CHAPTER VIII

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.