I wish indeed that I had the tongues of men and of angels to express the
admiration of the reading public of America for the History of John
Richard Green. I suppose that he has had more readers in our country
than any other historian except Macaulay, and he has shaped the opinions
of men who read, more than any writers of history except those whom John
Morley called the great born men of letters,--Gibbon, Macaulay, and
Carlyle.
I think it is the earlier volumes rather than the last volume of his
more extended work which have taken hold of us. Of course we thrill at
his tribute to Washington, where he has summed up our reverence, trust,
and faith in him in one single sentence which shows true appreciation
and deep feeling; and it flatters our national vanity, of which we have
a goodly stock, to read in his fourth volume that the creation of the
United States was one of the turning points in the history of the world.
No saying is more trite, at any rate to an educated American audience,
than that the development of the English nation is one of the most
wonderful things, if not the most wonderful thing, which history
records. That history before James I is our own, and, to our general
readers, it has never been so well presented as in Green's first two
volumes. The victories of war are our own. It was our ancestors who
preserved liberty, maintained order, set the train moving toward
religious toleration, and wrought out that language and literature which
we are proud of, as well as you.
For my own part, I should not have liked to miss reading and re-reading
the five chapters on Elizabeth in the second volume. What eloquence in
simply the title of the last,--The England of Shakespeare! And in fact
my conception of Elizabeth, derived from Shakespeare, is confirmed by
Green. As I think how much was at stake in the last half of the
sixteenth century, and how well the troubles were met by that great
monarch and the wise statesman whom she called to her aid, I feel that
we could not be what we are, had a weak, irresolute sovereign been at
the head of the state.
With the power of a master Green manifests what was accomplished. At the
accession of Elizabeth--"Never" so he wrote--"had the fortunes of
England sunk to a lower ebb. The loss of Calais gave France the mastery
of the Channel. The French King in fact 'bestrode the realm, having one
foot in Calais, and the other in Scotland.'"
And at the death of Elizabeth, thus Green tells the story: "The danger
which had hitherto threatened our national existence and our national
unity had disappeared: France clung to the friendship of England, Spain
trembled beneath its blows."
With the wide range of years of his subject, with a grasp of an extended
period akin to Gibbon's, complete accuracy was, of course, not
attainable, but Samuel R. Gardiner once told me that Green, although
sometimes inaccurate in details, gave a general impression that was
justifiable and correct; and that is in substance the published opinion
of Stubbs.
Goethe said that in reading Moliere you perceive that he possessed the
charm of an amiable nature in habitual contact with good society. So we,
who had not the advantage of personal intercourse, divined was the case
of Green; and when the volume of Letters appeared, we saw that we had
guessed correctly. But not until then did we know of his devotion to his
work, and his heroic struggle, which renders the story of his short and
brilliant career a touching and fascinating biography of a historian who
made his mark upon his time.