Sir J. F. Stephen's biography was written after his death by his younger brother, Sir Leslie Stephen: "The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. A Judge of the High Court of Justice, By his brother Leslie Stephen" (London; Smith Elder & Co., 1895). It also includes some interesting material about the origins of this family in Scotland. Here are some quotations from this work, including Stephen's own words from his journal and family correspondence as well as from his journalism published in the reviews:
The impression made upon [J. F. Stephen] by contemporary politics was
remarkable. The events of 1848 stirred all young men in one way or the
other; and although the apostles [the society at Cambridge of which Stephen
was a member] were discussing the abstract problems of freewill and
utilitarianism, they were no doubt keenly interested in concrete history. No
one was more moved than Fitzjames. He speaks of the optimistic views which
were popular with the Liberals after 1832, expounded by Cobden and Bright
and supposed to be sanctioned by the Exhibition of 1851. It was the favourite
cant that Captain Pen 'had got the best of Captain Sword, and that
henceforth the kindly earth would slumber, lapt in universal law. I cannot
say how I personally loathed this way of thinking, and how radically false,
hollow and disgusting it seemed to me then, and seems to me now.' The crash
of 1848 came like a thunderbolt, and 'history seemed to have come to life
again with all its wild elemental forces.' For the first time, he was aware
of actual war within a small distance, and the settlement of great questions
by sheer force. 'How well I remember my own feelings, which were, I think,
the feelings of the great majority of my age and class, and which have ever
since remained in me as strong and as unmixed as they were in 1848. I feel
them now [1887] as keenly as ever, though the world has changed and thinks
and feels, as it seems, quite differently. They were feelings of fierce,
unqualified hatred for the revolution and revolutionists; feelings of the
most bitter contempt and indignation against those who feared them, truckled
to them, or failed to fight them whensoever they could and as long as they
could: feelings of zeal against all popular aspirations and in favour of all
established institutions whatever their various defects and harshnesses
(which, however, I wished to alter slowly and moderately): in a word, the
feelings of a scandalised policeman toward a mob breaking windows in the
cause of humanity. I should have liked first to fire grapeshot down every
street in Paris, till the place ran with blood, and next to try Louis
Philippe and those who advised him not to fight by court martial, and to
have hanged them all as traitors and cowards. The only event in 1848 which
gave me real pleasure was the days of June, when Cavaignac did what, if he
had been a man or not got into a fright about his soul, or if he had had a
real sense of duty instead of a wretched consciousness of weakness and a
false position, Louis Philippe would have done months before.' He cannot, he
admits, write with calmness to this day of the king's cowardice; and he
never passed the Tuileries in later life without feeling the sentiment about
Louis XVI. and his 'heritage splendid' expressed by Thackeray's drummer,
'Ah, shame on him, craven and coward, that had not the heart to defend
it!'
'I have often wondered,' adds Fitzjames, 'at my own vehement
feelings on these subjects, and I am not altogether prepared to say that they
are not more or less foolish. I have never seen war. I have never heard a
shot fired in anger, and I have never had my courage put to any proof worth
speaking of. Have I any right to talk of streets running with blood? Is it
not more likely that, at a pinch, I might myself run in quite a different
direction? It is one of the questions which will probably remain unanswered
for ever, whether I am a coward or not. But that has nothing really to do
with the question. If I am a coward, I am contemptible: but Louis Philippe
was a coward and contemptible whether I am a coward or not; and my feelings
on the whole of this subject are, at all events, perfectly sincere, and are
the very deepest and most genuine feelings I have.' Fitzjames's only
personal experience of revolutionary proceedings was on the famous 10th of
April, when he was in London, but saw only special constables. The events of
the day confirmed him in the doctrine that every disorganised mob is more
likely to behave in the spirit of the lowest and most contemptible units
than in the spirit of what is highest in them. (pp. 107-9)
He could also... enjoy Dickens's humour as heartily as any one. He was
well up in 'Pickwick'... and he had a special liking for the 'Uncommercial
Traveller'. But when Dickens deserted his proper function Fitzjames was
roused to indignation. The 'little Nell' sentimentalism and the long gallery
of melodramatic deathbeds disgusted him, while the assaults upon the
governing classes generally stirred hs wrath. The satire on individuals may
be all very well in its place, but a man, he said, has no business to set up
as the 'regenerator of society' because he is its most 'distinguished
buffoon'...
The 'comic writers' for him were exponents of the petty and
vulgar ideals of the lower middle classes of the day. The world of Dickens's
novels was a portrait of the class for which Dickens wrote. It was a world
of smug little tradesmen of shallow and half-educated minds, with paltry
ambitions, utter ignorance of history and philosophy, shrinking
instinctively from all strenuous thought and resenting any attack upon the
placid optimism in which it delighted to wrap itself. It had no perception
of the doubts and difficulties which beset loftier minds, or any
consciousness of the great drama of history in which our generation is only
playing its part for the passing hour. Whatever lay beyond its narrow
horizon was ignored, or, if accidentally mentioned, treated with ignorant
contempt. This was the spirit which revealed itself in the paeans raised
over the Exhibition of 1851, accepted by the popular voice of the day as the
inauguration of a millennium of peace and free trade. But all its
manifestations were marked by the same narrowness... Its... religion was
that kind of vapid philanthropic sentiment which calls itself
undenominational; a creed of maudlin benevolence from which all the deeper
and sterner elements of religious belief have been carefully purged away...
When it came face to face with death, and sin, and suffering, it made them
mere occasions for displays of sentimentalism, disgusting because such
trifling with the most awful subjects shows a hopeless shallowness of
nature. Dickens' indulgence in deathbeds meant an effeminate delight in the
'luxury of grief', revolting in proportion to the solemnity of the topic.
This was only another side of the levity with which he treated serious
political and social problems. The attitude of mind represented is that of
the ordinary newspaper correspondent, who imagines that a letter to the
'Times' is the ultimate remedy for all the evils to which flesh is
heir...
Dickens' attacks upon the 'Circumlocution Office' and its like
were not altogether inconsistent with some opinions upon the English system
of government to which, as I shall have to show, Fitzjames himself gave
forcible expression in after years. They started, however, from a very
different point of view... The assault upon the 'Circumlocution Office' was,
I doubt not, especially offensive because 'Barnacle Tite', and the effete
aristocrats who are satirised in 'Little Dorrit', stood for representatives
of Sir James Stephen [Fitzjames' and Leslie Stephen's father] and his best
friends. In fact, I think, Dickens took the view natural to the popular
mind, which always embodies a grievance in a concrete image of a wicked and
contemptible oppressor intending all the evils which result from his office.
A more interesting and appropriate topic for art of a serious kind would be
the problem presented by a body of men of the highest ability and integrity
who are yet doomed to work a cumbrous and inadequate system. But the popular
reformer, to whom everything seems easy and obvious, explains all abuses by
attributing them to the deliberate intention of particular fools and knaves.
This indicates Fitzjames's position at the time. He was fully conscious of
the administrative abuses assailed, and was as ardent on law reform as
became a disciple of Bentham. But he could not accept the support of men who
thought that judicious reform could be suggested by rough caricatures, and
that all difficulties could be appreciated by the first petty tradesman who
encountered an incidental grievance or by [sic] such summary remedies as were
to be suggested off-hand by anonymous correspondents. The levity, the
ignorance, the hasty and superficial irritability of these reformers, their
enormous conceit and imperturbable self-complacency revolted him...
'...Boundless luxury,' he thought, 'and thirst for excitement, have raised a
set of writers who show a strong sympathy for all that is most opposite to the very foundations of English life.'... He will not accept legislators
whose favourite costume is the cap and bells, or admit that men who 'can make
silly women cry can, therefore, dictate principles of law and government.'
The defects of our system are due to profound historical causes. 'Freedom and
law and established rules have their difficulties,' not perceptible to
'feminine, irritable, noisy minds, always clamouring and shrieking for
protection and guidance.' The end to which Dickens would really drive us
would be 'pure despotism. No debates to worry effeminate understandings, no
laws to prevent judges deciding according to their own inclination, no forms
to prevent officials from dealing with their neighbours as so many parcels
of ticketed goods.'
[Footnote: see e.g. Saturday Review, January 3 and July
11, 1857, 'Mr Dickens as a Politician,' and 'The Saturday Review and Light
Literature.'] (pp. 156-160)
He denounces the quality for which 'geniality' had become the accepted nickname. The geniality, whether of Dickens or Kingsley, was often, he thought, disgusting and offensive. It gives a false view of life. 'Enjoyment forms a small and unimportant element in the life of most men.' Life, he thinks, is 'satisfactory' but 'enjoyment casual and transitory.' 'Geniality,' therefore, should be only an occasional element; habitually indulged and artificially introduced, it becomes as nauseous as sweetmeats mixed with bread and cheese... the talk of progress seems to him to express the idea of a moral 'lubberland.' Six thousand years of trial and suffering, according to these prophets, are to result in a 'perpetual succession of comfortable shopkeepers.' The supposition is 'so revolting to the moral sense that it would be difficult to reconcile it with any belief at all in a Divine Providence.'... Our life, he says elsewhere ('Christian Optimism'), is like 'standing on a narrow strip of shore, waiting until the tide which has washed away hundreds of millions of our fellows shall wash us away into a country of which there are no charts and from which there is no return. What little we have reason to believe about that unseen world is that it exists, that it contains extremes of good and evil, awful and mysterious beyond human conception, and that these tremendous possibilities are connected with our conduct here. It is surely wiser and more manly to walk silently by the shore of that silent sea, than to boast with puerile exultation over the little sand castles which we have employed our short leisure in building up. Life can never be a matter of exultation, nor can the progress of arts and sciences ever fill the heart of a man who has a heart to be filled.' The value of all human labours is that of schoolboys' lessons, 'worth nothing at all except as a task and a discipline.' Life and death are greater and older than steam engines and cotton mills. 'Why mankind was created at all, why we continue to exist, what has become of all that vast multitude which has passed, with more or less sin and misery, through this mysterious earth, and what will become of those vaster multitudes which are treading and will tread the same wonderful path? -- these are the great insoluble problems which ought to be seldom mentioned but never forgotten. Strange as it may appear to popular lecturers, they do make it seem rather unimportant whether, on an average, there is a little more or less good nature, a little more or less comfort, and a little more or less knowledge in the world.' Such thoughts were indeed often with him, though seldom uttered. The death of a commonplace barrister about this time makes him remark in a letter that the sudden contact with the end of one's journey is not unwelcome. The thought that the man went straight from the George IV. Hotel to 'a world of ineffable mysteries is one of the strangest that can be conceived.' (pp. 180-1)
... it is only at times [in his journalism] that he cares to lay bare his strongest convictions; and the ordinary reader finds himself in company with a stern, proud man who obviously thinks him foolish but scarcely worth denouncing for his folly. (p. 182)
He apologises to a lady in a letter referring to another controversy upon the same subject [the relations between men and women] in which he had used rather strong language about masculine 'superiority.' 'When a beast is stirred up,' he says, 'he roars rather too loud,' and 'this particular beast loves and honours and worships women more than he can express, and owes most of the happiness of his life to them.' (p. 330)
[On Stephen's later career as a judge] I will only venture to refer to two judgments, which may be read with interest even by the unprofessional, as vigorous pieces of argument and lucid summaries of fact. One is the case (1880) of the 'Attorney-General v. the Edison Telephone Company,' [footnote: LR 6 QBD 244-263] in which the question arose whether a telephonic message was a telegram. If so, the Company were infringing the act which gave to the Post Office the monopoly of transmitting telegrams. It was argued that the telephone transmitted the voice itself, not a mere signal. Fitzjames pointed out that it might be possible to hear both the voice transmitted through the air and the sound produced by the vibrations of the wire. Could the two sounds, separated by an interval, be one sound? The legal point becomes almost metaphysical. On this and other grounds Fitzjames decided that a telephone was a kind of telegraph, and the decision has not been disturbed. The other case was that of the Queen v. Price [footnote: LR 12 QBD 247-256], tried at Cardiff in 1883. William Price, who had called himself a Druid, was an old gentleman of singularly picturesque appearance who had burnt the body of his child in conformity, I presume, with what he took to be the rites of the Druids. He was charged with misdemeanour. Fitzjames gave a careful summary of the law relating to burials which includes some curious history. He concluded that there was no positive law against burning bodies, unless the mode of burning produced a nuisance. The general principle, therefore, applied that nothing should be a crime which was not distinctly forbidden by law. The prisoner was acquitted, and the decision has sanctioned the present practice of cremation. Fitzjames, as I gather from letters, was much interested in the quaint old Druid, and was gratified by his escape from the law. (pp. 449-50)