to meet not a single critic only, but a whole army. As far as one could
see, a kind of association had been formed for the suppression of his
“History.” Those who were behind the scenes know how certain of his
rivals and enemies actually banded themselves together, as if against a
common enemy. Now, I remember seeing in _Fraser’s Magazine_, then edited
by Froude, a review of Green’s “History of the English People,” with
pages and pages of mistakes in names, in dates, in facts. Yet, the same
writers who delighted in picking holes in Froude’s “History” from week
to week, from month to month, from year to year, kept up a constant
chorus of applause for Green’s “History of the English People”—no doubt
rightly so; but why not mete the same measure to others also? One of his
reviewers openly confessed that if he took the trouble of reading a book
carefully, he could not afford to review it in one paper only, he had to
write at least five or six articles to make it pay. This Φρουδοφονία, as
it was called, went on year after year, but, strange to say, Froude’s
work was not killed by it; on the contrary, it became more and more
popular. In fact, together with his other works, it enabled him to live
independently and even comfortably by his pen. Things have come to such
a pass that, if we may trust the experience of publishers, nothing sells
so well as a well-abused book, while laudatory notices seem to produce
little or no effect. The public, it seems, has grown too wise. Even such
powerful adjectives as epoch-making (_Epoche-machend_), monumental and
even _pyramidal_, fall flat. _Epoche-machend_ has too often been found
out to mean no more than _Poche-machend_ (_Poche_ in German means
_claque_), and _monumental_ has once or twice proved a misprint for
_momental_ or momentary. Few scholars would agree with M. Le Bon that
“works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination, as
fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts.” This is a French exaggeration.
But neither are books of history meant to be mere chronicles. History is
surely meant to teach not only facts, but lessons also; and, though
historians may say that facts ought to speak for themselves, they will
not speak without a _vates sacer_. I am the last man to stand up for an
unscholarlike treatment of history, or of anything else. But as I do not
call a man a scholar who simply copies and collates MSS., makes indices
or collects errata, I doubt whether mere _Quellenstudium_ will make a
historian. _Quellenstudium_ is a _sine quâ non_, but it is not
everything; and whereas the number of those who can ransack archives and
libraries is large, the world has not been rich in real historians whom
it is a delight to listen to, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and
Tacitus, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and, may we not add, Macaulay and Froude?
None of these historians, not even Gibbon, has escaped criticism, but
how poor should we be without them!
Sir Walter Raleigh, when he was writing his “History of the World” in
the Tower of London, overheard two boys quarrelling over the facts of an
incident that had happened the day before; and he said to himself: “If
these two boys cannot agree on an event which occurred almost before
their own eyes, how can any one be profited by the narration which I am
writing, of events which occurred in ages long past?” The answer which
the critical historian would give to Raleigh would probably be: “Go and
examine the two boys; find out their home, their relations, their
circumstances, particularly the opportunities they had of seeing what
they profess to have seen; and try to discover whether there was any
bias in their minds that could have made them incline towards one side
rather than the other. Give all that evidence, and then you are a real
historian.” But is that true, and were any of the great historians
satisfied with that? Was not their heart in their work, and is the heart
ever far from what we call bias? Did not Herodotus, in describing the
conflict between Greece and Asia, clearly espouse the cause of Greece? I
know he has been called the father of lies rather than of history; but
he has survived for all that. Did not Thucydides throughout his history
write as the loyal son of Athens? Was Tacitus very anxious to find out
all that could be said in favour of Tiberius? Was even Gibbon, in his
“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” quite impartial? Ranke’s
“History of the Popes,” may be very accurate, but for thousands who read
Macaulay and Froude is there one who reads Ranke, except the historian
by profession? History is not written for historians only. Macaulay
wrote the history of the English Restoration as a partisan, and Froude
made no secret on which side he would have fought, if he had lived
through the storms of the English Reformation. If Macaulay had been one
of the two boys of Sir Walter Raleigh, he would probably not have
discovered some of the dark shadows on the face of William III. which
struck the other boy; while some critics might possibly say of Froude
that in drawing the picture of Henry VIII. he may have followed now and
then the example of Nelson in the use of his telescope. Still, in
describing such recent periods as the reign of Henry VIII., historians
cannot, at all events, go very far wrong in dates or names. Froude may
have been wrong in embracing the cause of Henry VIII. and accepting all
the excuses or explanations which could be given for his violent acts.
But Froude is, at all events, honest, in so far that no one can fail to
see where his sympathies lie, so that he really leaves us free to decide
what side we ourselves should take.
When the historian has to analyse prominent characters, and bring them
again full of life on the stage of history, is it not the artist, nay
the poet, who has to do the chief work, and not the mere chronicler? In
Froude’s case the difficulty was very great. The contemporary estimates
of Henry’s character were most conflicting, and without taking a line of
his own, without claiming in fact the same privilege which Henry’s
contemporaries claimed, whether friends or foes, it would have been
impossible for him to create a character that should be consistent and
intelligible. There was nothing too fiendish to be told of the English
king by the Papal party, and yet we cannot help asking how such a
caitiff, as he is represented to have been by Roman Catholic agents,
could have retained the love of the English people and secured the
services of some of the best among the noblemen and gentlemen of his
time? If we take upon ourselves to reject all reports of Royal
Commissioners in Henry’s reign as corrupt and mendacious, would it be
worth while to write any history of the English people at all? It is, no
doubt, an ungrateful task to whitewash a historical character that has
been besmirched for years by a resolute party. Yet it has to be done
from time to time, from a sense of justice, and not from a mere spirit
of opposition. Carlyle’s heroes were nearly all the best-abused men in
Christendom: Frederick the Great, Cromwell, and Goethe. Every one of
these characters was lying, as Carlyle said himself, under infinite
dung; yet every one of them is now admired by thousands, because they
trust in Carlyle. It was the same Carlyle who encouraged Froude in his
work of rehabilitating Bluff King Hal, and we ought, at all events, to
be grateful to him for having enabled us to know all that can be said by
the king’s advocates. If Froude wrote as a partisan, he wrote, at the
same time, as a patriot, and if a patriot sees but one side of the
truth, some one else will see the other.
Can we imagine any history of our own times written from the pole star,
and not from amid the turmoil of contending parties? Would a history of
the reign of Queen Victoria, written by Gladstone, be very like a
history written by Disraeli? However, these squabbles of reviewers about
the histories of Macaulay and Froude are now almost entirely forgotten,
while the historical dramas which Macaulay and Froude have left us,
remain, and Englishmen are proud of possessing two such splendid
monuments of the most important periods of their history. Macaulay’s
account of William III. remained unfinished, and it is characteristic of
Froude that, if I understood him rightly, he gave up the idea of
finishing the reign of Queen Elizabeth, because, as an Englishman, he
was disappointed in her character towards the end of her reign.
I saw much of Froude again during the last years of his life, when he
returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of History, having been appointed
by Lord Salisbury. “It is the first public recognition I have received,”
he used to say. He rejoiced in it, and he certainly did credit to Lord
Salisbury’s courageous choice. His lectures were brilliant, and the room
was crowded to the end. His private lectures also were largely attended,
and he was on the most friendly and intimate terms with some of his
pupils.
There is no place so trying for a professor as Oxford. Froude’s
immediate predecessors, Goldwin Smith, Stubbs, and Freeman, were some of
the best men that Oxford has produced. Their lectures were excellent in
every respect. Yet every one of them had to complain of the miserable
scantiness of their audiences at Oxford. The present Bishop of Oxford,
Dr. Stubbs, in his “Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediæval and
Modern History” (1886), states what may sound almost incredible, that he
had sometimes to deliver his lectures “to two or three listless men.”
The same may be said of some of the best lectures delivered in the
University. The young men are encouraged in each college to attend the
lectures delivered by the tutors, and are given to understand that
professorial lectures “do not pay” in the examinations. These
examinations are chiefly in the hands of college tutors. Professor
Stubbs was not given to complain about anything that might seem to
concern himself, yet he confesses that “sometimes he felt hurt that in
the combined lecture list he found the junior assistant tutor
advertising a course on the same subject, or at the same hours, as his
own.” Nay, he goes so far in his modesty as to say: “It may be better
that there should be a dozen or fifteen college lecturers working away
with large classes, when I have only a few stray men,” but the real
friends of the University would hardly think so. As things are at
present, it has been said, and, I believe, truly said, that nearly all
professorial lectures might be abolished, and the studies of the
undergraduates would go on just the same. Oxford suffers in this respect
from a real _embarras de richesse_. The University is rich enough,
though by no means so rich as it was formerly, to keep up a double staff
of teachers, professorial and tutorial. It supports sixty-five
professors, readers, and lecturers, and probably four or five times as
many tutors. Many of the tutors are quite equal to the professors, nay,
it may be, even superior to them, but the most popular tutor, whose
lectures, when in college, were crowded, has to be satisfied with two or
three listless men as soon as he has been raised to the professoriate.
Froude’s lectures formed an exception, but even this was quoted against
him.
Froude was not only the most fascinating lecturer, but the most charming
companion and friend. His conversation was like his writings. It never
tired one, it never made one feel his superiority. His store of
anecdotes was inexhaustible, and though in his old age they were
sometimes repeated, they were always pleasant to listen to. He enjoyed
them so thoroughly himself, he chuckled over them, he covered his eyes
as if half ashamed of telling them. They are all gone now, and a pity it
is, for most of them referred to what he had actually seen, not only to
what he had heard, and he had seen and heard a good deal, both in Church
and State. He knew the little failings of great men, he knew even the
peccadilloes of saints, better than anybody. He was never ill-natured in
his judgments, he knew the world too well for that, and it is well,
perhaps, that many things which he knew should be forgotten. He himself
insisted on all letters being destroyed that had been addressed to him,
and from a high sense of duty, left orders that his own letters,
addressed to his friends, should not be divulged after his death. Though
he left an unfinished autobiography, extremely interesting to the few
friends who were allowed to read it, those who decided that it should
not be published have acted, no doubt, wisely and entirely in his
spirit.
My friend Charles Kingsley was a very different man. He was a strong
man, while Froude had some feminine weaknesses, but also some of the
best feminine excellencies. His life and his character are well known
from that excellent biography published by his gifted widow, not much
more than a year after his death. This Life of hers really gave a new
life to him, and secured a new popularity and influence to his writings.
In him, too, what I admired besides his delightful character was his
poetical power, his brilliant yet minute and accurate descriptions of
nature, and the characters he created in his novels. With all the
biographies that are now published, how little do people know after all
of the man they are asked to love or hate! In order to judge of a man,
we ought to know in what quarry the marble of which he was made was
carved, what sunshine there was to call forth the first germs of his
mind, nay, even whether he was rich or poor, whether he had what we
rightly call an independence, and whether from his youth he was and felt
himself a free man. There is something in the character of a man like
Stanley, for instance, which we have no right to expect in a man who had
to struggle in life like Kingsley. The struggle for life may bring out
many fine qualities, but it cannot but leave traces of the struggle, a
certain amount of self-assertion, a love of warfare, and a more or less
pronounced satisfaction at having carried the day against all rivals and
opponents. These are the temptations of a poor man which do not exist
for a man of independent means. It is no use shutting our eyes to this.
Every fight entails blows, and wounds, and scars, and some of them
remain for life. Kingsley seems to have had no anxieties as a young man
at school or at the University, but when he had left the University and
become a curate, and, more particularly, when he had married on his
small curacy and there were children, his struggles began in good
earnest. He had often to write against time; he had to get up subject
after subject in order to be able to write an article, simply that he
might be able to satisfy the most troublesome tradesmen. He always wrote
at very high pressure; fortunately his physical frame was of iron, and
his determination like that of a runaway horse. People may say that he
had the usual income of a country clergyman, but why will they forget
that a man in Kingsley’s position had not only to give his children an
expensive education, but had to keep open house for his numerous friends
and admirers? There was no display in his quiet rectory at Eversley, but
even the simplest hospitality entails more expense than a small living
can bear, and his friends and visitors ranged from the lowest to the
highest—from poor workmen to English and foreign royalties. As long as
he could wield his pen he could procure the necessary supplies, but it
had to be done with a very great strain on the brain. “It must be done,
and it shall be done,” he said; yes, but though most of his work was
done, and well done, it was like the work of an athlete who breaks down
at the end of the day when his victory is won. People did not see it and
did not know it, for he never would yield, and never would show signs of
yielding. When, towards the end of his life, a canonry was offered him,
first at Chester, then at Westminster, he felt truly grateful. “After
all,” he said to me, “these stalls are good for old horses.” His
professorship at Cambridge was really too much for him. He was not
prepared for it. Personally he did much good among the young men, and
was certainly most popular. At Cambridge as a professor he did his best,
but he had hardly calculated _Quid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent_.
Anyhow, the work soon became too much even for his iron constitution,
and he was glad to be relieved. The fact is that Kingsley was all his
life, in everything he thought and in everything he did, a poet, a man
of high ideals, and likewise of unswerving honesty. No one knew
Kingsley, such as he really was, who had not seen him at Eversley, and
among his poor people. He visited every cottage, he knew every old man
and old woman, and was perfectly at home among them. His “Village
Sermons” gave them just the food they wanted, though it was curious to
see every Sunday a large sprinkling of young officers from Sandhurst and
Aldershot sitting quietly among the smock-frocked congregation, and
anxious to have some serious conversation with the preacher afterwards.
Kingsley was a great martyr to stammering, it often was torture to him
in a lively conversation to keep us all waiting till his thoughts could
break through again. In church, however, whether he was reading or
speaking extempore, there was no sign of stammering; apparently there
was no effort to overcome it. But when we walked home from church he
would say: “Oh, let me stammer now, you won’t mind it.”
He was not a learned theologian, his one idea of Christianity was
practical Christianity, honesty, purity, love. He was always most
courteous, most willing to bow before higher authority or greater
learning; but when he thought there was anything wrong, or mean, or
cowardly, anything with which he, as an honest man, could not agree, he
was as firm as a rock.
His favourite pursuits lay in natural science. He knew every flower,
every bird, every fish, and every insect in his neighbourhood, and he
had imbibed a belief in the laws of nature, which represented to him
indirectly the thoughts of God. When, therefore, after a long
continuance of drought, the bishop of his diocese ordered him to have a
special prayer for rain, he respectfully and firmly declined. He would
pray for the good gifts of heaven, offer thanks to God for all that He
was pleased to send in His wisdom, but he would not enter into
particulars with Him, he would not put his own small human wisdom
against the Divine wisdom; he would not preach on what he thought was
good for us, for God knew best. He had no difficulty in persuading his
farmers and labourers that if they had any trust in God, and any
reverence for the Divine wisdom that rules the world, they would place
all their troubles and cares before Him in prayer, but they would not
beg for anything which, in His wisdom, He withheld from them. “Thy will
be done,” that was his prayer for rain. There was great commotion in
ecclesiastical dovecotes, most of all in episcopal palaces. All sorts of
punishments were threatened, but Kingsley remained throughout perfectly
quiet, yet most determined. He would not degrade his sacred office to
that of a rain-maker or medicine-man, and he carried his point. “In
America we manage these things better!” said an American friend of
Kingsley. “A clergyman in a village on the frontier between two of our
States prayed for rain. The rain came, and it soaked the ground to such
an extent that the young lambs in the neighbouring State caught cold and
died. An action was brought against the clergyman for the mischief he
had done, and he and his parishioners were condemned to pay damages to
the sheep farmers. They never prayed for rain again after that.”
Kingsley incurred great displeasure by the support he gave to what was
called Christian Socialism. His novel “Alton Locke,” contained some very
outspoken sentiments as to the terrible sufferings of the poor and the
duties of the rich. Kingsley, Frederick Maurice, and their friends, did
not only plead, but they acted; they formed societies to assist poor
tailors, and for a time the clothes they wore showed but too clearly
that they had been cut in Whitechapel, not in Regent Street. Poor
Kingsley suffered not only in his wardrobe, but in his purse also, owing
to his having been too sanguine in his support of tailoring by
co-operation.
However, his books, both in prose and poetry, became more and more
popular, and this meant that his income became larger and larger.
Publishers say that novels and sermons have the largest market in
England and the colonies, and Kingsley provided both. All went on well:
even his being stopped once in the middle of a sermon by a clergyman who
had invited him to preach in his church in London, but did not approve
of his sermon, did not hurt him. He had many influential friends; both
the Queen and the Prince of Wales had shown by special marks of favour
how much they appreciated him, and he had a right to look forward to
ecclesiastical preferment and to a greater amount of leisure and
freedom. One unexpected cloud, however, came to darken his bright and
happy life. Some people will say that he brought it upon himself, but
there are certain clouds which no honest man can help bringing upon
himself. He, no doubt, began the painful controversy with Newman. Having
seen how much misery had been caused among some of his own dearest
friends by the Romanising teaching under the auspices of Newman and
Pusey, he made the mistake of fastening the charge of dishonesty,
half-heartedness, and untruthfulness on Newman personally, instead of on
the whole Roman Catholic propaganda in England from the time of Henry
VIII.’s apostasy from the Roman Church to that of Newman’s apostasy from
the Church of England. I shall not enter into this controversy again. I
have done so once, and have been well punished for having ventured to
declare my honest conviction that throughout this painful duel Kingsley
was in the right. But Kingsley was clumsy and Newman most skilful.
Besides, Newman was evidently a man of many friends, and of many able
friends who knew how to wield their pens in many a newspaper.
In spite of having taken a most unpopular step in leaving the national
church, Newman always retained the popularity which he had so well
earned as a member of that Church. I have myself been one of his true
admirers, partly from having known many of his intimate friends at
Oxford, partly from having studied his earlier works when I first came
to England. I read them more for their style than for their contents. If
Newman had left behind him no more than his exquisite University sermons
and his sweet hymns he would always have stood high among the glories of
England. But Kingsley also was loved by the people and surrounded by
numerous and powerful friends. It must be due to my ignorance of the
national character, but I have certainly never been able to explain why
public sympathy went so entirely with Newman and against Kingsley; why
Kingsley was supposed to have acted unchivalrously and Newman was looked
upon as a martyr to his convictions, and as the victim of an illiberal
and narrow-minded Anglican clique. Certain it is that in the opinion of
the majority Kingsley had failed, and failed ignominiously, while
Newman’s popularity revived and became greater than ever.
Kingsley felt his defeat most deeply; he was like a man that stammered,
and could not utter at the right time the right word that was in his
mind. What is still more surprising was the sudden collapse of the sale
of Kingsley’s most popular books. I saw him after he had been with his
publishers to make arrangements for the sale of his copyrights. He
wanted the money to start his sons, and he had a right to expect a
substantial sum. The sum offered him seemed almost an insult, and yet he
assured me that he had seen the books of his publishers, and that the
sale of his books during the last years did not justify a larger offer.
He was miserable about it, as well he might be. He felt not only the
pecuniary loss, but, as he imagined, the loss of that influence which he
had gained by years of hard labour.
However, he was mistaken in his idea that he had laboured in vain.
Immediately after his death there came the most extraordinary reaction.
His books sold again in hundreds of thousands, and his family received
in one year a great deal more from his royalties than had been offered
him for the whole copyright of all his books. People are more willing
now to admit that though Newman may have been right in his “Apologia pro
Vita Sua,” Kingsley was not wrong in pointing out the weak points in
Newman’s character and in the moral and political doctrines of the Roman
Catholic system, more particularly of the Jesuits, and the dangers that
threatened his beloved England from those who seemed halting between the
two Churches, the one national, the other foreign, the one reformed, the
other unreformed.