Sir Leslie Stephen

IT is well sometimes that a distinguished man should die without having written an autobiography. Leslie Stephen was not the sort of person to be likely to write about himself, and possibly the fact that he had written so many biographies of others further indisposed him to undertake such a task. But by a happy chance he wrote two works in which the reader may incidentally acquire a good bit of information about his ancestry and his early life. These are the biography of his brother, the well-known judge, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, and of his former college chum, the economist and politician, Henry Fawcett.¹ From the former we learn that Leslie, who was born in 1832, came of a good ancestry, having in its roll some distinguished names. On the paternal side he came, like Gladstone, from a sturdy stock whose will, energy, and wit were developed by business pursuits. We find in it traces of exceptional muscular strength, and Leslie, the famous athlete and Alpine climber, was fond of relating how his paternal grandfather once started in the early morning of his seventieth birthday on a walk of twenty-five miles to Hampstead, at which place he breakfasted. We note, too, evidences of a brave and independent spirit, ready to fight valiantly on occasion for legal rights. Mr. F. Galton finds a good illustration of the heredity of talent in the fact that Stephen and his distinguished brother had for their grandfather a master in Chancery, and for their father a gentleman who won eminence as Colonial Under-Secretary, as a professor of history, and as the author of a noteworthy book, Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography.

The father was a warm adherent of the sombre creed of the Evangelical school known as the Clapham Sect; and the mother, the daughter of Rev. John Venn of Clapham, held the same faith. It is not hard for one who knew Stephen in later life to form a tentative picture of the boy’s home. The father was evidently a potent influence in its atmosphere. He was a man of an “exquisitely sensitive nature,” “shy in a remarkable degree,” and “the least sanguine of mankind.” He lived the life of a recluse. This of itself would have given a certain sombreness to the children’s world. Yet it was the stern impositions of the Clapham creed which must, one supposes, have brought oppressiveness into the home atmosphere. The youngsters were strictly forbidden such worldly pleasures as the theatre and dances. Nevertheless, glints of a cheerful light were not wanting. Even the stern father would unbend in the relaxing surroundings of family and friends, and go to the length of producing doggerel rhymes for his children’s delectation. It seems probable, however, that the mother was the chief source of cheerfulness and hopefulness in the house. She was of a serene temper, and accepted Evangelicalism in a milder form. The interesting detail in the son’s description, that she was learned in poetry, suggests that she may have relieved the dullness of the children’s surroundings by introducing the enthralling pleasures of verse recited by a beloved voice.

The child Leslie was of a delicate constitution, and this circumstance may have strengthened a disposition to self-retirement and sombre reflection which was handed down by progenitors and so well fostered by the milieu of the home. It seems hard to think of him as ever having been a playful child. It is even possible that in those first years he developed something of the attitude of critical onlooker. The saving grace of humor could not have come yet; nevertheless, he may have had glimpses of the absurdities inseparable from a narrow ascetic creed brought into touch with the ordinary ways of men. Perhaps he ventured now and again to make caustic observations on the doings of the straiter members of the sect; and one likes to imagine that the serene-tempered and conciliative mother would then give him his first lessons in tolerance.

Owing to the boy’s feeble health, and other circumstances, the experiment of schooling did not come off with brilliant success. During four years the two brothers were at Eton as day pupils, and as such came in for the contempt which is apt to be bestowed by boys, as well as by men, on those who are without or only halfway within their set. The harsh régime may have helped to develop in Leslie the grit of the later mountaineer and intellectual fighter; possibly also the keen sense of justice and the sympathy with those who suffer. At the age of eighteen he went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, studied mathematics, and after winning a scholarship came out in the mathematical Tripos as a wrangler. In later years he was fond of writing and talking about the good effects of mathematical study as evinced by the number of eminent men in various walks of life who had stood high in the list of Cambridge wranglers. There is little doubt that the discipline conduced to the formation of that high standard of clearness and exactness in reasoning which he impartially imposed on himself and on others.

Soon after taking his degree he gained the emolument of a college fellowship, for which at that time one was still required to take holy orders. In the undergraduate days the severities of mathematical study had been relieved by physical exercises hardly less exacting, which his better health now permitted him to carry out. He won distinction in running, both as an undergraduate and as a don; and though he did not become famous as an oarsman, he was keenly interested in rowing, and in later life he told amusing stories of his experiences as a coach of his college boat, whose duty it was to run along the river bank regardless of mud or flood and keep the eight up to the mark by stimulative and corrective shouts. It was in this work, perhaps, that he first developed his powders as a leader of men, more particularly his skill in keeping a team of workers together.

As is well known, Stephen made memorable ascents in the Alps and other mountains. He was made president of the Alpine Club in 1865. His first published writings are descriptions, half serious, half humorous, of his ascents, some of which are happily still accessible in one of the most attractive of his works, the Playground of Europe (published in 1871). This work is well worth studying to-day, not only for its vivid descriptions, but for its presentation of a conception of climbing at once dignified and modest, very unlike that of many unseasoned men who nowadays rush at the perilous ascent. He relinquished his beloved art in deference to family obligations, and he has given us in a chapter of the same volume, headed “The Regrets of a Mountaineer,” his characteristic adieu to the Alps. Stephen’s fine record in athletics suggests how curiously nature sometimes combines with considerable delicacy of organism a special degree of muscular power and breathing capacity. He was considerably above the average height, and according to a widespread notion his tallness ought to have handicapped him in the athletic field. Yet exceptional length of limb was certainly an advantage to him in getting over the ground, and no less certainly stood him in good stead in rock climbing; and one may suppose that his stature touched the point where the maximum of these advantages could be realized without sensible drawbacks.

Athletic pursuits, though a keen interest, were by no means the chief occupation of the young Cambridge don. The biography of Fawcett gives us a charming account of the good fellowship of the fellows of a college in the old days when “society” had not yet invaded the semimonastic seclusion of the college, capturing its “married fellows;” when outside social engagements did not entice the others to a too frequent absence from the Hall and the Common Room; and when long hours of uninterrupted talk were a chief feature of the day’s life. Stephen, naturally shy like his father, needed just this quiet world of keen and sufficiently kindred spirits. Fawcett and other gifted members of the society afforded a powerful intellectual stimulus. He gained from these lively discussions with men of other intellectual pursuits the inestimable advantage of outgrowing his specialism, of reaching a wider horizon, a sympathetic comprehension of the aims and methods of minds different from his own. At the same time this close communion with men of intellect exercised him in the art of debate, in alertness and precision of logical stroke, when called upon to attack the theories of others or to defend his own.

The group of young men to which Stephen was now attached were under the spell of John Stuart Mill. Cambridge may almost be called the university home of Utilitarianism, and one may note in passing that what is probably destined to be the last considerable development of utilitarian ethics was the work of the Cambridge professor, Henry Sidgwick, whose loss the University is still deploring. Stephen seems to have plunged resolutely into the current of freer thought about man and his destiny in which Fawcett and others were being swiftly carried onwards. At the same time he became an ardent disciple of the new teachers of Evolution, Darwin and Herbert Spencer, the influence of whom was to become a much more permanent force in his development. These influences brought a crisis into his career. Like many another man at the University, he began now for the first time to examine the foundations of early religious beliefs which had been adopted more from filial duty than from personal conviction. The outcome of these searchings of mind was the abandonment of holy orders, and, as a necessary consequence, the loss of his fellowship.

This plucky resolution laid upon Stephen the unpleasant necessity of finding a career for himself. Under Fawcett’s influence he made an attempt to enter the political field. His first visit to America, paid at this time, was undertaken in furtherance of his political education. It was the time of the Civil War, and it was natural that the sympathies of one whose grandfather had been a chief supporter of Wilberforce, and who was a new recruit in the small army of philosophical Radicals, should be drawn to the cause of the North. He was long afterwards pleased at having shaken hands with Abraham Lincoln, and lastingly grateful for the friendships which this and other visits to America secured him. A good many years after this visit, while I was staying with Stephen’s family in the country, where Russell Lowell was another guest, I was particularly pleased to be the witness of the warm intimacy as of kinship between the illustrious American poet and my host and his family. The visit has been impressed on my memory by more than one agreeable incident, among others the having Lowell as smoking companion in the morning in the library, while Stephen was busy with his pen, when the poet would graciously vary his talk by taking down a copy of Tom Sawyer and reading out extracts.

It is easy for us who knew him later to see that politics could never have been Stephen’s life-work. Not only was he too retiring to make his mark in the clamorous political forum; the bent of his mind led him far away from what he saw to be a domain in which independence of thought is sadly hampered by the requirements of party loyalty. It is a curious circumstance that Stephen appears to have abandoned the idea of a political career shortly before John Stuart Mill, under strong pressure from his friends, entered Parliament and distinguished himself afresh by a courageous profession of “singular” views. One is tempted to speculate whether, if the fates had arranged the sequence of events otherwise, Mill’s example would have modified Stephen’s views. It seems more likely, however, that the rejection of Mill on the second contest for the Westminster seat would have confirmed him in his opinions.

The stronger and lasting impulse toward literature now asserted itself. Like most modern writers, Stephen found his apprenticeship to letters in writing for the journals. The Saturday Review, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Cornhill Magazine, and later the Fortnightly Review, provided him with ample scope for work of various aim and degree of solidity. The Saturday, which was now enjoying its palmy days as a formidable censor of books and men, numbered among its contributors some eminent names, such as Freeman the historian and Mr. John Morley, the latter of whom soon afterwards undertook the editorship of the Fortnightly. The tone of the journal in theology was robustly Anglican, and in politics severely Conservative; but the literary side offered free scope to writers who by no means shared its views in these matters. The only condition exacted, besides special knowledge, clearness and force in expression, and argumentative skill, was the adoption of a characteristic tone, which included a manly contempt of sentiment and of dreamy or paradoxical ideas, and asserted its superiority to the duller sort of common sense by a delicate yet mordant satire. As a distinguished writer on the staff remarked to me later on, it was an excellent school for training in style. Stephen always seemed to me in his manner of writing to illustrate the effect of this training at its best.

The early familiarity with theological speculation, and still more the Cambridge studies and discussions, had developed in Stephen a decided turn for the serious kind of thinking, and in the Fortnightly he began to give literary form to his ripening views on theological and ethical questions. The appearance in 1873 of the vigorous work, Essays on Freethinking and Plain Speaking, clearly indicated that bold attitude of agnosticism, to which, as that other volume, An Agnostic’s Apology, published in later life, sufficiently shows, he was henceforth steadily to adhere. Meanwhile his growing reputation as a man of letters was demonstrated by his appointment to the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine, an office which Thackeray’s tenure had stamped with a special literary distinction. A close family connection with the illustrious novelist had been formed about four years earlier by a marriage with his daughter.

It was three or four years after he became editor of the Cornhill that I first met Stephen. I had already seen him in the drawing-room of the “Priory” in St. John’s Wood, where in the seventies a little circle of literary, scientific, and artistic folk gathered on Sunday afternoons at the tea-hour, on the chance of getting a few minutes’ quiet talk with George Eliot, now elderly and much of an invalid, and with the certainty of hearing brilliant sallies from the witty and still lively veteran, G. H. Lewes. I recall Stephen as sitting in the social arc drawn about the fireplace toward the end opposite the door, that is to say, as far as possible from the window end where the novelist sat. His distinguished aspect could not but impress, even in an assembly which was by no means an ordinary one. I seem to see still, as in some Venetian masterpiece, the slight but commanding figure; the long and finely moulded head and face, delicate, yet of a virile keenness; the eyes looking up from under their shaggy brows as if, like the best music, they had been charged with the impossible task of revealing the secret deeps of a rich personality; and the coloring of the eyes and of the abundant hair, mustache, and beard, well supported by an attire which itself had a note of easy dignity. He did not take a large part in the talk, which was wont to bubble softly here and there along the arc, save when the genial host, made a brave attempt to start a general conversation; but he had a smile when others talked. The first meeting was under somewhat trying circumstances. Some one, probably Lewes, had given me an introduction to him, and I called on him to discuss possibilities of work for the Cornhill. It was an autumn or early winter afternoon, when the light of a London drawing-room, which is but rarely in excess, falls to a rich low key, bits of flame-lit color standing out against sombre depths of shadow. Stephen had recently lost his wife, and I was warned that I might find him a melancholy recluse. His accost had in it behind its evident cordiality a touch of awkwardness, as if he were forcing himself to forget the books left behind. The memory of his low, winsome voice and of the first of his many kind words of encouragement still comes back to me. I wrote for the Cornhill from that day until Stephen ceased to be its editor. He seemed to me the most considerate of editors,— almost too timid, some would have said, before the unpleasant necessity of rejecting a manuscript or of asking a contributor to shorten his article; and ever ready to take a kindly and helpful interest in the younger men who assisted him.

Some years later, toward the end of the seventies, I gained a peculiarly favorable opportunity of knowing Stephen intimately. London sets up cruel barriers between busy friends, and next to proximity of dwelling, if indeed inferior to this, is the chance of meeting on off-service days in the country. The Alpine climber, who had wisely given up risky ascents, was still vigorous enough; and he conceived the happy idea of a fortnightly walk in the country with a small band of friends. A sort of informal club was started with Stephen as chief, and was christened by him, with a characteristic disregard of fine language, the Sunday Tramps. The members, carefully chosen by the chief, consisted of literary men, lawyers, and others. Every fortnight, toward the end of the week we received a post card on which was indicated in Stephen’s firm pointed writing the train by which we were to set out, as well as that by which we were to return. The aim of our chief was to secure a crosscountry walk from one railway to another. Attractive scenery, especially that of the hilly and heathy districts of Surrey and Kent, together with the more picturesque portion of the Thames, counted in the selection; and where possible the route was made to include some house, church, or natural object having historic interest or literary associations. Stephen showed great skill in planning our route, having an acute instinct for direction, and for divining short-cuts not indicated by the maps. His fondness for the latter prompted him on one occasion to defy a notice board warning trespassers, a defiance which brought us face to face with a keeper, who dignified his office by going through the formality of taking down names and addresses. Stephen always had something of the solicitous look of a schoolmaster as he stood on the London platform crowded with people bent on a Sunday excursion, and looked round for his flock. We used to pack ourselves as best we could into a second-class smoking compartment, Stephen and others of us having a keen appetite for the morning pipe. We would start walking in a compact body at a good pace, but disintegrating tendencies in the shape of unequal degrees of energy and special mutual drawings soon broke up the squad into twos and threes, the numbers which proved to be the most favorable for talk. I believe that it was found, too, that when we were a good number and marched in a close body, we exposed ourselves to the contemptuous remarks of juvenile onlookers, who took us for a procession of the Salvation Army. Our chief brought with him a beautiful collie dog, who occupied himself with running to and fro between the front and rear groups, as if we were sheep needing to be kept together. The loss of that dog, who was poisoned during a walk with his master in his favorite London park, affected him profoundly, so that we avoided speaking of it.

The chief, of course, gave the pace, which had a delusive look of moderation, so quietly did his limbs appear to move, before we had learned the range of his stride. He found it difficult sometimes to allow for the limitations of weaker brethren; and the catching of a train at the end of a quickish walk of twenty miles or more was apt to impose a nasty run on the tail of the company. But a tolerance like that of a big dog for feebler creatures, and a genuine kind-heartedness, soon corrected any tendency to overestimate average powers of locomotion; and I remember well his once speaking to me, with an unusual tenderness and something of self-reproach in his voice, of a friend in poor health who had, unwisely perhaps, essayed a walk and suffered from the effort. Lunch was enjoyed in a humble “pub ” — the meanerlooking the inn, the better Stephen seemed to be pleased; for he had not christened us Tramps for nothing. There was a distinct note of asceticism in his discipline. He would smile rather contemptuously if we brought our drawing-room standards of art to bear on the wondrous oleographs of the inn parlor. Bread and cheese and a pint of beer was our allowance, and there was, indeed,but rarely the choice of other fare. When we happened to stray into a hotel and found a hot joint going, our chief good-naturedly left us free to indulge; though I shall never forget his expression as on one cold day shortly before Christmas we allowed ourselves to be allured by piquant odors into partaking of hot turkey. As he sat faithfully consuming his bread and cheese, he eyed us with something of the sad despair of a Greatheart watching some backsliding in his pilgrims, yet with more, perhaps, of that of a good-natured schoolmaster who catches sight of his boys launching out at a tuck-shop. The severe regulations, as we were sometimes disposed to regard them, of the former trainer of college athletes, were now and again formally relaxed when there came an invitation to lunch or afternoon tea. Among other hospitable houses was that of Charles Darwin at Down; it was a thing to remember to see the signs of mutual regard between the literary editor and his scientific master. Another roof which offered generous hospitality, and perhaps the most brilliant talk to be obtained in England, was that of George Meredith at Box Hill, Stephen’s intimate friend, the one man, as he once remarked to me, of undoubted genius whom he had known.

The various experiences of these days in the country served to bring out the qualities of our chief. He was now tasting the new happiness which came with his second marriage, and had lost much of the look of sadness and of self-withdrawal of earlier days. He was not what is called a brilliant talker, but spoke slowly, often with a visible as well as audible effort, and preferred to pitch his voice in a low key for one or two listeners. Yet what he said was of the best, and worthy of the man and the scholar. His words apropos of his beloved Johnson apply to himself: “A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance.” The Sunday walk gave him the needed quantity and quality of audience. Sometimes in the railway carriage or at the luncheon table conversation would become general. Topics inviting to humorous treatment were often started. It was natural, perhaps, that a company consisting largely of young writers should raise the question of the comparative demerits of this and that London publisher. Stephen would good-naturedly descend to our level at such times, joining in now and again with some pithy observation or appropriate story. But it was in the privileged hours when one found one’s self on the road alone with him that he opened himself up, mind and heart. He loved to talk of men and their doings. In the Cornhill days he would take one into his confidence and speak of his contributors, for example of Robert Louis Stevenson, or of Grant Allen, who was now beginning under a nom de plume to strike out a new line as a story-writer. When, as in these two cases, the risks of literary enterprise were faced on a slender basis of health, his interest was intensified. He would show the same kindly interest in his listener, questioning and trying to understand his aims, and often suggesting facts, such as striking instances of the precocity of genius, and apparent exceptions. But he could not long keep off the subjects of his own ardent study. In the first days of the Tramps we often discussed ethical points which he was just tackling in connection with his forthcoming volume, the Science of Ethics, a work in which he was to make excellent use of the new sociological conceptions of the Evolutionist.

In the second half of the seventies appeared the two important works, Hours in a Library and the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. He was now steeped in the winters of that period, and he would entertain his fellow Tramps out of the abundance of his knowledge with many interesting facts and curious problems. He seemed even in these intervals of country repose to be ever near the time and the world which by close reading he had made his own. This preoccupation of mind with his literary researches, which made his talk delightfully instructive, grew more marked after the year 1882, when he gave up the editorship of the Cornhill for that of the Dictionary of National Biography, the great undertaking on which his friend. and publisher, George Smith, was now embarking. The work of searching out every name which by any sort of notability could lay claim to admission in the volumes was in itself colossal, and in carrying this out he had to grapple with many an intricate and perplexing question. His accounts of these editorial investigations gave one a clear insight into the peculiar nature of his work, as also into the manner of working of his mind, the exercise of a sportive instinct for scenting out undiscovered facts, always watched and controlled by a trained logical faculty. Such labors had, of course, their moments of delay and seeming bafflement. What tried him more was the task of keeping his team of contributors up to time. As in the case of the Tramps, a habit of applying a high standard to his own performances may at the outset have led him to underestimate others’ difficulties, especially the limitations of time which pressed on men who did not enjoy his own freedom from other than literary occupations. Then there was the problem of confining contributors to the limits of space prescribed, and, what was probably a still more knotty one, that of securing the necessary degree of uniformity in the treatment of subjects. The Dictionary undoubtedly weighed heavily at times on Stephen’s shoulders, especially toward the end of the nine years of his management. He often spoke to me of the difficulties with just a shade of complaint in his tone. At the same time, another weighty undertaking, the English Utilitarians, was hanging fire, and Stephen often relieved his soul by pouring out his sense of weariness. Yet no one was at heart less of a growler than he. After talking of the difficulties, he would often wind up with a sigh, followed by some humorous observation. Among these I remember his once saying to me that as our initials fell late in the alphabetic order there would be no need of hurry in the case of notices of ourselves. For the rest, these talks always brought out his manly spirit, his courage in facing difficulties, and his deep love of his work. He brought into it something of the spirit of the sportsman, liking nothing better than cutting his way through some knotty thicket of false tradition and misrepresentation, and tracking facts to their lair.

Manly himself, Stephen had a genuine admiration of the manly temper in others. He had quite a partiality for invalids of the uncomplaining sort. The gifted young Clifford, smitten with a fatal malady,had drawn out from him an affectionate halffatherly care. Later on, Croom Robertson, the editor of Mind, was added to his visiting list, during a long and painful illness. He often talked to me of his visits to the latter, who showed his pluck when struck down by a cruel and relentless foe, not only by bearing his sufferings without complaint, but by holding on to his professorial and editorial duties with the tenacity of his Scotch race. Then I would hear of visits to James Payn, and how, when overtaken with bouts of acute pain, the novelist still persevered in writing entertainingly for his readers. Stephen was a man of unusually tender sympathy for real distress; but the sufferer had to show himself a man in order to receive the full overflow of his kind-heartedness. His estimate of courage was not precisely what one might have expected from so keen an admirer of athletics. As readers of his Playground of Europe will remember, he had a contempt for foolhardiness; and it is significant that in discussing in his book on ethics the virtue of courage, he raises the question whether courage is in itself always a virtue. And for him courage was much more than readiness to face physical evil and pain. Among other subjects talked over in these walks was the case of a man who had just been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for a particularly unsavory and irritating act of blasphemy. Stephen’s fine sense of the dignity of things led him to recoil from the man in disgust; yet being convinced that the sentence was excessive and vindictive, he courageously threw himself into the work of getting signatures to a petition praying for a mitigation of the penalty.

I always thought that his great respect for intellectual industry and thoroughness in work was deeply tinged with admiration for courage. To him the hasty and slovenly worker, the charlatan who made a pretense of seeking truth, was branded wdth the meanness of the poltroon; he was one who shrank from the irksomeness of strenuous work. It has been said that he was a shade too hard on the ignoramus; but it was only the ignorance which comes from dislike of exertion that incurred Stephen’s contempt. His attitude toward the ignorance which results from intellectual incapacity was widely different from that of Swift, of whom he writes: “He scorns fools too heartily to treat them tenderly and do justice to the pathetic side of even human folly.” Stephen’s contempts were undoubtedly numerous and active, and they were wont to be vigorously expressed. R. L. Stevenson once remarked to me that a good way of getting at a man’s character was to induce him to confess his pet aversion, to answer the question: “What sort of action would you most dislike to be accused of?” This test would certainly have been applicable to Stephen. All that was mean-spirited excited his contempt: he had something of Carlyle’s fierce hatred of whatever had the ring of falsity; and his finely disciplined character recoiled from every exhibition of animalism in man. His account of the vice of gluttony, in the Science of Ethics, has a peculiar interest for those who remember the character of the man. Yet, though a man of strong antipathies, he was not what is called a good hater. At the season of life of which I am now speaking, which may be indurating, though in the case of the best it is mellowing, he was at the core a sociable and kindly man, who, while a fighter, dealing blows many and vigorous, never, I believe, excited animosity in the persons whose cause he attacked. To those who really knew him the idea of Stephen’s having an enemy would not have been entertainable.

So far as I could make out, Stephen’s tastes were few and simple. His chief pleasures were books and the society of friends. His love of nature was genuine and deep, but during our walks he rarely dwelt on the beauties of scenery. He would stand and enjoy a fine view silently. I suspect that with his dislike of everything that smacked of sentimentalism he had a wholesome suspicion of gush in this domain; perhaps, too, he had been sickened of this sort of thing in his visits to the resorts of tourists in Switzerland. His book about the Alps serves among other purposes as a valuable corrective for what one may call the Baedeker standard of nature’s beauty, the estimation of a view according to the number of mountain peaks and lakes comprehended in it; and there seems to be a touch of mischievous satisfaction in his warning to the aspiring seeker after mere extent of view, that from the summit of Mont Blanc the range of outlook dwindles to contemptible dimensions. As regards art, his love seems to have been largely absorbed by literature. He had, especially after his second marriage, many points of contact with the art circles of London. Yet one doubts whether he had developed his taste in this direction to a noteworthy degree. Toward music, as he once remarked to me, apropos of an article I had just sent him, he entertained a positive dislike, saying with a characteristic touch of playful exaggeration, no doubt, that it affected him much in the same way that it did his dog,in whom it gave occasion for a melancholy howl.

No reader of Stephen’s books need be told that he possessed a rare quality of humor. His amusing remarks during these country walks illustrated the various qualities of laughter. Sometimes it was slightly acrid, reminding one of donnish and Saturday Review days; at other times it would take on something of Carlylean grimness, as in the remark about our chances of dying in time to get a place in the Dictionary. But for the most part, in the agreeable surroundings of country and friends, it had a mellow, kindly tone, as when some of us would protest against the miseries of a ploughed field in the wet winter season, over which Stephen, looking like the figure of inexorable fate, insisted on leading us.

The fellowship of the Tramps had to come to an end like other fellowships, and the end affected us as a change in the old order of the world, Stephen’s health made it necessary for him to keep to short, slow walks. It was pathetic to see, toward the close of the tramps, our valiant chief beginning to bring a special lunch with him, and, what was perhaps worse, a wrap. After the Tramp days Stephen liked now and again to take a quiet Sunday ramble with one of his friends. I enjoyed his companionship in this way through the years of his declining health, and noted how these years were bringing more patience and charity to help him to meet their burden. Those last walks together over the meadows gay with June brightness, to the secluded house of our friend at Box Hill are things not to be written about. By this time cruel family bereavements had come to make further trial of him, and his spirit had to make more strenuous efforts to come forth welcomingly to meet friendly accost. Yet even in these desolate days his humor did not fail him. The last time I saw him, a few months before his death, he talked of the plans of his family for passing the summer holiday in the country; and with a characteristic movement of the body and a gentle sigh, added: “I shall sit still: I’m getting uncommonly good at sitting.”

In dealing in this article with Stephen’s character and life, I have followed his own method of approaching a man’s writings. For him the works of Johnson, Sterne, Balzac, even the scientific treatises of Bentham, were the expression of an individual mind and character, and only to be fully understood through a knowledge of these. Stephen’s writings were of diverse texture, varying from the popularly written Playground of Europe and the studies of Johnson, Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the rest, to the weightier and more scientific treatises, the Science of Ethics, the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and the English Utilitarians. Notwithstanding this diversity of subject and of treatment, his writings had a real unity of purpose and of spirit. A deep humanity, an intense interest in character, shone through even the abstract form of exposition of the work on ethics; and, on the other hand, the critical appreciation of poet, novelist, or other man of pure letters, is essentially an appreciation of a mind and character at work. This mind and character he presents to us as conditioned by its surroundings, and here his studies in evolutional sociology stood him in good stead. With this he combines a dignified method of argument, an insistence on the necessity of starting from clear principles, — for example, in his complaint that Swift’s “principles” were “prejudices in the highest degree,” — in which we may trace more than one influence of his training. A further unity is given to this diversified work by reflections of those traits of temperament and character on which we have here been dwelling. One needs to know something of the writer’s temperament in order fully to appreciate the flavor of parts of the Science of Ethics. Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which the tenderness and humor of the man accompany him throughout, tempering the edge of adverse criticism, and bringing now and then in a half disguised form a humane note into the severest of his scientific writings.