Old Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere. John Willis Clark
ought to possess is not readily found. It is a question of natural fitness rather than of training. In the first place, he must be content to forego all other occupations, and to be at the beck and call of his pupils and their parents whenever they may choose to come to him. Secondly, he must never forget that the dull, the idle, and the vicious demand even more care and time than the clever and the industrious. It may seem almost superfluous to mention that nothing which concerns his pupils must be beneath his notice. Petty details which concern their daily life, their rooms, their bills, their domestic relations, their amusements, have all to be referred to the tutor; and the most trivial of these may not seldom be of the greatest importance in giving occasion for exercising influence or administering advice. We are sorry to have to admit that Whewell was hardly so successful as he ought to have been in discharging these arduous duties. The period of his tutorship was, as we have shown, precisely that during which he was most occupied with his private studies; he threw his energies into them, and disposed of his College work in a perfunctory fashion. His letters are full of such passages as: ‘I have got an infinitude of that trifling men call business on my hands’; ‘During the last term I have been almost too busy either to write or read. I took upon myself a number of employments which ate up almost every moment of the day’; and the like; and his delight at having transferred the financial part of the work to his colleague Mr. Perry, in 1833, was unbounded. The result was inevitable; he could not give the requisite time to his pupils, and, in fact, hardly knew some of them by sight. A story used to be current about him which is so amusing that we think it will bear repeating. We do not vouch for its accuracy; but we think that it would hardly have passed current had it not been felt to be applicable. One day he gave his servant a list of names of certain of his pupils whom he wished to see at a wine-party after Hall, a form of entertainment then much in fashion. Among the names was that of an undergraduate who had died some weeks before. ‘Mr. Smith, sir; why he died last term, sir!’ objected the man. ‘You ought to tell me when my pupils die,’ replied the tutor sternly; and Whewell could be stern when he was vexed. Again, his natural roughness of manner was regarded by the undergraduates as indicating want of sympathy. They thought he wanted to get rid of them and their affairs as quickly as possible. Those who understood him better knew that he was really a warm-hearted friend; and we have seen that with his private pupils he had been exceedingly popular; but those who came only occasionally into contact with him regarded him with fear, not with affection. On the other hand, he was inflexibly just, whatever gossip or malevolence may have urged to the contrary. He had no favourites. No influence of any kind could make him swerve from the lofty standard of right which he had prescribed for himself.
We left Whewell completing the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences; and for the future we shall find him turning his attention exclusively—so far as he could be said to do anything exclusively—to Moral Philosophy. In 1838 he was elected to the Knightbridge Professorship, founded in 1677 by the Rev. John Knightbridge, who directed his Professor of ‘Moral Theology or Casuistical Divinity,’ as he termed it, to read five lectures in the Public Schools in every term, and, at the end of it, to deliver them, fairly written out, to the Vice-Chancellor. Various pains and penalties were enjoined against those who failed to perform these duties; but, notwithstanding, the office had remained a sinecure for more than a century; indeed we are doubtful whether it had ever been anything else. The suggestion that Whewell should become a candidate for it was made by his old friend, Dr. Worsley, Master of Downing, who was Vice-Chancellor in that year, and, by virtue of his office, one of the electors. Whewell determined to inaugurate a new era, and at once commenced a course of lectures, which were regularly continued in subsequent years. We have seen that he had prepared himself for these pursuits by previous studies; and his letters show that he had made up his mind to devote himself to them for some years to come. In 1845 he produced his Elements of Morality, wherein the subject is treated systematically; and subsequently he wrote, or edited, works devoted to special parts of it, as Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England; Grotius de Jure Belli et Pacis; and the Platonic Dialogues for English Readers. The permanent influence which Grotius exercised upon his mind is marked by his munificent foundation of a Professorship and Scholarships in International Law, in connexion with two additional courts for Trinity College, one of which was built during his life-time, while for the other funds were provided by his Will. The most sober-minded of men may sometimes be a visionary; and the motto Paci sacrum, which Whewell placed on the western façade of his new buildings, would seem to prove that he seriously believed that his foundation would put an end to war, and inaugurate ‘a federation of the world.’
As time went on, and Whewell approached his fiftieth year, he began to feel that ‘College rooms are no home for declining years.’ His friends were leaving, or had left; he did not make new ones; and he was beginning to lead a life of loneliness which was very oppressive to him. In 1840 he thought seriously of taking a College living, but his friend Mr. Hare dissuaded him; and the letters that passed between them on this subject are among the most interesting in Mrs. Stair Douglas’ volume. In 1841 he made up his mind to settle in Cambridge as a married man, with his Professorship and his ethical studies as an employment. The lady of his choice was Miss Cordelia Marshall. They were married on October 12, 1841, and on the very same day, Dr. Wordsworth, Master of Trinity, wrote to him at Coniston, where he was spending his honeymoon, announcing his intention of resigning, ‘in the earnest desire, hope, and trust, that you may be, and will be, my successor.’ The news, which seems to have been quite unexpected, spread rapidly among the small circle of Whewell’s intimate friends; and succeeding posts brought letters from Dr. Worsley and others, urging him ‘not to linger in his hymeneal Elysium,’ but to go up to London at once, and solicit the office from the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel. Dr. Whewell describes himself as ‘vehemently disturbed’; most probably he was unwilling to comply with what seems to us to have been extraordinary advice. He did comply, however, and went to London, where he found a letter from Sir Robert, offering him the Mastership. It is pleasant to be able to record that the offer was made spontaneously, before any solicitations had reached the Minister. Whewell accepted it on October 18; had an interview with Sir Robert on the 19th; returned to Coniston by the night mail; and on the 23rd (according to Mr. Todhunter) had sufficiently recovered from his excitement to sit down to compose the first lecture of a new course on Moral Philosophy.
The appointment was felt to be a good one, though it must be admitted that there were dissentient voices. It was notorious that Dr. Wordsworth had resigned soon after the fall of Lord Melbourne’s administration, in order to prevent the election of either Dean Peacock or Professor Sedgwick, both of whom were very popular with the Fellows. The feeling in College, therefore, was rather against the new Master than with him. Nor was he personally popular. We now know, from the letters which, in reply to congratulations, he wrote to Lord Lyttelton, Bishop Thirlwall, Mr. Hare, and others, how diffident he was of his fitness for the office, and how anxious to discharge its high duties becomingly. Mr. Hare had evidently been giving advice with some freedom, as was his wont, for Whewell replies:
‘I perceive and feel the value of the advice you give me, and I have no wish, I think, either to deny or to defend the failings you point out. In a person holding so eminent a station as mine will be, everything impatient and overbearing is of course quite out of place; and though it may cost me some effort, my conviction of this truth is so strong that I think it cannot easily lose its hold. As to my love of disputation, I do not deny that it has been a great amusement to me; but I find it to be so little of an amusement to others that I should have to lay down my logical cudgels for the sake of good manners alone.’
The writer of these sentences was far too straightforward not to have meant every word that he wrote; and we feel sure that he tried to carry out his good intentions. We are compelled, however, to admit that he failed. He was impatient and he was overbearing; or he was thought to be so, which, so far as his success as a Master went, came to the same thing. He had lived so long as a bachelor among bachelors—giving and receiving thrusts in argument, like a pugilist in a fair fight—that he had become somewhat pachydermatous. It is probable, too, that he was quite ignorant of the weight of his own blows. He forgot those he received, and expected his antagonist to have an equally short memory. Again, the high view which he took of his position as Master laid him open to the charge of arrogance. We believe the true explanation to be that he was too conscientious, if such a phrase be