Studies in Contemporary Biography

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

The love of truth and the sense of duty guided his life as well as his pen. Though always warmly interested in politics, he was of all the persons I have known the least disposed to be warped by partisanship, for he examined each political issue as it arose on its own merits, apart from predilections for either party or for the views of his nearest friends. We used to wonder 335 how such splendid impartiality would have stood a practical test such as that of the House of Commons. His loyalty to civic duty was so strong as on one occasion to bring him, in the middle of his vacation, all the way from Davos, in the easternmost corner of Switzerland, to Cambridge, solely that he might record his vote at a parliamentary election, although the result of the election was already virtually certain.

Sidgwick’s attitude toward the Benthamite system of Utilitarianism illustrates the cautiously discriminative habit of mind I have sought to describe. If he had been required to call himself by any name, he would not have refused that of Utilitarian, just as in mental philosophy he leaned to the type of thought represented by the two Mills rather than to the Kantian idealism of his friend and school contemporary, the Oxford professor T. H. Green. But the system of Utility takes in his hands a form so much more refined and delicate than was given to it by Bentham and James Mill, and is expounded with so many qualifications unknown to them, that it has become a very different thing, and is scarcely, if at all, assailable by the arguments which moralists of the idealistic type have brought against the older doctrine. Something similar may be said of his treatment of bimetallism in his book on political economy. While assenting to some of the general propositions on which the bimetallic 336 theory rests, he points out so many difficulties in the application of that theory to the actual conditions of currency that his assent cannot be cited as a deliverance in favour of trying to turn theory into practice. He told me in 1896 that he held the political and other practical objections to an attempt to establish a bimetallic system to be virtually insuperable. When he treats of free trade, he is no less guarded and discriminating. He points out various circumstances or conditions under which a protective tariff may become, at least for a time, justifiable, but never abandons the free trade principle as being generally true and sound, a principle not to be departed from save for strong reasons of a local or temporary kind. His general economic position is equally removed from the “high and dry” school of Ricardo on the one hand, and from the “Katheder-Sozialisten” and the modern “sentimental” school on the other. In all his books one notes a tendency to discover what can be said for the view which is in popular disfavour, even often for that which he does not himself adopt, and to set forth all the objections to the view which is to receive his ultimate adhesion. There is a danger with such a method of losing breadth and force of effect. One is ready to cry, “Do lapse for a moment into dogmatism.” Yet it ought to be added that Sidgwick’s subtlety is always restrained by practical good sense, as well as by the desire to 337 reconcile opposite views. His arguments, though they often turn on minute distinctions, are not bits of fine-drawn ingenuity, but have weight and substance in them.[52]

One book of his which has not yet (December 1902) been published, but which I have had the privilege of reading in proof, displays his constructive power in another light. It is a course of lectures on the development of political institutions in Europe from early times down to our own. Here, as he is dealing with concrete matter, the treatment is more broad, and the line of exposition and argument more easy to follow, than in the treatises already referred to. It is a masterly piece of work, and reveals a wider range of historical knowledge and a more complete mastery of historical method than had been shown in his earlier books, or indeed than some of his friends had known him to possess.

The tendency to analysis rather than to construction, the abstention from the deliverance of doctrines easy to comprehend and repeat, which belong to his writings on ethics and economics, do not impair the worth of his literary criticisms. In this field his fine perception and discriminative 338 taste had full scope. He was an incessant reader, especially of poetry and novels, with a retentive memory for poetry, as well as a finely modulated and expressive voice in reciting it. His literary judgments had less of a creative quality, if the expression be permissible, than Matthew Arnold’s, but are not otherwise inferior to those of that brilliant though sometimes slightly prejudiced critic. No one of his contemporaries has surpassed Sidgwick in catholicity and reasonableness, in the power of delicate appreciation, or in an exquisite precision of expression. His essay on Arthur Hugh Clough, prefixed to the latest edition of Clough’s collected poems, is a good specimen of this side of his talent. Clough was one of his favourites, and has indeed been called the pet poet of University men. Sidgwick’s literary essays, which appeared occasionally in magazines, were few, but they well deserve to be collected and republished, for this age of ours, though largely occupied in talking about literature, has produced comparatively little criticism of the first order.

Sidgwick did not write swiftly or easily, because he weighed carefully everything he wrote. But his mind was alert and nimble in the highest degree. Thus he was an admirable talker, seeing in a moment the point of an argument, seizing on distinctions which others had failed to perceive, suggesting new aspects from which a question might be regarded, and enlivening every topic 339 by a keen yet sweet and kindly wit. Wit, seldom allowed to have play in his books, was one of the characteristics which made his company charming. Its effect was heightened by a hesitation in his speech which often forced him to pause before the critical word or phrase of the sentence had been reached. When that word or phrase came, it was sure to be the right one. Though fond of arguing, he was so candid and fair, admitting all that there was in his opponent’s case, and obviously trying to see the point from his opponent’s side, that nobody felt annoyed at having come off second best, while everybody who cared for good talk went away feeling not only that he knew more about the matter than he did before, but that he had enjoyed an intellectual pleasure of a rare and high kind. The keenness of his penetration was not formidable, because it was joined to an indulgent judgment: the ceaseless activity of his intellect was softened rather than reduced by the gaiety of his manner. His talk was conversation, not discourse, for though he naturally became the centre of nearly every company in which he found himself, he took no more than his share. It was like the sparkling of a brook whose ripples seem to give out sunshine.

Though Sidgwick’s writings are a mine of careful and suggestive thinking, he was even more remarkable than his books. Though his 340 conversation was delightful, the impression of its fertility and its wit was the least part of the impression which his personality produced. An eminent man is known to the world at large by what he gives them in the way of instruction or of pleasure. A man is prized and remembered by his friends for what he was in the intercourse of life. Few men of our time have influenced so wide or so devoted a circle of friends as did Henry Sidgwick; few could respond to the calls of friendship with a like sympathy or wisdom. His advice was frequently asked in delicate questions of conduct, and he was humorously reminded that, by his own capacity as well as by the title of his chair, he was a professor of casuistry. His stores of knowledge and helpful criticism were always at the service of his pupils or his fellow-workers.

From his earliest college days he had been just, well-balanced, conscientious alike in the pursuit of truth and in the regulation of his own life, appearing to have neither prejudices nor enmities, and when he had to convey censure, choosing the least cutting words in which to convey it. Yet in earlier years there had been in him a touch of austerity, a certain remoteness or air of detachment, which confined to a very few persons the knowledge of his highest qualities. As he grew older his purity lost its coldness, his keenness of discernment mellowed into a sweet and 341 persuasive wisdom. A life excellently conducted, a life which is the expression of fine qualities, and in which the acts done are in harmony with the thoughts and words of the man, is itself a beautiful product, whether of untutored nature or of thought and experience turning every faculty to the best account. In the modern world the two types of excellence which we are chiefly bidden to admire are that of the active philanthropist and that of the saint. The ancient world produced and admired another type, to which some of its noblest characters conformed, and which, in its softer and more benignant aspect, Sidgwick presented. In his indifference to wealth and fame and the other familiar objects of human desire, in the almost ascetic simplicity of his daily life, in his pursuit of none but the purest pleasures, in his habit of subjecting all impulses to the law of reason, the will braced to patience, the soul brought into harmony with the divinely appointed order, he seemed to reproduce one of those philosophers of antiquity who formed a lofty conception of Nature and sought to live in conformity with her precepts. But the gravity of a Stoic was relieved by the humour and vivacity which belonged to his nature, and the severity of a Stoic was softened by the tenderness and sympathy which seemed to grow and expand with every year. In Cambridge, where, though the society is a large one, all the teachers become personally 342 known to one another, and the students have opportunities of familiar intercourse with the teachers, affection as well as admiration gathered round him. His thoughts quickened and his example inspired generation after generation of young men passing through the University out into the life of England, as a light set high upon the bank beams on the waves of a river gliding swiftly to the sea.

It was a life of single-minded devotion to truth and friendship, a life serene and gentle, free alike from vanity and from ambition, bearing without complaint the ill-health which sometimes checked his labours, viewing with calm fortitude those problems of man’s life on which his mind was always fixed, untroubled in the presence of death.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas Quique metus omnes et inexorabile fatum Subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari.

When his friends heard of his departure there rose to mind the words in which the closing scene of the life of Socrates is described by the greatest of his disciples, and we thought that among all those we had known there was none of whom we could more truly say that in him the spirit of philosophy had its perfect work in justice, in goodness, and in wisdom.