THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF

LESLIE STEPHEN1

A DOUBLE interest attaches to this fascinating volume. It is a rare, original, and attractive character that is here described; and the book which describes it was the last work of the learned and highlygifted author, whose untimely death the world of legal and historical science now deplores. Subject and writer were worthy of one another. It would have been impossible to find anyone more capable than F. W. Maitland of appreciating the strange and subtle blend-the mixture of gruffness and tenderness, of reserve and sympathy, of solitariness and capacity for friendship, of the love of letters and the love of nature, of irony and reverence, and many other apparent opposites that made the charm of Leslie Stephen's character.

It seemed strange to some that a scholar, whose great mental powers and untiring industry had hitherto been concentrated on the study of medieval English law and institutions, should undertake the life of a literary man of our own age, a man, too, whose interests were essentially modern, and who was by temperament disposed to regard minute antiquarian research with something akin to contempt. But no one who knew the two men could have failed to perceive the sympathy that existed between them, the natural attunement of their characters; and any one familiar with Maitland's writings would at once see that here were the makings of a first-rate biographer. For his studies of thirteenth or fourteenth century law are no mere dryasdust researches after rule and precedent, no mere abstract deductions from the records of the Courts; they are instinct with human sympathy, with that quality of restrained and reasonable but vivifying imagination which distinguishes the true historian. In restoring the forms and the procedure of our early legal system, he got behind them to the ideas on which that system was based, and so to the minds and characters of the men who framed and worked it. And not only were these men familiar to him in general; he seemed to know them individually, these Edwardian lawyers and judges, to have talked confidentially with Bracton, to have listened to Hengham's By Frederic William Maitland. London: Duckworth & Co. 1906

judgments, nay, to have even sat at the feet of the English Justinian himself, so deeply had he entered into the spirit of the men of the Middle Age.

It was not really wonderful, then, that he should have turned his pen from the elucidation of medieval law-books to perpetuate the memory of a beloved personal friend. The result is a biography of remarkable brilliance, truthfulness, and insight-a biography, too, which, like all good biographies, while never putting the author in front of his subject, even as guide or showman, betrays throughout the flavour of an individual mind, and inevitably, but in a delicate shadowy manner, delineates the writer's character and temperament behind that of his hero. Such is indeed the nature of all great biographies. A good biographer must keep himself out of sight so far as he can; but extinguish himself he neither can nor should. Do we not know Tacitus almost as fully as Agricola, Joinville like Saint Louis, Boswell at least as well as Johnson?

So here, not obvious, but to be found by those who read the book with this secondary object in their minds, is enshrined much at least of the character of F. W. Maitland as well as that of Leslie Stephen. The scholar who was the greatest writer on English law since Blackstone, who has created anew the study of his subject, whose name as a historian of the creative type will go down to posterity along with those of Savigny and Stubbs and Mommsen, has, in raising a monument to his friend, unwittingly built up his own, and shown himself to be not merely a great scholar but a writer of first-rate literary power, and a lovable, humorous, sympathetic man. Thus much it may be permitted on this occasion to remark, for the author, alas! is dead, and we may praise him freely. We may say that, had he never written this biography, the world would never have known how much it lost by that fatal voyage to the Canaries; we may be thankful that, with unerring insight, Leslie Stephen chose him to write-if any one was to write it—his biography, and that Maitland's life was spared long enough to complete the task. But he would have been the first to remind me that not the author but his book, and the subject of his book, are now in question; and to these, after a digression which Leslie Stephen at all events would have excused, I must now return.

The story of Stephen's life is not more eventful than the lives of most literary men, in whose careers the production of notable works or the development of opinions takes the place of action and adventure. Born in the year of the great Reform Act, of stout legal and evangelical stock, the son of the ecclesiastical historian, the brother of the judge, he was a delicate, sensitive, quick-tempered child, whose health at one time gave cause for anxiety, and was far from foreshadowing the vigour of his youth and manhood. Mentally and morally, however, he very early showed signs of what was to be his later disposition.

It is related that he refused to say his prayers if another person was in the room. His mother tells us that his first experience of a sermon bored him sadly. Towards the end of it,' she says, 'Leslie, quite forgetting himself, said in a loud voice, "Three." He was counting my rings. . . . Soon afterwards a loud yawn was heard from him. With these exceptions he was very good.' Poetry made a very different impression. Scott was his favourite. When out for a drive he would repeat The Lady of the Lake so loudly that the passersby would turn round in astonishment.' When reciting Marmion, he seemed to have neither eyes nor ears for what was passing round him, but to be completely absorbed by what he was saying.' A love of poetry and a dislike of sermons were characteristic of him all his life. He preserved to the end his faculty for learning by heart. His memory for poetry was wonderful,' says his daughter; he could absorb a poem that he liked almost unconsciously from a single reading.' And in his old age he would shout Mr. Newbolt's Admirals All as he strolled in Kensington Gardens, to the surprise of the attendants, perhaps the sons of those he had astonished with Marmion sixty years before. Nor was poetry alone a pleasure. As a boy he read Boswell's Johnson- the most purely delightful of all books'—and the first book he ever bought with his own money was Vanity Fair. Truly, in these matters the child was father to the man.

Four years of his boyhood he spent at Eton, but that famous school set no mark upon him, partly, it may be surmised, because he lived with his parents up town '-in other words, in Windsorand thus could never be fully absorbed in the life of the place. He was not happy at school; his health was poor; and he left when he was only fourteen-at a moment, that is, when, for most boys, the best part of their school-time has hardly begun. Eton, then, cannot be said to have 'produced' Stephen-a word which in his connexion (he used to say) should be translated into 'failed to extinguish;' and it was to the loss of both that they were not better acquainted.

After a year or two at King's College, London, he went up to Cambridge and entered at Trinity Hall. For the next fourteen years of his life this was to be his home. His early physical weakness had almost disappeared; at Cambridge his health steadily improved; he was lean, as always, but active and vigorous in mind and body. In the wholesome atmosphere of the place, its studies, its sports, its companionships, he began for the first time really to live. His career as an undergraduate was not specially distinguished, but, ' without being brilliant, it was,' says Mr. Maitland, 'just that which a wise father might wish for his son.' He read steadily, rowed hard, took his share in the debates at the Union, and won a scholarship and eventually a first-class in the Mathematical Tripos. For ten years he rowed in his college boat; he was so keen about it that he seemed, to one who might have known better, a mere 'rowing rough.'

He himself never regarded it as waste of time. The greatest pleasure in life,' he wrote later, 'is to have a fanatical enthusiasm about something. . . . This is the real glory of rowing; it is a temporary fanaticism of the most intense kind; while it lasts it is less a mere game than a religion.' And he goes on to say that it is so closely bound up with memories of close and delightful intimacies, that it almost makes me sentimental.' He could not say more; against sentimentalism he was always on his guard.

Having taken his degree, what was he to do? Fate decided for him. He felt no call for any particular profession; why not stay where he was? His position as a Wrangler led on to a Fellowship; a tutorship fell vacant; in a natural way-a way more natural then than it would be now-he accepted the post, took orders, and settled down as a college don. For eight years more he remained at Cambridge, living mostly with and for his pupils, sometimes rowing in the boat, sometimes 'coaching' it-we remember the prayer of Sir G. Trevelyan 'for the wind of a tutor of Trinity Hall '—occasionally preaching in the college chapel, looking after his young men's morals, teaching them mathematics, and taking them out for long Sunday walks, after one of which-it is not surprising to learn-a young companion had to go to bed instead of to dinner. For his walking, as the 'Tramps' (his walking-club of later years) knew well, was prodigious. His biographer mentions some wonderful feats, such as his nearly beating a famous runner, Mr. P. M. Thornton, in a match in which the latter was to run three miles while Stephen walked two. Once he walked his fifty miles, from Cambridge to London, in twelve hours, to dine with the Alpine Club; on another occasion he walked six miles and three-quarters within the hour. He despised the constitutional grind,' but a long walk was a joy to him, a tonic and a refreshment, sometimes a moral resource or medicine, as when, like his shadow, Mr. Whitford, in The Egoist, he wanted to 'walk off his temper.' One of his best essays is that In Praise of Walking. He often walked alone, but he did not, like R. L. Stevenson, prefer lonely walks. In fact, this rather grim, shy, reserved man loved companionship of the right sort, and could be the most delightful of companions. Nor must we look on Stephen as, in these youthful days, an athlete for athletics' sake, or as sacrificing the mind to the body. On the contrary, bodily exercise and the corpus sanum that results were for him the best preservative of the sana mens; and mental sanity was his reward.

While engaged in the varied activities of a tutor's life (and to be a tutor at Cambridge is no sinecure), he read widely-philosophy, political economy, and other stubborn subjects. He began to write, too, not very seriously as yet, but such short pieces as his papers about the Alps and those whimsical, ironical, and illuminative Sketches from Cambridge by a Don. He was reflecting, too, and reflecting

VOL. LXI-No. 362

SS

6

to some purpose. His reflections changed not only his views but his whole way of life. In 1862 he came to the conclusion that he could no longer subscribe to those religious doctrines to which he had assented when he took orders six or seven years before. By what exact process he arrived at this conclusion we are not told. It seems to have come gradually, without any painful searchings of heart; but it was decisive and final. As he himself put it, 'it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs as of discovering that he had never really believed.' He had taken many things on trust; the gradual opening of his mind showed him that he could do so no longer. Having arrived at this point, he could not conscientiously retain his tutorship, and he therefore resigned. But he did not give up his orders, apparently because he was under the impression that this was out of his power; nor did he lose his Fellowship. This he only resigned on his marriage in 1867; his orders he did not give up till 1875.

He did not even leave Cambridge at once. Two years longer he stayed on, unable to tear himself away, and doing what work he could. It was in this interval, during the American Civil War, that he first visited the United States. The occasion was notable. He was intensely interested in the struggle; he sympathised with the North, at a time when most of the influential classes in this country were Southerners; and, though Gladstone thought-and said that Jefferson Davis ' had made a nation,' he became convinced that the North would win. He did not come back enamoured of the country or the people as a whole, but, what was of more importance, he made some close and firm friends. To Lowell, Holmes, and C. E. Norton he became deeply attached; and among all the charming letters, warm with affection, rippling with humour, that are published in this book, none are more charming than those addressed to his American friends. His opinions as to the war he defended in a vigorous onslaught on the Times-almost his only exercise in this genre:

If I had proved [he says] that the Times had made a gigantic blunder from end to end as to the causes, progress, and consequences of the war, I should have done little. . . . But I contend that I have proved simultaneously that it was guilty of 'foolish vituperation'; and as I am weak enough to think anything a serious evil which tends to alienate the freest nation of the old world from the great nation in the new, I contend also that I have proved the Times to have been guilty of a public crime.

Soon after his return to England he left Cambridge for good, and launched out on what was to be the business of his life, literature and journalism, in the great world of London. He left Cambridge without regret, for his last two years had given him a distaste for the life, and he was glad to have been forced away to enter on a freer and larger course. But he never repented him of the years he had spent at the Hall,' and he returned again and again with pleasure to his old haunts. In after years it was especially the old associa