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The name of Thomas Green, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford, was not, during his lifetime, widely known outside the University itself. But he is still remembered by students of metaphysics and ethics as one of the most vigorous thinkers of his time; and his personality was a striking one, which made a deep and lasting impression on those with whom he came in contact.

He was born in Yorkshire in 1836, the son of a country clergyman; was educated at Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow in 1860, and a tutor in 1869. In 1867 he was an unsuccessful candidate for a chair of philosophy at St. Andrews, and in 1878 was elected Professor of Moral Philosophy in his own University, which he never thereafter quitted. He was married in 1869 and died in 1882. It was a life externally uneventful, but full of thought and work, and latterly crowned by great influence over the younger and great respect from the senior members of the University.

I can best describe Green as he was in his undergraduate days, for it was then that I saw most of him. His appearance was striking, and made him a familiar figure even to those who did not know him personally. Thick black hair, a sallow complexion, dark eyebrows, deep-set eyes of rich brown with a peculiarly steadfast look, were the features which first struck one; and with these there was a remarkable seriousness of expression, an air of solidity and quiet strength. He knew comparatively few people, and of these only a very few intimately, having no taste or turn for those sports in which university acquaintances are most frequently made, and seldom appearing at breakfast or wine parties. This caused him to pass for harsh or unsocial; and I remember having felt a slight sense of alarm the first time I found myself seated beside him. Though we belonged to different colleges I had heard a great deal about him, for Oxford undergraduates are warmly interested in one another, and at the time I am recalling they had an inordinate fondness for measuring the intellectual gifts and conjecturing the future of those among their contemporaries who seemed likely to attain eminence.

Those who came to know Green intimately, soon perceived that under his reserve there lay not only a capacity for affection--no man was more tenacious in his friendships--but qualities that made him an attractive companion. His tendency to solitude sprang less from pride or coldness, than from the occupation of his mind by subjects which seldom weigh on men of his age. He had, even when a boy at school , been grappling with the problems of metaphysics and theology, and they had given a tinge of gravity to his manner. The relief to that gravity lay in his humour, which was not only abundant but genial and sympathetic. It used to remind us of Carlyle--he had both the sense of humour and an underlying Puritanism in common with Carlyle, one of the authors who had most influenced him--but in Green the Puritan tinge was more kindly, and, above all, more lenient to ordinary people. While averse, perhaps too severely averse, to whatever was luxurious or frivolous in undergraduate life, he had the warmest interest in, and the strongest sympathy for, the humbler classes. Loving social equality, and filled with a sense of the dignity of simple human nature, he liked to meet farmers and tradespeople on their own level, and knew how to do so without seeming to condescend; indeed nothing pleased him better, than when they addressed him as one of themselves, the manner of his talk to them, as well as the extreme plainness of his dress, conducing to such mistakes. The belief in the duty of approaching the people directly and getting them to think and to form and express their own views in their own way was at the root of all his political doctrines.

Though apt to be silent in general company, no one could be more agreeable when you were alone with him. We used to say of him--and his seniors said the same--that one never talked to him without carrying away something to ponder over. On everything he said or wrote there was stamped the impress of a strong individuality, a mind that thought for itself, a character ruggedly original, wherein grimness was mingled with humour, and practical shrewdness with a love for abstract speculation. His independence appeared even in the way he pursued his studies. With abilities of the highest order, he cared comparatively little for the distinctions which the University offers; choosing rather to follow out his own line of reading in the way he judged permanently useful than to devote himself to the pursuit of honours and prizes.

He was constitutionally lethargic, found it hard to rouse himself to exertion, and was apt to let himself be driven to the last moment in finishing a piece of work. There was a rule in his College that an essay should be given in every Friday evening. His was, to the great annoyance of the dons, never ready till Saturday. But when it did go in, it was the weightiest and most thoughtful, as well as the most eloquent, that the College produced. This indolence had one good result. It disposed him to brood over subjects, while others were running quickly through many books and getting up subjects for examination. It contributed to that depth and systematic quality which struck us in his thinking, and made him seem mature beside even the ablest of his contemporaries. When others were being, so to speak, blown hither and thither, picking up and fascinated by new ideas, which they did not know how to fit in with their old ones, he seemed to have already formed for himself, at least in outline, a scheme of philosophy and life coherent and complete. There was nothing random or scattered in his ideas; his mind, like his style of writing, which ran into long and complicated sentences, had a singular connectedness. You felt that all its principles were in relation with one another. This maturity in his mental attitude gave him an air of superiority, just as the strength of his convictions gave a dogmatic quality to his deliverances. Yet in spite of positiveness and tenacity he had the saving grace of a humility which distrusted human nature in himself at least as much as he distrusted it in others. Leading an introspective life, he had many "wrestlings," and often seemed conscious of the struggle between the natural man and the spiritual man, as described in the Epistle to the Romans.

In these early days, before, and to a less extent after, taking his degree, he used to speak a good deal, mostly on political topics, at the University Debating Society, where so many generations of young men have sharpened their wits upon one another. His speaking was vigorous, shrewd, and full of matter, yet it could not be called popular. It was, in a certain sense, too good for a debating society, too serious, and without the dash and sparkle which tell upon audiences of that kind. Sometimes, however, and notably in a debate on the American War of Secession in 1863, he produced, by the concentrated energy of his language and the fierce conviction with which he spoke, a powerful effect. In a business assembly, discussing practical questions, he would soon have become prominent, and would have been capable on occasions of an oratorical success.

Retired as was Green's life, he became by degrees more and more widely known beyond the circle of his own intimates; and became also, I think, more willing to make new friends. His truthfulness appeared in this that, though powerful in argument, he did not argue for victory. When he felt the force of what was urged against him, his admissions were candid. Thus people came to respect his character, with its high sense of duty, its simplicity, its uprightness, its earnest devotion to an ideal, even more than they admired his intellectual powers. I remember one friend of my own, himself eminent in undergraduate Oxford, and belonging to another college, between which and Green's there existed much rivalry, who, having been defeated by Green in competition for a University prize, said, "If it had been any one else, I should have been vexed, but I don't mind being beaten by a man I respect so much." My friend knew Green very slightly, and had been at one time strongly prejudiced against him by rumours of his heterodox opinions.

So much for those undergraduate days on which recollection loves to dwell, but which were not days of unmixed happiness to Green, for his means were narrow and the future rose cloudy before him. When anxiety was removed by the income which a fellowship secured, he still hesitated as to his course in life. At one time he thought of journalism, or of seeking a post in the Education Office. More frequently his thoughts turned to the clerical profession. His theological opinions would not have permitted him to enter the service of the Church of England, but he did seriously consider whether he should become a Unitarian minister. It was not till he found that his college needed him as a teacher that these difficulties came to an end. Similarly he had doubted whether to devote himself to history, to theology, or to metaphysics. For history he had unquestionable gifts. With no exceptional capacity for mastering or retaining facts, he had a remarkable power of penetrating at once to the dominant facts, of grasping their connection, and working out their consequences. He had also a keen sense of the dramatic aspect of events, and a turn, not unlike Carlyle's, partly perhaps formed on Carlyle, of fastening on the details in which character shows itself, and illumining narrative by personal touches. On the problems of theology he had meditated even at school, and after taking his degree he set himself to a systematic study of the German critics, and I remember that when we were living together at Heidelberg he had begun to prepare a translation of C. F. Baur's principal treatise. As he worked slowly, the translation was never finished. Though not professing to be an adherent of the T?bingen school, he had been fascinated by Baur's ingenuity and constructive power.

His mind, though constructive, was not, having regard to its general power, either fertile or versatile. Like most of those who prefer solitary musings to the commerce of men, he had little facility, and found it hard to express his thoughts in any other words than those into which his musings had first flowed. Thus even his oral teaching was not easy to follow. An anecdote was current how when one day he had been explaining to a small class his theory of the origin of our ideas, the class listened in rapt attention to his forcible rhetoric, admiring each sentence as it fell, and thinking that all their difficulties were being removed. When he ended they expressed their gratitude for the pleasure he had given them, and were quitting the room, when one, halting at the door, said timidly, "But, Mr. Green, what did you say was really the origin of our ideas?" However, whether they were or were not capable of assimilating his doctrines, his pupils all joined in their respect for him. They felt the loftiness of his character, they recognised the fervour of his belief. He was the most powerful ethical influence, and perhaps also the most stimulative intellectual influence, that in those years played upon the minds of the ablest youth of the University. But it was a singular fact, which those who have never lived in Oxford or Cambridge may find it hard to understand, that when he rose from the post of a college tutor to that of a University professor, his influence declined, not that his powers or his earnestness waned, but because as a professor he had fewer auditors and less personal relation with them than he had commanded as a college teacher. Such is the working of the collegiate system in Oxford, curiously unfortunate when it deprives the ablest men, as they rise naturally to the highest positions, of the opportunities for usefulness they had previously enjoyed.

As his powers developed and came to be recognised, so did those slight asperities which had been observed in undergraduate days soften down and disappear. Though he lived a retired life, his work brought him into contact with a good many people, and he became more genial in general company. I remember his saying with a smile when I had lured him into Wales for a short excursion, "I don't know whether it is a sign of declining virtue, but I find as I grow older that I am less and less fond of my own company." From the first he had won the confidence and affection of his pupils. Many of them used long afterwards to say that his conduct and his teaching had been the one great example or one great influence they had found and felt in Oxford. The unclouded happiness of his married life made it easier for him to see the bright side of things, and he could not but enjoy the sense that the seed he sowed was falling on ground fit to receive it. Even when ill-health had fastened on him, and was checking both his studies and his public work, it did not affect the evenness of his temper nor sharpen the edge of his judgments of others. In earlier days these had been sometimes austere, though expressed in temperate and measured terms.

I must not forget to add that although Green's opinions were by no means orthodox, the influence he exerted while he remained a college tutor was in large measure a religious influence. As the clergyman used to be in the English Universities less of a clergyman than he was anywhere else, so conversely it caused no surprise there that a lay teacher should concern himself with the religious life of his pupils. Green, however, did more, for he on two occasions at least delivered to his pupils, before the celebration of the communion in the college chapel, addresses which were afterwards privately printed, and which present his view of the relations of ethics and religion in a way impressive even to those who may find it hard to follow the philosophical argument.

Metaphysicians are generally as little interested in practical politics as poets are, and not better suited for political life. Green was a remarkable exception. Politics were in a certain sense the strongest of his interests. To him metaphysics were not only the basis of theology, but also the basis of politics. Everything was to converge on the free life of the individual in a free State; rational faith and reason inspired by emotion were to have their perfect work in making the good citizen.

His interest in politics was perhaps less active in later years than it had been in his youth, but his principles stood unchanged. He was a thoroughgoing Liberal, or what used to be called a Radical, full of faith in the people, an advocate of pretty nearly every measure that tended to democratise English institutions, a friend of peace and of non-intervention. In our days he would have been called a Little Englander, for though his ideal of national life was lofty, the wellbeing of the masses was to him a more essential part of that ideal than any extension of territory or power. He once said that he would rather see the flag of England trailed in the dirt than add sixpence to the taxes that weigh upon the poor. In foreign politics Louis Napoleon, as the corrupter of France and the disturber of Europe, was his favourite aversion; in home politics, Lord Palmerston, as the chief obstacle to parliamentary reform. The statesman whom he most admired and trusted was Mr. Bright. A strong sense of civic duty led him to enter the City Council of Oxford, although he could ill spare from his study and his lecture-room the time which the discharge of municipal duties required. He was the first tutor who had ever offered himself to a ward for election. The townsfolk, between whom and the University there had generally been little love, the former thinking themselves looked down upon by the latter, warmly appreciated his action in coming out of his seclusion to help them, and his influence in the Council contributed to secure some useful reforms, among others, the establishment of a "grammar" or secondary school for the city.

One of the last things he wrote was a short pamphlet on freedom of contract, intended to justify the interference with bargains between landlord and tenant which was proposed by Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Bill of 1881. It is a vigorous piece of reasoning, which may still be read with interest in respect of its application of philosophical principles to a political controversy. Had he desired it he might have gone to the House of Commons as member for the city of Oxford. But he had found in the Council a field for local public work, and apart from his constitutional indolence and his declining health, he had concluded that his first duty lay in expounding his philosophical system.

Green will be long remembered in the English Universities as the strongest force in the sphere of ethical philosophy that they have seen in the second half of the nineteenth century, and remembered also as a singular instance of a metaphysician with a bent towards politics and practical life, no less than as a thinker far removed from orthodoxy who exerted over orthodox Christians a potent and inspiring religious influence.

As I have referred to the American Civil War, it is worth adding that there were no places in England where the varying fortunes of that tremendous struggle were followed with a more intense interest than in Oxford and Cambridge, and none in which so large a proportion of the educated class sympathised with the cause of the North. Mr. Goldwin Smith led the section which took that view, and which included three-fourths of the best talent in Oxford. Among the younger men Green was the most conspicuous for his ardour on behalf of the principles of human equality and freedom. He followed and watched every move in the military game. No Massachusetts Abolitionist welcomed the fall of Vicksburg with a keener joy. He used to say that the whole future of humanity was involved in the triumph of the Federal arms.

ARCHBISHOP TAIT

England is now the only Protestant country in which bishops retain some relics of the dignity and influence which belonged to the episcopal office during the Middle Ages. Even in Roman Catholic countries they have been sadly shorn of their ancient importance, though the prelates of Hungary still hold vast possessions, while in France, or Spain, or the Catholic parts of Germany a man of eminent talents and energy may occasionally use his official position to become, through his influence over Catholic electors or Catholic deputies, a considerable political factor. This happens even in the United States and Canada, though in the United States the general feeling that religion must be kept out of politics obliges ecclesiastics to use their spiritual powers cautiously and sparingly. England stands alone in the fact that although the Protestant Episcopal Church is, in so far as she is established by law, the creature and subject of the State, she is nevertheless so far independent as a religious organisation that she retains a greater power than in other Protestant nations. State establishment, though it may have depressed, has not stifled her ecclesiastical life, and an interest in ecclesiastical questions is shown by a larger proportion of her laity than one finds in Germany or the Scandinavian kingdoms. A man of shining parts has, as an English bishop, a wide field of action and influence open to him outside the sphere of theology or of purely official duty. And the opportunities of the position attain their maximum when he reaches the primatial chair of Canterbury, which is now the oldest and the most dignified of all the metropolitan sees in countries that have accepted the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Bishoprics were in those days regarded chiefly as pieces of rich preferment with which prime ministers bought the support of powerful adherents. But since the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Anglican Church has become at once more threatened and more energetic, as more of the life of the nation has flowed into her and round her, the office of a bishop has risen in importance. People show more interest in the appointments to be made, and ministers have become proportionately careful in making them. Bishops work harder and are more in the public eye now than they were eighty, or even fifty, years ago. They have lost something of the antique dignity and social consideration which they enjoyed. They no longer wear wigs or ride in State coaches. They may be seen in third-class railway carriages, or sitting on the tops of omnibuses. But they have gained by having countless opportunities opened up to them for exerting influence in philanthropic as well as in religious movements; and the more zealous among them turn these opportunities to excellent account.

Archibald Campbell Tait was educated at Glasgow University and at Balliol College, Oxford; worked at his college for some years as a tutor, succeeded Dr. Arnold as headmaster of Rugby School in 1843, became Dean of Carlisle and then Bishop of London, and was translated to Canterbury in 1868. It has been generally understood that Mr. Disraeli, then Prime Minister, suggested another prelate for the post, but the Queen, who did not share her minister's estimate of that prelate, expressed a preference for Tait. Her choice was amply justified, for Tait united, and indeed possessed in a high degree, the qualifications which have just been enumerated. He was, if it be not a paradox to say so, more remarkable as an archbishop than as a man. He had no original power as a thinker. He was not a striking preacher, and the more pains he took with his sermons the less interesting did they become. He was so far from being learned that you could say no more of him than that he was a sound scholar and a well-informed man. He was deeply and earnestly pious, but in a quiet, almost dry way, which lacked what is called unction, though it impressed those who were in close contact with him. He showed slight interest either in the historical or in the speculative side of theology. Though a good headmaster, he was not a stimulating teacher. Had he remained all his life in a subordinate position, as a college tutor at Oxford, or as canon of some cathedral, he would have discharged the duties of the position in a thoroughly satisfactory way, and would have acquired influence among his colleagues, but no one would have felt that Fate had dealt unfairly with him in depriving him of some larger career and loftier post. No one, indeed, who knew him when he was a college tutor seems to have predicted the dignities he was destined to attain, although he had shown in the theological strife that then raged at Oxford the courage and independence of his character.

In what, then, did the secret of his success lie--the secret, that is, of his acquitting himself so excellently in those dignities as to have become almost a model to his own and the next generation of what an Archbishop of Canterbury ought to be? In the statesmanlike quality of his mind. He had not merely moderation, but what, though often confounded with moderation, is something rarer and better, a steady balance of mind. He was carried about by no winds of doctrine. He seldom yielded to impulses, and was never so seduced by any one theory as to lose sight of other views and conditions which had to be regarded. He was, I think, the first man of Scottish birth who ever rose to be Primate of England, and he had the cautious self-restraint which is deemed characteristic of his nation. He knew how to be dignified without assumption, firm without vehemence, prudent without timidity, judicious without coldness. He was, above all things, a singularly just man, who recognised every one's rights, and did not seek to overbear them by an exercise of authority. He was as ready to listen to his opponents as to his friends. Indeed, he so held himself as to appear to have no opponents, but to be rather a judge before whom different advocates were stating their respective cases, than a leader seeking to make his own views or his own party prevail. Genial he could hardly be called, for there was little warmth, little display of emotion, in his manner; and the clergy noted, at least in his earlier episcopal days, a touch of the headmaster in his way of receiving them. But he was simple and kindly, capable of seeing the humorous side of things, desiring to believe the good rather than the evil, and to lead people instead of driving them. With all his caution he was direct and straightforward, saying no more than was necessary, but saying nothing he had occasion to be ashamed of. He sometimes made mistakes, but they were not mistakes of the heart, and, being free from vanity or self-conceit, he was willing in his quiet way to admit them and to alter his course accordingly. So his character by degrees gained upon the nation, and so even ecclesiastical partisanship, proverbially more bitter than political, because it springs from deeper wells of feeling, grew to respect and spare him. The influence he obtained went far to strengthen the position of the Established Church, and to keep its several parties from breaking out into more open hostility with one another. He himself inclined to what might be called a moderate Broad Church attitude, leaning more to Evangelical than to Tractarian or Romanising views in matters of doctrine. At one time the extreme High Churchmen regarded him as an enemy. But this unfriendliness had almost died away when the death of his wife and his only son , followed by his own long illness, stilled the voices of criticism.

He exerted great influence in the House of Lords by his tact, by his firmness of character, and by the consistency of his public course, as well as by powers of speech, which, matured by long practice, had risen to a high level. Without eloquence, without either imagination or passion, which are the chief elements in eloquence, he had a grave, weighty, thoughtful style which impressed that fastidious audience. His voice was strong and sonorous, his diction plain yet pure and dignified, his matter well considered. His thought moved on a high plane; he spoke as one who fully believed every word he said. The late Bishop of Winchester, the famous Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, was incomparably his superior not only as a talker but as an orator, but no less inferior in his power over the House of Lords, for so little does rhetorical brilliance count in a critical and practical assembly. Next to courage, the quality which gains trust and regard in a deliberative body is that which is familiarly described when it is said of a man, "You always know where to find him." Tait belonged to no party. But his principles, though not rigid, were fixed and settled; his words and votes were the expression of his principles.

The presence of bishops in the House of Lords is disapproved by some sections of English opinion, and there are those among the temporal peers who, quite apart from any political feeling, are said to regard them with little favour. But every one must admit that they have raised and adorned the debates in that chamber. Besides Tait and Wilberforce, two other prelates of the same generation stood in the front rank of speakers, Dr. Magee, whose wit and fire would have found a more fitting theatre in the House of Commons, and Dr. Thirlwall, a scholar and historian whose massive intellect and stately diction were too rarely used to raise great political issues above the dust-storms of party controversy.

Perhaps a doubtful service either to the Church or to the State. Yet even those who regret the connection, and who, surveying the long course of Christian history from the days of the Emperor Constantine down to our own, believe that the Christian Church would have been spiritually purer and morally more effective had she never become either the mistress or the servant or the ally of the State, but relied on her divine commission only, may wish that, when the day arrives for the ancient bond to be unloosed, it should be unloosed not through an embittered political struggle, but because the general sentiment of the nation, and primarily of religious men throughout the nation, has come to approve the change.

An admirable life of Archbishop Tait by his son-in-law, Dr. R. T. Davidson , and Canon Benham appeared in 1891.

They thought his public action scarcely consistent with the language he had used to Temple in private.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

When Mr. Anthony Trollope died at the age of sixty-seven, he was the best known of our English writers of fiction, and stood foremost among them if the double test of real merit and wide popularity be applied. Some writers, such as Wilkie Collins, may have commanded a larger sale. One writer at least, Mr. George Meredith, had produced work of far deeper insight and higher imaginative power. But the gifts of Mr. Meredith had then scarcely begun to win recognition, and not one reader knew his name for five who knew Trollope's. So Mr. Thomas Hardy had published what many continue to think his two best stories, but they had not yet caught the eye of the general public. Mrs. Oliphant, high as was the general level of her work, and inexhaustible as her fertility appeared, had not cut her name so deep upon the time as Trollope did. Everything she did was good, nothing superlatively good. No one placed Trollope in the first rank of creative novelists beside Dickens or Thackeray, or beside George Eliot, who had died two years before. But in the second rank he stood high; and though other novelists may have had as many readers as he, none was in so many ways representative of the general character and spirit of English fiction. He had established his reputation nearly thirty years before, when Thackeray and Dickens were still in the fulness of their fame; and had maintained it during the zenith of George Eliot's. For more than a generation his readers had come from the best-educated classes as well as from those who lack patience or taste for anything heavier than a story of adventure. In this respect he stood above Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Ouida, and other heroines of the circulating libraries, and also above such more artistic or less sensational writers as William Black, Walter Besant, James Payn, and Whyte Melville. None of these had, like Trollope, succeeded in making their creations a part of the common thought of cultivated Englishmen; none had, like him, given us characters which we treat as typical men and women, and discuss at a dinner-table as though they were real people. Mrs. Proudie, for instance, the Bishop of Barchester's wife, to take the most obvious instance , or Archdeacon Grantly, was when Trollope died as familiar a name to English men and women between sixty and thirty years of age as Wilkins Micawber, or Blanche Amory, or Rosamond Lydgate. There was no other living novelist of whose personages the same could be said, and perhaps none since has attained this particular kind of success.

When E. A. Freeman wrote a magazine article denouncing the cruelty of field sports, Trollope replied, defending the amusement he loved. Some one said it was a collision of two rough diamonds. But the end was that Freeman invited Trollope to come and stay with him at Wells, and they became great friends.

His range was not wide, for he could not present either grand characters or tragical situations, any more than he could break out into the splendid humour of Dickens. His wings never raised him far above the level floor of earth. But within that limited range he had surprising fertility. His clerical portrait-gallery is the most complete that any English novelist has given us. No two faces are exactly alike, and yet all are such people as one might see any day in the pulpit. So, again, there is scarcely one of his stories in which a young lady is not engaged, formally or practically, to two men at the same time, or one man more or less committed to two women; yet no story repeats exactly the situation, or raises the problem of honour and duty in quite the same form as it appears in the stories that went before. Few people who have written so much have so little appeared to be exhausting their invention.

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

John Richard Green was born in Oxford on 12th December 1837, and educated first at Magdalen College School, and afterwards, for a short time, at a private tutor's. He was a singularly quick and bright boy, and at sixteen obtained by competition a scholarship at Jesus College, Oxford, where he began to reside in 1856. The members of that college were in those days almost entirely Welshmen, and thereby somewhat cut off from the rest of the University. They saw little of men in other colleges, so that a man might have a reputation for ability in his own society without gaining any in the larger world of Oxford. It so happened with Green. Though his few intimate friends perceived his powers, they had so little intercourse with the rest of the University, either by way of breakfasts and wine-parties, or at the University debating society, or in athletic sports, that he remained unknown even to those among his contemporaries who were interested in the same things, and would have most enjoyed his acquaintance. The only eminent person who seems to have appreciated and influenced him was Dean Stanley, then Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of Christ Church. Green had attended Stanley's lectures, and Stanley, whose kindly interest in young men never failed, was struck by him, and had some share in turning his studies towards history. He graduated in 1860, having refused to compete for honours, because he had not received from those who were then tutors of the college the recognition to which he was entitled.

In 1860 he was ordained, and became curate in London at St. Barnabas, King's Square, whence, after two years' experience, and one or two temporary engagements, including the sole charge of a parish in Hoxton, he was appointed in 1865 to the incumbency of St. Philip's, Stepney, a district church in one of the poorest parts of London, where the vicar's income was ill-proportioned to the claims which needy parishioners made upon him. Here he worked with zeal and assiduity for about three years, gaining an insight into the condition and needs of the poor which scholars and historians seldom obtain. He learnt, in fact, to know men, and the real forces that sway them; and he used to say in later life that he was conscious how much this had helped him in historical writing. Gibbon, as every one knows, makes a similar remark about his experience as a captain in the Hampshire militia.

Although physical weakness was one of the causes which compelled this step, there was also another. He had been brought up in Tractarian views, and is said to have been at one time on the point of entering the Church of Rome. This tendency passed off, and before he went to St. Philip's he had become a Broad Churchman, and was much influenced by the writings of Mr. F. D. Maurice, whom he knew and used frequently to meet, and whose pure and noble character, even more perhaps than his preaching, had profoundly impressed him. However, his restless mind did not stop long at that point. The same tendency which had carried him away from Tractarianism made him feel less and less at home in the ministry of the Church of England, and would doubtless have led him, even had his health been stronger, to withdraw from clerical duties. After a few years his friends ceased to address letters to him under the usual clerical epithet; but he continued to interest himself in ecclesiastical affairs, and always retained a marked dislike to Nonconformity. Aversions sometimes outlive attachments.

Another class of articles written by Mr. Green were articles on towns in England, France, or Italy. I do not know whether it was he or Mr. Freeman who introduced this custom of bringing into a short space the historical aspect of a single town or of a famous building, and showing how the town or the building recorded its own history, and how it was linked to general history, but Mr. Green, at least, began it very early in his articles on Oxford. At any rate, it was his habit, at this time, whenever he travelled in England, France, or Italy, to make a study of any town he visited.

Articles of this kind--and he had them by fifties in his head--formed the second line of what has been called his journalism. I should prefer to call them contributions to history. They are totally different in quality from ordinary journalism. They are short historical essays.

As his duties at Lambeth made no great demands on his time, he was now 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 , 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.

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