A Sketch by W.R. Greg

It is perhaps a little hard to undertake to write about the personality of a thinker whose ideas one does not share, and whose reading of the events and tendencies of our time was in most respects directly opposite to one's own. But literature is neutral ground. Character is more than opinion. Here we may forget the loud cries and sounding strokes, the watchwords and the tactics of the tented field, and fraternise with the adversary of the eve and the morrow in friendly curiosity and liberal recognition. It fell to the present writer at one time to have one or two bouts of public controversy with Mr. Greg. In these dialectics Mr. Greg was never vehement and never pressed, but he was inclined to be—or, at least, was felt by an opponent to be—dry, mordant, and almost harsh. These disagreeable prepossessions were instantly dissipated, as so often happens, by personal acquaintance. He had not only the courtesy of the good type of the man of the world, but an air of moral suavity, when one came near enough to him, that was infinitely attractive and engaging. He was urbane, essentially modest, and readily interested in ideas and subjects [214] other than his own. There was in his manner and address something of what the French call liant . When the chances of residence made me his neighbour, an evening in his drawing-room, or half an hour's talk in casual meetings in afternoon walks on Wimbledon Common, was always a particularly agreeable incident. Some men and women have the quality of atmosphere. The egotism of the natural man is surrounded by an elastic medium. Mr. Greg was one of these personalities with an atmosphere elastic, stimulating, elevating, and yet composing. We do wrong to narrow our interests to those only of our contemporaries who figure with great lustre and éclat in the world. Some of the quiet characters away from the centre of great affairs are as well worth our attention as those who in high-heeled cothurnus stalk across the foreground.

Mr. Greg, it is not necessary to say, has a serious reputation in the literature of our time. In politics he was one of the best literary representatives of the fastidious or pedantocratic school of government. In economics he spoke the last word, and fell, sword in hand, in the last trench, of the party of capitalist supremacy and industrial tutelage. In the group of profound speculative questions that have come up for popular discussion since the great yawning rents and fissures have been made in the hypotheses of theology by the hypotheses of science, he set a deep mark on many minds. 'We are in the sick foggy dawn of a new era,' says one distinguished writer of our day, 'and no one saw more clearly than W. R. Greg what [215] the day that would follow was likely to be.' To this I must humbly venture to demur; for there is no true vision of the fortunes of human society without Hope, and without Faith in the beneficent powers and processes of the Unseen Time. That and no other is the mood in which our sight is most likely to pierce the obscuring mists from which the new era begins to emerge. When we have said so much as this, it remains as true as before that Mr. Greg's faculty of disinterested speculation, his feeling for the problems of life, and his distinction of character, all make it worth while to put something about him on record, and to attempt to describe him as he was, apart from the opaque influences of passing controversy and of discussions that are rapidly losing their point.

Mr. Greg was born at Manchester in 1809. The family stock was Irish by residence and settlement, though Scotch in origin. The family name was half jocosely and half seriously believed to be the middle syllable of the famous clan of Macgregor. William Rathbone Greg's grandfather was a man of good position in the neighbourhood of Belfast, who sent two of his sons to push their fortunes in England. The younger of the two was adopted by an uncle, who carried on the business of a merchant at Manchester. He had no children of his own. The boy was sent to Harrow, where Dr. Samuel Parr was then an assistant master. When the post of head master became vacant, Parr, though only five-and-twenty, entered into a very vehement contest for the prize. [216] He failed, and in a fit of spleen set up an establishment of his own at Stanmore. Many persons, as De Quincey tells us, of station and influence both lent him money and gave him a sort of countenance equally useful to his interests by placing their sons under his care. Among those who accompanied him from Harrow was Samuel Greg. The lad was meant by his uncle to be a clergyman, but this project he stoutly resisted. Instead of reading for orders he travelled abroad, acquired foreign languages, and found out something about the commercial affairs of the continent of Europe. His uncle died in 1783, and the nephew took up the business. It was the date of the American Peace. Samuel Greg was carried forward on the tide of prosperity that poured over the country after that great event, and in a moderate time he laid the foundation of a large and solid fortune. The mighty industrial revolution that was begun by the inventions of Arkwright was now in its first stage. Arkwright's earliest patent had been taken out a few years before, and his factory in Derbyshire had by this time proved a practical success. Instead of sharing the brutish animosity of the manufacturers of Lancashire to the new processes that were destined to turn their county into a mine of gold, Greg discerned their immense importance. The vast prospects of manufacturing industry grew upon his imagination. He looked about him in search of water-power in the neighbourhood of Manchester, and at length found what he wanted a dozen miles [217] away at Wilmslow, over the Cheshire border. Here the stream of the Bollen cuts through a flat and uninteresting table-land, and forms a pretty valley of its own, as it winds between banks of red sandstone. When the mill was built, and a house close to it, Quarry Bank became the home of the family, and it was here that W. R. Greg passed his childhood, youth, and early manhood.

His mother was fifth in descent from Philip Henry, one of the two thousand uncompromising divines who were driven out from their benefices on that Black Bartholomew's Day of 1662, which is still commemorated by the severer Nonconformists of the old school. His son was the better known Mathew Henry, whose famous commentary on the Bible has for more than a century and a half been the favourite manual of devotional reading in half the pious households all over England and the United States. Something of the Puritan element was thus brought into the family. In Ireland the Gregs belonged to the Presbyterians of the New Light, and their doctrine allowed of a considerable relaxation in the rigours of older orthodoxy. Many, again, of the Puritans of the North of England had favoured the teachings of Priestley. The result of these two streams of influence was that the Gregs of Manchester joined the Unitarians. In this body W. R. Greg was brought up. His mother was a woman of strongly marked character. She was cultivated, and had some literary capacity of her own; she cared eagerly for the things of the mind, both for [218] herself and her children; and in spite of ill health and abundant cares, she persisted in strenuous effort after a high intellectual and moral standard. A little book of Maxims compiled by her still remains; and she found time to write a couple of volumes of Practical Suggestions towards alleviating the Sufferings of the Sick . One volume is little more than a selection of religious extracts, not likely to be more apt or useful to the sick than to the whole. The other is a discreet and homely little manual of nursing, distinguished from the common run of such books by its delicate consideration and wise counsel for the peculiar mental susceptibilities of the invalid. The collection of Maxims and Observations was designed to be 'an useful gift to her children, gleaned from her own reading and reflection.' Though not intended for publication, they found their way into a few congenial circles, and one at least of those who were educated at Dr. Carpenter's school at Bristol can remember these maxims being read aloud to the boys, and the impression that their wisdom and morality made upon his youthful mind. The literary value of the compilation is modest enough. Along with some of the best of the sayings of Chesterfield, La Rochefoucauld, Addison, and other famous masters of sentences, is much that is nearer to the level of nursery commonplace. But then these commonplaces are new truths to the young, and they are the unadorned, unseen foundations on which character is built.

The home over which this excellent woman presided [219] offered an ideal picture of domestic felicity and worth. The grave simplicity of the household, their intellectual ways, the absence of display and even of knick-knacks, the pale blue walls, the unadorned furniture, the well-filled bookcases, the portrait of George Washington over the chimney-piece, all took people back to a taste that was formed on Mrs. Barbauld and Dr. Channing. Stanley, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, and father of the famous Dean of our own day, was rector of the adjoining parish of Alderley. Catherine Stanley, his wife, has left a charming memorial of the home of the Gregs.

Mrs. Fletcher, again, that beautiful type of feminine character alike as maiden and mother, whose autobiography [220] was given to the world a few years ago, tells how the family at Quarry Bank struck and delighted her. 'We stayed a week with them,' she says, 'and admired the cultivation of mind and refinement of manners which Mrs. Greg preserved in the midst of a money-making and somewhat unpolished community of merchants and manufacturers. Mr. Greg, too, was most gentlemanly and hospitable, and surrounded by eleven clever and well-conducted children. I thought them the happiest family group I had ever seen.' [1]

Samuel Greg was one of thirteen children, and he in his turn became the father of thirteen. W. R. Greg was the youngest of them. The brightness and sweetness of his disposition procured for him even more than the ordinary endearment of such a place in a large family. After the usual amount of schooling, first at home under the auspices of an elder sister, then at Leeds, and finally at Dr. Carpenter's at Bristol, in the winter of 1826-1827 he went to the University of Edinburgh, and remained there until the end of the session of 1828. He was a diligent student, but we may suspect, from the turn of his pursuits on leaving the university, that his mind worked most readily out of the academic groove. After the manner of most young men with an aptitude for literature, he competed for a prize poem in John Wilson's class, but he did not win. When he was in low spirits—a [221] mood so much more common in early manhood than we usually remember afterwards—he drove them away by energetic bursts of work. On one occasion, he says, 'When I was so bad that I thought I should have gone distracted, I shut myself up, and for three days studied all the most abstruse works that I could find on the origin of government and society, such as Godwin, Goguet, Rousseau, et cætera , from seven in the morning till twelve at night, which quite set me up again.' 'Natural history,' at another time he tells his sister, 'is my principal pursuit at present, and from half-past six in the morning to twelve at night I am incessantly at work, with the exception of about two hours for exercise, and two more for meals.'

Sir William Hamilton was the chief intellectual influence in Edinburgh at this time, and Greg followed his lectures with lively interest. He was still more attracted by the controversy that then raged in Edinburgh and elsewhere on the value of Phrenology and Animal Magnetism. Hamilton, as all students of contemporary philosophy are aware, denounced the pretensions of Phrenology with curious vehemence and asperity. It was the only doctrine, his friends said, that he could not even tolerate. On Animal Magnetism he held a very different opinion, and he wrote to Greg encouraging his enthusiasm in that direction. 'There has always,' he said, 'seemed to me a foundation of truth in the science, however overlaid with a superstructure of credulity and enthusiasm.... I foresee as great a clamour in favour of the science as [222] there is at present a contempt and prejudice against it, and both equally absurd.'

It was in this field, and not in literature or philosophy, that Greg's interests were most actively aroused during his university career. When his life as a student came to an end, he returned home with his whole faculties of curiosity and enthusiasm concentrated upon natural history, phrenology, and animal magnetism. 'I have a canine appetite for natural history,' he told his brother in 1828. He describes with all the zeal of a clever youth of nineteen how busily he is employed in macerating skulls, dissecting unsavoury creatures before breakfast, watching the ants reduce a viper to a skeleton for him, and striving with all his might to get a perfect collection of animal and human skulls. All this, however, was rather an accidental outbreak of exuberant intellectual activity than serious and well-directed study. He was full of the vague and morbid aspirations of youth.

We may smile at the youthful rhetoric, as the writer proceeds to describe how shameful it would be to remain inactive in the sight of exertion, to be satisfied with ignorance when in full view of the temple of knowledge, and so forth. But it is the language of a generous ardour for pure aims, and not the commoner ambition for the glittering prizes of life. This disinterested preference remained with Greg from the beginning to the end.

William Greg's truest delight at this time lay in his affectionate and happy intercourse with his brother Samuel. There were three elder brothers. One of them died comparatively young, but Robert and John were eminently successful in the affairs of life; the former of them represented Manchester; they both lived to be octogenarians, and both left behind them the beneficent traces of long years of intelligent and conscientious achievement. In Samuel Greg an interesting, clear, and earnest intelligence was united to the finest natural piety of character. Enough remains to show the impression that Samuel Greg made even on those who were not bound to him by the ties of domestic affection. The posthumous memorials of him disclose a nature moulded [224] of no common clay; and when he was gone, even accomplished men of the world and scholars could not recall without emotion his bright and ardent spirit, his forbearance, his humility. [3] The two brothers, says one who knew them, were 'now both of them fresh from college: their interest was alike keen in a great variety of subjects—poetry, philosophy, science, politics, social questions. About these the two brothers were never tired of talking together. They would pace up and down all the evening under the stars, and late into the night, discussing things in heaven and earth with a keen zest that seemed inexhaustible. Their appetite for knowledge was insatiable, and their outlook over the rich life that was opening before them was full of hope and promise.'

The energetic and high-minded mother of the house died at the end of 1828, and the tenderness and skill of her youngest son in the sickroom surpassed the devotion of women. In the following year he went to manage one of his father's mills at Bury, where he went to reside. The Gregs had always been distinguished for their efforts to humanise the semi-barbarous population that the extraordinary development of the cotton industry was then attracting to Lancashire. At Quarry Bank the sedulous cultivation of their own minds had always been [225] subordinate to the constant and multifarious demands of their duties towards their workpeople. One of the curious features of that not very distant time was the Apprentice House. The employer procured children from the workhouse and undertook the entire charge of them. The Gregs usually had a hundred boys and girls between the ages of ten and twenty-one in their apprentice house, and the care of them was one of the main occupations of the family. They came from the refuse of the towns, yet the harmony of wise and gentle rule for the young, along with dutifully adjusted demand and compliance between the older hands and their employers, ended in the transformation of the thin, starved, half-dazed creatures who entered the gates of the factory into the best type of workpeople to be found in the district. The genial side of the patriarchal system was seen at its best. There is a touch of grace about the picture of the pleasant house with its old beech-trees and its steep grassy lawns sloping to the river, with the rhythmic hum of the mill, the loud factory bell marking the hours like the voice of time itself, the workers pouring through the garden in the summer morning on their way to Wilmslow church, and receiving flowers and friendly salutation from the group at the open door of the great house. It was little wonder that these recollections acquired a fascination for William Greg that never passed away, and gave that characteristic form to his social ideas which they never lost. [226]

At Bury and at Quarry Bank the two brothers were unresting in their efforts both to acquire knowledge for themselves and to communicate it to their neighbours. They delivered courses of lectures, and took boundless trouble to make them interesting and instructive. In these lectures William Greg took what opportunities he could find to enforce moral and religious sentiment. 'I lay it down,' he said, 'as an indubitable fact that religion has double the effect on Saturday that it has on Sunday; and weekday morality, incidentally introduced, meets with far more attention than the tautology of Sabbath subjects, treated in the style in which they generally are by professed teachers.' A more questionable diligence displayed itself in the zealous practice of experiments in animal magnetism and mesmerism. With a faith that might have moved mountains the two brothers laid their hands upon all sorts of sick folk, and they believed themselves to have wrought many cures and wonders. William Greg described animal magnetism as a 'discovery bearing more immediately and extensively on the physical happiness of the world than any which the last three centuries have witnessed.' The cowardice of doctors and others, who believed but were afraid to speak, stirred all the generous fire of youth. 'Here, of itself,' he cries out to his sister (September 4, 1829), 'is a bitter satire upon human nature, and a sufficient answer to all who moralise on the impropriety of flying in the face of received opinions and public [227] prejudice. I assure you it is a knowledge of how often the ridicule and contempt of the world has crushed truth in the embryo or stifled it in the cradle, which makes me so eager to examine and support those opinions which mankind generally condemn as visionary and irrational.' In later times these interests became a bond between W. R. Greg and Miss Martineau. He finally let the subject drop, with the conviction that years of practice had brought it no farther on its way either to scientific rank or to practical fruitfulness. The time would have been better spent in severer studies, though these were not absent. From Green Bank he writes to his sister in 1830:—

We here see that before he was one-and-twenty years old, Greg was possessed by the conception that haunted him to the very end. When the people complain, their complaint savours of rebellion. Those who make themselves the mouthpieces of popular complaint must be wicked incendiaries. The privileged classes must be ordained by Nature to rule over the non-privileged. The few ought to direct and teach, the many to learn. That was Greg's theory of government from first to last. It was derived at this time, I suppose, from Burke, without the powerful correctives and indispensable supplements that are to be found in Burke's earlier writings. Some one said of De Tocqueville, who afterwards became Mr. Greg's friend, and who showed in a milder form the same fear of democracy, 'Il a commencé à penser avant d'avoir rien appris; ce qui fait qu'il a quelquefois pensé creux.' What is to be said for Mr. Greg, now and always, is that he most honourably accepted the obligations of his doctrine, and did his best to discharge his own duties as a member of the directing class.

He did not escape moods of reaction. The truth seems to be, that though his life was always well filled, he inherited rather the easy and buoyant disposition of his father than the energy and strenuousness of his mother, though he too could be energetic and strenuous enough upon occasion. Both William Greg [230] and his favourite brother were of what is called, with doubtful fitness, the feminine temperament. It was much less true of William than of Samuel Greg; but it was in some degree true of him also that, though firm, tenacious, and infinitely patient, 'he rather lacked that harder and tougher fibre, both of mind and frame, which makes the battle of life so easy and so successful to many men.' It may be suspected in both cases that their excessive and prolonged devotion to the practice of mesmerism and animal magnetism had tended to relax rather than to brace the natural fibre. Samuel Greg broke down at a comparatively early age; and though his brother's more vigorous system showed no evil results for many long years to come, there was a severe reaction from the nervous tension of their mesmeric experimentation.

Those who trace despondent speculations of the mind to depressed or morbid conditions of body will find some support for their thesis in Mr. Greg's case. When he was only one-and-twenty he writes to his sister (December 2, 1830):—

From these broodings the young man was rescued by a year of travel. It was one of the elements in the domestic scheme of education that the university should be followed by a year abroad, and in William Greg's case it had been postponed for a season by the exigences of business and the factory at Bury. He went first through France and Switzerland to Italy. At Florence he steeped himself in Italian, and read Beccaria and Machiavelli; but he had no dæmonic passion (like Macaulay's) for literature. 'Italian,' he said, 'is a wonderfully poor literature in everything but poetry, and the poets I am not up to, and I do not think that I shall take the trouble to study them.' When he reached that city which usually excites a traveller as no other city on earth can excite him, dyspepsia, neuralgia, and vapours plunged him into bad spirits, and prevented him from enjoying either [232] Rome or his books. The sights of Rome were very different fifty years ago from those that instruct and fascinate us to-day. Except the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and a few pillars covered thick with the filth of the modern city, the traveller found the ancient Rome an undistinguishable heap of bricks. Still, when we reflect on the profound and undying impression that Rome even then had made on such men as Goethe, or Winckelmann, or Byron, the shortcoming must have been partly in the traveller. In truth, Mr. Greg was not readily stirred either by Goethe's high artistic sense, or by Byron's romantic sense of the vast pathos of Rome.

From Rome Mr. Greg and a companion went to Naples, and from Naples they made their way to Sicily. I have said that Mr. Greg had not Byron's historic sense; still this was the Byronic era, and no one felt its influence more fervently. From youth to the end of his life, through good and evil repute, Mr. Greg maintained Byron's supremacy among poets of the modern time. It was no wonder, then, that he should write home to his friends,—'I am tired of civilised Europe, and I want to see a wild country if I can.' Accordingly at Naples he made up his mind to undertake what would be a very adventurous tour even in our day, travelling through Greece and Asia Minor to Constantinople, and thence northwards through Hungary to Vienna. This wild and hazardous part of his tour gave him a refreshment and pleasure that he had not found in Swiss landscapes or Italian cities, and he enjoyed the excitement of the 'wild countries' as thoroughly as he had expected. On his return to England he published anonymously an account of what he had seen in Greece and Turkey, in a volume which, if occasionally florid and imaginative, is still a lively and copious piece of description. It is even now worth turning to for a picture of the ruin and distraction of Greece after the final expulsion of the Turk. [5]

On his return he found the country in the throes of the great election after the Reform Bill. Perhaps his experiences of the sovereign Demos on that occasion helped to colour his opinions on popular government afterwards.

It is little wonder that in a man of his literary temperament and predispositions a strong reaction followed close behind these energetic performances.

In 1833 Mr. Greg started in business on his own account at Bury. He inherited his father's mechanical taste, and took a lively interest in the improvements that were constantly being made in those years in the wonderful machinery of the cotton manufacture. With his workpeople his relations were the most friendly, and he was as active as he had ever been before in trying to better their condition. A wider field was open for his philanthropic energies. Lancashire was then the scene of diligent social efforts of all kinds. Mr. Greg was an energetic member of the circle at Manchester (Richard Cobden was another) [236] which at this time pushed on educational, sanitary, and political improvements all over that important district. He fully shared the new spirit of independence and self-assertion that began to animate the commercial and manufacturing classes in the north of England at the time of the Reform Bill. It took a still more definite and resolute shape in the great struggle ten years later for the repeal of the Corn Laws. 'It is among these classes,' he said, in a speech in 1841, 'that the onward movements of society have generally had their origin. It is among them that new discoveries in political and moral science have invariably found the readiest acceptance; and the cause of Peace, Civilisation, and sound National Morality has been more indebted to their humble but enterprising labours, than to the measures of the most sagacious statesman, or the teachings of the wisest moralist.'

In 1835 Mr. Greg married the daughter of Dr. Henry, an eminent physician in Manchester, and honourably known to the wider world of science by contributions to the chemistry of gases that were in their day both ingenious and useful. Two years after his marriage he offered himself as a candidate for the parliamentary representation of Lancaster. He was much too scrupulous for that exceedingly disreputable borough, and was beaten by a great majority. In 1841 the health of his wife made it desirable to seek a purer air than that of the factory district, and in the spring of 1842 they settled in a charming spot at [237] the foot of Wansfell—the hill that rises to the southeast above Ambleside, and was sung by Wordsworth in one of his latest sonnets:—

Such a step had long been in his mind. From Naples when on the threshold of active life, he had written (February 6, 1832):—

The nearer prospect of the world of business and actual contact with it made no change in the perpetual refrain. [238]

The move to the Lakes, though it enriched his lite with many delicious hours, and gave him leisure for thought and composition, yet seems to have led directly to commercial difficulties. At first he spent alternate weeks at Bury and at Wansfell, and for a little time he even removed to Macclesfield. But business fell by insensible degrees into the second place. Mr. Greg's temperament, moreover, was too sanguine in practical affairs, as Cobden's was; and we might almost gather from his writings that he had not that faculty of sustained attention to details which is the pith and marrow of success in such a business as his. At last the crash came in 1850. Three years before this the health of his brother Samuel had broken down, and William Greg added the management of his affairs to his own. The strain was too great, and a long struggle ended in defeat. Both mills were closed, and the forty thousand pounds of capital with which Mr. Greg had begun business were almost entirely swept away. At the age of forty-one he was called upon to begin life afresh. The elasticity of his mind proved equal to all the demands upon it, and they were severe. The illness [239] of his wife cast the shadow of a terrible cloud over his house, and for long periods it was deprived of a mother, and he of a companion. Yet amid these sore anxieties and heavy depressions he never lost either his fortitude or, what is much rarer than fortitude, that delicate and watchful consideration for others which is one of the most endearing of human characteristics. When he was twenty years younger, he had written of himself to one of his sisters (January 14, 1830):—

The judgment was not an unjust one, and the apprehension that life would bring too few difficulties was superfluous, as most of us find it to be. When the difficulties came, he confronted them with patient stoicism. His passionate love of natural beauty was solace and nourishment to him during the fifteen years of his sojourn in that taking, happy region of silver lake and green mountain slope. He had many congenial neighbours. Of Wordsworth he saw little. The poet was, in external manner and habit, too much of the peasant for Greg's intellectual fastidiousness. He called on one occasion at Rydal Mount, [240] and Wordsworth, who had been regravelling his little garden-walks, would talk of nothing but gravel, its various qualities, and their respective virtues. The fine and subtle understanding of Hartley Coleridge, his lively fancy, his literature, his easy play of mind, made him a more sympathetic companion for a man of letters than his great neighbour. Of him Mr. Greg saw a good deal until his death in 1849. [6] Southey was still lingering at Greta Hall; but it was death in life. He cherished and fondled the books in his beloved library as if they had been children, and moved mechanically to and fro in that mournful 'dream from which the sufferer can neither wake nor be awakened.' Southey's example might, perhaps, have been a warning to the new-comer how difficult it is to preserve a clear, healthy, and serviceable faculty of thinking about public affairs, without close and constant contact with those who are taking the lead in them. [7] There was a lesson for the Cassandra of a later day in the picture of Southey when Mrs. Fletcher took tea with him in 1833.

The condition, say of Bury, in Lancashire, at that time, contrasted with its condition to-day, is the adequate answer to these dreary vaticinations.

One resident of the Lake District was as energetic and hopeful as Southey was despondent. This was Harriet Martineau, whom Mr. Greg first introduced to the captivating beauty of Westmoreland, and whom he induced in 1850 to settle there. Other friends—the Speddings, the Arnolds at Fox How, the Davys at Ambleside, the Fletchers at Lancrigg—formed a delightful circle, all within tolerably easy reach, and affording a haven of kind and nourishing companionship. But, for a thinker upon the practical aspects of political and social science, it was all too far from—

For during these years Mr. Greg did not handle merely the abstract principles of politics and sociology. [242] A very scanty livelihood would have come by that way. He discussed the men, measures, and events of the day; and most of what strikes one as unsatisfactory in the discussion is probably due to a want of that close observation of facts which was hardly possible to a student on the shores of Windermere. On the other hand, it is still more certain that it was in these meditative scenes that the germs were ripened of those grave, ingenious, and affecting speculations which afterwards came to their full growth in the Enigmas of Life —to most of us by so much the most interesting of all its author's performances. His note-book shows that the thoughts that are suggested in this short but important volume were springing up in his mind for years, and that it touches the problems that were most constantly present to him in his best moments. It was during his residence at Windermere that he worked out and published (1851) his memorable book on the Creed of Christendom . It is enough here to remind ourselves how serious a place is held by that work in the dissolvent literature of the generation. The present writer was at Oxford in the last three years of the decade in which it appeared, and can well recall the share that it had, along with Mansel's Bampton Lectures and other books on both sides, in shaking the fabric of early beliefs in some of the most active minds then in the University. The landmarks have so shifted within the last twenty years that the Creed of Christendom is now comparatively orthodox. [243] But in those days it was a remarkable proof of intellectual courage and independence to venture on introducing to the English public the best results of German theological criticism, with fresh applications from an original mind. Since then the floods have broken loose. One may add that Mr. Greg's speculations show, as Hume and smaller men than Hume had shown before, how easily scepticism in theology allies itself with the fastidious and aristocratic sentiment in politics.

As was to be expected under the circumstances, much of Mr. Greg's time was given to merely fugitive articles on books or groups of passing events. Even the slightest of them, so far as they are known to me, show conscience and work. In 1852, for example, he wrote no less than twelve articles for the four leading quarterlies of that date. They were, with one exception, all on political or economical subjects. 'Highland Destitution,' and 'Irish Emigration,' 'Investments for the Working Classes,' 'The Modern Exodus;'—these were not themes to be dealt with by the facile journalist, standing on one foot. Mr. Greg always showed the highest conception of the functions and the obligations of the writer who addresses the public, in however ephemeral a form, on topics of social importance. No article of his ever showed a trace either of slipshod writing or of make-believe and perfunctory thinking. To compose between four and five hundred pages like these, on a variety of grave subjects, all needing to be carefully [244] prepared and systematically thought out, was no inconsiderable piece of work for a single pen. The strain was severe, for there was insufficient stimulus from outside, and insufficient refreshment within his own home. Long days of study were followed by solitary evening walks on the heights, or lonely sailing on the lake. In time, visits to London became more frequent, and he got closer to the world. Once a year he went to Paris, and he paid more than one visit to De Tocqueville at his home in Normandy. I remember that he told me once how surprised and disappointed he was by the indifference of public men, even the giants like Peel, to anything like general views and abstract principles of politics or society. They listened to such views with reasonable interest, but only as matters lying quite apart from their own business in the world. The statesman who pleased him best, and with whom he found most common ground, was Sir George Cornewall Lewis.

Like most men of letters who happen to be blessed or cursed with a prudential conscience, Mr. Greg was haunted by the uncertainty of his vocation. He dreaded, as he expressed it, 'to depend on so precarious a thing as a brain always in thinking order.' In every other profession there is much that can be done by deputy, or that does itself, or is little more than routine and the mechanical. In letters alone, if the brain be not in working order, all is lost. In 1856 Sir Cornewall Lewis, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, offered Greg a place on the Board of [245] Customs, and he accepted it. Yet, as he said, he did so 'with some loathing and great misgiving.' Five years earlier he would have entered upon it with eagerness, but in five years he was conscious of having made 'sad progress in that philosophy whose root is idleness, indulged freedom, and increasing years.' To James Spedding he wrote on the 24th of May 1856:—

On the whole, when the time came, his new employment brought him moderate interests of its own. What may be called the literary part of the work, such as the drawing up of reports, naturally fell into his hands. The necessity of working with other people, which does not always come easily to men accustomed to the isolation and independence of their own libraries, he found an agreeable novelty. Still he was not sorry when, at the end of 1864, the chance came to him of a move to the Stationery Office. Here he was the head of a department, and not merely a member of a Board, and the regulation of his hours fell more into his own hands.

From the time when he came to London, until his death five and twenty years later (November 1881), his life was for the most part without any incident in which the world can have an interest. He formed many acquaintances according to the cheerful and hospitable fashion of London, and he made a number of warm and attached friends. In 1873 his wife died. In the following year he married a daughter of Mr. James Wilson, well known as the fellow-worker of Cobden and Bright in the agitation against the Corn Laws, and as Finance Minister in India, where he sank under the cares of his office in 1860. Mr. Wilson had been Greg's intimate friend from the days of the League down to the time of his death. When by and by Mr. Greg retired from his post as Controller (1877), he wrote:— [247]

This was his attitude to the end. A heavy shock fell upon him in the death of his brother-in-law, Walter Bagehot (1877), that brilliant original, well known to so many of us, who saw events and books and men with so curious an eye.

There is a pensive grace about one of his last letters to the widow of the favourite brother of earlier days:—

He was not one of the fortunate beings who can draw on a spontaneous and inexhaustible fund of geniality and high spirits. He had a craving both for stimulation and for sympathy. Hence he belonged to those who are always happier in the society of women than of men. In his case this choice was not due, as it so often is, to a love of procuring deference cheaply. It was not deference that he sought, but a sympathy that he could make sure of, and that put him at his ease. Nobody that ever lived was less of a pedant, academic don, or loud Sir Oracle. He was easy to live with, a gay and appreciative companion, and the most amiable of friends, but nothing was further from his thoughts than to pose as guide and philosopher. His conversation was particularly neat and pointed. He had a lucidity of phrase such as is more common in French society than among ourselves. The vice of small talk and [249] the sin of prosing he was equally free from; and if he did not happen to be interested, he had a great gift of silence.

The grace of humility is one of the supreme moral attractions in a man. Its outward signs are not always directly discernible; and it may exist underneath marked intrepidity, confidence in one's own judgment, and even a strenuous push for the honours of the world. But without humility, no veracity. There is a genuine touch of it in a letter which Greg wrote to a friend who had consented to be the guardian of his children:—

This sentiment of the unprofitable servant was deep in his nature—as it may well be in all who are not either blinded by inborn fatuity, or condemned by natural poverty of mind to low and gross ideals.

Though he took great delight in the enchanted land of pure literature, apart from all utility, yet he was of those, the fibres of whose nature makes it impossible for them to find real intellectual interest [250] outside of what is of actual and present concern to their fellows. Composition, again, had to him none of the pain and travail that it brings to most writers. The expression came with the thought. His ideas were never vague, and needed no laborious translation. Along with them came apt words and the finished sentence. Yet his fluency never ran off into the fatal channels of verbosity. Ease, clearness, precision, and a certain smooth and sure-paced consecutiveness, made his written style for all purposes of statement and exposition one of the most telling and effective of his day. This gift of expression helped him always to appear intellectually at his best. It really came from a complete grasp of his own side of the case, and that always produces the best style next after a complete grasp of both sides. Few men go into the troubled region of pamphleteering, article-writing, public controversy, and incessant dialectics, without suffering a deterioration of character in consequence. Mr. Greg must be set down as one of these few. He never fell into the habitual disputant's vice of trying to elude the force of a fair argument; he did not mix up his own personality in the defence of his thesis; differences in argument and opinion produced not only no rancour, but even no soreness.

The epicurean element was undoubtedly strong in him. He liked pleasant gardens; set a high value on leisure and even vacuity; did not disdain novels; and had the sense to prefer good wine to bad. When he travelled in later life he showed none of the over-praised [251] desire to acquire information for information's sake. While his companions were 'getting up' the Pyramids, or antiquities in the Troad, or the great tomb of Alyattis, Mr. Greg refused to take any trouble to form views, or to pretend to find a sure footing among the shifting sands of archæological or pre-historic research. He chose to lie quietly among the ruins, and let the beauty and wonder of the ancient world float silently about him. For this poetic indolence he had a great faculty. To a younger friend whom he suspected of unwholesome excess of strenuousness, he once propounded this test of mental health: 'Could you sit for a whole day on the banks of a stream, doing nothing and thinking of nothing, only throwing stones into the water?'

The ascetic view of things was wholly distasteful to him. He had a simple way of taking what was bright and enjoyable in life, refusing to allow anything but very distinct duty to interfere with the prompt acceptance of the gifts of the gods. Yet, as very seldom happens in natures thus composed, he was before all things unselfish. That is to say, he struck those who knew him best as less of a centre to himself than most other people are. Though thoroughly capable of strong and persistent wishes, and as far as possible from having a character of faint outlines and pale colours, it came to him quite naturally and without an effort to think of those for whom he cared, and of himself not at all. There was something of the child of nature in him. Though nobody [252] liked the fruits of cultivated life better—order, neatness, and grace in all daily things—yet nobody was more ready to make short work of conventionalities that might thrust shadows between him or others and the substance of happiness.

It would be difficult for me here to examine Mr. Greg's writings with perfect freedom and appropriateness. The man rather than the author has prompted this short sketch. His books tell their own story. There is not one of them that does not abound in suggestion both in politics and in subjects where there is more room for free meditation and the subtler qualities of mind than politics can ever afford. Mr. Greg is not one of the thinkers whom we can place in any school, still less in any party. It may be safely said of him that he never took up an idea or an opinion, as most writers even of high repute are not afraid of doing, simply because it was proffered to him, or because it was held by others with whom in a general way he was disposed to agree. He did not even shrink from what looked like self-contradiction, so honest was his feeling for truth, and so little faith had he in the infallibility of sect and the trustworthiness of system. In the Enigmas of Life (1875) there is much that is hard to reconcile with his own fundamental theology, and he was quite aware of it. He was content with the thought that he had found fragments of true ore. Hence the extraordinary difficulty of classifying him. One would be inclined to place him as a Theist, yet can we give any other [253] name but Agnostic to a man who speaks in such terms as these?—

The same impossibility of classification meets us in his politics. He was certainly, in a philosophic sense, a Conservative; he was anti-popular and anti-democratic. Yet he was an ardent champion of the popular and democratic principle of Nationalities; he was all for the Greeks and Bulgarians against the Turks, and all for the Hungarians and Italians against the Austrians. [10] Nor had he any sympathy with the old ordering of society as such. He had no zeal, as far as one can see, for an hereditary peerage and an established church. He threw himself into the memorable battle of the Reform Bill of 1832 with characteristic spirit and energy. His ideal, like that of most literary thinkers on politics, was an aristocracy, not of caste, but of education, virtue, and public spirit. It was the old dream of lofty minds from Plato down to Turgot. Every page of Greg's political writing is coloured by this attractive vision. Though as anxious [254] as any politician of his time for practical improvements, and as liberal in his conception of their scope and possibility, he insisted that they could only be brought about by an aristocracy of intellect and virtue. [11] But then the great controversy turns on the best means of securing sense and probity in a government. The democrat holds that under representative institutions the best security for the interests of the mass of the community is, that the mass shall have a voice in their own affairs, and that in proportion as that security is narrowed and weakened, the interests of the mass will be subordinate to those of the class that has a decisive voice. Mr. Greg had no faith in the good issues of this rough and spontaneous play of social forces. The extension of the suffrage in 1867 seemed to him to be the ruin of representative institutions; and when that was capped by the Ballot in 1872, the cup of his dismay was full. Perhaps, he went on to say, some degree of safety might be found by introducing the Ballot inside the House of Commons. De Tocqueville wrote Mr. Greg a long and interesting letter in 1853, which is well worth reading to-day in connection with scrutin de liste and the Ballot. [12] De Tocqueville was for both. He was, as has been said, 'an aristocrat who accepted his defeat,' and he tried to make the best of democracy. Greg fought against the enemy to the last, and clung [255] to every device for keeping out the deluge. He could not get on to common ground with those who believe that education is no sort of guarantee for political competency; that no class, however wise and good, can be safely trusted with the interests of other classes; and finally, that great social and economic currents cannot be checked or even guided by select political oligarchies, on whatever base any such oligarchy may rest.

Lord Grey's prescription for correcting the practical faults revealed by experience in our present system of representation, consisted of the following ingredients:—the cumulative vote; not fewer than three seats to each constituency; universities and some other constituencies, necessarily consisting of educated men, to have increased representation; a limited number of life members to be introduced into the House of Commons, the vacancies to be filled, when not less than three had occurred, by cumulative vote within the House itself. On all this Mr. Greg wrote to Lord Grey (May 28, 1874): 'I quite agree with you that this impending danger we both foresee might be averted, if our country would listen either to you or to me.'

Tenderness for these truly idle devices for keeping power in the hands of a restricted class was all the less to be expected in Mr. Greg, as he had made a serious study of French politics prior to 1848. Now the Monarchy of July maintained a narrow and exclusive franchise, and its greatest minister was the [256] very type of the class from whom Mr. Greg would have sought the directors of national affairs. If ever there was a statesman who approached the fulfilment of Mr. Greg's conditions, it was Guizot. Guizot had undergone years of patient historic study; nobody of his time had reflected more carefully on the causes and forces of great movements; he had more of what is called the calm philosophic mind, than any one then eminent in literature; he overflowed with what Mr. Greg describes as the highest kind of wisdom; his moral pretensions were austere, lofty, and unbending to a fault. No man of any time would seem to have been better entitled to a place among the Wise and the Good whom nations ought to seek out to rule over them. Yet this great man was one of the very worst statesmen that ever governed France. The severe morality of the student was cast behind him by the minister. He did not even shrink from defending, from considerations of political convenience, the malversations of a colleague. The pattern of wisdom and goodness devised and executed a cynical and vile intrigue, from which Sir Robert Walpole would have shrunk with masculine disgust, and that would have raised scruples in Dubois or Calonne. Finally, this famous professor of political science possessed so little skill in political practice, that a few years of his policy wrecked a constitution and brought a dynasty to the ground.

All these political regrets and doubts, however, cannot lessen or affect our interest in those ingenious, [257] subtle, and delicate speculations which Mr. Greg called Enigmas of Life . Though his Creed of Christendom may have made a more definite and recognisable mark, the later book rapidly fell in with the needs of many minds, stirred much controversy of a useful and harmonious kind, and attracted serious curiosity to a wider variety of problems. It is at this moment in its fifteenth edition. The chapters on Malthus and on the Non-Survival of the Fittest make a very genuine and original contribution to modern thought. But it is the later essays in the little volume that touched most readers, and will for long continue to touch them. They are as far as possible from being vague, or misty, or aimless. Yet they have, what is so curiously rare in English literature, the charm of reverie. As the author said, they 'contain rather suggested thoughts that may fructify in other minds than distinct propositions which it is sought argumentatively to prove.' They have the ever seductive note of meditation and inwardness, which, when it sounds true, as it assuredly did here, moves the spirit like a divine music. There is none of the thunder of Carlyle (which, for that matter, one may easily come in time to find prodigiously useless and unedifying); there is not the piercing concentrated ray of Emerson: but the complaints, the misgivings, the aspirations of our generation find in certain pages of Mr. Greg's book a voice of mingled fervour and recueillement , a union of contemplative reason with spiritual sensibility, which makes them one of the best expressions [258] of one of the highest moods of this bewildered time. They are in the true key for religious or spiritual composition, as Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar is; thought and emotion are fused without the decorations of misplaced rhetoric. That meditations so stamped with sincerity, and so honestly directed to the actual perplexities of thoughtful people, should have met with wide and grateful acceptance, is no more than might have been expected. Least of all can their fine qualities be underrated even by those who, like the present writer, believe that, ponder these great enigmas as we may, we shall never get beyond Goethe's majestic psalm:—

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Characteristics	213
Born at Manchester in 1809	215
Goes to the Edinburgh University in the winter of 1826-1827	220
Sir William Hamilton	221
Mother died, 1828	224
The Apprentice House	225
De Tocqueville	229
Goes abroad	231
*Genius of the Nineteenth Century*	232
Starts in business on his own account at Bury, 1833	235
Marries the daughter of Dr. Henry in 1835	236
Moves to the Lakes	238
Sir George Cornewall Lewis	244
Offered a place on the Board of Customs, 1856	244
Letter to James Spedding, May 24, 1856	245
Marries again in 1874 the daughter of Mr. James Wilson	246
Death of his brother-in-law, Walter Bagehot (1877)	247
Letter to Lady Derby	247
Died November 1881	248
*Enigmas of Life, 1875*	252
Letter to Lord Grey, May 28, 1874	255
Conclusion	256

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3), Essay 7: W.R. Greg: A Sketch

CRITICAL

MISCELLANIES

BY

JOHN MORLEY

VOL. III.

Essay 7: W.R. Greg: A Sketch

London

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1904

W. R. GREG: A SKETCH.

W. R. GREG: A SKETCH.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE