Some Early Impressions

II.

I HAVE said that we were not without intellectual interests at Cambridge. In truth, when one looks back from a distance of forty years, it seems that all but the very dullest of men must have been profoundly interested in the questions then coming to the front. We were in one of the periods at which a crust of conventional dogma has formed, like the palæocrystic ice of the polar sea, upon the surface of opinion. The accepted formulas are being complacently repeated in all good faith by the respectable authorities. And yet new currents are everywhere moving beneath, and the superincumbent layer of official dogma is no longer conformable to the substratum of genuine belief. Then a sudden cataclysm begins to break up the crust and to sweep away the temporary bridging of the abyss which superficial observers had mistaken for solid earth. The alarm caused by the collapse of the ancient dogmas may perhaps be exaggerated. In time we come to see that the change is mainly in the open manifestations of the old, rather than in the intrusion of the really new modes of thought; and somehow or other as the new doctrines lose their strangeness we are sagacious enough to discover that we always believed them in substance. However that may be, old-fashioned people had to bear some severe shocks. In 1857 Buckle appeared as a devil’s advocate of extraordinary abilities and knowledge. A certain percentage of us, he was supposed to argue, had got to be murderers whether we liked it or not. Two years later Darwin’s Origin of Species showed that we were a kind of monkey, though innocent lookers-on flattered themselves that he could be triumphantly confuted by the versatile Bishop Wilberforce. Mr. Herbert Spencer had already propounded his essential theories ; and in 1860 announced that he was elaborating the system of philosophy upon which he was to labor so heroically for a generation to come. “Evolution,” in short, was revealing itself as a demon horned and hoofed. Religious dogmas were melting in new currents of thought. In 1860 the clerical world of England was alarmed by Essays and Reviews. Anglican divines, it appeared, had admitted that the Bible should be criticised “like any other book; ” and had serious qualms about Noah’s ark. Two years later the good Bishop Colenso explained with a touching simplicity how an intelligent Zulu had refused to believe that Noah ever built an ark, and how he had come to agree with the Zulu. The story is familiar, and requires no comment; only when I remember the thrill of indignation which then ran through the respectable world, the clerical manifestoes which I was adjured to sign, the masses of polemical literature, the prosecutions for heresy, and the vehement assertions that the very foundations of religion and morality were being assailed, and then remind myself that we are all now evolutionists, and that orthodox divines accept the most startling doctrines of Essays and Reviews, I feel as though I must have lived through more than one generation. I recall the facts because it has become difficult to realize the greatness of the shock to the equanimity of the orthodox and respectable; but, for the present, my only purpose is to note the effect upon our little world at Cambridge.

Not long after leaving the university I wrote certain articles descriptive of Cambridge life, and if any one should say that they were a bit of flippant journalism, I shall not dispute his opinion. I fancied, however, that they had long been forgotten when I heard that they had been denounced by a distinguished professor in a university sermon. What excited his wrath was my statement (substantially) that at Cambridge we were careless Gallios. I had said that though we could lose our temper over political discussions, we became calm when conversation was turned to the controversies which divided the religious world. My critic took me to insinuate that we were covert unbelievers, and confuted me by mentioning the eminent orthodox authorities who were then lights of the university. I shall not argue the point. Of one thing I am certain : the Cambridge of those days was not an arena for struggles between church-parties. Individuals might belong to what were then called the “high,” “low,” or “broad” parties; but their differences did not form the ground for any division in university politics. We left such matters to Oxford. There, too, a comparative calm had followed the catastrophe of Newman’s conversion. But at Oxford Jowett and Stanley were becoming known as leaders of the broad church. The orthodox were showing their bitterness by refusing to grant Jowett the emoluments of his Greek professorship, and a band of disciples was taking him and his friends as spiritual guides. Six of tbe “seven against Christ, ” as the authors of Essays and Reviews were pleasantly called, were distinguished Oxford men. Jowett and Pattison were, I suppose, the most distinguished teachers in the place. Younger Oxford men, especially T. H. Green, were beginning to read Hegel, and preparing to introduce the next philosophical fashion. Others were revolting from all theology. Dr. Congreve was planting the positivist church in England, and finding his chief proselytes at Oxford. Cambridge looked on with a comparative indifference and congratulated itself upon the intellectual calm. Our interest in such matters took a characteristic form. Colenso was a man of noble character as well as a good Cambridge mathematician. The mathematician appeared in his argument that the authors of the Pentateuch were disgracefully ignorant of his text-book on arithmetic. Otherwise they would not have made statements from which it followed that every priest had to eat over eighty-eight pigeons daily. That no doubt brought the question to a good tangible definite issue; but it was a trifle narrow, and could be plausibly described as a cavil. A similar proclivity to stick to matter of fact was characteristic, I fancy, of our orthodox divines. The ablest, I suppose, was Lightfoot, afterwards Bishop of Durham, who in my time became a professor of divinity and at a later period, with his friends Westcott and Hort, did admirable work in criticism of the early Christian writings. The method, however, suggests wider questions. Lightfoot, as his friend Hort tells us, was personally shy, and, though enthusiastically appreciated by a few congenial pupils, “shrank from what seemed to him abstract speculation.” Hort’s remark is suggested by his reply to the author of Supernatural Religion. I turned, I remember, with great interest to his articles to see what reply so learned and able an apologist would make to a criticism of the evidences. I learnt from them that he had a very poor opinion of his antagonist’s scholarship, and could apparently point out many errors of detail. But I was disappointed to find that he expressly declined to argue the general question. What are the essential canons of historical criticism ? Can you be at once historical and accept the supernatural ? What proofs, if any, will establish the truth of a miraculous narrative? Lightfoot might be fully justified in not discussing that question; but till it was decided in his favor he could not convert one of the opposite way of thinking. One man accepts as sufficient evidence a statement which to his opponent is intrinsically incredible. There is no common ground for argument. You may fix the dates or authorship of documents, but you cannot say what weight is to be attached to them. Our Cambridge authorities, in short, put aside the discussion of general principles, or assumed the truth of principles which to me seemed erroneous. They liked to keep their feet on solid ground of fact, and had no love of “abstract speculation.” That meant that they had still a strong admixture of the old Paley leaven, which implied the reduction of the problem to a mere question of historical evidence. Their hatred for the abstract in the “Serbonian bog ” of metaphysics inclined them to shrink from discussing questions which are, after all, strictly relevant and essential. Our teachers had of course a philosophy of religion, but they did not often expound or defend their views on the vital question. They were generally content to assume them. This shrinking from the “abstract ” implies no indifference to the great issues ; but it certainly was congenial to those who were indifferent. We know pretty well what is the “religion of all sensible men, ” careful as sensible men may be not to reveal it. Any man whose religion was of that type was safe at Cambridge from impertinent curiosity — nobody would ask what he thought. His creed was certainly not without adherents. According to a very comfortable “Erastian” doctrine, the Church of England is simply a department of the state. The articles lay down the formulas which its members are forbidden to contradict. If in performing the services they have to affirm, as well as to refrain from denying certain doctrines, their personal convictions do not matter : they are merely acting in their official capacity, performing a ceremony considered by the authorities to be edifying, not stating what they believe to be true. That is not a theory which I hold myself; and I agree that it is open to some objections from the ethical point of view. Still I have known respectable persons who have accepted and acted upon it with apparently comfortable consciences. I do not believe nor mean to insinuate that such men were otherwise than exceptional. If I were to describe what was the average state of belief among my acquaintances, — and any such description must, of course, be highly conjectural, — I should be inclined to guess, in the first place, that the great majority might fairly call themselves sincere believers. They held that some religious belief was not only supremely useful, but must somehow or other be true. They held also that the beliefs demanded from members of the Church of England were the least dogmatic, the easiest of acceptance, and capable of the widest interpretation. They might be aware that critics and scientific people had raised difficulties; and did not know very clearly what was the proper answer. They assumed that there was an answer somewhere or other, and meanwhile left the question to experts, avoided raising awkward questions, and went on the old lines comfortably and quietly. That was not a solution to satisfy everybody, and it did not satisfy me.

We had, I have said, no spiritual guides among the Cambridge residents. We had, of course, our favorite teachers in the world of speculative thought. The greatest of English writers who could assume such a position was Carlyle. Carlylism had its zealots, and Froude has told us how he and others oscillated between the opposite poles of Carlyle and Newman. To most of us, however, Carlyle passed for an eccentric Diogenes or, as he called himself, a St. John the Baptist, denouncing not only the wearers of purple and fine linen, but everybody who had a decent coat to his back. Sartor Resartus called upon us to throw aside the old clothes of orthodoxy — “ to come out of Houndsditch, ” as he put it. The prophet was fulminating outrageous denunciations against things in general, and yet offering no tangible alternative. His LatterDay Pamphlets had shocked not only the good British Tory, but the sound Liberal, who was scandalized by any apology for slavery. His theology, whatever that might precisely be, was too vague for practical purposes. Young men who were not prepared to “swallow all formulas ” and, like Herr Teufelsdröckh, strip themselves stark naked, read Coleridge, and found the most attractive contemporary leader in the admirable F. D. Maurice. He, they thought, might be taken as a guide to the promised land where orthodox dogma in alliance with philosophy could also be reconciled with science and criticism. Maurice undeniably was one of the most attractive and saint-like of men. He was clearly sincere even to an excess of scrupulosity. His very weaknesses and excess of sensibility gave to his friends the sense that they were the bodyguard of an unworldly teacher, whom they could relieve from practical difficulties, and screen from the harsh censures of the ordinary controversialist and the religious newspaper. I always remember a photograph in which he appeared taking the arm of Tom Hughes. Hughes was turning a reverential glance to his master and at the same time looking from the corner of his eye with an obvious wish that some caviler would try to punch the prophet’s head and require a lesson from a practical expert in the art of fisticuffs. The loyalty of the disciples was most natural and intelligible. Maurice in the pulpit was the very incarnation of earnestness, reverence, and deep human feeling. But he did not strike me as an incarnation of clearheadedness. No one could denounce more impressively the coarse theology which dealt in threats of hell-fire and hopes that a wrathful deity might be appeased by transferring the penalty to perfect innocence. The true gospel revealed a loving father, not an arbitrary tyrant. But then came a difficulty. The coarse version, he held, had been somehow read into the dogmatic system : it was not properly there. The plain meaning of the gospels more or less embodied in the Thirty-Nine Articles was the very reverse, and, moreover, was as clear as daylight to the unsophisticated reader. Formulas repulsive to the human heart and conscience, if interpreted in the vulgar plan, became infinitely beautiful and edifying in the natural meaning. So far, therefore, from rejecting, you were to accept them as unconditionally true. To the ordinary mind this feat seemed to require considerable ingenuity and a kind of spiritualization uncongenial to common sense. It was easier to say that hell was a figment than to make hell a manifestation of mercy; and the statement that all who denied certain metaphysical dogmas should without doubt perish everlastingly was somehow an awkward way of asserting the universality of divine love. “Eternal,” said Maurice, “has nothing to do with time; ” which was a more satisfactory than intelligible conclusion. I once ventured in an article some years later to express my difficulty in understanding how the ThirtyNine Articles came to express a man’s “deepest convictions in the most unequivocal language.” Maurice accepted the phrase, though adding an explanation. A “more spiritual theology” was required than would have satisfied our ancestors; but “ the groundwork ” of such a theology was “ laid bare ” in the Thirty-Nine Articles. We should retain the groundwork instead of frittering it away with the broad church rationalists. Somehow or other the groundwork appeared to me to be made of crumbling materials.

I never doubted his sincerity or felt “contempt ” for him personally; but I could not believe in his perspicacity. Perhaps that was because I was not a born Platonist, and could not breathe in the semi-mythical region where Maurice was at home, and where this transfiguration of dogmas may be perfectly natural. I found it easier simply to admit that the dogmas simply meant what the dogmatist supposed them to mean and to reject them “in a lump.” I could admire the loyal enthusiasm of Kingsley and Hughes, but found the teaching of their prophet to be no help for my difficulties. It only seemed to lead into beautiful rose-colored mists of illusions,where anything might turn out to bear the reverse of its plain, everyday sense. I had taken orders, rashly, though not, I trust, with conscious insincerity, on a sort of tacit understanding that Maurice or his like would act as an interpreter of the true facts. The difficulty which finally upset me was commonplace and prosaic enough. I had to take part in services where the story of the flood or of Joshua’s staying the sun to massacre the Amorites were solemnly read as if they were authentic and edifying narratives — as true as the stories of the Lisbon earthquake or of the battle of Waterloo, besides being creditable to the morality of Jehovah. It may be easy to read any meaning into a dogma, but since allegorizing has gone out of fashion historical narratives are not so malleable. They were, it seemed to me, true or false, and could not be both at once. Divines, since that day, have discovered that it is possible to give up the history without dropping a belief in revelation. I could not then, as I cannot now, take that view, I had to give up my profession. I once heard an anecdote of Maurice which proves, I think, that he was not without humor. He was lecturing a class of young men upon the Old Testament, and came to the story of Jacob’s questionable behavior to Esau. After noticing the usual apologies, he added: “After all, my brethren, this story illustrates the tendency of the spiritual man in all ages to be a liar and a sneak.” Nobody, it is superfluous to add, was less of a liar or a sneak than Maurice. But the “tendency ” may lead the spiritual man to do quite innocently what in other men can only be done by deliberate self-mystification. I, not being a spiritual man, must have deserved one or both of these epithets had I continued to set forth as solemn truths narratives which I could not spiritualize, and which seemed to me to be exploded legends implying a crude and revolting morality — I gave up the attempt to reconcile the task to my conscience.

By degrees I gave up a good deal more; and here I must make a further confession. Many admirable people have spoken of the agony caused by the abandonment of their old creed. Truth has forced them to admit that the very pillars upon which their whole superstructures of faith rested were unsound. The shock has caused them exquisite pain, and even if they have gained a fresh basis for a theory of life, they still look back fondly at their previous state of untroubled belief. I have no such story to tell. In truth, I did not feel that the solid ground was giving way beneath my feet, but rather that I was being relieved of a cumbrous burden. I was not discovering that my creed was false, but that I had never really believed it. I had unconsciously imbibed the current phraseology; but the formulas belonged to the superficial stratum of my thought instead of to the fundamental convictions. I will not inquire what is the inference as to my intellectual development. I fear that it would be rather humiliating, or at least imply that the working of “what I pleased to call my mind ” had been of a very easygoing and perfunctory character. But the ease of the change was probably due to another part of my intellectual “environment.” In fact, the ordinary state of opinion among my Cambridge friends, as elsewhere, was permeated by an influence of which I have not yet spoken. We cared little for Carlyle and less for Newman; but we were thoroughly attracted by one man whom they both denounced. John Stuart Mill was then at the height of his influence. His books on Logic and on Political Economy had given him an established position. His Liberty, published in 1859, was accepted as a noble utterance of the truth, even by many men (Kingsley, for example) who belonged to a hostile school of thought. Mill was living in seclusion at that period ; he had few personal relations with members of the political or social world ; and we used to listen with reverential curiosity to the few anecdotes which might percolate through the two or three intimates admitted to the presence. No personal attraction, therefore, stimulated our loyalty; we read the books as we might treatises of physical or of mathematical science, and judged them as we might judge Newton’s Principia without reference to the personality of the author. In later days I had a few glimpses of Mill himself, and was startled by the contrast between the reality and my preconceived image. I heard him speak in the House of Commons. Instead of an impassive philosopher, I saw a slight, frail figure, trembling with nervous irritability. He poured out a series of perfectly formed sentences with an extraordinary rapidity suggestive of learning by heart; and, when he lost the thread of his discourse, closed his eyes for two or three minutes, till, after regaining his composure, he could again take up his parable. Although his oratory was defective, he was clearly speaking with intense feeling, and was exceedingly sensitive to the reception by his audience. Some of his doctrines were specially irritating to the rows of stolid country gentlemen who began by listening curiously to so strange an animal as a philosopher, and discovered before long that the animal’s hide could be pierced by scornful laughter. To Mill they represented crass stupidity, and he became unable either to conceal his contempt or keep his temper. Neither his philosophy nor his official experience had taught him to wear a mask of insensibility, especially when his friendships were touched. I once met him at a small gathering where some doubts were hinted as to the merits of a youthful disciple. Mill took the reflections as though they had been a personal attack upon himself. We were taken aback by the indignant zeal with which he proclaimed that the youth — a singularly fine specimen of the offensive prig in general estimation — possessed one of the clearest and most cultivated intellects of the day. On such occasions he showed glimpses of the excessive sensibility which was so marked in his devotion to his wife. The Mill of the treatises, as we read them, was the very reverse — the embodiment of pure passionless reason. They possessed the merits which we most admired,— good, downright, hard logic, with a minimum of sentimentalism. Mill was, in short, utilitarianism, and classical Political Economy incarnate.

It is common to speak now as if the supremacy of the school of which he was the mouthpiece was then universally admitted. Ruskin, according to the legend which has grown up, was the first man to challenge this wicked monster generally called laissez faire. In one sense, this is absurd. Ruskin, as he always himself declared, was only applying the teaching of his master Carlyle, and aiming new darts at the “pig-philosophy.” The orthodox utilitarians had always been a small and an essentially unpopular sect. The “Christian Socialist ” movement of Maurice and his friends was only one symptom of a discontent with the adequacy of their teaching which had been uttered by many others. Kingsley had run his head against Political Economy most emphatically in Yeast and Alton Locke. But it is no doubt quite true that Mill’s disciples claimed with complete confidence to be in possession of a definite and scientific system of economical, political, and ethical truth. They were calmly convinced that all objectors, from Carlyle downwards, were opposed to him as dreamers to logicians: and the recent triumph of free trade had given special plausibility to their claims. The claims exactly suited our Cambridge notions. The study of mathematical sciences predisposes, no doubt, to a sympathy with good hard reasoning, and our favorite antipathy was the “impostor,” that is, the man given, in another favorite phrase of ours, to “gushing,” and to allowing his feelings to override his common sense. My most intimate friend of those days was Henry Fawcett, afterwards the blind Postmaster General, and then a fellow of my college. No more generous or warm-hearted man has ever been known to me; not the less conspicuously because intellectually he belonged to that shrewd, hard-headed, north country type, which was so conspicuous at Cambridge ; and which, it must he confessed, was apt to be as narrow as it was vigorous intellectually. Fawcett knew Mill’s Political Economy as a Puritan knew the Bible. His own brief treatise was virtually a short summary of Mill with shrewd practical applications. In our little circle the summary answer to all hesitating proselytes was “read Mill.” In those argumentations of which I have spoken, hour after hour was given to discussing points raised by Mill as keenly as mediæval commentators used to discuss the doctrines of Aristotle. The application of Mill’s logic to religious orthodoxy is of course obvious. A thorough-going disciple must be an Agnostic. Indeed, he would probably come to regard the master himself as showing a questionable tenderness for the old creed. Mill, however, like the rest of his school, had preserved a rather singular reticence upon that side of his teaching. When his political opponents wished to prove his infidelity, the one sentence they could discover in his works was the assertion that he would rather go to hell than worship an immoral deity. His religious (or anti-religious) influence was therefore, one may say, latent. The inference was obvious if you chose to draw inferences. But that was needless for the Gallios who cared nothing for such inquiries ; or who imitated Mill’s own reticence. Undoubtedly many of us drifted in this direction, and my own admiration for Mill, though it was never quite unqualified, helped to alienate me from orthodoxy. But this meant an undercurrent of opinion which affected individuals, but did not rouse attention. Political questions were more generally exciting. Our little world was, as I have said, agitated by the first step of university reform. The Fellows, as governing bodies of the various colleges, had to arrange schemes in combination with the parliamentary commission. The topics over which we argued are too obsolete to be worth exposition. I need only say that the chief aim of reformers showed no very revolutionary principles. The driving wheel of the university machinery was still to be competition for prize fellowships; and though some people were beginning to talk about “endowment of research, ” and Pattison wrote a very able book upon academical reorganization, such speculations had little affected our projects. One point may be worth a word. One of the chief changes which strikes an old student on returning to the scenes of his youth is the presence of woman. In my day we were a society of bachelors. I do not remember during my career to have spoken to a single woman at Cambridge except my bedmaker and the wives of one or two heads of houses. Those exalted ladies belonged to the upper sphere of severe dignity which formed a separate section of society. We were beginning to propose some modification of the absurd system of celibacy which meant in practice that every official teacher of youth should speedily become discontented with his position. Yet proposals to alter it excited horror. Fathers of families, it was known, were capable of everything; and married fellows, it was thought, would use the college endowments as patronage for their sons. I remember a pathetic sermon preached upon that subject by a gentleman, who, as soon as the law was altered, took advantage of the change by marrying himself and becoming, I may add, a most useful official, and the more useful for his charming wife. But to admit women to lectures was regarded as outside all practical possibilities. An American gentleman, Mr. Moncure Conway, I think, who came to Cambridge about 1863, told Fawcett in my hearing that we should admit female students within a generation. Fawcett, a most ardent advocate of woman’s rights, replied that such a revolution might happen in a century. Within ten years Girton and Newnham were beginning their successful careers. Fawcett would have been startled could he have foreseen that his daughter was to be the first female senior wrangler. In that and in other directions we have moved fast. Meanwhile, university reform was merely a corollary from more general principles. Fawcett was my leader in the little warfare which introduced reform into our college. From very early days he had been stirred by political ambition; and I need not dwell upon the splendid audacity which enabled him not only to persevere when he was struck with blindness, but to make the accident a stepping-stone to success. Fawcett had a double share, I might say, of the true Cambridge spirit; where his hearty, downright ways made him universally popular, and where he found plenty of most congenial comrades. He got into some trouble a little later with his constituents for forming a “republican club, ” which counted among other members that most charming genius W. K. Clifford. Men should be no more ashamed of having been republicans in their youth, said Southey, than of having had the measles. Rather, one could say, a man should be ashamed of not having felt in his youth the generous impulses which make him sympathize with whatever appears to be the cause of progress. Enthusiasm, it is true, is apt to generate arrogance. The epithet “cocksure” has been applied to the Liberals of those days, and we probably deserved it. We held ourselves to be in the very van of the army of the faithful: and were comfortably convinced of the extreme stupidity of all our opponents. Looking back with the experience of later years, I feel some bewilderment. It is often said that the radicalism of those days, with its faith in laissez faire and “Individualism, ” is hopelessly effete. Yet the modern Liberal still claims to represent the old reformers, and to inherit their happy peculiarity of being on the right side of every question. The old simple issues, in truth, have been perplexed by later development. The Radical takes credit for having transferred political power to the democracy, though the democracy sets at defiance the old Radical’s hatred of government interference and of all socialistic legislation. The Tory boasts that the prejudice against state interference lias vanished, though the rulers of the state have now to interfere as the servants and not as the masters of the democracy. Both sides have modified their creeds in course of their flirtation with Socialism, till it is difficult to assign the true principle of either, or trace the affiliation of ideas. In those days tendencies which have produced divergence of different wings of the Liberal party were still so far latent as to be comportable with apparent unity. The immediate issue was that which led to what Carlyle called the “shooting of Niagara.” The question was whether the democracy was to be content with the position assigned to it by the reform bill of 1832. The Tory and the good old Whig of the Macaulay type were contented with the existing order. The extraordinary popularity of Palmerston during his last six years (1859—65) meant the good old British patriotism stimulated by the Crimean war or the Indian Mutiny and indifference or decided dislike to further political changes. On his death, the discontent which had been accumulating became manifest and patent. Cobden and Bright had won the battle of free trade against the squires, and had been the objects of the bitterest aversion among the ruling classes for their supposed want of patriotic feeling. People were now beginning to suspect that the Crimean war had been a stupendous blunder; and the success of the free trade gave credit to the champions who had forced it upon the old aristocratic class. Mill was the interpreter of the economic and political doctrine of which free trade had been a practical application. That doctrine is now condemned as “individualistic ” and as sanctioning the selfishness of wicked capitalists. But to Mill and his disciples it showed a different face. In the first place, it meant for them justice to the poor, abolition of the tax on food, and full liberty to combine and coöperate. There could be no more energetic advocate than Mill of every measure which could strengthen the independence and improve the outlook of the laboring classes. The political economists indeed held, and, as I believe, held most truly, that no reform could be permanent which did not stimulate the sense of individual responsibility. The laborer must recognize his duties as well as his rights. If in asserting that side of the question too unconditionally they approved of " Individualism ” in a bad sense, they were also assuring a fundamental truth which is now too often ignored or treated with contempt. I say so much to exclude the assumption that even implicit belief in the old economic doctrine meant cynicism or hard-hearted indifference to the interests of the poor. We held, it is true, that Ruskin when he attacked Mill was a sentimentalist, who could neither look facts in the face nor reason coherently. We could not believe in extemporizing Utopia or in hysterical denunciations of the whole industrial structure. Real improvement must condescend to be guided by scientific method. Mill and his closest followers were as keenly desirous as men could be of promoting the welfare of all classes, and as sensitive to the existing evils, however rashly they might have accepted certain nostrums as all-sufficient. Mill’s generous aims appealed to Fawcett, and must be realized by accepting his principles. Though the prophet was still in seclusion, one or two of his lieutenants reached us at Cambridge: especially W. T. Thornton, who was to convert Mill himself on an important point, and Hare, whose scheme of voting was to solve the great difficulty and make democracy supreme without being tyrannical. Fawcett himself was becoming known at that (I must confess) dreariest of all bodies, the Social Science Association, and as a candidate for a seat in Parliament. I was a humble satellite to my friend in that capacity, and for a period held myself to be a keen politician. I wrote a campaign newspaper started to support Fawcett’s candidature on one occasion: I remember with a shudder addressing a mob from the windows of an inn at election time, and being cruelly chaffed for my well-meant eloquence ; and I sat through a social science meeting, where I remember chiefly the painfully pathetic spectacle of Brougham, in his stage of senile decay, delivering a perfectly inaudible address to a pitying audience which tried to maintain a dumb show of respectful attention.

Fawcett’s Radical friends at Cambridge were a small minority, but were numerous enough to give abundant animation to our discussions. One of the topics which then evoked the keenest interest was the civil war in the United States. It had incidentally a special interest for me. Mr. C. F. Adams has lately discussed in a very interesting paper the change which has come over English opinion upon American affairs. One remark which must, I think, be suggested to every reader of such discussions is the utter worthlessness from any logical point of view of any judgment passed by one nation upon another. I have lived many years in England, and still feel myself totally incompetent to form any trustworthy estimate of the moral value even of my own countrymen. I know intimately only a small section, and in regard to it I am prejudiced and in many ways ignorant. I am justified at most in rough conjectures about the great majority, whom I know only from second-hand sources. What right have I to speak with any confidence about the millions of another nation of which I am far more ignorant ? The conventional picture made by one nation of another is a mere random putting together of hasty guesses and rash assumptions. International prejudices must be explained as irrational instincts, not as results of any intelligent observation. Fifty years ago the view taken of Americans by the English upper classes was the product of blind antipathies. Our national pride had suffered from the separation, and we naturally liked to believe that the separation had led to political deterioration on the other side. Meanwhile the unpatriotic Radical had never been tired of holding up the United States as the ideal of true democracy. There, said those wicked people, you have a standing proof that a great people can dispense with a monarchy, a House of Lords, and an established church. They represented the good old frugal republican simplicity and freedom from corruption. Such panegyrics only strengthened the Tory prejudice against republicans by the prejudices which made Cobden and Bright hateful to the right-minded believer in British institutions. For that, and many other reasons, the supposed collapse of the Union was, I fear, a sweet morsel to the average well-to-do Englishman. Spite of his pride in our own abolition of slavery, he was glad to see the democratic bubble burst, and persuaded himself by a smart article or two that slavery had nothing to do with the question. The ignorance displayed was gigantic, but not more gigantic than is usual. Meanwhile, to us young Radicals the sentiment seemed to be altogether mean and bigoted. We sympathized cordially with the Union, and the sense that we were in a minority in our own class gave special zest to our advocacy. Many a college feast was resolved into a vehement debating society, and passions ran high.

At that time I had given up Noah’s ark and my old calling. It struck me that I should gain new power to my elbow if I could say, “I have been on the spot.” In 1863, accordingly, I crossed the Atlantic, and on reaching Boston heard of the battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg. I returned rich with three months’ experience, and could lay down the law in Cambridge circles with unanswerable authority. I am afraid, indeed, that certain anecdotes, especially of some of Lincoln’s humorous sayings, had more success than my political observations. To that journey I owe an advantage for which I am now most grateful. At the American Cambridge I had the good fortune to make friendships which have been invaluable. I can never forget the hours which I passed in Lowell’s study at Elmwood. It was the beginning of cordial relations which lasted till his death, and only grew warmer with years — but of that I have spoken elsewhere. I remember telling him as a joke that I had thought of making a book of my travels when I got home. I was startled when he took me to be in earnest. I was too conscious of my ignorance to contemplate such a performance seriously, and I still looked upon bookmaking with the awful reverence of Gibbon contemplating his great work. My highest ambition was to qualify myself to write a newspaper article or two. I was aspiring, indeed, to a character for which I came to recognize my incompetence. I was,for once, traveling like the British member of Parliament who visits India in his endeavors to become a fountain of political information. Fawcett had obtained for me a letter of introduction to Seward from the great John Bright. Seward received me with the courtesy due to a friend of the chief English sympathizer, told me with a frankness which amazed my notions of official reticence that if England did not stop the “rams ” then building the United States would go to war with us, and gave me the opportunity, for which I have always been grateful, of shaking hands with Abraham Lincoln. I felt myself to be a terrible impostor. I had, I fear, to exaggerate slightly as to the degree of my acquaintance with Bright, — whom I had never seen, — and felt painfully my incapacity to be even a political journalist. I had, indeed, sufficient zeal. Certain letters of the time enable me to recall my state of mind. They show how innocently I had accepted the Liberal platform of the day. I have not abandoned the opinions then expressed; I still think that I was substantially right; though I could not now be so much impressed by the truisms and commonplaces which I then took to be the best results of political wisdom. No doubt one’s state is in some respects the more gracious when such moral platitudes as strike a popular audience and appeal to the gallery arouse one’s own enthusiasm, and are announced with the fervor of a proselyte as new and startling truths. To be disposed to take them for granted, and to think rather of the limitations than of the positive significance of sounding moral generalities, is, it may be, a proof of sophistication if not of downright cynicism. I was then in my virtuous stage, I could heartily join in the applause which welcomes an oration denouncing slavery or cruelty to woman, as if nobody had ever denounced them before. Now, perhaps, I should be inclined to mutter with Brougham listening to a popular preacher, “the court is with you,” and wish that he would expose the fallacies rather than assert the general truths embodied in edifying philanthropy. I had, so to speak, swallowed the orthodox political dogma whole, and had not yet begun to chew and digest. It was a virtuous and certainly an agreeable state of mind. I could follow my Mill or Bright unhesitatingly, and share the zeal with which Fawcett was enlisting in behalf of advanced reformers without a doubt that we were in the van of progress, and that we were advancing not only the truth, but the whole truth. Before many years were over, I am afraid that my friends regarded me not, indeed, as a backslider, but as one whose zeal had grown rather tepid. A friend of mine used to tell a story of me upon which I vainly sought to cast a doubt. It was that I called upon him during the FrancoPrussian war, when I happened to have heard the news, of which he was still ignorant, of the catastrophe of Sedan. After a couple of hours’ talk, about books, I imparted this startling intelligence incidentally as I was taking leave. My friend declares that he told this anecdote as creditable to me. He only meant to show that I was absorbed in literary interests, and so far resembled the immortal Goethe when he held the French Revolution of 1830 to be of insignificance compared with a declaration of Cuvier about the homologies of the skull. I must admit that my political zeal cooled down pretty rapidly. The refrigeration was due partly to a justifiable modesty. I most sincerely admired and envied the vigor with which Fawcett and others could throw themselves heart and soul into the thick of the struggle. Political warfare is a most fascinating and absorbing pursuit which gives full play to the highest intellectual faculties. But success in it, even in the capacity of journalist, — the only one open to me, — requires the shrewd eye for affairs which makes the practical man of business. I have always felt myself to be a child in such matters. I have my political opinions ; but when it is a question of interpreting them into the dialect of the day, of appreciating the merits of a particular platform, or choosing the best method of giving effect to a policy, I am as helpless as a country parson on the Stock Exchange. Though I can’t write verses, I am for such purposes as bad as the merest poet, and, therefore, I must confess that the society of active politicians is often uncongenial to me. They strike me as painfully self-righteous. They hold fidelity to a party to be among the highest of human virtues ; and to me it generally seems to mean that a man attaches an absurd sanctity to some formula which he only half understands and is just as likely to apply in the wrong place as in the right. Consistency — a doubtful virtue at the best — comes to mean that you follow your leader in a confused struggle till you have lost your general bearings and may be heading in the wrong direction. As friends of mine came to be altogether absorbed in the vortex, I fully agreed that it was because they possessed faculties to which I could make no claim. But I felt also that it was at a certain cost. A. friend who had succeeded in apolitical career was early good enough to administer consolation to me. It was not true, he said, that men who had made a mark as statesmen were necessarily superior to men of letters. That, of course, was the presumption, but cases might be mentioned of ministers of state not intrinsically superior to the best writers of the day. I tried to look as if the remark was as novel as, of course, it was gratifying. Still I had occasionally thought so myself; and I might have referred him to the famous passage in which Plato points out that Thales, though he fell into a well while looking at the stars, had really chosen a lot higher in some respects than that of the men who ridiculed his sheepish awkwardness. I do not profess to be a Thales or a Plato, but I speedily came to admit that I was less incapable of diverting myself in the world to which they belong than of playing a part in the rough and tumble of political warfare.

Leslie Stephen.

(To be continued.)