by Bart Schultz
always voyaging, the friends of Socrates knew what soaring was all about.
As Symonds explained, when recounting some of Tennyson’s views
on how “moral good is the crown of man,” though it would be nothing
“without immortality” – views that were expressed at a dinner party also
including Symonds, his father, and Gladstone:
In all this metaphysical vagueness about matter, morals, the existence of evil, and
the evidences of God there was something almost childish. Such points pass with
most men for settled as insoluble after a time. But Tennyson has a perfect simplicity about him which recognises the real greatness of such questions, and regards
them as always worthy of consideration. He treats them with profound moral
earnestness. His “In Memoriam” and “Two Voices” illustrate this habit. There
is nothing original or startling – on the contrary, a general common-placeness,
about his metaphysics; yet, so far as they go, they express real agitating questions –
express, in a poet’s language, what most men feel and think about.
Ironically, then, Sidgwick’s “club” was a very metaphysically engaged
one. Given this, and his philosophical erudition, the obvious question that
presents itself is why he was not more receptive to the Kantian–Hegelian
answers to the problems that he had so labored over. Kant and Kantism
also spoke to the issue of the dualism of practical reason, and they also
offered up a solution couched in the language of immortality. How could a
mind as philosophically penetrating as Sidgwick’s have pronounced para-
psychology the more promising prospect?
Thus, a more extensive comparison between Sidgwick’s project and
the Idealist one might prove singularly helpful. After all, many of the
questions to be addressed concern the degree to which Sidgwick was, in
his own peculiar fashion, in fact engaged in a project akin to Green’s, or
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for that matter Jowett’s, both of whom he knew and admired as fellow
academic liberals. Next to evolutionism, it was Idealism – whether in
the older, more Platonic form represented by Jowett, or in the newer
Kantian–Hegelian synthesis represented by Green and Bradley – that
exercised Sidgwick as a philosophical and political rival, a more serious
rendering of the perfectionist alternative than Arnold’s. And it did so in
part because the entire Oxford philosophical context reflected in its own
way the Apostolic ethic of personal growth through intimate (if tutorial)
friendships between teachers and students. Indeed, later Victorian Oxford
carried this to a pitch rather beyond tranquil Cambridge, though the
differences between the two institutions are often overstated. Symonds
was an Oxford product, a student of Jowett, Green, Conington, and the
other lights of liberalism. Green, as it happened, would end up marrying
Symonds’s sister, Charlotte.
To be sure, there was much straightforward philosophical debate over
Sidgwick’s work, particularly over the Methods, emanating from Oxford.
The later objections of Moore and Rashdall, mainly directed at Sidgwick’s
defenses of egoism and hedonism, were all anticipated earlier on, partic-
ularly by Green and Bradley (but also by others who resist easy classifica-
tion, notably such Cambridge figures as Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson
and James Ward – two more of Sidgwick’s spiritual offspring). But
Green, more than these others, was Sidgwick’s immediate rival, the friend
and contemporary who also represented the academic liberal agenda and
whose influence, like Jowett’s, extended far beyond the academic setting.
He represented much more, to Sidgwick, than a mere alternative academic
philosophy.
In so many respects, Green is the bridge to Sidgwick’s deeper concerns –
speculative, social, and sexual. An earnest academic liberal with deep
religious convictions worked into an Idealist philosophy bordering on
spiritualism, and an inspiring teacher who, among other things, coached
Symonds in Plato, Green was the one who invariably appeared whenever
Sidgwick looked over his shoulder. They virtually began philosophizing
together; Sidgwick would recall how Green was stimulated to philosophize
by his classics, such that when “he was out walking one day with Green,
they came upon a bridge which his companion attempted to prove was a
different bridge for each of them.” Green too was pained that the
most intelligent critics had rather, it would seem, that the ideas which poetry
applies to life, together with those which form the basis of practical religion,
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should be left to take their chance alongside of seemingly incompatible scientific
beliefs, than that anything calling itself philosophy should seek to systematise
them and to ascertain the regions to which they on the one side, and the truths of
science on the other, are respectively applicable.
Green, as noted in previous chapters, had no use for psychical research
and found in Idealist metaphysics the revivifying intellectual and cultural
force that would fill the void left by disintegrating Christian orthodoxy. Or
rather, he took his philosophical mission to be one of supporting Christian
orthodoxy, albeit of the Mauricean, Broad Church variety, mixed with his
own Evangelical Puritanism, an aspect of his familial background for which
he always evinced some sympathy. As he put it to a former pupil in ,
he could find no greater satisfaction “than to think that I at all helped to lay
the intellectual platform for your religious life.” If he were “only a breeder
of heretics,” he would suspect his philosophy, which, if it is “sound,” ought
“to supply intellectual formulae for the religious life whether lived by an
‘orthodox’ clergyman or (let us say) a follower of Mazzini.” Green, that
is, “never dreamt of philosophy doing instead of religion,” and his own
interest in it “is wholly religious” in “the sense that it is to me . . . the reasoned intellectual expression of the effort to get to God.”
Thus, Green’s attitude may well seem quite different from Sidgwick’s.
As Schneewind has it, for Sidgwick, “philosophy is the rational search for
truth, and if Christianity turns out to possess it, so much the better for
Christianity. For Green, it seems, philosophy has the task of showing that
Christianity does possess the truth, and if the philosopher fails to come to
that result, then it follows that he has more work to do.” But this is not
quite right. Plainly, Sidgwick worried considerably about his philosophical
results being so hard on the human heart, and kept searchin
g.
It is scarcely odd that Sidgwick and Green should have shared much by
way of the religious attitude. Green was also a Rugby product – indeed, one
of Sidgwick’s old Rugby friends. During the sixties, both were hammering
out their distinctive philosophical worldviews and often doing so by direct
exchange – for instance, while on a walking tour of the continent in .
Sidgwick would later confess, in his “Reminiscences of T. H. Green,”
that he was at this point “in a crude and confident stage of utilitarianism”
and consequently “quite unappreciative” of Green’s line. And plainly,
he did not appreciate his “sniffing” at psychical research. Green was a
strange figure, the model for a character named Professor Grey in Mary
(Mrs. Humphrey) Ward’s Robert Elsmere, a novel about an earnest young
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man who loses his orthodox faith but finds a new one in working for the
underprivileged, inspired in part by professor Grey. By all accounts, Green
was, if not as austere as some claimed, exceedingly earnest and lost in his
own soul searching. As Melvin Richter has judiciously described him:
There was general agreement about the quality of Green’s mind. ‘You never talked
to him without carrying away something to remember and ponder over.’ Yet it
seemed highly unlikely that he would accommodate himself to university life any
better than he had done to Rugby. The classical philology that bulked so large in
the Greats curriculum bored him. In his first trial by examination, he failed to
distinguish himself. Absorbed in his efforts to articulate views unusually personal
and deeply felt, he was notorious for puzzling on Monday over essays that had
been due the previous Friday. None of this augured well for a successful university
career. And yet the class of degree achieved by a poor clergyman’s son might fix
the course of his future life. With First Class Honours doors would be opened
to him, beyond which he otherwise could not hope to penetrate. Left to himself,
Green’s character might have manifested itself in a mediocre record which would
have condemned him to eking out an existence as a schoolmaster, or to burying
himself in an obscure government post. But Green fortunately profited from the
ministrations of his tutor, that Pascal of the undergraduate heart.
Jowett saw something worth stimulating in this gauche freshman.
Just what Jowett saw in his earnest young Anglican Evangelical is, as
Richter explains, most illuminating: “As he said many years later, the only
person in his experience who at all resembled this singular young man was
another Rugbeian who had entered Balliol twenty years before, Arthur
Hugh Clough.” If Clough was the “more indolently dreamy” of the two,
and Green the more abstract, Jowett was nonetheless a shrewd judge of his
students. As Richter puts it, referring to Clough and Green: “Reserved
and self-contained, they moved in a detached sphere of almost inhuman
high principle. Society and politics were to them intimate realities, the
great problems of which it had fallen to them personally to resolve.” Had
Sidgwick taken up the Balliol option, following Rugby, there might have
been another young Cloughian in Jowett’s care and keeping.
But as he would shortly discover with yet another dreamy student –
namely, Symonds – Jowett found that Green needed more than a little
prodding.
Jowett decided that it was only through his Puritan sense of duty that Green
could be made to work. And so, particularly after Green disappointed his friends
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and family by taking a Second in Moderations, his tutor began to prod. Green’s
essays, he remarked, were much too dry and dull, a fault which might be repaired
by reading poetry. But Jowett’s major stroke was yet to come. One day he said
casually: ‘If you do not get your First, Green, I shall have a good deal to answer for.’ This remark Green later recalled as the turning point of his life. Knowing
how much the prestige of the college meant to his tutor, Green’s sense of duty
was called into play: the gospel of work taught by Carlyle, Dr. Arnold, and Jowett
had now to be applied to himself and his conditions. And so he plunged into the
task ahead.
With the support and stimulus of Jowett, and the help of C. S. Parker
and John Conington – the University Professor of Latin and another old
(though strikingly radical) Rugbeian – Green was stirred up, transformed,
and in due course, after many walks and many talks and many reading par-
ties, became a successful First, the first lay Fellow of Balliol, and in due
course Professor. He became a fixture of the “Old Mortality Society,” the
somewhat less secretive Oxford equivalent of the Apostles that included
such notable figures as Symonds, Bryce, Dicey, Walter Pater, and Algernon
Swinburne. All in all, he represented the virtues of that very personal and
intimate form of education that had come to mark Oxford, an outgrowth,
in part, of the Tractarian movement’s transformation of the tutorial into a
transfiguring personal experience, a spiritual awakening. It was common
Oxbridge ground that, in the words of Noel Annan, “all fellows, certainly
all directors of studies and tutors, should try, as far as they were able, to
become the guide, philosopher and friend of those they taught.” Edu-
cation was a very important and a very personal business – indeed, not a
business at all, but a special form of intimacy. The Platonic revival came
to fruition in Jowett’s Oxford.
But Green imbibed this in a fashion that mixed Platonic elitism with
a good deal of Puritan moral democracy. W. L. Newman gave a famous,
and by all accounts accurate, description of him:
His habitual dress of black and grey suited him well and was true to his character.
He was drawn to plain people, to people of the middle and lower class rather than
to the upper, to the puritans of the past and the nonconformists of the present, to
Germans, to all that is sober-suited and steady-going. One judged from his feeling
for homely, unadorned and solid worth what he must feel for things showy, brilliant
and hollow.
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Of course, Sidgwick was also in love with things German, and in the
sixties he vied with Green for superior knowledge of German biblical
criticism and philosophy. In ,
he had explained to Dakyns: “I should
like to get at this Oxford Hegelianism and see what it means. I used to
talk with Green, but I did not draw much.” (M ) Again, Sidgwick
was always perfectly ready to admit the importance of Kant and Kantism.
Indeed, he began his lectures on the metaphysics of Kant by observing
that “it is partly at least to Kant that we trace the origin of the systems
of metaphysical thought which have most vogue at the present day – the
Agnosticism of Spencer (though here the influence is indirect, through
Hamilton and Mansel), and more directly the Idealism or Spiritualism of
which I take Green as a representative” (LPK ). Thus, he found the
root of both Spencer’s evolutionism and Green’s Idealism in the works of
Kant, which suggests how he attached much more importance to the latter
than the arguments of the Methods reveal.
Now, as many have observed, when Green translated his general predis-
positions into philosophical Idealism, it was in a somewhat more demo-
cratic and reforming fashion than that of many later Idealists, such as
his student F. H. Bradley. Little wonder that, whereas Sidgwick’s ex-
changes with Bradley were marked by an unusual asperity on both sides, his
exchanges with Green were far more congenial.
Green, of course, in good Hegelian fashion, did not fear the growth of
the state in quite the way that most of the old Benthamites or Millians did,
but rather regarded it as potentially a positive force for spiritual develop-
ment, for positive freedom, especially when it came to education. The
disciples of Jowett may have been concerned with the practical business
of running the empire on Platonic grounds, but the disciples of Green –
notably Arnold Toynbee – also went on to produce the settlement move-
ment and nurse the work of Mary Ward and Jane Addams, who went far
toward implementing the Mauricean social gospel of bringing the classes
together and opening up educational and cultural opportunities to all. The
library fireplace at Mary Ward House (formerly the Passmore Edwards
Settlement, an early settlement that complemented Toynbee Hall) bore
the initials T. H. G., in honor of its philosophical inspirer, after whom the
library was named. Ironically, in the late s it would also house the
