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Title: Leslie Stephen
Date of first publication: 1937
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   Cambridge University Press, 1937 (First Edition)
Author: Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952)
Date first posted: 23 November 2007
Date last updated: 23 November 2007
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #37

This ebook was produced by: Dr Mark Bear Akrigg




LESLIE STEPHEN

by

DESMOND MacCARTHY


THE LESLIE STEPHEN LECTURE DELIVERED
BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
ON 27 MAY 1937


CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1937




In that joyously affectionate and informal book, _The Life
and Letters of Leslie Stephen_, Maitland, after disclaiming
any intention of criticising his work, says: "If, as I doubt
not, he has left worthy successors, someone will some day do
for him what he to our admiration did for many others;
illustrate in a small compass his life by his books, his
books by his life and both by their environment. Meanwhile,"
he says, "here are some materials."

And this, as perhaps you guess, is what I would like to do.
But even were I a "worthy successor" in other ways, I should
be hard put to it to succeed without Leslie Stephen's gift
of concision. To place his books in their environment would
mean giving an account of the struggle in the 'seventies and
'eighties between Orthodoxy and Free-thought, in which
Leslie Stephen played so effective a part, and it would mean
giving some historical account of that close alliance
between Agnosticism and Puritanism, as noticeable in him as
it was in Huxley, which has struck a later generation as
curious. That alliance was certainly not adopted by them as
a defence against those who argued that attacks upon the
Scriptures undermined morality; though Huxley's and Leslie
Stephen's strenuous moral orthodoxy did have a protective
value. The connection between their Agnosticism and
Puritanism had deeper root. After all, the desire to
eradicate beliefs which seem false or groundless is a moral
passion; and when that has shown itself strong enough to
make a man face odium, we need not be surprised to find he
is a staunch moralist all round. Neither Huxley nor Leslie
Stephen were sceptics; they were certain of too many things,
and their adversaries were fair, I think, when they said
that their "agnosticism" was accompanied by little doubt
about the nonexistence of God. The term "agnostic" was
coined by Huxley; but Maitland is of the opinion that it was
the controversial writings of Leslie Stephen which gave it
vogue.

Judged by the influence upon men's minds alone, the writings
which Leslie Stephen collected in _Essays on Free-thinking
and Plain-speaking_ (1873), and in _An Agnostic's Apology_
(1893) (most of the latter written much earlier), must be
considered the most important part of his life's work. One
reason why, as we shall be presently reminded, he wrote
disparagingly of literary criticism, was that it seemed so
trivial compared with criticism of thought and religion.
What if he had induced some readers to take a clearer view
of the merits and limitations of Fielding or De Quincey, or
if he had succeeded in giving a tolerably true account of
some man's life? Of what importance was that compared with
helping men to a truer conception of the nature of things,
or with the work of a man of science? This reflection, which
often visited him, robbed him of retrospective satisfaction
in his books, though while writing them he derived keen
pleasure from knocking nails on the head. He knew that his
controversial writings had made an impression on the public,
who think by fits and starts, but before the end of the
nineteenth century his controversial work was over. He could
have only repeated himself.

Among go-between thinkers of that century who disseminated
ideas without originating them, he must be reckoned among
the three first--I cannot think of a fourth comparable in
influence to set beside Huxley, Matthew Arnold and Leslie
Stephen. I except Herbert Spencer, because he was a
system-maker. W. K. Clifford died too young and wrote too
little: the wide influence of Samuel Butler came later and
was chiefly posthumous. But Arnold had his poetry to show,
Huxley his scientific work as a Zoologist. What else of
value outside controversy had Leslie Stephen achieved?

I will try to answer that question which he often put
despondently to himself; to describe the kind of criticism
he wrote, and, using also external evidence, the man who was
behind it. This was his own way of setting about criticism;
indeed, the most comprehensive description of Leslie Stephen
as a critic would be to call him an expert in character, if
that is also taken as implying connoisseurship in defining
points of view. It is his conception of the writer that
gives unity to most of his literary essays; not the relation
of a book to the history of literature or to some standard
of perfection. What he investigated with greater interest
was the relation of a book to its author. Of course, this
did not preclude his pointing out with great acuteness, as
he went along, an author's successes or failures as a
craftsman, or reminding us of the pertinence or the folly of
a work as a commentary on life; but as a critic he directed
our attention chiefly to the sort of man the author had
apparently been; to the man who saw and felt things thus and
thus, and expressed himself in this way and no other.

The title of his last four volumes of criticism, _Studies of
a Biographer_, is in no small degree applicable to his
first collection of critical essays, _Hours in a Library_.
In his essay on "Shakespeare the Man", we find him writing :

    "Now I confess that to me one main interest in reading is
    always the communion with the author. _Paradise Lost_ gives
    me the sense of intercourse with Milton, and the _Waverley
    Novels_ bring me a greeting from Scott. Every author, I
    fancy, is unconsciously his own Boswell, and, however
    'objective' or dramatic he professes to be, really betrays
    his own secrets. Browning is one of the authorities against
    me. If Shakespeare, he says, really unlocked his heart in
    the sonnets, why 'the less Shakespeare he'. Browning
    declines for his part to follow the example, and fancies
    that he has preserved his privacy. Yet we must, I think,
    agree with a critic who emphatically declares that a main
    characteristic of Browning's own poetry is that it brings us
    into contact with the real 'self of the author'.
    Self-revelation is not the less clear because involuntary or
    quite incidental to the main purpose of a book. I may read
    Gibbon simply to learn facts; but I enjoy his literary
    merits because I recognise my friend of the autobiography
    who 'sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son'. I may study
    Darwin's _Origin of Species_ to clear my views upon natural
    selection; but as a book it interests me even through the
    defects of style by the occult personal charm of the candid,
    sagacious, patient seeker for truth. In pure literature the
    case is, of course, plainer, and I will not count up
    instances because, in truth, I can hardly think of a clear
    exception. Whenever we know a man adequately we perceive
    that, though different aspects of his character may be made
    prominent in his life and his works, the same qualities are
    revealed in both, and we cannot describe the literary
    without indicating the personal charm."

Now a critic who approaches his subjects in this spirit will
inevitably discourse more about human nature and morals than
about art, and Leslie Stephen is the least aesthetic of
noteworthy critics. In this connection his strenuous
evangelical upbringing must not be overlooked; through both
his father and his mother his home was affiliated to the
Clapham Sect. He is constantly harping on "sincerity".
Sincerity is a condition of all satisfactory personal
relations, and therefore a condition of the communion
between writer and reader which he valued most. In his essay
on Sterne, whom he finds deficient in that respect, he says:

    "The qualification must, of course, be understood that a
    great book really expresses the most refined essence of the
    writer's character. It gives the author transfigured and
    does not represent all the stains and distortions which he
    may have received in his progress through the world. In real
    life we might have been repelled by Milton's stern
    Puritanism, or by some outbreak of rather testy
    self-assertion. In reading _Paradise Lost_, we feel only
    the loftiness of character, and are raised and inspirited by
    the sentiments without pausing to consider the particular
    application.

    "If this be true in some degree of all imaginative writers,
    it is especially true of humorists. For humour is
    essentially the expression of a personal idiosyncrasy.... We
    love the humour in short so far as we love the character
    from which it flows."

He could not bring himself to love Sterne, which I (though
love may be too strong a word) find no difficulty in doing.
He examined his life, especially his married life and his
flirtations, with severity, and he concluded that "Sterne
was a man who understood to perfection the art of enjoying
his own good feelings as a luxury without humbling himself
to translate them into practice" (Stephen's definition of a
sentimentalist). The judgment pronounced by Thackeray on
Sterne seemed to him substantially unimpeachable. He
strongly reprobated Sterne's trick of inclining our thoughts
(before we realise it) gently towards indecency. With that
sense of fun which delights to trip up the dignity of the
reader, trusting to his smiling afterwards, he had no
sympathy. Leslie Stephen did not smile at that sort of
mischief; nor did he make any comment on the really
penetrating humour of the opening of _Tristram Shandy_.

Nevertheless, it must not be supposed that this essay,
perhaps more likely than any other in _Hours in a Library_
to strike our contemporaries as missing the point, is
without warmly appreciative passages. Referring to Sterne's
touches of exquisite precision, he says that "they give the
impression that the thing has been done once for all". Two
or three of the scenes in which Uncle Toby expresses his
sentiments struck him as being "as perfect in their way as
the half-dozen lines in which Mrs Quickly describes the end
of Falstaff; and Uncle Toby's oath", he declares to be "a
triumph fully worthy of Shakespeare" ; but he adds, "the
recording angel, though he comes in effectively, is a little
suspicious to me". While admitting the felicity with which
the scene is presented, he suggests that it would have been
really stronger had the angel been omitted (by stronger, he
means more moving), "for the angel seems to introduce an
unpleasant air as of eighteenth-century politeness; we fancy
that he would have welcomed a Lord Chesterfield to the
celestial mansions with a faultless bow and a dexterous
compliment".

Perfectly true. But to wish on that account the angel away
is surely to miss the point of Sterne, whose attitude
towards all emotions was playful. No doubt Sterne thought
that here, or in the bravura passage on the dead donkey, he
was achieving the acme of pathos. But his temperament was
stronger than any conscious intention; consequently what in
effect we enjoy, as everywhere in Sterne, is an elegant
ambiguity. As with some other Irishmen known to fame,
Sterne's heart was in his imagination. The infection we
catch from him is, as Goethe noticed, a light fantastic
sense of freedom; a state of mind (Shandyism) in which we
enjoy together the pleasures of extravagant sensibility, and
a feeling that nothing much matters.

Leslie Stephen's attitude towards Sterne's pathetic passages
was the same as Dr Johnson's who, when Miss Monckton said:
"I am sure they have affected me", replied smiling and
rolling himself about, "That is because, dearest, you are a
dunce." Johnson set no store by airy detachment, nor could
he believe that posterity would cherish its products. Did he
not point to Sterne as an instance of the ephemeral nature
of all reputations founded on the fantastic? Leslie Stephen
had no sense of the fantastic, or of the charm of the
artificial; it is one of the dumb notes on his piano. He
wanted to be moved; and more--he wanted to be certain that
the author had been moved himself.

    "We are always pursued in reading Pope", he says, "by
    disagreeable misgivings. We don't know what comes from the
    heart, and what from the lips: when the real man is
    speaking, and when we are only listening to old commonplaces
    skilfully vamped.... A critic of the highest order is
    provided with an Ithuriel spear, which discriminates the
    sham sentiments from the true. As a banker's clerk can tell
    a bad coin by its ring on the counter, without need of a
    testing apparatus, the true critic can instinctively
    estimate the amount of bullion in Pope's epigrammatic
    tinsel. But criticism of this kind, as Pope truly says, is
    as rare as poetical genius. Humbler writers must be content
    to take their weights and measures, or, in other words, to
    test their first impression, by such external evidence as is
    available. They must proceed cautiously in these delicate
    matters, and instead of leaping to the truth by a rapid
    intuition, patiently enquire what light is thrown upon
    Pope's sincerity by the recorded events of his life, and a
    careful cross-examination of the various witnesses to his
    character."

Leslie Stephen did not trust himself to tell good coin by
its ring, or perhaps it would be truer to say he thought he
ought not to. Certainly, investigations into the genuineness
of an author require a testing apparatus, even when
conducted by a critic of rapid intuitions. In the case of
Pope that investigation ended unfavourably. I will not
consider at this point how far that verdict ought to modify
our estimate of Pope's poetry, but will turn to an instance
where the results of a similar enquiry were so
overwhelmingly favourable that they reversed a judgment
based on the written word. In his first essay on Johnson,
Leslie Stephen wrote:

    "The whole art of criticism consists in learning to know the
    human being who is partially revealed to us in his spoken or
    his written words. Whatever the means of communication, the
    problem is the same. The two methods of enquiry may
    supplement each other; but their substantial agreement is
    the test of their accuracy. If Johnson, as a writer, appears
    to us to be a mere windbag and manufacturer of
    sesquipedalian verbiage, whilst as a talker, he appears to
    be one of the most genuine and deeply feeling of men, we may
    be sure that our analysis has been somewhere defective."

Johnson was the man after Leslie Stephen's heart. Of his
five biographical monographs in the _English Men of
Letters_, his Johnson is the best, and it is equal to the
very best in that excellent series. Johnson was the man he
loved most in literature, though not (need it be said?) the
writer he admired most, which incidentally throws some doubt
on his critical method. Johnson as a writer seemed to him "a
great force half wasted because the fashionable costume of
the day hampered the free exercise of his powers"; but
Johnson as he is known through the records of his life and
his talk, embodied nearly all the qualities which Leslie
Stephen admired most in other writers.

We cannot be in Johnson's company long without becoming
aware that what attracts us to him so strongly is that he
combined a disillusioned estimate of human nature,
sufficient to launch twenty little cynics, with a craving
for love and sympathy so urgent that it would have turned a
weaker nature into a benign sentimentalist, and in a lesser
degree this is what attracts us in Leslie Stephen. His
raciest passages might often be described as cynical. There
are also evidences of deep feeling. There is a Johnsonian
contempt for those who look only upon the bright side of
life or human nature, equalled only by a contempt for those
who adopt a querulous or dainty tone.

    "Good sense," he says, "is one of the excellent qualities to
    which we are scarcely inclined to do justice at the present
    day; it is the guide of a time of equilibrium, stirred by no
    vehement gales of passion, and we lose sight of it just when
    it might give us some useful advice."

But he is aware of its limitations. "Like all the shrewd and
sensible part of mankind", he says of Johnson, "he condemns
as mere moonshine what may be easily the first faint dawn of
new daylight." That is an important admission.

But Leslie Stephen was born in 1832, not 1709, which implies
considerable differences, and allowing for those, it is
tempting to describe his critical work as an attempt to go
on writing, in the nineteenth century, Johnson's _Lives of
the Poets_. He was more at home with prose writers; but the
poets he did study were Pope, Crabbe, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Tennyson and Matthew Arnold; Shelley in so far as his poetry
is related to the ideas of Godwin; Cowper in so far as he
could be compared with Rousseau, and Donne--but only in
relation to his times. He sees Pope as "the incarnation of
the literary spirit", and as the complete antithesis to the
evil principle of dullness which generates an atmosphere in
which literature cannot thrive; but he would be the last man
to see in such a phrase as "die of a rose in aromatic pain"
the best evidence of Pope's genius.

The essays on Tennyson and Matthew Arnold contain little
literary criticism. The former gives an account of what
Tennyson's poetry meant to Stephen's generation, and shows a
strong preference for the earlier poetry.

    "I cannot", he wrote, "though my inability may be owing to
    my spiritual blindness, place him among 'the great sage
    poets', but I have wished to intimate that such as I am are
    not therefore disqualified from appreciating his poetry in
    another capacity: as a document indicating the effect of
    modern movements of thought upon a mind of extraordinary
    delicacy and a nature of admirable sweetness; but, far more,
    as a perfect utterance of emotions which are all equally
    beautiful in themselves whatever the 'philosophy' with which
    they are associated."

He utterly repudiated (and how rightly!) Taine's verdict on
_In Memoriam_ as the mourning of a correct gentleman wiping
away his tears with a cambric handkerchief; but he regretted
that the poet should be always haunted by the fear of
depriving his "sister of her happy views" ("a woefully
feeble phrase, by the way, for Tennyson"), and perpetually
be praising the philosopher for keeping his doubts to
himself.

    "Noble poetry, let us admit, may express either faith or
    scepticism:... but Tennyson, even in the _In Memoriam_,
    always seems to me to be like a man clinging to a spar left
    floating after a shipwreck, knowing that it will not support
    him, and yet never able to make up his mind to strike out
    and take his chance of sinking or swimming."

In the essay on Arnold he expresses the same impatience at
being told again and again, however melodiously, that the
wisest of us must take dejectedly "his seat upon the
intellectual throne", keeping as our only friend "sad
patience, too near neighbour to despair".

    "This note jars upon some people who prefer, perhaps, the
    mild resignation of the _Christian Year_. I fail of
    sympathy for the opposite reason. I cannot affect to share
    Arnold's discomfort. I have never been able--doubtless it is
    a defect --to sympathise with the Obermanns and Amiels whom
    Arnold admired; excellent but surely effeminate persons, who
    taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and finding the
    taste bitter, go on making wry faces over it all their
    lives; and admitting with one party that old creeds are
    doomed, assert with the other that all beauty must die with
    them.... I say all this simply as explaining why the
    vulgar--including myself--fail to appreciate these musical
    moans over spilt milk, which represent rather a particular
    eddy in an intellectual revolution than the deeper and more
    permanent emotions of human nature."

It is impossible to imagine a Matthew Arnold who had never
been at Oxford and a Leslie Stephen who had never been at
Cambridge. The stamp which this University left on him was
lasting. The fourteen years he spent here as an
undergraduate and a fellow of Trinity Hall, from 1850 to
1864, decided what he was to admire and trust in men and
books throughout his life. A famous definition might be
modified to fit him: Criticism is the adventures of the soul
of Cambridge among masterpieces. Souls like bodies change.
Perhaps that of Cambridge has changed or is changing; from
time to time indications of that possibility have lately
reached me. All I can say is that the spirit of Cambridge in
the late 'nineties was very like indeed to that which Leslie
Stephen knew and carried away with him. He was well aware
that some of these adventures might cause outsiders to
blaspheme, and there is a recurring note in his criticism--I
will not call it apologetic, it was often humorously
defiant--which amounts now and then to an admission that
possibly the soul of Cambridge had no business at all to
embark on such adventures; to risk perdition in regions
where reason is at a disadvantage compared with intuition,
and the habits are encouraged of skimming over intellectual
difficulties, and deviating into the delicate impertinences
of egotism. As a practising critic he limited himself as far
as he could to that aspect of his subject about which it was
possible to argue. He was a man of letters who would have
preferred to be a philosopher or a man of science. His
moving essay on Wordsworth was, as its title "Wordsworth's
Ethics" suggests, chiefly a commentary on the poet's thought
and the value of his poetry to those in sorrow.

"Other poetry becomes trifling when we are making our
inevitable passage through the Valley of the Shadow of
Death. Wordsworth's alone retains its power." The essay was
written shortly after the death of his first wife,
Thackeray's daughter, in 'seventy-five; and together with
the beautiful description of "The Alps in Winter" and "The
Agnostic's Apology" (not the book of that name, but the
essay in it), it might be considered Leslie Stephen's _De
Profundis_, or rather, as Maitland says, his "_in
excelsis_". Those three essays contain the passages which
let us most unreservedly into his innermost feelings. In "An
Agnostic's Apology" he speaks as one acquainted with grief:

    "Standing by an open grave, and moved by all the most solemn
    sentiments of our nature, we all, I think--I can only speak
    for myself with certainty--must feel that the Psalmist takes
    his sorrow like a man, and as we, with whatever difference
    of dialect, should wish to take our own sorrows; while the
    Apostle is desperately trying to shirk the inevitable and at
    best resembles the weak comforters who try to cover up the
    terrible reality under a veil of well-meant fiction. I would
    rather face the inevitable with open eyes."

In the closing passage of "The Alps in Winter" he comes down
to the matter of fact, to the _buffet_ and the railway
station. "The winter Alps no longer exist. They are but a
vision--a faint memory intruding itself at intervals, when
the roar of the commonplace has an interval of stillness.
Only, if dreams were not at times the best and most solid of
realities, the world would be intolerable." That abrupt turn
at the end, after he has been modulating into the matter of
fact out of the nearest approach he ever allowed himself to
impassioned description, is characteristic.

The provinces of the poet and philosopher were in his view
concentric but not coincident, and the poetry he felt best
able to criticise was that kind which could be most directly
reconverted from an expression of emotion into thought. But
he was well aware that this was not all that was required of
a critic of poetry.

    "Our best critics of poetry", he wrote, "at least, from
    Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have been (to invert a famous
    maxim) poets who have succeeded. Coleridge's specific merit
    was not, as I think, that he laid down any scientific
    theory. I don't believe that any such theory has as yet any
    existence except in embryo. He was something almost unique
    in this as in his poetry, first because his criticism (so
    far as it was really excellent) was the criticism of love,
    the criticism of a man who combined the first single impulse
    of admiration with the power of explaining why he admired;
    and secondly, and as a result, because, he placed himself at
    the right point of view."

Leslie Stephen, for his part, was well aware of the danger,
though he did not always avoid it, of applying strong sense
to inappropriate topics, and falling into the error of
Johnson in his criticism of _Lycidas_ and Gray.

His first impulses of admiration he seldom felt able to
analyse, and nothing would induce him merely to "shriek and
clasp his hands in ecstacy". And yet from childhood he had
been particularly susceptible to poetry, and few men have
been able to repeat more of it by heart. He was one of the
fortunates who do not need to learn verse that has delighted
them; and it was a persistent habit of his to rumble it out
on his solitary walks, which in one of his gaunt abstruse
appearance was apt to startle passers-by. As a child, poetry
and such books as the _Arabian Nights_ had often excited
him to a degree, alarming his parents; and since he was both
nervously shy and deplorably feeble in physique, his early
education was deliberately planned to correct an extreme
sensibility. It was while at Cambridge that he changed
physically and temperamentally, first into an enthusiastic
oar, then into a rowing-coach famous for his wind on the
towing path, and incidentally into one of the first Alpine
climbers and long-distance walkers of his day. In mind he
became an almost fanatical admirer of intellect, and a
mathematician. He also became a clergyman, but for several
years he was so entirely absorbed in his life as a fellow
and tutor of Trinity Hall that he did not realise the
falseness of his position.

    "I had taken orders", he wrote in _Some Early Impressions_,
    "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.... It may be easy
    to read any meaning into a dogma, but since allegorising 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 humour. He was
    lecturing a class of young men upon the Old Testament, and
    came to the story of Jacob's questionable behaviour 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 spiritualise 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 superstructure of faith rested are 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."

That confession is significant. His faith, while he
possessed it, had not been accompanied by what is called
spiritual life. He had never associated religion with his
most valued emotions towards nature or man. The points at
which he had touched Christianity had been purely moral; and
these he took over intact into his new life: they were a
contempt, not to say dread, of self-indulgence, a belief in
the importance of chastity, and something approaching
adoration for tenderness of heart, while his reprobation of
the softer vices remained adamant.

In 1862, he resigned his tutorship by refusing to take
services in Chapel, and in 1867 his fellowship. Then he
began to earn a living in London as a journalist. He had
lingered on at Cambridge those last two years because the
atmosphere of the place was singularly sympathetic to him.
"The one thing", he says, "that can spoil the social
intercourse of well-educated men living in great freedom
from unnecessary etiquette is a spirit of misplaced zeal";
and from that Cambridge was blessedly free. There were also
no prophets; prophets, though not necessarily humbugs in
themselves, were apt, he thought, to be the cause of humbug
in others. In his essay on Jowett, and elsewhere, he has
contrasted the spirit of Cambridge with that of Oxford:

    "We had some very vigorous and excellent tutors, but they
    were rather anxious to disavow than to assert any such
    personal influence as is independent of downright logical
    argument. Perhaps this was partly due to the mathematical
    turn of Cambridge studies. At the time when Oxford was dimly
    troubled by the first rumours about German theology,
    Cambridge reformers were chiefly concerned to introduce a
    knowledge of the new methods of mathematical analysis, to
    which Englishmen had been blinded by a superstitious
    reverence for Newton. That was an excellent aim; but of
    course you cannot appeal to men's 'souls' in the name of the
    differential calculus. Even when Cambridge men took to the
    study of classical literature, they stuck to good, tangible
    matters of grammatical construction without bothering
    themselves about purely literary or philosophical interests.
    They did not deny the existence of the soul; but knew that
    it should be kept in its proper place. It may be an
    estimable entity; but it also generates 'fads' and futile
    enthusiasms and gushing sentimentalisms. It should not be
    unduly stimulated in early years, but kept in due
    subordination to the calm understanding occupied with
    positive matters of fact."

What he valued most at Cambridge were the friendships which
spring from discussion; in the pursuit of truth he allowed
the soul full play. He would also have agreed with Mr Belloc
that in youth, the essence of University life is "laughter
and the love of friends". In a volume of essays on Sports
edited by Anthony Trollope (1868), the article on "Rowing"
is almost certainly by Leslie Stephen; and there the writer
speaking of fellowship among oarsmen says: "To my mind, the
pleasantest of all such bonds are those which we form with
fellow students by talking nonsense with them and mistaking
it for philosophy." Possibly, as an undergraduate, he was
regarded by his most intellectual contemporaries as a
"rowing rough".

It was a great regret to him that, unlike his brother
FitzJames, he was, unfortunately, not chosen by the
Cambridge Apostles to be one of them.

Perhaps this is the place to say something about his
intellectual ambitions. Their nature as well as the
direction of them had an effect on his criticism. Apparently
he was not ambitious, but he was only not ambitious because,
in literature at any rate, he thought only the highest
achievement worth while; and that was out of his reach. One
friend attributed to him the opinion that on the whole books
ought not to be written; and there is occasionally something
in the tone of his comments on authors which lends
plausibility to that exaggeration. He would have gladly
extended the condemnation of mediocre poetry ("In poetry
there is no golden mean; mediocrity there is of a different
metal") to every branch of literature. Yet he lived in a
period of hero-worship, and was himself extremely
susceptible to emotions of enthusiasm and reverence. His
horror of gush was partly due to fear of failing to do
justice to those almost sacred feelings. He held (and this
was one of his first principles as a critic) that "a man's
weakness can rarely be overlooked without underestimating
his strength". Some of his studies in human nature might
seem grudging, owing to the number of reservations they
contain, until the reader has grasped that praise from
Leslie Stephen, which he always strove to make precise,
meant a very great deal.

His essays are an effective protest against the contemporary
habit of debasing the currency of praise. He was absurdly
humble about his own writings, partly, as I have said,
because he would have far rather been a philosopher or a man
of science, partly on account of this sense of the width of
the gap between work of the first order and the next. It is
possible that a tendency to dwell on that gap was
self-consolatory; if he could be by no means reckoned among
writers of the first order, others of no mean merit were
likewise excluded. But only a constitutional diffidence, or,
as he sometimes was inclined to suspect, an inverted
conceit, can account for his humility in some directions. He
even compared his own writing, with a sigh of inferiority,
to that of John Morley, whose style, though it may have the
appearance at a distance of marble, in texture resembles
blancmange. At any rate you cannot poke holes in Leslie
Stephen's page with an umbrella. There is no doubt he was a
self-disappointed man. His editorship of the _Cornhill
Magazine_ gave him leisure to try his hand intermittently
at solving the old Utilitarian problem of reconciling "the
general Happiness" with the principle of a rational egotism,
and at proving that the "good" had a survival value for
society, though not necessarily for the individual. Many
years afterwards, his daughter, Virginia Woolf, asked him
which was his favourite among his books; all he would reply
was that he knew which one he would like the world to think
his best--_The Science of Ethics_. The reception of it
disappointed him. Sidgwick, reviewing it in _Mind_, showed
that he did not think the book had solved any of the
difficulties he had raised himself in _The Methods of
Ethics_. No second edition was ever called for. It was a
work which had occupied Stephen off and on for six years. It
was published in 1882, and, as the _Cornhill_ was flagging
at that time, his disappointment made him accept the
editorship of _The Dictionary of National Biography_. He
did not embark on this incalculably beneficent task with
much enthusiasm. He describes it as "a very laborious and
what was worse, a very worrying piece of work", and at the
start the work was unfamiliar to him. He was not a
researcher by inclination and he had not estimated the
burden involved. "I thought I should have time for other
things and hoped the _Dictionary_ would either die at once
or make such a success that I might be able to content
myself with superintending it and have a second-in-command."
He had a dangerous collapse in 1888. Volume XXII of the
_Dictionary_ was published in 1890 with Sidney Lee's name
also on the title page, who had been his sub-editor from the
start. This joint editorship continued till the
twenty-seventh volume when, after an attack of influenza,
Leslie Stephen resigned. How did he regard an achievement
which has proved as important to our culture, as any recent
scientific discovery to our comfort? He admits he "came to
take a certain pride in it"; but it evidently did not
relieve that sense of failure which haunted him. After the
death of his second wife, Mrs Duckworth, while he could
think of nothing but the past, he wrote a long confidential
letter to his children. In substance this document is an
account of the two women he had loved, but it contains
passages about himself. Writing of his children's mother he
says:

    "When I walked into a room with her, I used to say to
    myself, everybody must see that she is the noblest woman
    present. And she took pride in me! Alas and alas again! Did
    I deserve it? Does it matter? But of that pride I must say
    something. I used often to complain of my work. I see that I
    told her in my early letters that I felt myself to be
    painfully inferior to Morley for example, and in later
    years, I constantly told her that I was 'a failure'. That
    became a kind of proverb between us. Now, partly for my own
    sake, I think it right to tell you what my feeling about
    myself really is. I know, of course, that I am a man of
    ability--literary at any rate. I feel myself to be really in
    this superior to many more popular writers. I have received
    many high compliments from good judges. When I think (as my
    Julia used to tell me I might think) of the way in which my
    friends spoke of me, of Lowell and Norton and Croom
    Robertson and Sidgwick and Morley and G. Meredith and
    Morison and many others, I feel ungrateful in making my
    complaints: I am not a failure pure and simple: I am, I
    hold, a failure in this way: I have scattered myself over
    too many subjects. I think that I had it in me to write
    something which should make a real mark in ethical and
    philosophical speculation. Unluckily, what with journalism
    and the _Dictionary_, I have been too much of a
    Jack-of-all-trades, and instead of striking home in any one
    direction, have shown (as my friends admitted) capacity for
    striking. I don't think that this matters very much, as you
    shall see, but I do feel that if the history of English
    thought in this century should ever be written, my name will
    come in a footnote and small type, whereas, if my energies
    had been better directed, it might have occupied a
    paragraph, even a section of a chapter, in full-sized type.
    The cause is that want of self-confidence which I indicated
    as an early failing.

    "Well, I say this once for all, in order to explain her
    feeling about it. She used to ridicule me for my excessive
    modesty; though I hope that she did not dislike it. I used,
    I must confess, and sometimes I confessed to her the truth,
    to exaggerate my self-humiliation in order to extort from
    her some of her delicious compliments. They were delicious,
    for even if they implied error of judgment, they implied the
    warmest love. Though she knew that I was 'fishing for
    compliments', she would not find it in her heart to refuse
    them. Again and again she has told me that it was unworthy
    of me to complain of want of popular success (that was not
    quite my real complaint, as you see, but I put it in that
    way sometimes). She assured me that she was a better judge
    of writing than I--in this case at least. She told me again
    and again that she had liked my articles before she cared
    for me; she gathered up all the compliments that she heard
    and used to produce them to me. I am so thin-skinned that I
    have given up reading any reviews of myself; intended praise
    often worries me, and I feel that, as I will not read abuse,
    I have no right to such compliments. She saw many reviews
    and, I presume, despised the unfavourable. But that is a
    trifle.... This suggests to me one more remark.... Had I
    fully succeeded and surpassed all my contemporaries in my
    own line, what should I have done? I should have written a
    book or two which might be read by my contemporaries and
    perhaps by the next generation, and which would have
    survived so long because they expressed a little better than
    others thoughts which were more or less common to thousands
    of people, many of them often a little less able than
    myself. Now I say, advisedly, that I do not think such an
    achievement as valuable as hers."

This is not the place in which to repeat the tribute of his
love and bereavement; but you will find a discussion of the
relative values of private virtues and intellectual
achievement or public services in Leslie Stephen's last
lecture on "Forgotten Benefactors" in _Social Rights and
Duties_.

In the core of his emotional nature he gave preference to
the private virtues. It is sometimes even disconcerting to
find how much this influenced him in deciding the value of
an author's works to the world. He is, as might have been
anticipated, severe towards Rousseau; and in so far as he
relents, it is due to his discovering in Rousseau "a
redeeming quality", namely the value he set on the simple
affections, on "an idyllic life of calm domestic
tranquillity", perhaps not unlike Cowper's delight in taking
tea with Mrs Unwin, though streaked (oddly as it appears to
Stephen) with "a kind of sensual appetite for pure simple
pleasures". In Hazlitt he cannot stomach the _Liber
Amoris_; in Coleridge, his having left Southey to look
after Mrs Coleridge and the children; and in De Quincey he
cannot overlook that the source of the awe-struck sense of
the vast and vague which De Quincey communicated so
magnificently, was opium. In Thackeray, one of his favourite
novelists, he sees no faults that seriously matter, since
"his writings mean, if they mean anything, that the love of
a wife and child and friends is the one sacred element in
our nature, of infinitely higher price than anything which
can come into competition with it; and that Vanity Fair is
what it is because it stimulates the pursuit of objects
frivolous and unsatisfying just so far that they imply
indifference to those emotions". He is also lenient to
Kingsley, partly because he detects in Kingsley the belief
that "the root of all that is good in man lies in the purity
and vigour of the domestic affections". In short, there are
times when we are left wondering if a critic, in whom the
exercise of the intellect was a passion, is not saying in
effect: "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever."
There are passages scattered through his books which
indicate that, compared with qualities of heart, all others
seemed to him like a row of figures preceded by a decimal
point and incapable of rising to the value of a single unit.
That he underrated the value of his own work, there is no
doubt. Even his masterly _English Thought in the Eighteenth
Century_ failed to satisfy him. He knew it was well done,
but he doubted its value, since thought and imaginative
literature were only by-products of social evolution, "the
noise that the wheels make as they go round", and therefore
no history of thought could be complete by itself. It was
because Sainte-Beuve had taken such pains to place every
author in his social setting and his times that he respected
Sainte-Beuve's work so much. The view held in France by some
critics, and advocated in England by Oscar Wilde and Walter
Pater, that criticism was the quintessence of literature
appeared to him too absurd to discuss. All the critic could
do for his fellow-men was to stimulate their interest in
literature by pointing out what he had himself enjoyed or
not enjoyed, and by giving names to the qualities he
perceived in them. He could appeal to the reader and say:
Are not these, when you come to think it over, the strong
points of this book, and these the weak ones?

Stephen himself was deficient in the power of transmitting
the emotions he had derived himself from literature; he
seldom, if ever, attempted to record a thrill. But he
excelled in describing the qualities of authors, whether he
summed up for or against them; and this is a most important
part of the critic's function. By focussing in a phrase our
scattered impressions, the critic confers an intellectual
benefit which increases our interest when we think over an
author's works. True, we can enjoy Defoe without noticing
that his method of producing an impression of reality is the
same as that of the circumstantial liar, who introduces
details so fortuitous that it is hard to believe he could
have invented them; but when Leslie Stephen says this, it
brings suddenly together in our minds a number of instances.
And the same effect is produced by his remark that knowledge
of human nature in Fielding is based on observation rather
than intuitive sympathy. Leslie Stephen's critical essays
are crammed with illuminating comments of this kind. Of
course, they do not help us to decide whether the fiction in
question is good or bad, any more than a naturalist's
description of a beast necessarily throws light on its value
to man. But criticism must be in great part a Natural
History of Authors, in which are set forth their distinctive
features, their adaptation to their environment, and their
relations to other species. When it comes to judgment, the
test which Leslie Stephen applied was the relation of a work
to life, the extent to which it ministered, in one way or
another, to all human good.




[End of _Leslie Stephen_ by Desmond MacCarthy]