7 March: Boreham on John Richard Green

A Scholar’s Dream
On the anniversary of his death, many people will turn aside today to honour the memory of John Richard Green, one of the most scholarly, one of the most painstaking, one of the most artistic, and one of the most engaging of British historians. In the year of Queen Victoria's accession, Green was born at Oxford. Few 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 stones of the imposing old 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 whilst 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 some long-forgotten yesterday threw him into transports of excitement. He once won a valuable prize; but the volume itself seemed to possess no attraction for him: the thing that took his breath away was the fact that the gentleman who had placed it in his hands had, as a boy, gazed into the face of Dr. Johnson! Then, at the age of sixteen, he fell under the spell of Gibbon. The "Decline and Fall" 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 understands his business. Delving more and more deeply into the picturesque territory that bygone ages offer to the fancy, Green became convinced that very few of the classical historians had cherished any adequate conception of the sublime potentialities of their craft. Lacking that rose-tinted vision, they had committed the unpardonable sin: they had actually made history dull.

Bringing The Dead Past To Life Again
Green held that 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. It is because so few of those who have assumed the role of the chronicler 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 top most shelves. Since they themselves are so unconscionably arid and dry, we mercifully allow the cobwebs to enfold them. It is a case of dust to dust. Green argued that it serves them right. To him, history represented everything that was romantic, everything that was colourful, everything that was dramatic. In contemplating the stately 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. If only somebody with eyes anointed and with soul on fire, could erect his easel, spread his canvas, arrange his pigments, and, with consummate artistry, immortalise its glory!

It was at the age of thirty-two that Green offered the hospitality of his heart to a lofty aspiration. It came to him like a dazzling dream and he gravely doubted the possibility of his giving to that noble ideal a concrete expression. If only he could write the history of his own people 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. He resolved that his production should never sink to the level of a drum-and-trumpet history. For 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 a piquant narrative of royal amours.

A Dreamer's Race With Death
Green vowed that, at any cost, he would 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 piled 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 should be successful. Taking fresh heart from such encouragement, Green applied himself to the task that had fired his fancy and challenged his powers; and his crazy lungs notwithstanding, he lived to hear, five years later, the plaudits that greeted the publication of his book.

Better still, he lived to see his masterpiece enthroned as one of our English classics and to draw royalties on the sale of 150,000 copies. Then the curtain fell. Having permitted him to quaff this intoxicating goblet of triumph, the pitiless disease which his iron will seemed to have held at bay until his work was done, asserted its grim supremacy, driving him to the south of France, where in 1883, at the age of forty-six, 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 those who today pay pilgrimage to his honoured tomb at Mentone, within sight of the blue waters of the Mediterranean, will find those three words inscribed upon the monument that marks his grassy grave.

F W Boreham

Image: John Richard Green