Born in Devon at the same time--within a year--as Ruskin, James
Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same sanguine and
poetical characteristics. His historical writings have, I believe, been
somewhat discredited of late years owing to the permission he is
alleged to have given himself to warp his account of events in order to
buttress some prejudice or contention of his own.
But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once restore
him to our regard as a lord of visionary language:--
"Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping, mellow
autumn of a rich, glorious summer. In the old man Nature has
fulfilled her work; she leads him with her blessings; she fills
him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to
the grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we
should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most
beautiful.
"There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with
bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the
symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side of the grave;
which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won;
and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of
man.
"Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose
life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to
do the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or
Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers,
priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has been
the same--the same bitter cup has been given them to drink."
Another passage of deep and melancholy beauty cannot be omitted
from this volume. It records in language of haunting loveliness the
passing away of feudalism and chivalry and of a thousand years of the
pageantry of faith:--
"The great trading companies were not instituted for selfish
purposes, but to ensure the consumer of manufactured articles that
what he purchased was properly made and of a reasonable price.
They determined prices, fixed wages, and arranged the rules of
apprenticeship. But in time the companies lost their healthy
vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the reign
of Elizabeth hastening away. There were no longer tradesmen to be
found in sufficient number who were possessed of the necessary
probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon
with the deep melancholy which, in those days, settled down on
Elizabeth herself.
"For indeed a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and
direction of which even is still 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 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 firm
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 was to remain no longer. And now it is all
gone--like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and the
old English there lies 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 as we gaze upon their silent
figures sleeping on their 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 mediæval
age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."
The sound of church bells, being entirely the creation of man, forms
perhaps a more touching link with the past for us than the eternal
sounds of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the waves of the sea
forms a bond between us and the unplumbed depths of time, as they
"Begin and cease, and then again begin
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring,
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery."
So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is the sound of wind in the trees,
and the voice of falling waters and rippling streams which must have
fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore-runners as they do upon our
own. These eternal sounds about us take no note of our brief coming
and going, and will be the same when you and I, Antony, and all the
millions that come after us in the world have returned to dust.
Your loving old
G.P.
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