"The increase of knowledge, and consequently of morality,
is the great aim of such a noble establishment as this; and
the rewards and honours dispensed there are bestowed in
proportion to the industry and good conduct of those who
receive them."
But the interesting point about these very lapses is that
they remain purely exceptional. They do not affect either
the tone of his writing or the value and intricacy of his
argument. They may be compared to those undignified
and valueless chips of conversational English that pop up
in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an enthusiastic
and wide man.
While, however, one is in the mood of criticism it is not
unjust to show what other lapses in him are connected
with this common sympathy of his and this very comprehension
of his class to which he owed his opportunity and
his effect.
Thus he is either so careless or so hurried as to use--
much too commonly--words which have lost all vitality,
and which are for the most part meaningless, but which go
the rounds still like shining flat sixpences worn smooth.
The word "practical" drops from his pen; he quotes "in a
glass darkly," and speaks of "a picture of human life"; the
walls of Oxford are "time-hallowed"; he enters a church
and finds in it "a dim religious light"; a man of Froude's
capacity has no right to find such a thing there. If he writes
the word "sin" the word "shame" comes tripping after.
It may be that he was a man readily caught by fatigue, or
it may bet it is more probable, that he thought it small
millinery to "travailler le verbe" At any rate the result
as a whole hangs to his identity of spirit with the thousands
for whom he wrote.
To this character of universality attach also faults not only
in his occasional choice of words but in his general style.
The word "style" has been so grossly abused during the
last thirty years that one mentions it with diffidence. Matthew
Arnold well said that when people came to him and asked
to be told how to write a good style he was unable to reply;
for indeed it is not a thing to be taught. It is a by-product,
though a necessary by-product, of good thinking. But when
Matthew Arnold went on to say that there was no such thing
as style except knowing clearly what you wanted to say, and
saying it as clearly as you could, he was talking nonsense.
There is such a thing as style. It is that combination of
rhythm, lucidity, and emphasis, which certainly must not
be consciously produced, but which if it arise naturally from
a man's pen and from his method of thought makes all the
difference between what is readable and what is not readable.
If any one doubt this let him compare the French Bible
with the English--both literal and lucid translations of the
same original; or again let him contrast the prose phrases of
Milton when he is dealing with the claims of the Church
in the Middle Ages with those of Mr. Bryce in the same
connection.
Now I say that just as the excellences of Froude's prose
proceeded from this universality of his so did the errors into
which that prose fell, and it is remarkable that these errors
are slips of detail. They proceed undoubtedly from rapid
writing and from coupling his scholarship with a very general
and ephemeral reading.
A few examples drawn from these essays will prove what
I mean. On the very first page, in the first line of the
second paragraph we have the word "often" coming after the
word "experience," instead of before it. He had written
"experience," he desired to qualify it, and he did not go back
to do what should always be done in plain English, and what
indeed distinguishes plain English from almost every other
language--to put the qualification before the thing qualified;
a peculiarly English mark in this, that it presupposes one's
having thought the whole thing out before writing it down.
On page 3 we have exactly the same thing; "A legend
not known unfortunately to general English readers." He
means of course, "unfortunately not known," but as the
sentence stands it reads as though he had meant to say,
somewhat clumsily, that the method in which English readers
knew the legend was not unfortunate.
He is again careless in the matter of repetitions, both of
the same word, and (what is a better test of ear) of rhymes
within the sentence: we have in one place "which seemed to
give a soul to those splendid donations to learning," and
further on in the same page "a priority in mortality."
On pages 34 and 35 you have "an intensely real conviction."
You are then told that "the most lawless men did
then really believe." Then that the American tribes were
in the eyes of the colonists "real worshippers" of the Devil,
and a few lines later we hear of "the real awfulness of the
world."
The position of the relative is often as slipshod as the
position of the qualicative; thus you will find upon page 37
that the pioneers "grayed out the channels, and at last paved
them with their bones, through which the commerce and
enterprise of England has flowed out of all the world." This
sentence is quite deplorable; it has a singular verb after two
nominatives, and is so framed that one might imagine the
commerce and enterprise of our beloved country to have flown
through those hollow interior channels, with which, I believe,
our larger bones are provided, and in which is to be discovered
that very excellent substance, marrow.
It is singular that, while these obvious errors have excited
so little comment, Froude should have been blamed so often
and by such different authorities for weaknesses of the pen
from which he did not suffer, or which, if he did suffer from
them, at least he had in common with every other writer
of our time and perhaps less than most.
Thus, as an historian he has been accused of two faults
which have been supposed by those who are ill acquainted
with the history of letters to be correlative: a straining
for effect and an inaccuracy of detail. There is not one of
his contemporaries who less forced himself in description
than Froude. Often in Green, very often in Freeman and
always in Carlyle you feel that your author is deliberately
exciting his mind and your own. Violent colours are chosen
and peculiar emphasis--from this Froude was free. He was
an historian.
To the end Froude remained an historian, and an historian
he was born. If we regret that his history was not general,
and that he turned his powers upon such a restricted set of
phenomena, still we must rejoice that there was once in
modern England a man who could sum up the nature of
a great movement. He lacked the power of integration.
He was not an artist. But he possessed to an extraordinary
degree the power of synthesis. He was a craftsman, as the
modern jargon goes. There is not in the whole range of
English literature as excellent a summary of the way in
which the Divinity of our Lord fought its way into the
leading brains of Europe, as appears upon page 192 of this
book. It is as good as Boissier; there runs all through it
knowledge, proportion, and something which, had he been
granted a little more light, or been nurtured in an intellectual
climate a little more sunny, would have been vision itself:--
"The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work
compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling
difficulty, what could He be but God? Who but God could
have wrested His prize from a power which half the thinking
world believed to be His coequal and co-eternal adversary?
He was God. He was man also, for He was the second
Adam--the second starting-point of human growth. He was
virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the
substance which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He
showed in the nature of His person after His resurrection,
what the material body would have been in all of us except
for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its
purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its
likeness."
There's a piece of historical prose which summarises,
teaches, and stamps itself finally upon the mind! Froude
saw that the Faith was the summit and the completion of
Rome. Had he written us a summary of the fourth and
fifth centuries--and had he written it just after reading some
dull fellow on the other side--what books we should have
had to show to the rival schools of the Continent!
Consider the sharp and almost unique judgment passed
upon Tacitus at the bottom of page 133 and the top of
page 134, or again, the excellent sub-ironic passages in which
he expresses the vast advantage of metaphysical debate:
which has all these qualities, that it is true, sober, exact,
and yet a piece of laughter and a contradiction of itself. It
is prose in three dimensions.
That pedantic charge of inaccuracy, with which I have
already dealt in another place, in connection with another
and perhaps a greater man, is not applicable to Froude. He
was hasty, and in his historical work the result certainly was
that he put down things upon insufficient evidence, or upon
evidence but half read; but even in his historical work (which
deals remember, with the most highly controversial part of
English history) he is as accurate as anybody else, except
perhaps Lingard. That the man was by nature accurate,
well read and of a good memory, appears continually throughout
this book, and the more widely one has read one's self,
the more one appreciates this truth.
For instance, there is often set down to Disraeli the remark
that his religion was "the religion of all sensible men." and
upon being asked what this religion might be, that Oriental
is said to have replied, "All sensible men keep that to
themselves." Now Disraeli could no more have made such a
witticism than he could have flown through the air; his
mind was far too extravagant for such pointed phrases.
Froude quotes the story (page 205 of this book) but rightly
ascribes it to Rogers, a very different man from Disraeli--
an Englishman with a mastery of the English language.
Look again at this remark upon page 20, "The happy allusion
of Quevedo to the Tiber was not out of place here:--the
fugitive is alone permanent.'" How many Englishmen know
that Du Bellay's immortal sonnet was but a translation of
Quevedo? You could drag all Oxford and Cambridge to-day
and not find a single man who knew it.
Note the care he has shown in quoting one of those hackneyed
phrases which almost all the world misquotes, "Que
mon nom soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre." Of a
hundred times that you may see those words of Danton's
written down, you will perhaps not see them once written
down exactly as they were said.
So it is throughout his work. Men still living in the
Universities accuse him vaguely of inexactitude as they will
accuse Jowett of ignorance, and these men, when one examines
them closely, are found to be ignorant of the French
language, to have read no philosophy between Aristotle and
Hobbes, and to issue above their signatures such errors of
plain dates and names as make one blush for English
scholarship and be glad that no foreigner takes our historical
school seriously.
There is always left to any man who deals with the writings
of Froude, a task impossible to complete but necessarily to be
attempted. He put himself forward, in a set attitude, to
combat and to destroy what he conceived to be--in the
moment of his attack--the creed of his countrymen. He was
so literary a man that he did this as much by accepting as by
denying, as much by dating from Elizabeth all we are as by
affirming unalterable material sequence and the falsity of
every transcendental acceptation. His time smelt him out
even when he flattered it most. Even when he wrote of the
Revenge the England of his day--luckily for him--thought
him an enemy.
Upon the main discussion of his life it is impossible to
pass a judgment, for the elements of that discussion are now
destroyed; the universities no longer pretend to believe.
And "free discussion" has become so free that the main
doctrines he assailed are no longer presented or read without
weariness in the class to which he appealed and from which
he sprang.
The sects, then, against which he set himself are dead:
but upon a much larger question which is permanent, and
which in a sort of groping way he sometimes handled,
something should be said here, which I think has never been
said before. He was perpetually upon the borderland of the
Catholic Church.
Between him and the Faith there stood no distance of space,
but rather a high thin wall; the high thin wall of his own
desperate conviction. If you will turn to page 209 of this
book you will see it said of the denial of the Sacrament
by the Reformers and of Ridley's dogma that it was bread
only "the commonsense of the country was of the same
opinion, and illusion was at an end." Froude knew that
the illusion was not at an end. He probably knew (for we
must continue to repeat that he was a most excellent historian)
that the "commonsense of the country" was, by the time
Ridley and the New English Church began denying the real
presence, and turning that denial into a dogma, profoundly
indifferent to all dogmas whatsoever. What "the common-sense
of the country" wanted was to keep out swarthy men,
chivalrous indeed but imperialists full of gold who owned
nearly all the earth, but who, they were determined, should
not own England.
Froude was fond of such assertions, his book is full of them,
and they are more than mere violence framed for combat;
they are in their curious way definite expressions of the man's
soul; for Froude was fond of that high thin wall, and liked
to build it higher. He was a dogmatic rationalist--one
hesitates to use a word which has been so portentously
misused. Renan before dying came out with one of his last
dogmas; it was to this effect, that there was not in the
Universe an intelligent power higher than the human mind.
Froude, had he lived in an atmosphere of perfectly free
discussion as Renan did, would have heartily subscribed to that
dogma.
Why then do I say that he was perpetually on the borderland
of the Catholic Church? Because when he leaves for a
moment the phraseology and the material of his youth and of
his neighbourhood, he is perpetually striking that note of
interest, of wonder, and of intellectual freedom which is the
note of Catholicism.
Let any man who knows what Catholicism may be read
carefully the Essay on the Dissolution of the Monasteries,
and the Essay on the Philosophy of Christianity which succeeds
it in this book, but which was written six years before.
Let him remember that nothing Froude ever wrote was
written without the desire to combat some enemy, and, having
made allowance for that desire, let him decide whether one
shock, one experience, one revelation would not have whirled
him into the Church. He was, I think, like a man who has
felt the hands of a woman and heard her voice, who knows
them so thoroughly well that he can love, criticise, or despise
according to his mood; but who has never seen her face.
And he was especially near to the Church in this: that
having discussed a truth he was compelled to fight for it and
to wound actively in fighting, He was an agent, He did,
He saw that the mass of stuff clinging round the mind
of wealthy England was decaying, He turned with regret
towards the healthy visions of Europe and called them
illusions because they were not provable, and because all
provable things showed a flee other than that of the creed
and were true in another manner. He despised the cowardice
--for it is cowardice--that pretends to intellectual conviction
and to temporal evidence of the things of the soul. He saw
and said, and he was right in saying, that the City of God is
built upon things incredible.
"Incredibilia nec crederim, nisi me compelleret ecclesiae auctoritas"