Frederick William Maitland. Fisher Herbert Albert Laurens
Cambridge bound to Maitland by close ties of friendship. To the masters Maitland presented none of the obvious points of interest. Even William Johnson, that learned and catholic scholar who made so many happy discoveries, failed to discover Maitland. The boy was not a Hellenist and his deficiencies in Greek and Latin prosody put him outside the intellectual pale. He was whimsical, full of eccentric interests, of puns and paradox and original humour. His closest school friend thought that he would possibly develop into "a kind of philosophic Charles Lamb4."
In the autumn of 1869 Maitland went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Commoner. The learned Samuel Roffey had been a musician both in theory and practice, and the taste for music descended through the son to the grandson. The first year of Maitland's undergraduate life was given over to music, mathematics and athletics; but his earliest distinctions were gained not in the most but in the least intellectual of these pursuits. Though he can never have looked otherwise than fragile, he had outgrown his early delicacy and become an active lad with considerable powers of endurance. He won the Freshman's mile in four minutes forty-seven seconds, excellent time as records went then, and obtained his "blue" as a three-miler in the Inter-University Sports. The two mile walking race, the quarter, and the mile, fell to him at various times in the Third Trinity Sports. Nor were his athletic activities confined to the running path. His friend Mr Cyprian Williams remembers his last appearance as a racing oarsman; how on the final day of the Lent races of 1872 the Third Trinity second boat after a successful week made a crowning bump, how in the moment of the victory the crew were tipped over into the cold and dirty waters of the Cam, and how in the evening the boat dined in Maitland's lodgings over Palmer's boot-shop and kept up its festivity well into the morning.
Long before this – at the beginning of his second year at Cambridge – Maitland found his way into Henry Sidgwick's lecture-room and made a discovery which shall be told in his own words. "It is now thirty years ago that some chance – I think it was the idle whim of an idle undergraduate – took me to Sidgwick's lecture-room, there to find teaching the like of which had never come in my way before. There is very much else to be said of Sidgwick; some part of it has been beautifully said this afternoon; but I should like to add this: I believe that he was a supremely great teacher. In the first place I remember the admirable patience which could never be out-worn by stupidity, and which nothing but pretentiousness could disturb. Then there was the sympathetic and kindly endeavour to overcome our shyness, to make us talk, and to make us think. Then there was that marked dislike for any mere reproduction of his own opinions which made it impossible for Sidgwick to be in the bad sense the founder of a school. I sometimes think that the one and only prejudice that Sidgwick had was a prejudice against his own results. All this was far more impressive and far more inspiriting to us than any dogmatism could have been. Then the freest and boldest thinking was set forth in words which seemed to carry candour and sobriety and circumspection to their furthest limit. It has been said already this afternoon, but I will say it again: I believe that no more truthful man than Sidgwick ever lived. I am speaking of a rare intellectual virtue. However small the class might be, Sidgwick always gave us his very best; not what might be good enough for undergraduates, or what might serve for temporary purposes, but the complex truth just as he saw it, with all those reservations and qualifications, exceptions and distinctions which suggested themselves to a mind that was indeed marvellously subtle but was showing us its wonderful power simply because, even in a lecture room, it could be content with nothing less than the maximum of attainable and communicable truth. Then, as the terms went by, we came to think of lecture time as the best time we had in Cambridge; and some of us, looking back now, can say that it was in a very true sense the best time that we have had in our lives. We turned away to other studies and pursuits, but the memories of Sidgwick's lectures lived on. The matter of the lectures, the theories and the arguments, might be forgotten; but the method remained, the spirit remained, as an ideal – an unattainable ideal, perhaps, but a model of perfect work. I know that in this matter I can speak for others; but just one word in my own case. For ten years and more I hardly saw Sidgwick. To meet him was a rare event, a rare delight. But there he always was: the critic and judge of any work that I might be doing: a master, who, however forbearing he might be towards others, always exacted from himself the utmost truthfulness of which word and thought are capable. Well, I think it no bad thing that young men should go away from Cambridge with such a master as that in their minds, even though in a given case little may come of the teaching … I can say no more. Perhaps I have already tried to say too much. We who were, we who are, Sidgwick's pupils, need no memorial of him. We cannot forget. Only in some way or another we would bear some poor testimony of our gratitude and our admiration, our reverence and our love5."
Such teaching was precisely calculated to ripen Maitland's unsuspected powers. The pupil was as modest, as exact, as truth-loving as the master, and possessed a quick turn for witty casuistry which was quite individual though not dissimilar to Sidgwick's own gift in the same direction. Under Sidgwick's influence Maitland's intellect deepened and widened. The piano was ejected from the college room; the University running path knew him no more; mathematics were abandoned for philosophy with such good result that a scholarship was gained at Trinity, and that in the Moral and Mental Science Tripos of 1872 Maitland came out at the head of the First Class, bracketed with his friend W. Cunningham, who has since won high distinction in the field of economic history. But the chief prize of undergraduate ambition, a Fellowship at Trinity, was denied him. Maitland competed, and was beaten in the competition by James Ward, now one of the most distinguished of living psychologists. Examiners make fewer mistakes than is commonly supposed, and on this occasion Henry Sidgwick and Thomas Fowler reached their decision not without hesitation. While admitting Maitland's literary brilliance and facility they discovered in his successful rival a deeper interest in the problems of philosophy and therefore a superior claim to a Fellowship in Moral and Mental Science6.
Maitland's Fellowship dissertation entitled "A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the time of Hobbes to the time of Coleridge" is, despite some defects of proportion, a remarkable performance for so young a man. Not only does it cover a wide range of reading, especially in the English moralists, but it is distinguished by two characteristic qualities – independence of judgment and a scrupulous estimate of the canons of proof. The scholar of Trinity says many good things7, but says nothing at random. Even when it would have been tempting to sally forth with a flourish of affirmation, he prefers to stand within the zone of caution. "I am inclined to think," he writes, "(though there is great risk of such speculations being wrong) that Hobbes was led to exaggerate his account of man's naturally unsocial character by a desire to bring the state of nature into discredit." One cannot dogmatise about the motives of the dead; our dogmas are but plausible hypotheses, and so complex is human nature, so inexhaustible is life's casuistry that the likeliest conjecture may fail of the mark. "There is a great risk of such speculation being wrong." Touches like this reveal the fact that the disciple of Sidgwick had learnt his master's lesson.
The scholarship at Trinity, carrying with it a place at the scholar's table, brought Maitland into communion with the ablest men in the College. It often happens that a youth who has attracted little attention at school by reason of his failure to satisfy the limited conventions of schoolboy excellence, springs into sudden prominence at the University. His conversation attracts notice; his friends discover that he has original opinions, or some peculiar charm of bearing, or that his gifts of mind or character are out of the common. So it was with Maitland. He soon achieved a reputation not only as a witty and brilliant talker, but as a charming companion and as the most original public speaker of his time. He was elected to be a member of the Apostles, a small society which for many university generations has been a bond between clever young Cambridge men and has brought them into friendly relations with their seniors: and by the suffrages of a larger and less select electorate he rose to be Secretary and then President of the Union Society.
Maitland's speeches at the Union printed themselves upon the minds of his audience as being very effective for their immediate purpose and yet quite unlike the speeches of ordinary vote-winners. His artifice was all his own. Others were more eloquent, more prompt in the cut and thrust of debate, but in the power of condensing an argument
A punning squib, very spirited and amusing, entitled "A solemn Mystery," and contributed to
There were four candidates for the Fellowship: W. Cunningham, Arthur Lyttelton, F. W. Maitland, and James Ward, every one of them distinguished in after life. With so strong a competition the College might have done well to elect more Fellows than one in Moral and Mental Science.
Such for instance as: —
"The love of simplicity has done vast harm to English Political Philosophy."
"No history of the British Constitution would be complete which did not point out how much its growth has been affected by ideas derived from Aristotle."
"The idea of a social compact did not become really active till it was allied with the doctrine that all men are equal."
"In Hume we see the first beginnings of a scientific use of History."