BOOKS.
THE LETTERS OF JOHN RICHARD GREEN.*
IT was high time that the Life of so notable a man as John Richard Green should be given to the world, although we doubt not that there were very good reasons for delaying it to a much later period than many of his friends could have wished. Now that the time which seemed opportune to those who bad a right to decide has at length arrived, it is most satisfactory that the duty of preparing it should have fallen into the hands of so consummate a biographer as Mr. Leslie Stephen. In spite of the opinion of Cardinal Newman and other high authorities, we have never been able to persuade ourselves that a man's life is best told in his letters ; but there are cases, such as the present, in which the alternative is either to write something like a long review article, or else to write after the fashion which Mr. Stephen has adopted. Where there are practically no events to record, where a man's energy in his serious hours has been thrown entirely into writing, the ablest biographer can only publish his letters and comment on his works. If, however, as in this case, his works are in the hands of all who are interested in his subjects, it is un- necessary to do the latter, and the publication of the letters strung on a slight biographical thread is all that is possible.
John Richard Green, born at Oxford in 1837, started in life with few external advantages. His father was amiable, but not strong, and died early. Of his mother we hear little, and may infer that she had no great share in the education of her distinguished son. The child's health was very delicate; the family means were scanty, and he was sent to a school which, though perhaps not worse managed than many others before the crammers began to teach the authorised educators what honest and intelligent teaching
• Letters of John Richard Green. Edited by Leslie Stephen. Loudon Mae. Wilma and Co. ELS.. heti meant, did very little indeed for the pupil entrusted to its care. The intelligence of its conductors may be judged from the fact that they taught the Latin grammar in Latin! Bad luck followed Green even to the University, where he became a member of Jesus College, at which he was thoroughly unhappy, learned to detest all that Oxford holds most dear, and ended in merely attaining a pass degree. The only good he seems to have got at Oxford came from Stanley's lectures on ecclesiastical history. Even at this early period he had shoWn marked ability in treating his- torical questions in an Oxford newspaper, but he had to think of a profession, and determined to take- Orders. This he did in 1860, and became curate- to the Rev. Henry Ward, Vicar of St. Barnabas, King's Square, Goswell Road. In the wife of this gentleman he found one of those rare and admirable natures which are born to develop whatever is best in those who have the good fortune to fall under their influence. No long time passed before she was taken from her friends by an early death, but Green preserved to the last the impress she had made upon his life. See his exquisite letter from San Remo at p. 284. What an epitaph from the hand of one of the greatest of English historians ! Hoc potius mills signis ! He discharged a variety of clerical duties for eight years in various out-of-the-way parts of London, but his views gradually changed, and he formally resigned his official connection with the work of the Church by a letter to his friend Archbishop Tait, whose librarian he had been at Lambeth. The text of the Primate's reply is given in this book, and does much credit alike to the head and to the heart of that shrewd and kindly Scot.
During much of his clerical life Green had employed a good deal of his scanty leisure in corresponding with friends and writing articles. Amongst his principal correspondents were Mr. Boyd Dawkins, the geologist, and Mr. Freeman, the historian. The letters are bright and lively, but not equal by any means to their author's conversation, which it would have been hard to beat. He early became connected, as did most of the best young men of those days, with the Saturday Review, its indefatigable editor always sweeping into his net a new shoal when a former one left him. Probably few were aware at first that Green had become connected with the Saturday, for the great Cook, as Sir Alexander Grant truly observed, was careful " to keep his beasts in separate cages:, His writing for the Saturday did much to form his style, and after finally giving up all clerical duty he became a man of letters pure and simple. The years from 1869 to 1874 were the period during which he worked at the Short History which made him so suddenly, so widely, and so deservedly famous. He would probably never have begun it if a visit to Sir Andrew Clark in 1869 had not made it only too clear to him that his time in this world might be short. "He resolved," says Mr. Leslie Stephen, "to write a book, which if he lived would serve as an introduction to future work, and insure that if he should die his labour should not have been entirely wasted." He gave up the Saturday Review to devote himself to his task, though he could ill afford to do so. Up to 1869 he had only made two very short visits to the Continent—one to Normandy, one to Anjou—but from that time forward he lived a great deal abroad, chiefly in a vain search for health.
The second period of Green's life, the period of the Short History, is amply illustrated by a long series of letters to some of his old and to some new correspondents. Among the latter those to Miss L. von Glehn, later Mrs. Creighton, to her sister Miss von Glehn, as well as to Mr. and Mrs. Ilumphry Ward, may be specially noticed. These letters are more agreeable than their predecessors from the accident that they are frequently written from interesting places and that their author's outlook on the world had become wider. But although they must have been delightful to receive, they do not strike us as quite as good as we should have expected the letters of the writer of the Short History to be. The contrast in them of the intense vitality which they show with the suggestion of the sword of Damocles which hung over the writer is very tragic. Tennyson used the right word when he described Green as " vivid." He was as vivid as lightning, while the precariousness of his life and the frequent dreariness of his circumstances represented the black clewd from which the lightning flashed.
It was indeed a scurvy trick which destiny played Green when it killed his friend Lord Strangford, and left him to be guided by his other friend Mr. Freeman through the mazes of the so-called " Eastern question," about which the former knew far more than all the other Members alike of the Lords and Commons rolled into one, while the latter was apt to be led away by half-knowledge and whole prejudices. We must not, accordingly, expect to find much that is -of value in the hints of their author's political opinions to be found in the third and concluding batch of his letters. Non omnia possumus omnes. Green was astonishing enough as he was, but if, in addition to all else, he had been an infallible politician after having led the life which he had led, he would have been a bum naturae. Still, if Lord Strangford had lived, we believe that in one branch of politics, very important from 1875 to the end of 1878, he would have been kept in the fold of the men who were neither Philo-Turks nor Anti- Turks, but Anti-Anti-Turks.
There are some curious glimpses of Green's political ideas as to home affairs to be found here and there in his letters written during the " seventies." He met Lord Aberdare at a country house during the Bulgarian troubles, and observed to a correspondent, with reference to a remark of that statesman about the ruin which Gladstone was bringing on the Liberal party, that he wished to see it ruined, and a new party of, say, eighty members reconstituted, with Gladstone at its head ! Wild talk of that kind was pardonable enough in a man who knew nothing of the difficulties of practical statesmanship, and to whom politics were an agreeable excitement, not the business of his life. Lord Aberdare's views on the Angevin Kings would, we dare say, if he had been unwise enough to formulate them, have been just as crude. So good and clever a man as Green would, if it had ever been his duty to trans- late political dreams into political action, have infallibly become what they call on the other side of the Bay of Biscay a Posibilista. Happily for him, he was taken away from the evil to come, and never had an opportunity of realising his dreams. We who have survived him now see what the ruin of the Liberal party meant for England.
There are fewer anecdotes in the Life than we should have axpected, but Green, like Dean Stanley, seems to have taken in much more by the eye than by the ear. His power of taking in by the former, in looking over a country which he had never seen before, must always have astonished his com- panions. The way in which a complicated bit of history which he only knew from books arranged itself in his mind when he looked upon the scene of it was really like divination. You felt that he had a sixth sense not granted to the rest of his fellow-creatures. Among the rare anecdotes in these pages is one which Green tells on the authority of Lord Houghton, but which has, we think, lost something in the setting down (see p. 450). What really happened was this. Tronchin, the physician, was going in the ordinary course of his duties to see the Orleans children at the Palais Royal, when he met Voltaire, then taking his last farewell of Paris. He asked to be allowed to accompany Tronchin, and in the course of the visit remarked, " Quelle belle Bourbonaille !" The Due d'Aumale used to tell the story with other particu- lars, and the present writer remembers hearing him on one occasion call the attention of those whom he addressed to the old-world tournure de phrase which his father used when speak- ing of this incident and of another alluded to by Green in the same letter. " J'ai vu Monsieur de Voltaire et j'ai rencontre Jean Jacques dans la rue." We may add that, speaking of the latter, the King made a highly characteristic remark : " Et cependant j'ai ete grand admirateur de cet animal-lh ! "
In 1877 Green married, and was fortunate in finding in the partner of his life a lady who was not less interested in, and hardly less gifted for, historical studies than himself. About the same time his enlarged edition of the History of the English People began to appear; but the fourth volume of it was not published till 1880. In that year he settled in Kensington Square, and Mr. Leslie Stephen gives a pleasant account of the society he saw there. In the course of this description Mrs. Humphry Ward, whom Mr. Stephen quotes, speaking of London, says, " Where conversation flourishes so little and so hardly." Is that true ? We very much doubt it. Conversation flourishes, we think, extremely well in London; but, of course, if by conversation is meant discussion, it does not flourish,—be the heavens ever blest I Green, however, was at his best when he was communicating knowledge to his friends through talk, not in discussion. When so employed he was as good as the ante-Indian Maine—Maine before 1862—and that is saying a great deal. Sir Henry Maine, the Maine of later life, though always admirable, was quite different. In an evil hour it was suggested in the end of 1880 that Green should try a winter in Egypt, but, alas ! everything went wrong. He came in for a bad gale in the Bay of Biscay. When Egypt was reached Cairo was found to be unhealthy, and he proceeded to Luxor, where he had a serious accident, and went through much dis- comfort till some friends took him down the river, a slow voyage of five weeks. On his way home from the Medi- terranean he was very ill at Avignon ; but although he reached this country in a sad state, his Making of England actually appeared, thanks to his indomitable perseverance, in the beginning of 1882. In the autumn of that year he started for Mentone, already at work upon the Conquest of England. He worked unceasingly at that book, which he was destined never to finish. On March 3rd he took leave of his friends, and died on March 7th, 1883, having by sheer force of will much overpassed the time which the most sanguine physi- cians assigned to him. No one ever better obeyed the in- junction,— " Dime nt semper victurus Vivo ut eras moriturus,—" and the tomb which commemorates his too-early death bears the apt inscription "He died learning."
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