Froude had this merit--a merit he shared with Huxley alone of
His contemporaries--that he imposed his convictions. He fought
against resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent
animosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yet
too strong for that surface to reject him. This combative and
aggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it was
permanent and never suffered a final defeat should arrest any
one who may make a general survey of the last generation in letters.
It was a period with a vice of its own which yet remains to be
detected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another
fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the
past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of
these affected the Victorian era. It was pure--though tainted
with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violence
in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had this
grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily)
that thought was restrained upon every side. Never in the history
of European letters was it so difficult for a man to say
what he would and to be heard. A sort of cohesive public spirit
(which was but one aspect of the admirable homogeneity of the
nation) glued and immobilised all individual expression. One
could float imprisoned as in a stream of thick substance: one
could not swim against it.
It is to be carefully discerned how many apparent exceptions to
this truth are, if they be closely examined, no exceptions at
all. A whole series of national defects were exposed and
ridiculed in the literature as in the oratory of that day; but
they were defects which the mass of men secretly delighted to
hear denounced and of which each believed himself to be free.
They loved to be told that they were of a gross taste in art,
for they connected such a taste vaguely with high morals and
with successful commerce. There was no surer way to a large
sale than to start a revolution in appreciation every five years,
and from Ruskin to Oscar Wilde a whole series of Prophets
attained eminence and fortune by telling men how something new
and as yet unknown was Beauty and something just past was to be
rejected, and how they alone saw truth while the herd around them
were blind. But no one showed us how to model, nor did any one
remark that we alone of all Europe had preserved a school of
water-colour.
So in politics our blunders were a constant theme; but no one
marked with citation, document, and proof the glaring progress
of corruption, or that, for all our enthusiasm, we never once
in that generation defended the oppressed against the oppressor.
There was a vast if unrecognised conspiracy, by which whatever
might have prevented those extreme evils from which we now suffer
was destroyed as it appeared. Efforts at a thorough purge were
dull, were libellous, were not of the "form" which the Universities
and the public schools taught to be sacred. They were rejected as
unreadable, or if printed, were unread. The results are with us to-day.
In such a time Froude maintained an opposing force, which was
not reforming nor constructive in any way, but which will obtain
the attention of the future historian, simply because it was an
opposition.
It was an opposition of manner rather than of matter. The matter
of it was common enough even in Froude's chief decade of power.
The cause to which he gave allegiance was already winning when he
proceeded to champion it, and many a better man, one or two greater
men, were saying the same things as he; but they said such things
in a fashion that suggested no violent effort nor any demand for
resistance: it was the peculiar virtue of Froude that he touched
nothing without the virile note of a challenge sounding throughout
his prose. On this account, though he will convince our posterity
even less than he does ourselves, the words of persuasion, the
writings themselves will remain: for he chose the hardest wood in
which to chisel, knowing the strength of his hand.
What was it in him which gave him that strength, and
which permitted him, in an age that would tolerate no formative
grasp upon itself, to achieve a permanent fame? I will not
reply to this question by pointing to the popularity
of his History of England; the essays that follow will
afford sufficient material to answer it. He produced the
effect he did and remained in the eminence to which he
had climbed, first because his manner of thought was rigid
and of a hard edge; secondly, because he could use that
steel tool of a brain in a fashion that was general; he could
use it upon subjects and with a handling that was
comprehensible to great masses of his fellow-countrymen.
It is not certain that such a man with such interests would
have made his voice heard in any other society. It is
doubtful whether he will be translated with profit. His field
was very small, the points of his attack might all be found
contained in one suburban villa. But in our society his
grip and his intensity did fall, and fall of choice, upon such
matters as his contemporaries either debated or were ready
to debate. He therefore did the considerable thing we
know him to have done.
I say that his mind was rigid and of a close fibre: it was
a mind (to repeat the metaphor) out of which a strong
graying-tool could be forged. Its blade would not be
blunted: it could deal with its material. Of this character,
which I take to be the first essential in his achievement, the
few essays before us preserve an ample evidence.
Thus you will find throughout their pages the presence of
that dogmatic assertion which invariably proceeds from such
a mind, and coupled with such assertion is a continual
consciousness that his dogmas are dogmas: that he is asserting
unprovable things and laying down his axioms before he
begins his process of reasoning.
The contrary might be objected by some foreign observer,
or by some one who had a larger acquaintance with European
history than had he. I can imagine a French or an Irish
critic pointing to a mass of assertion with no corresponding
admission that it is assertion only: such a critic might quote
even from these few pages phrase after phrase in which
Froude poses as certain what are still largely matters of
debate. Thus upon page 144 he takes it for granted that
no miracles have been worked by contact with the bodies
of saints. He takes it for granted on page 161 that the
checking of monastic disorders, and the use of strong
language in connection with them, was peculiar to the
generation which saw at its close the dissolution of the
monasteries. He takes it for granted on page 125 that what
we call "manifestations" or what not,--spirit rappings,
table-turnings, and the rest--are deceptions of the senses to
which superstition alone would give credence.
He ridicules (upon p. 128) the tradition of St. Patrick which
all modern research has come to accept. He says downright
(upon pp. 186-187) that the Ancient world did not inquire
into the problem of evil. On p. 214 he will have it that the
ordinary man rejects, "without hesitation," the interference
of will with material causes. In other words, he asserts that
the ordinary man is a fatalist--for Froude knew very well
that between the fatalist and the believer in a possibility of
miracle there is no conceivable position. He will have it (on
p. 216) that a modern doctor always regards a "vision" as
an hallucination. On p. 217 he denies by implication the
stigmata of St. Francis--and so forth--one might multiply
the instances indefinitely. All Froude's works are full of
them, they are part and parcel of his method--but their
number is to no purport. One example may stand for all,
and their special value to our purpose is not that they are
mere assertions, but that they are assertions which Froude
must have known to be personal, disputable, and dogmatic.
He knew very well that the vast majority of mankind
accepted the virtue of relics, that intellects the equals of his
own rejected that determinism to which he was bound, and
that the Pagan world might be presented in a fashion very
different from his own. And in that perpetual--often gratuitous
--affirmation you have no sign of limitation in him but
rather of eagerness for battle.
It is an admirable fault or perhaps no fault at all, or if a
fault an appendage to the most considerable virtue a writer
of his day could have had: the virtue of courage.
See how he thrusts when he comes to lay down the law,
not upon what the narrow experience of readers understands
and agrees with him about, but upon some matter which he
knows them to have decided in a manner opposed to his own.
See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the
sentences in which he asserts that Christianity is Catholic
or nothing:--
". . . This was the body of death which philosophy detected
but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now
came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.
"The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are
compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in
the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics,
has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was
the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could
be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from
the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable,
without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But
the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless
organization could begin again from a new original, no pure
material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom
God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the
Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and
around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a
material body grew again of the substance of His mother,
pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when
it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things."
Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity,
where he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of
his readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of
Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and
Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is called
a thing "worn and old" even in Luther's time (upon page 194),
and he definitely prophesies a period when "our posterity"
shall learn "to despise the miserable fabric which Luther
stitched together out of its tatters."
His judgments are short, violent, compressed. They are
not the judgments of balance. They are final not as a goal
reached is final, but as a death-wound delivered. He throws
out sentences which all the world can see to be insufficient
and thin, but whose sharpness is the sharpness of conviction
and of a striving determination to achieve conviction in others
---or if he fails in that, at least to leave an enemy smarting.
Everywhere you have up and down his prose those short
parentheses, those side sentences, which are strokes of offence.
Thus on page 199, "We hear---or we used to hear when the
High Church party were more formidable than they are," &c.;
or again, on page 210, "The Bishop of Natal" (Colenso)
has done such and such things, "coupled with certain
arithmetical calculations far which he has a special aptitude."
There are dozens of these in every book he wrote. They
wounded, and were intended to wound.
His intellect may therefore be compared, as I have compared
it, to an instrument or a weapon of steel, to a chisel
or a sword. It was hard, polished, keen, stronger than what
it bit into, and of its nature enduring. This was the first of
the characters that gave him his secure place in English
letters.
The second is his universality--the word is not over-exact,
but I can find no other. I mean that Froude was the exact
opposite of the sciolist and was even other than the student.
He was kneaded right into his own time and his own people.
The arena in which he fought was small, the ideas he combated
were few. He was not universal as those are universal
who appeal to any man in any country. But he was eager
upon these problems which his contemporaries wrangled over.
He was in tune with, even when he directly opposed, the
class from which he sprang, the mass of well-to-do Protestant
Englishmen of Queen Victoria's reign. Their furniture had
nothing shocking for him nor their steel engravings. He
took for granted their probity, their common sense, and their
reading. He knew what they were thinking about and
therefore all he did to praise or blame their convictions,
to soothe or to exasperate them, told. He could see the
target.
Perpetually this looking at the world from the standpoint
of the men around him makes him say things that irritate
more particular and more acute minds than his own, but I
will maintain that in his case the fault was a necessary fault
and went with a power which permitted him to achieve the
sympathy which he did achieve. He talks of the "Celt"
and the "Saxon," and ascribes what he calls "our failures
in Ireland" to the "incongruity of character" between these
two imaginaries. He takes it for granted that "we are
something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by
an impassable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he must
quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking
of Oxford undergraduates one has "pleasant faces, cheerful
voices, and animal spirits," and at the end of the fine but
partial essay on Spinoza we have six lines which might come
bodily from a leader in the Daily Telegraph, or from any
copy of the Spectator picked up at random.
These are grave faults, but, I repeat, they are the faults of
those great qualities which gave him his position.
And side by side with such faults go an exceptional
lucidity, a good order within the paragraph and in the
succession of the paragraphs. A choice of subject suited to
his audience, an excision of that which would have bored or
bewildered it, a vividness of description wherewith to amuse
and a directness of conclusion wherewith to arrest his readers
--all these he had, beyond perhaps any of his contemporaries.
Occasionally that brotherhood in him leads him to faults
more serious. You get gross commonplace and utterly false
commonplace, of which when he came back to them (if
indeed he was a man who read his own works) he must
have been ashamed:--
"Persecutions come, and martyrdoms, and religious wars;
and, at last, the old faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its
altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.
"Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions,
natural and moral."