THE OXFORD PROFESSORSHIP
ON the 16th of March, 1892, Froude's old antagonist, Freeman, who
had been Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford since Stubbs's
elevation to the Episcopal Bench in 1884, died suddenly in Spain.
The Prime Minister, who was also Chancellor of the University,
offered the vacant Chair to Froude, and after some hesitation Froude
accepted it. The doubt was due to his age. "There are seventy-four
reasons against it," he said. Fortunately he yielded. "The
temptation of going back to Oxford in a respectable way," he wrote
to Skelton, "was too much for me. I must just do the best I can, and
trust that I shall not be haunted by Freeman's ghost." Lord
Salisbury did a bold thing when he appointed Froude successor to
Freeman. Froude had indeed a more than European reputation as a man
of letters, and was acknowledged to be a master of English prose.
But he was seventy-four, five years older than Freeman, and he had
never taught in his life, except as tutor for a very brief time in
two private families. The Historical School at Oxford had been
trained to believe that Stubbs was the great historian, that Freeman
was his prophet, and that Froude was not an historian at all. Lord
Salisbury of course knew better, for it was at Hatfield that some of
Froude's most thorough historical work had been done. Still, it
required some courage to fly in the face of all that was pedantic in
Oxford, and to nominate in Freeman's room the writer that Freeman
had spent the best years of his life in "belabouring." Some critics
attributed the selection to Lord Salisbury's sardonic humour, or
pronounced that, as Lamb said of Coleridge's metaphysics, "it was
only his fun." Some stigmatised it as a party job. Gladstone's
nominee Freeman, had been a Home Ruler, Froude was a Unionist; what
could be clearer than the motive? But both nominations could be
defended on their own merits, and a Regius Professorship should not
be the monopoly of a clique.
Lord Salisbury's choice of Froude was indeed, like Lord Rosebery's
subsequent choice of Lord Acton for Cambridge, an example which
justified the patronage of the Crown. A Prime Minister has more
courage than an academic board, and is guided by larger
considerations. Froude was one of the most distinguished living
Oxonians, and yet Oxford had not even given him an honorary degree.
Membership the Scottish Universities Commission in 1876 was the only
official acknowledgment of his services to culture that he had ever
received, and that was more of an obligation than a compliment.
"Froude," said Jowett, "is a man of genius. He has been abominably
treated." Lord Salisbury had made amends. Himself a man of the
highest intellectual distinction, apart from the offices he happened
to hold, he had promoted Froude to great honour in the place he
loved best, and the most eminent of living English historians
returned to Oxford in the character which was his due.
The new Professor gave up his house in London, and settled at
Cherwell Edge, near the famous bathing-place called Parson' s
Pleasure.* He found the University a totally different place from
what it was when he first knew it. Dr. Arnold, who died in 1842, the
year after his appointment, was the earliest Professor whose
lectures were famous, or were attended, and Dr. Arnold did exactly
as he pleased. There was no Board of Studies to supervise him, and
it was thought rather good of a Professor to lecture at all. Now the
Board of Studies was omnipotent, and a Professor's time was not his
own. He was bound in fact to give forty-two lectures in a year, and
to lecture twice a week for seven weeks in two terms out of the
three. The prospect appalled him. "I never," he wrote to Max
Muller,+ "I never gave a lecture on an historical subject without a
fortnight or three weeks of preparation, and to undertake to deliver
forty-two such lectures in six months would be to undertake an
impossibility. If the University is to get any good out of me, I
must work in my own way." He did not, however, work in his own way,
and the University got a great deal of good out of him all the same.
--
* The house is now, oddly enough, a Catholic convent.
+ April 18th, 1892.
--
Lord Salisbury, in making Froude the offer, spoke apologetically of
the stipend as small, but added that the work would be light. The
accomplished Chancellor was imperfectly informed. The stipend was
small enough: the work was extremely hard for a man of seventy-four.
Froude's conscientiousness in preparation was almost excessive.
Every lecture was written out twice from notes for improvement of
style and matter. His audiences were naturally large, for not since
the days Mr. Goldwin Smith, who resigned in 1866, had anything like
Froude's lectures been heard at Oxford. When I was an undergraduate,
in the seventies, we all of course knew that Professor Stubbs had a
European reputation for learning. But, except to those reading for
the History School, Stubbs was a name, and nothing more. Nobody ever
dreamt of going to hear him. Crowds flocked to hear Froude, as in my
time they flocked to hear Ruskin.
One sex was as well represented as the other. Froude had left the
dons celibate and clerical. He found them, for the most part,
married and lay. There was every variety of opinion in the common
rooms, and every variety of perambulators in the parks. London hours
had been adopted, and the society, though by no means frivolous or
ostentatious, was anything rather than monastic. At Oxford, as in
London, Froude was almost always the best talker in the room. He had
travelled, not so much in Europe as in America and the more distant
parts of the British Empire. He had read almost everything, and
known almost every one. His boyish enthusiasm for deeds of adventure
was not abated. He believed in soldiers and sailors, especially
sailors. Creeds, Parliaments, and constitutions did not greatly
attract or keenly interest him. Old as he was by the almanac, he
retained the buoyant freshness of youth, and loved watching the
eights on the river as much as any undergraduate. The chapel
services, especially at Magdalen, brought back old times and tastes.
As Professor of History he became a Fellow of Oriel, where he had
been a commoner in the thick of the Oxford Movement. If the
Tractarian tutors could have heard the conversation of their
successors, they would have been astonished and perplexed. Even the
Essayists and Reviewers would have been inclined to wish that some
things could be taken for granted. Modern Oxford was not altogether
congenial to Froude. While he could not be called orthodox, he
detested materialism, and felt sympathy, if not agreement, with
Evangelical Protestants. Like Bacon, he would rather believe all the
legends of the Talmud than that this universal frame was without a
mind.
Of the questions which absorbed High Churchmen he said, "One might
as well be interested in the amours of the heathen gods." On the
other hand, he had no sympathy with the new school of specialists,
the devotees of original research. He believed in education as a
training of the mental faculties, and thought that undergraduates
should learn to use their own minds. "I can see what books the boys
have read," he observed, after examining for the Arnold Prize, "but
I cannot see that they make any use of what they have read. They
seem to have power of assimilation." The study of authorities at
first hand, to which he had given so much of his own time, he
regarded as the work of a few, and as occupation for later years. The
faculty of thinking, and the art of writing, could not be learned
too soon.
Few indeed were the old friends who remained at Oxford to welcome
him back. Max Muller was the most intimate of them, and among his
few surviving contemporaries was Bartholomew Price, Master of
Pembroke, a clergyman more distinguished in mathematics than in
theology. The Rector of Exeter* gave a cordial welcome to the most
illustrious of its former Fellows. The Provost of Oriel+ was equally
gracious. In the younger generation of Heads his chief friends were
the Dean of Christ Church,^ now Bishop of Oxford, and the President
of Magdalen.# But the Oxford of 1892 was so unlike the Oxford of
1849 that Froude might well feel like one of the Seven Sleepers of
Ephesus. And if there had been many changes in Oxford, there had
been some also in himself. He had long ceased to be, so far as he
ever was, a clergyman. He had been twice married, and twice left a
widower. His children had grown up. His fame as an author extended
far beyond the limits of his own country, and of Europe. He had made
Carlyle's acquaintance, become his intimate friend, and written a
biography of him which numbered as many readers as The French
Revolution itself. He had lectured in the United States, and
challenged the representatives of Irish Nationalism on the history
of their own land. He had visited most of the British Colonies, and
promoted to the best of his ability the Federation of South Africa.
Few men had seen more, or read more, or enjoyed a wider experience
of the world. What were the lessons which after such a life he
chiefly desired to teach young Englishmen who were studying the
past? The value of their religious reformation, and the achievements
of their naval heroes. The Authorised Version and the Navy were in
his mind the symbols of England's greatness. Greater Britain,
including Britain beyond the seas, was the goal of his hopes for the
future progress of the race. There were in Oxford more learned men
than Froude, Max Muller for one. There was not a single Professor,
or tutor, who could compare with him for the multitude and variety
of his experience. Undergraduates were fascinated by him, as
everybody else was. The dignitaries of the place, except a stray
Freemanite here and there, recognised the advantage of having so
distinguished a personage in so conspicuous a Chair. Even in a
Professor other qualities are required besides erudition. Stubbs's
Constitutional History of England may be a useful book for students.
Unless or until it is rewritten, it can have no existence for the
general reader; and if the test of impartiality be applied, Stubbs
is as much for the Church against the State as Froude is for the
State against the Church. When Mr. Goldwin Smith resigned the
Professorship of Modern History, or contemplated resigning it Stubbs
wrote to Freeman, "It would be painful to have Froude, and worse
still to have anybody else." He received the appointment himself,
and held it for eighteen years, when he gave way to Freeman, and
more than a quarter of century elapsed before the painful event
occurred. By that time Stubbs was Bishop of Oxford, translated from
Chester, and had shown what a fatal combination for a modern prelate
is learning with humour. If Froude had been appointed twenty years
earlier, on the completion of his twelve volumes, he might have made
Oxford the great historical school of England. But it was too late.
The aftermath was wonderful, and the lectures he delivered at Oxford
show him at his best. But the effort was too much tor him, and
hastened his end.
--
* Dr. Jackson. + Mr. Monro. ^ Dr. Paget. # Mr. Warren.
--
It must not be supposed that Froude felt only the burden. His powers
of enjoyment were great, and he thoroughly enjoyed Oxford. He had
left it forty years ago under a cloud. He came back in a dignified
character with an assured position. He liked the familiar buildings
and the society of scholars. The young men interested and amused
him. Ironical as he might be at times, and pessimistic, his talk was
intellectually stimulating. His strong convictions, even his
inveterate prejudices, prevented his irony from degenerating into
cynicism. History, said Carlyle, is the quintessence of innumerable
biographies, and it was always the human side of history that
appealed to Froude. He once playfully compared himself with the
Mephistopheles of Faust, sitting in the Professor's chair. But in
truth he saw always behind historical events the directing
providence of God. Newman held that no belief could stand against
the destructive force of the human reason, the intellectus sibi
permissus. Froude felt that there were things which reason could not
explain, and that no revelation was needed to trace the limits of
knowledge. Sceptical as he was in many ways, he had the belief which
is fundamental, which no scientific discovery or philosophic
speculation can shake or move. Creeds and Churches might come or go.
The moral law remained where it was. His own creed is expressed in
that which he attributes to Luther. "The faith which Luther himself
would have described as the faith that saved is the faith that
beyond all things and always truth is the most precious of
possessions, and truthfulness the most precious of qualities; that
when truth calls, whatever the consequence, a brave man is bound to
follow."*
--
* Short Studies, iii. 189.
--
Although Froude was probably happier at Oxford than he had been at
any time since 1874, the regulations of his professorship worried
him, as they had worried Stubbs and Freeman. They seemed to have
been drawn on the assumption that a Professor would evade his
duties, and behave like an idle undergraduate. Froude, on the
contrary, interpreted them in the sense most adverse to himself. The
authorities of the place, or some of them, would have had him spare
his pains, and colourably evade the statute by talking instead of
lecturing. But Froude was too conscientious to seek relief in this
way. Whatever he had to do he did thoroughly, conscientiously, and
as well as he could. There is no trace of senility in his
professorial utterances. On the contrary, they are full of life and
fire. Yet Froude was by no means entirely engrossed in his work. He
had time for hospitality, and for making friends with young men. He
loved his familiar surroundings, for nothing can vulgarise Oxford.
He found men who still read the classics as literature, not to convict
Aeschylus of violating Dawes's Canon, or to get loafers
through the schools. He was not in all respects, it must be
admitted, abreast of modern thought. His education had been
unscientific, and he cared no more for Darwin than Carlyle did. He
had learnt from his brother William, who died in 1879,* the scope
and tendency of modern experiments, and astronomical illustrations
are not uncommon in his writings. But the bent of his mind was in
other directions, and he had never been under the influence of
Spencer or of Mill. The Oxford which he left in 1849 was dominated
by Aristotle and Bishop Butler. He came back to find Butler
dethroned, and more modern philosophers established in his place.
Aristotle remained where he was, not the type and symbol of
universal knowledge, as Dante conceived him, but the groundwork upon
which all later systems had been built. Plato, without whom there
would have been no Aristotle, was more closely and reverently
studied than ever, partly no doubt through Jowett, and yet mainly
because no philosopher can ever get far away from him. Jowett
himself, the ideal "Head of a House," who had been at Balliol when
Froude was at Oriel, died in the second year of Froude's
professorship, after seeing many of his pupils famous in the world.
He had lived through the great period of transition in which Oxford
passed from a monastery to a microcosm. The Act of 1854 had opened
the University to Dissenters, reserving fellowships and
scholarships, all places of honour and emolument, for members of the
Established Church. The Act of 1871 removed the test of
churchmanship for all such places, and for the higher degrees,
except theological professorships and degrees in divinity. The Act
of 1877 opened the Headships of the Colleges, and put an end to
prize Fellowships for life. The Provost of Oriel, then Vice-
Chancellor, was a layman. Marriage did not terminate a Fellowship,
which, unless it were connected with academic work, lasted for seven
years, and no longer. The old collegiate existence was at an end.
Many of the tutors were married, and lived in their own houses. When
Gladstone revisited Oxford in 1890, and occupied rooms in college as
an Honorary Fellow of All Souls, nothing pleased him less than the
number of women he encountered at every turn. They were not all the
wives and daughters of the dons, who in Gladstone's view had no more
right to such appendages than priests of the Roman Church; there
were also the students at the Ladies' Colleges, who were allowed to
compete for honours, though not to receive degrees.
--
* "My brother," Froude wrote to Lady Derby, "though his name was little
before the public, was well known to the Admiralty and indeed in every
dock-yard in Europe. He has contributed more than any man of his time
to the scientific understanding of ships and shipbuilding. His inner
life was still more remarkable. He resisted the influence of Newman
when all the rest of his family gave way, refusing to become a Catholic
when they went over, and keeping steadily to his own honest convictions.
To me he was ever the most affectionate of friends. The earliest
recollections of my life are bound up with him, and his death takes away
a large past of the little interest which remained to me in this most
uninteresting world. The loss to the Admiralty for the special work in
which he was engaged will be almost irreparable."
--
Froude, who brought his own daughters with him, entered easily into
the changed conditions. He was not given to lamentation over the
past, and if he regretted anything it was the want of Puritan
earnestness, of serious purpose in life. He had an instinctive
sympathy with men of action, whether they were soldiers, sailors, or
statesmen. For mere talkers he had no respect at all, and he was
under the mistaken impression that they governed the country through
the House of Commons. He never realised, any more than Carlyle, the
vast amount of practical administrative work which such a man as
Gladstone achieved, or on the other hand the immense weight carried
in Parliament by practical ability and experience, as distinguished
from brilliancy and rhetoric. The history which he liked, and to
which he confined himself, was antecedent to the triumph of
Parliament over the Crown. Warren Hastings, he used to say,
conquered India; Burke would have hanged him for doing it. The House
of Lords acquitted Hastings; and so far from criticising the
doubtful policy of the war with France in 1793, Burke's only
complaint of Pitt was that he did not carry it on with sufficient
vigour. The distinction between talkers and doers is really
fallacious. Some speeches are actions. Some actions are too trivial
to deserve the name. But if Froude was incapable of understanding
Parliamentary government, he very seldom attempted to deal with it.
The English in Ireland is a rare and not a fortunate, exception. The
House of Tudor was far more congenial to him than either the House
of Stuart or the House of Brunswick.
Froude delivered his Inaugural Lecture on the 27th of October, 1892.
The place was the Museum, which stands in the parks opposite Keble,
and the attendance was very large. In the history of Oxford there
have been few more remarkable occasions. Although the new Professor
had made his name and writings familiar to the whole of the educated
world, his immediate predecessor had vehemently denied his right to
the name of historian, and had assured the public with all the
emphasis which reiteration can give that Froude could not
distinguish falsehood from truth. If anything could have brought
Freeman out of his grave, it would have been Froude's appointment to
succeed him. It is the custom in an Inaugural Lecture to mention in
eulogistic language the late occupant of the chair. No man was less
inclined to bear malice than Froude. His disposition was placable,
and his temperament calm. Freeman had grossly and frequently
insulted him without the faintest provocation. But he had long since
taken his revenge, such as it was, and he could afford to be
generous now. He discovered, with some ingenuity, a point of
agreement in that Freeman, like himself, was a champion of classical
education. Therefore, "along with his asperities," he had "strong
masculine sense," and had voted for compulsory Greek. If the right
of suffrage were restricted to men who knew Greek as well as Froude
or Freeman, the decisions of Congregation at Oxford, and of the
Senate at Cambridge, would command more respect.
Froude must have been reminded by the obligatory reference to
Freeman that a man of seventy-four was succeeding a man of sixty-
nine. The Roman Cardinals were, he said, in the habit of electing an
aged Pontiff with the hope, not always fulfilled, that he would die
soon. He had no belief that such an expectation would be falsified
in his own case, and he undertook, with obvious sincerity, not to
hold the post for a single day after he had ceased to be capable of
efficiently discharging his functions. To history his own life had
been devoted, and it would indeed have been strange if he could not
give young men some help in reading it. His own great book might not
be officially recommended for the schools. It was unofficially
recommended by all lovers of good literature and sound learning.
Like most people who know the meaning of science and of history, he
denied that history was a science. There were no fixed and
ascertained principles by which the actions of men were determined.
There was no possibility of trying experiments. The late Mr. Buckle
had not displaced the methods of the older historians, nor founded a
system of his own. "I have no philosophy of history," added Froude,
who disbelieved in the universal applicability of general truths.
Here, perhaps, he is hardly just to himself. The introductory
chapter to his History of the Reformation, especially the impressive
contrast between modern and mediaeval England, is essentially
philosophical, so much so that one sees in it the student of
Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon. History to Froude, like the world
to Jaques, was a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
But a lover of Goethe knows well enough that the drama can be
philosophical, and Shakespeare, the master of human nature, has
drawn nothing more impressive than the close of Wolsey's career.
"The history of mankind is the history of great men," was Carlyle's
motto, and Froude's. It is a noble one, and to discredit great men
with low motives is the vice of ignoble minds. The reign of Henry
VIII., after Wolsey's fall, was rich in horrors and in tragical
catastrophes. But it was not a mere carnival of lust and blood. High
principles were at stake, and profound issues divided parties,
beside which the levity of Anne Boleyn and the eyes of Jane Seymour
were not worth a moment's thought. Hobbes wondered that a Parliament
man worth thousands of pounds, like Hampden, to pay twenty shillings
for ship-money, as if the amount had anything to do with the
principle that taxes could only be levied by the House of Commons.
Henry's vices are dust in the balance against the fact that he stood
for England against Rome. It is one of Froude's chief merits that he
never fails to see the wood for the trees, never forgets general
propositions to lose himself in details. A novice whose own mind is
a blank may read whole chapters of Gardiner without discovering that
any events of much significance happened in the seventeenth century.
He will not read many pages of Froude before he perceives that the
sixteenth century established our national independence.
Two of Froude's pet hobbies may be found in his Inaugural Lecture.
There is the theory that judgment falls upon idleness and vice,
which he adopted from Carlyle. There is his own doctrine that the
Statute Book furnishes the most authentic material of history. It is
no answer to say that preambles are inserted by Ministers, who put
their own case and not the case of the nation. In the use or
reception of all evidence allowance must be made for the source from
which it comes. But even Governments do not invent out of their own
heads, or put into statutes what is foreign to the public mind. They
employ the arguments most likely to prevail, and these must be
closely connected with the circumstances of the day. No recital in
an Act of parliament can prove incontestably that the monasteries
were stews, or worse. That such a thing could be plausibly alleged,
and generally believed, is itself important, and history must take
account of popular views. Debates were not reported in the sixteenth
century, nor was freedom of speech in Parliament recognised by the
Crown. There was nothing to ensure a fair trial for the victims of a
royal prosecution, and testimony obtained by torture was accepted as
authentic. All these are facts, and to neglect them is to go astray.
But they do not prove that every public document is untrustworthy;
or that the words of a statute have no more to do with reality than
the words of a romance. It is a question of degree. Historical
narrative could not be written under the conditions most properly
imposed upon criminal proceedings in a court of law. If nothing
which cannot be proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt is
admitted into the pages of history, they will be bare indeed. It is
significant that Froude laid down in 1892 the same propositions for
which he had contended in the Oxford Essays of 1855. He had suffered many
things in the meantime of The Saturday Review, but he held to his
old opinions with unshaken tenacity. All Froude's changes were made
early in life. When once he had shaken himself free of Tractarianism,
The Nemesis of Faith, and Elective Affinities, he remained a
Protestant, Puritan, sea-loving, priest-hating Englishman.
The subject with which Froude began his brief career as Professor
was the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent has been described by
one of the great historians of the world, Fra Paolo Sarpi, whom
Macaulay considered second only to Thucydides. Entirely ineffective
for the purpose of securing universal concord, it did in reality
separate Protestant from Catholic Europe, and establish Papal
authority over the Church of Rome. When the Council met, the Papacy
was no part of orthodox Catholicism, and Henry VIII. never dreamt
that in repudiating the jurisdiction of the Pope he severed himself
from the Catholic Church. If Luther had been only a heretic, the
Council might have put him down. But he had behind him the bulk of
the laity, and Cardinal Contarini told Paul III. that the revolt
against ecclesiastical power would continue if every priest
submitted. "The Reformation," said Froude at the beginning of his
first course, in November, 1892, "is the hinge on which all modern
history turns." He traced in it the rise of England's greatness.
When he came back in his old age to Oxford, it was to sound the
trumpet-note of private judgment and religious liberty, as if the
Oxford Movement and the Anglo-Catholic revival had never been.
Froude could not be indifferent to the moral side of historical
questions, or accept the doctrine that every one is right from his
own point of view. The Reformation did in his eyes determine that
men were responsible to God alone, and not to priests or Churches,
for their opinions and their deeds. It also decided that the Church
must be subordinate to the State, not the State to the Church. This is
called Erastianism, and is the bugbear of High Churchmen. But
there is no escape from the alternative, and the Church of Rome has
never abandoned her claim to universal authority. Against it Henry
VIII. and Cromwell, Elizabeth and Cecil, set up the supremacy of the
law, made and administered by laymen. As Froude said at the close of
his first course, in the Hilary Term of 1893, "the principles on
which the laity insisted have become the rule of the modern
Popes no longer depose Princes, dispense with oaths, or absolve
subjects from their allegiance. Appeals are not any more carried to
Rome from the national tribunals, nor justice sold there to the
highest bidder." Justice was sold at Rome before the existence of
the Catholic Church, or even the Christian religion. It has been
sold, as Hugh Latimer testified, in England herself. But with the
English Court's independence of the Holy See came the principles of
civil and religious freedom.
Few things annoyed Froude more than the attacks of Macaulay and
other Liberals on Cranmer. This was not merely sentimental
attachment on Froude's part to the compiler of the Prayer Book. He
looked on the Marian Martyrs as the precursors of the Long
Parliament and of the Revolution, the champions of liberty in church and
State. He would have felt that he was doing less than his duty if he
had taught his pupils mere facts. Those facts had a lesson, for them
as well as for him, and his sense of what the lesson was had
deepened with years. He had observed in his own day an event which
made much the same impression upon him as study of the French
Revolution had made upon Carlyle. When the Second Empire perished at
Sedan, Froude saw in the catastrophe the judgment of Providence upon
a sinister and tortuous career. If the duty of an historian be to
exclude moral considerations, Froude did not fulfil it. That there
were good men on the wrong side he perceived plainly enough. But
that did not make it the right side, nor confuse the difference
between the two.
Froude's second set of Oxford lectures, begun in the Easter Term of
1893, was entitled English Seamen of the Sixteenth Century, and the
name of the first lecture in it, a thoroughly characteristic name,
was The Sea Cradle of the Reformation. He was in his element, and
his success was complete. How Protestant England ousted Catholic
Spain from the command of the ocean, and made it Britannia's realm,
was a story which he loved to tell. "The young King," Henry VIII.,
"like a wise man, turned his first attention to the broad ditch, as
he called the British Channel, which formed the natural defence of
the kingdom." It was "the secret determined policy of Spain to
destroy the English fleet, pilots, masters, and sailors, by means of
the Inquisition." In 1562, according to Cecil, more than twenty
British subjects had been burnt at the stake in Spain for heresy,
and more than two hundred were starving in Spanish prisons. There
was work for Hawkins and Drake. They were both Devonshire men, like
Raleigh.
'Twas ever the way with good Queen Bess,
Who ruled as well as a mortal can,
When she was stogged, and the country in a mess,
To send for a Devonshire man.
Spain paid heavily for the persecution of British sailors. In his
fifth lecture, Parties in the State, Froude read with dramatic
emphasis, and in a singularly impressive manner, the application of
a seaman to Elizabeth for leave to attack Philip's men-of-war off
the banks of Newfoundland. "Give me five vessels, and I will go out
and sink them all, and the galleons shall rot in Cadiz Harbour for
want of hands to sail them. But decide, Madam, and decide quickly.
Time flies, and will not return. The wings of man's life are plumed
with the feathers of death." When he uttered these tragic words,
Froude paused, and looked up, and it seemed to those who heard him
as if he felt that the time of his own departure was at hand.
Elizabeth herself was never moved by sentiment, and final vengeance
on Spain had to wait for the Armada, with which these lectures, like
the History, conclude. The consequences he left to others who had
more years before them than he himself. He loved to dwell on the
glories of seamen, especially Devonshire seamen, whose descendants
he had known from his boyhood. The open sea and the open air, the
stars and the waves, were akin to him. His companions sometimes
thought that he cared too little for the perils of the deep. A lady
who went boating with him, and hazarded the opinion that they would
be drowned, got no warmer comfort than "Very likely," which struck
her as grim. Probably he knew that there was no danger. He was
accustomed to storms, and rather enjoyed them than otherwise. His
lectures on the Elizabethan heroes of the sea had a fascination for
young Englishmen which no historical discourses ever surpassed.
These sea-tales were spread over a year, being delivered in the
Easter Terms of 1893 and 1894. Before they were finished Froude had
begun another course on the life and correspondence of Erasmus.
Erasmus is one of the choicest names in the history of letters, the
flower of the religious Renaissance. Simply and sincerely pious, he
enjoyed without abusing all the pleasures of life, wrote such Latin
prose as had not been known since Pliny, and learnt Greek that he
might understand the true meaning of the New Testament. Hating the
monks of his own time for their ignorance and coarseness, he was as
learned as any Benedictine of old, and as a master of irony he is
like a gentler Pascal, a more reverent Voltaire. He loved England,
the England of Archbishop Warham, Dean Colet, and Sir Thomas More.
English ladies too were much to his taste, and in his familiar
letters he has described their charms with frank appreciation.
Priest as he was, and strictly moral, he cultivated an innocent
epicureanism, including the collection of manuscripts and the
exposure of pretentious ignorance in high places. He felt imperfect
sympathy with Luther, and his literary criticism would have made no
reformation. He was indeed precisely what we now call a Broad
Churchman, accepting forms as convenient, though not essential, to
faith. No one was better qualified to interpret him than Froude,
whose translations of his letters, though free and sometimes loose,
are vivid, racy, and idiomatic. Froude was by no means a blind
admirer of Erasmus. His favourite heroes were men of action, and he
regarded Luther as the real champion of spiritual freedom.
Intellect, he used to say, fought no battles, and was no match for
superstition. Without Luther there would have been no Reformation.
There might well have been a Reformation without Erasmus.
Neither of them was necessary according to Contarini, and in truth
the Reformation had many sides. When Selden attended the Westminster
Assembly of Divines, he took occasion to remind his colleagues that
the Scriptures were not written in English. "Perhaps in your little
pocket Bibles with gilt leaves" (which they would often pull out and
read) "the translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew
signifies thus and thus." So he would speak, says Whitelock, and totally
silence them. But neither were the Scriptures written in
Latin. It was Erasmus who revived the study of the Greek Testament,
the charter of the scholar's reformation. He gave the Renaissance,
in its origin purely Pagan, a Christian direction, and prevented the
divorce of learning from religion. He also protested against the
confusion of Christianity with asceticism, and against belief in the
superior sanctity of monks. He turned his satire upon corruption in
high places, and did not spare the Holy See. His residence in
England, his friendship with More, his admiration for the earlier
and better part of Henry VIII.'s career, connected him with events
of which Froude had Himself traced the development. Luther moved him
sometimes to sarcasm. Toleration and comprehension were the
watchwords of Erasmus. "Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed,"
he said, "to the smallest possible number; you can do it without
danger to the realities of Christianity. On other points, either
discourage inquiry, or leave every one to believe what he pleases-
then we shall have no more quarrels, and religion will again take
hold of life." The subject was not a new one to Froude. He had
lectured on Erasmus and Luther at Newcastle five-and-twenty years
before. The contrast between the two reformers is perennially
interesting. Goethe, a supreme critic, thought that reform of the
Church should have been left to Erasmus, and that Luther was a
misfortune.
But then Goethe, though he understood religious enthusiasm, did not
see the need for it, and would have tolerated such a Pope as Leo X.,
who had excellent taste in literature, rather than see issues
submitted to the people which should be left for the learned to
decide.
The weak point of Froude's Erasmus is the inaccuracy of its verbal
scholarship. "Sir," said Dr. Johnson of a loose scholar, "he makes
out the Latin from the meaning, not the meaning from the Latin."
This biting sarcasm would be inapplicable to Froude, who knew the
dead languages, as they are called, well enough to read them with
ease and enjoyment. But he took in the general sense of a passage so
quickly that he did not always, even in translating, stop to
consider the precise significance of every word. Literal conformity
with the original text is of course not possible or desirable in a
paraphrase. What Froude did not sufficiently consider was the
difference between the translation and the translator himself, who
cannot paraphrase properly unless he renders literally in his own
mind. Froude gave abundant proof of his good faith by quoting in
notes some of the very passages which are incorrectly rendered
above. A great deal has been made by a Catholic critic of the fact
that the book which checked Ignatius Loyola's "devotional emotions"
was not Erasmus's Greek Testament, but his Enchiridion Militis
Christiani, Christian Soldier's Manual. This mistake was unduly
favourable to the saint. Froude did not mean to imply that it was
the actual words of Scripture which had this effect upon Ignatius.
He was referring to the great scholar's own notes, which are
polemical, and not intended to please monks. The founder of the
Jesuits would have doubtless regarded them as most detestable
blasphemy. The Enchiridion, on the other hand, is a purely
devotional book, though written for a man of the world.
"My object," says Froude in his Preface, "has been rather to lead
historical students to a study of Erasmus's own writings than to
provide an abbreviated substitute for them." The students who took
the advice will have found that Froude was guilty of some strange
inadvertences, such as mistaking through a misprint a foster brother
for a collection of the classics, but they will not have discovered
anything which substantially impairs the value of his work. His
paraphrases were submitted to two competent scholars, who drew up a
long and rather formidable list of apparently inaccurate renderings.
These were in turn submitted to the accomplished Latinist, Mr. Allen
of Corpus, who is editing the Letters of Erasmus for the Clarendon
Press. Mr. Allen thought that in several cases Froude had given the
true meaning better than a more literal translation would give it.
There remain a number of rather trivial slips, which do not
appreciably diminish the merit of the best attempt ever made to set
Erasmus before English readers in his habit as he was. The Latin of
Erasmus is not always easy. He wrote it beautifully, but not
naturally, as an exercise in imitation of Cicero. Without a thorough
knowledge of Cicero and of Terence he is sometimes unintelligible,
in a few cases the text of his letters is corrupt, and in others his
real meaning is doubtful. One of the most glaring blunders, "idol"
for "old," is obviously due to the printer, and a more careful
comparison with the Latin would have easily removed them all. But at
seventy-six a little laxity may be pardoned, and these were the only
Oxford lectures which Froude himself prepared for the press. The
publication of English Seamen and the Council of Trent was
posthumous.
Between 1867 and 1893 Froude had become more favourable to Erasmus,
or more sympathetic with his point of view. It was not that he
admired Luther less. On the contrary, his Protestant convictions
grew stronger with years, and to the last he raised his voice
against the Anglo-Catholic revival. But he seemed to feel with more
force the saying of Erasmus that "the sum of religion is peace." He
translated and read out to his class the whole of the satiric
dialogue held at the gate of Paradise between St. Peter and Julius
II., in which the wars of that Pontiff are ruthlessly flagellated,
and the wicked old man threatens to take the celestial city by
storm. Erasmus, averse as he was from violent measures, had no lack
of courage, and in his own name he told the truth about the most
dignified ecclesiastics. No artifices imposed upon him, and he
acknowledged no master but Christ. He translated the arch-sceptic
Lucian, about whom Froude has himself written a delightful essay. "I
wish," said Froude, "I wish more of us read Lucian now. He was the
greatest man by far outside the Christian Church in the second
century." Lucian lived in an age when miracles the most grotesque
were supported by witnesses the most serious, and when, as he said,
the one safeguard was an obstinate incredulity, the ineradicable
certainty that miracles did not happen. Erasmus enjoyed Lucian as a
corrective of monkish superstition, though he himself was
essentially Christian. A Protestant he never became. He lived and
died in communion with Rome, denounced by monks as a heretic, and by
Lutherans as a time-server. Paul III. Would have made him a Cardinal
if his means had sufficed for a Prince of the Church. Standing
between the two extremes, he saw better than any of his
contemporaries the real proportions of things, and Froude's last
words on the subject were that students would be most likely to
understand the Reformation if they looked at it with the eyes of
Erasmus. Small faults notwithstanding, there is no one who has drawn
a more vivid, or a more faithful, portrait of Erasmus than Anthony
Froude.
Of Froude in his Oxford Chair it may fairly be said that in a short
time he fulfilled a long time, and made more impression upon the
under-graduates in a few months than Stubbs had made in as many
years. It was not so much the love of learning that he inspired,
though the range of his studies was wide, as enthusiasm for history
because it was the history of England. His subjects were really
English. Erasmus knew England thoroughly, and would have been an
Englishman if he could. The Council of Trent failed to check the
Reformation, and England without the Reformation would have been a
different country, if not a province of Spain. Froude's lectures
were events, landmarks in the intellectual life of Oxford, and the
young men who came to him for advice went away not merely with dry
facts, but with fructifying ideas. Distasteful as modern
Parliamentary politics were to him, the position of the British
Empire in the world was the dominant fact in his mind, and he
regarded Oxford as a training-ground of imperial statesmanship.
He was not made to run in harness, or to act as a coach for the
schools. "The teaching business at Oxford," he wrote to Skelton,
after his last term, "goes at high pressure--in itself utterly
absurd, and unsuited altogether to an old stager like myself. The
undergraduates come about me in large numbers, and I have asserted
in some sense my own freedom; but one cannot escape the tyranny of
the system."* This is severe, though not perhaps severer than the
Inaugural Lecture of Professor Firth. To a critic from the outside
it seems that Boards of Studies should have power to relax their own
rules, and that the utmost possible relaxation should have been
granted in the case of Froude. A famous historian of seventy-four,
if qualified to be a Professor at all, must be capable of managing
his own work so that it may be most useful and efficient. The
restrictions of which Froude, not alone, complained are really
incompatible with Regius Professorships, or at least with the
patronage of the Crown. They imply that the teaching branch of the
University is to be entirely controlled by expert specialists on the
spot. A Regius Professor is a national institution, a public man,
not like a college tutor, who has purely local functions to
discharge. That is a point on which Freeman would have agreed with
Froude, and Stubbs would have agreed with both of them. Froude's
success in spite of limitations does not show that they were wise,
but that genius surmounts obstacles and breaks the barriers which
seek to impede it. "To my sorrow I am popular," he said, "and my
room is crowded. I know not who they are, and have no means of
knowing. So it is not satisfactory. I must alter things somehow.
--
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 222.
--
I can't yet tell how." The opportunity never came. But he was too
old and too wise a man to let such things affect his happiness, and
he was happier in Oxford than in London. "Some of the old Dons," he
wrote, "have been rather touchingly kind."
There was indeed only one chance of escaping Froude's magnetism, and
that was to keep out of his way. The charm of his company was always
irresistible. Different as the Oxford of 1893 was from the Oxford of
1843, young men are always the same, and Froude thoroughly
understood them. He had enjoyed himself at Oriel not as a reading
recluse, but as a boy out of school, and he was as young in heart as
ever. Strange is the hold that Oxford lays upon men, and not less
strong than strange. Nothing weakens it; neither time, nor distance,
nor success, nor failure, nor the revolution of opinion, nor the
deaths of friends. Oxford had been unjust to Froude, and had driven
out one of her most illustrious sons in something like disgrace. Yet
he never wavered in his affection for her, and the many vicissitudes
of his life he came back to Oriel with the spirits of a boy. The
spells of Oxford, like the spells of Medea, disperse the weight of
years.