Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [33]
Balfour’s father, also an M.P., died at thirty-five, when Arthur was seven, leaving Lady Blanche, in whom the Cecil streak of religious feeling was particularly marked, to govern her family of five sons and three daughters. Besides teaching Arthur to admire Jane Austen and her brother’s favorite, The Count of Monte Cristo, she also communicated the Cecil sense of duty. When her son at Cambridge became enamored of philosophy and wished to make over his inheritance to a brother in favor of the studious life, she scolded him severely for poor spirit in wanting to shirk the responsibilities of his position.
At Trinity College, where Balfour read Moral Science, his failure to take a First did not depress his imperturbable good nature or good spirits. He was, wrote Lady Jebb, the doyen of Cambridge society, “a young prince in his way and almost as much spoiled.” Of his four brothers, Frank was a professor of embryology who according to Darwin would have become “the first of English biologists” if he had not been killed climbing in the Swiss Alps at the age of thirty-one; Gerald, superbly handsome, was, according to Lady Jebb, “the most superior man I ever met,” although her niece thought him “the most conceited”; Eustace was merely average and Cecil was the bad apple in the barrel, who died disgraced in Australia. But Arthur, decided Lady Jebb, was “the best in a family all of whom are best,… a man that almost everyone loves.” She thought his nature, however, was “emotionally cold” and that his one essay in love, with May Lyttelton, sister of a Cambridge friend and Gladstone’s niece, who died when she was twenty-five and Balfour twenty-seven, had “exhausted his powers in that direction.” This was the accepted supposition in later years to explain Balfour’s bachelorhood. In fact, it was not so much that he was emotionally cold as that he was warmly attached to his complete freedom to do as he pleased.
Among his friends were two of Trinity’s outstanding scholars: his tutor Henry Sidgwick, later Professor of Moral Philosophy, and the physicist John Strutt, later third Baron Rayleigh, a future Nobel prize winner and Chancellor of the University, each of whom married a sister of Balfour. At that time, when to be an intellectual was to be agnostic, Balfour’s inherited religious sense caused his Cambridge friends to regard him as “a curious relic of an older generation.” His Society friends, on the other hand, when he published his first book, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, in 1879, assumed from the title that Arthur was championing agnosticism, and when his name was mentioned, “they went about looking very solemn.” In fact, by expressing doubt of material reality, the book was paradoxically asserting the right to spiritual faith, a position more explicitly stated in his later book, The Foundations of Belief. At Whittinghame, which was run for him by his maiden sister, Alice, and shared by his married brothers and their numerous children, he read family prayers every Sunday evening. Steeped in the Hebraism