LESLIE STEPHEN.*
LESLIE STEPHEN was not the type of man whose Life it is easy to write. He had none of the vanity of the would-be biographee, which shows itself in voluminous reminiscences. " If you adhered to the letter of Stephen's words," says Mr. Maitland, " you would believe that he had sometimes looked at a few books, that he had now and then scribbled for the newspapers, and that, by way of relaxation from this fatiguing toil, he had strolled across some rising ground in the neighbourhood of Grindelwald or Zermatt." He spoke little of himself, and was content always to adopt a tone of careless irony about his own achievements. But few men of letters have had a more varied life, or have been more beloved by their friends. If in one sense he is a difficult subject for the biographer, in another he is easy, for his character was essentially simple, clean-cut, and masculine. He had that distinction which comes from personality and intellect rather than from the accidents of tz career. Indeed, to our mind, he is one of the two or three heroic figures of recent times in a not very heroic calling. His life is a record of hard thinking and wholesome living which is inspiriting to recall, and a most valuable counter- active to the debauches of sentiment and egotism which too often make up literary biographies. Happily, too, it has found a worthy chronicler. It would be difficult to overpraise the merits of Mr. Maitland's work. Written in a style which rivals Stephen's own in nervous strength, and excels it, per- haps, in colour and a certain whimsical humour, it presents a most living portrait of a most vital being. The personality of the writer never obtrudes itself ; but Stephen seems to speak on every page, so that the book has the value of an auto- biography without its defects. When Mr. Maitland allows himself a comment or a criticism, it is always singularly acute and true. It is such a memorial as Stephen would have approved, and it is a piece of literature which should rank not far from the best among modern biographies.
Stephen was of the stuff of which great adventurers are made, but the actual incidents of his life were prosaic. The son of Sir James Stephen, of the Colonial Office, the author of Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, he was brought up in a home where old-fashioned piety was joined to a wide and generous culture. He went to Eton as a day- boy, his parents having taken a house in Windsor, but he never was much of an Etonian. Cambridge was his real Alma Mater, and from the day when he went into residence at Trinity Hall to the end of his life he was the most devout of Cantabrigians. His College record was not specially dis- tinguished, but he did creditably in the schools, acquired a great deal of miscellaneous learning, made a host of friends, and on the river and the track showed that a sickly boy may develop into a very respectable athlete. " A great athlete in mind and body," Lord Justice Romer has called him. Soon he became a clerical Fellow and Tutor of his College, very popular among young men because of his complete absence of donnishness. Meanwhile he had become bitten with mountaineering, and in his vacations he was con- quering giants of the Oberland and the Pennines in that first happy and heroic age of the sport. A visit to America during the Civil War deepened his Liberalism, and showed him thathe had some power of writing. Soon afterwards we find him leaving the Church, discovering, not that his creed was false, but that he had never really believed it. "I had unconsciously imbibed the current phraseology; but the formulae belonged to the superficial stratum of my thought instead of to the fundamental convictions." With his Orders he lost his tutor- ship, and coming up to London he took up, at the age of thirty-three, the career of journalism. Those were good days for journalism, as they were for mountaineers, and he soon became sufficiently prosperous to allow him to marry. His wife was a daughter of Thackeray, and those early years in London were probably the happiest in his life. His luminous, broad-minded, and genial criticism made him a reputation in a province which is too much given over to the ill-balanced and the petulant. His wife's death in 1875 was his first great sorrow, and for long, while he continued to work hard and well, the buoyancy had gone out of his nature. A happy second marriage and a task—the editing of the Dictionary of • The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. By Frederic William Maitland. London : Duckworth and Co. [18s. net.] National Biography—which he could do supremely well cheered his later years, and we find in his writings once more something of that irresponsible boyishness which was so real a trait in his character. To the end he was amazingly industrious and wholly courageous, and when death came in 1904 at the age of seventy-two it was preceded by no painful epoch of mental or physical. inactivity. Stephen was the true
type of the man of letters. "Unluckily," he once complained, " what with journalism and dictionary-making, I have been a jack-of-all trades; and instead of striking home, have only done enough to persuade friendly judges that I could have struck." But it seems to us that in certain cases not to have specialised may count for righteousness. We need not lament that be informed and delighted his generation instead of captivating a few students.
Mr. Maitland's biography is rightly rather a study of the
man than a criticism of his work. Vernon Whitford in The Egoist was drawn from Stephen, and Mr. Meredith has summed up his friend in words which no biographer can emulate: Candour,• loyalty, a slightly coltish temper to be worked off by hard' exercise, above all, a clear, humorous outlook on the world, were the traits of 'Whitford'and of his original. The present writer may confess that he has always ldoked on the conqueror of the Schreckhorn, the man who "strode from peak to peak like a pair of compasses," with more reverence than on the critic, and that he prefers The Playground of Europe to The Science of Ethics. Stephen was the finest kind of mountaineer,—a great rock and snow athlete who never fell into the vulgarity of record-breaking, a lover of wild Nature who was never guilty of pose or rhetoric. He was a very typical Englishman in his mental and , moral robustness. His cynicism was of that breed which is first-cousin to fine sentiment. Like Thackeray, be liked to batten down the hatches on his emotions and enthusiasms, but they were always there. It was easy to bring him to the verge of the sentimental abyss, though, as Mr. Maitland says, " on the verge of abysses his fobthold was always sure." He hated displays of feeling, because of the shallows, not the deeps, they revealed. Like all cynics of this kind, he was an optimist. " If the superior intelligence of whom you speak," he writes to Mr. Norton, " asked me how I had liked it, I should say, not only that I have had times of exceeding happiness, but that I have been continuously happy,
except for certain periods Even now, lonely and worn as I am, I feel as if each day were on the whole something to the good." His agnosticism was the real thing,—a deliberate and conscientious suspense of judgment. He hated any one who tinkered with the truth. In many ways he was singularly like his brother, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. The accent of their minds was different, for the latter was always prepared to burke inquiry for the sake of law •and order, while the former had much of the intransigence of the zealot. But both had an utter detestation of cant and all sops to conscience. Sir James Fitzjames, if he bad been com- pelled to persecute men for their faith, would have frankly founded his conduction the convenience of the State, and made no attempt at sophistical ethics. Both brothers, too,had a certain bluntness of mind as regards metaphysics. Leslie in his youth thought Hegel "little better than an ass," and he never changed his attitude towards that side of philosophy.
His writings on ethics are strong, wholesome work, but a little uninspired ; in Mr. Maitland's words, in philosophy he is "the great pedestrian." One delightful passage may be quoted which gives his views on the matter, the views, perhaps, of all the typically English schools of thought :—
" The poet and the philosopher have this in common : they prove nothing, but by utterly dissimilar means they suggest a view_ ,of life.' Your system, when you have made it, will not be adequate or coherent. Assuredly you will come out by the same door wherein you went ; but in the course of arguing 'about it and about,' you, if you are honest with the hard facts and have the proper kind of imaginative power, are not unlikely to hit on some formula, some scheme, which will serve as a mould, a temporary mould, for some part of our small knowledge."
Stephen was a man of many friendships, and not the least attractive side of this biography is the company to which the reader is admitted. The most intimate of his friends, to whom his finest letters were addressed, were Mr. Charles Eliot Norton and Mr. John Morley. It would be hard . to find better examples of the kind of frank and affectionate intimacy which makes good correspondence. To use Mr. Morley's own phrase,
Stephen' had. a- "genius for friendship." There mil -dthel•s; acquaintances, who appear in these :pages, and are described often with some telling phrase.' Fronde' is "a sentimentalist in his way, and apt to go Wrong. and turn sour, like other sentimentalists ; but not, I think, fundamentally wicked." Matthew Arnold is delightfully hit off in many comments; and in a less kindly vein we have this of a famous Life. of Christ : " The Gospels done into Daily-Telegraphese and drowned in a torrent of flummery." Stevenson - in .1875 makes his appearance as "a youth of some literary promise, who has been working at Knox, and was anxious to talk to Carlyle about him." One of Stephen's chief discoveries as editor was Mr. Thomas Hardy, who in a sonnet .which: com- pares Stephen to the Schreckhorn—" gaunt and difficult like himself "—has caught the very spirit of his friend.' , That mountain is not accessible from every point, and' Stephen aid not hold out open arms to the world. But his Menas could use of him Mr. Bryce's words to the Alpine Club :—" I do not suppose that any of us will ever know any one more pure. minded or more high-minded in small things and great."
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