Studies in Contemporary Biography

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Green was an historian of the Herodotean type. He possessed capacities which belong to the other type also; he was critical, sceptical, perhaps too sceptical, and philosophical. Yet the imaginative quality was the leading and distinctive quality in his mind and writing. An ordinary reader, if asked what was the main impression given by the Short History of the English People, would answer that it was the impression of picturesqueness and vividity—picturesqueness in attention to the externals of the life described, vividity in the presentation of that life itself.

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 151 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 152 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.

Though he wrote very fast, and in the most familiar way, the style of his more serious letters was as good, I might say as finished, as that of his 153 books. Every one of them had a beginning, middle, and end. The ideas were developed in an apt and graceful order, the sentences could all be construed, the diction was choice. It was the same with the short articles which he at one time used to write for the Saturday Review. They are little essays, some of them worthy to live not only for the excellent matter they contain, but for the delicate refinement of their form. Yet they were all written swiftly, and sometimes in the midst of physical exhaustion. The friend I have previously quoted describes the genesis of one. Green had reached the town of Troyes early one morning with two companions, and immediately started off to explore it, darting hither and thither through the streets like a dog trying to find a scent. In two or three hours the examination was complete. The friends lunched together, took the train on to Basel, got there late, and went off to bed. Green, however, wrote before he slept, and laid on the breakfast-table next morning, an article on Troyes, in which its characteristic features were brought out and connected with its fortunes and those of the Counts of Champagne during some centuries, an article which was really a history in miniature. Then they went out together to look at Basel, and being asked some question about that city he gave on the spur of the moment a sketch of its growth and character equally vivid and equally systematic, grouping all 154 he had to say round two or three leading theories. Yet he had never been in either place before, and had not made a special study of either. He could apparently have done the same for many another town in France or the Rhineland.

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.

Men and women—that is to say, such of them as have characteristics pronounced enough to make them classifiable—may be divided into those whose primary interests are in nature and what relates to nature, and those whose primary interests are in and for man. Green was the most striking type I have known of the latter class, not merely because his human interests were strong, but also because they excluded, to a degree singular in a mind so versatile, interests in purely natural things. He did not seem to care for or seek to know any of the sciences of nature[24] except in so far as they bore directly 155 upon man’s life, and were capable of explaining it or of serving it. He had a keen eye for country, for the direction and character of hills, the position and influence of rivers, forests, and marshes, of changes in the line of land and sea. Readers of The Making of England will recall the picture of the physical aspects of Britain when the Teutonic invaders entered it as an unsurpassed piece of reconstructive description. So on a battle-field or in an historical town, his vision of the features of the ground or the site was unerring. But he perceived and enjoyed natural beauty chiefly in reference to human life. The study of the battle-field and the town site were aids to the comprehension of historical events. The exquisite landscape was exquisite because it was associated with the people dwelling there, with the processes of their political growth, with their ideas or their social usages. I remember to have had from him the most vivid descriptions of the towns of the Riviera and of Capri, where he used to pass the winter, but he never touched on anything which did not illustrate or intertwine itself with the life of the people, leaving one uninformed on matters purely physical. Facts about the character of the mountains, the relation of their ranges to one another, or their rocks, or the trees and flowers of their upper regions, the prospects their summits command, the scenes of beauty in their 156 glens, or beside their wood-embosomed lakes, all, in fact, which the mountain lover delights in, and which are to him a part of the mountain ardour, of the passion for pure nature unsullied by the presence of man—all this was cold to him. But as soon as a touch of human life fell like a sunbeam across the landscape, all became warm and lovable.

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.

It seems a truism to say that one who writes history ought to care for all that bears upon man in the present in order that he may comprehend what bore upon him in the past. This roaring loom of Time, these complex physical and moral forces playing round us, and driving us hither and thither by such a strange and intricate interlacement of movements that we seem to perceive no more than what is next us, and are unable to say whither we are tending, ought to be always before the historian’s mind. 157 But there are few who have tried, as Green tried, to follow every flash of the shuttle, and to discover a direction and a relation amidst apparent confusion, for there are few who have taken so wide a view of the historian’s functions, and have so distinctly set before them as their object the comprehension and realisation and description of the whole field of bygone human life. The Past was all present to him in this sense, that he saw and felt in it not only those large events which annalists or state papers have recorded, but the everyday life of the people, their ideas, their habits, their external surroundings. And the Present was always as if past to him in this sense, that in spite of his strong political feelings, he looked at it with the eye of a philosophical observer, trying to disengage principles from details, permanent tendencies from passing outbursts. His imagination visualised, so to speak, the phenomena as in a picture; his speculative faculty tried to harmonise them, measure them, and forecast their effects. Hence it was a necessity to him to know what was passing in the world. The first thing he did every day, whatever other pressure there might be on him, was to read the daily newspaper. The last thing that he ceased to read, when what remained of life began to be counted by hours, was the daily newspaper. This warm interest in mankind is the keynote of his History of the 158 English People. It is the whole people that is ever present to him, as it had been present before to few other historians.

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.