Goldwin Smith

GOLDWIN SMITH FRANK H. UNDERHILL IT is now twenty-three years since Goldwin Smith died. During his career} both in England and in Canada, he was engaged in almost continuous controversy ; and during the last thirty-nine years of his life he resided in a city which, while it respected him highly for his attainments, abhorred his political views and never made much attempt to understand him. Though he had been a Regius Professor of History, his own writings were mostly in the nature of journalisln, and they are already largely forgotten by Canadians, who, as inveterate newspaper readers} are a people with short memories. His secretary; Mr. Arnold Haultain, who was his literary executor, has left us t.he only attempt at a full-length portrait that we have; it was painted when Mr. Haultain was smarting a little from a sense of ill-treatment, and it shows much more concentration upon the warts than up'0n the rest of the face. Besides, no man was ever more completely unfitted by temperament for understanding the real elements of Goldwin Smith's greatness than was Mr. Haultain. He had a naive instinctive admiration for everything which his chief detested. He bubbled with enthusiasm for the Chamberlainite imperialism of the late I890'S and early 1900'S, and he believed firmly that Rudyard Kipling was a poet. I t seems therefore worth while, even though the issue between Cobden and Chamberlain is not yet settled in the British Empire, to survey afresh the development of Goldwin Smith's ideas. The more difficult task of estimating his influence in Canada I shall not attempt. I suspect that his real influence is yet . to 2 85 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY come3 and will be .exercised upon those Canadian historians who settle down to study the Canada of 1867 to 1914) who fall under the spell of the Bystander and come to see how shrewd were his comments upon current events, how enlightening his criticism of the nature of Canadian nationality) and how far-reaching his conception of the place of Canada in the English-speaking world. Goldwin Smith was born in 1823, the son of a wellto -do physician in Reading. He received the typical training of the English scholar and gentleman of his day. He was sent to Eton in 1836, went up to Oxford in 1841, and won his B.A. in 1845. A brilliant classical student, he became on graduation a candidate for a fellowship at Queen's. But already he was marked out as a coming man in the little group of reformers in the University, and he was defeated for the fellowship by an obscure rival who was supported by the ecclesiastical party in the college. This was the beginning for him of a struggle in which he was to play a part for the next twenty years in the University. Oxford was then almost entirely under clerical control, and it was only beginning to awake from the long intellectual torpor of the eighteenth century. Academical duty, Goldwin Smith tells us in his Reminiscences ) was lost in the theological fray. The great question in his student days was, of course, the controversy over Newman. Looking back on it in his old age he declared that "the confluence of Newmanism with Romanism seems as natural as the confluence of two drops of water on a window-pane, and perhaps fraught with consequences little more momentous to humanity". But in the 1840'S and 1850's he threw himself vigorously into the efforts of the little group of liberal reformet$ who were fighting against both Newman 286 GOLDWIN SMITH and his opponents, who were striving to emancipate Oxford altogether from its ecclesiastical atmosphere and its clerical control, and as he put it himsel( to restore it to the nation. After "the failure at Queen's he won a fellowship at University College. In 1850 he was appointed assistant-secretary of the Royal Commission of Inquiry which the reformers succeeded in having set up; and he served also as secretary of the later Parliamentary Commission which drafted the legislation of 1854 and so made the first breach in ecclesiastical monopoly...