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 illustrious
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 accumulated
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 _Saturday 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 passionate
facility, his whole style." In order to finish it he gave up the
_Saturday 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 multitude 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 mass, 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
Association 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 Association, 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 title 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 passionately
anti-Turkish, and Morris indeed acted for the next two years as
treasurer of the Association, 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 title 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 institutions 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 title 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
passed in the world. When one saw him sitting propped up with cushions
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
Godwine 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 sunshine. 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 passing 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
illustration 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 aptitudes 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?
Distinguishing these several aptitudes, historians will be found to
fall into two classes, 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
constitutional 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 masses 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 passes by.
As Coleridge, when he divided thinkers into two classes, 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 illustration 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 _Saturday
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
passionate 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.