').
I have had my share of pastime, and I've done my share of toil,
And life is short—the longest life a span.
I care not now to tarry for the corn or for the oil,
Or for the wine that maketh glad the heart of man;
For good undone and time misspent and resolutions vain
'Tis somewhat late to trouble—this I know;
I would live the same life over if I had to live again
And the chances are I go where most men go.
I am perfectly well aware of the comments which that statement may suggest. The orthodox may, if they please, draw a moral for their own tastes; and I could draw a moral which is not quite orthodox. I only say that I have tried to describe his final position in the matter, without reserve; and that, in my opinion, whatever else it shows, it reveals both the sincerity and the manliness of a man who dared to look facts in the face.
I must speak, though briefly, of his political sympathies in this period, for they were exceedingly deep and strong. His position as a judge gave him the solace of an employment which could divert his mind from annoying reflections. It may be held that it should also have restrained him more completely than it did from taking any part in party controversies. I confess that to be my own opinion. He felt that he ought to keep within limits; but I cannot help thinking that they might have been a little closer than he would quite acknowledge. The old journalistic impulse, however, stirred within him when he saw certain political moves, and he found it impossible quite to keep silence. The first occasion of his writing was upon the starting of the 'St. James's Gazette,' under the editorship of his old friend Mr. Greenwood. Both personal and political sympathy induced him, as he put it, 'to take Mr. Greenwood's shilling,' and I believe that he also enlisted Maine. Besides the poem which I have quoted, he wrote a good many articles upon legal and literary topics from 1881 to 1883, and some which came very close to contemporary politics. The doctrine may be pretty well summed up in the phrase which he quotes more than once— Δἡμος ψηφἱξων μεγαλην αρχην διαλυασει. I need not follow the applications which he indicates both to Indian matters and to Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy.
He ceased to contribute after the beginning of 1883, but he wrote occasional letters under his own name to the 'Times.' The chief of these (I believe that there were others) were reprinted, and attracted some notice. In 1883 a question arose in which he had a special interest. In passing the Criminal Procedure Bill he had accepted what was described as a compromise. Magistrates were to receive powers of dealing summarily in trifling cases with Europeans who had previously had a right to be tried by juries before the High Courts. Fitzjames accepted the proposal that the power should be entrusted only to magistrates of European birth. The 'Ilbert Bill,' in 1883, proposed to remove this restriction, and so to confer a right of imprisoning Europeans for three months upon native magistrates, of whom there were now a greater number. Fitzjames, whose name had been mentioned in the controversy, wrote very earnestly against this proposal.[194] He asserted the right of Englishmen to be tried by magistrates who could understand their ways of thought, and approved the remark that if we were to remove all anomalies from India, our first step should be to remove ourselves. This, however, was, to his mind, only one example of the intrusion of an evil principle. A more serious case occurred upon Mr. Gladstone's introduction of the first Home Rule Bill in 1886. Fitzjames wrote some elaborate letters upon the 'Irish Question,' when the measure was anticipated, and wrote again upon the bill when the debates upon Mr. Gladstone's proposals were in progress.[195] The letters begin by disavowing any 'party politics'—a phrase which he does not consider to exclude an emphatic expression of opinion both upon Home Rule and upon the Land Legislation. It is entirely superfluous to summarise arguments which have been repeated till nobody can want to hear more of them. Briefly, I may say that Fitzjames's teaching might be summarised by saying that Ireland ought to be governed like India—justly, and in any case firmly. The demands both for Home Rule and for land legislation are, according to him, simply corollaries from the general principles of Jacobinism and Socialism. The empire will be destroyed and the landlords will be plundered. Virtually we are dealing with a simple attempt at confiscation supported by an organised system of crime. The argument is put with his usual downright force, and certainly shows no symptoms of any decline of intellectual vigour. He speaks, he says, impelled by the 'shame and horror' which an Englishman must feel at our feebleness, and asks whether we are cowards to be kicked with impunity? Sometimes he hoped, though his hopes were not sanguine, that a point would yet be reached at which Englishmen would be roused and would show their old qualities. But as a rule he turned, as his letters show, from the contemplation of modern politics with simple disgust. He is glad that he is, for the time at least, behind a safe breakwater, but no one can say how much longer it will withstand the advancing deluge.
Three months' rest after the attack of 1885 enabled him to go the summer circuit, and during the latter part of the year he was recovering strength. He became so much better that he was, perhaps, encouraged to neglect desirable precautions, and early in 1886 he writes that he has been able to dismiss from his mind a passing fear which had been vaguely present, that he might have to resign. In the following September, Mr. W. H. Smith requested him to become chairman of a Commission to inquire into the Ordnance Department. What he learnt in that capacity strengthened his conviction as to the essential weakness of our administrative system; although the rumours of corruption, to which, I believe, the Commission was owing, were disproved. He made, however, such suggestions as seemed practicable under the circumstances. While the Commission lasted he presided three days a week, and sat as judge upon the other three. He felt himself so competent to do his duties as to confirm his belief that he had completely recovered. He did a certain amount of literary work after this. He made one more attempt to produce a second edition of the 'View of the Criminal Law.' Indeed, the title-page gives that name to his performance. Once more, however, he found it impossible to refrain from re-writing. The so-called second edition is more properly an abbreviated version of the 'History,' though the reports of trials still keep their place; and, as the whole forms only one moderately thick volume, it represents much less labour than its predecessors. It includes, however, the result of some later inquiries and of his judicial experience. He abandons, for example, an opinion which he had previously maintained in favour of a Court of Appeal in criminal cases, and is now satisfied with the existing system. In this shape it is virtually a handbook for students, forming an accompaniment to the 'Digest' and the 'History.' It was the last of his works upon legal topics.
Meanwhile, if he wrote little, he was still reading a great variety of books, and was deeply interested in them. His letters are full of references to various authors, old and new. His criticisms have the primary merits of frankness and independence. He says exactly what he feels, not what the critics tell him that he ought to feel. No criticism can be really valuable which does not fulfil those conditions. I must admit, however, that a collection of his remarks would include a good many observations rather startling to believers in the conventional judgments. Purely literary qualities impress him very little unless they are associated with some serious purpose. He shows the same sort of independence which enabled him to accept a solitary position in religious and political matters. In private letters, moreover, he does not think it necessary to insist upon the fact, which he would have fully admitted, that the great object of criticism is always the critic himself. A man who says that he can't see, generally proves that he is blind, not that there is no light. If only for this reason, I would not quote phrases which would sound unduly crude or even arrogant when taken as absolute judgments, instead of being, as they often are, confessions of indifference in the form of condemnations. When a great writer really appeals to him, he shows no want of enthusiasm. During the enforced rest in 1885 he studied Spanish with great zeal; he calls it a 'glorious language,' and had the proverbial reward of being enabled to read 'Don Quixote' in the original. 'Don Quixote,' he says, had always attracted him, even in the translations, to a degree for which he cannot quite account. His explanation, however, is apparently adequate, and certainly characteristic. He sees in Cervantes a man of noble and really chivalrous nature, who looks kindly upon the extravagance which caricatures his own qualities, but also sees clearly that the highest morality is that which is in conformity with plain reason and common sense. Beneath the ridicule of the romances there is the strongest sympathy with all that is really noble.
After Spanish and Cervantes, Fitzjames turned to Italian and Dante. Dante, too, roused his enthusiasm, and he observes, quaintly enough, that he means to be as familiar with the 'Divina Commedia' as he once was with Bentham—two authors rarely brought into contact. Dante conquered him the more effectually by entering over the ruins of Milton. Some years before he had pronounced the 'Paradise Lost' to be 'poor, contradictory, broken-down stuff, so far as the story goes.' He inferred that 'poetry was too slight an affair to grapple with such an awful subject.' He had, however, already read Dante in Cary's translation, and thereby recognised something far greater. When he came to the original he was profoundly impressed. It is strange, he says, that he has learnt for the first time at the age of sixty what a really great poem could be. Poor Milton's adaptation of pagan mythology to the Hebrew legends, in order to expound Puritan theology, results in a series of solecisms, which even the poet could not expect his readers to take seriously. The story, taken for history, certainly breaks down sufficiently to justify a severe remark. But Dante's poem, embodying a consistent imagery into which was worked the whole contemporary philosophy and theology, is of absorbing interest even to those who are comparatively indifferent to its more purely literary merits. Fitzjames does not make any detailed criticisms, but fittingly expresses his astonishment and admiration upon Dante's revelation of a new world of imagination. I think that it is possible to show fitting reverence for Dante without deposing Milton from his much lower, though still very lofty place. But to one brought up in the old English traditions it was difficult to avoid the rather superfluous contrast.
With the help of such studies and frequent visits to old friends, and minor literary tasks, Fitzjames could find ample means of filling up any spaces left by his judicial duties. In spite of the disgust with which he regarded the political world, he was happy in his own little world; and his time passed in a peaceful round of satisfactory work. A few troublesome cases, those especially of which I have spoken, gave him occasional worry; but he could adhere to his principle of never fretting unnecessarily. But now was to begin the painful experience which comes to the survivors when the ranks begin to thin. He felt such losses deeply, if with little display of feeling. I find a remark in one of his letters which is, I think, characteristic. He says that his first feeling upon a severe blow had been something like shame at not suffering more. But in a few weeks the sense of loss had become deeper and stronger; and he had to remind himself of the necessity of conquering his depression. I have no need, I hope, to dwell upon the strength of his affections. I can never forget one occasion when his sympathies were deeply stirred; and when his sense of a certain awkwardness in expressing himself, a relic of his old prejudice against 'sentimentalism,' served only to bring out most pathetically the power of the emotions with which he was struggling.