printing press, so called after his country house. Of illuminated
manuscripts[55] he had always been fond, but it was only in 1888 that
his attention was turned to details of typography. The mere study of old
and new founts did not satisfy him for long; the creative impulse
demanded that he should design types of his own and produce his own
books. As in the other arts, his lifelong friend Burne-Jones was called
in to supply figure drawings for the illustrated books which Morris was
himself to adorn with decorative borders and initials. Of his many
schemes, not all came to fruition; but after four years of planning, and
a year and a half given to the actual process of printing, his
masterpiece, the Kelmscott edition of Chaucer, was completed, and a copy
was in his hands a few months before his death.
[Note 55: Mr. Hyndman (_Story of an Adventurous Life_, p. 355)
describes a visit to the Bodleian Library at Oxford with Morris, and how
'quickly, carefully, and surely' he dated the illuminated manuscripts.]
The last seven years of his life were spent partly at Hammersmith and
partly at Kelmscott, the old manor house, lying on the banks of the
Upper Thames, which he had tenanted since 1878. He had never been a
great traveller, dearly though he loved the north of France with its
Gothic cathedrals and 'the river bottoms with the endless poplar forests
and the green green meadows'. His tastes were very individual. Iceland
made stronger appeals to him than Greece or Rome; and even at Florence
and Venice he was longing to return to England and its homely familiar
scenes. Scotland with its bare hills, 'raw-boned' as he called it, never
gave him much pleasure; for he liked to see the earth clothed by nature
and by the hand of man. By the Upper Thames, at the foot of the
Cotswolds, the buildings of the past were still generally untouched; and
beyond the orchards and gardens, with their old-world look, lay
stretches of meadows, diversified by woods and low hills, haunted with
the song of birds; and he could believe himself still to be in the
England of Chaucer and Shakespeare. There he would always welcome the
friends whom he loved and who loved him; but to the world at large he
was a recluse. His abrupt manner, his Johnsonian utterances, would have
made him a disconcerting element in Victorian tea-parties. When provoked
by foolish utterances, he was, no less than Johnson, downright in
contradiction. There was nothing that he disliked so much as being
lionized; and there was much to annoy him when he stepped outside his
own home and circle. His last public speech was made on the abuses of
public advertisement; and in the last year of his life we hear him
growling in Ruskinian fashion that he was ever 'born with a sense of
romance and beauty in this accursed age'.
His life had been a strenuous and exhausting one, but he enjoyed it to
the last. As he said to Hyndman ten days before the end, 'It has been a
jolly good world to me when all is said, and I don't wish to leave it
yet awhile'. At least his latter years had been years of peace. He had
been freed from the stress of conflict; he had found again the joys of
youth, and could recapture the old music.
The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by
And brought me the summer again; and here on the grass I lie
As erst I lay and was glad, ere I meddled with right and wrong.
After an illness in 1891 he never had quite the same physical vigour,
though he continued to employ himself fully for some years in a way
which would tax the energy of many robust men. In 1895 the vital energy
was failing, and he was content to relax his labours. In August 1896 he
was suffering from congestion of the lungs, and in October he died
peacefully at Hammersmith, attended by the loving care of his wife and
his oldest friends. The funeral at Kelmscott was remarkable for
simplicity and beauty, the coffin being borne along the country road in
a farm wagon strewn with leaves; and he lies in the quiet churchyard
amid the meadows and orchards which he loved so well.
Among the prophets and poets who took up their parable against the
worship of material wealth and comfort, he will always have a foremost
place. The thunder of Carlyle, the fiery eloquence of Ruskin, the
delicate irony of Matthew Arnold, will find a responsive echo in the
heart of one reader or another; will expose the false standards of life
set up in a materialistic age and educate them in the pursuit of what is
true, what is beautiful, and what is reasonable. But to men who work
with their hands there must always be something specially inspiring in
the life and example of one who was a handicraftsman and so much beside.
And Morris was not content to denounce and to despair. He enjoyed what
was good in the past and the present, and he preached in a hopeful
spirit a gospel of yet better things for the future. He was an artist in
living. Amid all the diversity of his work there was an essential unity
in his life. The men with whom he worked were the friends whom he
welcomed in his leisure; the crafts by which he made his wealth were the
pastimes over which he talked and thought in his home; his dreams for
the future were framed in the setting of the mediaeval romances which he
loved from his earliest days. Though he lived often in an atmosphere of
conflict, and often knew failure, he has left us an example which may
help to fill the emptiness and to kindle the lukewarmness of many an
unquiet heart, and may reconcile the discords that mar the lives of too
many of his countrymen in this age of transition and of doubt.
[Illustration: JOHN RICHARD GREEN
From a drawing by Frederick Sandys]
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
1837-83
1837. Born at Oxford, December 12.
1845-52. Magdalen College School, Oxford.
1852-4. With a private tutor.
1855-9. Jesus College, Oxford.
1861-3. Curate at Goswell Road, E.C.
1863-4. Curate at Hoxton.
1864-9. Mission Curate and Rector of St. Philip's, Stepney.
1869. Abandons parochial work. Librarian at Lambeth Palace.
1867-73. Contributor to _Saturday Review_.
1874. _Short History of the English People_ published.
1877. Marries Miss Alice Stopford.
1877-80. Four volumes of larger _History of the English People_ published.
1880-1. Winter in Egypt.
1882. January, _Making of England_ published.
1883. January, _Conquest of England_ finished (published posthumously).
Last illness. Death, March 7.
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
HISTORIAN
The eighteenth century did some things with a splendour and a
completeness which is the despair of later, more restlessly striving
generations. Barren though it was of poetry and high imagination, it
gave birth to our most famous works in political economy, in biography,
and in history; and it has set up for us classic models of imperishable
fame. But the wisdom of Adam Smith, the shrewd observation of Boswell,
the learning of Gibbon, did not readily find their way into the
market-place. Outside of the libraries and the booksellers' rows in
London and Edinburgh they were in slight demand. Even when the volumes
of Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson had been added to the library shelves,
where Clarendon and Burnet reigned before them, too often they only
passed to a state of dignified retirement and slumber. No hand disturbed
them save that of the conscientious housemaid who dusted them in due
season. They were part of the furnishings indispensable to the elegance
of a 'gentleman's seat'; and in many cases the guests, unless a Gibbon
were among them, remained ignorant whether the labels on their backs
told a truthful tale, or whether they disguised an ingenious box or
backgammon board, or formed a mere covering to the wall.
The fault was with the public more than with the authors. Those who
ventured on the quest would find noble eloquence in Clarendon, lively
narrative in Burnet, critical analysis in Hume; but the indolence of the
Universities and the ignorance of the general public unfitted them for
the effort required to value a knowledge of history or to take steps to
acquire it. It is true that the majestic style of Clarendon was puzzling
to a generation accustomed to prose of the fashion inaugurated by Dryden
and Addison; and that Hume and other historians, with all their
precision and clearness, were wanting in fervour and imagination. But
the record of English history was so glorious, so full of interest for
the patriot and for the politician, that it should have spoken for
itself, and the apathy of the educated classes was not creditable to
them. Even so Ezekiel found the Israelites of his day, forgetful of
their past history and its lessons, sunk in torpor and indifference. He
looked upon the wreckage of his nation, settled in the Babylonian plain;
in his fervent imagination he saw but a valley of dry bones, and called
aloud to the four winds that breath should come into them and they
should live.
In our islands the prophets who wielded the most potent spell came from
beyond the Border. Walter Scott exercised the wider influence, Carlyle
kindled the intenser flame. As artists they followed very different
methods. Scott, like a painter, wielding a vigorous brush full charged
with human sympathies, set before us a broad canvas in lively colours
filled with a warm diffused light. Carlyle worked more in the manner of
an etcher, the mordant acid eating deep into the plate. From the depth
of his shadows would stand out single figures or groups, in striking
contrast, riveting the attention and impressing themselves on the
memory. Scott drew thousands of readers to sympathize with the men and
women of an earlier day, and to feel the romance that attaches to lost
causes in Church and State. Carlyle set scores of students striving to
recreate the great men of the past and by their standards to reject the
shibboleths of the present. However different were the methods of the
enchanters, the dry bones had come to life. Mediaeval abbot and
crusader, cavalier and covenanter, Elizabeth and Cromwell, spoke once
more with a living voice to ears which were opened to hear.
Nor did the English Universities fail to send forth men who could meet
the demands of a generation which was waking up to a healthier political
life. The individual who achieved most in popularizing English history
was Macaulay, who began to write his famous Essays in 1825, the year
after he won his fellowship at Trinity, though the world had to wait
another twenty-five years for his History of the English Revolution.
Since then Cambridge historians like Acton, or Maitland, have equalled
or excelled him in learning, though none has won such brilliant success.
But it was the Oxford School which did most, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, to clear up the dark places of our national record
and to present a complete picture of the life of the English people.
Freeman delved long among the chronicles of Normans and Saxons; Stubbs
no less laboriously excavated the charters of the Plantagenets; Froude
hewed his path through the State papers of the Tudors; while Gardiner
patiently unravelled the tangled skein of Stuart misgovernment. John
Richard Green, one of the youngest of the school, took a wider subject,
the continuous history of the English people. He was fortunate in
writing at a time when the public was prepared to find the subject
interesting, but he himself did wonders in promoting this interest, and
since then his work has been a lamp to light teachers on the way.
In a twofold way Green may claim to be a child of Oxford. Not only was
he a member of the University, but he was a native of the town, being
born in the centre of that ancient city in the year of Queen Victoria's
accession. His family had been engaged in trade there for two
generations without making more than a competence; and even before his
father died in 1852 they were verging on poverty. Of his parents, who
were kind and affectionate, but not gifted with special talents, there
is little to be told; the boy was inclined, in after life, to attribute
any literary taste that he may have inherited to his mother. From his
earliest days reading was his passion, and he was rarely to be seen
without a book. Old church architecture and the sound of church bells
also kindled his childish enthusiasms, and he would hoard his pence to
purchase the joy of being admitted into a locked-up church. So he was
fortunate in being sent at the age of eight to Magdalen College School,
where he had daily access to the old buildings of the College and the
beautiful walks which had been trodden by the feet of Addison a century
and a half before. An amusing contrast could be drawn between the
decorous scholar of the seventeenth century, handsome, grave of mien,
calmly pacing the gravel walk, while he tasted the delights of classic
literature, and little 'Johnny Green', a mere shrimp of a boy with
bright eyes and restless ways, darting here and there, eagerly searching
for anything new or exciting which he might find, whether in the bushes
or in the pages of some romance which he was carrying.
But, for all his lively curiosity, Green seems to have got little out of
his lessons at school. The classic languages formed the staple of his
education, and he never had that power of verbal memory which could
enable him to retain the rules of the Greek grammar or to handle the
Latin language with the accuracy of a scholar. He soon gave up trying to
do so. Instead of aspiring to the mastery of accidence and syntax, he
aimed rather at securing immunity from the rod. At Magdalen School it
was still actively in use; but there were certain rules about the number
of offences which must be committed in a given time to call for its
application. Green was clever enough to notice this, and to shape his
course accordingly; and thus his lessons became, from a sporting point
of view, an unqualified success.
But his real progress in learning was due to his use of the old library
in his leisure hours. Here he made acquaintance with Marco Polo and
other books of travel; here he read works on history of various kinds,
and became prematurely learned in the heresies of the early Church. The
views which he developed, and perhaps stated too crudely, did not win
approval. He was snubbed by examiners for his interest in heresiarchs,
and gravely reproved by Canon Mozley[56] for justifying the execution of
Charles I. The latter subject had been set for a prize essay; and the
Canon was fair-minded enough to give the award to the boy whose views he
disliked, but whose merit he recognized. Partial and imperfect though
this education was, the years spent under the shadow of Magdalen must
have had a deep influence on Green; but he tells us little of his
impressions, and was only half conscious of them at the time. The
incident which perhaps struck him most was his receiving a prize from
the hands of the aged Dr. Routh, President of the College, who had seen
Dr. Johnson in his youth, and lived to be a centenarian and the pride of
Oxford in early Victorian days.
[Note 56: Rev. J. B. Mozley, 1813-78. Canon of Worcester and Regius
Professor of Divinity at Oxford: a Tractarian; author of essays on
Strafford, Laud, &c.]
Green's school life ended in 1852, the year in which his father died. He
was already at the top of the school; and to win a scholarship at the
University was now doubly important for him. This he achieved at Jesus
College, Oxford, in December 1854, after eighteen months spent with a
private tutor; and, as he was too young to go into residence at once, he
continued for another year to read by himself. Though he gave closer
attention to his classics he did not drop his general reading; and it
was a landmark in his career when at the age of sixteen he made
acquaintance with Gibbon.
His life as an undergraduate was not very happy and was even less
successful than his days at school, though the fault did not lie with
him. Shy and sensitive as he was, he had a sociable disposition and was
naturally fitted to make friends. But he had come from a solitary life
at a tutor's to a college where the men were clannish, most of them
Welshmen, and few of them disposed to look outside their own circle for
friends. Had Green been as fortunate as William Morris, his life at
Oxford might have been different; but there was no Welshman at Jesus of
the calibre of Burne-Jones; and Green lived in almost complete isolation
till the arrival of Boyd Dawkins in 1857. The latter, who became in
after years a well-known professor of anthropology, was Green's first
real friend, and the letters which he wrote to him show how necessary it
was for Green to have one with whom he could share his interests and
exchange views freely. Dawkins had the scientific, Green the literary,
nature and gifts; but they had plenty of common ground and were always
ready to explore the records of the past, whether they were to be found
in barrows, in buildings, or in books. If Dawkins was the first friend,
the first teacher who influenced him was Arthur Stanley, then Canon of
Christ Church and Professor of Ecclesiastical History. An accident led
Green into his lecture-room one day; but he was so much delighted with
the spirit of Stanley's teaching, and the life which he imparted to
history, that he became a constant member of the class. And when Stanley
made overtures of friendship, Green welcomed them warmly.
A new influence had come into his life. Not only was his industry, which
had been feeble and irregular, stimulated at last to real effort; but
his attitude to religious questions and to the position of the English
Church was at this time sensibly modified. He had come up to the
University a High Churchman; like many others at the time of the Oxford
Movement, he had been led half-way towards Roman Catholicism, stirred by
the historical claims and the mystic spell of Rome. But from now
onwards, under the guidance of Stanley and Maurice, he adopted the views
of what is called the 'Broad Church Party', which suited his moral
fervour and the liberal character of his social and political opinions.
Despite, however, the stimulus given to him (perhaps too late) by
Dawkins and Stanley, Green won no distinctions at the University, and
few men of his day could have guessed that he would ever win distinction
elsewhere. He took a dislike to the system of history-teaching then in
vogue, which consisted in demanding of all candidates for the schools a
knowledge of selected fragments of certain authors, giving them no
choice or scope in the handling of wider subjects. He refused to enter
for a class in the one subject in which he could shine, and managed to
scrape through his examination by combining a variety of uncongenial
subjects. This was perverse, and he himself recognized it to be so
afterwards. All the while there was latent in him the talent, and the
ambition, which might have enabled him to surpass all his
contemporaries. His one literary achievement of the time was unknown to
the men of his college, but it is of singular interest in view of what
he came to achieve later. He was asked by the editor of the _Oxford
Chronicle_, an old-established local paper, to write two articles on the
history of the city of Oxford. To most undergraduates the town seemed a
mere parasite of the University; to Green it was an elder sister. Many
years later he complained in one of his letters that the city had been
stifled by the University, which in its turn had suffered similar
treatment from the Church. To this task, accordingly, he brought a ready
enthusiasm and a full mind; and his articles are alive with the essence
of what, since the days of his childhood, he had observed, learnt, and
imagined, in the town of his birth. We see the same spirit in a letter
which he wrote to Dawkins in 1860, telling him how he had given up a day
to following the Mayor of Oxford when he observed the time-honoured
custom of beating the bounds of the city. He describes with gusto how he
trudged along roads, clambered over hedges, and even waded through
marshes in order to perform the rite with scrupulous thoroughness. But
it was years before he could find an audience who would appreciate his
power of handling such a subject, and his University career must, on his
own evidence, be written down a failure.
When it was over he was confronted with the need for choosing a
profession. It had strained the resources of his family to give him a
good education, and now he must fend for himself. To a man of his nature
and upbringing the choice was not wide. His age and his limited means
put the Services out of the question; nor was he fitted to embark in
trade. Medicine would revolt his sensibility, law would chill his
imagination, and journalism did not yet exist as a profession for men of
his stamp. In the teaching profession, for which he had such rare gifts,
he would start handicapped by his low degree. In any case, he had for
some time cherished the idea of taking Holy Orders. The ministry of the
Church would give him a congenial field of work and, so he hoped, some
leisure to continue his favourite studies. Perhaps he had not the same
strong conviction of a 'call' as many men of his day in the High Church
or Evangelical parties; but he was, at the time, strongly drawn by the
example and teaching of Stanley and Maurice, and he soon showed that it
was not merely for negative reasons or from half-hearted zeal that he
had made the choice. When urged by Stanley to seek a curacy in West
London, he deliberately chose the East End of the town because the need
there was greater and the training in self-sacrifice was sterner; and
there is no doubt that the popular sympathies, which the reading of
history had already implanted in him, were nourished and strengthened by
nine years of work among the poor. The exertion of parish work taxed his
physical resources, and he was often incapacitated for short periods by
the lavish way in which he spent himself. Indeed, but for this constant
drain upon his strength, he might have lived a longer life and left more
work behind him.
Of the parishes which he served, the last and the most interesting was
St. Philip's, Stepney, to which he went from Hoxton in 1864. It was a
parish of 16,000 souls, lying between Whitechapel and Poplar, not far
from the London Docks. Dreary though the district seems to us
to-day--and at times Green was fully conscious of this--he could
re-people it in imagination with the men of the past, and find pleasure
in the noble views on the river and the crowded shipping that passed so
near its streets. But above all he found a source of interest in the
living individuals whom he met in his daily round and who needed his
help; and though he achieved signal success in the pulpit by his power
of extempore preaching, he himself cared more for the effect of his
visiting and other social work. Sermons might make an impression for the
moment; personal sympathy, shown in the moment when it was needed, might
change the whole current of a life.
For children his affection was unfailing; and for the humours of older
people he had a wide tolerance and charity. His letters abound with
references to this side of his work. He tells us of his 'polished' pork
butcher and his learned parish clerk, and boasts how he won the regard
of the clerk's Welsh wife by correctly pronouncing the magic name of
Machynlleth. He gave a great deal of time to his parishioners, to
consulting his churchwardens, to starting choirs, to managing classes
and parish expeditions. He could find time to attend a morning police
court when one of his boys got into difficulties, or to hold a midnight
service for the outcasts of the pavement.
When cholera broke out in Stepney in 1866, Green visited the sick and
dying in rooms that others did not dare to enter, and was not afraid to
help actively in burying those who had died of the disease. At holiday
gatherings he was the life and soul of the body, 'shocking two prim
maiden teachers by starting kiss-in-the-ring', and surprising his most
vigorous helpers by his energy and decision. On such occasions he
exhausted himself in the task of leadership, and he was no less generous
in giving financial help to every parish institution that was in need.