II.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM WALLACE.1

THE death of Professor Wallace in February made

a great blank among English philosophers. It is one more added to the list of similar losses which the present generation has suffered. W. K. Clifford, T. H. Green, R. L. Nettleship, and now William Wallace. If all these were "happy in the opportunity of their death," inasmuch as they died before any of their natural force was abated, and yet not before they had given evidence of the maturity of their thought, just for that reason we have the more to regret, for we know what we have lost.

As one who had the privilege of reckoning himself among the comparatively small number of Wallace's intimate friends, I may, perhaps, be permitted here to say how great is our personal loss. None who knew him will ever forget the splendid simplicity of his character. It seemed a stroke of irony that he should have been a University professor. No professor was ever less professorial, and it was often difficult to realise in private that he was one of the most learned men of our time. No man—or, at any rate, no University man -ever laid less store by external distinctions. This freedom from conventionality he owed to the large fund of genuine humour which he possessed. He has himself described the kind of humour that goes to the 1 Fortnightly Review, 1897.

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making of a philosopher in the highest sense-" the humour, viz., which strides over the barriers set up by institution and convention between the high and the humble, and sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by a half-grim, half-jubilant Ananke." This kind of humour he himself possessed in no small measure. He was a fellow-countryman of Burns. He valued men and women for what they are. His standard was character. All else, wealth, rank, college honours, were but the guinea stamp-if they were even that the man was the man for a' that. Even distinctions deeper than those he is thinking of in the above passage, such as those of genuine learning and culture, seemed to be little to him. What he has said of Jowett was true of himself in a striking degree: "He bore in upon his pupils and friends the conviction that beyond scholarship and logic there was the fuller truth of life, and the all-embracing duty of doing their best to fulfil the amplest requirements of their place."

But it is as a lecturer and writer on philosophy that he is generally known, and here we all feel that a teacher of peculiarly ripe scholarship, of extraordinary insight, and very marked individuality, has passed away from us.

To those who live in London his figure has not been unfamiliar for some years past, when he has come to lecture at Toynbee Hall or at the London Ethical Society. The tall and somewhat gaunt outlines, the earnest and thought-worn expression, the perfect mastery of material and language which enabled him to speak for usually over an hour without note or reference, and yet without a slip, the graphic and humorous illustrations, must have stamped themselves

on the memory of many. His habit was to choose for his subject some individual thinker (Rousseau, Epicurus, Nietzsche, Wordsworth, were the titles of some of these lectures), or, if he chose a more abstract topic, such as "Duty," he was always careful to attach what he said to some concrete instancethe lecture last referred to taking the unexpected turn of a vivid characterisation of Frederick the Great as a type of devotion to the duties of one's station. Ideas were to Wallace living forces, and unless he could show them in actual operation in concrete instances, he had little hope of making their scope and meaning clear.

In Oxford, Wallace has been known for the last quarter of a century as the brilliant Fellow of Merton, and since 1882 as the successor to T. H. Green in the Whyte Professorship of Moral Philosophy. In several respects he was a striking contrast to his predecessor in the chair. They were both markedly original products of modern Oxford. They were both leading representatives of the Idealistic philosophy commonly thought to have been made in Germany and imported into this country by Coleridge and Carlyle. But here the resemblance ends. One of the most remarkable traits in Green was the union of theory and practice. Besides being University professor, Green took an active part in municipal politics, and, as is well known, was in a sense the inspirer of Arnold Toynbee and the modern University Settlement movement. Wallace took little interest in practical politics. It was even with difficulty that he could be brought to interest himself in University affairs. Perhaps, like Schopenhauer, he considered that life was an awkward business, and came to the conclusion that it was best

But it is more likely strong ethical bent of

✔employed in reflecting upon it. and more in harmony with the his character that he considered thinking a sufficient employment for any single life. His view in this may have been that of Hegel, who when reproached by his landlady for not attending divine service, replied, "Meine liebe Frau, das Denken ist auch Gottesdienst." Another feature in which Wallace contrasted with Green was the comparative absence in his teaching of any attempt to develop an independent system. He liked to "rove" in philosophy and attaching himself to the thought of another to develop his own by way of exposition and criticism. He had said of Schopenhauer that his was a philosophy which sought to drag everything to its centre. The opposite might be said of his own; instead of dragging everything to its centre, it moved from centre to centre, and thus sought to extend its circumference further and further. This was partly the result of the strong literary and historical bent of his mind, which makes us sometimes hesitate whether to rank his work as philosophy or literature. In these excursuses his style often reminds one of Carlyle. It was said of Carlyle that he gives us history by lightning flashes. Wallace also has his lightning, but it is the broad and gentle sort we have in summer, lighting up the distance and shedding a peculiar brilliance upon the grey landscapes of philosophy.

Another point in which Wallace contrasted with Green was his dislike of controversy. While one of the most tolerant of men in everyday life, Green used to exhibit a species of almost puritanic antagonism to certain modes of thought, and spent much of his time both in lecture-room and in his books in following the

errors of the English Sensational and Utilitarian school with remorseless criticism. Wallace, on the other hand, entertained a large toleration for all sorts and conditions of thinkers, and is probably best known for his expositions of doctrines (notably those of Epicurus and Schopenhauer) which stood in direct antagonism to the leading principles of his own philosophy. He complains himself of the injustice we are apt to do to a philosophy by giving it a bad name, on the ground of some isolated feature or doctrine. "It has been the misfortune of philosophers to be known to the philosophical world by some conspicuous red rag of their system which first caught the eye of the bull-like leaders of the human herd." Green, of course, cannot be accused of this kind of injustice; but besides the trenchant and for the most part valid criticism, of which Green was the master, there is need of the more sympathetic method in which Wallace has led the way.

But these differences must not be exaggerated. Wallace was a philosopher, and not a politician. His eyes were turned away from temporary changes to the eternities of thought and being. But he was no dreamer. The reality on which his gaze was anxiously bent was the reality that is in life and things, and not any reality beyond them. Philosophy was not so much a special kind of occupation different from those of ordinary life, but just those ordinary occupations thoroughly understood. In the performance of the more practical part of his own duties as professor, no one ever took more trouble. Though he had much of the poet's insight himself, seeming to go directly to his results, he spared no pains in his efforts to lead others to them by paths which they could follow. He had no sympathy with the exclusiveness of genius or culture.