THE END
He lectures on Erasmus were not public; they were delivered in
Froude's private house at Cherwell Edge, and attended only by
members of the University reading for the Modern History School. His
public lectures on the Council of Trent and on English seamen had
been so much crowded by men and women, young and old, that
candidates for honours in history were scarcely able to find room.
Nothing could be more honourable to Froude, or to Oxford, than his
enthusiastic reception by his old University at the close of his
brilliant and laborious career. But it was too much for him. Like
Voltaire in Paris, he was stifled with flowers. His twentieth
discourse on Erasmus begins with the pathetic sentence, "This will
be my last lecture, for the life of Erasmus was drawing to an end."
So was his own. His final task in this world was the preparation of
Erasmus for the press. He had been all his life accustomed to work
at his own time, and the strain of living by rule at Oxford had told
upon him more than he knew. Before the end of the summer term in
1894 he left Oxford for Devonshire, worn out and broken down.
"Education," he wrote in his last letter to Skelton, "like so much
else in these days, has gone mad, and has turned into a large
examination mill." He was so much exhausted that he could not go
again to Norway with Lord Ducie,* though with characteristic pluck
he half thought of paying another visit to Sir George Grey in New
Zealand. But it was not to be. During the summer his strength
failed, and it became known that the disorder was incurable. With
philosophic calmness he awaited the inevitable close, feeling, as he
had always felt, that he was in the hands of God. His religion, very
deep, constant, and genuine, was not a spiritual emotion, nor a
dogmatic creed, but a calm and steady confidence that, whatever weak
mortals might do, the Judge of all the earth would do right. "It is
impossible," said Emerson, whom he loved and admired, "for a man not
to be always praying." The relations of such men with the unseen are
an inseparable part of their daily lives. Froude had no more
sympathy with the self-complacent "agnosticism" of modern thought
than he had with Catholic authority or ecstatic revivalism. To fear
God and to keep His commandments was with him the whole duty of man.
The materialistic hypothesis he rejected as incredible, explaining
nothing, meaning nothing, a presumptuous attempt to put ignorance in
the place of knowledge.
--
* "Ducie wanted me to go to Norway with him, salmon-fishing; but I
didn't feel that I could do justice to the opportunity. In the debased
state to which I am reduced, if I hooked a thirty-pound salmon, I
should only pray him to get off."--Table Talk of Shirley, pp. 222, 223.
--
His soul had always dwelt apart. His early training did not
encourage spiritual sympathy, and, except in his books, he
habitually kept silence on ultimate things. But he had always
thought of them; and as he lay dying, in almost the last moments of
consciousness, he repeated dearly to himself those great, those
superhuman lines which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Macbeth
between his wife's death and his own.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle;
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
Still later he murmured, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do
right?"
He died on the 20th of October, 1894, and was buried at Salcombe in
his beloved Devonshire not far from his beloved sea. He "made his
everlasting mansion upon the beached verge of the salt flood." By
his own particular desire he was described on his tombstone as
Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, so deeply did he feel
the complete though tardy recognition of the place he had made for
himself among English historians. Otherwise he was the most
unassuming of men, simple and natural in manner, never putting
himself forward, patient under the most hostile criticism which did
not impugn his personal veracity. Although the malice of Freeman did
once provoke him to a retort the more deadly because it was
restrained, he suffered in silence all the detraction which followed
the reminiscences and the biography of Carlyle. His temper was
singularly placable, and he bore no malice. His father and his
eldest brother had not treated him wisely or kindly. But neither of
Hurrell Froude nor of the Archdeacon did he ever speak except with
admiration and respect. His early training hardened him, and perhaps
accounts for the indifference to cruelty which sometimes disfigures
his pages. He did not know what a mother's affection was before he
had a wife and children of his own. Before he became an honour to
his family he was regarded as a disgrace to it, and not until the
first two volumes of the History appeared did his father believe
that there was any good in him. Yet the Archdeacon was always his
ideal clergyman, and the Church of England as it stood before the
Oxford Movement was his model communion. With the Evangelical party,
represented to him by his Irish friend, Mr. Cleaver, he had
sympathetic relations, and practical, though not doctrinal,
agreement. His temporary leaning towards Tractarianism was no more
than personal admiration for Newman, and he took orders not because
he was a High Churchman, but because he was a Fellow. Yet it was in
some respects a fortunate accident, which, by shutting him out from
other professions, drove him into literature. Fiction he soon
learned to avoid, for his early experiments in it were failures, and
in later years his least successful book, with all its eloquence,
was The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. As an historical writer he has few
superiors, and his essays are among the most delightful in our
tongue. To analyse his style is as difficult as not to feel the
charm of it. It is as smooth as the motion of a ship sailing on a
calm sea, and yet it is never fiat nor tame.
Although Froude, like Newman, belonged to the Oriel school, he has a
spirit which is not of any school, which breathes from the wide
ocean and the liquid air. He wrote, for all his scholarly grace,
like a man of flesh and blood, not a pedant nor a doctrinaire.
Impartial he never was, nor pretended to be. Dramatic he could not
help being, and yet his own opinions were seldom concealed. Three or
four main propositions were at the root of his mind. He held the
Reformation to be the greatest and most beneficent change in modern
history. He believed the English race to be the finest in the world.
He disbelieved in equality, and in Parliamentary government.
Essentially an aristocrat in the proper sense of the term, he
cherished the doctrine of submission to a few fit persons, qualified
for authority by training and experience. These ideas run through
all Froude's historical writing, which takes from them its trend and
colour. Whatever else the male Tudors may have been, they were
emphatically men; and even Elizabeth, whom Froude did not love, had
a commanding spirit. Except poor priest-ridden Mary, who had a
Spanish mother and a Spanish husband, they did not brook control,
and no one was ever more conscious of being a king than Henry VIII.
To him, as to Elizabeth, the Reformation was not dogmatic but
practical, the subjection of the Church to the State. The struggle
between Pope and sovereign had to be fought out before the struggle
between sovereign and Parliament could begin.
Liberals thought that Froude would not have been on the side of the
Parliament, and they joined High Churchmen in attacking him.
Spiritual and democratic power were to him equally obnoxious. He
delighted in Plato's simile of the ship, where the majority are
nothing, and the captain rules. His opinions were not popular,
except his dislike for the Church of Rome. He is read partly for his
exquisite diction, and partly for the patriotic fervour with which
he rejoices in the achievements of England, especially on sea.
Rossetti's fine burden:
Lands are swayed by a king on a throne,
The sea hath no king but God alone:
might be a motto for the title-page of Froude. The fallacy that
brilliant writers are superficial accounts for much of the prejudice
in academic circles against which Froude had to contend. To him of
all men it was inapplicable, for no historian studied original
documents with greater zest. That he did not know his period nobody
could pretend. He knew it so much better than his critics that few
of them could even criticise him intelligently. That he was not
thoroughly acquainted with the periods preceding his own may be more
plausibly argued. There must of course be some limit. The siege of
Troy can be told without mention of Leda's egg. But if Froude had
given a little more time to Henry VII., and all that followed the
Battle of Bosworth, he would have approached the fall of Wolsey and
the rise of Cromwell with a more thorough understanding of cause and
effect. His mind moved with great rapidity, and went so directly to
the point that the circumstances were not always fully weighed. It
is possible to see the truth too clearly, without allowance for
drawbacks and qualifications. The important fact about Henry, for
instance, is that he was a statesman who had to provide for a
peaceful succession. But he was also a wilful, headstrong, arbitrary
man, spoiled from his cradle by flatterers, and determined to have
his own way. Froude saw the absurdity of the Blue-beard delusion,
and did immense service in exposing it. He would have given no
handle to his Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic enemies if he had
acknowledged that there was an explanation of the error. He was
sometimes carried away by his own eloquence, and his convictions
grew stronger as he expressed them, until the facts on the other
side looked so small that they were ignored.
History deals, and can only deal, with consequences and results.
Motives and Intentions, however interesting, belong to another
sphere. Henry and Cromwell, Mary and Pole, Elizabeth and Cecil, are
tried in Froude's pages by the simple test of what they did, or
failed to do, for England. Froude detested and despised the
cosmopolitan philosophy which regards patriotic sentiment as a relic
of barbarism. He was not merely an historian of England, but also an
English historian; and holding Fisher to be a traitor, he did not
hesitate to justify the execution of a pious, even saintly man.
Fisher would no doubt have said that it was far more important to
preserve the Catholic faith in England than to keep England
independent of Spain. Froude would have replied that unless the
nation punished those who sought for the aid of Spanish troops
against their own countrymen, she would soon cease to be a nation at
all. His critics evaded the point, and took refuge in talk about
bloody tyrants wreaking vengeance upon harmless old men.
If patriotism be not a disqualification for an historian, Froude had
none. Like every other writer, he made mistakes. But he was
laborious in research, a master of narrative, with a genius for
seizing dramatic points. Above all, he had imagination, without
which the vastest knowledge is as a ship without sails, or a bird
without wings. His objects, even his prejudices, were frankly
avowed, and his prejudices gave way to fresh facts or reasons. The
records at Simancas, for instance, completely changed, and changed
for the worse, his estimate of Queen Elizabeth's character, and he
admitted it at once with his transparent candour. To defend Froude
against mendacity seems like an insult to his memory, for if he
loved anything it was truth, though he sometimes spoke in a cynical
way about the difficulty of attaining it. But such monstrous charges
were made against him when he could no longer reply for himself that
I may be forgiven for quoting an authority which will command
general respect. Mr. Andrew Lang is as scrupulously accurate in
statement as he is brilliantly felicitous in style. He has studied
the history of the sixteenth century, especially in Scotland, and he
disagrees with Froude on many, if not on most, of the points in
dispute. Yet this is Mr. Lang's deliberate judgment:
"I have found Mr. Froude often in error; often, as I think,
misunderstanding, misquoting, omitting and even adding, but I have
never once seen reason to suspect him of conscious misrepresentation,
of knowingly giving a false impression. ... It is easy to show that
Mr. Froude erred contrary to his bias on occasion, and it must never
be forgotten that he did what no consciously dishonest historian could
possibly do. He deposited at the British Museum copies, in the
original Spanish, of the documents, very difficult of access, which he
used in his History. By aid of these transcripts, we can find him
slipping into errors, and his action in presenting the country with
the means of correcting his mistakes proves beyond doubt that he did
not consciously make mistakes. There is no way in which this
conclusion can be evaded. No historian was more honest than Mr.
Froude, though few or none of his merit have been so fallible."
How many historians of his merit have there been? He had no
contemporary rival in England, for Carlyle and Macaulay belonged to
a previous generation. There was certainly no one living when Froude
died who could have written the famous passage in the first chapter
of his History about the decay of mediaevalism:
"For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and
direction of which even still are hidden from us, a change from era
to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up;
old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten
centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the
abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and
all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were
passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond
the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk
back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair
earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a
small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of
habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind
were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone--like an
unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English
themselves a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will
never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination
can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the
cathedrals, only before the silent figures sleeping on the tombs,
some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when
they were alive, and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that
peculiar creation of the middle age, which falls upon the ear like
the echo of a vanished world."
Although Froude cared little for music, the rhythm of his sentences
is musical, and the organ-note of the opening words in the quotation
carries a reminiscence of Tacitus which will not escape the
classical reader. That is literary artifice, though a very high form
of it. The real merit of the paragraph is not so much its eloquence
as its insight into the depth of things. Many respectable historians
see only the outward lineaments. Froude saw the nation's heart and
soul. It was the same with the great man whose biographer Froude
became. Carlyle's faults would have been impossible in a character
mean or small. They were the defects of his qualities, those
Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,
which do not wait to appear till the last scene of life. Now that
more than twenty years have passed since the final volumes of the
Life were published, it may be said with confidence that Carlyle
owes almost as much to Froude as to his own writings for his high
and enduring fame. "Though the lives of the Carlyles were not
happy," says Froude, "yet, if we look at them from the beginning to
the end, they were grandly beautiful. Neither of them probably under
other conditions would have risen to as high an excellence as in
fact they each actually achieved; and the main question is not how
happy men and women have been in this world, but what they have made
of themselves."* The loftier a man's own view of mental conceptions
and sublunary things, the more will he admire Carlyle as described
by Froude. The same Carlyle who made a ridiculous fuss about trifles
confronted the real evils and trials of life with a dignity,
courage, and composure which inspire humble reverence rather than
vulgar admiration. Froude rightly felt that Carlyle's petty
grumbles, often most amusing, throw into bright and strong relief
his splendid generosity to his kinsfolk, his manly pride in writing
what was good instead of what was lucrative, his anxiety that Mill
should not perceive what he lost in the first volume of The French
Revolution. Whenever a crisis came, Carlyle stood the test. The
greater the occasion, the better he behaved. One thing Froude did
not give, and perhaps no biographer could. Carlyle was essentially a
humourist. He laughed heartily at other people, and not less
heartily at himself. When he was letting himself go, and indulging
freely in the most lurid denunciations of all and sundry, he would
give a peculiar and most significant chuckle which cannot be put
into print. It was a warning not to take him literally, which has
too often passed unheeded. He has been compared with Swift, but he
was not really a misanthropist, and no man loved laughter more, or
could excite more uproarious merriment in others. I remember a sober
Scotsman, by no means addicted to frivolous merriment, telling me
that he had come out of Carlyle's house in physical pain from
continuous laughter at an imaginary dialogue between a missionary
and a negro which Carlyle had conducted entirely himself.
--
* Carlyle's Early Life, i. 381.
--
Carlyle, it must be remembered, knew Froude's historical methods
quite as well as he knew Froude. It was because he knew them, and
approved of them, that he asked Froude to be the historian of Cheyne
Row. Froude's devotion to him had indeed been singular. During the
last decade of his life Carlyle was very feeble, and required
constant care. He came to lean upon Froude more and more, requiring
his company in walks, and even in omnibuses, until Froude almost
ceased to be his own master. The lecturing tour in the United States
and the political visits to South Africa were permitted, because
they were thought right. But Fraser's Magazine had to be given up,
partly that employment might be found for a young man in whom
Carlyle was interested, and the project for a new history of Charles
V. was perforce abandoned. It has been said, though not by any one
who knew the facts, that Froude profited in a pecuniary sense by
exchanging history for biography. The exact opposite is the truth.
From 1866 to 1869, the last years of his great book, Froude received
from Messrs. Longman about fourteen hundred pounds a year, including
his salary as editor of Fraser, which he relinquished at Carlyle's
bidding. From 1877 to 1884 he did not receive more than seven
hundred. Two volumes of history brought in about as much as three of
biography, and there is no reason to suppose that Charles V. would
have proved less popular than Henry VIII. or Elizabeth. Froude was
unusually prosperous and successful as a man of letters, though it
is of course impossible for the highest literary work to be
adequately paid. He had to deal with liberal publishers, and after
1856 his position as a writer was assured. The idea that necessity
drove him to fill his pockets at the expense of a dead friend's
reputation is as preposterous in his case as it would have been in
Lockhart's or Stanley's.
Had Froude been the cynic he is often called, he would have borne
with callous indifference, as he did bear in dignified silence, the
attacks made upon him for his revelations of Carlyle. But Froude was
not what he seemed. Behind his stately presence, and lofty manner,
and calmly audacious speech, there was a singularly sensitive
nature. He would do what he thought right with perfect fearlessness,
and without a moment's hesitation. When the consequences followed he
was not always prepared for them, and people who were not worth
thinking about could give him pain. Human beings are composite
creatures, and the feminine element in man is more obvious than the
masculine element in woman. Froude had a feminine disposition to be
guided by feeling, and to remember old grievances as vividly as if
they had happened the day before. He was also a typical west
countryman in habit of mind, as well as in face, figure, and speech.
His beautiful voice, exquisitely modulated, never raised in talk,
was thoroughly Devonian. So too were his imperfect sense of the
effect produced by what he said upon ordinary minds, and his love,
which might almost be called mischievous, of giving small electric
shocks. In the case of Carlyle, however, the out-cry was wholly
unexpected, and for a time he was distressed, though never mastered,
by it. What he could not understand, what it took him a long time to
live down, was that friends who really knew him should believe him
capable of baseness and treachery. Now that it is all over, that
Froude's biography has taken its place in classical literature, and
that Mrs. Carlyle's letters are acknowledged to be among the best in
the language, the whole story appears like a nightmare. But it was
real enough twenty years ago, when people who never read books of
any kind thought that Froude was the name of the man that
whitewashed Henry VIII. and blackened Carlyle. Froude would probably
have been happier if he had turned upon his assailants once for all,
as he once finally and decisively turned upon Freeman. Freeman,
however, was an open enemy. A false friend is a more difficult
person to dispose of, and even to deny the charge of deliberate
treachery hardly consistent with self-respect. Long before Froude
died the clamour against him had by all decent people been dropped.
But he himself continued to feel the effect of it until he became
Professor of History at Oxford. That rehabilitated him, where only
he required it, in his own eyes. It was a public recognition by the
country through the Prime Minister of the honour he had reflected
upon Oxford since his virtual expulsion in 1849, and he felt himself
again. From that time the whole incident was blotted from his mind,
and he forgot that some of his friends had forgotten the meaning of
friendship. The last two years of his life were indeed the fullest
he had ever known. Forty-two lectures in two terms at the age of
seventy-four are a serious undertaking. Happily he knew the
sixteenth century so well that the process of refreshing his memory
was rather a pleasure than a task, and he could have written good
English in his sleep. Yet few even of his warmest admirers expected
that in a year and a half he would compose three volumes which both
for style and for substance are on a level with the best work of his
prime. It was less surprising, and intensely characteristic, that
his subjects should be the Reformation and the sea.
Froude's religious position is best stated in his own words, written
when he was in South Africa, to a member of his family:
"I know by sad experience much of what is passing in your mind.
Although my young days were chequered with much which I look back on
with regret and shame, still I believe I always tried to learn what
was true, and when I had found it to stick to it. The High Church
theology was long attractive to me, but then I found, or thought I
found, that it had no foundation, and indeed that very few of its
professors in their heart of hearts believed what they were saying.
Apostolic Succession, Sacramental Grace, and the rest of it, are
very pretty, but are they facts? Is it a fact that any special
mysterious power is communicated by a Bishop's hands? Is it a fact
that a child's nature is changed by water and words--or that the
bread when it is broken ceases to be bread? We cannot tell that it
is not so, you say. But can we tell that it is so? and we ought to
be able to tell before we believe it. All that fell away from me
when I came in contact with the Cleavers and their friends. Their
views never commended themselves to me wholly; but at least they
were spiritual and not material. And election is a fact, although
they express it oddly--and so is reprobation--and so is what they
say of free will, and so is conversion. It is true that we bring
natures into the world which are moulded by circumstances and by
their own tendencies, as clay in the hands of the potter. Look round
you and see that some are made for honour and some for dishonour. So
far I agree with the Evangelicals still, and I agree too with them
that if what they call faith--that is, a distinct conviction of sin,
a resolution to say to oneself "Sammy, my boy, this won't do,"* a
perception and love for what is right and good, and a loathing of
the old self--can be put into one, and by the grace of God we see
that it can be and is--the whole nature is changed, is what we call
regenerated. This is certain--and it is to me certain also that the
world and we who live in it, with all these mysterious conditions of
our being, are no creation of accident or blind law. We were created
for purposes unknown to us by Almighty God, who is using us and
training us for His own objects--objects wholly unconceivable by us,
but nevertheless which we know to exist, for Intelligence never
works but for an end.
--
* The reference is to Thackeray's story of a hairdresser named Samuel,
who remarked, "Mr. Thackeray, there comes a time in the life of every
man when he says to himself, 'Sammy, my boy, this won't do.'" The story
was an especial favourite of Froude's.
--
"Of other things which are popularly called religion, I have my
opinion positive and negative. But religion to me is not opinion it
is certainty. I cannot govern my actions or guide my deepest
convictions by probabilities. The laws which we are to obey and the
obligations to obey them are part of my being of which I am as sure
as that I am alive. The things to argue about are by their nature
uncertain, and therefore it is to me inconceivable that in them can
lie Religion. I cannot tell whether these thoughts will be of any
help to you. But it is better, in my judgment, to remain a proselyte
of the gate--resolute to remain there till one receives a genuine
conviction of some truths beyond--than for imagined relief from the
pain of suspense to take up by an act of will a complete system of
belief, Catholic or Calvinistic, and insist to one's own soul that
it is, was, and shall be the whole and complete truth. Some people
do this--deliberately blind their eyes, and because they never see
again declare loudly that no one else can see. Other people, less
happy, find by experience that they cannot believe what they have
taken to in this way, and fly for a change to the next theory and
then to the next. I remain for myself unconvinced of much which is
generally called the essential part of things; but convinced with
all my heart of what I regard as essential."
Froude made no secret of his religious opinions and they may be
collected from his numerous books, especially perhaps from The
Oxford Counter-Reformation. A curious paper, first published in
1879, called "A Siding at a Railway Station," is one of his most
direct utterances on the subject. It will be found in the fourth
series of Short Studies, and is in many respects the most remarkable
of them all. "Some years' ago," it begins, "I was travelling by
railway, no matter whence or whither." The railway is life, and the
siding at which the train was suddenly stopped is the end that
awaits all travellers through this world. The examination of the
luggage is the judgment which will be passed upon all human actions
hereafter. Wages received are placed on one side, and value to
mankind of service rendered on the other. Naturally working men come
out best. The worst show is made by idle and luxurious grandees.
Authors occupy a middle position, and in Froude's own books "chapter
after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean as if no
compositor had ever laboured in setting type for it. Pale and
illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had
secretly prided myself. A few passages, however, survived here and
there at long intervals. They were those on which I had laboured
least and had almost forgotten, or those, as I observed in one or
two instances, which had been selected for special reprobation in
the weekly journals." The hit at The Saturday Review is amusing
enough, and Froude goes on to plead successfully that though he may
have been ignorant, prejudiced, or careless, no charge of dishonesty
could be established against him. Apart from his own personal case,
the allegory means little more than the gospel of work which is the
noblest part in the teaching of Carlyle. Titled personages come off
badly, and the most ridiculous figure in the motley throng is an
Archbishop. Not much sympathy is shown with any one, except with a
widow who hopes to rejoin her husband, and sympathy is all that
Froude can give her.
Of Froude's friendships much has been said. They were numerous, and
drawn from very different classes. Beginning at Oxford, they increased
rather than diminished throughout his life, notwithstanding the gaps
which death inevitably and inexorably made. To one Fellow of Exeter
who stood by him in his troubles, George Butler, afterwards Canon of
Winchester, he remained always attached. Dean Stanley throughout life
he loved, and another clerical friend, Cowley Powles. Of the many
persons who felt Clough's early death as an irreparable calamity there
was hardly one who felt it more than Froude. His affectionate
reverence for Newman was proof against a mental and moral antagonism
which could not be bridged. After Kingsley's death he wrote, from the
Molt, to Mrs. Kingsley: "Dearest Fanny,--You tell me not to write, so
I will say nothing beyond telling you how deeply I am affected by your
thought of me. The old times are as fresh in my mind as in yours. You
and Charles were the best and truest friends I ever had. We shall soon
be all together again. God bless you now and in eternity.
"Your affectionate. J. A. FROUDE."
"Cowley Powles is here. It was he who first took me to Eversley."
It was when he came to London that Froude enlarged the circle of his
friends, Carlyle being the greatest and the chief. Among the
contributors to Fraser's Magazine those whom he knew best were the
late Sir John Skelton, "Shirley," and the present Sir Theodore
Martin, the biographer of the Prince Consort, whom some still prefer
to associate with those delightful parodies, the Bon Gaultier
Ballads. The enumeration of Froude's London acquaintances would be
merely a social chronicle, with the supplement of some names, such
as General Cluseret's, quite outside the ordinary groove. He could
get on with any one, and he was interested in every one who had
interesting qualities. After his second marriage his dinner-parties
in Onslow Gardens were famous for their brilliancy and charm. His
magnetic personality drew from people whatever they had, while his
ease of manner made them feel at home. It was perhaps because he
never pretended to know anything that only scholars realised how
much he knew, and that he seemed to be not so much a man of letters
as a man of the world. Of all the friends he made in later life
there was not one that he valued more highly than Lord Wolseley. "I
have been staying," he wrote to his daughter, from South Africa,
"with Sir Garnet Wolseley and his brilliant staff. It was worth a
voyage to South Africa to make so intimate an acquaintance with
him." After his second return from the Cape, when his social life in
London was taken up again, with his eldest daughter in her step-
mother's place, there were added to the military and naval officers
he had met, the Irish Protestants, who regarded him as their
champion, and the wide circle of his ordinary associates, an
Africander contingent, made up of all parties in that troubled area.
There were, in fact, few phases of human life with which Froude was
not familiar, from Devonshire fishermen to Cabinet Ministers.
Although he knew and admired Mr. Chamberlain, his greatest political
friends were Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby, with whom he almost
invariably agreed. The man of science whom, after his own brother,
he knew best, was Tyndall. Men of letters were familiar to him in
every degree. Among the houses where he was a frequent and welcome
guest were Knowsley, Highclere, Tortworth, and Castle Howard. In his
own family there were troubles and bereavements. His eldest son, who
died before him, gave him much trouble and anxiety. His second
daughter died of consumption a few months after her stepmother,
while he was in South Africa alone. Otherwise, his relations with
his children were perfect and unbroken, for no father was more
beloved and adored. Indeed, all intelligent children delighted in
his company, because they could not help understanding him, and yet
he paid them the acceptable compliment of talking to them as if they
were grown up.
There is nothing in the world more evanescent than good
conversation. Froude was one of the best and most agreeable talkers
of his day. He could talk to old and young, to men, women, and
children, to Devonshire seamen or labourers, to the most highly
cultivated society of Oxford or London, with equal ease and equal
enjoyment. He never tried to monopolise the conversation, and yet
somehow the chief share fell naturally to him. If he were bored, he
could be as silent as the grave. But when his interest was roused,
and most things roused it, he always had something pointed and
forcible to say. He was not always a sympathetic hearer. Once he sat
between two extremely intellectual women who considered themselves
leaders of advanced thought. When they left the room after dinner he
turned to a friend of mine, and said simply, "I think all these
bigots ought to be burnt." Such deplorable intolerance was happily
rare. Less rare, perhaps, were his irresistible sense of the
ludicrous and irrepressible tendency to sarcasm. Of a famous
clergyman he said, "At least they have not put him into a bishop's
apron, the emblem of our first parents' shame." "What can education
do for a man," he once asked, "except enable him to tell a lie in
five ways instead of one?" As a rule, Froude, like most good
talkers, listened well, and responded readily. If he had not
Carlyle's rich, exuberant humour, he was also without the prophet's
leaning to dogmatism and anathema. Sardonic irony was his nearest
approach to an offensive weapon, and even in that he was sparing.
But he had a look which seemed to say, "Don't offer me any theories,
or creeds, or speculations, for I have tried them all."
Perhaps I may be permitted in this connection to describe my one and
only experience of Froude and his ways. It was after dinner, and the
talk had fallen into the hands, or the mouth, of an eminent
administrator, who seemed to be a pillar, a model of talent and
virtue. His language was copious, his subject "schoolmaster
Bishops," and the services they had rendered to the Church of
England. Bishop Blomfield, for example, had procured the appointment
of the Ecclesiastical Commission. There might, for aught we knew, be
endless examples, and the prospect was appalling. The host was a
Roman Catholic, and the guests were not ecclesiastical. Froude came
to the rescue. In a gentle voice, and with the air of an anxious
inquirer, he asked whether Dr. Blomfield had happened to acquaint
the Commissioners with the nature and extent of his own emoluments.
Then, without pausing for a reply, he added, still gently, "Because
it always used to be said that there were only two persons who knew
what the Bishop of London's income was; himself and the devil." The
remark may not have been a new one. It was not offered as such, but
it served its purpose, for the interrupted lecture was never
resumed.
Froude's vast reading and his wide human experience enabled him to
hold his own in any company, but he never paraded his knowledge, or
lay in wait to trip people up. Although the prospect of going out
worried him, and his first impulse was to refuse an invitation, he
enjoyed society when he was in it, being neither vain nor shy. At
Oxford he could not dine out. Late hours interfered with his work.
But he was hospitable both to tutors and to undergraduates, liking
to show himself at home in the old place. Except for the failure of
his health, perhaps in spite of it, his enjoyment of his Oxford
professorship was unmixed. He did not hold it long enough to feel
the brevity of the generations which makes the real sadness of the
place. Many ghosts he must have seen, but he had reached
an age when men are prepared for them, and his academic career in
the forties had come to such an unfortunate end that comparison of
the past with the present can only have been cheerful and
honourable. He found a Provost of Oriel and a Rector of Exeter who
could read his books, and appreciate them, without prejudice against
the author. But indeed, though he was capable of being profoundly
bored, he was at his ease in the most diverse societies, and no form
of conversation not absolutely foolish came amiss to him. He had
read so many books, and seen so much of the world, he held such
strong opinions, and expressed them with such placid freedom, that
he never failed to command attention, or to deserve it. Contemptuous
enough, perhaps too contemptuous, of human frailties, he at least
knew how to make them entertaining, and his urbane irony dissolved
pretentious egoism.
It is a familiar saying that men's characters and habits are formed
in the earliest years of their lives. Froude was by profession and
by choice a man of letters. He loved writing, and whatever he read,
or heard, or saw, turned itself without effort into literary shape.
The occupations and amusements of his life can be traced in his
Short Studies. But he had not been reared in a literary atmosphere.
He had been brought up among horses and dogs, with grooms and
keepers, on the moors and the sea. He describes it himself as "the
old wild scratch way, when the keeper was the rabbit-catcher, and
sporting was enjoyed more for the adventure than for the bag." He
never lost his love of sport, and he gave his own son the same training
he had himself. Even in his last illness he liked the young
man to go out shooting, and always asked what sport he had had. His
own father had been a country gentleman, as well as a clergyman, and
his brothers, while their health lasted, all rode to hounds. He
himself never forgot how he had been put by Robert on a horse
without a saddle, and thrown seventeen times in one afternoon
without hurting himself on the soft Devonshire grass. He went out
shooting with his brothers long before he could himself shoot. For
his first two years at Oxford he had done little except ride, and
boat, and play tennis. At Plas Gwynant he was as much out of doors
as in, and even to the last his physical enjoyment of an expedition
in the open air was intense. Yet this was the same man who could sit
patiently down at Simancas in a room full of dusty, disorderly
documents, ill written in a foreign tongue, and patiently decipher
them all. If a healthy mind in a healthy body be, as the Roman
satirist says, the greatest of blessings, Froude was certainly
blessed. The hardness of his frame, and the soundness of his nerves,
gave him the imperturbable temper which Marlborough is said to have
valued more than money itself. Of money Froude was always careful,
and he was most judicious in his investments. He held the Puritan
view of luxury as a thing bad in itself, and the parent of evil,
relaxing the moral fibre. The sternness of temperament he had
inherited from his father was concealed by an easy, sociable
disposition, inclined to make the best of the present, but it was
always there. In the struggle between Knox and Mary Stuart all his
sympathies are with Knox, who had the root of the matter in him,
Calvinism and the moral law. Few imaginative artists could have
resisted as he did the temptation to draw a dazzling picture of
Mary's charms and accomplishments, scholarship and statesmanship,
beauty and wit. Froude felt of her as Jehu felt of Jezebel, that she
was the enemy of the people of God. So with his own contemporaries,
such as Carlyle's "copper captain," Louis Napoleon.
He was never dazzled by the blaze of the Tuileries and the glare of
temporary success. He might have said after Boileau, J' appelle un
chat un chat, et Louis un fripon.
The peculiarity of Froude's nature was to combine this firm
foundation with superficial layers of cynicism, paradox, and irony,
as in his apology for the rack, his character of Henry VIII., his
defence of Cranmer's churchmanship, and Parker's. He shared with
Carlyle the belief that conventional views were sham views, and
ought to be exposed. Ridicule, if not a test of truth, is at all
events a weapon against falsehood, and has done much to clear the
air of history. Froude's sense of humour was rather receptive than
expansive, and he did not often display it in his writings. Tristram
Shandy he knew almost by heart, and he never tired of Candide, or
Zadig.
Voltaire's wit and Sterne's humour have not in their own lines been
surpassed. But sure as Froude's taste was in such matters, he did
not himself enter the lists as a competitor. He was too much
occupied with his narrative, or his theory, as the case might be, to
spare time for such diversion by the way. He was too earnest to be
impartial.
Where is the impartial historian to be found? Macaulay said in
Hallam. The clerical editor of Bishop Stubbs's Letters thinks that
Hallam, who was an Erastian, had a violent prejudice against the
Church. His impartial historian is Stubbs, for the simple reason
that he agrees with him. Froude was for England against Rome and
Spain. He could oppose the foreign policy of an English Government
when he thought it wrong, as in the case of the Crimean War, and of
Disraeli's aggressive Imperialism in 1877. But the English cause in
the sixteenth century he regarded as national and religious, making
for freedom and independence of policy and thought. To be free, to
understand, to enjoy, said Thomas Hill Green, is the claim of the
modern spirit. Froude would not have admitted that man in the
philosophic sense was free, or that he could ever hope to understand
the ultimate causes of things. And, though no man was more capable
of enjoying the present moment, he would have sternly denied that
pleasure, however refined, could be a legitimate aim in life. He was
a disciple of the porch, and not of the garden. It was deeds of
chivalry and endurance that he held up to the admiration of mankind.
The hero of his History, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was not a man
of brilliant gifts or dazzling attainments, but a sober, solid,
servant of duty and of the State. To most people Burghley is a far
less interesting figure than his haughty and splendid sovereign, or
the beautiful and seductive queen against whom he protected her.
Froude judged Burghley, as he judged Elizabeth Tudor and Mary
Stuart, by the standards of political integrity and personal honour.
The secret of Froude's influence and the source of his power is that
beneath the attraction of his personality and the seductiveness of
his writing there lay a bedrock of principle which could never be
moved.
Professor Sanday, who preached the first University sermon at Oxford
after Froude's death, referred to his "fifty years of unwearied
literary activity." The period of course included, and was meant to
include, The Nemesis of Faith.
"We all know," continued Dr. Sanday, "how the young and ardent
Churchman followed his reason where it seemed to lead, and
sacrificed a Fellowship, and, as it seemed, a career, to scruples of
conscience .... Now we can see that the difficulties which led to it
were real difficulties. It was right and not wrong that they should
be raised and faced." It is the fashion to regard scruples of
conscience as morbid, and the last man who troubled himself about a
test was not a young and ardent Churchman, but Charles Bradlaugh.
Froude was "ever a fighter," who wished always to fight fair. He
preferred resigning his Fellowship to fighting for it on purely
legal grounds, and holding it, if he could have held it, in the
teeth of the College Statutes. More than twenty years elapsed before
the tests which condemned him were abolished, and in that time there
must have been many less orthodox Fellows than he. It was more than
twenty years before he could lay aside the orders which in a rash
moment under an evil system he had assumed. But he was a preacher,
though a lay one, and his life was a struggle for the causes in
which he believed. Ecclesiastical controversies never really
interested him, except so far as they touched upon national life and
character. He wished to see the work, of the sixteenth century
continued in the nineteenth by the naval power and the Colonial
possessions of England. "England" with him meant not merely that
part of Great Britain which lies south of the Tweed, but all the
dominions of the Sovereign, the British Empire as a whole. What
Seeley called the expansion of England was to him the chief fact of
the present, and the chief problem of the future. Events since his
death have vindicated his foresight. He urged and predicted the
Australian Federation, which he did not live to see. To the policy
which impeded the Federation of South Africa he was steadily
opposed. The moral which he drew from his travels in Australasia,
and in the West Indies, was the need for strengthening imperial
ties. Lord Beaconsfield's Imperialism was not to his taste, and he
disliked every form of aggression or pretence. While he dreaded the
intervention of party leaders, and desired the Colonies to take the
initiative themselves, he thought that a common tariff was the
direction in which true Imperialism should move. Whether he was
right or wrong is too large a question to be discussed here. That
matter must make its own proof. But in raising it Froude was a
pioneer, and, though a man of letters, saw more plainly than
practical politicians what were the questions they would have to
solve. He despised local jealousies, and took large views. Many men,
perhaps most men, contract their horizon with advancing years.
Froude's vision seemed to widen. Through the storms and mists of
passion and prejudice which blinded the eyes of Liberals and
Conservatives fighting each other at Westminster, he looked to the
ultimate union of all British subjects in an England conterminous
with the sovereignty of the Crown. It was that England of which he
wrote the history. It was knowledge of her past, and belief in her
future, that inspired the work of his life.
THE END