Born, in Kensington, 28 Nov. 1832. Early education at Eton and at King’s Coll., London. Matric. Trin. Hall, Camb., 1851; B.A., 1854; M.A., 1857; Fellow Trin. Hall, 1855. Left Cambridge and settled in London, 1864. Married (i.) Harriet Marion Thackeray, 1864; she died, 1875. Editor of “Cornhill Mag.,” 1871–82. Married (ii.) Julia Prinsep Duckworth, 1878. Editor of “Dict. of Nat. Biog.,” 1882–91. Clark Lecturer in English Literature, Camb., 1883–84. LL.D., Camb. Hon. Fellow Trin. Hall., Camb. Pres. of Ethical Society. Works: “Sketches from Cambridge” (anon.), 1865; “The Times on the American War” (under initials: “L. S.”), 1865; “The Play-Ground of Europe,” 1871; “Essays on Freethinking,” 1873; “Hours in a Library” (3 vols.), 1874–79; “History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century” (2 vols.), 1876; “Samuel Johnson,” 1878; “Alexander Pope,” 1880; “The Science of Ethics,” 1882; “Swift,” 1882; “Life of Henry Fawcett,” 1885; “What is Materialism?” 1886; “An Agnostic’s Apology,” 1893; “The Life of Sir James Fitz-James Stephen,” 1895; “Social Rights and Duties” (2 vols.), 1896. He has translated: Berlepsch’s “The Alps,” 1861; and edited: W. K. Clifford’s “Lectures and Essays” (with Sir F. Pollock), 1879; Fielding’s Works, 1882; Richardson’s Works, 1883; “Dictionary of National Biography,” vols. i.–xxvi., 1885–91.
Personal
He is by no means the traditional Englishman in appearance, being tall and rather thin; and his manner is that of a gentle and refined scholar. Without being a fluent speaker he is never at a loss for an appropriate expression, and he has a vein of pleasant humor which enlivens his speech and conversation.
Among all the coronation honors, none has been greeted with such universal and unfeigned satisfaction as the knighthood conferred upon Leslie Stephen…. Sir Leslie Stephen’s most obvious claim to honor is that he is a most eminent “man of letters,” and that men of letters, in the sense in which that term used to be used, are rare in modern England.
As, on Wednesday, February 24 last, in the sombre chapel at Hudson, the coffin stood on the bier in its violet covering before the portal of the crematorium, the profound silence was charged deep with a thousand memories to the friends who were gathered for the last time around him. There were men and women who had grown to old age in close touch with him—who had worked with him, worked for him, enjoyed life with him, who had loved him, whom he had loved—men who had served the State, or served the people, who had governed provinces, formed schools, written their names in the roll of statesmanship, literature, and science for the best part of two generations. Stephen’s last book, composed, we might say, on his very death-couch, appeared to the public almost on the day of his funeral. He died literally in harness, as the Roman emperor said a general should die, erect and in his armor. But the inner memory of Leslie Stephen will remain for us, his coevals as a stalwart of the mid-Victorian age.
General
Have I read your book? [“Hours in a Library”]. I wish you had read it so carefully, for then I should not have a string of errata to send you for your next edition.
On looking back over Mr. Stephen’s book a single feeling of admiration possesses me for the width of his knowledge, the vigour of his style, and the versatility of mind which has enabled him to do justice to so many subjects.
Mr. Stephen is a bracing writer. His criticisms are no sickly fruit of fond compliance with his authors. By no means are they this, but hence their charm. There is much pestilent trash now being talked about “Ministry of Books,” and the “Sublimity of Art,” and I know not what other fine phrases. It almost amounts to a religious service conducted before an altar of first editions. Mr. Stephen takes no part in such silly rites. He remains outside with a pail of cold water.
When, a hundred years hence, some one sets himself to write the history of English critical literature in the nineteenth century, he will probably regard Mr. Leslie Stephen as a transition figure, and see in his work a bridge spanning the gulf between two important and sharply differentiated schools. There are certain years during which Lord Macaulay and Mr. Walter Pater were contemporaries; but to pass from the pure literary essays of the former to those of the latter is like passing from one age into another…. There is no doubt that, in the main, Mr. Leslie Stephen’s critical work has more in common with the Edinburgh than with the Oxford school. It is, to use words which are in some danger of becoming terms of literary slang, “judicial” rather than “æsthetic;” its conclusions are based rather on general principles than on particular sensibilities or preferences; it strives after impersonal estimates rather than personal appreciations. Nevertheless there is, in addition to all this, a constant admission, explicit or implicit, of the fact that even the critic cannot jump off his own shadow, and that, though he must appeal to the common reason, his appeal must in the nature of things be made on behalf of some individual approval or disapproval which it is his business to justify…. Mr. Leslie Stephen’s style is the style which his substance makes inevitable. The manner of the seer or the rhetorician would indeed be an ill-fitting vesture for the thought of a shrewd, humorous observer who knows how to admire wisely, how to condemn sanely, but who, neither in eulogy nor condemnation, will allow himself the perilous luxury of excitement.
Mr. Stephen’s criticism is of a peculiar, personal kind, and it is marked, above all, by an extreme sincerity, which has moulded his style, not inelegantly, into simply the most direct of possible vessels for pouring fact and opinion from the mind to the paper. Among other qualities he has an intellectual mastery over fact, precisely such as he demands, in one of the pages before us, from the ideal biographer, whom he contrasts, very happily, with the “dry antiquary,” to whom “any and every fact is of the same importance.” And, through this peculiar mastery, he has the gift of always being interesting, no matter what he is writing about; for in the first place, he never allows fact to stray from its logical place in an argument or an analysis, and, secondly, he humanises speculation while he intellectualises fact.
Granted the moral judgment—given a soul devoted to the social weal—Mr. Stephen offers vigorous and pointed encouragement, and dissuades one from being argued out of obedience to conscience. But, if the moral judgment be disputed, and if any soul prefers his own private weal, Mr. Stephen gives no help. To call selfish men “idiots” merely because they distinguish meum from tuum is not helpful. Tastes differ—that is the last word on these questions, if we adopt Mr. Stephen’s premises.
His intense and thoroughgoing desire to arrive at true conclusions on the fundamental principles of morality gives a speculative interest to the pictures and analysis of character which belong to biography of the best kind. His immense knowledge of the actual lives of men guards him against that abstract, and therefore unreal, way of looking at things which is the special weakness of systematic thinkers; it supplies indeed, a good deal of that sort of knowledge which some writers have gained from large acquaintance with affairs or from mixing with the world, and is often lacking in teachers who have studied books more than men. John Mill, for one, would assuredly have gained a good deal from that wide knowledge of the lives and feelings of men who have lived and played their part in the world, which gives a tone of reality to even the most abstract of Stephen’s speculative works. It is this quality, at any rate, combined with his subtle and playful humor, that makes Sir Leslie Stephen a moralist in the sense in which our grandfathers applied the word to Dr. Johnson.
The most personal and characteristic trait in all these collected essays is the continual play of a kind of ironical casuistry. On every page we see a keen and brilliant intellect seeking to ease the burden of the mystery, or of sad conviction, by the exercise of witty logic…. For all his ironical casuistry and mocking wit, it is always these deeper and more permanent emotions of human nature which warm and vitalize Sir Leslie Stephen’s writing. His cool, familiar manner, so express and admirable, tells of turbulence subdued; and reveals rather than hides the mellow soundness of the writer. He is the chief biographical craftsman of English Literature, and the “Dictionary of National Biography” is a practical achievement which must have brought its first editor a fuller joy “than the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian.”… The things that are eternally worth while, are seen for what they are.
A book such as this [“An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays”] is bound to be difficult reading even for a fairly trained mind and despite its author’s avoidance of intricate sentences and technical phraseology. Sir Leslie’s “Apology” is hard reading, because it is close reasoning, and the reader who perseveres intelligently to the end of it cannot possibly be the kind of reader for whom any intelligent person should be rash enough to offer himself as a guardian. Then again, if, as Sir Leslie says, “A religion is the synthesis of a philosophy and a poetry,” it is fairly clear that a number of persons capable of following the line of argument presented in this book, so far as it is philosophical, will be either repelled or disappointed by the fact that the poetical element of religion receives scarcely a word of attention. Hence the comparatively small number of readers capable of being radically affected by Sir Leslie’s arguments is, I should say, at least cut in half.
It remains to say that in the “Hours in a Library” and “Studies of a Biographer” we have Sir Leslie’s sunnier side, in which many have delighted who have sometimes shivered in that clear cold air which blows from off the coasts of his more continental works and from his heights of passionate reality. Here, too, he can be the acute dialectician, but is oftener the delightful humorist, the brilliant satirist, the master of vivid characterization, the writer whose style is always clear and strong, often genial, and habitually abounding in felicity and charm. How many books and authors have we enjoyed more perfectly when walking in his steps! It is a great and lofty work that he has done for us, and it has qualities that will ensure for it some permanent and grateful recognition in a world where nothing but the best lasts very long.
When that noble body of scholarly and cheerful pedestrians, the Sunday Tramps, were on the march, with Leslie Stephen to lead them, there was a conversation which would have made the presence of a shorthand writer a benefaction to the country. A pause to it came at the examination of the leader’s watch and Ordnance map under the western sun, and word was given for the strike across country to catch the tail of a train offering dinner in London, at the cost of a run through hedges, over ditches and fallows, past proclamations against trespassers, under suspicion of being taken for more serious depredators in flight. The chief of the tramps had a wonderfully calculating eye in the observation of distances and the nature of the land, as he proved by his discovery of untried passes in the higher Alps, and he had no mercy for pursy followers. I have often said of this life-long student and philosophical head, that he had in him the making of a great military captain. He would not have been opposed to the profession of arms if he had been captured early for the Service, notwithstanding his abomination of bloodshed. He had a high, calm courage, was unperturbed in a dubious position, and would confidently take the way out of it which he considered to be the better…. His work in literature will be reviewed by his lieutenant of Tramps, one of the ablest of our writers. The memory of it remains with us as being the profoundest and the most sober criticism we have had in our time. The only sting in it was an inoffensive humorous irony that now and then stole out for a roll over, like a furry cub, or the occasional ripple on a lake in grey weather. We have nothing left that is like it.
