504

PERSONAL

I recall little or nothing of childhood beyond a morbid shyness, a love of books, a habit of singing about the house, a sense of being weaker and smaller than other boys. Our home was not a happy one-the only gleam of light in it was my father's love for and pride in me. He was always very gentle and considerate; he brought me up by love and not by fear, and always hated to hear of punishment and blows. I was fourteen when he died, but I recall little of him save this vague tenderness; a walk when he encouraged me to question him "about everything;" his love of my voice-a clear, weak, musical child's voice-and of my musical ear and faculty for catching tunes; and his pride in my quickness and the mass of odd things which I knew. . . . All was not fun or poetry in these early schooldays. The old brutal flogging was still in favour, and the old stupid system of forcing boys to learn by rote. I was set to learn Latin grammar from a grammar in Latin! and a flogging every week did little to help me. I was simply stupefied,-for my father had never struck me, and at first the cane hurt me like a blow, but the "stupid stage" soon came, and I used to fling away my grammar into old churchyards and go up for my "spinning" as doggedly as the rest. Everything had to be learned by memory, and by memory then, as now, I could learn nothing. How I picked up Latin Heaven knows; but somehow I did pick it up, and when we got to books where head went for something, I began to rise fast among my fellow-schoolboys. But I really hated my work, and my mind gained what it gained

not from my grammars and construing, but from an old school library which opened to me pleasures I had never dreamed of.GREEN, JOHN RICHARD, 1873, Letter, Nov. 4; Letters, ed. Stephen, pp. 3, 6.

My first acquaintance with the late J. R. Green was made at Oxford in the autumn of 1859, when he was a senior man, about to pass his first school in greats, and I was in my freshman's term. . . . When I first met him I was at once struck with his bright, speaking eyes, and his remarkably sparkling conversation, the like of which I have never heard since. I was once able to identify him by his conversation. A country clergyman mentioned to me his having met at a dinner in a friend's house a most wonderful person, who made himself exceedingly pleasant, and enchanted everyone by the racy way in which he said whatever he had to say. My friend did not know who he was, but there was no mistaking the description; only one man in Oxford answered to it; that was J. R. Green. . . . To those whom he liked no one could make himself so delightful, but no one in his younger days made himself more enemies. He had a terrible gift of sarcasm; he knew it, it gave him a sense of power, and he may possibly have used it sometimes for the pleasure of using it. He was a most awkward opponent in any wordy debate, his repartee was instantaneous and decisive, never spiteful nor malicious. He was not popular with his contemporaries; such persons seldom are; the fault was probably more often theirs than his. To his intimates his singular individuality of character, his tender love, his perpetual wit, and his great power

of sympathy rendered him the most fascinating of friends. Half-hours in his company were never dull; and, when the need arose, no one could show more delicate or more helpful sympathy than such as I have known him to bestow on those whom he had made his friends.-BROWNE, H. L., 1883, Some Personal Reminiscences of J. R. Green, The Academy, vol. 23, p. 187.

Incomplete as his life seems, maimed and saddened by the sense of powers which ill health would not suffer to produce their due results, it was not an unhappy one, for he had the 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. Society never 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 he never boasted of it, the fame his books had won, and the splendid 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 most perfect sympathy, and enabled him, by her industry and vigour, to prosecute labours which physical weakness must otherwise have checked before the best of all his works had been accomplished.-BRYCE, JAMES, 1883, John Richard Green, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 48, p. 65.

There was probably no man whose writings and whose personality had a closer connexion with one another than those of John Richard Green. A singular mixture of strength and weakness distinguished him; but neither strength nor weakness could have been spared; both went to make up a character in which even the weaker elements became a kind of strength. And both his character and his writings were deeply impressed by the special circumstances of his life. Nothing perhaps tended more to make Green and his writings what they were than his birth as an Oxford citizen. It told more to the advantage of the readers of his writings than it did to the advantage of his own personal career; but, on the whole, it was a strengthening and ennobling element. His native city and its history were ever near to his heart. Those who knew him best in the days when his mind and character were forming were

struck, and were sometimes annoyed, by a kind of dislike which he often expressed towards the University of Oxford. This is a feeling which is certainly not common among its members, at any rate not among such members of it as Green. Now in this there was something of that waywardness and capriciousness which was so apt to come out in all that he did and wrote, something too of that love of saying startling things in a startling way which was perhaps natural in one of the very best of talkers.FREEMAN, EDWARD A., 1883, John Richard Green, British Quarterly Review, vol. 78 p.

120.

...

His was a nature which could not take rest whilst any work remained to be done, and in the East-end the work of a parson of genius was no less than infinite. Înto each position to which he was appointed-St. Barnabas, Holy Trinity, Hoxton, a missioncuracy at St. Peter's, Stepney, and finally the neighbouring vicarage of St. Philip'she threw himself with the whole energy of his nature, and from each in turn, after an effort more or less prolonged, he withdrew with shattered health. . . . But he retired from the post he had so bravely held, a broken man. The seeds of consumption had been sown unsuspected by himself in those arduous years, and almost immediately declared themselves. Henceforward he was doomed, as he said, to the life of the student and the invalid, flitting winter by winter to those southern shores, whence came back to his friends in England the sheaves of charming letters he has left behind him. Of those days, the days of his travel, the days of his best historic work, the days of perfect happiness in married life, the days over which hung always the close shadow of the end which now at last has come, there is no space to speak. Despite the depression of illness and of waning strength, they were perhaps his happiest days, not only on account of the dear companionship in which he dwelt, but because he was giving what remained of life undividedly to the work he held to be his duty. Indeed, he never ceased working. Years before he had truly, though half-lightly, forecast his own epitaph, "He died learning." When he was too weak to sit, his toil went forward on the sofa, and when he could not rise, it still went forward on his bed. Amidst all the vivacity and the merriment which no inroads of disease impaired, he felt, like his

favourite Bede, the responsibility of knowledge, and would fain have passed it on before the end came.-GELL, PHILIP LYTTLETON, 1883, John Richard Green, Fortnightly Review, vol. 39, pp. 741, 747.

That slight nervous figure, below the medium height; that tall forehead, with the head prematurely bald; the quick but small eyes, rather close together; the thin month, with lips seldom at rest, but often closed tightly as though the teeth were clenched with an odd kind of latent energy beneath them; the slight, almost feminine hands; the little stoop; the quick alert step; the flashing exuberance of spirits; the sunny smile; the torrent of quick invective, scorn, or badinage, exchanged in a moment for a burst of sympathy or a delightful and prolonged flow of narrative-all this comes back to me, vividly! And what narrative, what anecdote, what glancing wit! What a talker! A man who shrank from society, and yet was so fitted to adorn and instruct every company he approached, from a parochial assembly to a statesman's reception!... Green was an omnivorous reader even in those busy days. No new book escaped him, and he seemed to master its contents with a bewildering rapidity. He was full of quick discernment; and I remember one night his reading out some passages of Swinburne's then new book of "Poems and Ballads," selected by the Athenæum for scathing ridicule, and saying, "This is the greatest master of poetical language since Shelley; but he can't think." -HAWEIS, HUGH REGINALD, 1883, John Richard Green, Contemporary Review, vol. 43, pp. 734, 739.

It was in 1863 that we met; I was not yet a professor, he had not begun to wear the air of an ascetic. We were invited to Wells, to a meeting of the Somerset Archæological Society, to stay with a common friend whom you will have no difficulty in identifying. I was told, "if you leave the station at two you will meet Green, and possibly Dimock," the biographer of St. Hugh whom I knew already. I knew by description the sort of man I was to meet; I recognised him as he got into the Wells carriage, holding in his hand a volume of Renan. I said to myself, "if I can hinder, he shall not read that book." We sat opposite and fell immediately into conversation. I dare say that I aired my erudition so far as to tell him that I was going to the

Archæological meeting and to stay at Somerleaze. "Oh, then," he said, "you must be either Stubbs or Dimock." I replied, "I am not Dimock." "I am not Dimock." He came to me at Navestock afterwards, and that volume of Renan found its way uncut into my wastepaper basket. That is all; a matter of confusion and inversion, and so, they say, history is written. Well, perhaps a friendship between two historical workers may be called a historic friendship and, to be historical, should gather some of the mist of fable about its beginning: anyhow it was a friendship that lasted for his life, and the loss of which I shall never cease regretting. -STUBBS, WILLIAM, 1884, A Last Statutory Public Lecture, May 8; The Study of Medieval and Modern History and Kindred Subjects, p. 377.

It is now just twenty years since I made Green's acquaintance, and my recollections of what speedily ripened into a warm friendship are still fresh. He had reluctantly decided to retire from the East-end parish on account of failing health. He still wore the clerical costume and the white tie, and I remember well the impression his appearance made upon me. His figure was slight and below middle height, but, once you had seen him, your gaze was concentrated on his face and head. Mr. Sandys's portrait, prefixed to the "Conquest of England," is very like in the intensity of the expression, but not so much so in the features. The nose was very small, and was overshadowed by the brow of the highly-developed forehead. In a cloak-room you could always recognize his hat by its extraordinary diameter. The eyes were rather sunk, and were not, I think, quite straight; but no one who ever encountered them could forget their keenness their appearance of being able to see through anything. He was very conscious of his own bodily insignificance, and I think, of all the countless anecdotes he knew, none pleased him more than that which represents Wilkes as saying, "Give me half an hour's start, and I can beat the handsomest man in England." He was a great admirer of physical beauty, both in men and women, and especially of tallness. -LOFTIE, W. J., 1888, John Richard Green, New Princeton Review, vol. 6, p. 370.

I remember that that night I renewed my acquaintance with Mr. J. R. Green, of Jesus College, who has become widely known by his "History of the English People," and

other historical writings of great value. Green died at Mentone, after residing there several winters, and on his grave in the Mentone Cemetery there is the striking inscription, "he died learning." He rather scandalized some of the brethren by saying that he looked upon the prophecies of Israel in much the same way as upon the prophecies of Merlin. He had a countenance of singular charm, beautiful eyes and a beaming look. Singularly enough, his first curacy had been in connection with the Pastoral Aid Society; next he was drafted off to one of those East London livings which Dr. Tait would give to his clever young men, not perhaps very much to the advantage of the East Enders, and he was afterwards transferred to the Librarianship of Lambeth, than which a more appropriate appointment could not have been made.-ANON., 1889, Reminiscences of a Literary and Clerical Life.

Another remarkable man I saw but once [in 1881], but that once made a great impression on me-J. R. Green., He was in a very far stage of consumption when I paid him a visit in Kensington Square. He only could speak in a whisper, but his talk was full of fire, ideas, and interests in the ideas of others; and his pretty, gentle wife sat by and treasured every word he spoke, till his coughing became violent; then she took us away, telling us how she was beginning to write quite easily with her left hand to his dictation, her right being paralysed after long years of incessant work. He dictated sometimes eleven hours in the day.-NORTH, MARIANNE, 1892, Recollections of a Happy Life, ed. Mrs. Symonds, vol. II, p. 216.

During our walks Mr. Freeman also talked much of his special friends. For Mr. J. R. Green, whom he always called "Johnny," he had a strong affection. Mr. Freeman was fourteen years his senior, and had known him ever since his boyhood, when he carried him on his shoulders. remember the day in May, 1882, when he took me to lunch at Mr. Green's house in London, and there I saw for myself how much the elder and the younger writer were to each other. It was only the year before Mr. Green's death, and he looked very frail. He wore a little black skull-cap. His eyes were bright and his manner and talk particularly charming. That he shared Mr. Freeman's vivid sense of the ludicrous,

was shown by the frequent laughter at that lunch-table. Among other things which amused him, was Mr. Freeman's declaration that he never let a man die at the end of a chapter in the "Norman Conquest," because Johnny told him not to.-PORTER, DELIA LYMAN, 1893, Mr. Freeman at Home, Scribner's Magazine, vol. 14, p. 620.

All his friends speak of the singular brilliancy of his conversation, and attribute it partly to the vivacity and alertness of his intellect, and the readiness with which mere statements of fact grouped themselves in his mind into vivid pictures. But it also implied the quick sympathy of an exquisitely sensitive nature. If he could appreciate Freeman's historical dissertations, he could enjoy the charm of naïve simplicity in women and children.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1901, ed. Letters of John Richard Green, p. 67.

This distaste for the routine methods of education debarred him from high university distinctions, but was in reality, as the event proved, his scholarly and artistic salvation. His genius was too original to suffer compression into the academic mould, which would have deadened his most vital intellectual impulses.-PAYNE, WILLIAM MORTON, 1901, John Richard Green, The Dial, vol. 31, p. 430.

Green, born in Oxford, and spending many of his happiest years there, knew and loved both town and University. He went to Magdalen Grammar School at the age of eight, and he won an Open Fellowship at Jesus at sixteen, before he was old enough to go into residence. His biographers tell us that he entered college a friendless, homeless boy, and that he continued, as an undergraduate, to lead a solitary life. His Welsh co-students, with their close homeassociations, looked upon him as an English interloper, and left him much to himself. But he found books in the Library, sermons in the stones of Oxford, and good in everything. He read enormously; and he wandered, in his solitary, studious way, among the spots and the buildings which were rich in their associations of ancient times, recalling, as he went, the memories of the past, and in his own mind combining them and putting together in coherent form. . . . His rooms at Jesus are unknown; and the Hall-porter, in 1899, had never heard his name.-HUTTON, LAURENCE, 1903, Literary Landmarks of Oxford, pp. 116, 117.

SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 1874

Mr. Green's style is eminently readable and attractive. A lively imagination, not always under the most rigid control, imparts its own colors to the dry details of history, where a more scrupulous or conscientious writer would have wearied himself, and fatigued his readers, unwilling to venture beyond the arid region of facts.

Upon inaccuracies in detail we have not insisted, prejudicial as such inaccuracies must be in a manual intended for schools, for it is not to be expected that in so wide a subject they could be altogether avoided. Our objections are of a graver and more general kind. It is against the whole tone and teaching of the book that we feel ourselves called upon most emphatically to protest. Under the disguise of a school history, Mr. Green has disseminated some very violent opinions in politics and religion. His design is not the less subtle and dangerous because, in accomplishing this object, he has been misled into ingenious perversions of facts, and in the ardour of his temperament has misrepresented the conduct and motives of menof those especially who have upheld the Church and the Monarchy. His sympathies seem not with order, but with disorder; not with established Government, but with those who have attempted to overthrow it. In the most ardent and furious of the leaders of the French Revolution he finds "a real nobleness of aim and temper," which he denies to the champions of good government, or the peaceful upholders of religion and morality. To him the aristocracy, in conjunction with the Monarchy, seem the plagues of mankind, united in a dire conspiracy against popular freedom, progress, and development. Is this a history, we ask, to be put into the hands of the young and incautious? Is it from this they are to learn wisdom and moderation, to form just and equitable judgments of past events, or of the great actors of times that are gone? Is this the teaching by which they are to estimate rightly the deeds of kings, the worth of an aristocracy, the beneficial effects of order and religion? We think not. We have warned our readers against the errors and tendencies of Mr. Green's book. It is for them to exercise the necessary precautions, both for themselves and for those who are committed to their

care and guidance.-BREWER, J. S., 187681, A Short History of the English People, English Studies, ed. Wace, pp. 50, 102.

It

This book has extraordinary merits. is rather a commentary on the history of England than a history itself, and therefore those who already have some knowledge of the subject are likely to be most profited by its use. The qualities which have given to the work its great popularity are the brilliancy of its style, the breadth of its generalizations, the vividness with which it portrays the general drift of events, the clearness with which it shows the relations of cause and effect, the prominence which it gives to the literary and social progress of the people, and the skill with which the author has made his selections and exclusions. The book has been shown to be somewhat inaccurate in matters of minor detail; but the inaccuracies are, for the most part, such as may easily be remedied by careful revision, without disturbing the general arrangement of the work. For the purposes of the general reader it is superior to all other works in a single volume. Its value is also increased by a carefully drawn list of authorities at the beginning of each subject. These lists afford a somewhat comprehensive and very valuable bibliography of English history.-ADAMS, CHARLES KENDALL, 1882, A Manual of Historical Literature, p. 467.

His accuracy has been much disputed. 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 he was on the whole 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, but this often arises from the summary method of treatment. 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, but 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