Restrained because for Sidgwick, as for all of them, the purpose of life was to distinguish in conduct as well as in concept the sham from the genuine, appearance from reality. Appearances were to be exposed and these men were splendidly eccentric in Victorian society in not keeping them up. They groaned at the thought of formal receptions and preferred to wear rough clothes. The gentlemanly Arthur Benson, Sidgwick’s nephew, opined that a don should be well dressed in the style-before-last and obeyed this precept by wearing shapeless flannels. Their self-confidence forbade them to ape the manners of their superiors in rank and their clothes, like their pursuits, were a protest against the pastimes of the upper classes, which became increasingly more gaudy and expensive. They neither hunted nor had the money for vast battues of pheasants. Most of them had lost their roots in their soil and, cut off from country sports, had become town-dwellers. But they had not lost touch with Nature, whom they sought mountaineering in the Alps or on forty-mile tramps or with their botanical satchel and geologist’s hammer. Their manners lacked polish. Indeed they despised it as much as they despised the art of pleasing – that imperative accomplishment for those who enter politics or London society. But they did not become parochial or cut themselves off from London. Many of them lived there, and those who did not kept up with public affairs through dining clubs, where they met their cousins and brothers-in-law in the professions, or sometimes by themselves through participating in politics.
Their good manners appeared in their prose. At its worst it was lucid and free from scholarly jargon. They wrote with a sense of form, of drama, of the possibilities of language; and they wrote not for a scholarly clique but for the intelligent public at large whom they addressed confident that they would be understood. Moreover, their scholarly manners had an ease seldom evident in a parochial professoriate. They declined, with a few exceptions, to follow the pulverising style of German professors. Darwin and Maitland showed that it was possible to argue without breaking heads, and even such controversialists as Huxley were untainted by the odium clericum and distinguished between the charlatan and the wrong-headed. They valued independence and recognised it in others. Because they judged people by an exterior standard of moral and intellectual merit, they never became an exclusive clique and welcomed the penniless son of a dissenting minister as a son-in-law if they believed in his integrity and ability. Because their own proud standards were assured they tolerated a wide variety of belief. They might follow the French sociologist Auguste Comte, they were often followers of Mill, they might be agnostics, or they might continue to adhere to the Church of their fathers; but they respected each other’s beliefs, however deeply convinced that the beliefs were wrong. They were agreed on one characteristic doctrine: that the world could be improved by analysing the needs of society and calculating the possible course of its development.
They could be intimidating to meet. Intellectuals often are. Their sense of responsibility to reason was too great for them to appreciate spontaneous behaviour. Spontaneity is attractive, but its lack of rational consideration irritated them. They were bored by the superficiality of drawing-room gossip, and preferred to have their talk out rather than converse. As infants they had learnt by listening to their parents to extend their vocabulary and talk in grammatical sentences – of which the best known (to an enquiry after his toothache) was the four-year-old Macaulay’s ‘Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.’ When older they subconsciously apprehended from hearing discussions between their elders how to reason logically. They lived in houses in which books were part of existence and the intellect was prized. They developed inner resources for entertaining themselves which did not depend on the ordinary social accomplishments. Competitive examinations at the schools and universities sharpened their minds. Children who did not inherit their parents’ intellectual talents suffered unjustly by feeling that they had failed; children were expected to marry according to their parents’ lights. One who was on the point of marrying an actor was safely brought back to the fold to marry a don. The dedicated agnostic G. M. Trevelyan bore his daughter’s marriage to a scholarly clergyman like a man. But there were limits, and he told his son: ‘I want you to know that your mother and I wish you to be free to marry whom you will. But we will take it hard if she is a Roman Catholic.’
They had their limitations, as every close-knit class must have. Their response to art was at best uncertain. Literature, of course, was in their bones. The poetry and prose of Greece and Rome had been their discipline, and that of their own country filled their leisure hours. They were the first to admire Meredith and Browning and to dethrone Byron for Wordsworth. Goethe and the German poets were admired primarily for the moral precepts which their works embodied. French culture was another matter. Lady Strachey, her children gathered about her, might rise from her seat in the railway carriage as the train steamed into the Gare du Nord and bow to the great city, the mistress of European civilisation, but such a gesture was rare. Matthew Arnold went as far as most were prepared to go in admiring French culture and he made strong reservations. The Parisian haute bourgeoisie combined a passion for general ideas with an interest in the arts, the theatre and opera, in a way which was impossible for them. Their experience of the visual arts was meagre. Beautiful objects and elegant rooms were not to them necessities: their comfortable ugly houses in Kensington, Bayswater and north Oxford, rambling, untidy, full of gloryholes and massive furnishings and staffed by two or three despairing servants, were dedicated to utility, not beauty. Some may have bought some good pieces of furniture, a very few of the more prosperous may have invested in Italian primitives, others were affected by the Pre-Raphaelites, but in the main they groped after artistic fashion in a manner inconsistent with their natural self-confidence.
To this there were exceptions. When Philip Webb, Norman Shaw and Bodley began to design houses, not in ponderous stucco or bewildering gothic, but in the potpourri of styles which came to be known as Queen Anne, some members of the intellectual aristocracy responded. Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge and the philosopher T. H. Green at Oxford both commissioned houses designed in the new style of sweetness and light, with bay windows, verandas, inglenooks and crannies crammed with a clutter of objects intended to delight the eye and interest the mind. Girton College was built as a spartan, spare building in the Tudor-gothic style of Waterhouse, everything geared to proving that women could compete on equal terms with men. But Sidgwick got his friend Champneys to design Newnham in the Queen Anne style: the students’ rooms were papered with Morris wallpaper, and his wife, the first Principal, insisted that the corridors should have windows on both sides for cheerfulness. Indeed there were always a handful of them who self-consciously kept up with new styles in the visual arts which, even if the effort was not spontaneous, was a good deal better than sinking into complacent philistinism. Still, many of them inherited the old evangelical distrust of beauty as a temptress, unsusceptible to the kind of analysis of which they were accomplished masters. That distrust inhibited them in their dealings with art. A fashionably dressed wife would not only have been an extravagance but an act of submission to worldly vanity: and the Pre-Raphaelite cloaks and dresses which had been donned as a homage to beauty and a protest against the world of upper-class fashion degenerated in some cases into thick woollen stockings and flannel petticoats, which were proudly worn as a badge of financial and spiritual austerity. By the end of the century there was a slight staidness, a satisfaction, a lack of spontaneity and intellectual adventure, even a touch of philistinism in the face of new forms of art; and some of their descendants, such as Samuel Butler or the Bloomsbury group, satirised these