I KNEW HERBERT HART for more than sixty years. He became part of my life early in our acquaintance, and remained so until the end of his life, and indeed beyond it. Others, far better qualified than I, have described his academic career and achievements. I propose to say something of a more personal nature, subjective as this must inevitably be.
I first met him, in I think 1929, at a meeting of the Jowett Society, an Oxford undergraduate philosophical society. During all the long years of our friendship, his appearance, manner, way of life seemed to me to have altered very little. The same rumpled clothes, the same disregard of domestic surroundings, the same simple, engaging manner, the same quiet, uninterrupted intellectual vitality and humour, eager interest in whatever came up in conversation or in the world – one never had to translate one’s views into the idiom he preferred: he understood one at once, however imperfect one’s language; and this made talking with him particularly easy, agreeable and fruitful. There never was a touch of pomposity, self-importance, self-righteousness, vanity; he was self-conscious at times, and occasionally withdrawn; but other than natural, never.
At the philosophical meetings I very soon realised that I had met a man of very high intellectual calibre. I was deeply impressed by the remarkable clarity and penetration with which he spoke, his full understanding of the views which he discussed or criticised, and above all by the sheer power of his mind and, something rare in a man of such gifts, his complete honesty, his readiness to withdraw or modify his assertions in the face of what seemed to him valid objections. He never tried to defend the indefensible out of amour propre, or stubbornness, or desire to win.
Our philosophical views were, at that time, somewhat similar. We were both what were then called Oxford realists: we read Cook Wilson – now forgotten – G. E. Moore, Russell, Price. After Herbert left the university to go to the Bar, we used to meet in London and Oxford and went on talking about philosophy. Philosophy was the first and last love of his life – more so, I should say, even than the law. In the early days his interest lay in logic and the theory of knowledge more than moral or social issues, which he thought and wrote about in his later years. He was a very frequent visitor to All Souls College during my years there before the war; I was not his only host – Douglas Jay, Richard Wilberforce, John Sparrow, Ian Bowen used to invite him. This was, perhaps, one of the reasons why my colleague Penderel Moon once remarked that every time he came back from India, the fellows seemed different, but the guests were always the same.
As the years went on, Herbert became increasingly critical of my views, and I therefore learnt a great deal from him. He was always just, understanding and generous; nevertheless, I always knew at once when I was embarking on some false or dubious path. He told me that what first turned him toward philosophy was a very stimulating master at Bradford Grammar School (called, I think, Goddard),1 who talked about Spengler and the patterns of history, and discussed vast metaphysical systems, and thereby greatly widened the horizons of his pupils. Herbert remained devoted to him.
I saw him often during his years at the Bar, and in those days he described himself as a Liberal; it was only later that he felt drawn to the policies of the Labour Party, probably as a result of a growing moral revulsion, which I shared, caused by the social and political policies of the Conservative governments of the 1930s. I saw him rather less during the war, when I was in Washington and he worked for the intelligence service in England. Conversations with Gilbert Ryle and Stuart Hampshire, who worked in the same field, helped to convert him from his earlier philosophical realism to a much more radical position: never to anything like full-blown logical positivism, but towards a careful form of what afterwards became called linguistic analysis, or, indeed, ‘Oxford philosophy’. His old tutor at New College, by this time Warden, A. H. Smith, wrote to me in Washington about luring Herbert to the College. He explained that he would be all the more valuable since the new trend towards radical empiricism, of which Smith held a low opinion, needed to be resisted, and Herbert would prove to be a very formidable opponent of it, ‘a real bulwark’ as Smith put it. Alas for Smith, the bulwark turned out to face in the opposite direction: like Balaam, instead of stopping the rot, the new fellow became a strong ally of the new philosophy.
After the war, the principal intellectual impact on him was, I think, that of J. L. Austin, who changed his approach to jurisprudence, and also to some degree that of Friedrich Waismann, who expounded a modified version of the doctrines of the so-called Vienna Circle of philosophers.
To the end of his life, Herbert tended to feel an unflagging, almost boyish, enthusiasm for new experience: ideas, methods, thinkers, music, literature, natural beauty, indeed anything that awoke a response in him – anything that he found interesting, important, beautiful, moving, attractive. He responded to social and political events, and indeed, to the life around him in every shape and form. He reacted strongly to people – their character, their appearance, their foibles. He talked easily with all kinds and conditions of people. He spoke with enthusiasm, or interest, or amusement, or irony – or a mixture of these – about colleagues, friends, and occasionally pupils, many of whom he would stimulate into a natural flow of their own thoughts, and feelings, and views of the world. He tended to describe his intellectual or artistic discoveries with fervour, clarity and remarkable insight into the flavour and quality of ideas, works of art, authors, whether he thought well of them or not; and this made his conversation illuminating, as well as delightful. He combined a very powerful mind, precision of thought, and an unshakeable sanity with a humane and generous nature – and, more than that, pure goodness, sometimes verging on saintliness, which could not but make a lasting impression upon those who met him for any length of time. I need not add that his moral integrity and unswerving pursuit of truth and justice became universally recognised.
He particularly admired J. S. Mill, and his beloved Bentham (who both impressed and amused him), because, like him, he believed in the value and power of reason. He liked their impatience with nonsense, and forgave their psychological crudity and narrowness of vision, which he recognised, for the sake of the soundness of their general approach – their dedication to human welfare. Like them he opposed customs and institutions if they seemed to him socially or morally deleterious, all the more if they were ancient, traditional and widely accepted. He was a man of the Enlightenment, wholly so. Condorcet would have found him most congenial; so, I think, would Adam Smith. Fallacies, stupidities, cruelties, injustices were for him all the more threatening if supported by appeals to intuition, faith, metaphysics, with no empirical basis.
He was very well read. He particularly liked biographies, memoirs, novels. Victorian and a good deal of modern literature absorbed him: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Henry James, the great Russian novelists, Aldous Huxley (he once told me that Huxley had liberated him from various adolescent inhibitions) – these and Nadine Gordimer – almost everything that he came across, or was suggested to him, was grist to that marvellous intellectual and emotional mill. He particularly loved poetry – Dante, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Tennyson, Verlaine, Yeats – and he quoted it freely. He loved music too; his friendship with William Glock opened a good many windows for him, in modern as well as classical music. He loved travel, he loved the beauties of nature, he was a tremendous walker, and remarkably eloquent in describing anything that caught his imagination.
He liked countries as such, particularly Italy. I remember his telling me that once, in an Italian train, in an open carriage, he suddenly realised that he had lost his wallet, probably at the booking-office of the railway station. He leapt to his feet and in Italian cried ‘Ho perduto tutto, tutto, tutto! – I have lost everything, my passport, my money, my ticket – everything, everything!’ Whereupon someone immediately offered him some money, someone else said that at the next station he would telephone the last station, and if he waited there perhaps his wallet would be found and arrive by the next train. And so it turned out. I suspect that his passion for Italy and Italians rose to a new height after this wonderful experience; moreover, he noted, perhaps somewhat uncharacteristically, that Italian policewomen were often quite good-looking. It is rather more characteristic of him that he should have broken out so spontaneously: the notion that this quiet, learned, immensely thoughtful, serious, critical man could not, on occasion, be carried away by feeling – fascination, astonishment, excited admiration, curiosity, contempt, indignation – that would be false. There was something perpetually youthful about him: he never lost his eager hope of finding some illuminating new idea, some new manifestation of human genius, whether in thought or art, something which, whenever he thought he had found it – not always correctly – he acclaimed and wanted to share, explain, examine, tracing its implications for life, not only for some universe of rational discourse.
He tended to be too critical of himself and his work; he thought better of the ability of others than of his own. No matter how much respect and praise he received, especially in the USA, where he was vastly admired, he remained prey to doubts about the lasting value of his writings. Of course admiration pleased him, not least from critics of his work, but it was never sufficient to still his self-distrust, his wondering about the validity of his arguments or conclusions. It was a result of this that there were endless corrections, re-corrections, corrections of re-corrections, leading to those heaps of scrawled-over notes, fragments, bundles of papers held together by clips and used envelopes which cluttered his tables and his rooms. This self-doubt and modesty, together with his great charm, was one of his most moving characteristics.
On public issues he was hardly ever dogmatic – always moderate, just, understanding, sane. He always hoped, if he did not always believe, that decency and reason would triumph – in British life, in Israel, in Oxford, in all the societies he cared about. If I may return to the point from which I began: Herbert Hart was a man of firm, clear and critical mind – he rejected contemptuously everything he thought crude, confused, muddled, intellectually shoddy; he was a man who could not tolerate obscurantism, oppression, injustice; all that he regarded as reactionary and an obstacle to human welfare he set on with his whole being. It is remarkable that such a man should at the same time have had so sensitive and complex an inner life, that he was not merely a model of virtue and integrity, but that with all this uncompromising rigour he had so much goodness, pure human goodness and generosity of temper. Surely this is rare. He was truly a major moral as well as intellectual asset to the civilisation for which he worked. It is said that no one is irreplaceable. This is not true. Herbert Hart was not replaceable. Like all those to whom, in one way or another, his existence made such a difference, I shall mourn his passing for whatever remains of my life.
1 E[dgar] H[enry] Goddard (1896–1983), né Gropius, taught classics at Bradford Grammar School 1920–32.