BOOKS AND TRAVEL
The two passions of Froude's life were Devonshire and the sea.
"Summer has come at last," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley from Salcombe
in the middle of September, "after two months of rain and storm. The
fields from which the wrecks of the harvest were scraped up mined
and sprouting now lie basking in stillest sunshine, as if wind and
rain had never been heard of. The coast is extremely beautiful, and
I, in addition to the charms of the place, hear my native tongue
spoken and sung in the churches in undiminished purity." Carlyle
often kept him in London when he would much rather have been
elsewhere. But, wherever he was, he had a ready pen, and his
thoughts naturally clothed themselves in a literary garb. His
enjoyment of books, especially old books, was intense. Reading,
however, is idle work, and idleness was impossible to Froude. On his
return from South Africa, where everything was being done which he
thought least wise, he took up a classical subject, and began to
write a book about Caesar. He read Cicero, Plutarch, Suetonius,
Caesar himself, and produced early in 1879 a volume which was always
a particular favourite of his own. "I believe," he said to Skelton,
"it is the best book I have ever written." The public did not
altogether agree with him, and it never became so popular as Short
Studies.
Yet it is undoubtedly a brilliant performance, with just the
qualities which might have been expected to make it popular, and a
second edition was soon required. It is interesting from the first
page to the last, and its whole object is to show that the Roman
world in the last days of the Republic was very like the English
world under Queen Victoria. In Rome itself it has a steady sale. The
general reader, however, was not wrong in thinking that these
eloquent pages are below the level of Froude at his best. There is a
hard metallic glitter in the style, and a forced comparison of
ancient with modern things not really parallel, which make the whole
narrative artificial and unreal. Lord Dufferin said, with his
natural acuteness, "It is interesting, and forcibly written, but one
feels he is not a safe guide. As they say of the mansions of
Ireland, 'they are always within a hundred yards of the best
situation,' so one feels that Froude is never quite in the bull's-
eye in the view he gives."*
--
* Lyall's Life of Dufferin, vol. ii. p. 244.
--
Those who criticised the book as if it were a formal and historical
narrative showed a lack of humour, which is a sense of proportion.
Macaulay might almost as well be judged by his Fragment of a Roman
Tale. Froude himself calls his Caesar a sketch, and it is scarcely
more authoritative than the pamphlet of Louis Napoleon on the same
subject. On the other hand, it is quite untrue that Froude had not
read Cicero's letters. He had read those which bore upon his
subject, and he quotes them freely enough. The fault of his Caesar
is that he makes a wrong start. Points of resemblance between the
first century before the Christian era and the nineteenth century
after it may of course be found. But the differences are essential
and fundamental. A society which rests upon servitude cannot be like
a society which rests upon freedom. Christianity has modified the
whole lives of those who do not profess it, and has created a
totally new atmosphere, even if it be not in all respects a better
one. Representative government, whether it be a good thing or a bad
thing, is at least a thing which counts. Caesar could hardly have
understood the idea of an indissoluble marriage, of a limited
monarchy, of equality before the law.
One strange similitude Froude did, in deference to outraged
susceptibilities, omit, and only the first edition contains a formal
comparison of Julius Caesar with Jesus Christ. No irreverence was
intended. It was Froude's enthusiasm for Caesar that carried him
away. Still, the instance is only an extreme form of what comes from
pushing parallels below the surface. It is only a shade less
misleading, though many shades less startling, to represent Caesar
as a virtuous philanthropist abstemious habits who perished in a
magnanimous effort to rescue the people from the tyranny of nobles.
The people in the modern sense were slaves, and the Republic at
least ensured that there should be some protection against military
despotism, to which in due course its abolition led. That Caesar was
intellectually among the greatest men of all time is beyond
question. Both strategist and as historian he is supreme. His
"thrasonical boast" was sober truth, and he stands above military or
literary criticism, a lesson and a model. But he was steeped in all
the vices of his age, and his motive was personal ambition. The
Republic did not give him sufficient scope, and therefore he would
have destroyed it, if he had not been himself destroyed.
Froude adopted the position of a great German professor and
historian, Theodor Mommsen, whose prejudices were as strong as his
learning was profound. He went with Mommsen in adoration of Caesar,
and in depreciation of Cicero. That Cicero used one sort of language
in public speeches, and another sort in private correspondence, is
true, and is notorious because some of his most intimate letters
have been preserved. But it is not peculiar to him. The man who
talked in public as he talked in private would have small sense of
fitness. The man who talked in private as he talked in public would
have small sense of humour. Although Cicero's humour was not brilliant,
he had sufficient taste to preserve him from pedantry and
from solecisms. His devotion to the Republic was perfectly sincere;
and if he changed in his behaviour to Caesar, it was because Caesar
changed in his behaviour to the Republic. Froude's specific charge
of rapid tergiversation is disproved by dates. The speech for
Marcellus, with its over-strained flattery of the conqueror, was
delivered, not "within a few weeks of his murder," but eighteen
months before that event, at a time when Cicero still hoped that
Caesar would be moderate. If Cicero's Republic was a narrow
oligarchy, it was also the only form of constitutional and civilian
government which he knew or could imagine. He failed to preserve it.
He was murdered like Caesar himself. Neither of them believed that
political assassination was a crime. Cicero's only regret was that
Antony had not been killed with Caesar. Antony's chief desire, which
he accomplished, was to kill Cicero. The idea that Cicero was a mere
declaimer, who did not count, never occurred either to Caesar or to
Antony. It was left for Professor Mommsen to discover. Froude,
always on the look-out for examples of his theory, or his father's
theory, that orators must be useless and mistaken, seized it with an
eager gasp. An agreeable looseness of treatment pervades the book,
and "patricians" appear as wealthy leaders of fashionable society,
being in fact a small number of old Roman families, who might be
poor, or in trade, and could not legally under the Republic be
increased in number, resembling rather a Hindu caste than any
institution of Western Christendom. In Caesar's time they had almost
died out, and the aristocracy of the day was an aristocracy of
office. The book, however, though far from faultless, though in some
respects misleading, has a singular fascination, the charm of a
picture drawn by the hand of a master with consummate skill. As an
historical study, what the French call une etude, it deserves a very
high place, and it contains one sentence which all democrats would
do well to learn:
"Popular forms are possible only when individual men can govern
their own lives on moral principles, and when duty is of more
importance than pleasure, and justice than material expediency."
That represents the best side of Carlyle's teaching; the
subordination of material objects, the supremacy of the moral law.
Carlyle, however, did not care for the book, as appears in the
following letter from Froude to Lady Derby:
"April 26th, 1879.--You are a most kind critic. If I have succeeded
in creating interest in so old a subject my utmost wishes are
accomplished. I am very curious indeed to hear what Lord D. says. I
can guess that he thinks I ought to have said more in defence of the
Constitutionalists, and that I have hardly used Cicero. Carlyle
reduced me to the condition of a 'drenched hen'--to use one of his
own images. He told me that the book was not clear, that 'he got no
good of it'--in fact, that it was 'a failure.' It may be a failure,
but 'want of clearness' is certainly not the cause. I fancy he
wanted something else which he did not find, and he would not give
himself the trouble to examine what he did find."
Froude contributed in 1880 to Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters a
critical and biographical sketch of Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress,
as the work of a Dissenter, had been excluded from the Rectory at
Dartington. But Froude was not long in supplying the deficiency for
himself, and his literary appreciation of Bunyan's style was
accompanied by a sincere sympathy with the Puritan part of his
faith. All religious people, he thought, might find common ground in
Bunyan, a man who lived for religion, and for nothing else. Yet even
here Froude's Erastianism, and respect for authority, come into
play. He gravely defends Bunyan's imprisonment in Bedford gaol,
which lasted, with some intermissions, from 1660 to 1672, as
necessary to enforce respect for the law. That such a man as Charles
Stuart should have had power to punish such a man as John Bunyan for
preaching the word of God is a strange comment on the nature of a
Christian country. But it cannot be denied that Charles and his
judges, Sir Matthew Hale among them, provided the leisure to which
we owe the best religious allegories in the language. Nor can it be
said that Froude's apology for the confinement Bunyan is so
repugnant to reason and justice as Gibbon's apology for the
martyrdom of Cyprian.
The General Election of 1880 was regarded by Froude with mixed
feelings.
"I am glad," he wrote to Lady Derby on the 9th of April, 1880, "that
there is to be an end of 'glory and gunpowder,' but my feelings
about Gladstone remain where they were. When you came into power in
1874, I dreamed of a revival of real Conservatism which under wiser
guiding might and would have lasted to the end of the century. This
is gone--gone for ever. The old England of order and rational
government is past and will not return. Now I should like to see a
moderate triumvirate--Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, and your
husband, with a Cabinet which they could control. This too may
easily be among the impossibilities, but I am sure that at the
bottom of its heart the country wants quiet, and a Liberal
revolutionary sensationalism will be just as distasteful to
reasonable people as 'Asian Mysteries,' tall talk, and ambitious
buffooneries."
Lord Derby became more and more Liberal, until in December, 1882, he
joined Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. Before that decisive step, however,
it became evident in which direction he was tending, and Froude
wrote to Lady Derby on the 5th of March:
"I will call on Tuesday about 5. I have not been out of town, but my
afternoons have been taken up with a multitude of small engagements,
and indeed I have been sulky too, and imagined Lord D. had delivered
himself over to the enemy. But what right have I to say anything
when I am going this evening to dine with Chamberlain? I like
Chamberlain. He knows his mind. There is no dust in his eyes, and he
throws no dust in the eyes of others."
Of the great struggle between Lords and Commons over the franchise
in 1884, Froude wrote to the same correspondent on the 31st of July:
"As to what has happened since I went away, I for my own humble part
am heartily pleased, for it will clear the air. If we are to have
democracy, as I suppose we are, let us go into it with our eyes
open. I don't like drifting among cataracts, hiding the reality from
ourselves by forms which are not allowed either sense or power. That
I suppose to be Lord Salisbury's feeling. I greatly admired his
speech in Cannon Street, which reminded me of a talk I had with him
long ago at Hatfield. If the result is a change in the Constitution
of the House of Lords which will make it a real power, no one will
be more sorry than Chamberlain, whose own wish is to keep it in the
condition of ornamental helplessness. Lord Derby himself can hardly
wish to see the country entirely in the hands of a single
irresponsible Chamber elected by universal suffrage--and of such a
Chamber, which each extension of the suffrage brings to a lower
intellectual level."
The following letter was written from Salcombe just after the
General Election of 1886 and the defeat of Home Rule:
"A Devonshire farmer fell ill of typhus fever once. He had
quarrelled with a neighbour, and the clergyman told him that he must
not die out of charity, and must see the man and shake hands with
him. He agreed. The man came. They were reconciled, and he was going
away again when the sick farmer called him back to the bed-side.
'Mind you,' he said, 'if so be as I get over this here, 'tis to be
as 'twas.'
"I am sorry to see we are taking for granted that we have got over
the scare, and that ''tis to be as 'twas' in Parliament. If no way
can be found of giving effect to the feeling of which has been just
expressed, the old enemy will be back again stronger than ever. I,
for my small part, shall finally despair of Parliamentary
Government, and shall pray for a Chamberlain Dictatorship. I do not
think politicians know how slight the respect which is now generally
felt for Parliament, or how weary sensible people have grown of it
and its factions.
"We are very happy down here. We have lost the Molt, but have a very
tolerable substitute for it. The Halifaxes are at the Molt
themselves, and considering what I am, and that he is the President
of the Church Union, I think he and I are both astonished to find
how well we get on together. The Colonists come next week to
Plymouth. I have promised to meet them. Their dinner will be the
exact anniversary of the arrival of the Armada off the harbour. That
was the beginning of the English naval greatness and of the English
Colonial Empire. Think of poor Oceana--75,000 copies of it sold. It
stands for something that the English nation is interested in....
But I must not try your eyes any further."
It was in 1881 that Froude, whose connection with Fraser had ceased,
wrote for Good Words the series of papers on The Oxford Counter-
Reformation which are the best record hitherto published of his
college life.* I have already referred to the vivid picture of John
Henry Newman contained in one of them. On the 2nd of March, 1881,
the aged Cardinal, writing from the Birmingham Oratory, sent a
gracious message of acknowledgment. "My dear Anthony Froude," he
began, "I have seen some portions of what you have been writing
about me, and I cannot help sending you a line to thank you... I
thank you, not as being able to accept all you have said in praise
of me. Of course I can't. Nor again as if there may not be other
aspects of me which you cannot praise, and which you may in a coming
chapter of your publication find it a duty, whether I allow them or
not, to remark upon. But I write to thank you for such an evidence
of your affectionate feelings towards me, for which I was not
prepared, and which has touched me very much. May God's fullest
blessings be upon you, and give you all good. Yours affectionately,
John H. Cardinal Newman."
--
* Short Studies, fourth series, pp. 192-206.
--
Froude carefully kept this letter, and, remote as their opinions
were, he never varied in his loyal admiration of the illustrious
Oratorian. That admiration, however, was purely personal, and did
not affect in any degree the staunchness of Froude's principles. In
1883 Protestant Germany celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of
Luther's birth, and Froude wrote for the occasion a short biography
of the rebellious monk who changed the history of the world. He
founded on the larger Life by Julius Koestlin, which had then just
appeared, this little book makes no pretence to original learning or
research. It is a polemical pamphlet by a master of English, and a
fervent admirer of the illustrious Martin. "When the German states
revolted against the Roman hierarchy," says Froude in his Preface,
"we in England revolted also," and Luther's name was as familiar as
Bunyan's to the Protestant Churches of England. The Catholic revival
of which Froude had seen so much at Oxford was still in full swing.
"Nevertheless, we are still a Protestant nation, and the majority of
us intend to remain Protestant. If we are indifferent to our
Smithfield and Oxford martyrs, we are not indifferent to the
Reformation, and we can join with Germany in paying respect to the
memory of a man to whom we also, in part, owe our deliverance.
Without Luther there would have been either no change in England in
the sixteenth century, or a change purely political. Luther's was
one of those great individualities which have modelled the history
of mankind, and modelled it entirely for good. He revived and
maintained the spirit of piety and reverence in which, and by which
alone, real progress is possible."
Such was the temper in which Froude set about his task, and which
made it a labour of love. Besides the great public events in
Luther's career which are familiar to all, he gave a charming
picture of the affectionate father, the genial host, the eloquent,
humourous talker whose fragments of conversation, his Tischreden,
are in Germany almost as popular as his hymns. Luther's dominant
quality was force, and that was a quality which Froude, like
Carlyle, honoured above all others. Luther was not in all respects
like a modern Protestant. He had a great respect for authority, when
it was genuine, and he believed in transubstantiation, which Leo X.
regarded as a juggle to deceive the vulgar. If Luther's appearance
before the Diet of Worms was, as Froude says, "the finest scene in
human history," it is so because this solitary monk stood not for
one form of religion against another, but for truth against
falsehood, for earnest belief in divine things against a Church
governed by unbelievers. The Renaissance in its most Pagan form had
invaded the Vatican, and the Vicar of Christ appeared to Luther as
Anti-Christ himself. If Charles V. had been Pope, and Leo X. had
been emperor, we might never have heard of Luther. Froude sincerely
respected Charles V., and held that Protestant historians had done
him less than justice. Although Charles opposed the Reformation, he
opposed it honestly, and his faith in his own religion was absolute.
He was a Christian gentleman. As he entered Wittenberg after the
battle of Mahlberg, some bishop asked him to dig up Luther's body
and burn it. "I war not with the dead," he perhaps remembering the
grand old Roman line:
Nullum cum victis certamen, et aethere cassis.
One valuable truth Froude had learned not from Carlyle, but from
study of the past, and from his own observation at the Cape. "If,"
he wrote in Caesar, "there be one lesson which history clearly
teaches, it is this, that free nations" cannot govern subject
provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their
dependencies to share their constitution, the constitution itself
will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties." A critic
in The Quarterly Review expressed a hope that this would not prove
to be true of India. But Froude was not thinking of India. He had in
his mind the self-governing Colonies, whose fortunes and future were
to him a source of perpetual interest. He loved travel, and as soon
as he had shaken off the burden of Carlyle he took a voyage round
the world, described, not always with topical accuracy, in Oceana.
The name of this delightful volume is of course taken from
Harrington, More's successor in the days of the Commonwealth. The
contents were a characteristic mixture of history, speculation, and
personal experience. Froude had a fixed idea that English
politicians, especially Liberal politicians, wanted to get rid of
the Colonies. Else why had they withdrawn British troops from Canada
and New Zealand? He could not see, perhaps they did not all see
themselves, that to give the Colonies complete freedom, and to
insist upon their providing, except so far as the Navy was
concerned, for their own defence, would strengthen, not weaken, the
tie. In proof of his theory he produced some singular evidence,
comprising one of the strangest stories that ever was told. He heard
it, so he informs us, from Sir Arthur Helps, and reproduces it in
his own words.
"A Government had gone out; Lord Palmerston was forming a new
Ministry, and in a preliminary Council was arranging the composition
of it. He had filled up the other places. He was at a loss for a
Colonial Secretary. This name and that was suggested, and thrown
aside. At last he said, 'I suppose I must take the thing myself.
Come upstairs with me, Helps, when the Council is over. We will look
at the maps, and you shall show me where these places are.'"
If Froude's memory of this anecdote be accurate, Helps must, for
once, have been drawing upon his imagination. As Clerk of the
Council, he had no more to do with forming Cabinets than with
appointing bishops. Palmerston was never Colonial Secretary in his
life; and among his faults as a Minister, which were positive rather
than negative, ignorance of political geography was certainly not
included. Many people, however, especially the Tariff Reform League,
will consider that the passage which immediately succeeds proves
Froude to have been in advance of his age. For he argues that trade
follows the flag, because "our colonists take three times as much of
our productions in proportion to their number as foreigners take." A
tour through the Colonies for the purpose of conversing with their
most influential statesmen had long been one of his cherished plans.
Hitherto he had got no farther than the Cape, where, as we have
seen, he became entangled in South African politics, and had to
repeat his visit. Now he was bound for Australasia, and on the 6th
of December, 1884, he left Tilbury Docks, with his son Ashley, in an
Aberdeen packet of four thousand tons. His love of the sea,
Elizabethan in its intensity, was heightened by his enjoyment of
Greek literature, especially the Odyssey, which he considered ideal
reading for a ship, and, as it surely is, on ship or on shore, an
incomparable tale of adventure.
Before the end of the year Froude was at Cape Town, renewing his
acquaintance with familiar scenes. Many of his former friends were
dead, and his courteous enemy, now Sir John Molteno, had left Cape
Town as well as public life. The Prime Minister was Mr. Upington, a
clever lawyer, afterwards Sir Thomas Upington, and the chief topic
was Sir Charles Warren's expedition to Bechuanaland, which happily
did not end in war, as Upington apprehended that it would. Sir
Hercules Robinson was Governor and High Commissioner, a man after
Froude's heart, "too upright to belong to any party," and thoroughly
appreciative of all that was best in the Boers. This time
Froude's stay was a short one, and early in 1885 he was at
Melbourne. Here the burning question was the German occupation of
New Guinea, for which Colonial opinion held Gladstone's Government,
and Lord Derby in particular, responsible. On the other hand, Lord
Derby had suggested Australian Federation, which received a good
deal of support, though it led to nothing at the time. On one point
Froude seems always to have met with Sympathy. Abuse of Gladstone
never failed to elicit a favourable response, and the news of
Gordon's death was an opportunity not to be wasted. But when there
came rumours of a possible war with Russia over the Afghan frontier,
Froude took the side of Russia, or at all events of peace, and
contended with his Tory companion, Lord Elphinstone, who was for
war. In New Zealand he visited the venerable Sir George Grey, who
had violated all precedent by entering local politics, and becoming
Prime Minister, after the Duke of Buckingham had recalled him from
the Governorship of the Colony. He was not equally successful in his
second career, and Froude's unqualified praise of him was resented
by many New Zealanders. That the Colonies would be true to the
mother country if the mother country were true to them was the safe
if somewhat vague conclusion at which the returning traveller
arrived. He came home by America, and met with a more formidable
antagonist than his old assailant Father Burke, in the shape of a
terrific blizzard.
But hardships had no deterring effect upon Froude, and his love of
travel, like his love of the classics, suffered no diminution while
strength remained. He returned from the Antipodes early in 1885.
Before 1886 was out he had started on a voyage to the West Indies,
so that his survey of our Colonial possessions might be complete.
Ardent imperialist as he was, Froude was not less fully alive than
Mr. Goldwin Smith to the difficulties inherent in a policy of
Imperial Federation. "All of us are united at present," he had
written in Oceana,* "by the invisible bonds of relationship and of
affection for our common country, for our common sovereign, and for
our joint spiritual inheritance. These links are growing, and if let
alone will continue to grow, and the free fibres will of themselves
become a rope of steel. A federation contrived by politicians would
snap at the first strain." Australian Federation, which Froude did
not live to see, was no contrivance of politicians, but the result
of spontaneous opinion generated in Australia, and ratified as a
matter of course by Parliament at home.
--
* P. 393.
--
The West Indian Islands had an especial fascination for Froude on
account of the great naval exploits of Rodney, Hood, and other
British sailors. 'Kingsley's At Last had revived his interest in
them; and though Kingsley had long been dead, his memory was fresh
among all who knew him. The diary which Froude kept during this
journey has been preserved, and I am enabled to make a few extracts
from it. On the last day of 1886, while he was crossing the Bay of
Biscay, he meditated upon the subject which occupied Cicero at an
earlier period of his life. "Last day of the year. One more gone of
the few which can now remain to me. Old age is not what I looked
for. It is much pleasanter. Physically, except that I cannot run, or
jump, or dance, I do not feel much difference, and I don't want to
do those things. Spirits are better. Life itself has less worries
with it, and seems prettier and truer to me now that I can look at
it objectively, without hopes and anxieties on my own account. I
have nothing to expect in this world in the way of good. It has
given me all that it will or can. I am less liable to illusions. One
knows by experience that nothing is so good or so bad as one has
fancied, and that what is to be will be mainly what has been. So
many of one's friends are dead! Yes, but one will soon die too. Each
friend gone is the cutting a link which would have made death
painful. It loses its terror as it draws nearer, especially when one
thinks what it would be if one were not allowed to die." Tennyson
has expressed in Tithonus the idea at which Froude glances, and from
which he averts his gaze. Carlyle's senility was not enviable, and
even that sturdy veteran Stratford Canning* told Gladstone that
longevity was "not a blessing." Like Cephalus at the opening of
Plato's Republic, Froude found that he could see more clearly when
the mists of sentiment were dispersed.
While at sea Froude pursued his favourite musings on the
worthlessness of all orators, from Demosthenes and Cicero to Burke
and Fox, from Burke and Fox to Gladstone and Bright. The world was
conveniently divided into talking men and acting men. Gladstone had
never done anything. He had always talked.
"I wonder whether people will ever open their eyes about all this.
The orators go in for virtue, freedom, etc., the cheap cant which
will charm the constituencies. They are generous with what costs
them nothing--Irish land, religious liberty, emancipation of
niggers--sacrificing the dependencies to tickle the vanity of an
English mob and catch the praises of the newspapers. If ever the
tide turns, surely the first step will be to hang the great
misleaders of the people--as the pirates used to be--along the House
of Commons terrace by the river as a sign to mankind, and send the
rest for ever back into silence and impotence."
--
* Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.
--
Whether a man be a pirate is a matter of fact. Whether he be a
misleader of the people is a matter of opinion. "Whom shall we
hang?" would become a party question, and perhaps a general amnesty
for mere debaters is the most practical solution of the problem.
Barbados, which has since suffered severely from the want of a
market for its sugar, seemed to Froude's eyes to present in a sort
of comic picture the summit of human felicity. "Swarms of niggers on
board--delightful fat woman in blue calico with a sailor straw hat,
and a pipe in her mouth. All of them perfectly happy, without a
notion of morality--piously given too--psalm-singing, doing all they
please without scruple, rarely married, for easiness of parting,
looking as if they never knew a care .... Niggerdom perfect
happiness. Schopenhauer should come here." Schopenhauer would
perhaps have said that "niggers" were happier than other men because
they come nearer to the beasts.
As Froude has been accused of injustice to the Church of Rome, it
may be as well to quote an entry from his journal at Trinidad:*
"Went to Roman Catholic Cathedral--saw a few men and women on their
knees at solitary prayers--much better for them than Methodist
addresses on salvation." In another place he says:+ "Religion as a
motive alters the aspect of everything--so much of the world rescued
from Rome and the great enemy. Yet the Roman Church after all is
something. It is a cause and a home everywhere--something to care
for outside oneself--an something which does not change."
--
* January 15th, 1887.
+ February 1st.
--
Again at Barbados, on the 17th of February he writes: "By far the
most prosperous of the upper classes that I have seen in the islands
are the Roman Catholic priests and bishops. They stand, step, and
speak out with as fine a consciousness of power as in Ireland itself ....
Large, authoritative, dignified, with their long sweeping
robes. The old thing is getting fast on its feet again. The
philosophers and critics have done for Protestantism as a positive,
manly, and intellectually credible explanation of the world. The old
organism and old superstition steps into its ancient dominion-
finding it swept and garnished."
In San Domingo at sunrise Froude's meditations were far from
cheerful: "The sense of natural beauty is nothing where man is
degraded." So far Bishop Heber in a well-known couplet.
Froude proceeds: "The perception of beauty is the perception of
something which is acting upon and elevating the intellectual
nature. . . It is connected with hope, connected with the
consciousness of the noble element in the human soul; and where it
is unperceived, or where there is none to perceive it, or where it
falls dead, and fails in its effect, the solitary eye which gazes
will find no pleasure, no joy--only distress--as for something
calling to him out of a visionary world from which his own race is
shut out. We cannot feel healthily alone. The sense of worship, the
sense of beauty, the sense of sight, is only alive and keen when
shared by others .... It is something not alone, but generated by
the action of the object on the soul. Thus in these islands there is
only sadness. In New Zealand there was hope and life."
A passage from the diary concerning the appointment of Colonial
Governors will be regarded by all official persons as obsolete.
"The English nation, if they wish to keep the Colonies, ought to
insist on proper men being chosen as Governors .... The Colonial
Office is not to blame and will only be grateful for an expression
of opinion which will enable them to answer pressure upon them with
a peremptory 'Impossible.' Court influence, party influence, party
convenience, all equally injurious. A noble lord is out at elbows;
give him a Governorship of a Colony. A party politician must be
disappointed in arrangements at home; console him with a Colony. The
Colonists feel that no respect is felt for them; anybody will do for
a Colony; and whether it is a Crown Colony, or a with responsible
government of its own, the effect is equally mischievous. In fact,
while they continue liable, and occasionally subject, to treatment
of this kind, the feelings insensibly generate which will lead in
the end to separation."
The immediate consequence of Froude's West Indian travels was his
well-known book The English in the West Indies, to which he gave a
second title, one that he himself preferred, The Bow of Ulysses. It
was illustrated from his own sketches, for he had inherited that
gift from his father. Being often controversial in tone, and not
always accurate in description, it provoked numerous criticisms,
though not of the sort which interfere with success. In everything
Froude wrote, though least of all in his History, allowance has to
be made for the personal equation. He had not Carlyle's memory, nor
his unfailing accuracy of eye. Where he wrote from mere
recollection, deserting the safe ground of his diary, he was liable
to error, and few men of letters have been less capable of producing
a trustworthy guide book. The value of Oceana and The Bow of Ulysses
is altogether different. They are the characteristic reflections of
an intensely vivid, highly cultivated mind, bringing out of its
treasure-house things new and old. "The King knows your book," it
was said to Montaigne, "and would like to know you." "If the King
knows my book," replied the philosopher, "he knows me." Froude is in
his books, especially in his books of travel, for in them, more than
anywhere else, he thinks aloud. There are strange people in the
world. One of them criticised Froude in an obituary notice because,
when he went to Jamaica, he sat in the shade reading Dante while he
might have been studying the Jamaican Constitution. There may be
those who would study the Jamaican Constitution, what there is of
it, in the sun, while they might, if they could, read Dante in the
shade, and the necrologist in question may be one of them. Froude
did not go to study Constitutions, which he could have studied at
home. He went to see for himself what the West Indian Colonies were
like, and his incorrigible habit of reading the best literature did
not forsake him even in tropical climates. He cared only too little
for Constitutions even when they were his proper business, as they
certainly were not in Jamaica. The object of The English in the West
Indies is to make people at home feel an interest in their West
Indian fellow-subjects, and that it did by the mere fact of its
circulation. His belief that the West Indies should be governed,
like the East Indies, despotically, is a subsidiary matter, and the
quaint parody of the Athanasian Creed in which he epitomised what he
supposed to be the Radical faith is merely an intellectual
amusement. On the virtues of Rodney, and the future of the Colonies,
he is serious, though scarcely practical.
"Imperial Federation," he wrote in 1887, "is far away, if ever it is
to be realised at all. If it is to come it will come of itself,
brought about by circumstances and silent impulses working
continuously through many years unseen and unspoken of. It is
conceivable that Great Britain and her scattered offspring, under the
pressure of danger from without, or impelled by some purpose, might
agree to place themselves under a single administrative head. It is
conceivable that out of a combination so formed, if it led to a
successful immediate result, some union of a closer kind might
eventually emerge. It is not only conceivable, but it is entirely
certain, that attempts made when no such occasion has arisen, by
politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves, will fail, and in
failing will make the object that is aimed at more confessedly
unattainable than it is now."*
--
* English in the West Indies, p. 168.
--
So far Froude's predictions have been realised. When he wrote, the
Imperial Federation League had just been formed, and Lord Rosebery was
arguing for Irish Home Rule as part of a much wider scheme. Except
Australia, which is homogeneous, like the Dominion of Canada, the British
Empire is no nearer Federation, and Ireland is no nearer
Home Rule, than they were then. The depression of the sugar trade in
the West Indian Islands has been met by a treaty which raises the
price of sugar at home, and makes those Colonies proportionately
unpopular with the working classes. It has since been proposed to
carry the principle farther, and tax the British workman for the
benefit of Colonial manufacturers. For these strange results of
imperial thinking neither Froude nor any of his contemporaries were
prepared. But they correspond accurately, especially the second of
them, with the "attempt made by politicians ambitious of
distinguishing themselves," against which Froude warned his
countrymen. Froude was no scientific economist. He believed in "free
trade within the Empire," which is not free trade. He was for an
imperial tariff, a thing made in Germany, and called a Zollverein.
But his practical experience and personal observation taught him
that proposals for closer union with the Colonies must come from the
Colonies themselves. The negroes were a difficulty. They were not
really fit for self-government, as the statesmen of the American
Union had found. Personal freedom, the inalienable right of all men
and all women, is a very different thing from the possession of a
vote. As for India, the idea of Home Rule there had receded a long
way into the distance since the sanguine predictions of Macaulay.
Perhaps Froude never quite worked out his conceptions of the federal
system which he would have liked to see. In Australia it would have
been plain sailing. In Canada it was already established. In South
Africa it would have embodied the union of British with Dutch, and
prevented the disasters which have since occurred. In the West
Indies it would have raised problems of race and colour which are
more prudently agitated at a greater distance from the Black.
Republic of Hayti. Imperial Federalists not yet explained what they
would do with India.
Froude neither was nor aimed at being practical politican. His
object, in which he succeeded, was to kindle in the public mind at
home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his
own heart was full. Although the measure of Colonial loyalty was
given afterwards in the South African War, the despatch of troops
from Sydney to the Soudan in 1885 showed that ties of sentiment are
the strongest of all. It was those ties, rather than any political
or commercial bond, which Froude desired to strengthen. No one would
have liked less to live in a Colony. Colonial society did not suit
him. Colonial manners were not to his mind. But to meet governing
men, like Sir Henry Norman, a "warm Gladstonian," by the way, was
always a pleasure to him, and as a symbol of England's greatness he
loved her territory beyond the seas.
The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, published in 1889, was Froude's one mature
and serious attempt at a novel. For distinction of style and beauty
of thought it may be compared with the greatest of historical
romances. If it was the least successful of his books, the failure
can be assigned to the absence of women, or at least of love, which
ever since Dr. Johnson's definition, if not before, has been
expected in a novel. The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his
favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth
century. The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring.
Goring "belonged to an order of men who, if they had been allowed
fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory of an
evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the Cromwellians
had died out of the land, and was not to be revived by a single
enthusiast." He was murdered, and Froude could point his favourite
moral that the woes of the sister country would be healed by the
appearance of another Cromwell, which he had to admit was
improbable. The Irish hero, Morty Sullivan, has been in France, and
is ready to fight for the Pretender. He did no good. Few Irishmen,
in Froude's opinion, ever did any good. But in The Two Chiefs of
Dunboy, if anywhere, Froude shows his sympathy with the softness of
the Irish character, and Morty's meditations on his return from
France are expressed as only Froude could express them. Morty was
walking with his sister by the estuary of the Kenmare River opposite
Derrynane, afterwards famous as the residence of Daniel O'Connell,
"For how many ages had the bay and the rocks and the mountains
looked exactly the same as they were looking then? How many
generations had played their part on the same stage, eager and
impassioned as if it had been erected only for them! The half-naked
fishermen of forgotten centuries who had earned a scanty living
there; the monks from the Skelligs who had come in on high days in
their coracles to say mass for them, baptize the children, or bury
the dead; the Celtic chief, with saffron shirt and battle-axe,
driven from his richer lands by Norman or Saxon invaders, and
keeping hold in this remote spot on his ragged independence; the
Scandinavian pirates, the overflow of the Northern Fiords, looking
for new soil where they could take root. These had all played their
brief parts there and were gone, and as many more would follow in
the cycles of the years that were to come, yet the scene itself was
unchanged and would not change. The same soft had fed those that
were departed, and would feed those that were to be. The same
landscape had affected their imaginations with its beauty or awed
them with its splendours; and each alike had yielded to the same
delusion that the valley was theirs and was inseparably connected
with themselves and their fortunes. Morty's career had been a stormy
one .... He had gone out into the world, and had battled and
struggled in the holy cause, yet the cause was not advanced, and it
was all nothing. He was about to leave the old place, probably for
ever. Yet there it was, tranquil, calm, indifferent whether he came
or went. What was he? What was any one? To what purpose the
ineffectual strivings of short-lived humanity? Man's life was but
the shadow of a dream, and his work was but the heaping of sand
which the next tide would level flat again."
Wordsworth's "pathetic fallacy" that the moods of nature correspond
with the moods of man has seldom found such eloquent illustration as
in Morty's vain imaginings. Morty himself was shot dead by English
soldiers in revenge for the murder of Goring. The story is a dismal
and tragic one. But the best qualities of the Irish race are there,
depicted with true sympathy, and perhaps this volume may be held to
confirm Carlyle's opinion, expressed in a letter to Miss Davenport
Bromley, that even The English in Ireland was "more disgraceful to
the English Government by far than to the Irish savageries." Froude,
indeed, never forgot the kindness of the Kerry peasants who nursed
him through the small-pox. He would have done anything for the
Irish, except allow them to govern themselves.
In 1890 Froude contributed to the series of The Queen's Prime
Ministers, edited by Mr. Stuart Reid, a biographical study of Lord
Beaconsfield. He wrote to Mr. Reid on the subject:
". . . Lord Beaconsfield wore a mask to the generality of mankind.
It was only when I read Lothair that I could form any notion to
myself of the personality which was behind. I once alluded to that
book in a speech at a Royal Academy banquet. Lord Beaconsfield was
present, and was so far interested in what I said that he wished me
to review Endymion in the Edinburgh, and sent me the proof-sheets of
it before publication. Edymion did not take hold of me as Lothair
did, and I declined, but I have never lost the impression which I
gathered out of Lothair. It is worse than useless to attempt the
biography of a man unless you know, or think you know, what his
inner nature was .... I am quite sure that Lord Beaconsfield had a
clearer insight than most men into the contemporary constitution of
Europe--that he had a real interest in the welfare and prospects of
mankind; and while perhaps he rather despised the great English
aristocracy, he probably thought better of them than of any other
class in England. I suppose that like Cicero he wished to excel, or
perhaps more like Augustus to play his part well in the tragic
comedy of life. I do not suppose that he had any vulgar ambition at
all .... "
The feelings with which he approached this not altogether congenial
task are described in the following passages from letters to Lady
Derby:
.... "THE MOLT, September 14th, 1889.
"If my wonderful adventure into the Beaconsfield country comes off,
I shall want all the help which Lord D. offered to give me. I do not
wonder that he and you were both startled at the proposition, and I
am not at all sure that in a respectable series of Victorian Prime
Ministers I should be allowed to treat the subject in the way that I
wish. The point is to make out what there was behind the mask. Had
it not been for Lothair I should have said nothing but a charlatan.
But that altered my opinion, and the more often I read it the more I
want to know what his real nature was. The early life is a blank
filled up by imaginative people out of Vivian Grey. I am feeling my
way indirectly with his brother, Ralph D'Israeli, and whether I go
on or not will depend on whether he will help me."
"THE MOLT, November 12th, 1889,
"The difficulty is to find out the real man that lay behind the
sphynx-like affectations. I have come to think that these
affectations (natural at first) came to be themselves affected as a
useful defensive armour which covered the vital parts. Anyway, the
study of him is extremely amusing. I had nothing else to do, and I
can easily throw what I write into the fire if it turns out
unsatisfactory."
Although the book was necessarily a short one, it is too
characteristic to be lightly dismissed. When Froude gave Mr. Reid
the manuscript, he said, "It will please neither Disraeli's friends
nor his foes. But it is at least an honest book." He heard, with
more amusement than satisfaction, that it had pleased Gladstone. For
the political estimate of a modern and Parliamentary statesman
Froude lacked some indispensable qualifications. He knew little, and
cared less, about the House of Commons, in which the best years of
Disraeli's life were passed. He despised the party system, of which
Disraeli was at once a product and a devotee. He had no sympathy
with Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy, and the colonial policy
which he would have substituted for it was outside Lord
Beaconsfield's scope. He had adopted from Carlyle the theory that
Disraeli and Gladstone were both adventurers, the difference between
them being that Disraeli only deceived others, whereas Gladstone
deceived also himself. But Gladstone had ignored whereas Disraeli,
with singular magnanimity, had offered to the author of Shooting
Niagara a pension and a Grand Cross of the Bath.
It was, however, as a man of letters rather than as a politician
that Disraeli fascinated Froude, so much so that he is betrayed into
the paradox of representing his hero as a lover of literature rather
than politics. Disraeli sometimes talked in that way himself, as
when he was persuading Lightfoot to accept the Bishopric of Durham, and
remarked, "I, too, have sacrificed inclination to duty." But he
was hardly serious, and even in his novels it is the political parts
that survive. Although Froude had found it impossible to review
Endymion, the book is very like the author, and can only be
appreciated by those who have been behind the scenes in politics.
Froude's idea of Disraeli as a man with a great opportunity who
threw it away, who might have pacified Ireland and preferred to
quarrel with Russia, was naturally not agreeable to Disraelites, and
as a general rule it is desirable that a biographer should be able,
to write from his victim's point of view. Yet, all said and done,
Froude's Beaconsfield is a work of genius, the gem of the series.
Professional politicians, with the curious exception of Gladstone,
thought very little of it. It was not written for them. Disraeli was
a many-sided man, so that there is room for various estimates of his
character and career. Of his early life Froude had no special
knowledge. He was not even aware that Disraeli had applied for
office to Peel. He shows sometimes an indifference to dry details,
as when he makes Gladstone dissolve Parliament in 1873 immediately
after his defeat on the Irish University Bill, and represents Russia
as having by her own act repealed the Black Sea Clauses in the
Treaty of Paris. Startling too is his assertion that the Parliament
of 1868 did nothing for England or Scotland, on account of its
absorption in Irish affairs. But he was not writing a formal
history, and these points did not appeal to him at all. He drew with
inimitable skill a picture of the despised and fantastic Jew, vain
as a peacock and absurdly dressed, alien in race and in his real
creed, smiling sardonically at English ways, enthusiasms, and
institutions, until he became, after years of struggle and obloquy, the
idol of what was then the proudest aristocracy in the world.
Disraeli's peculiar humour just suited Froude's taste. Disraeli
never laughed. Even his smile was half inward. The irony of life, and of
his own position, was a subject of inexhaustible amusement to him.
There was nothing in his nature low, sordid, or petty. It was not
money, nor rank, but power which he coveted, and at which he aimed.
Irreproachable in domestic life, faithful in friendship, a placable
enemy, undaunted by failure, accepting final defeat with philosophic
calm, he played with political passions which he did not share, and
made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as
he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything
stuffy and commonplace. From a constitutional history of English
politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not
his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In
any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the principal
figure. In the Congress of Berlin, where he did nothing, or next to
nothing, he attracted the gaze of every one, not for anything he
said there, but because he was there at all. If he had left an
autobiography, it would be priceless, not for its facts, but for its
opinions. That Froude thoroughly understood him it would be rash to
say. But he did perceive by sympathetic intuition a great deal that
an ordinary writer would have missed altogether. For instance, the
full humour of that singular occasion when Benjamin Disraeli
appeared on the platform of a Diocesan Conference at Oxford, with
Samuel Wilberforce in the chair, could have been given by no one
else exactly as Froude gave it. Nothing like it had ever happened
before. It is scarcely possible that anything of the kind can ever
happen again. Froude found the origin of the Established Church in
the statutes of Henry VIII. Gladstone found it, or seemed to find
it, in the poems of Homer. In Disraeli's eyes its pedigree was
Semitic, and it ministered to the "craving credulity" of a sceptical
age, undisturbed by the provincial arrogance that flashed or flared
in an essay or review.
"In the year 1864," says Froude, "Disraeli happened to be on a visit
at Cuddesdon, and it happened equally that a Diocesan Conference was
to be held at Oxford at the time, with Bishop Wilberforce in the
chair. The clerical mind had been doubly exercised, by the
appearance of Colenso on the 'Pentateuch' and Darwin on the 'Origin
of Species.' Disraeli, to the surprise of every one, presented
himself in the theatre. He had long abandoned the satins and silks
of his youth, but he was as careful of effect as he had ever been,
and had prepared himself in a elaborately negligent. He lounged into
the assembly in a black velvet shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat,
as if he had been accidentally passing through the town. It was the
fashion with University intellect to despise Disraeli as a man with
neither sweetness nor light; but he was famous, or at least
notorious, and when he rose to speak there was a general curiosity.
He began in his usual affected manner, slowly and rather pompously,
as if he had nothing to say beyond perfunctory platitudes. The
Oxford wits began to compare themselves favourably the dullness of
Parliamentary orators; when first one sentence and then another
startled them into attention. They were told that the Church was not
likely to be disestablished. It would remain, but would remain
subject to a Parliament which would not allow an imperium in
imperio. It must exert itself and reassert its authority, but within
the limits which the law laid down. The interest grew deeper when he
came to touch on the parties to one or other of which all his
listeners belonged. High Church and Low Church were historical and
intelligible, but there had arisen lately, the speaker said, a party
called the Broad, never before heard of. He went on to explain what
Broad Churchmen were."
Disraeli's gibes at Colenso and Maurice are too well known to need
repetition here. The equally famous reference to Darwin will bear to
be quoted once more, at least as an introduction for Froude's
incisive comment.
"What is the question now placed before society with a glibness the
most astounding? The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I,
my lord, am on the side of the angels."
"Mr. Disraeli," so Froude continues, "is on the side of the angels.
Pit and gallery echoed with laughter. Fellows and tutors repeated
the phrase over their port in the common room with shaking sides.
The newspapers carried the announcement the next morning over the
length and breadth of the island, and the leading article writers
struggled in their comments to maintain a decent gravity. Did
Disraeli mean it, or was it but an idle jest? and what must a man be
who could exercise his wit on such a subject? Disraeli was at least
as much in earnest as his audience. The phrase answered its purpose.
It has lived and become historical when the decorous protests of
professional divines have been forgotten with the breath which
uttered them. The note of scorn with which it rings has preserved it
better than any affectation of pious horror, which indeed would have
been out of place in the presence of such an assembly."
I have taken the liberty of giving such emphasis as italics can
confer to two brief passages in this brilliant description, because
they express Froude's real opinion of Diocesan Conferences and those
who frequented them.* Disraeli's audience applauded, partly in
admiration of his wit, and partly because, they thought that he was
amusing them at the expense of the latitudinarians they abhorred.
Froude's appreciation came from an opposite source. He regarded
Disraeli not as a flatterer, but as a busy mocker, laughing at the
people thought he was laughing with them. He made no attempt at a
really critical estimate of the most baffling figure in English
politics. He fastened on the picturesque aspects of Disraeli's
career, and touched them with an artist's hand. As to what it all
meant, or whether it meant anything, he left his readers as much, in
the dark as they were before. My own theory, if one must have a
theory, is that one word explains Disraeli, and that that word is
"ambition." If so, he was one of the most marvellously successful
men that ever lived. If not, and if a different standard should be
applied, other consequences would ensue. Froude gives no help in the
solution of the problem. What he does is to portray the original
genius which no absurdities could cover, and no obstacles could
restrain. Disraeli the "Imperialist" had no more to do with building
empires than with building churches, but he was twice Prime Minister
of England.
--
* Disraeli's contempt for italics is well known. He called them "the
last resort of the forcible Feebles."
--
Froude's Sea Studies in the third series of his collected essays are
chiefly a series of thoughts on the plays of Euripides. But, like so
much of his writing, they are redolent of the ocean, on which and
near which he always felt at home. The opening sentences of this
fresh and wholesome paper are too characteristic not to be quoted.
"To a man of middle age whose occupations have long confined him to
the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library, there is something
unspeakably delightful in a sea voyage. Increasing years, if they
bring little else that is agreeable with them, bring to some of us
immunity from sea-sickness. The regularity of habit on board a ship,
the absence of dinner parties, the exchange of the table in the
close room for the open deck under an awning, and the ever-flowing
breeze which the motion of the vessel forbids to sink into a calm,
give vigour to the tired system, restore the conscious enjoyment of
elastic health, and even mock us for the moment with the belief that
age is an illusion, and that 'the wild freshness' of the morning of
life has not yet passed away for ever. Above our heads is the arch
of the sky, around us the ocean, rolling free and fresh as it rolled
a million years ago, and our spirits catch a contagion from the
elements. Our step on the boards recovers its buoyancy. We are
rocked to rest at night by a gentle movement which soothes you into
the dreamless sleep of childhood, and we wake with the certainty
that we are beyond the reach of the postman. We are shut off, in a
Catholic retreat, from the worries and anxieties of the world."
This is not the language of a man who ever suffered seriously from
sea-sickness, and Froude's face had an open-air look which never
suggested "the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library." But he was
of course a laborious student, and nothing refreshed him like a
voyage. On the yacht of his old friend Lord Ducie, as Enthusiastic a
sailor and fisherman as himself, he made several journeys to Norway,
and caught plenty of big salmon. He has done ample justice to these
expeditions in the last volume of his essays, which contains The
Spanish Story of the Armada. A country where the mountains are
impassable, and the fiords the only roads, just suited his taste. It
even inspired him with a poem, Rornsdal Fiord, which appeared in
Blackwood for April, 1883, and it gave him health, which is not
always, like poetry, a pure gift of nature.
The life of society, and of towns, never satisfied Froude. Apart
from his genius and his training, he was a country gentleman, and
felt most at home when he was out of doors.
From Panshanger he wrote to Lady Derby:
"How well I understand what you felt sitting on the top of the
Pyrenees. We men are but a sorry part of the creation. Now and then
there comes to us a breath out of another order of things; a sudden
perception--coming we cannot tell how--of the artificial and
contemptible existence we are all living; a longing to be out of it
and have done with it--by a pistol-shot if nothing else will do. I
continually wonder at myself for remaining in London when I can go
where I please, and take with me all the occupations I am fit for.
Alas! it is oneself that one wants really to be rid of. If we did
not ourselves share in the passions and follies that are working
round us we should not be touched by them. I have made up my mind to
leave it all, at all events, as soon as Mr. Carlyle is gone; but the
enchantment which scenery, grand or beautiful, or which simple
country life promises at a distance, will never abide--let us be
where we will. It comes in moments like a revelation; like the faces
of those whom we have loved and lost; which pass before us, and we
stretch our hands to clasp them and they are gone. I came here
yesterday for two or three days. The house is full of the young
generation. They don't attract me .... Whatever their faults,
diffidence is not one of them. Macaulay's doctrine of the natural
superiority of each new generation to its predecessor seems most
heartily accepted and believed. The superb pictures in the house are
a silent protest against the cant of progress. You look into the
faces of the men and the women on the walls and can scarcely believe
they are the same race with us. I have sometimes thought 'the
numbers' of the elect have been really fulfilled, and that the rest
of us are left to gibber away an existence back into an apehood
which we now recognise as our real primitive type."
From the Molt, on the other hand, he wrote:
"It is near midnight. I have just come in from the terrace. The moon
is full over the sea, which is glittering as if it was molten gold.
The rocks and promontories stand out dear and ghost-like. There is
not a breath to rustle the leaves or to stir the painted wash upon
the shore. Men and men's doings, and their speeches and idle
excitement, seem all poor, transient, and contemptible. Sea and
rocks and moonlight looked just as they look to-night before Adam
sinned in Paradise. They remain--we come and go, hardly more
enduring than the moth that flutters in through the window, and we
are hardly of more consequence."