GREAT HISTORIAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 September 1940, Page 7

GREAT HISTORIAN

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

NEW IDEAS OF HIS CRAFT.

GALLANT GENTLEMAN & GREAT CHRISTIAN.

A very gallant gentleman and a great Christian withal was John Richard Green (says a writer in the Melbourne "Age"). He stands for all time as one of the most scholarly, one of the most painstaking, one of the most artistic, and one of the most engaging of British historians.

It was in the year of Queen Victoria's accession that Green first saw the light at Oxford. His father was a maker of silk gowns for the Fellows of the University. Very few eminent men owe so much to their birthplace as did he. From earliest infancy he became saturated in the university atmosphere. His childish eyes stared in wondering awe at the pageant of academic life moving around him. As soon as he was old enough to interest himself in such matters the storied stories of the old university city began to whisper into his enchanted ear their hoarded secrets. Nothing delighted him more than to sit at the feet of very old men and women while they narrated to him the earliest happenings of which their memories preserved any impression. The past to him was fairyland; he loved to plunge into its bewitching realms whenever the shadow of an opportunity presented itself. Any new discovery concerning the Oxford-that-once-was-fired his imagination and threw him into transports of excitement.

BREATHLESS AWE. He cherished in superstitious veneration every link, however slender, that bound his own today with the nation's long-forgotten yesterdays. Mrs Green amusingly describes the breathless awe with which her husband as a small boy once received a prize from the hands of Dr Routh, the president of the college. The prize itself was to its recipient a negligible affair; the fact that paralysed all his powers was the circumstance that Dr Routh was more than 100 years old, and had actually looked into the face of Dr Johnson.If a boy, tingling to the core of his being with such emotions, needed any further stimulus to give bent and direction to his career. Green found it when at the age of 16 he fell under the spell of Gibbon. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” swept the responsive and impressionable youth completely off his feet. The glamour of Gibbon fascinated him. It was a revelation to him of the conquests awaiting the historian who really understood his business. And as the years passed and as the brilliant young student delved more and more deeply into the picturesque territory that bygone ages presented convinced that very few of the classical historians had cherished any adequate conception of the sublime potentialities of their craft. And, lacking that rose-tinted vision, they had perpetuated the unpardonable sin —they had actually made history dull! THE HISTORIANS ART. In one of his masterly and entrancing essays Walter Bagehot says that many men become historians for the simple reason that the material is considerably prepared for them. All the facts are ready; the events have actually happened. There is no intricate plot to be worked out; there are no original ideas to be conceived; the facts stand waiting to be marshalled and arranged. Many men. Bagehot declares are vaguely conscious of their ability to write, but, for the life of them, they can think of nothing to write about. Fiction is not in their line, poetry needs melodious inspiration; they have never had the good fortune to commit some dastardly crime, and cannot, therefore, favour us with a thrilling volume of confessions. History, however, furnishes them with an endless panorama of dramatic and sensational incidents. All that they have to do is carefully to investigate and skilfully to record this stately pageant of events. Yet. simple as that task may appear to some men, Green felt that of those who had essayed its execution ninetynine out of every hundred had most dismally failed. They failed because they deplorably under-rated the subtle character of their task. The apparent simplicity of the work is an optical illusion. In point of fact the historian needs the vivid imagination of the novelist; he needs the mathematical accuracy of the scientist; he needs the penetrating insight of the philosopher, and he needs the contemplative temper the soulfulness and the graceful diction of the poet. He needs all these qualities and many more; he needs them all the time.

FEW POSSESSED IT. It is because so few of those who have assumed the role of the historian have been able to command this wealthy equipment that most of their ponderous and pretentious volumes are allowed to lie in undisturbed repose upon our topmost shelves. It is a case of dust to dust. Since they themselves are so unconsciousably arid and dry, we mercifully allow the cobwebs to enfold them. Green argued that it serves them right. To him, history renresented everything that was enthralling, everything that was colourful, everything that was substantial, everything that was dramatic. In contemplating the vivid and palpitating past, he felt that he was watching an imposing and magnificent procession—a procession that, with gay banners waving and stirring music playing, was marching in splendid panoply and perfectly marshalled pageantry before his wondering eyes. But. when he critically analysed the technique of the classical historians, he had to confess with shame that they had done all that human ingenuity could suggest to make the knight-errantry of the centuries look drab, wooden, stilted, lifeless. and unconvincing. They maintained the statuesque dignity of history. but destroyed its living charm.

At the age of thirty-two. Green found himself cherising a lofty and passionate ideal although he gravely doubted the possibility of his giving that ideal any concrete expression. He exulted in the conviction that he could write the history of his own peoples as that history had never before been written. It should be not a history of our British wars, nor a history of our British kings, but primarily and essentially and fundamentally a history of our British people. NO DRUMS AND TRUMPETS. He resolved that this history should never sink to the level of a drum and trumpet history. And anybody who

cares to look back will recognise that, until Green ushered in the new vogue, a history of England was almost exclusively a recital of military campaigns and royal amours. Green set himself to write a history which should be a record of the great processes by which the nation had been built up. But. just as he had shaken himself free from all distracting entanglements, and had plied around his desk the notes that he had amassed in the course of his researches he discovered to his dismay that his lungs were in ruins, and that he might at any time drop into a consumptive’s grave.

However, Alexander Macmillan, of the famous publishing house, offered him £350 for the unwritten manuscript, with a promise of more if the book proved successful. Taking fresh heart from such encouragement. Green lived to hear, five years later, the plaudits that greeted the publication of his book. And better still, he lived to see it enthroned as one of our English classics, and to draw royalties on the sale of 150.000 copies. But, having allowed him to taste this measure of triumph, the pitiless disease which his iron will seemed to have held at bay asserted its supremacy, and drove him to the south of France, and there, in 1883, at the age of 46, he passed away. “I know what they will say," he exclaimed one day as. book in hand, he surveyed the grove of palms beneath his sickroom window, "they will say of me that ’he died learning!’ ” And pilgrims who today visit his tomb at Mentone will find those three words inscribed upon the monument that marks his grave.