His accuracy has been much impeached. 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 Green was 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, some pictures drawn from exceedingly slender materials. Mr. Skene remarks of the account given of the battle between the Jutes and the Britons which took place in the middle of the fifth century, somewhere near Aylesford in Kent, and about which we really know scarcely anything, “Mr. Green describes it as if he had been present.” The temptation to such liberties is strong where the treatment of a period is summary. A writer who compresses the whole history of England 159 into eight hundred pages of small octavo, making his narrative not a bare narrative but a picture full of colour and incident—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 conjecture; and it is probable that when the authorities are scrutinised their result will sometimes appear different from that which the author has presented. On this head the Short History may be admitted to have occasionally purchased vividity at the price of exactitude. Of mistakes, strictly so called—i.e. statements demonstrably incorrect and therefore ascribable to haste or carelessness—there are enough to make a show under the hands of a hostile critic, yet not more than one is prepared to expect from any but the most careful scholars. The book falls far short of the accuracy of Thirlwall or Ranke or Stubbs, short even of the accuracy of Gibbon or Carlyle; but it is not greatly below the standard of Grote or Macaulay or Robertson, it is equal to the standard of Milman, above that of David Hume. I take famous names, and could put a better face on the matter by choosing for comparison divers contemporary writers whose literary eminence is higher than their historical. And Green’s mistakes, although pretty numerous, were (for they have been corrected 160 in later editions) nearly all in small matters. He puts an event, let us say, in 1340 which happened in the November of 1339; he calls a man John whose name was William. These are mistakes to the eye of a civil service examiner, but they seldom make any difference to the general reader, for they do not affect the doctrines and pictures which the book contains, and in which lies its permanent value as well as its literary charm. As Bishop Stubbs says, “Like other people, Green makes mistakes sometimes; but scarcely ever does the correction of his mistakes affect either the essence of the picture or the force of the argument.... All his work was real and original work; few people besides those who knew him well would see under the charming ease and vivacity of his style the deep research and sustained industry of the laborious student.” It may be added that Green’s later and more detailed works, The Making of England and The Conquest of England, though they contain plenty of debatable matter, as in the paucity of authentic data any such book must do, have been charged with few errors in matters of fact.
In considering his critical gift, it is well to distinguish those two elements of acute perception and sober judgment which I have already specified, for he possessed the former in larger measure than the latter. The same activity of mind which made 161 him notice everything while travelling or entering a company of strangers, played incessantly upon the historical data of his work, and supplied him with endless theories as to the meaning of a statement, the source it came from, the way it had been transmitted, the conditions under which it was made. No one could be more acute and penetrating in what the Germans call Quellenforschung, the collection and investigation and testing of the sources of history, nor could any one be more painstaking. Errors of view, apart from those trivial inaccuracies already referred to, did not arise from an indolence that left any stone unturned, but rather from an occupation with the leading idea which had drawn his attention away from the details of time and place. The ingenuity with which he built up theories was as admirable as the art with which he stated them. People whom that art fascinated sometimes fancied that the charm lay entirely in the style. But the style was only a part of the craftsmanship. The facility in theorising, the power of grouping facts under new aspects, the skill in gathering and sifting evidence, were as remarkable as those artistic qualities which expressed themselves in the paragraphs and sentences and phrases. What danger there was arose from this fecundity. His mind was so fertile, could see so much in a theory and apply it so dexterously, that his judgment was sometimes 162 dazzled by the brilliance of his ingenuity. I do not think he loved his theories specially because they were his own, for he often modified them, and was ready to consider any one else’s suggestions; but he had a passion for light, and when a new view seemed to him to explain things previously dark, he wanted the patience to suspend his judgment and abide in uncertainty. Some of his hypotheses he himself dropped. Some others he probably would have dropped, as the authorities he respected have not embraced them. Others have made their way into general acceptance, and may become still more useful as future research works them out. But, whether right or wrong, they were instructive. Every one of them is based upon facts whose importance had not been so fully seen before, and suggests a point of view worth considering. Green’s view may sometimes appear fanciful: it is never foolish, or superficial, or perverse. And so far from being credulous, his natural tendency was towards doubt.
Inventive as his mind was, it was also solvent and sceptical. Seldom is a strong imagination coupled with so unsparing a criticism as that which he applied to the materials on which the constructive faculty had to work. His later tendencies were rather towards scepticism, and towards what one may call a severe and ascetic view of history. While writing The Making of 163 England and The Conquest of England, he used to lament the scantiness of the data and the barren dryness which he feared the books would consequently show. “How am I to make anything of these meagre entries of marches and battles which are the only materials for the history of whole centuries? Here are the Norsemen and Danes ravaging and occupying the country; we learn hardly anything about them from English sources, and nothing at all from Danish. How can one conceive and describe them? how have any comprehension of what England was like in the districts the Northmen took and ruled?” I tried to get him to work at the Norse Sagas, and remember in particular to have entreated him when he came to the battle of Brunanburh to eke out the pitifully scanty records of that fight from the account given of it in the story of the Icelandic hero, Egil, son of Skallagrim. But he answered that the Saga was unhistorical, a bit of legend written down more than a century after the events, and that he could not, by using it in the text, appear to trust it, or to mix up authentic history with what was possibly fable. It was urged that he could guard himself in a note from being supposed to take it for more than what it was, a most picturesque embellishment of his tale. But he stood firm. Throughout these two last books, he steadily refrained from introducing any matter, however 164 lively or romantic, which could not stand the test of his stringent criticism, and used laughingly to tell how Dean Stanley had long ago said to him, after reading one of his earliest pieces, “I see you are in danger of growing picturesque. Beware of it. I have suffered for it.”
If in these later years he reined in his imagination more tightly, the change was due to no failing in his ingenuity. Nothing in his work shows higher constructive ability than The Making of England. He had to deal with a time which has left us scarcely any authentic records, and to piece together his narrative and his picture of the country out of these records, and the indications, faint and scattered, and often capable of several interpretations, which are supplied by the remains of Roman roads and villas, the names of places, the boundaries of local divisions, the casual statements of writers many centuries later. What he has given us remains an enduring witness to his historical power. For here it is not a question of mere brilliance of style. The result is due to patience, penetration, and the careful weighing of evidence, joined to that faculty of realising things in the concrete by which a picture is conjured up out of a mass of phenomena, everything falling into its place under laws which seem to prove themselves as soon as they are stated.
Of his style nothing need be said, for his 165 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 (and in his shortsightedness), 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.
Green was not one of those whose personality is unlike their books, for there was in both the same fertility, the same vivacity, the same quickness of sympathy. Nevertheless, his conversation seemed to give an even higher impression 166 of intellectual power than did his writings, because it was so swift and so spontaneous. Such talk has rarely been heard in our time, so gay was it, so vivid, so various, so full of anecdote and illustration, so acute in criticism, so candid in consideration, so graphic in description, so abundant in sympathy, so flashing in insight, so full of colour and emotion as well as of knowledge and thought. One had to forbid one’s self to visit him in the evening, because it was impossible to get away before two o’clock in the morning. And, unlike many famous talkers, he was just as willing to listen as to speak. One of the charms of his company was that it made a man feel better than his ordinary self. His appreciation of whatever had any worth in it, his comments and replies, so stimulated the interlocutor’s mind that it moved faster and could hit upon apter expressions than at any other time. The same gifts which shone in his conversation, lucid arrangement of ideas, ready command of words, and a power in perceiving the tendencies of those whom he addressed, would have made him an admirable public speaker. I do not remember that he ever did speak, in his later years, to any audience larger than a committee of twenty. But he was an eloquent preacher. The first time I ever saw him was in St. Philip’s Church at Stepney about 1866, and I shall never 167 forget the impression made on me by the impassioned sentences that rang through the church from the fiery little figure in the pulpit with its thin face and bright black eyes.
What Green accomplished seems to those who used to listen to him little in comparison with what he might have done had longer life and a more robust body been granted him. Some of his finest gifts would not have found their full scope till he came to treat of a period where the materials for history are ample, and where he could have allowed himself space to deal with them—such a period, for instance, as that of his early choice, the Angevin kings of England. Yet, even basing themselves on what he has done, they may claim for him a place among the foremost writers of his time. He left behind him no one who combined so many of the best gifts. There were among his contemporaries historians more learned and equally industrious. There were two or three whose accuracy was more scrupulous, their judgment more uniformly sober and cautious. But there was no one in whom so much knowledge and so wide a range of interests were united to such ingenuity, acuteness, and originality, as well as to such a power of presenting results in rich, clear, pictorial language. A master of style may be a worthless historian. We have instances. A skilful investigator and sound reasoner may be unreadable. The conjunction of fine gifts for 168 investigation with fine gifts for exposition is a rare conjunction, which cannot be prized too highly, for while it advances historical science, it brings historical methods, as well as historical facts, within the horizon of the ordinary reader.
Of the services Green rendered to English history, the first, and that which was most promptly appreciated, was the intensity with which he realised, and the skill with which he portrayed, the life of the people of England as a whole, and taught his readers that the exploits of kings and the intrigues of ministers, and the struggles of parties in Parliament, are, after all, secondary matters, and important chiefly as they affect the welfare or stimulate the thoughts and feelings of the great mass of undistinguished humanity in whose hands the future of a nation lies. He changed the old-fashioned distribution of our annals according to reigns and dynasties into certain periods, showing that such divisions often obscure the true connection of events, and suggesting new and better conceptions of the periods into which the record of English progress naturally falls. And, lastly, he laid, in his latest books, a firm and enduring foundation for our mediæval history by that account of the Teutonic occupation of England, of the state of the country as they found it, and the way they conquered and began to organise it, which I have already dwelt on as a signal proof of his constructive faculty.
Many readers will be disposed to place him near Macaulay, for though he was less weighty he was more subtle, and not less fascinating. To fewer perhaps will it occur to compare him with Gibbon, yet I am emboldened by the opinion of one of our greatest contemporary historians to venture on the comparison. There are indeed wide differences between the two. Green is as completely a man of the nineteenth century as Gibbon was a man of the eighteenth. Green’s style has not the majestic march of Gibbon: it is quick and eager almost to restlessness. Nor is his judgment so uniformly grave and sound. But one may find in his genius what was characteristic of Gibbon’s also, the combination of a mastery of multitudinous details, with a large and luminous view of those far-reaching forces and relations which govern the fortunes of peoples and guide the course of empire. This width and comprehensiveness, this power of massing for the purposes of argument the facts which his literary art has just been clothing in its most brilliant hues, is the highest of a historian’s gifts, and is the one which seems most surely to establish Green’s position among the leading historical minds of his time.