Chapter IV: Part 4

Archibald Campbell Tait (born in Scotland in 1811, died 1882) was educated at Glasgow University and at Balliol College, Oxford; worked at his college for some years as a tutor, succeeded Dr. Arnold as headmaster of Rugby School in 1843, became Dean of Carlisle and then Bishop of London, and was translated to Canterbury in 1868. It has been generally understood that Mr. Disraeli, then Prime Minister, suggested another prelate for the post, but the Queen, who did not share her minister's estimate of that prelate, expressed a preference for Tait. Her choice was amply justified, for Tait united, and indeed possessed in a high degree, the qualifications which have just been enumerated. He was, if it be not a paradox to say so, more remarkable as an archbishop than as a man. He had no original power as a thinker. He was not a striking preacher, and the more pains he took with his sermons the less interesting did they become. He was so far from being learned that you could say no more of him than that he was a sound scholar and a well-informed man. He was deeply and earnestly pious, but in a quiet, almost dry way, which lacked what is called unction, though it impressed those who were in close contact with him. He showed slight interest either in the historical or in the speculative side of theology. Though a good headmaster, he was not a stimulating teacher. Had he remained all his life in a subordinate position, as a college tutor at Oxford, or as canon of some cathedral, he would have discharged the duties of the position in a thoroughly satisfactory way, and would have acquired influence among his colleagues, but no one would have felt that Fate had dealt unfairly with him in depriving him of some larger career and loftier post. No one, indeed, who knew him when he was a college tutor seems to have predicted the dignities he was destined to attain, although he had shown in the theological strife that then raged at Oxford the courage and independence of his character.

In what, then, did the secret of his success lie--the secret, that is, of his acquitting himself so excellently in those dignities as to have become almost a model to his own and the next generation of what an Archbishop of Canterbury ought to be? In the statesmanlike quality of his mind. He had not merely moderation, but what, though often confounded with moderation, is something rarer and better, a steady balance of mind. He was carried about by no winds of doctrine. He seldom yielded to impulses, and was never so seduced by any one theory as to lose sight of other views and conditions which had to be regarded. He was, I think, the first man of Scottish birth who ever rose to be Primate of England, and he had the cautious self-restraint which is deemed characteristic of his nation. He knew how to be dignified without assumption, firm without vehemence, prudent without timidity, judicious without coldness. He was, above all things, a singularly just man, who recognised every one's rights, and did not seek to overbear them by an exercise of authority. He was as ready to listen to his opponents as to his friends. Indeed, he so held himself as to appear to have no opponents, but to be rather a judge before whom different advocates were stating their respective cases, than a leader seeking to make his own views or his own party prevail. Genial he could hardly be called, for there was little warmth, little display of emotion, in his manner; and the clergy noted, at least in his earlier episcopal days, a touch of the headmaster in his way of receiving them. But he was simple and kindly, capable of seeing the humorous side of things, desiring to believe the good rather than the evil, and to lead people instead of driving them. With all his caution he was direct and straightforward, saying no more than was necessary, but saying nothing he had occasion to be ashamed of. He sometimes made mistakes, but they were not mistakes of the heart, and, being free from vanity or self-conceit, he was willing in his quiet way to admit them and to alter his course accordingly. So his character by degrees gained upon the nation, and so even ecclesiastical partisanship, proverbially more bitter than political, because it springs from deeper wells of feeling, grew to respect and spare him. The influence he obtained went far to strengthen the position of the Established Church, and to keep its several parties from breaking out into more open hostility with one another. He himself inclined to what might be called a moderate Broad Church attitude, leaning more to Evangelical than to Tractarian or Romanising views in matters of doctrine. At one time the extreme High Churchmen regarded him as an enemy. But this unfriendliness had almost died away when the death of his wife and his only son (a young man of singularly winning character), followed by his own long illness, stilled the voices of criticism.

He exerted great influence in the House of Lords by his tact, by his firmness of character, and by the consistency of his public course, as well as by powers of speech, which, matured by long practice, had risen to a high level. Without eloquence, without either imagination or passion, which are the chief elements in eloquence, he had a grave, weighty, thoughtful style which impressed that fastidious audience. His voice was strong and sonorous, his diction plain yet pure and dignified, his matter well considered. His thought moved on a high plane; he spoke as one who fully believed every word he said. The late Bishop of Winchester, the famous Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, was incomparably his superior not only as a talker but as an orator, but no less inferior in his power over the House of Lords, for so little does rhetorical brilliance count in a critical and practical assembly. Next to courage, the quality which gains trust and regard in a deliberative body is that which is familiarly described when it is said of a man, "You always know where to find him." Tait belonged to no party. But his principles, though not rigid, were fixed and settled; his words and votes were the expression of his principles.

The presence of bishops in the House of Lords is disapproved by some sections of English opinion, and there are those among the temporal peers who, quite apart from any political feeling, are said to regard them with little favour. But every one must admit that they have raised and adorned the debates in that chamber. Besides Tait and Wilberforce, two other prelates of the same generation stood in the front rank of speakers, Dr. Magee, whose wit and fire would have found a more fitting theatre in the House of Commons, and Dr. Thirlwall, a scholar and historian whose massive intellect and stately diction were too rarely used to raise great political issues above the dust-storms of party controversy.

Perhaps no Archbishop since the Revolution of 1688 has exercised so much influence as Dr. Tait, and certainly none within living memory is so well entitled to be credited with a definite ecclesiastical policy. His aim was to widen the bounds of the Church of England, so far as the law could, without evasion, be stretched for that purpose. He bore a leading part in obtaining an Act of Parliament which introduced a new and less strict form of clerical subscription. He realised that the Church of England can maintain her position as a State Church only by adapting herself to the movements of opinion, and accordingly he voted for the Divorce Bill of 1859, and for the Burials Bill, which relieved Dissenters from a grievance that exposed the Established Church to odium. The Irish Church Disestablishment Bill of 1869 threw upon him, at the critical moment when it went from the House of Commons, where it had passed by a large majority, to the House of Lords, where a still larger majority was hostile, a duty delicate in itself, and such as seldom falls to the lot of a prelate. The Queen wrote to him suggesting that he should endeavour to effect a compromise between Mr. Gladstone, then head of the Liberal Ministry, and the leading Tory peers who were opposing the Bill. He conducted the negotiation with tact and judgment, and succeeded in securing good pecuniary terms for the Protestant Episcopal Establishment. Though he had joined in the Letter of the Bishops which conveyed their strong disapproval of the book called _Essays and Reviews_ (whose supposed heretical tendencies roused such a storm in 1861), and had thereby displeased his friends, Temple (afterwards archbishop), Jowett, and Stanley,[20] he joined in the judgment of the Privy Council which in 1863 dismissed the charges against the impugned Essayists. Despite his advocacy of the Bill which in 1874 provided a new procedure to be used against clergymen transgressing the ritual prescribed by law, he discouraged prosecutions, and did his utmost to keep Ritualists as well as moderate Rationalists within the pale of the Church of England. He did not succeed--no one could have succeeded, even though he had spoken with the tongues of men and of angels--in stilling ecclesiastical strife. The controversies of his days still rage, though in a slightly different form. But in refusing to yield to the pressure of any section, in regarding the opinion of the laity rather than that of the clergy, in keeping close to the law yet giving it the widest possible interpretation, he laid down the lines on which the Anglican Established Church can best be defended and upheld. That she will last, as an Establishment, for any very long time, will hardly be expected by those who mark the direction in which thought tends to move all over the civilised world. But Tait's policy and personality have counted for something in prolonging the time-honoured connection of the Anglican Church with the English State.

Perhaps a doubtful service either to the Church or to the State. Yet even those who regret the connection, and who, surveying the long course of Christian history from the days of the Emperor Constantine down to our own, believe that the Christian Church would have been spiritually purer and morally more effective had she never become either the mistress or the servant or the ally of the State, but relied on her divine commission only, may wish that, when the day arrives for the ancient bond to be unloosed, it should be unloosed not through an embittered political struggle, but because the general sentiment of the nation, and primarily of religious men throughout the nation, has come to approve the change.

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[19] An admirable life of Archbishop Tait by his son-in-law, Dr. R. T.
Davidson (now Archbishop of Canterbury), and Canon Benham
appeared in 1891.

[20] They thought his public action scarcely consistent with the
language he had used to Temple in private.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE[21]

When Mr. Anthony Trollope died (December 11, 1882) at the age of sixty-seven, he was the best known of our English writers of fiction, and stood foremost among them if the double test of real merit and wide popularity be applied. Some writers, such as Wilkie Collins, may have commanded a larger sale. One writer at least, Mr. George Meredith, had produced work of far deeper insight and higher imaginative power. But the gifts of Mr. Meredith had then scarcely begun to win recognition, and not one reader knew his name for five who knew Trollope's. So Mr. Thomas Hardy had published what many continue to think his two best stories, but they had not yet caught the eye of the general public. Mrs. Oliphant, high as was the general level of her work, and inexhaustible as her fertility appeared, had not cut her name so deep upon the time as Trollope did. Everything she did was good, nothing superlatively good. No one placed Trollope in the first rank of creative novelists beside Dickens or Thackeray, or beside George Eliot, who had died two years before. But in the second rank he stood high; and though other novelists may have had as many readers as he, none was in so many ways representative of the general character and spirit of English fiction. He had established his reputation nearly thirty years before, when Thackeray and Dickens were still in the fulness of their fame; and had maintained it during the zenith of George Eliot's. For more than a generation his readers had come from the best-educated classes as well as from those who lack patience or taste for anything heavier than a story of adventure. In this respect he stood above Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Ouida, and other heroines of the circulating libraries, and also above such more artistic or less sensational writers as William Black, Walter Besant, James Payn, and Whyte Melville. (The school of so-called realistic fiction had scarcely begun to appear.) None of these had, like Trollope, succeeded in making their creations a part of the common thought of cultivated Englishmen; none had, like him, given us characters which we treat as typical men and women, and discuss at a dinner-table as though they were real people. Mrs. Proudie, for instance, the Bishop of Barchester's wife, to take the most obvious instance (though not that most favourable to Trollope, for he produced better portraits than hers), or Archdeacon Grantly, was when Trollope died as familiar a name to English men and women between sixty and thirty years of age as Wilkins Micawber, or Blanche Amory, or Rosamond Lydgate. There was no other living novelist of whose personages the same could be said, and perhaps none since has attained this particular kind of success.

Personally, Anthony Trollope was a bluff, genial, hearty, vigorous man, typically English in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes. His large eyes, which looked larger behind his large spectacles, were full of good-humoured life and force; and though he was neither witty nor brilliant in conversation, he was what is called very good company, having travelled widely, known all sorts of people, and formed views, usually positive views, on all the subjects of the day, views which he was prompt to declare and maintain. There was not much novelty in them--you were disappointed not to find so clever a writer more original--but they were worth listening to for their solid common-sense, tending rather to commonplace sense, and you enjoyed the ardour with which he threw himself into a discussion. Though boisterous and insistent in his talk, he was free from assumption or conceit, and gave the impression of liking the world he lived in, and being satisfied with his own place in it. Neither did one observe in him that erratic turn which is commonly attributed to literary men. He was a steady and regular worker, who rose every morning between five and six to turn out a certain quantity of copy for the printer before breakfast, enjoying his work, and fond of his own characters--indeed he declared that he filled his mind with them and saw them moving before him--yet composing a novel just as other people might compose tables of statistics. These methodical habits were to some extent due to his training as a clerk in the Post Office, where he spent the earlier half of his working life, having retired in 1864. He did not neglect his duties there, even when occupied in writing, and claimed to have been the inventor of the pillar letter-box. It was probably in his tours as an inspector of postal deliveries that he obtained that knowledge of rural life which gives reality to his pictures of country society. He turned his Civil Service experiences to account in some of his stories, giving faithful and characteristic sketches, in _The Three Clerks_ and _The Small House at Allington_, of different types of Government officials, a class which is much more of a class in England than it is in America, though less of a class than it is in Germany or France. His favourite amusement was hunting, as readers of his novels know, and until his latest years he might have been seen, though a heavy weight, following the hounds in Essex once or twice a week.

When E. A. Freeman wrote a magazine article denouncing the cruelty of field sports, Trollope replied, defending the amusement he loved. Some one said it was a collision of two rough diamonds. But the end was that Freeman invited Trollope to come and stay with him at Wells, and they became great friends.

Like most of his literary contemporaries, he was a politician, and indeed a pretty keen one. He once contested in the Liberal interest--in those days literary men were mostly Liberals--the borough of Beverley in Yorkshire, a corrupt little place, where bribery proved too strong for him. It was thereafter disfranchised as a punishment for its misdeeds; and his costly experiences doubtless suggested the clever electioneering sketches in the story of _Ralph the Heir_. Thackeray also was once a Liberal candidate. He stood for the city of Oxford, and the story was current there for years afterwards how the freemen of the borough (not an exemplary class of voters) rose to an unwonted height of virtue by declaring that though they did not understand his speeches or know who he was, they would vote for him, expecting nothing, because he was a friend of Mr. Neate's. Trollope showed his continued interest in public affairs by appearing on the platform at the great meeting in St. James's Hall in December 1876, which was the beginning of a vehement party struggle over the Eastern Question that only ended at the general election of 1880. He was a direct and forcible speaker, who would have made his way had he entered Parliament. But as he had no practical experience of politics either in the House of Commons or as a working member of a party organisation in a city where contests are keen, the pictures of political life which are so frequent in his later tales have not much flavour of reality. They are sketches obviously taken from the outside. Very rarely do even the best writers of fiction succeed in reproducing any special and peculiar kind of life and atmosphere. Of the various stories that purport to describe what goes on in the English Parliament, none gives to those who know the social conditions and habits of the place an impression of truth to nature, and the same has often been remarked with regard to tales of English University life. Trollope, however, with his quick eye for the superficial aspects of any society, might have described the House of Commons admirably had he sat in it himself. He was fond of travel, and between 1862 and 1880 visited the United States, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa, about all of which he wrote books which, if hardly of permanent value, were fresh, vigorous, and eminently readable, conveying a definite and generally correct impression of the more obvious social and economic phenomena he found then existing. His account of the United States, for instance, is excellent, and did something to make the Americans forgive the asperity with which his mother had described her experiences there many years before. Trollope's travel sketches are as much superior in truthfulness to Froude's descriptions of the same regions as they are inferior in the allurements of style.

The old classification of novels, based on the two most necessary elements of a drama, divided them into novels of plot and novels of character. To these we have of late years added novels of incident or adventure, novels of conversation, novels of manners, not to speak of "novels with a purpose," which are sermons or pamphlets in disguise. No one doubted to which of these categories Trollope's work should be referred. There was in his stories as little plot as a story can well have. The conversations never beamed with humour like that of Scott, nor glittered with aphorisms like those of George Meredith. The incidents carried the reader pleasantly along, but seldom surprised him by any ingenuity of contrivance. Character there was, and, indeed, great fertility in the creation of character, for there is hardly one of the tales in which three or four at least of the personages do not stand out as people whom you would know again if you met them years after. But the conspicuous merit of Trollope's novels, in the eyes of his own countrymen, is their value as pictures of contemporary manners. Here he may claim to have been surpassed by no writer of his own generation. Dickens, with all his great and splendid gifts, did not describe the society he lived in. His personages were too unusual and peculiar to speak and act and think like the ordinary men and women of the nineteenth century; nor would a foreigner, however much he might enjoy the exuberant humour and dramatic power with which they are presented, learn from them much about the ways and habits of the average Englishman. The everyday life to which the stories are most true is the life of the lower middle class in London; and some one has observed that although this class changes less quickly than the classes above it, it is already unlike that which Dickens saw when in the 'thirties he was a police-court reporter. Critics have, indeed, said that Dickens was too great a painter to be a good photographer, but the two arts are not incompatible, as appears from the skill with which Walter Scott, for instance, portrayed the peasantry of his own country in _The Antiquary_. Thackeray, again, though he has described certain sections of the upper or upper middle class with far more power and delicacy than Trollope ever reached, does not go beyond those sections, and has little to tell us about the middle class generally, still less about the classes beneath them. Trollope was thoroughly at home in the English middle class and also (though less perfectly) in the upper class; and his pictures are all the more true to life because there is not that vein of stern or cynical reflection which runs through Thackeray, and makes us think less of the story than of the moral. Trollope usually has a moral, but it is so obvious, so plainly and quietly put, that it does not distract attention from the minor incidents and little touches of every day which render the sketches lifelike. If even his best-drawn characters are not far removed from the commonplace this helps to make them fairly represent the current habits and notions of their time. They are the same people we meet in the street or at a dinner-party; and they are mostly seen under no more exciting conditions than those of a hunting meet, or a lawn-tennis match, or an afternoon tea. They are flirting or talking for effect, or scheming for some petty temporary end; they are not under the influence of strong passions, or forced into striking situations, like the leading characters in Charlotte Bronte's or George Eliot's novels; and for this reason again they represent faithfully the ordinary surface of English upper and upper middle class society: its prejudices, its little pharisaisms and hypocrisies, its snobbishness, its worship of conventionalities, its aloofness from or condescension to those whom it deems below its own level; and therewith also its public spirit, its self-helpfulness, its neighbourliness, its respect for honesty and straightforwardness, its easy friendliness of manner towards all who stand within the sacred pale of social recognition. Nor, again, has any one more skilfully noted and set down those transient tastes and fashions which are, so to speak, the trimmings of the dress, and which, transient though they are, and quickly forgotten by contemporaries, will have an interest for one who, a century or two hence, feels the same curiosity about our manners as we feel about those of the subjects of King George the Third. That Trollope will be read at all fifty years after his death one may hesitate to predict, considering how comparatively few in the present generation read Richardson, or Fielding, or Miss Edgeworth, or Charlotte Bronte, and how much reduced is the number of those who read even Walter Scott and Thackeray. But whoever does read Trollope in 1930 will gather from his pages better than from any others an impression of what everyday life was like in England in the "middle Victorian" period. The aspects of that life were already, when his latest books were written, beginning to change, and the features he drew are fast receding into history. Even the clergy of 1852-1862 are no longer, except in quiet country districts, the same as the clergy we now see.

People have often compared the personal impressions which eminent writers make on those who talk to them with the impressions previously derived from their works. Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning used to be taken as two instances representing opposite extremes. Carlyle always talked in character: had there been phonographs in his days, the phonographed "record" might have been printed as part of one of his books. Browning, on the other hand, seemed unlike what his poems had made a reader expect: it was only after a long _tete-a-tete_ with him that the poet whose mind had been learned through his works stood revealed. Trollope at first caused a similar though less marked surprise. This bluff burly man did not seem the kind of person who would trace with a delicate touch the sunlight sparkling on, or a gust of temper ruffling, the surface of a youthful soul in love. Upon further knowledge one perceived that the features of Trollope's talent, facile invention, quick observation, and a strong common-sense view of things, with little originality or intensity, were really the dominant features of his character as expressed in talk. Still, though the man was more of a piece with his books than he had seemed, one could never quite recognise in him the delineator of Lily Dale.

As a painter of manners he recalls two of his predecessors--one greater, one less great than himself. In his limitations and in his fidelity to the aspects of daily life as he saw them, he resembles Miss Austen. He is inferior to her in delicacy of portraiture, in finish, in atmosphere. No two of his books can be placed on a level with _Emma_ and _Persuasion_. On the other hand, while he has done for the years 1850-1870 what Miss Burney did for 1770-1790, most critics will place him above her both in fertility and in naturalness. Her characters are apt either to want colour, like the heroines of _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, or to be so exaggerated, like Mr. Briggs and Miss Larolles, as to approach the grotesque. Trollope is a realist in the sense of being, in all but a few of his books, on the lines of normal humanity, though he is seldom strong enough to succeed, when he pierces down to the bed-rock of human nature, in rendering the primal passions either solemn or terrible. Like Miss Austen, he attains actuality by observation rather than by imagination, hardly ever entering the sphere of poetry.

His range was not wide, for he could not present either grand characters or tragical situations, any more than he could break out into the splendid humour of Dickens. His wings never raised him far above the level floor of earth. But within that limited range he had surprising fertility. His clerical portrait-gallery is the most complete that any English novelist has given us. No two faces are exactly alike, and yet all are such people as one might see any day in the pulpit. So, again, there is scarcely one of his stories in which a young lady is not engaged, formally or practically, to two men at the same time, or one man more or less committed to two women; yet no story repeats exactly the situation, or raises the problem of honour and duty in quite the same form as it appears in the stories that went before. Few people who have written so much have so little appeared to be exhausting their invention.

It must, however, be admitted that Trollope's fame might have stood higher if he had written less. The public which had been delighted with his earlier groups of novels, and especially with that group in which _The Warden_ comes first and _Barchester Towers_ second, began latterly to tire of what they had come to deem the mannerisms of their favourite, and felt that they now knew the compass of his gifts. Partly, perhaps, because he feared to be always too like himself, he once or twice attempted to represent more improbable situations and exceptional personages. But the attempt was not successful. He lost his touch of ordinary life without getting into any higher region of poetical truth; and in his latest stories he had begun to return to his earlier and better manner.

New tendencies, moreover, embodying themselves in new schools, were already beginning to appear. R. L. Stevenson as leader of the school of adventure, Mr. Henry James as the apostle of the school of psychological analysis, soon to be followed by Mr. Kipling with a type of imaginative directness distinctively his own, were beginning to lead minds and tastes into other directions. The influence of France was more felt than it had been when Trollope began to write. And what a contrast between Trollope's manner and that of his chief French contemporaries, such as Octave Feuillet or Alphonse Daudet or Guy de Maupassant! The French novelists, be their faculty of invention greater or less, at any rate studied their characters with more care than English writers had usually shown. The characters were fewer, almost as few as in a classical drama; and the whole action of the story is carefully subordinated to the development of these characters, and the placing of them in a critical position which sets their strength and weakness in the fullest light. There was more of a judicious adaptation of the parts to the whole in French fiction than in ours, and therefore more unity of impression was attained. Trollope, no doubt, set a bad example in this respect. He crowded his canvas with figures; he pursued the fortunes of three or four sets of people at the same time, caring little how the fate of the one set affected that of the others; he made his novel a sort of chronicle which you might open anywhere and close anywhere, instead of a drama animated by one idea and converging towards one centre. He neglected the art which uses incidents small in themselves to lead up to the _denoument_ and make it more striking. He took little pains with his diction, seeming not to care how he said what he had to say. These defects strike those who turn over his pages to-day. But to those who read him in the 'fifties or 'sixties, the carelessness was redeemed by, or forgotten in, the vivacity with which the story moved, the freshness and faithfulness of its pictures of character and manners.

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[21] Trollope's autobiography, published in 1883, is a good specimen
of self-portraiture, candid, straightforward, and healthy, and
leaves an agreeable impression of the writer. Dr. Richard
Garnett has written well of him in the _Dictionary of National
Biography_.

JOHN RICHARD GREEN[22]

John Richard Green was born in Oxford on 12th December 1837, and educated first at Magdalen College School, and afterwards, for a short time, at a private tutor's. He was a singularly quick and bright boy, and at sixteen obtained by competition a scholarship at Jesus College, Oxford, where he began to reside in 1856. The members of that college were in those days almost entirely Welshmen, and thereby somewhat cut off from the rest of the University. They saw little of men in other colleges, so that a man might have a reputation for ability in his own society without gaining any in the larger world of Oxford. It so happened with Green. Though his few intimate friends perceived his powers, they had so little intercourse with the rest of the University, either by way of breakfasts and wine-parties, or at the University debating society, or in athletic sports, that he remained unknown even to those among his contemporaries who were interested in the same things, and would have most enjoyed his acquaintance. The only eminent person who seems to have appreciated and influenced him was Dean Stanley, then Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of Christ Church. Green had attended Stanley's lectures, and Stanley, whose kindly interest in young men never failed, was struck by him, and had some share in turning his studies towards history. He graduated in 1860, having refused to compete for honours, because he had not received from those who were then tutors of the college the recognition to which he was entitled.

In 1860 he was ordained, and became curate in London at St. Barnabas, King's Square, whence, after two years' experience, and one or two temporary engagements, including the sole charge of a parish in Hoxton, he was appointed in 1865 to the incumbency of St. Philip's, Stepney, a district church in one of the poorest parts of London, where the vicar's income was ill-proportioned to the claims which needy parishioners made upon him. Here he worked with zeal and assiduity for about three years, gaining an insight into the condition and needs of the poor which scholars and historians seldom obtain. He learnt, in fact, to know men, and the real forces that sway them; and he used to say in later life that he was conscious how much this had helped him in historical writing. Gibbon, as every one knows, makes a similar remark about his experience as a captain in the Hampshire militia.

Green threw the whole force of his nature into the parish schools, spending some part of every day in them; he visited incessantly, and took an active part in the movement for regulating and controlling private charity which led to the formation of the Charity Organisation Society. An outbreak of cholera and period of distress among the poor which occurred during his incumbency drew warm-hearted men from other parts of London to give their help to the clergy of the East End. Edward Denison, who was long affectionately remembered by many who knew him in Oxford and London, chose Green's parish to work in, and the two friends confirmed one another in their crusade against indiscriminate and demoralising charity. It was at this time that Green, who spent upon the parish nearly all that he received as vicar, found himself obliged to earn some money by other means, and began to write for the _Saturday Review_. The addition of this labour to the daily fatigues of his parish duties told on his health, which had always been delicate, and made him willingly accept from Archbishop Tait, who had early marked and learned to value his abilities, the post of librarian at Lambeth. He quitted Stepney, and never took any other clerical work.

Although physical weakness was one of the causes which compelled this step, there was also another. He had been brought up in Tractarian views, and is said to have been at one time on the point of entering the Church of Rome. This tendency passed off, and before he went to St. Philip's he had become a Broad Churchman, and was much influenced by the writings of Mr. F. D. Maurice, whom he knew and used frequently to meet, and whose pure and noble character, even more perhaps than his preaching, had profoundly impressed him. However, his restless mind did not stop long at that point. The same tendency which had carried him away from Tractarianism made him feel less and less at home in the ministry of the Church of England, and would doubtless have led him, even had his health been stronger, to withdraw from clerical duties. After a few years his friends ceased to address letters to him under the usual clerical epithet; but he continued to interest himself in ecclesiastical affairs, and always retained a marked dislike to Nonconformity. Aversions sometimes outlive attachments.

On leaving Stepney he went to live in lodgings in Beaumont Street, Marylebone, and divided his time between Lambeth and literary work. He now during several years wrote a good deal for the _Saturday Review_, and his articles were among the best which then appeared in that organ. The most valuable of them were reviews of historical books, and descriptions from the historical point of view of cities or other remarkable places, especially English and French towns. Some of these are masterpieces. Other articles were on social, or what may be called occasional, topics, and attracted much notice at the time from their gaiety and lightness of touch, which sometimes seemed to pass into flippancy. He never wrote upon politics, nor was he in the ordinary sense of the word a journalist, for with the exception of these social articles, his work was all done in his own historical field, and done with as much care and pains as others would bestow on the composition of a book. Upon this subject I may quote the words of one of his oldest and most intimate friends (Mr. Stopford Brooke), who knew all he did in those days.

The real history of this writing for the _Saturday Review_ has
much personal, pathetic, and literary interest.

It was when he was vicar of St. Philip's, Stepney, that he wrote
the most. The income of the place was, I think, L300 a year, and
the poverty of the parish was very great. Mr. Green spent every
penny of this income on the parish. And he wrote--in order to
live, and often when he was wearied out with the work of the day
and late into the night--two, and often three, articles a week for
the _Saturday Review_. It was less of a strain to him than it
would have been to many others, because he wrote with such speed,
and because his capacity for rapidly throwing his subject into
form and his memory were so remarkable. But it was a severe
strain, nevertheless, for one who, at the time, had in him the
beginnings of the disease of which he died.

I was staying with him once for two days, and the first night he
said to me, "I have three articles to write for the _Saturday
Review_, and they must all be done in thirty-six hours." "What are
they?" I said; "and how have you found time to think of them?"
"Well," he answered, "one is on a volume of Freeman's _Norman
Conquest_, another is a 'light middle,' and the last on the
history of a small town in England; and I have worked them all
into form as I was walking to-day about the parish and in London."
One of these studies was finished before two o'clock in the
morning, and while I talked to him; the other two were done the
next day. It is not uncommon to reach such speed, but it is very
uncommon to combine this speed with literary excellence of
composition, and with permanent and careful knowledge. The
historical reviews were of use to, and gratefully acknowledged by,
his brother historians, and frequently extended, in two or three
numbers of the _Saturday Review_, to the length of an article in a
magazine. I used to think them masterpieces of reviewing, and
their one fault was the fault which was then frequent in that
_Review_--over-vehemence in slaughtering its foes. Such reviewing
cannot be fairly described as journalism. It was an historical
scholar speaking to scholars.

Another class of articles written by Mr. Green were articles on
towns in England, France, or Italy. I do not know whether it was
he or Mr. Freeman who introduced this custom of bringing into a
short space the historical aspect of a single town or of a famous
building, and showing how the town or the building recorded its
own history, and how it was linked to general history, but Mr.
Green, at least, began it very early in his articles on Oxford. At
any rate, it was his habit, at this time, whenever he travelled in
England, France, or Italy, to make a study of any town he
visited.

Articles of this kind--and he had them by fifties in his
head--formed the second line of what has been called his
journalism. I should prefer to call them contributions to history.
They are totally different in quality from ordinary journalism.
They are short historical essays.

As his duties at Lambeth made no great demands on his time, he was now able to devote himself more steadily to historical work. His first impulse in that direction seems, as I have said, to have been received from Dean Stanley at Oxford. His next came from E. A. Freeman, who had been impressed by an ingenious paper of his at a meeting of the Somerset Archaeological Society, and who became from that time his steadfast friend. Green was a born historian, who would have been eminent without any help except that of books. But he was wise enough to know the value of personal counsel and direction, and generous enough to be heartily grateful for what he received. He did not belong in any special sense to what has been called Freeman's school, differing widely from that distinguished writer in many of his views, and still more in style and manner. But he learnt much from Freeman, and he delighted to acknowledge his debt. He learnt among other things the value of accuracy, the way to handle original authorities, the interpretation of architecture, and he received, during many years of intimate intercourse, the constant sympathy and encouragement of a friend whose affection was never blind to faults, while his admiration was never clouded by jealousy. It was his good fortune to win the regard and receive the advice of another illustrious historian, Dr. Stubbs, who has expressed in language perhaps more measured, but not less emphatic than Freeman's, his sense of Green's services to English history. These two he used to call his masters; but no one who has read him and them needs to be told that his was one of those strong and rich intelligences which, in becoming more perfect by the study of others, loses nothing of its originality.

His first continuous studies had lain among the Angevin kings of England, and the note-books still exist in which he had accumulated materials for their history. However, the book he planned was never written, for when the state of his lungs (which forced him to spend the winter of 1870-71 at San Remo) had begun to alarm his friends, they urged him to throw himself at once into some treatise likely to touch the world more than a minute account of so remote a period could do. Accordingly he began, and in two or three years, his winters abroad sadly interrupting work, he completed the _Short History of the English People_. When a good deal of it had gone through the press, he felt, and his friends agreed with him, that the style of the earlier chapters was too much in the eager, quick, sketchy, "point-making" manner of his _Saturday Review_ articles, "and did not possess" (says the friend whom I have already quoted) "enough historical dignity for a work which was to take in the whole history of England. It was then, being convinced of this, that he cancelled a great deal of what had been stereotyped, and re-wrote it, re-creating, with his passionate facility, his whole style." In order to finish it he gave up the _Saturday Review_ altogether, though he could ill spare what his writing there brought him in. It is seldom that one finds such swiftness and ease in composition as his, united to so much fastidiousness. He went on remoulding and revising till his friends insisted that the book should be published anyhow, and published it accordingly was, in 1874. Feeling that his time on earth might be short, for he was often disabled even by a catarrh, he was the readier to yield.

The success of the _Short History_ was rapid and overwhelming. Everybody bought it. It was philosophical enough for scholars, and popular enough for schoolboys. No historical book since Macaulay's _History_ has made its way so fast, or been read with so much avidity. And Green was under disadvantages from which his great predecessor did not suffer. Macaulay's name was famous before his _History of England_ appeared, and Macaulay's scale was so large that he could enliven his pages with a multitude of anecdotes and personal details. Green was known only to a small circle of friends, having written nothing under his own signature except one or two papers in magazines or in the Transactions of archaeological societies; and the plan of his book, which dealt, in eight hundred and twenty pages, with the whole fourteen centuries of English national life, obliged him to handle facts in the mass, and touch lightly and briefly on personal traits. A summary is of all kinds of writing that which it is hardest to make interesting, because one must speak in general terms, one must pack facts tightly together, one must be content to give those facts without the delicacies of light and shade, or the subtler tints of colour. Yet such was his skill, both literary and historical, that his outlines gave more pleasure and instruction than other people's finished pictures.

In 1876 he took, for the only time in his life, except when he had supported a working-man's candidate for the Tower Hamlets at the general election of 1868, an active part in practical politics. Towards the end of that year, when war seemed impending between Russia and the Turks, fears were entertained that England might undertake the defence of the Sultan, and a body called the Eastern Question Association was formed to organise opposition to the pro-Turkish policy of Lord Beaconsfield's Ministry. Green threw himself warmly into the movement, was chosen to serve on the Executive Committee of the Association, and was one of a sub-committee of five (which included also Mr. Stopford Brooke and Mr. William Morris the poet[23]) appointed to draw up the manifesto convoking the meeting of delegates from all parts of the country, which was held in December 1876, under the title of the Eastern Question Conference. The sub-committee met at my house and spent the whole day on its work. It was a new and curious experience to see these three great men of letters drafting a political appeal. Morris and Green were both of them passionately anti-Turkish, and Morris indeed acted for the next two years as treasurer of the Association, doing his work with a business-like efficiency such as poets seldom possess. Green continued to attend the general committee until, after the Treaty of Berlin, it ceased to meet, and took the keenest interest in its proceedings. But his weak health and frequent winter absences made public appearances impossible to him. He was all his life an ardent Liberal. His sympathy with national movements did not confine itself to Continental Europe, but embraced Ireland and made him a Home Ruler long before Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal party adopted that policy. It ought to be added that though he had ceased to belong to the Church of England, he remained strongly opposed to disestablishment.

When he had completed the re-casting of his _Short History_ in the form of a larger book, which appeared under the title of _A History of the English People_, he addressed himself with characteristic activity to a new project. He had for a long time meditated upon the _origines_ of English history, the settlement of the Teutonic invaders in Britain, followed by the consolidation of their tribes into a nation with definite institutions and a settled order; and his desire to treat this topic was stimulated by the way in which some critics had sought to disparage his _Short History_ as a mere popularising of other people's ideas. The criticism was unjust, for, if there had been no rummaging in MS. sources for the _Short History_, there was abundant originality in the views the book contained. However, these carpings disposed his friends to recommend an enterprise which would lead him to deal chiefly with original authorities, and to put forth those powers of criticism and construction which they knew him to possess. Thus he set to work afresh at the very beginning, at Roman Britain and the Saxon Conquest. He had not advanced far when, having gone to spend the winter in Egypt, he caught an illness which so told on his weak frame that he was only just able to return to London in April, and would not have reached it at all but for the care with which he was tended by his wife. (He had married Miss Alice Stopford in 1877.) In a few weeks he so far recovered as to be able to resume his studies, though now forbidden to give to them more than two or three hours a day. However, what he could not do alone he did with and through his wife, who consulted the original sources for him, investigated obscure points, and wrote at his dictation. In this way, during the summer and autumn months of 1881, when often some slight change of weather would throw him back and make work impossible for days or weeks, the book was prepared, which he published in February 1882, under the title of _The Making of England_. Even in those few months it was incessantly rewritten; no less than ten copies were made of the first chapter. It was warmly received by the few persons who were capable of judging its merits. But he was himself far from satisfied with it as a literary performance, thinking that a reader would find it at once too speculative and too dry, deficient in the details needed to make the life of primitive England real and instructive. If this had been so it would have been due to no failing in his skill, but to the scantiness of the materials available for the first few centuries of our national history. But he felt it so strongly that he was often disposed to recur to his idea of writing a history of the last seventy or eighty years, and was only induced by the encouragement of a few friends to pursue the narrative which, in _The Making of England_, he had carried down to the reign of Egbert. The winter of 1881 was spent at Mentone, and the following summer in London. He continued very weak, and was sometimes unable for weeks together to go out driving or to work at home. But the moment that an access of strength returned, the note-books were brought out, and he was again busy going through what his wife's industry had tabulated, and dictating for an hour or two till fatigue forced him to desist. Those who saw him during that summer were amazed, not only at the brave spirit which refused to yield to physical feebleness, but at the brightness and clearness of his intellect, which was not only as active as it had ever been before, but as much interested in whatever passed in the world. When one saw him sitting propped up with cushions on the sofa, his tiny frame worn to skin and bone, his voice interrupted by frequent fits of coughing, it seemed wrong to stay, but, after a little, all was forgotten in the fascination of his talk, and one found it hard to realise that where thought was strong speech might be weak.

In October, when he returned to Mentone, the tale of early English history had been completed, and was in type down to the death of Earl Godwine in A.D. 1052. He had hesitated as to the point at which the book should end, but finally decided to carry it down to A.D. 1085, the date of the dispersion of the last great Scandinavian armament which threatened England. As the book dealt with both the Danish and Norman invasions, he called it _The Conquest of England_. It appeared after his death, wanting, indeed, those expansions in several places which he had meant to give it, but still a book such as few but he could have produced, full of new light, and equal in the parts which have been fully handled to the best work of his earlier years.