THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL
673
sense of honor," "come what might," or "whatever reasons"-answers
that are more in the nature of an admission that there are no answers
-surely the philosopher, Stephen implies, cannot expect better ones.
From the sportsman's maxim that life is nothing but a game,
it
is
only one short step to the assertion that the game is more than life.
Life is sometimes farcical; the game is always serious. In life there
are extenuating circumstances and rules have exceptions; the game
must be played out strictly according to the laws. In life, responsibil–
ities may be shirked and consequences evaded; the game takes its
toll inexorably.
If
the game, an enterprise apparently so grave and
momentous, has no meaning, then life itself need have no meaning.
Thus the philosopher yielded to the sportsman.
As the philosopher in Stephen yielded, so did the intellectual.
At Cambridge, he was known as a "college rough." In his early
memoirs, he spoke of a don (identified by his friends as himself) who
lectured on the Greek Testament in this manly fashion: "Easy all!
Hard word there! Smith, do you know what it means? No? No more
don't I. Paddle on all!" He was not much worse than most profes–
sors who were too busy with the administration of the college to
study or even tutor seriously, and whose students had to depend
upon crammers to pass their examinations. He himself, like most
of his contemporaries, was largely self-educated. To an American, for
whom self-education implies that painful process by which an un–
schooled person acquires a smattering of knowledge, it may seem odd
to speak of urbane, cultivated, professional intellectuals, men of good
breeding, graduates of the best schools, as self-educated. Yet this was
so. Stephen had to learn French and German on his own; he first
read modern philosophy-Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant,
Comte, Hamilton and Mill- while a don, between bouts of rowing
and tutoring; he became acquainted with modern literature only af–
ter he was installed as a literary critic in London. Even the univer–
sity man's knowledge of the ancients was more a matter of vocabulary
and prosody than ideas and philosophy. Stephen tells the story of
his Cambridge friend and colleague, Henry Fawcett, who announced
after dinner one evening: "Now I am interested in Socrates, and
want to know more about him, so I am thinking of giving a lecture
upon him." "But Fawcett," Stephen mildly remonstrated, "have you
read his works?" "No, but I mean to."
