Born at Manchester, from manager of mills at Bury became a Commissioner of Customs in 1856, and was Comptroller of H. M. Stationery Office in 1864–77. In his “Rocks Ahead” (1874), he took a highly pessimistic view of the future of England, foreboding the political supremacy of the lower classes, industrial decline, and the divorce of intelligence from religion. His other works include “The Creed of Christendom” (1851), “Essays on Political and Social Science” (1854), “Literary and Social Judgments” (1869), “Political Problems” (1870), “Enigmas of Life” (1872; 18th ed. 1891, with a memoir by widow), “Mistaken Aims” (1876), and “Miscellaneous Essays” (1884).

Personal

  It fell to the present writer at one time to have one or two bouts of public controversy with Mr. Greg. In these dialects Mr. Greg was never vehement and never pressed, but he was inclined to be—or, at least, was felt by an opponent to be—dry, mordant, and almost harsh. The disagreeable prepossessions were instantly dissipated, as so often happens, by personal acquaintance. He had not only the courtesy of the good type of the man of the world, but an air of moral suavity, when one came near enough to him, that was infinitely attractive and engaging. He was urbane, essentially modest, and readily interested in ideas and subjects other than his own. There was in his manner and address something of what the French call liant. When the chances of residence made me his neighbour, an evening in his drawing-room, or half an hour’s talk in casual meetings in afternoon walks on Wimbledon Common was always a particularly agreeable incident. Some men and women have the quality of atmosphere. The egotism of the natural man is surrounded by an elastic medium. Mr. Greg was one of these personalities with an atmosphere, elastic, stimulating, elevating, and yet composing.

General

  I do respect Greg the manufacturer, though not the reviewer.

  The essays of Mr. W. R. Greg are, in our opinion, pre-eminently distinguished by their great good sense; they are replete with judicious observations—observations which, if they may not be characterized as profound, are certainly not such as lie on the surface, within the reach of every hand; the cultivated reader cannot rise from the perusal of his writings without the consciousness of having derived profit and instruction from them…. We commend them most cordially to every one who is in search of clear and sound guidance, or who can appreciate manly unaffected good sense, and distinct and impartial statements, for in reading the essays of Mr. Greg, we feel we have left the narrow boundaries of party—we are neither Whig nor Tory; we are conservative in the most philosophical sense of the term, and we are liberal and progressive in the safest of all methods, being invited to advance only where there is light upon our path, and solid ground beneath our feet.

  Though unorthodox in opinion, he is sound at heart, religious in feeling, and a sincere well-wisher of humanity. He is most popular on directly practical questions, with a philanthropic turn.

  What gave Mr. Greg his peculiar position among journalists, was the singular lucidity and incisiveness with which he expressed and expounded that aspect of the difficulties and dangers with which he dealt, appealing most strongly to the imagination of practical men, and especially of practical men belonging to the upper section of the middle class. For the miseries of the working class Mr. Greg’s pity was profound and almost passionate, but his moral and intellectual sympathy was not with them, and was often inaccessible from their points of view. Again, as to style, Mr. Greg was never in any depreciatory sense rhetorical; for verbiage of any kind he had no taste. But he was a keen logician, and took what I may call almost a rhetorical pleasure in plunging cold steel into the heart of what he regarded as a mischievious fallacy. And this he did after a fashion which especially went home to practical men. His intellectual logic was keen enough, but still keener was the logic which the late Emperor of the French called “the logic of facts.” Mr. Greg loved to look facts clearly in the face, to realise as vividly as he could exactly what they meant, before he even cared to consider whether they were capable of any agreeable or even tolerable interpretation.

  It is no small tribute that we pay to an habitual controversialist when we assert, as we do with great confidence, that the result of his labors has been to induce thousands of his countrymen to examine the burning questions of religion with the calmness, the fairness, and the good sense which most persons find it far easier to bring to the consideration of political or social problems than to the solution of theological perplexities.

  Though he took great delight in the enchanted land of pure literature, apart from all utility, yet he was of those, the fibres of whose nature makes it impossible for them to find real intellectual interest outside of what is of actual and present concern to their fellows. Composition, again, had to him none of the pain and travail that it brings to most writers. The expression came with the thought. His ideas were never vague, and needed no laborious translation. Along with them came apt words and the finished sentence. Yet his fluency never ran off into the fatal channels of verbosity. Ease, clearness, precision, and a certain smooth and sure-paced consecutiveness, made his written style for all purposes of statement and exposition one of the most telling and effective of his day. This gift of expression helped him always to appear intellectually at his best. It really came from a complete grasp of his own side of the case, and that always produces the best style next after a complete grasp of both sides.

  If an author’s special faculties cut their image most sharply on his political estimates and social speculations, his nature as a whole finds its largest expression in his religion. Even if it be merely an undisturbed tradition, the fact that this suffices for him is far from insignificant. And if it be self-formed, whether spontaneously given or deliberately thought out, it not only carries in it all the traits of the personality, but presents them in magnified scale and true proportion. Hence Mr. Greg’s “Creed of Christendom,” quite apart from its merits as a theological treatise, possesses a high biographical interest; for it is a transparently sincere book, and lays bare the interior dealings of an eminently veracious, exact, and reverent mind with the supreme problems of human belief. In order to give it its true value as a chapter in history, it should be taken into view not as an isolated product, but in connection with the earlier state of mind from which it recedes, and the latter which speaks in the Preface to the third edition (1873). This Preface—perhaps the finest of his essays—contains his last word of doubt and faith, and probably marks the resting-place of his mind in its best vigour; for, though we have since heard from him both brighter and sadder things, they seemed to be, the one the sunshine of a passing mood, the other the expression of a growing languor and weariness of life.

  In Greg ardent philanthropy and disinterested love of truth were curiously allied to an almost epicurean fastidiousness, which made him unduly distrustful of the popular element in politics. He would have wished to see public affairs controlled by an enlightened oligarchy, and did not perceive that such an oligarchy was incompatible with the principles which he had himself admitted. Little practical aid towards legislation, therefore, is to be obtained from his writings. It was Greg’s especial function to discourage unreasonable expectations from political or even social reforms, to impress his readers with the infinite complexity of modern problems and in general to caution democracy against the abuse of its power. His apprehensions may sometimes appear visionary, and sometimes exaggerated, but are in general the previsions of a far-seeing man, acute in observing the tendencies of the age, though perhaps too ready to identify tendencies with accomplished facts. His style is clear and cogent, but his persuasiveness and impressiveness rather arise from moral qualities, his absolute disinterestedness, and the absence of class feeling, even when he may seem to be advocating the cause of a class.

  He was one of the chief assailants of the Christian faith in his day, and, in a work entitled the “Creed of Christendom,” did what was in him to make an end of that persistent doctrine which survives so many attacks. This work is another example of the tendency of such books to drop aside into corners and be no more seen, after having, for a moment, affrighted the timid believer. Another work, “Enigmas of Life,” published in 1872, had a powerful human interest in one or two occasional passages, in which the writer let his imagination go, for instance, into speculations as to what might be a logical and reasonable Hell, with curious power, and a strange, unintentional, and very striking approach to that picture of the place of despair, which represents it as a place where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.