A GREAT OXFORD TEACHER.* PROFESSOR GREEN is the last teacher
who has deeply in.
fluenced the whole current of opinion at Oxford. To those who had the happiness to enjoy his friendship the immense
effect of his teaching hardly needed explanation ; it lay in the very character of the man. Each of Green's friends might apply to him words in which more than fifty years ago Stanley has described Clough :—" He is the profoundest an I have known, or that Rugby has sent forth." The intellectual and moral depth which these words emphasise was Green's most marked trait. His way of looking at things, whatever its defects, was never superficial ; there never was a thinker who from his youth up was more firmly determined not to be the slave of current phrases or of transitory opinions. In his conversation, no less than in his books, you felt the constant effort to get at the bottom of things, and as a talker he displayed a kind of humour of which there are appa- rently few traces in his writings, but which made his con- versation full of interest and often of charm. Few persons, again, spoke less of their own feelings, yet it was quite impossible for any friend not to recognise the depth of Green's affection. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that on every matter which engaged his attention at all, whether it were a matter of politics, of religion, or of morals, he felt strongly,—which is quite a different thing from feeling vehemently. But nowhere did the profoundness of his nature become more apparent than in regard to the morality of politics. This was the side of political life which mainly interested a man who was far more deeply than most of us interested in public affairs. The international duties of England, the rights of the poor, the immorality of giving any support whatever, either politically or morally, to societies such as the Southern States of the Union, which maintained a system of slavery,—these and the like topics in which you can hardly draw the line between politics and morals, were, as every contemporary of Green's must remember, the subjects which above all others engaged his thoughts. His friends will also remember on these and kindred topics how weighty was his personal influence. If they did not during his lifetime fully realise his power, they must have learnt what it was from the extent of the gap caused by his death. There must be scores of men who, whether his con- temporaries or his pupils, have, during the political crises of recent years, felt the lack of the guidance or support of a friend such as Green, whose judgment was as sound as his sympathies were deep. That as a teacher Green should have deeply influenced his pupils seems then to the friends who knew him almost a matter of course. The strange thing would have been that a man intellectually and morally so powerful, should not have exerted power. A critic's temptation is rather to overestimate than to underrate the personal element in the success of such a teacher. Yet where the result of a teacher's labours is deep and permanent, it is always due to something more than the weight of character. Now that Green's Lectures on the Principles of Political Obli- gation have been most seasonably published in a form fitted to reach a wider public than the Oxford audiences to whom he was personally known, it is worth while considering what were the intellectual elements of his influence, and to examine, as far as is possible in a newspaper article, what, independently of his character, were the causes which enabled him, within a comparatively short period, to impress his doctrine on the best students of his day.
One source of Green's power lay in the fact that he was the convinced expounder of an elaborate system of thought applicable alike to politics, morals, and religion. He was in the strictest sense a systematiser. As you read and re-read the lectures on political obligation, you become conscious of an almost painful effort on the writer's part to bring hie thoughts into harmony with definite and fundamental prin- • Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. By Thomas Hill Green, with Preface by Bernard Bosanquet. London Longmans ad Co. 1595. eiples. To many readers, this constant reference to principles, this attempt—often, it must be added, extraordinarily suc- cessful—to link together in a systematic scheme all the opinions he held and taught, will appear a defect. There is current among many educated men of to-day a sentiment, amounting sometimes to a firm belief, that at the present stage of human knowledge and experience the formation of true and consistent systems of morals or of religion is an im- possibility. The generalisations which satisfied past genera- tions, have been shown to be at any rate but partially true; and though the time may arrive when the extension of human knowledge may permit as to form wide systems resting on a foundation of well-ascertained facts, that time has not yet arrived, and is probably far distant. To persons who feel thus, a systematiser is self-condemned. His doctrine appears incredible, because the formation of any wide philosophic ex- planation of the universe appears itself to be an impossibility ; but whatever may be the weight which ought to be attached to this kind of scepticism—a matter on which it is not the purpose of the present writer to pronounce any opinion what- ever—one fact ought always to be borne in mind. It is the thinker who with fervour and genius expounds a system, and such a thinker alone, who can form the morals of the young and gain the guidance of the world ; and this for the best of all reasons. Young men, perhaps all men, need a scheme of thought as a support which may give them strength for thinking, and still more for carrying out their thoughts into action. It is impossible for any educated man at the present moment to accept the system, say, of Bentham, as anything like a true or complete scheme of philosophy. But let no one for that reason over- look the fact that the utilitarianism of Bentham, though an incomplete and in some sense a crude form of belief, gave to Bentham's disciples a vigour of thought and a force of action which could be derived from nothing but genuine trust in a creed. The legitimate influence of a systematic thinker, who, whatever might be the defects of his doctrine, always laboured to base it upon truth, belonged to Green, and it is an influence of which no one can overrate the power.
The doctrine or system moreover of which Green was the exponent or preacher, appealed to the two strongest and noblest sentiments of young men; the love of freedom and, to use the expression made current by the author of Ecce Homo, the enthusiasm of humanity. The very basis of Green's teaching was an appeal to freedom in the noblest sense which can be given to that term, that is to say, the right of the individual to realise his idea of self-perfection or to work out his own salvation. The end for which the State, as he taught, exists, is to maintain certain con- ditions requisite for the true freedom of man. Law can do no more than compel the performance of outward acts. With morality, which depends on the exercise of will and reason, law has no direct concern. Its only proper object is to maintain a state of things necessary "to the fulfilment of man's vocation as a moral being ; to an effectual self- devotion to the work of developing the perfect character in himself and others." From this point of view there appears, though the appearance is entirely delusive, to be no great difference between Green's teaching and utilitarianism as it was presented to the world by John Mill. What for our present purpose, however, ought to be noticed, is that the stress laid by Green upon moral freedom appealed to exactly the sentiment which was raised to fervent enthusiasm by "Mill On Liberty." Critics who now read Mill's treatise in cold blood can, without the exercise of extraordinary acumen, see the weak sides and the deficiencies of his theory. What is not easy for persons who read the book in 1895 is to realise and understand the enthusiasm with which it was greeted by the youth of 1839. The logical flaws in Mill's reasoning were overlooked, because his work addressed itself to emotions far stronger than logic. "The grand leading principle towards which every argument enfolded in these pages directly converges is the absolute and essential im- portance of human development in its richest diversity." This is the motto taken from Humboldt, which Mill affixes to his essay. It may not accurately designate the line of Mill's argument, but it does with perfect precision describe his moral tone. The right of eac!- individual to shape his own life for himself, to be independent, to be true to himself, the duty of opposing the tyranny of society, and refusing
to bend the knee before the despotism either of aristocratic classes or of numbers, the glory of maintaining one's freedom, and thereby, as Mill taught, attaining to a noble and well. developed life, these, or something like them, were the ideas which one reader after another learned, or supposed himself to learn, from Mill's pages. His writings are now little read; they do not excite among the young men of to- day any vivid emotion. This does not however of itself prove that they did not do their work, and work which has greatly benefited mankind. But, however this may be, what is certain is that from one side of his teaching Green appealed, and most honestly appealed, to that sense of human dignity and of the worth of individual freedom which had been tinged with something of religions fervour under the influence of John Mill.
If Green's doctrine fell in with the tone of opinion or feeling created by Mill, it also harmonised with the sentiment which could not, logically at least, be easily combined with Mill's dogmatic individualism. The plain truth is that Mill's arguments and Mill's emotions never thoroughly coincided. His reasoning pointed towards individualism ; but he ex- hibited more sympathy than did the economists of his day with the aspirations of Socialism. Yet laissez faire, in spite of Mill's wishes, remained the last word of his political philosophy. Let the State and society keep within their proper sphere ; let each man boldly, in every matter which primarily and chiefly concerns himself, follow out the dictates of his own individuality ; and as originality and individuality will at last have a fair opportunity of de- veloping themselves, truth will, as Mill implies, get the better of error, and from the diversities of human nature there will emerge marked individualities and noble characters. That this in the main is the drift of Mill's theories an impartial critic will hardly deny, and it may well be maintained that such doctrine is, with all its short- comings, in the main salutary doctrine, and represents at any rate an important side of truth. One consideration, however, which Mill scarcely noticed, certainly escaped the immediate attention of his younger disciples; laissez faire, however excel- lent a motto, and there are few better, must cease to kindle enthusiasm from the moment that its truth is generally and practically acknowledged. No doubt in Mill's youth, and even later, laissez faire was the war-cry of enthusiasts ; but this was so just because there was a battle to be fought against its opponents. Once let it be granted that each man's duty is to leave his neighbour alone, and though life may become all the more pleasant, and society be, on the whole, all the better constituted, the one thing which will not continue to exist is political enthusiasm. You cannot, from the nature of things, be fervent about doing nothing. This effect of Mill's principles must have become, say, in 1870, apparent to the students over whom Green's philosophy then exerted at Oxford its full influence. His doctrine supplied just what Mill's lacked. Liberty, in his mouth, did not mean the mere leaving people alone, or even the strenuous insisting that one should one's self be left alone ; it meant the earnest struggle to ensure the moral perfection of one's self and others as members of the State. With Mill, the State was at best the protector of the individual's freedom; with Green, the State was the power which existed to secure the moral development of the citizens. "The true ground," he writes, "of objection to paternal government is not that it violates the laissez-faire principle, and conceives that its office is to make people good, to promote morality, but that it rests on a misconception of morality. The real function of government being to maintain conditions of life in which morality shall be possible, and morality consisting in disinterested per- formance of self-imposed duties, paternal government does its best to make it impossible by narrowing the room for the self-imposition of duties and for the play of disinterested motives." These sentences, which touch the very centre of Green's social philosophy, might well serve as a text for a treatise on its merits and defects. They are, however, cited here for another purpose ; they show how his lectures supplied to his pupils, and more especially to those of them who were prepared to become either clergymen of the Church of Eng- land or lay philanthropists, just that element which they missed in Mill. If the office of the State be "to make people good," there is ample scope for the most active zeal on the part of good citizens. Green's teaching, in short, curiously links together the enthusiasm for individual freedom aroused or intensified by Mill, with the enthusiasm for philan- thropic effort which neither the admirer nor the censor of our age can deny to be the most prominent characteristic of the present day.
Neither the fact that Green was the teacher of a system, nor the ooincidence of his doctrine with noble sentiments which arouse the sympathy of youth, would, taken alone, account for the whole of his power. He was a thinker and a metaphysician, and, as was natural to such a one, erred, it may be conceived, by an even excessive love for certain forms and modes of thought ; but, unlike many men of speculative genius, he bad the firmest grip on the realities of life. Of Mill, whose forms of expression are far less abstract than those in which Green delighted, it has been said with some truth that he had not in him enough of human nature. One fancies, without exactly knowing why, that Mill was, as he once described himself, a "solitary thinker," who, with all his infinite benevolence and kindness, knew little of actual human beings. The impression may be a false one ; but it is an impression which Green can never have given to any one who knew him. More than this, it is an impression which no intelligent student can ever derive from his works. The Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation are from this point of view admirably characteristic of their author ; they constitute neither a treatise on ethics nor a treatise on politics; their subject is the connection between politics and morality ; they deal with questions which occupy at this moment, and will more and more occupy, the minds and hearts of living men and women. What is the moral justification for the exercise by society of its coercive powers ? Is it right, and, if so, why is it right, to punish enthusiasts who, if they break the law, bear in the temper of their minds a strong resemblance to martyrs? What is the duty of a philanthropist who, say, in a Slave State, finds the dictates of his conscience opposed to the law of the land ? the existence of Society by moral justification ? These questions, and others like them, are raised and faced by our author. In dealing with them he exhibits the rare sagacity which could twenty years ago see the need of answering inquiries which, though they were in his day hardly uttered even by desperadoes, are now propounded by men of as quiet and respectable lives as are doubt- less all the readers of the Spectator. But he did much more than merely exhibit his prescience of the coming time; he made his audience feel as all readers of Green's books must feel, that he was leading them to deal with realities. To say that he solved all the problems with which he dealt, would be to make a ridiculous claim on his behalf, which no man of half Green's insight or wisdom has ever made for himself. But what may be said is that to the profoundness of his mind was due his power as a teacher. His capacity as a thinker enabled him to elaborate a subtle system of moral and social philosophy, his system appealed to the best and noblest sentiments of his hearers, and the truthfulness of his character enabled him to fix their minds and his on the solution of the deepest ethical and social problems of the time.
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