THE PROBLEM OF THE POOR
A Prime Object—Lincoln—Leslie Stephen—Daily Life at
Cambridge—Deepening Interest in Social Questions.
[Sidenote: Prime Object of his Career.]
When Fawcett first began to pick up the threads of his life again he
planned to continue reading for the Bar, and obtained special facilities
from the Council of Legal Education. But about a year after his
blindness he decided to give up law altogether. There have been
successful blind lawyers, but Fawcett’s goal was not law but Parliament,
and he shrewdly perceived that he might make his way to the front as
quickly by distinction as a political economist as by good work at the
Bar. To live at Cambridge among the colleges and streets that he knew
and loved, and among the many intimate friends he had there, appealed
very strongly to him in his first blindness.
He determined to avail himself of all that the University had to give
him. While continuing his economic studies he took occasion to give
lectures and to attend and speak at meetings of learned societies. Above
all, he sought to find and win a constituency.
[Sidenote: Personality at twenty-five.]
Let us try to realise what manner of man he was when he went back to
Trinity Hall. He was a little over twenty-five years of age, and a
little over six feet three inches in height, not broad in proportion,
but lanky; of commanding presence, he had a voice of such volume that
his friends used to say it ’scorned concealment.’ Frank and transparent
in all his relations with men and women, he hated subterfuge of any
kind. His quick kindness saved him from hurting any one’s feelings,
though he was still somewhat rough in his ways. Never stereotyped in
appearance or manner, nor really conventional, he had a distinction
quite his own. His pronunciation never became entirely urbane, and his
friends had much difficulty in persuading him that Professor Tyndall
might be right in saying that glacier ice was a viscous fluid, but that
he had never asserted it to be ‘vicious.’
Fawcett hated tyranny in every form. His sympathies ranged from the
smallest child forced to work in the English mines to the American negro
enslaved, whose problems were then beginning to shake the Western
Hemisphere. Deeply interested in America, Fawcett became an ardent
Federalist and a great admirer of Lincoln.
[Sidenote: English Fun, American Humour.]
Not only by his build and love of justice does he suggest the great
emancipator for whom he felt such interest. If Lincoln had lived in
England it is probable that he would have lent a hand in some of the
many problems which Fawcett helped to solve; while if Fawcett had been
born in a cabin in Kentucky instead of by Salisbury Plain, it is not
unthinkable that he might have been a great fighter for the cause of
freedom and integrity of the Union. Another strong characteristic which
these men shared was an ever-present sense of humour. In Fawcett it was
akin to that of the big schoolboy; practical jokes appealed to him and
called forth his ringing laughter. His fun was of a hearty kind that
suited his voice and his huge type. Perhaps Fawcett’s humour would best
be described by the American as an English sense of fun, and by the
Englishman as not in the least American.
Lincoln’s immortal wit, both in its defects as well as its perfection,
could only have been the outcome of American conditions. But for the
support and relief afforded to Lincoln by his intense, unfailing humour
he would probably not have been able to bear the strain necessary to
accomplish his mighty task; but for his present love of fun and his
elastic buoyancy of spirit Fawcett would not have been able to master
his great affliction and to have continued in his struggle on behalf of
the down-trodden, ignorant, and afflicted of his country.
[Sidenote: Grey Suits.]
His Conservative Salisbury tailor said recently of him, ‘He was a very
great anti-slavery man, and sympathised with the abolitionists in
America.’ We can imagine Fawcett holding forth in stentorian tones about
the rights of the negro, while his small, gentle tailor tried in vain to
make the new grey suit fit his giant customer. By the same authority we
learn that Fawcett ‘was very partial to grey suits.’
[Sidenote: Fawcett and Stephen.]
He established himself at the Hall, as the college is known in
Cambridge, in rooms in the main court that looked south and gathered all
the sun grey Cambridge had to give them. They were on the first floor,
and above them his attendant and guide, Brown, occupied some garrets.
Leslie Stephen roomed on the same floor, and could reach Fawcett by
passing through a lecture-room. The two men were always together, and
Stephen writes that Fawcett’s rooms seemed part of his own.
Onlookers have said that Stephen’s care of Fawcett at this time ‘was
beautiful to see’; it ‘was almost womanly.’ The two men were curiously
different in temperament and traditions. They seem to have shared little
but their earlier politics and their love of walking. Stephen, from whom
Meredith is said to have modelled his character of Vernon Whitford, was
a writer and student, a descendant of writers and students. Though he
seems to have much enjoyed the Cambridge society in which he was then
living, he was usually the silent member of a company where Fawcett
dominated by force of energy if not always by the intrinsic value of
what he said.
Fawcett’s room was gay with photographs and the flowers which the blind
man loved to have about him. His fondness for them was a strong and
charming trait. In these days he usually wore a flower in his
button-hole. He loved having them about him; through their fragrance and
the delicacy of their petals he took in their beauty so completely that
he seemed to lose little because he could not see them with his bodily
eye.
[Sidenote: The Fellows’ Garden on the Cam.]
Trinity Hall is in the very heart of Collegiate Cambridge, wedged in
between the Senate House and the Cam. Along the river lies the Fellows’
Garden that Henry James has so warmly praised. After Fawcett’s death
Stephen spoke of this garden and Fawcett’s love for it.
‘I always associated Fawcett with a garden. He loved a garden because he
could there take the exercise in which he delighted without the
precautions necessary for a blind man in public places. He loved it
because he heartily enjoyed the sweet air and the scent of flowers and
the song of birds. He loved it because he could ... enjoy even the
sights, the sky and the trees, through the eyes of others. He loved it
not least because a garden is the best of all places for those long
talks with friends which were among the greatest pleasures of his life.
The garden where I oftenest met Fawcett, and where I have talked with
him for long hours, never clouded by an unkind word, is the garden of an
old Cambridge College with a smooth bowling green, and a terrace walk by
the side of the river, and a noble range of old chestnut trees and the
grand pinnacles of King’s College Chapel looking down through the
foliage.’
Within the limits of his college Fawcett moved freely and alone. He
would cross the court and find his way up and down stairs quite
unattended, verifying places with his cane. A Cambridge friend tells how
his coming would be heralded by his well-known step and by the tapping
of that same cane. Announcing himself outside the door with ‘Hello, are
you there?’ he would come into the room, waving his stick about to
locate objects. A hearty handshake would be followed by some such
comment as ‘How well you are looking,’ or ‘I am sorry you are not
looking so well to-day,’ this information probably reaching him from the
greeting of what was to him the tell-tale voice of his host.
Sometimes he would wander in the court at night, annoying the sleepers
by his tapping on the stone flags. Was it as a just retribution that one
night his sleep was hopelessly broken by the continuous singing of a
nightingale near his window? At last he could stand it no longer, and
sought for a missile to drive the bird away; his soap proving the only
available ammunition, he hurled it at the offending mistrel, and routed
him completely. But though the blind man achieved his purpose without
injury to the nightingale, later he had a long and futile hunt for his
cherished bit of soap, and his lusty voice was heard echoing along the
historic Cambridge walls, ‘Oh, I say, who will lend me some soap?’ until
that essential was provided by a neighbour.
He worked in the mornings, and between tea and dinner, the afternoons
were given up to exercise, and the evenings to conversations
interminable.
[Sidenote: Work and Walks.]
His favourite walk was over the Gog Magogs, the Cambridge Hills. They
are perhaps the lowest hills to be dignified with the name, but he
insisted that the air was purer on their summit than anywhere else,
because there was practically nothing between him and the Ural
Mountains. He would call attention to the outlook towards the distant
towers of Ely Cathedral, and invariably paused at certain points ‘to
look at the view.’ Through life he took the keenest joy in walking to
some place where the scenery was beautiful, and, helped by his friends’
description, he would see with their eyes. His love of Nature was
intense; he would often describe a sunset with such vividness that he
himself forgot whether he had actually seen it before he was blind, or
had only beheld it in his mind’s eye.
The fascination political economy had for him grew as he worked. To him
it was never the dry and impersonal science which freezes so many
enthusiasms, but the science which is necessary knowledge for the
statesman who wishes to better the condition of the man furthest down.
We have seen how Fawcett’s interest in the market folk at Salisbury
began when he was a child. The sight of many industrious, hard-working
people unable to support themselves in spite of the greatest frugality,
and having nothing better to look forward to than the poorhouse, had
left an indelible impression; he wanted to free these people so that
they might have rational lives with a fair return for their hard work.
His father’s political example and his own sympathetic nature and wish
to serve had made him from his youth a Radical. He had a passion for
justice and a zeal to redress wrongs and to liberate the poor from the
bondage in which their ignorance kept them. He regarded political
economy and kindred studies as means to his end, and Parliament as the
ultimate stronghold, from which he could direct his campaign. This was
his prime object, and while achieving it he gathered on his way all the
happiness and merriment that was honourably to be had.
[Sidenote: Freeing the Fellowships.]
In the year that Fawcett was elected fellow of his college the question
of reforming the tenure of the fellowships was newly opened, and at once
he took a hot and revolutionary part. When he returned to Cambridge he
continued to uphold a policy which would leave the fellowships open to
the freest competition. He insisted that neither religious opinions nor
other disabilities, many of which existed, should be any bar. The issues
involved by these reforms were intricate and came up for discussion in
the House of Commons when Fawcett was a member; but all through their
varying phases he kept to the one view that fellowships should be aids
to poor men who desired a university training and should be open to the
competition of the ablest.
But in 1858 fellowships could be held by unmarried men only. Cambridge
society consisted largely of young men before their departure into those
wider fields which permit of matrimony, and a few belated seniors
lingering behind, bachelors by predilection or compulsion. The
youthfulness of the majority appealed to the youthful; sanguine,
buoyant, and sociable, they could boast of sufficient ability to have
won them places in open competition. If they gave evidence of the truth
of the famous admonition of Dr. Thompson, the Master of Trinity College,
that ‘we are none of us infallible, not even the youngest of us,’ their
intercourse was only the more lively.
Into this circle Fawcett came like a huge magnet, drawing to himself all
kinds of curiously different people. He was most heartily welcomed
everywhere, and even when his hot Radicalism encountered in some senior
a wall of Conservative opposition, the wall soon crumbled under
Fawcett’s unquestionable sincerity and good-will.