Goldwin Smith

Abstract

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 journalism, 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 the 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 upon 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 1890'S and early 1900'S, and he believed firmly that Rudyard Kipling was a poet.