Part 3

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):--

I am again attacked with one of those fits of melancholy indifference to everything, and total incapacity for exertion, to which I am so often subject, and which are indeed the chronic malady of my existence. They sometimes last for many weeks, and during their continuance I do not believe, among those whose external circumstances are comfortable, there exists any one more thoroughly miserable.... For nearly four years these fits of melancholy and depression have been my periodical torment, and as yet I have found no remedy against them, except strong stimulants or the society of intimate friends, and even these are only temporary, and the latter seldom within my reach, and the former I abstain from partly on principle, but more from a fear of consequences. Every one has a thorn in the flesh, and this is mine; but I am egotistical, if not selfish, in inflicting it upon others. I begin to think I have mistaken my way both to my own happiness and the affections of others. My strongest passion has always been the desire to be loved--as the French call it, 'le besoin d'etre aime.' It is the great wish, want, desire, necessity, desideratum of my life, the source through which I expect happiness to flow to me, the ultimate aim and object which has led me on in all the little I have done, and the much that I have tried to do.

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 daemonic 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 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.

I pass my time here [he says] with extreme regularity and quietness, not knowing, even to speak to, a single individual in Rome; and the direction to my valet when I start on my perambulations, 'al Campidoglio,' 'al Foro,' forms the largest part of my daily utterances.... In a fit of desperation I took to writing a kind of political philosophy, in default of my poetical aim, which is quite gone from me. It is a setting forth of the peculiar political and religious features of the age, wherein it differs from all preceding ones, and is entitled the Genius of the Nineteenth Century. I do not know if I shall ever finish it; but if I could write it as I have imagined it, it will at least be entitled to come under Mr. Godwin's definition of eloquence. That gentleman being in a company of literati, who were comparing their notions of what eloquence could be defined to consist in, when his opinion was asked replied, 'Eloquence is truth spoken with fervour.' I am going on with it, though slowly, and fill up the rest of my leisure time with Dante and Machiavelli (with which last author I am delighted) in the morning, and with Boccaccio and our English poets in the evening. Sight-seeing does not occupy much of my time.

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.

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.

December 5, 1832.--On Tuesday we nominated--there was a fearful crowd of 10,000 ruffians, Grundy's friends from the country. A tremendous uproar. I seconded Mr. Walker's nomination, but was received with yells and groans, owing chiefly to the prosecution which I have instituted against the other candidate and four of his supporters for intimidation of voters. The ruffians roared at me like so many bulls of Bashan, and shook their fists at me, whereupon I bowed profoundly; and, finding it impossible to obtain a hearing, I turned to the opposite candidate and his immediate supporters on the hustings and spoke to them. When we concluded, the uproar was fearful. I was warned to escape as I could, which I did, amid groans and hisses, but no violence. The next morning we started polling. I had the honour of giving the first vote, and at four o'clock the poll was decided in our favour--Walker, 301; Grundy, 151. The next day I returned from Manchester, and had not been in the mill two hours before I was summoned to assist in quelling a riot. I rode down immediately with three other gentlemen and a magistrate to the scene of faction. We found plenty of broken windows and heads, but no one killed. Here were two parties of such bludgeon men as I never before witnessed, evidently bent on mischief. We read the Riot Act--sent for the military and the Haslams! I rode among the ruffians. They were in a state of extreme exasperation, especially against me, but listened to my exhortations, and after shaking their bludgeons at me, came at last to shake hands. About dusk I received several hints to take care of myself, so rode back to Green Bank, and lay with my blunderbuss and sword, ready to give entertainment to any visitor.

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

Do you know [he writes, December 29], I am sick of public life. I mean sicker than ever. The reward, or rather success, is so very inadequate to the sacrifice; and the exertion, and the injury to one's character, mentally, morally, and religiously, is so great, and one's real happiness suffers yet more. My love for retirement and the country, scientific studies, and calm, quiet, and refreshing society, such as the country only can afford, which has always been a sort of passion, is now urging me more strongly and imperiously than ever, to weigh conflicting interests and tastes, and to hold fast that which is good. And is it not far better to retire in the full vigour of life, when the energy of application is still unimpaired, and can be usefully directed?

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) 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 the foot of Wansfell--the hill that rises to the southeast above Ambleside, and was sung by Wordsworth in one of his latest sonnets:--

Wansfell! this household has a favoured lot, Living with liberty on thee to gaze, To watch while morn first crowns thee with her rays: Or when along thy breast securely float Evening's angelic clouds.... When we are gone From every object dear to mortal sight, As soon we shall be, may these words attest How oft, to elevate our spirits, shone Thy visionary majesties of light, How in thy pensive glooms our hearts found rest.

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

I am becoming more and more anxious to realise a competence speedily, every time I look to the future, and reflect on the true objects of life, and the likeliest means of procuring them. I am desirous to be able to realise the projects I have formed before the age of feeling and acting be past, and before the energy of youth has been evaporated by long repression. Life and talents and desires were not given me to be wasted in a situation where the power of doing good is at best very limited, and where that of acquiring the higher kinds of knowledge and enjoying the best gifts of life is still more confined.

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

I wonder [he writes, May 15, 1833] how long philosophy or indecision will induce to continue the dog's life I am leading here. I never open a book, but shun them as if they were poison, rise at half-past five o'clock, go to bed at ten, and toil like a galley slave all day, willy, nilly. Man labours for the meat which perisheth, and the food which satisfieth not.

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 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):--

Nature never cut me out for a happy man, for my mind is so constituted as to create difficulties and sorrows where I do not find them, and to strive with and overcome them when I meet them. I am never so happy as in times of difficulty and danger and excitement, and I am afraid my line of life will furnish me with but few of these times, so that I shall remain in the ground like the seed of a strong plant, which has never found the soil or the atmosphere necessary for its germination.

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, 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. 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. 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.

I never saw any one [she said] whose mind was in so morbid a state as that of this excellent poet and amiable man on the subject of the present political aspect of affairs in England. He is utterly desponding. He believes the downfall of the Church and the subversion of all law and government is at hand; for in spite of all our endeavours to steer clear of politics, he slid unconsciously into the subject, and proclaimed his belief that the ruin of all that was sacred and venerable was impending.

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--

Labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar.

For during these years Mr. Greg did not handle merely the abstract principles of politics and sociology. 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. 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 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 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:--

My position every one but myself seems to think most enviable. I contrast Lower Thames Street with The Craig, and my heart sinks into my shoes. The attendance is onerous; the actual work is not. It seems to be a place wherein a man may grow old comfortably. There is a good salary (nominally L1200), and a liberal retiring allowance when you are worked out. A board every day--except for two months' holiday, varied only by occasional tours of inspection--sounds horrible slavery to a man accustomed to wander at his own free will; and finally, at my time of my life, I have an indefinable dislike to anything involving a total change of life and habits. En revanche, I have a provision for old age and for my family, and shall be almost as glad to be spared the necessity of writing for bread--for butter at least--as sorry to be tied out from scribbling when and where the spirit moves me.

My last quarter's labours are an article on America in the National, and on Montalembert in the Edinburgh, and one on Macaulay in the North Briton, of which I am not proud. Froude's History I have not yet seen. I hope now, as I write less, I shall have more time for reading. It seems to be somewhat paradoxical. By the way, is not Carlyle sadly gone off? I met him the other day, and he did nothing but blaspheme, and pour out a torrent of bad language against blackguards, fools, and devils that was appalling to listen to.