accountable, by the way, for a good deal of weak theology. More truly
may it be said that the merits of a great historian are far from lying
wholly in his intellectual powers. Among the highest of such merits,
merits which the professional student has even more reason to
appreciate than the general reader, because he more frequently
discerns the disturbing causes, are two moral qualities. One is the
zeal for truth, with the willingness to undertake, in a search for it,
a toil by which no credit will ever be gained. The other is a clear
view of, and loyal adherence to, the permanent moral standards. In
both these points Freeman stood in the front rank. He was kindly and
fair in his judgments, and ready to make all the allowances for any
man's conduct which the conditions of his time suggested, but he hated
cruelty, falsehood, oppression, whether in Syracuse twenty-four
centuries ago or in the Ottoman empire to-day. That conscientious
industry which spares no pains to get as near as possible to the facts
never failed him. Though he talked less about facts and verities than
Carlyle did, Carlyle was not so assiduous and so minutely careful in
sifting every statement before he admitted it into his pages. That he
was never betrayed by sentiment into partisanship it would be too much
to say. Scottish critics have accused him, perhaps not without
justice, of being led by his English patriotism to over-state the
claims of the English Crown to suzerainty over Scotland. J. R. Green,
as well as the late Mr. C. H. Pearson, thought that the same cause
disposed him to overlook the weak points in the character of Harold
son of Godwin, one of his favourite heroes. But there have been few
writers who have so seldom erred in this way; few who have striven so
earnestly to do full justice to every cause and every person. Even the
race prejudices which he allowed himself to indulge, in letters and
talk, against Irishmen, Frenchmen, and Jews, scarcely ever appear in
his books. The characters he has drawn of Lucius Cornelius Sulla,
William the Conqueror and William the Red, St. Thomas of Canterbury
(none of whom he liked), and, in his _History of Sicily_, of Nicias,
are models of the fairness which historical portraiture requires. It
is especially interesting to compare his picture of the unfortunate
Athenian with the equally vigorous but harsher view of Grote. Freeman,
whom many people thought fierce, was one of the most soft-hearted of
men, and tolerant of everything but perfidy and cruelty. Though
disposed to be positive in his opinions, he was always willing to
reconsider a point when any new evidence was discovered or any new
argument brought to his notice, and not unfrequently modified his view
in the light of such evidence or arguments. It was this passion for
accuracy and for that lucidity of statement which is the necessary
adjunct of real accuracy, that made him deal so sternly with confused
thinkers and careless writers. Carelessness seemed to him a moral
fault, because a fault which true conscientiousness excludes. So also
clearness of conception and exact precision in the use of words were
so natural to him, and appeared so essential to good work, that he
would set down the want of them rather to indolence than to
incapacity, and apply to them a proportionately severe censure. Mere
ignorance he could pardon, but when it was, as often happens, even in
persons of considerable pretensions, joined to presumption, his wrath
was the hotter because he deemed it a wholly righteous wrath. Never
touching any subject which he had not mastered, he thought it his duty
as a critic to expose impostors, and rendered in this way, during the
years when he wrote for the _Saturday Review_, services to English
scholarship second only to those which were embodied in his own
treatises. It must be confessed that he enjoyed the work, and, like
Samuel Johnson, was not displeased to be told that he had "tossed and
gored several persons."
His determination to get to the bottom of a question was the cause of
the censure he so freely bestowed both on lawyers, who were wont to
rest content with their technicalities, and not go back to the
historical basis on which those technicalities rested, and on
politicians who fell into the habit of using stock phrases which
muddled or misrepresented the principles involved. The expression
"national property," as applied to tithes, incensed him, and gave
occasion for some of his most vigorous writing. So the commonplace
grumblings against the presence of bishops in the House of Lords,
which may be heard from people who acquiesce in the presence of
hereditary peers, led him to give the most clear and forcible
statement of the origin and character of that House which our time has
produced. Here he was on ground he knew thoroughly. But his habits of
accuracy were not less fully illustrated by his attitude towards
branches of history he had not explored. With a profound and minute
knowledge of English history down to the fourteenth century, so far as
his aversion to the employment of manuscript authorities would allow,
and a scarcely inferior knowledge of foreign European history during
the same period, with a less full but very sound knowledge down to the
middle of the sixteenth century, and with a thorough mastery of pretty
nearly all ancient history, his familiarity with later European
history, and with the history of such outlying regions as India or
America, was not much beyond that of the average educated man. He used
to say when questioned on these matters that "he had not come down to
that yet." But when he had occasion to refer to those periods or
countries, he hardly ever made a mistake. If he did not know, he did
not refer; if he referred, he had seized, as if by instinct, something
which was really important and serviceable for his purpose. The same
remark applies (speaking generally) to Gibbon and to Macaulay, and I
have heard Freeman make it of the writings of Mr. Goldwin Smith, for
whom he had a warm admiration.
Freeman's abstention from the use of manuscript sources was virtually
prescribed by his persistence in refusing to work out of his own
library, or, as he used to say, out of a room which he could
consider to be his library for the time being. As, however, the
original authorities for the times with which he chiefly dealt are,
with few or unimportant exceptions, all in print, this habit can
hardly be considered a defect in his historical qualifications. In
handling the sources he was a judicious critic and a sound scholar,
thoroughly at home in Greek and Latin, and sufficiently equipped in
Anglo-Saxon, or, as he called it, Old English. Of his breadth of
view, of the command he had of the whole sweep of his knowledge, of
his delight in bringing together things the most remote in place or
time, it is superfluous to speak. These merits are perhaps most
conspicuously seen in the plan of his treatise on Federal Government,
as well as in the execution of that one volume which unfortunately
was all he produced of what might have been, if completed, a book of
the utmost value. But one or two trifling illustrations of this habit
of living in an atmosphere in which the past was no less real to him
than the present may be forgiven. When careless friends directed
letters to him at "Somerleaze, Wookey, Somerset," Wookey being a
village a quarter of a mile from his house, but on the other side of
the river Axe, he would write back complaining that they were
"confusing the England and Wales of the seventh century." When his
attention had been called to a discussion in the weekly journals
about Shelley's first wife he wrote to me, "Why will they worry us
with this _Harrietfrage_? You and I have quite enough to do with
Helen, and Theodora, and Mary Stuart." So in addressing Somersetshire
rustics during his election campaign in 1868, he could not help on one
occasion referring to Ptolemy Euergetes, and on another launching
out into an eloquent description of the Landesgemeinde of Uri.
Industry came naturally to Freeman, because he was fond of his own
studies and did not think of his work as task work. The joy in reading
and writing about bygone times sprang from the intensity with which he
realised them. He had no geographical imagination, finding no more
pleasure in books of travel than in dramatic poetry. But he loved to
dwell in the past, and seemed to see and feel and make himself a part
of the events he described. Next to their worth as statements of
carefully investigated facts, the chief merit of his books lies in the
sense of reality which fills them. The politics of Corinth or Sicyon,
the contest of William the Red with St. Anselm, interested him as
keenly as a general election in which he was himself a candidate.
Looking upon current events with an historian's eye, he was fond, on
the other hand, of illustrating features of Roman history from
incidents he had witnessed when taking part in local government as a
magistrate; and in describing the relations of Hermocrates and
Athenagoras at Syracuse he drew upon observations which he had made in
watching the discussions of the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford. This
power of realising the politics of ancient or mediaeval times was
especially useful to him as a writer, because without it his
minuteness might have verged on prolixity, seeing that he cared
exclusively for the political part of history. It was one of the
points in which he rose superior to most of those German students with
whom it is natural to compare him. Many of them have equalled him in
industry and diligence; some have surpassed him in the ingenuity which
they bring to bear upon obscure problems; but few of them have shown
the same gift for understanding what the political life of remote
times really was. Like Gibbon, Freeman was not a mere student, but
also a man with opportunities of mixing in affairs, accustomed to bear
his share in the world's work, and so better able than the mere
student can be to comprehend how that work goes forward. Though he was
too peculiar in his views and his way of stating them to have been
adapted either to the House of Commons or to a local assembly, and
would indeed have been wasted upon nineteen-twentieths of the business
there transacted, he loved politics and watched them with a shrewdly
observant eye. Though he indulged his foibles in some directions, he
could turn upon history a stream of clear common sense which sometimes
made short work of German conjectures. And he was free from the
craving to have at all hazards something new to advance, be it a
trivial fact or an unsupported guess. He was accustomed of late years
to complain that German scholarship seemed to be suffering from the
passion for _etwas Neues_, and the consequent disposition to disparage
work which did not abound with novelties, however empty or transient
such novelties might be.
To think of the Germans is to think of industry. Freeman was a true
Teuton in the mass of his production. Besides the seven thick
volumes devoted to the Norman Conquest and William Rufus, the four
thick volumes to Sicily, four large volumes of collected essays,
and nine or ten smaller volumes on architectural subjects, on the
English constitution, on the United States, on the Slavs and the
Turks, he wrote an even greater quantity of matter which appeared in
the _Saturday Review_ during the twenty years from 1856 to 1876, and
it was by these articles, not less than by his books, that he
succeeded in dispelling many current errors and confusions, and in
establishing some of his own doctrines so firmly that we now
scarcely remember what iteration and reiteration, in season and out
of season, and much to the impatience of those who remembered that
they had heard these doctrines often before, were needed to make
them accepted by the public. Freeman's swift facility was due to
his power of concentration. He always knew what he meant an article
to contain before he sat down to his desk; and in his historical
researches he made each step so certain that he seldom required to
reinvestigate a point or to change, in revising for the press, the
substance of what he had written.
In his literary habits he was so methodical and precise that he could
carry on three undertakings at the same time, keeping on different
tables in his working rooms the books he needed for each, and passing
at stated hours from one to the other. It is often remarked that the
growth of journalism, forcing men to write hastily and profusely,
tends to injure literature both in matter and in manner. In point of
matter, Freeman, though for the best part of his life a very prolific
journalist, did not seem to suffer. He was as exact, clear, and
thorough at the end as he had been at the beginning. On his style,
however, the results were unfortunate. It retained its force and its
point, but it became diffuse, not that each particular sentence was
weak, or vague, or wordy, but that what was substantially the same
idea was apt to be reiterated, with slight differences of phrase, in
several successive sentences or paragraphs. He was fond of the
Psalter, great part of which he knew by heart, and we told him that he
had caught too much of the manner of Psalm cxix. This tendency to
repetition caused some of his books, and particularly the _Norman
Conquest_ and _William Rufus_, to swell to a portentous bulk. Those
treatises, which constitute a history of England from A.D. 1042 to
1100, would be more widely read if they had been, as they ought to
have been, reduced to three or four volumes; and as he came to
perceive this, he resolved in the last year of his life to republish
the _Norman Conquest_ in a condensed form. To be obliged to compress
was a wholesome, though unwelcome, discipline, and the result is seen
in some of his smaller books, such as the historical essays, and the
sketches of English towns, often wonderfully fresh and vigorous bits
of work. Anxiety to be scrupulously accurate runs into prolixity, and
Freeman so loved his subjects that it pained him to omit any
characteristic detail a chronicler had preserved; as he once observed
to a distinguished writer who was dealing with a much later period,
"You know so much about your people that you have to leave out a great
deal, I know so little that I must tell all I know." The tendency to
repeat the same word too frequently sprang from his preference for
words of Teutonic origin and his pride in what he deemed the purity of
his English. His pages would have been livelier had he felt free to
indulge in the humour with which his private letters sparkled; for he
was full of fun, though it often turned on points too recondite for
the public. But it was only in the notes to his histories, and seldom
even there, that he gave play to one of the merits that most commended
him to his friends.
So far of his books. He was, however, also Regius Professor of History
at Oxford during the last eight years of his life, and thus the head
of the historical faculty in his own university which he dearly loved.
That he was less effective as a teacher than as a writer may be partly
ascribed to his having come too late to a new kind of work, and one
which demands the freshness of youth; partly also to the cramping
conditions under which professors have to teach at Oxford, where
everything is governed by a system of examinations which Freeman was
never tired of denouncing as ruinous to study. His friends, however,
doubted whether the natural bent of his mind was towards oral
teaching. It was a peculiar mind, which ran in a deep channel of its
own, and could not easily, if the metaphor be permissible, be drawn
off to irrigate the adjoining fields. He was always better at putting
his own views in a clear and telling way than at laying his intellect
alongside of yours, apprehending your point of view, and setting
himself to meet it. Or, to put the same thing differently, you learned
more by listening to him than by conversing with him. He had not the
quick intellectual sympathy and effusion which feels its way to the
heart of an audience, and indeed derives inspiration from the sight of
an audience. In his election meetings I noticed that the temper and
sentiment of the listeners did not in the least affect him; what he
said was what he himself cared to say, not what he felt they would
wish to hear. So also in his lecturing he pleased himself, and chose
the topics he liked best rather than those which the examination
scheme prescribed to the students. Perhaps he was right, for he was of
those whose excellence in performance depends upon the enjoyment they
find in the exercise of their powers. But even on the topics he
selected, he did not take hold of and guide the mind of the students,
realising their particular difficulties and needs, but simply
delivered his own message in his own way. Admitting this deficiency,
the fact remains that he was not only an ornament to the University by
the example he set of unflagging zeal, conscientious industry, loyalty
to truth, and love of freedom, but also a stimulating influence upon
those who were occupied with history. He delighted to surround himself
with the most studious of the younger workers, gave them abundant
encouragement and recognition, and never grudged the time to help them
by his knowledge or his counsel.
Much the same might be said of his lifelong friend and illustrious
predecessor in the chair of history (Dr. Stubbs), whom Freeman had
been generously extolling for many years before the merits of that
admirable scholar became known to the public. Stubbs disliked
lecturing; and though once a year he delivered a "public lecture" full
of wisdom, and sometimes full of wit also, he was not effective as a
teacher, not so effective, for instance, as Bishop Creighton, who won
his reputation at Merton College long before he became Professor of
Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge. But Stubbs, by his mere presence
in the University, and by the inexhaustible kindness with which he
answered questions and gave advice, rendered great services to the
studies of the place. It may be doubted whether, when he was raised to
the episcopal bench, history did not lose more than the Church of
England gained. Other men of far less ability could have discharged
five-sixths of a bishop's duties equally well, but there was no one
else in England, if indeed in Europe, capable of carrying on his
historical researches. So Dr. Lightfoot was, as Professor at
Cambridge, doing work for Christian learning even more precious than
the work which is still affectionately remembered in his diocese of
Durham.
Few men have had a genius for friendship equal to Freeman's. The
names of those he cared for were continually on his lips, and their
lives in his thoughts; their misfortunes touched him like his own;
he was always ready to defend them, always ready to give any aid they
needed. No differences of opinion affected his regard. Sensitive
as he was to criticism, he received their censure on any part of his
work without offence. The need he felt for knowing how they fared and
for sharing his thoughts with them expressed itself in the enormous
correspondence, not of business, but of pure affection, which he kept
up with his many friends, and which forms, for his letters were so
racy that many of them were preserved, the fullest record of his
life.
This warmth of feeling deserves to be dwelt on, because it explains
the tendency to vehemence in controversy which brought some enmities
upon him. There was an odd contrast between his fondness for
describing wars and battles and that extreme aversion to militarism
which made him appear to dislike the very existence of a British army
and navy. So his combativeness, and the zest with which he bestowed
shrewd blows on those who encountered him, though due to his wholesome
scorn for pretenders, and his hatred of falsehood and injustice,
seemed inconsistent with the real kindliness of his nature. The
kindliness, however, no one who knew him could doubt; it showed itself
not only in his care for dumb creatures and for children, but in the
depth and tenderness of his affections. Of religion he spoke little,
and only to his most intimate friends. In opinion he had drifted a
long way from the Anglo-Catholic position of his early manhood; but he
remained a sincerely pious Christian.
Though his health had been infirm for some years before his death, his
literary activity did not slacken, nor did his powers show signs of
decline. There is nothing in his writings, nor in any writings of our
time, more broad, clear, and forcible than many chapters of the
_History of Sicily_. Much of his work has effected its purpose, and
will, by degrees, lose its place in the public eye. But much will
live on into a yet distant future, because it has been done so
thoroughly, and contains so much sound and vigorous thinking, that
coming generations of historical students will need it and value it
almost as our own has done.
-----
[37] An excellent Life of Freeman has been written by his friend Mr.
W. R. W. Stephens, afterwards Dean of Winchester, whose death
while these pages were passing through the press has caused the
deepest regret to all who had the opportunity of knowing his
literary gifts and his lovable character.
[38] The scholars of Trinity were then (1843) all High Churchmen, and
never dined in hall on Fridays. Fourteen years later there was
not a single High Churchman among them. Ten or fifteen years
afterwards Anglo-Catholic sentiment was again strong. Freeman
said that his revulsion against Tractarianism began from a
conversation with one of his fellow-scholars, who had remarked
that it was a pity there had been a flaw in the consecration of
some Swedish bishops in the sixteenth century, for this had
imperilled the salvation of all Swedes since that time. He was
startled, and began to reconsider his position.
[39] Having had about the same time a brush with George Anthony
Denison (Archdeacon of Taunton), and a less friendly passage of
arms with James Anthony Froude, he wrote to me in 1870: "I am
greater than Cicero, who was smiter of one Antonius. I venture
to think that I have whopped the whole _Gens Antonia_--first
Anthony pure and simple, which is Trollope; secondly, James
Anthony, whom I believe myself to have smitten, as Cnut did
Eadric swiethe rihtlice, in the matter of St. Hugh; thirdly,
George Anthony, with whom I fought again last Tuesday, carrying
at our Education Board a resolution in favour of Forster's
bill." Trollope and he became warm friends. Froude he heartily
disliked, not, I think, on any personal grounds, but because he
thought Froude indifferent to truth, and was incensed by the
defence of Henry VIII.'s crimes.
It may be added that Freeman, much as he detested Henry VIII.,
used to observe that Henry had a sort of legal conscience,
because he always wished his murders to be done by Act of
Parliament, and that the earlier and better part of Henry's
reign ought not to be forgotten. He was fond of quoting the
euphemism with which an old Oxford professor of ecclesiastical
history concluded his account of the sovereign whom, in respect
of his relation to the Church of England, it seemed proper to
handle gently: "The later years of this great monarch were
clouded by domestic troubles."
[40] "The heart makes the theologian."
ROBERT LOWE VISCOUNT SHERBROOKE[41]
Had Robert Lowe died in 1868, when he became a Cabinet Minister, his
death would have been a political event of the first magnitude; but
when he died in 1892 (in his eighty-second year) hardly anybody under
forty years of age knew who Lord Sherbrooke was, and the new
generation wondered why their seniors should feel any interest in the
disappearance of a superannuated peer whose name had long since ceased
to be heard in either the literary or the political world. It requires
an effort to believe that he was at one time held the equal in oratory
and the superior in intellect of Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone. There
are few instances in our annals of men who have been equally famous
and whose fame has been bounded by so short a span out of a long
life.
No one who knew Lowe ever doubted his abilities. He made a brilliant
reputation, first at Winchester (where, as his autobiography tells
us, he was miserable) and then at Oxford, where he was the
contemporary and fully the peer of Roundell Palmer (afterwards Lord
Chancellor Selborne) and of Archibald Tait (afterwards Archbishop of
Canterbury). He was much sought after and wonderfully effective as a
private tutor or "coach" in classical subjects, being not only an
excellent scholar but extremely clear and stimulating as a teacher. He
retained his love of literature all through life, and made himself,
_inter alia permulta_, a good Icelandic scholar and a fair Sanskrit
scholar. For mathematics he had no turn at all. Active sports, he
tells us, he enjoyed, characteristically adding, "they open to dulness
also its road to fame." When he left the University, where anecdotes
of his caustic wit were long current, he tried his fortune at the Bar,
but with such scant success that he presently emigrated to New South
Wales, soon rose to prominence and unpopularity there, returned in ten
years with a tolerable fortune and a detestation of democracy, became
a leading-article writer on the _Times_, entered Parliament, but was
little heard of till Lord Palmerston gave him (in 1859) the place of
Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education. His function
in that office was to administer the grants made from the national
treasury to elementary schools, and as he found the methods of
inspection rather lax, and noted a tendency to superficiality and a
neglect of backward children, he introduced new rules for the
distribution of the grant (the so-called "Revised Code") which
provoked violent opposition. The motive was good, but the rules were
too mechanical and rigid and often worked harshly; so he was presently
driven from office by an attack led by Lord Robert Cecil (now Lord
Salisbury).
Though Lowe became known by this struggle, his conspicuous fame dates
from 1865, when he appeared as the trenchant critic of a measure
for extending the parliamentary franchise in boroughs, introduced
by a private member. Next year his powers shone forth in their full
lustre. The Liberal Ministry of Lord Russell, led in the House of
Commons by Mr. Gladstone, had brought in a Franchise Extension Bill
(applying to boroughs only) which excited the dislike of the more
conservative or more timid among their supporters. This dislike might
not have gone beyond many mutterings and a few desertions but for the
vehemence with which Lowe opposed the measure. He fought against it
in a series of speeches which produced a greater impression in the
House of Commons, and roused stronger feelings of admiration and
hostility in the country, than any political addresses had done since
1832. The new luminary rose so suddenly to the zenith, and cast so
unexpected a light that everybody was dazzled; and though many
dissented, and some attacked him bitterly, few ventured to meet him
in argument on the ground he had selected. The effect of these
speeches of 1866 can hardly be understood by any one who reads them
to-day unless he knows how commonplace and "practical," that is to
say, averse to general reasonings and historical illustrations,
the character of parliamentary debating was becoming even in Lowe's
time. It is still more practical and still less ornate in our own
day.