Studies in Contemporary Biography Part 4

As his duties at Lambeth made no great demands on his time, he was now able to devote himself more steadily to historical work. His first impulse in that direction seems, as I have said, to have been received from Dean Stanley at Oxford. His next came from E. A. Freeman, who had been impressed by an ingenious paper of his at a meeting of the Somerset Archaeological Society, and who became from that time his steadfast friend. Green was a born historian, who would have been eminent without any help except that of books. But he was wise enough to know the value of personal counsel and direction, and generous enough to be heartily grateful for what he received. He did not belong in any special sense to what has been called Freeman's school, differing widely from that distinguished writer in many of his views, and still more in style and manner. But he learnt much from Freeman, and he delighted to acknowledge his debt. He learnt among other things the value of accuracy, the way to handle original authorities, the interpretation of architecture, and he received, during many years of intimate intercourse, the constant sympathy and encouragement of a friend whose affection was never blind to faults, while his admiration was never clouded by jealousy. It was his good fortune to win the regard and receive the advice of another ill.u.s.trious historian, Dr. Stubbs, who has expressed in language perhaps more measured, but not less emphatic than Freeman's, his sense of Green's services to English history. These two he used to call his masters; but no one who has read him and them needs to be told that his was one of those strong and rich intelligences which, in becoming more perfect by the study of others, loses nothing of its originality.

His first continuous studies had lain among the Angevin kings of England, and the note-books still exist in which he had acc.u.mulated materials for their history. However, the book he planned was never written, for when the state of his lungs (which forced him to spend the winter of 1870-71 at San Remo) had begun to alarm his friends, they urged him to throw himself at once into some treatise likely to touch the world more than a minute account of so remote a period could do. Accordingly he began, and in two or three years, his winters abroad sadly interrupting work, he completed the _Short History of the English People_. When a good deal of it had gone through the press, he felt, and his friends agreed with him, that the style of the earlier chapters was too much in the eager, quick, sketchy, "point-making"

manner of his _Sat.u.r.day Review_ articles, "and did not possess" (says the friend whom I have already quoted) "enough historical dignity for a work which was to take in the whole history of England. It was then, being convinced of this, that he cancelled a great deal of what had been stereotyped, and re-wrote it, re-creating, with his pa.s.sionate facility, his whole style." In order to finish it he gave up the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ altogether, though he could ill spare what his writing there brought him in. It is seldom that one finds such swiftness and ease in composition as his, united to so much fastidiousness. He went on remoulding and revising till his friends insisted that the book should be published anyhow, and published it accordingly was, in 1874. Feeling that his time on earth might be short, for he was often disabled even by a catarrh, he was the readier to yield.

The success of the _Short History_ was rapid and overwhelming.

Everybody bought it. It was philosophical enough for scholars, and popular enough for schoolboys. No historical book since Macaulay's _History_ has made its way so fast, or been read with so much avidity.

And Green was under disadvantages from which his great predecessor did not suffer. Macaulay's name was famous before his _History of England_ appeared, and Macaulay's scale was so large that he could enliven his pages with a mult.i.tude of anecdotes and personal details. Green was known only to a small circle of friends, having written nothing under his own signature except one or two papers in magazines or in the Transactions of archaeological societies; and the plan of his book, which dealt, in eight hundred and twenty pages, with the whole fourteen centuries of English national life, obliged him to handle facts in the ma.s.s, and touch lightly and briefly on personal traits. A summary is of all kinds of writing that which it is hardest to make interesting, because one must speak in general terms, one must pack facts tightly together, one must be content to give those facts without the delicacies of light and shade, or the subtler tints of colour. Yet such was his skill, both literary and historical, that his outlines gave more pleasure and instruction than other people's finished pictures.

In 1876 he took, for the only time in his life, except when he had supported a working-man's candidate for the Tower Hamlets at the general election of 1868, an active part in practical politics.

Towards the end of that year, when war seemed impending between Russia and the Turks, fears were entertained that England might undertake the defence of the Sultan, and a body called the Eastern Question a.s.sociation was formed to organise opposition to the pro-Turkish policy of Lord Beaconsfield's Ministry. Green threw himself warmly into the movement, was chosen to serve on the Executive Committee of the a.s.sociation, and was one of a sub-committee of five (which included also Mr. Stopford Brooke and Mr. William Morris the poet[23]) appointed to draw up the manifesto convoking the meeting of delegates from all parts of the country, which was held in December 1876, under the t.i.tle of the Eastern Question Conference. The sub-committee met at my house and spent the whole day on its work. It was a new and curious experience to see these three great men of letters drafting a political appeal. Morris and Green were both of them pa.s.sionately anti-Turkish, and Morris indeed acted for the next two years as treasurer of the a.s.sociation, doing his work with a business-like efficiency such as poets seldom possess. Green continued to attend the general committee until, after the Treaty of Berlin, it ceased to meet, and took the keenest interest in its proceedings. But his weak health and frequent winter absences made public appearances impossible to him. He was all his life an ardent Liberal. His sympathy with national movements did not confine itself to Continental Europe, but embraced Ireland and made him a Home Ruler long before Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal party adopted that policy. It ought to be added that though he had ceased to belong to the Church of England, he remained strongly opposed to disestablishment.

When he had completed the re-casting of his _Short History_ in the form of a larger book, which appeared under the t.i.tle of _A History of the English People_, he addressed himself with characteristic activity to a new project. He had for a long time meditated upon the _origines_ of English history, the settlement of the Teutonic invaders in Britain, followed by the consolidation of their tribes into a nation with definite inst.i.tutions and a settled order; and his desire to treat this topic was stimulated by the way in which some critics had sought to disparage his _Short History_ as a mere popularising of other people's ideas. The criticism was unjust, for, if there had been no rummaging in MS. sources for the _Short History_, there was abundant originality in the views the book contained. However, these carpings disposed his friends to recommend an enterprise which would lead him to deal chiefly with original authorities, and to put forth those powers of criticism and construction which they knew him to possess. Thus he set to work afresh at the very beginning, at Roman Britain and the Saxon Conquest. He had not advanced far when, having gone to spend the winter in Egypt, he caught an illness which so told on his weak frame that he was only just able to return to London in April, and would not have reached it at all but for the care with which he was tended by his wife. (He had married Miss Alice Stopford in 1877.) In a few weeks he so far recovered as to be able to resume his studies, though now forbidden to give to them more than two or three hours a day. However, what he could not do alone he did with and through his wife, who consulted the original sources for him, investigated obscure points, and wrote at his dictation. In this way, during the summer and autumn months of 1881, when often some slight change of weather would throw him back and make work impossible for days or weeks, the book was prepared, which he published in February 1882, under the t.i.tle of _The Making of England_. Even in those few months it was incessantly rewritten; no less than ten copies were made of the first chapter. It was warmly received by the few persons who were capable of judging its merits. But he was himself far from satisfied with it as a literary performance, thinking that a reader would find it at once too speculative and too dry, deficient in the details needed to make the life of primitive England real and instructive. If this had been so it would have been due to no failing in his skill, but to the scantiness of the materials available for the first few centuries of our national history. But he felt it so strongly that he was often disposed to recur to his idea of writing a history of the last seventy or eighty years, and was only induced by the encouragement of a few friends to pursue the narrative which, in _The Making of England_, he had carried down to the reign of Egbert.

The winter of 1881 was spent at Mentone, and the following summer in London. He continued very weak, and was sometimes unable for weeks together to go out driving or to work at home. But the moment that an access of strength returned, the note-books were brought out, and he was again busy going through what his wife's industry had tabulated, and dictating for an hour or two till fatigue forced him to desist.

Those who saw him during that summer were amazed, not only at the brave spirit which refused to yield to physical feebleness, but at the brightness and clearness of his intellect, which was not only as active as it had ever been before, but as much interested in whatever pa.s.sed in the world. When one saw him sitting propped up with cus.h.i.+ons on the sofa, his tiny frame worn to skin and bone, his voice interrupted by frequent fits of coughing, it seemed wrong to stay, but, after a little, all was forgotten in the fascination of his talk, and one found it hard to realise that where thought was strong speech might be weak.

In October, when he returned to Mentone, the tale of early English history had been completed, and was in type down to the death of Earl G.o.dwine in A.D. 1052. He had hesitated as to the point at which the book should end, but finally decided to carry it down to A.D. 1085, the date of the dispersion of the last great Scandinavian armament which threatened England. As the book dealt with both the Danish and Norman invasions, he called it _The Conquest of England_. It appeared after his death, wanting, indeed, those expansions in several places which he had meant to give it, but still a book such as few but he could have produced, full of new light, and equal in the parts which have been fully handled to the best work of his earlier years.

Soon after he returned to Mentone he became rapidly worse, and unfit for any continuous exertion. He could barely sit in the garden during an hour or two of morning suns.h.i.+ne. There I saw him in the end of December, fresh and keen as ever, aware that the most he could hope for was to live long enough to complete his _Conquest_, but eagerly reading every new book that came to him from England, starting schemes for various historical treatises sufficient to fill three life-times, and ranging in talk over the whole field of politics, literature, and history. It seemed as if the intellect and will, which strove to remain till their work was done, were the only things which held the weak and wasted body together. The ardour of his spirit prolonged life amid the signs of death. In January there came a new attack, and in February another unexpected rally. On the 2nd of March he remarked that it was no use fighting longer, and expired five days afterwards at the age of forty-six.

Short as his life was, maimed and saddened by an ill-health which gave his powers no fair chance, it was not an unhappy life, for he had that immense power of enjoyment which so often belongs to a vivacious intelligence. He delighted in books, in travel, in his friends'

company, in the constant changes and movements of the world. No satiety dulled his taste for these things, nor was his spirit, except for pa.s.sing moments, darkened by the shadows which to others seemed to lie so thick around his path. He enjoyed, though without boasting, the fame his books had won, and the sense of creative power. And the last six years of his life were brightened by the society and affection of one who entered into all his tastes and pursuits with the fullest sympathy, and enabled him, by her unwearied diligence, to prosecute labours which physical weakness must otherwise have arrested.

He might have won fame as a preacher or as a political journalist. It was, however, towards historical study that the whole current of his intellect set, and as it is by what he did in that sphere that he will be remembered, his special gifts for it deserve to be examined.

A historian needs four kinds of capacity. First of all, accuracy, and a desire for the exact truth, which will grudge no time and pains in tracing out even what might seem a trivial matter.

Secondly, keen observation, which can fasten upon small points, and discover in isolated data the basis for some generalisation, or the ill.u.s.tration of some principle. Thirdly, a sound and calm judgment, which will subject all inferences and generalisations, both one's own and other people's, to a searching review, and weigh in delicate scales their validity. These two last-mentioned qualifications taken together make up what we call the critical faculty, _i.e._ the power of dealing with evidence as tending to establish or discredit statements of fact, and those general conclusions which are built on the grouping of facts. Neither acuteness alone nor the judicial balance alone is enough to make the critic. There are men quick in observation and fertile in suggestion whose conclusions are worthless, because they cannot weigh one argument against another, just as there are solid and well-balanced minds that never enlighten a subject because, while detecting the errors of others, they cannot combine the data and propound a luminous explanation. To the making of a true critic, in history, in philosophy, in literature, in psychology, even largely in the sciences of nature, there should go not only judgment, but also a certain measure of creative power. Fourthly, the historian must have imagination, not indeed with that intensity which makes the poet, but in sufficient volume to let him feel the men of other ages and countries to be living and real like those among whom he moves, to present to him a large and full picture of a world remote from himself in time--as a world moving, struggling, hoping, fearing, enjoying, believing, like the near world of to-day--a world in which there went on a private life of thousands or millions of men and women, vaster, more complex, more interesting than that public life which is sometimes all that the records of the past have transmitted to us. Our imaginative historian may or may not be able to reconstruct for us the private and personal as well as the public or political life of the past. If he can, he will. If the data are too scanty, he may cautiously forbear. Yet he will still feel that those whose movements on the public stage he chronicles were steeped in an environment of natural and human influences which must have affected them at every turn; and he will so describe them as to make us feel them human, and give life to the pallid figures of far-off warriors and lawgivers.

To these four apt.i.tudes one need hardly add the faculty of literary exposition, for whoever possesses in large measure the last three, or even the last alone, cannot fail to interest his readers; and what more does literary talent mean?

Distinguis.h.i.+ng these several apt.i.tudes, historians will be found to fall into two cla.s.ses, according as there predominates in them the critical or the imaginative faculty. Though no one can attain greatness without both gifts, still they may be present in very unequal degrees. Some will investigate tangible facts and their relations with special care, occupying themselves chiefly with that const.i.tutional and diplomatic side of history in which positive conclusions are (from the comparative abundance of records) most easily reached. Others will be drawn towards the dramatic and personal elements in history, primarily as they appear in the lives of famous individual men, secondarily as they are seen, more dimly but not less impressively, in groups and ma.s.ses of men, and in a nation at large, and will also observe and dwell upon incidents of private life or features of social and religious custom, which the student of stately politics pa.s.ses by.

As Coleridge, when he divided thinkers into two cla.s.ses, took Plato as the type of one, Aristotle of the other, so we may take as representatives of these two tendencies among historians Thucydides for the critical and philosophical, Herodotus for the imaginative and picturesque. The former does not indeed want a sense of the dramatic grandeur of a situation; his narrative of the later part of the Athenian expedition against Syracuse is like a piece of aeschylus in prose. So too Herodotus is by no means without a philosophical view of things, nor without a critical instinct, although his generalisations are sometimes vague or fanciful, and his critical apparatus rudimentary. Each is so splendid because each is wide, with the great gifts largely, although not equally, developed.

Green was an historian of the Herodotean type. He possessed capacities which belong to the other type also; he was critical, sceptical, perhaps too sceptical, and philosophical. Yet the imaginative quality was the leading and distinctive quality in his mind and writing. An ordinary reader, if asked what was the main impression given by the _Short History of the English People_, would answer that it was the impression of picturesqueness and vividity--picturesqueness in attention to the externals of the life described, vividity in the presentation of that life itself.

I remember to have once, in talking with Green about Greek history, told him how I had heard Mr. Jowett, in discussing the ancient historians, disparage Herodotus and declare him unworthy to be placed near Thucydides. Green answered, almost with indignation, that to say such a thing showed that eminent scholars might have little feeling for history. "Great as Thucydides is," he said, "Herodotus is far greater, or at any rate far more precious. His view was so much wider." I forget the rest of the conversation, but what he meant was that Herodotus, to whom everything in the world was interesting, and who has told us something about every country he visited or heard of, had a more fruitful conception of history than his Athenian successor, who practically confined himself to politics in the narrower sense of the term, and that even the wisdom of the latter is not so valuable to us as the flood of miscellaneous information which Herodotus pours out about everything in the early world--a world about which we should know comparatively little if his book had not been preserved.

This deliverance was thoroughly characteristic of Green's own view of history. Everything was interesting to him because his imagination laid hold of everything. When he travelled, nothing escaped his quick eye, perpetually ranging over the aspects of places and society. When he went out to dinner, he noted every person present whom he had not known before, and could tell you afterwards something about them. He had a theory, so to speak, about each of them, and indeed about every one with whom he exchanged a dozen words. When he read the newspaper, he seemed to squeeze all the juice out of it in a few minutes. Nor was it merely the large events that fixed his mind; he drew from stray notices of minor current matters evidence of principles or tendencies which escaped other people's eyes. You never left him without having new light thrown upon the questions of the hour. His memory was retentive, but more remarkable was the sustained keenness of apprehension with which he read, and which made him fasten upon everything in a book or in talk which was significant, and could be made the basis for an ill.u.s.tration of some view. He had the Herodotean quality of reckoning nothing, however small or apparently remote from the main studies of his life, to be trivial or unfruitful. His imagination vitalised the small things, and found a place for them in the pictures he was always sketching out.

As this faculty of discerning hidden meanings and relations was one index and consequence of his imaginative power, so another was found in that artistic gift to which I have referred. To give literary form to everything was a necessity of his intellect. He could not tell an anecdote or repeat a conversation without unconsciously dramatising it, putting into people's mouths better phrases than they would have themselves employed, and giving a finer point to the moral which the incident expressed. Verbal accuracy suffered, but what he thought the inner truth came out the more fully.

Though he wrote very fast, and in the most familiar way, the style of his more serious letters was as good, I might say as finished, as that of his books. Every one of them had a beginning, middle, and end. The ideas were developed in an apt and graceful order, the sentences could all be construed, the diction was choice. It was the same with the short articles which he at one time used to write for the _Sat.u.r.day Review_. They are little essays, some of them worthy to live not only for the excellent matter they contain, but for the delicate refinement of their form. Yet they were all written swiftly, and sometimes in the midst of physical exhaustion. The friend I have previously quoted describes the genesis of one. Green had reached the town of Troyes early one morning with two companions, and immediately started off to explore it, darting hither and thither through the streets like a dog trying to find a scent. In two or three hours the examination was complete. The friends lunched together, took the train on to Basel, got there late, and went off to bed. Green, however, wrote before he slept, and laid on the breakfast-table next morning, an article on Troyes, in which its characteristic features were brought out and connected with its fortunes and those of the Counts of Champagne during some centuries, an article which was really a history in miniature. Then they went out together to look at Basel, and being asked some question about that city he gave on the spur of the moment a sketch of its growth and character equally vivid and equally systematic, grouping all he had to say round two or three leading theories. Yet he had never been in either place before, and had not made a special study of either. He could apparently have done the same for many another town in France or the Rhineland.

Nothing struck one so much in daily intercourse with him as his pa.s.sionate interest in human life. The same quickness of sympathy which had served him well in his work among the East End poor, enabled him to pour feeling into the figures of a bygone age, and become the most human, and in so far the most real and touching, of all who have dealt with English history. Whether or not his portraits are true, they always seem to breathe.

Men and women--that is to say, such of them as have characteristics p.r.o.nounced enough to make them cla.s.sifiable--may be divided into those whose primary interests are in nature and what relates to nature, and those whose primary interests are in and for man. Green was the most striking type I have known of the latter cla.s.s, not merely because his human interests were strong, but also because they excluded, to a degree singular in a mind so versatile, interests in purely natural things. He did not seem to care for or seek to know any of the sciences of nature[24] except in so far as they bore directly upon man's life, and were capable of explaining it or of serving it. He had a keen eye for country, for the direction and character of hills, the position and influence of rivers, forests, and marshes, of changes in the line of land and sea. Readers of _The Making of England_ will recall the picture of the physical aspects of Britain when the Teutonic invaders entered it as an unsurpa.s.sed piece of reconstructive description. So on a battle-field or in an historical town, his vision of the features of the ground or the site was unerring. But he perceived and enjoyed natural beauty chiefly in reference to human life. The study of the battle-field and the town site were aids to the comprehension of historical events. The exquisite landscape was exquisite because it was a.s.sociated with the people dwelling there, with the processes of their political growth, with their ideas or their social usages. I remember to have had from him the most vivid descriptions of the towns of the Riviera and of Capri, where he used to pa.s.s the winter, but he never touched on anything which did not ill.u.s.trate or intertwine itself with the life of the people, leaving one uninformed on matters purely physical. Facts about the character of the mountains, the relation of their ranges to one another, or their rocks, or the trees and flowers of their upper regions, the prospects their summits command, the scenes of beauty in their glens, or beside their wood-embosomed lakes, all, in fact, which the mountain lover delights in, and which are to him a part of the mountain ardour, of the pa.s.sion for pure nature unsullied by the presence of man--all this was cold to him. But as soon as a touch of human life fell like a sunbeam across the landscape, all became warm and lovable.

It was the same with art. With an historian's delight in the creative ages and their work, he had a fondness for painting and sculpture, and could so describe what he saw in the galleries and churches of Italy as to bring out meanings one had not perceived before. But here, too, it was the human element that fascinated him. Technical merits, though he observed them, as he observed most things, were forgotten; he dwelt only on what the picture expressed or revealed. Pure landscape painting gave him little pleasure.

It seems a truism to say that one who writes history ought to care for all that bears upon man in the present in order that he may comprehend what bore upon him in the past. This roaring loom of Time, these complex physical and moral forces playing round us, and driving us. .h.i.ther and thither by such a strange and intricate interlacement of movements that we seem to perceive no more than what is next us, and are unable to say whither we are tending, ought to be always before the historian's mind. But there are few who have tried, as Green tried, to follow every flash of the shuttle, and to discover a direction and a relation amidst apparent confusion, for there are few who have taken so wide a view of the historian's functions, and have so distinctly set before them as their object the comprehension and realisation and description of the whole field of bygone human life. The Past was all present to him in this sense, that he saw and felt in it not only those large events which annalists or state papers have recorded, but the everyday life of the people, their ideas, their habits, their external surroundings.

And the Present was always as if past to him in this sense, that in spite of his strong political feelings, he looked at it with the eye of a philosophical observer, trying to disengage principles from details, permanent tendencies from pa.s.sing outbursts. His imagination visualised, so to speak, the phenomena as in a picture; his speculative faculty tried to harmonise them, measure them, and forecast their effects. Hence it was a necessity to him to know what was pa.s.sing in the world. The first thing he did every day, whatever other pressure there might be on him, was to read the daily newspaper. The last thing that he ceased to read, when what remained of life began to be counted by hours, was the daily newspaper. This warm interest in mankind is the keynote of his _History of the English People_. It is the whole people that is ever present to him, as it had been present before to few other historians.

Such power of imagination and sympathy as I have endeavoured to describe is enough to make a brilliant writer, yet not necessarily a great historian. One must see how far the other qualifications, accuracy, acuteness of observation, and judgment, are also brought into action.

His accuracy has been much impeached. When the first burst of applause that welcomed the _Short History_ had subsided, several critics began to attack it on the score of minor errors. They pointed out a number of statements of fact which were doubtful, and others which were incorrect, and spread in some quarters the impression that Green was a careless and untrustworthy writer. I do not deny that there are in the first editions of the _Short History_ some a.s.sertions made more positively than the evidence warrants, some pictures drawn from exceedingly slender materials. Mr. Skene remarks of the account given of the battle between the Jutes and the Britons which took place in the middle of the fifth century, somewhere near Aylesford in Kent, and about which we really know scarcely anything, "Mr. Green describes it as if he had been present." The temptation to such liberties is strong where the treatment of a period is summary. A writer who compresses the whole history of England into eight hundred pages of small octavo, making his narrative not a bare narrative but a picture full of colour and incident--incident which, for brevity's sake, must often be given by allusion--cannot be always interrupting the current of the story to indicate doubts or quote authorities for every statement in which there may be an element of conjecture; and it is probable that when the authorities are scrutinised their result will sometimes appear different from that which the author has presented. On this head the _Short History_ may be admitted to have occasionally purchased vividity at the price of exact.i.tude. Of mistakes, strictly so called--_i.e._ statements demonstrably incorrect and therefore ascribable to haste or carelessness--there are enough to make a show under the hands of a hostile critic, yet not more than one is prepared to expect from any but the most careful scholars. The book falls far short of the accuracy of Thirlwall or Ranke or Stubbs, short even of the accuracy of Gibbon or Carlyle; but it is not greatly below the standard of Grote or Macaulay or Robertson, it is equal to the standard of Milman, above that of David Hume. I take famous names, and could put a better face on the matter by choosing for comparison divers contemporary writers whose literary eminence is higher than their historical. And Green's mistakes, although pretty numerous, were (for they have been corrected in later editions) nearly all in small matters. He puts an event, let us say, in 1340 which happened in the November of 1339; he calls a man John whose name was William. These are mistakes to the eye of a civil service examiner, but they seldom make any difference to the general reader, for they do not affect the doctrines and pictures which the book contains, and in which lies its permanent value as well as its literary charm. As Bishop Stubbs says, "Like other people, Green makes mistakes sometimes; but scarcely ever does the correction of his mistakes affect either the essence of the picture or the force of the argument.... All his work was real and original work; few people besides those who knew him well would see under the charming ease and vivacity of his style the deep research and sustained industry of the laborious student." It may be added that Green's later and more detailed works, _The Making of England_ and _The Conquest of England_, though they contain plenty of debatable matter, as in the paucity of authentic data any such book must do, have been charged with few errors in matters of fact.

In considering his critical gift, it is well to distinguish those two elements of acute perception and sober judgment which I have already specified, for he possessed the former in larger measure than the latter. The same activity of mind which made him notice everything while travelling or entering a company of strangers, played incessantly upon the historical data of his work, and supplied him with endless theories as to the meaning of a statement, the source it came from, the way it had been transmitted, the conditions under which it was made. No one could be more acute and penetrating in what the Germans call _Quellenforschung_, the collection and investigation and testing of the sources of history, nor could any one be more painstaking. Errors of view, apart from those trivial inaccuracies already referred to, did not arise from an indolence that left any stone unturned, but rather from an occupation with the leading idea which had drawn his attention away from the details of time and place.

The ingenuity with which he built up theories was as admirable as the art with which he stated them. People whom that art fascinated sometimes fancied that the charm lay entirely in the style. But the style was only a part of the craftsmans.h.i.+p. The facility in theorising, the power of grouping facts under new aspects, the skill in gathering and sifting evidence, were as remarkable as those artistic qualities which expressed themselves in the paragraphs and sentences and phrases. What danger there was arose from this fecundity. His mind was so fertile, could see so much in a theory and apply it so dexterously, that his judgment was sometimes dazzled by the brilliance of his ingenuity. I do not think he loved his theories specially because they were his own, for he often modified them, and was ready to consider any one else's suggestions; but he had a pa.s.sion for light, and when a new view seemed to him to explain things previously dark, he wanted the patience to suspend his judgment and abide in uncertainty. Some of his hypotheses he himself dropped. Some others he probably would have dropped, as the authorities he respected have not embraced them. Others have made their way into general acceptance, and may become still more useful as future research works them out. But, whether right or wrong, they were instructive. Every one of them is based upon facts whose importance had not been so fully seen before, and suggests a point of view worth considering. Green's view may sometimes appear fanciful: it is never foolish, or superficial, or perverse. And so far from being credulous, his natural tendency was towards doubt.

Inventive as his mind was, it was also solvent and sceptical. Seldom is a strong imagination coupled with so unsparing a criticism as that which he applied to the materials on which the constructive faculty had to work. His later tendencies were rather towards scepticism, and towards what one may call a severe and ascetic view of history. While writing _The Making of England_ and _The Conquest of England_, he used to lament the scantiness of the data and the barren dryness which he feared the books would consequently show.

"How am I to make anything of these meagre entries of marches and battles which are the only materials for the history of whole centuries? Here are the Nors.e.m.e.n and Danes ravaging and occupying the country; we learn hardly anything about them from English sources, and nothing at all from Danish. How can one conceive and describe them? how have any comprehension of what England was like in the districts the Northmen took and ruled?" I tried to get him to work at the Norse Sagas, and remember in particular to have entreated him when he came to the battle of Brunanburh to eke out the pitifully scanty records of that fight from the account given of it in the story of the Icelandic hero, Egil, son of Skallagrim. But he answered that the Saga was unhistorical, a bit of legend written down more than a century after the events, and that he could not, by using it in the text, appear to trust it, or to mix up authentic history with what was possibly fable. It was urged that he could guard himself in a note from being supposed to take it for more than what it was, a most picturesque embellishment of his tale. But he stood firm. Throughout these two last books, he steadily refrained from introducing any matter, however lively or romantic, which could not stand the test of his stringent criticism, and used laughingly to tell how Dean Stanley had long ago said to him, after reading one of his earliest pieces, "I see you are in danger of growing picturesque. Beware of it. I have suffered for it."

If in these later years he reined in his imagination more tightly, the change was due to no failing in his ingenuity. Nothing in his work shows higher constructive ability than _The Making of England_. He had to deal with a time which has left us scarcely any authentic records, and to piece together his narrative and his picture of the country out of these records, and the indications, faint and scattered, and often capable of several interpretations, which are supplied by the remains of Roman roads and villas, the names of places, the boundaries of local divisions, the casual statements of writers many centuries later. What he has given us remains an enduring witness to his historical power. For here it is not a question of mere brilliance of style. The result is due to patience, penetration, and the careful weighing of evidence, joined to that faculty of realising things in the concrete by which a picture is conjured up out of a ma.s.s of phenomena, everything falling into its place under laws which seem to prove themselves as soon as they are stated.

Of his style nothing need be said, for his readers have felt its charm. But it deserves to be remarked that this accomplished master of words had little verbal memory. He used to say that he could never recollect a phrase in its exact form, and in his books he often unconsciously varied, writing from memory, some expression whose precise form is on record. Nor had he any turn for languages. German he knew scarcely at all, a fact which makes the range of his historical knowledge appear more striking; and though he had spent several winters in Italy, he could not speak Italian except so far as he needed it for the inn or the railway. The want of mere verbal memory partly accounts for this deficiency, but it was not unconnected with the vehemence of his interest in the substance of things. He was so anxious to get at the kernel that he could not stop to examine the nut. In this absence of linguistic gifts, as well as in the keenness of his observation (and in his shortsightedness), he resembled Dean Stanley, who, though he had travelled in and brought back all that was best worth knowing from every country in Europe, had no facility in any language but his own.

Green was not one of those whose personality is unlike their books, for there was in both the same fertility, the same vivacity, the same quickness of sympathy. Nevertheless, his conversation seemed to give an even higher impression of intellectual power than did his writings, because it was so swift and so spontaneous. Such talk has rarely been heard in our time, so gay was it, so vivid, so various, so full of anecdote and ill.u.s.tration, so acute in criticism, so candid in consideration, so graphic in description, so abundant in sympathy, so flas.h.i.+ng in insight, so full of colour and emotion as well as of knowledge and thought. One had to forbid one's self to visit him in the evening, because it was impossible to get away before two o'clock in the morning. And, unlike many famous talkers, he was just as willing to listen as to speak. One of the charms of his company was that it made a man feel better than his ordinary self.

His appreciation of whatever had any worth in it, his comments and replies, so stimulated the interlocutor's mind that it moved faster and could hit upon apter expressions than at any other time. The same gifts which shone in his conversation, lucid arrangement of ideas, ready command of words, and a power in perceiving the tendencies of those whom he addressed, would have made him an admirable public speaker. I do not remember that he ever did speak, in his later years, to any audience larger than a committee of twenty. But he was an eloquent preacher. The first time I ever saw him was in St. Philip's Church at Stepney about 1866, and I shall never forget the impression made on me by the impa.s.sioned sentences that rang through the church from the fiery little figure in the pulpit with its thin face and bright black eyes.

What Green accomplished seems to those who used to listen to him little in comparison with what he might have done had longer life and a more robust body been granted him. Some of his finest gifts would not have found their full scope till he came to treat of a period where the materials for history are ample, and where he could have allowed himself s.p.a.ce to deal with them--such a period, for instance, as that of his early choice, the Angevin kings of England. Yet, even basing themselves on what he has done, they may claim for him a place among the foremost writers of his time. He left behind him no one who combined so many of the best gifts. There were among his contemporaries historians more learned and equally industrious. There were two or three whose accuracy was more scrupulous, their judgment more uniformly sober and cautious. But there was no one in whom so much knowledge and so wide a range of interests were united to such ingenuity, acuteness, and originality, as well as to such a power of presenting results in rich, clear, pictorial language. A master of style may be a worthless historian.

We have instances. A skilful investigator and sound reasoner may be unreadable. The conjunction of fine gifts for investigation with fine gifts for exposition is a rare conjunction, which cannot be prized too highly, for while it advances historical science, it brings historical methods, as well as historical facts, within the horizon of the ordinary reader.

Of the services Green rendered to English history, the first, and that which was most promptly appreciated, was the intensity with which he realised, and the skill with which he portrayed, the life of the people of England as a whole, and taught his readers that the exploits of kings and the intrigues of ministers, and the struggles of parties in Parliament, are, after all, secondary matters, and important chiefly as they affect the welfare or stimulate the thoughts and feelings of the great ma.s.s of undistinguished humanity in whose hands the future of a nation lies. He changed the old-fas.h.i.+oned distribution of our annals according to reigns and dynasties into certain periods, showing that such divisions often obscure the true connection of events, and suggesting new and better conceptions of the periods into which the record of English progress naturally falls. And, lastly, he laid, in his latest books, a firm and enduring foundation for our mediaeval history by that account of the Teutonic occupation of England, of the state of the country as they found it, and the way they conquered and began to organise it, which I have already dwelt on as a signal proof of his constructive faculty.

Many readers will be disposed to place him near Macaulay, for though he was less weighty he was more subtle, and not less fascinating. To fewer perhaps will it occur to compare him with Gibbon, yet I am emboldened by the opinion of one of our greatest contemporary historians to venture on the comparison. There are indeed wide differences between the two. Green is as completely a man of the nineteenth century as Gibbon was a man of the eighteenth. Green's style has not the majestic march of Gibbon: it is quick and eager almost to restlessness. Nor is his judgment so uniformly grave and sound. But one may find in his genius what was characteristic of Gibbon's also, the combination of a mastery of mult.i.tudinous details, with a large and luminous view of those far-reaching forces and relations which govern the fortunes of peoples and guide the course of empire. This width and comprehensiveness, this power of ma.s.sing for the purposes of argument the facts which his literary art has just been clothing in its most brilliant hues, is the highest of a historian's gifts, and is the one which seems most surely to establish Green's position among the leading historical minds of his time.

[22] This sketch was written in 1883. A volume of Green's Letters, with a short connecting biography by Sir Leslie Stephen, was published in 1901. The letters are extremely good reading, the biography faithful and graceful.

[23] Sir George Young and I were the other members.

[24] At one time, however, he learnt a little geology from his friend Professor Dawkins, perceiving its bearings on history.

SIR GEORGE JESSEL, MASTER OF THE ROLLS

There is hardly any walk of English life in which brilliant abilities win so little fame for their possessor among the public at large as that of practice at the Chancery bar. A leading ecclesiastic, or physician, or surgeon, or financier, or manufacturer, or even a great man of science, unless his work is done in some sphere which, like pure mathematics, is far removed from the comprehension of ordinary educated men, is sure, in a time like ours, to become well known to the world and acquire influence in it. A great advocate practising in the Common-law Courts is, of course, still more certain to become a familiar figure. But the cases which are dealt with by the Courts of Equity, though they often involve vast sums of money and raise intricate and important points of law, mostly turn on questions of a technical kind, and are seldom what the newspapers call sensational.

Thus it may happen that a pract.i.tioner or a judge in these Courts enjoys an extraordinary reputation within his profession, and is by them regarded as one of the ornaments of his time, while the rest of his fellow-countrymen know nothing at all about his merits.

This was the case with Sir George Jessel, though towards the end of his career the admiration which the Bar felt for his powers began so far to filter through to the general public that his premature death was felt to be a national misfortune.

Jessel (born in 1824, died in 1883) was only one among many instances England has lately seen of men of Jewish origin climbing to the highest distinction. But he was the first instance of a Jew who, continuing to adhere to the creed of his forefathers, received a very high office; for Mr. Disraeli, as every one knows, had been baptized as a boy, and always professed to be a Christian. Jessel's career was not marked by any remarkable incidents. He rose quickly to eminence at the bar, being in this aided by his birth; for the Jews in London, as elsewhere, hold together. There are among them many solicitors in large practice, and these take a natural pleasure in pus.h.i.+ng forward any specially able member of their community. His powers were more fully seen and appreciated when he became (in 1865) a Queen's Counsel, and brought him with unusual speed to the front rank. He came into Parliament at the general election of 1868 on the Liberal side, and three years later was made Solicitor-General in Mr. Gladstone's first Government, retaining, as was then usual, his private practice, which had become so large that there was scarcely any case of first-rate importance brought into the Chancery Courts in which he did not appear. Although a decided Liberal, as the Jews mostly were until Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy had begun to lead them into other paths, he had borne little part in politics till he took his seat in the House of Commons; and when he spoke there, he obtained no great success. Lawyers in the English Parliament are under the double disadvantage of having had less leisure than most other members to study and follow political questions, and of having contracted a manner and style of speaking not suited to an a.s.sembly which, though deliberative, is not deliberate, and which listens with impatience to a technical or forensic method of treating the topics which come before it.

Jessel's ability would have soon overcome the former difficulty, but less easily the latter. Though he was lucid and powerful in his treatment of legal topics, and made a quite admirable law officer in the way of advising ministers and the public departments, he was never popular with the House of Commons, for he presented his views in a hard, dry, dogmatic form, with no graces of style or delivery.