pronounced enough to make them classifiable--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 class, 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 unsurpassed 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 associated 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 pass the winter, but he never touched on anything which did not
illustrate 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 passion 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 hither 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 passing 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 passing 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 assertions 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 exactitude. 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 craftsmanship. 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 passion
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 Norsemen 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 mass 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 illustration, so acute in criticism, so
candid in consideration, so graphic in description, so abundant in
sympathy, so flashing 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 impassioned
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 space 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 mass of undistinguished humanity in whose hands
the future of a nation lies. He changed the old-fashioned 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 multitudinous 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 massing 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 practitioner 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.