ins, the relation of their ranges to one another, or
their rocks, or the trees and flowers of their upper regions, the
prospects their summits command, the scenes of beauty in their glens,
or beside their wood-embosomed lakes, all, in fact, which the mountain
lover delights in, and which are to him a part of the mountain ardour,
of the passion for pure nature unsullied by the presence of man--all
this was cold to him. But as soon as a touch of human life fell like a
sunbeam across the landscape, all became warm and lovable.
It was the same with art. With an historian's delight in the creative
ages and their work, he had a fondness for painting and sculpture, and
could so describe what he saw in the galleries and churches of Italy
as to bring out meanings one had not perceived before. But here, too,
it was the human element that fascinated him. Technical merits, though
he observed them, as he observed most things, were forgotten; he dwelt
only on what the picture expressed or revealed. Pure landscape
painting gave him little pleasure.
It seems a truism to say that one who writes history ought to care
for all that bears upon man in the present in order that he may
comprehend what bore upon him in the past. This roaring loom of
Time, these complex physical and moral forces playing round us, and
driving us hither and thither by such a strange and intricate
interlacement of movements that we seem to perceive no more than what
is next us, and are unable to say whither we are tending, ought to
be always before the historian's mind. But there are few who have
tried, as Green tried, to follow every flash of the shuttle, and to
discover a direction and a relation amidst apparent confusion, for
there are few who have taken so wide a view of the historian's
functions, and have so distinctly set before them as their object the
comprehension and realisation and description of the whole field
of bygone human life. The Past was all present to him in this sense,
that he saw and felt in it not only those large events which
annalists or state papers have recorded, but the everyday life of
the people, their ideas, their habits, their external surroundings.
And the Present was always as if past to him in this sense, that in
spite of his strong political feelings, he looked at it with the eye
of a philosophical observer, trying to disengage principles from
details, permanent tendencies from passing outbursts. His imagination
visualised,
|