[Illustration: EDWARD A. FREEMAN]
Edward Augustus Freeman, one of the most prolific of recent English
historians, was born at Harborne in Staffordshire, England, on August
2d, 1823. His early education was received at home and in private
schools, from which at the age of eighteen he went up to Oxford, where
he was elected a scholar of Trinity College. Four years later (1845)
he took his degree and was elected a Fellow of Trinity, an honor which
he held till his marriage in 1847 forced him to relinquish it.
Long before this event, Freeman was deep in historical study. His
fortune was easy. The injunction that he should eat bread in the sweat
of his face had not been laid on him. His time was his own, and was
devoted with characteristic zeal and energy to labor in the field of
history, which in the course of fifty years was made to yield him a
goodly crop.
Year after year he poured forth a steady stream of Essays, Thoughts,
Remarks, Suggestions, Lectures, Short Histories on matters of current
interest, little monographs on great events or great men,--all
covering a range of subjects which bear evidence to most astonishing
versatility and learning. Sometimes his topic was a cathedral church,
as that of Wells or Leominster Priory; or a cathedral city, as Ely or
Norwich. At others it was a grave historical theme, as the 'Unity of
History'; or 'Comparative Politics'; or the 'Growth of the English
Constitution from the Earliest Times'; or 'Old English History for
Children.' His 'General Sketch of European History' is still a
standard text book in our high schools and colleges. His 'William the
Conqueror' in Macmillan's 'Twelve English Statesmen'; his 'Short
History of the Norman Conquest of England' in the Clarendon Press
Series; his studies of Godwin, Harold, and the Normans, in the
'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' are the best of their kind.
His contributions to the reviews and magazines make a small library,
encyclopaedic in character. Thirty-one essays were published in the
Fortnightly Review; thirty in the Contemporary Review; twenty-seven in
Macmillan's Magazine; twelve in the British Quarterly, and as many
more in the National Review; while such as are scattered through the
other periodicals of Great Britain and the United States swell the
list to one hundred and fifty-seven titles. Every conceivable subject
is treated,--politics, government, history, field sports,
architecture, archaeology, books, linguistics, finance, great men
living and dead, questions of the day. But even this list does not
comprise all of Freeman's writings, for regularly every week, for more
than twenty years, he contributed two long articles to the Saturday
Review.
Taken as a whole, this array of publications represents an industry
which was simply enormous, and a learning as varied as it was immense.
If classified according to their subjects, they fall naturally into
six groups. The antiquarian and architectural sketches and addresses
are the least valuable and instructive. They are of interest because
they exhibit a strong bent of mind which appears constantly in
Freeman's works, and because it was by the aid of such remains that he
studied the early history of nations. Then come the studies in
politics and government, such as the essays on presidential
government; on American institutional history; on the House of Lords;
the growth of commonwealths, and such elaborate treatises as the six
lectures on 'Comparative Politics,' and the 'History of Federal
Government,'--all notable because of the liberal spirit and breadth of
view that mark them, and because of a positiveness of statement and
confidence in the correctness of the author's judgments. Then come the
historical essays; then the lectures and addresses; then his
occasional pieces, written at the request of publishers or editors to
fill some long-felt want; and finally the series of histories on
which, in the long run, the reputation of Freeman must rest. These, in
the order of merit and value, are the 'Norman Conquest'; the 'Reign of
William Rufus,' which is really a supplement to the 'Conquest'; the
'History of Sicily,' which the author did not live to finish.
The roll of his works is enough to show that the kind of history which
appealed to Freeman was that of the distant past, and that which dealt
with politics rather than with social life. Of ancient history he had
a good mastery; English history from its dawn to the thirteenth
century he knew minutely: European history of the same period he knew
profoundly. After the thirteenth century his interest grew less and
less as modern times were approached, and his knowledge smaller and
smaller till it became that of a man very well read in history and no
more.
Freeman was therefore essentially a historian of the far past; and as
such had, it is safe to say, no living superior in England. But in his
treatment of the past he presents a small part of the picture. He is
concerned with great conquerors, with military leaders, with battles
and sieges and systems of government. The mass of the people have no
interest for him at all. His books abound in battle-pieces of the age
of the long-bow and the javelin, of the battle-axe, the mace, and the
spear; of the age when brain went for little and when brawn counted
for much; and when the fate of nations depended less on the skill of
individual commanders than on the personal prowess of those who met in
hand-to-hand encounters. He delights in descriptions of historic
buildings; he is never weary of drawing long analogies between one
kind of government and another; but for the customs, the manner, the
usages, the daily life of the people, he has never a word. "History,"
said he on one occasion, "is past politics; politics is present
history," and to this epigram he is strictly faithful. The England of
the serf and the villein, the curfew and the monastery, is brushed
aside to leave room for the story of the way in which William of
Normandy conquered the Saxons, and of the way in which William Rufus
conducted his quarrels with Bishop Anselm.
With all of this no fault is to be found. It was his cast of mind, his
point of view; and the questions which alone concern us in any
estimate of his work are: Did he do it well? What is its value? Did he
make a real contribution to historical knowledge? What are its merits
and defects? Judged by the standard he himself set up, Freeman's chief
merits, the qualities which mark him out as a great historian, are an
intense love of truth and a determination to discover it at any cost;
a sincere desire to mete out an even-handed justice to each and every
man; unflagging industry, common-sense, broad views, and the power to
reproduce the past most graphically.
From these merits comes Freeman's chief defect,--prolixity. His
earnest desire to be accurate made him not only say the same thing
over and over again, but say it with an unnecessary and useless
fullness of detail, and back up his statement with a profusion of
notes, which in many cases amount to more than half the text. Indeed,
were they printed in the same type as the text, the space they occupy
would often exceed it. Thus, in the first volume of the 'Norman
Conquest' there are 528 pages of text, with foot-notes occupying from
a third to a half of almost every page, and an appendix of notes of
244 pages; in the second volume, the text and foot-notes amount to
512, and the appendix 179; in the third, the text covers 562 and the
appendix 206 pages. These notes are always interesting and always
instructive. But the end of a volume is not the place for an
exhibition of the doubts and fears that have tormented the historian,
for a statement of the reasons which have led him to one conclusion
rather than another, nor for the denunciation or reputation of the
opinions of his predecessors. When the building is finished, we do not
want to see the lumber used as the scaffolding piled in the back yard.
Mr. Freeman's histories would be all the better for a condensation of
the text and an elimination of the long appendices.
With these exceptions, the workmanship is excellent. He entered so
thoroughly into the past that it became to him more real and
understandable than the present. He was not merely the contemporary
but the companion of the men he had to deal with. He knew every spot
of ground, every Roman ruin, every mediaeval castle, that came in any
way to be connected with his story, as well as he knew the topography
of the country that stretched beneath his study window, or the
arrangement of the house in which he lived.
In his histories, therefore, we are presented at every turn with
life-like portraits of the illustrious dead, bearing all the marks of
having been taken from life; with descriptions of castles and towers,
minsters and abbeys, and of the scenes that have made them memorable;
with comparisons of one ruler with another, always sane and just; and
with graphic pictures of coronations, of battles, sieges, burnings,
and all the havoc and pomp of war.
The essays and studies in politics show Mr. Freeman in a yet more
interesting light; many are elaborate reviews of historical works, and
therefore cover a wide range of topics, both ancient and of the
present time. Now his subject is Mr. Bryce's 'Holy Roman Empire'; now
the Flavian Caesars; now Mr. Gladstone's 'Homer and the Homeric Age';
now Kirk's 'Charles the Bold'; now presidential government; now
Athenian democracy; now the Byzantine Empire; now the Eastern Church;
now the growth of commonwealths; now the geographical aspects of the
Eastern Question.
By so wide a range of topics, an opportunity is afforded for a variety
of remarks, analogies, judgments of men and times, far greater than
the histories could give. In the main, these judgments may be
accepted; but so thoroughly was Freeman a historian of the past, that
some of his estimates of contemporary men and things were singularly
erroneous. While our Civil War was still raging he began a 'History of
Federal Government,' which was to extend from the Achaean League "to
the disruption of the United States." A prudent historian would not
have taken up the role of prophet. He would have waited for the end of
the struggle. But absolute self-confidence in his own good judgment
was one of Freeman's most conspicuous traits. His estimate of Lincoln
is another instance of inability to understand the times in which he
lived. In the 'Essay on Presidential Government,' published in the
National Review in 1864 and republished in the first series of
'Historical Essays' in 1871, the greatest President and the grandest
public character the United States has yet produced is declared
inferior to each and all the Presidents from Washington to John Quincy
Adams. A comparison of Lincoln with Monroe or Madison or Jefferson by
Freeman would have been entertaining.
Two views of history as set forth in the essays are especially
deserving of notice. He is never weary of insisting on the unity and
the continuity of history in general and that of England in
particular, and he attaches unreasonable importance to the influence
of the Teutonic element in English history. This latter was the
inevitable result of his method of studying the past along the lines
of philology and ethnology, and has carried him to extremes which
taken by anybody else he would have been quick to see.
An examination of Freeman's minor contributions to the reviews--such
essays, sketches, and discussions as he did not think important enough
to republish in book form--is indicative of his interest in current
affairs. They made little draft on his learning, yet the point of view
is generally the result of his learning. He believed, for instance,
that a sound judgment on the Franco-Prussian War could not be found
save in the light of history. "The present war," he wrote to the Pall
Mall Gazette, "has largely risen out of a misconception of history,
out of the dream of a frontier of the Rhine which never existed. The
war on the part of Germany is in truth a vigorous setting forth of the
historical truth that the Rhine is, and always has been, a German
river."
Freeman was still busy with his 'History of Sicily' from the earliest
times, and had just finished the preface to the third volume, when he
died at Alicante in Spain, March 16th, 1892. Since his death a fourth
volume, prepared from his notes, has been published.
But one biography of Freeman has yet appeared, 'The Life and Letters
of Edward A. Freeman,' by W. R. W. Stephens, 2 vols., 1895.
[Signature: John Bach McMartin]