Victorian Worthies

G >> George Henry Blore >> Victorian Worthies

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28

But, for all his lively curiosity, Green seems to have got little out of
his lessons at school. The classic languages formed the staple of his
education, and he never had that power of verbal memory which could
enable him to retain the rules of the Greek grammar or to handle the
Latin language with the accuracy of a scholar. He soon gave up trying to
do so. Instead of aspiring to the mastery of accidence and syntax, he
aimed rather at securing immunity from the rod. At Magdalen School it
was still actively in use; but there were certain rules about the number
of offences which must be committed in a given time to call for its
application. Green was clever enough to notice this, and to shape his
course accordingly; and thus his lessons became, from a sporting point
of view, an unqualified success.

But his real progress in learning was due to his use of the old library
in his leisure hours. Here he made acquaintance with Marco Polo and
other books of travel; here he read works on history of various kinds,
and became prematurely learned in the heresies of the early Church. The
views which he developed, and perhaps stated too crudely, did not win
approval. He was snubbed by examiners for his interest in heresiarchs,
and gravely reproved by Canon Mozley[56] for justifying the execution of
Charles I. The latter subject had been set for a prize essay; and the
Canon was fair-minded enough to give the award to the boy whose views he
disliked, but whose merit he recognized. Partial and imperfect though
this education was, the years spent under the shadow of Magdalen must
have had a deep influence on Green; but he tells us little of his
impressions, and was only half conscious of them at the time. The
incident which perhaps struck him most was his receiving a prize from
the hands of the aged Dr. Routh, President of the College, who had seen
Dr. Johnson in his youth, and lived to be a centenarian and the pride of
Oxford in early Victorian days.

[Note 56: Rev. J. B. Mozley, 1813-78. Canon of Worcester and Regius
Professor of Divinity at Oxford: a Tractarian; author of essays on
Strafford, Laud, &c.]

Green's school life ended in 1852, the year in which his father died. He
was already at the top of the school; and to win a scholarship at the
University was now doubly important for him. This he achieved at Jesus
College, Oxford, in December 1854, after eighteen months spent with a
private tutor; and, as he was too young to go into residence at once, he
continued for another year to read by himself. Though he gave closer
attention to his classics he did not drop his general reading; and it
was a landmark in his career when at the age of sixteen he made
acquaintance with Gibbon.

His life as an undergraduate was not very happy and was even less
successful than his days at school, though the fault did not lie with
him. Shy and sensitive as he was, he had a sociable disposition and was
naturally fitted to make friends. But he had come from a solitary life
at a tutor's to a college where the men were clannish, most of them
Welshmen, and few of them disposed to look outside their own circle for
friends. Had Green been as fortunate as William Morris, his life at
Oxford might have been different; but there was no Welshman at Jesus of
the calibre of Burne-Jones; and Green lived in almost complete isolation
till the arrival of Boyd Dawkins in 1857. The latter, who became in
after years a well-known professor of anthropology, was Green's first
real friend, and the letters which he wrote to him show how necessary it
was for Green to have one with whom he could share his interests and
exchange views freely. Dawkins had the scientific, Green the literary,
nature and gifts; but they had plenty of common ground and were always
ready to explore the records of the past, whether they were to be found
in barrows, in buildings, or in books. If Dawkins was the first friend,
the first teacher who influenced him was Arthur Stanley, then Canon of
Christ Church and Professor of Ecclesiastical History. An accident led
Green into his lecture-room one day; but he was so much delighted with
the spirit of Stanley's teaching, and the life which he imparted to
history, that he became a constant member of the class. And when Stanley
made overtures of friendship, Green welcomed them warmly.

A new influence had come into his life. Not only was his industry, which
had been feeble and irregular, stimulated at last to real effort; but
his attitude to religious questions and to the position of the English
Church was at this time sensibly modified. He had come up to the
University a High Churchman; like many others at the time of the Oxford
Movement, he had been led half-way towards Roman Catholicism, stirred by
the historical claims and the mystic spell of Rome. But from now
onwards, under the guidance of Stanley and Maurice, he adopted the views
of what is called the 'Broad Church Party', which suited his moral
fervour and the liberal character of his social and political opinions.

Despite, however, the stimulus given to him (perhaps too late) by
Dawkins and Stanley, Green won no distinctions at the University, and
few men of his day could have guessed that he would ever win distinction
elsewhere. He took a dislike to the system of history-teaching then in
vogue, which consisted in demanding of all candidates for the schools a
knowledge of selected fragments of certain authors, giving them no
choice or scope in the handling of wider subjects. He refused to enter
for a class in the one subject in which he could shine, and managed to
scrape through his examination by combining a variety of uncongenial
subjects. This was perverse, and he himself recognized it to be so
afterwards. All the while there was latent in him the talent, and the
ambition, which might have enabled him to surpass all his
contemporaries. His one literary achievement of the time was unknown to
the men of his college, but it is of singular interest in view of what
he came to achieve later. He was asked by the editor of the _Oxford
Chronicle_, an old-established local paper, to write two articles on the
history of the city of Oxford. To most undergraduates the town seemed a
mere parasite of the University; to Green it was an elder sister. Many
years later he complained in one of his letters that the city had been
stifled by the University, which in its turn had suffered similar
treatment from the Church. To this task, accordingly, he brought a ready
enthusiasm and a full mind; and his articles are alive with the essence
of what, since the days of his childhood, he had observed, learnt, and
imagined, in the town of his birth. We see the same spirit in a letter
which he wrote to Dawkins in 1860, telling him how he had given up a day
to following the Mayor of Oxford when he observed the time-honoured
custom of beating the bounds of the city. He describes with gusto how he
trudged along roads, clambered over hedges, and even waded through
marshes in order to perform the rite with scrupulous thoroughness. But
it was years before he could find an audience who would appreciate his
power of handling such a subject, and his University career must, on his
own evidence, be written down a failure.

When it was over he was confronted with the need for choosing a
profession. It had strained the resources of his family to give him a
good education, and now he must fend for himself. To a man of his nature
and upbringing the choice was not wide. His age and his limited means
put the Services out of the question; nor was he fitted to embark in
trade. Medicine would revolt his sensibility, law would chill his
imagination, and journalism did not yet exist as a profession for men of
his stamp. In the teaching profession, for which he had such rare gifts,
he would start handicapped by his low degree. In any case, he had for
some time cherished the idea of taking Holy Orders. The ministry of the
Church would give him a congenial field of work and, so he hoped, some
leisure to continue his favourite studies. Perhaps he had not the same
strong conviction of a 'call' as many men of his day in the High Church
or Evangelical parties; but he was, at the time, strongly drawn by the
example and teaching of Stanley and Maurice, and he soon showed that it
was not merely for negative reasons or from half-hearted zeal that he
had made the choice. When urged by Stanley to seek a curacy in West
London, he deliberately chose the East End of the town because the need
there was greater and the training in self-sacrifice was sterner; and
there is no doubt that the popular sympathies, which the reading of
history had already implanted in him, were nourished and strengthened by
nine years of work among the poor. The exertion of parish work taxed his
physical resources, and he was often incapacitated for short periods by
the lavish way in which he spent himself. Indeed, but for this constant
drain upon his strength, he might have lived a longer life and left more
work behind him.

Of the parishes which he served, the last and the most interesting was
St. Philip's, Stepney, to which he went from Hoxton in 1864. It was a
parish of 16,000 souls, lying between Whitechapel and Poplar, not far
from the London Docks. Dreary though the district seems to us
to-day--and at times Green was fully conscious of this--he could
re-people it in imagination with the men of the past, and find pleasure
in the noble views on the river and the crowded shipping that passed so
near its streets. But above all he found a source of interest in the
living individuals whom he met in his daily round and who needed his
help; and though he achieved signal success in the pulpit by his power
of extempore preaching, he himself cared more for the effect of his
visiting and other social work. Sermons might make an impression for the
moment; personal sympathy, shown in the moment when it was needed, might
change the whole current of a life.

For children his affection was unfailing; and for the humours of older
people he had a wide tolerance and charity. His letters abound with
references to this side of his work. He tells us of his 'polished' pork
butcher and his learned parish clerk, and boasts how he won the regard
of the clerk's Welsh wife by correctly pronouncing the magic name of
Machynlleth. He gave a great deal of time to his parishioners, to
consulting his churchwardens, to starting choirs, to managing classes
and parish expeditions. He could find time to attend a morning police
court when one of his boys got into difficulties, or to hold a midnight
service for the outcasts of the pavement.

When cholera broke out in Stepney in 1866, Green visited the sick and
dying in rooms that others did not dare to enter, and was not afraid to
help actively in burying those who had died of the disease. At holiday
gatherings he was the life and soul of the body, 'shocking two prim
maiden teachers by starting kiss-in-the-ring', and surprising his most
vigorous helpers by his energy and decision. On such occasions he
exhausted himself in the task of leadership, and he was no less generous
in giving financial help to every parish institution that was in need.

What hours he could snatch from these tasks he would spend in the
Reading Room of the British Museum; but these were all too few. His
position, within a few miles of the treasure houses of London, and of
friends who might have shared his studies, must have been tantalizing
to a degree. To parish claims also was sacrificed many a chance of a
precious holiday. We have one letter in which he regretfully abandons
the project of a tour with Freeman in his beloved Anjou because he finds
that the only dates open to his companion clash with the festival of the
patron saint of his church. In another he resists the appeal of Dawkins
to visit him in Somerset on similar grounds. His friend may become
abusive, but Green assures him emphatically that it cannot be helped. 'I
am not a pig,' he writes; 'I am a missionary curate.... I could not come
to you, because I was hastily summoned to the cure of 5,000
costermongers and dock labourers.' We are far from the easy standard of
work too often accepted by 'incumbents' in the opening years of the
nineteenth century.

Early in his clerical career he had begun to form plans for writing on
historical subjects, most of which had to be abandoned for one reason or
another. At one time he was planning with Dawkins a history of Somerset,
which would have been a forerunner of the County Histories of the
twentieth century. Dawkins was to do the geology and anthropology; Green
would contribute the archaeology and history. In many ways they were
well equipped for the task; but the materials had not been sifted and
the demands on their time would have been excessive, even if they
abstained from all other work. Another scheme was for a series of Lives
of the Archbishops of Canterbury. Green was much attracted by the
subject. Already he had made a special study of Dunstan and other great
holders of the See; and he believed that the series would illustrate,
better than the lives of kings, the growth of certain principles in
English history. But with other archbishops he found himself out of
sympathy; and in the end he was not sorry to abandon the idea, when he
found that Dean Hook was already engaged upon it.

A project still nearer to his heart, which he cherished till near the
end of his life, was to write a history of our Angevin kings. For this
he collected a vast quantity of materials, and it was a task for which
he was peculiarly fitted. It would be difficult to say whether Fulc
Nerra, the founder of the dynasty, or Black Angers, the home of the
race, was more vividly present to him. Grim piles of masonry, stark
force of character, alike compelled his admiration and he could make
them live again in print. As it proved, his life was too short to
realize this ambition and he has only left fragments of what he had to
tell, though we are fortunate in having other books on parts of the
subject from his wife and from Miss Norgate, which owed their origin to
his inspiration.

During his time as a London clergyman Green used to pay occasional
visits to Dawkins in Somerset; and in 1862, when he went to read a paper
on Dunstan to a society at Taunton, he renewed acquaintance with his old
schoolfellow, E. A. Freeman, a notable figure in the county as squire,
politician, and antiquarian, and already becoming known outside it as a
historian. The following year, as Freeman's guest, he met Professor
Stubbs; and about this time he also made friends with James Bryce, 'the
Holy Roman', as he calls him in later letters.[57] The friendship of
these three men was treasured by Green throughout his life, and it gave
rise to much interesting correspondence on historical subjects. They
were the central group of the Oxford School; they reverenced the same
ideals and were in general sympathy with one another. But this sympathy
never descended to mere mutual admiration, as with some literary
coteries. Between Freeman and Green in particular there was kept up a
running fire of friendly but outspoken criticism, which would have
strained the tie between men less generous and less devoted to
historical truth. Freeman was the more arbitrary and dogmatic, Green
the more sensitive and discriminating. Green bows to Freeman's superior
knowledge of Norman times, acknowledges him his master, and apologizes
for hasty criticisms when they give offence; but he boldly rebukes his
friend for his indifference to the popular movements in Italian cities
and for his pedantry about Italian names.

[Note 57: The first edition of Bryce's _Holy Roman Empire_ was
published in 1862.]

And he treads on even more delicate ground when he taxes him with
indulging too frequently in polemics, urging him to 'come out of the
arena' and to cease girding at Froude and Kingsley, whose writings
Freeman loved to abuse. Freeman, on the other hand, grumbles at Green
for going outside the province of history to write on more frivolous
subjects, and scolds him for introducing fanciful ideas into his
narrative of events. The classic instance of this was when Green, after
describing the capture by the French of the famous Chateau Gaillard in
Normandy, had the audacity to say, 'from its broken walls we see not
merely the pleasant vale of Seine, but also the sedgy flats of our own
Runnymede'. Thereby he meant his readers to learn that John would never
have granted the Great Charter to the Barons, had he not already
weakened the royal authority by the loss of Coeur-de-Lion's great
fortress beyond the sea, and that to a historian the germs of English
freedom, won beside the Thames, were to be seen in the wreckage of
Norman power above the Seine. But Freeman was too matter of fact to
allow such flights of fancy; and a lively correspondence passed between
the two friends, each maintaining his own view of what might or might
not be permitted to the votaries of Clio.

But before this episode Green had been introduced by Freeman to John
Douglas Cook, founder and editor of the _Saturday Review_, and had begun
to contribute to its columns. Naturally it was on historical subjects
that his pen was most active; but apart from the serious 'leading
articles', the _Saturday_ found place for what the staff called
'Middles', light essays written after the manner of Addison or Steele on
matters of every-day life. Here Green was often at his best. Freeman
growled, in his dictatorial fashion, when he found his friend turning
away from the strait path of historical research to describe the humours
of his parish, the foibles of district visitors and deaconesses, the
charms of the school-girl before she expands her wings in the
drawing-room--above all (and this last was quoted by the author as his
best literary achievement) the joys of 'Children by the sea'. But any
one who turns over the pages of the volume called _Stray Studies from
England and Italy_, where some of these articles are reprinted, will
probably agree with the verdict of the author on their merits. The
subjects are drawn from all ages and all countries. Historical scenes
are peopled with the figures of the past, treated in the magical style
which Green made his own. Dante is seen against the background of
mediaeval Florence; Tintoret represents the life of Venice at its
richest, most glorious time. The old buildings of Lambeth make a noble
setting for the portraits of archbishops, the gentle Warham, the hapless
Cranmer, the tyrannical Laud. Many of these studies are given to the
pleasant border-land between history and geography, and to the
impressions of travel gathered in England or abroad. In one sketch he
puts into a single sentence all the features of an old English town
which his quick eye could note, and from which he could 'work out the
history of the men who lived and died there. In quiet quaintly-named
streets, in the town mead and the market-place, in the lord's mill
beside the stream, in the ruffed and furred brasses of its burghers in
the church, lies the real life of England and Englishmen, the life of
their home and their trade, their ceaseless, sober struggle with
oppression, their steady, unwearied battle for self-government.'

In another he follows the funeral procession of his Angevin hero Henry
II from the stately buildings of Chinon 'by the broad bright Vienne
coming down in great gleaming curves, under the grey escarpments of rock
pierced here and there with the peculiar cellars or cave-dwellings of
the country', to his last resting-place in the vaults of Fontevraud.
Standing beside the monuments on their tombs he notes the striking
contrast of type and character which Henry offers to his son Richard
Coeur-de-Lion. 'Nothing', he says, 'could be less ideal than the narrow
brow, the large prosaic eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged
jaw, that combine somehow into a face far higher than its separate
details, and which is marked by a certain sense of power and command. No
countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in
both there is the same look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's
is a face of cultivation and refinement, but there is a strange severity
in the small delicate mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted,
which realizes the verdict of his day. To an historical student one
glance at these faces, as they lie here beneath the vault raised by
their ancestor, the fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of history.'
Our reviews and magazines may abound to-day in such vivid pen-pictures
of places and men; but it was Green and others of his day who watered
the dry roots of archaeology and restored it to life.

But from his earliest days as a student Green had looked beyond the
figures of kings, ministers, and prelates, who had so long filled the
stage in the volumes of our historians. However clearly they stood out
in their greatness and in their faults, they were not, and could not be,
the nation. And when he came to write on a larger scale, the title which
he chose for his book showed that he was aiming at new ideals.

The _Short History of the English People_ is the book by which Green's
fame will stand or fall, and it occupied him for the best years of his
life. The true heroes of it are the labourer and the artisan, the friar,
the printer, and the industrial mechanic--'not many mighty, not many
noble'. The true growth of the English nation is seen broad-based on the
life of the commonalty, and we can study it better in the rude verse of
Longland, or the parables of Bunyan, than in the formal records of
battles and dynastic schemes.

The periods into which the book is divided are chosen on other grounds
than those of the old handbooks, where the accession of a new king or a
new dynasty is made a landmark; and a different proportion is observed
in the space given to events or to prominent men. The Wars of the Roses
are viewed as less important than the Peasants' Revolt; the scholars of
the New Learning leave scant space for Lambert Simnels and Perkin
Warbecks. Henry Pelham, one of the last prime ministers to owe his
position to the king's favour, receives four lines, while forty are
given to John Howard, a pioneer in the new path of philanthropy. Besides
social subjects, literature receives generous measure, but even here no
rigid system is observed. Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare take a
prominent place in their epochs; Byron, Wordsworth, and Tennyson are
ignored. This is not because Green had no interest in them or
undervalued their influence. Far from it. But, as the history of the
nation became more complex, he found it impossible, within the limits
prescribed by a _Short_ History, to do justice to everything. He
believed that the industrialism, which grew up in the Georgian era,
exercised a wider influence in changing the character of the people than
the literature of that period; and so he turned his attention to Watt
and Brindley, and deliberately omitted the poets and painters of that
day. With his wide sympathies he must have found this rigorous
compression the hardest of his tasks, and only in part could he
compensate it later. He never lived long enough to treat, as he wished
to do, in the fullness of his knowledge, the later periods of English
history.

In writing this book Green had many discouragements to contend against,
apart from his continual ill-health. Even his friends spoke doubtfully
of its method and style, with the exception of his publisher, George
Macmillan, and of Stopford Brooke, whose own writings breathe the same
spirit as Green's, and who did equally good work in spreading a real
love of history and literature among the classes who were beginning to
read. It was true that Green's book failed to conform to the usual type
of manual; it was not orderly in arrangement, it was often allusive in
style, it seemed to select what it pleased and to leave out what
students were accustomed to learn. But Green's faith in its power to
reach the audience to whom he appealed was justified by the enthusiasm
with which the general public received it. This success was largely due
to the literary style and artistic handling of the subject. Green claims
himself that on most literary questions he is French in his point of
view. 'It seems to me', he says, 'that on all points of literary art we
have to sit at the feet of French Gamaliels'; and in his best work he
has more in common with Michelet than with our own classic historians.
But while Michelet had many large volumes in which to expand his
treatment of picturesque episodes, Green was painfully limited by space.

What he can give us of clear and lively portraiture in a few lines is
seen in his presentation of the gallant men who laid the foundation of
our Empire overseas. By a few lines of narrative, and a happy quotation
from their own words, Green brings out the heroism of their sacrifice or
their success, the faith which inspired Humphry Gilbert to meet his
death at sea, the patience which enabled John Smith to achieve the
tillage of Virginian soil.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28