He was born in Yorkshire in 1836, the son of a country clergyman; was educated at Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow in 1860, and a tutor in 1869. In 1867 he was an unsuccessful candidate for a chair of philosophy at St. Andrews, and in 1878 was elected Professor of Moral Philosophy in his own University, which he never thereafter quitted. He was married in 1869 and died in 1882. It was a life externally uneventful, but full of thought and work, and latterly crowned by great influence over the younger and great respect from the senior members of the University.
I can best describe Green as he was in his undergraduate days, for it was then that I saw most of him. His appearance was striking, and made him a familiar figure even to those who did not know him personally. Thick black hair, a sallow complexion, dark eyebrows, deep-set eyes of rich brown with a peculiarly steadfast look, were the features which first struck one; and with these there was a remarkable seriousness of expression, an air of solidity and quiet strength. He knew comparatively few people, and of these only a very few intimately, having no taste or turn for those sports in which university acquaintances are most frequently made, and seldom appearing at breakfast or wine parties. This caused him to pass for harsh or unsocial; and I remember having felt a slight sense of alarm the first time I found myself seated beside him. Though we belonged to different colleges I had heard a great deal about him, for Oxford undergraduates are warmly interested in one another, and at the time I am recalling they had an inordinate fondness for measuring the intellectual gifts and conjecturing the future of those among their contemporaries who seemed likely to attain eminence.
Those who came to know Green intimately, soon perceived that under his reserve there lay not only a capacity for affection--no man was more tenacious in his friendships--but qualities that made him an attractive companion. His tendency to solitude sprang less from pride or coldness, than from the occupation of his mind by subjects which seldom weigh on men of his age. He had, even when a boy at school (where he lived much by himself, but exercised considerable moral influence), been grappling with the problems of metaphysics and theology, and they had given a tinge of gravity to his manner. The relief to that gravity lay in his humour, which was not only abundant but genial and sympathetic. It used to remind us of Carlyle--he had both the sense of humour and an underlying Puritanism in common with Carlyle, one of the authors who (with Milton and Wordsworth) had most influenced him--but in Green the Puritan tinge was more kindly, and, above all, more lenient to ordinary people. While averse, perhaps too severely averse, to whatever was luxurious or frivolous in undergraduate life, he had the warmest interest in, and the strongest sympathy for, the humbler classes. Loving social equality, and filled with a sense of the dignity of simple human nature, he liked to meet farmers and tradespeople on their own level, and knew how to do so without seeming to condescend; indeed nothing pleased him better, than when they addressed him as one of themselves, the manner of his talk to them, as well as the extreme plainness of his dress, conducing to such mistakes. The belief in the duty of approaching the people directly and getting them to think and to form and express their own views in their own way was at the root of all his political doctrines.