(_a_) The Oxford historians of the moment enjoy an unjust monopoly,
and exercise a disastrous power of veto.
(_b_) That the _power_ to stop all this, to force these people to
their duty or to send them about their business lies with the
majority.
(_c_) That the majority is composed of those who pay for the education
of their sons, and of those who proceed to the University for an
education.
(_d_) That the historian must be not only a scholar, but an artist and
man of letters also.
(_e_) That the fear of Froude provoked the attack on him in the past,
and has maintained it until a year ago.
(_f_) That Mr. Paul’s _Life of Froude_ has silenced the misstatements
of mediocrity and incompetence for ever.
The whole business of Froude has provided one with a lens in which to
focus the question upon the page, and no one was ever provided with a
better text than I have been. Excuse me, however, if I make a brief
personal explanation. While engaged upon this piece of work an Oxford
man, an old-fashioned High Churchman of the Freeman type, has been
staying with me. It is forty years since he was in residence, and he
did not see with me at all in this matter when we discussed it.
“I cannot understand,” he said, “how you are going to champion Froude
and Mr. Paul against Freeman, who was perfectly sound on Church
matters, as I believe you to be. All you have ever published has been
in support of Catholic Truth, and yet you are earnestly advocating a
historian who was the incarnation of Protestantism.”
It was, in the first place, difficult to make my interlocutor see that
I was writing of the art of the historian, and not the trend of his
opinions. In the second place, I do not agree with him as to the
essential Protestantism of Froude. Froude’s religious attitude has
been summed up once and for all by one of the most brilliant writers
of our time, an historian, artist, and scholar, whom Oxford dons
rejected, but for whom Oxford calls aloud, and for whom St. Stephen’s
has naturally a greater attraction--much as one deplores it.