The Life of Froude Part 11

Spain paid heavily for the persecution of British sailors. In his fifth lecture, Parties in the State, Froude read with dramatic emphasis, and in a singularly impressive manner, the application of a seaman to Elizabeth for leave to attack Philip's men-of-war off the banks of Newfoundland. "Give me five vessels, and I will go out and sink them all, and the galleons shall rot in Cadiz Harbour for want of hands to sail them. But decide, Madam, and decide quickly. Time flies, and will not return. The wings of man's life are plumed with the feathers of death." When he uttered these tragic words, Froude paused, and looked up, and it seemed to those who heard him as if he felt that the time of his own departure was at hand. Elizabeth herself was never moved by sentiment, and final vengeance on Spain had to wait for the Armada, with which these lectures, like the History, conclude. The consequences he left to others who had more years before them than he himself. He loved to dwell on the glories of seamen, especially Devons.h.i.+re seamen, whose descendants he had known from his boyhood. The open sea and the open air, the stars and the waves, were akin to him. His companions sometimes thought that he cared too little for the perils of the deep. A lady who went boating with him, and hazarded the opinion that they would be drowned, got no warmer comfort than "Very likely," which struck her as grim. Probably he knew that there was no danger. He was accustomed to storms, and rather enjoyed them than otherwise. His lectures on the Elizabethan heroes of the sea had a fascination for young Englishmen which no historical discourses ever surpa.s.sed.

These sea-tales were spread over a year, being delivered in the Easter Terms of 1893 and 1894. Before they were finished Froude had begun another course on the life and correspondence of Erasmus. Erasmus is one of the choicest names in the history of letters, the flower of the religious Renaissance. Simply and sincerely pious, he enjoyed without abusing all the pleasures of life, wrote such Latin prose as had not been known since Pliny, and learnt Greek that he might understand the true meaning of the New Testament. Hating the monks of his own time for their ignorance and coa.r.s.eness, he was as learned as any Benedictine of old, and as a master of irony he is like a gentler Pascal, a more reverent Voltaire. He loved England, the England of Archbishop Warham, Dean Colet, and Sir Thomas More. English ladies too were much to his taste, and in his familiar letters he has described their charms with frank appreciation. Priest as he was, and strictly moral, he cultivated an innocent epicureanism, including the collection of ma.n.u.scripts and the exposure of pretentious ignorance in high places. He felt imperfect sympathy with Luther, and his literary criticism would have made no reformation. He was indeed precisely what we now call a Broad Churchman, accepting forms as convenient, though not essential, to faith. No one was better qualified to interpret him than Froude, whose translations of his letters, though free and sometimes loose, are vivid, racy, and idiomatic. Froude was by no means a blind admirer of Erasmus. His favourite heroes were men of action, and he regarded Luther as the real champion of spiritual freedom.

Intellect, he used to say, fought no battles, and was no match for superst.i.tion. Without Luther there would have been no Reformation. There might well have been a Reformation without Erasmus.

Neither of them was necessary according to Contarini, and in truth the Reformation had many sides. When Selden attended the Westminster a.s.sembly of Divines, he took occasion to remind his colleagues that the Scriptures were not written in English. "Perhaps in your little pocket Bibles with gilt leaves" (which they would often pull out and read) "the translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew signifies thus and thus." So he would speak, says Whitelock, and totally silence them. But neither were the Scriptures written in Latin. It was Erasmus who revived the study of the Greek Testament, the charter of the scholar's reformation. He gave the Renaissance, in its origin purely Pagan, a Christian direction, and prevented the divorce of learning from religion. He also protested against the confusion of Christianity with asceticism, and against belief in the superior sanct.i.ty of monks. He turned his satire upon corruption in high places, and did not spare the Holy See. His residence in England, his friends.h.i.+p with More, his admiration for the earlier and better part of Henry VIII.'s career, connected him with events of which Froude had Himself traced the development. Luther moved him sometimes to sarcasm. Toleration and comprehension were the watchwords of Erasmus. "Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed," he said, "to the smallest possible number; you can do it without danger to the realities of Christianity. On other points, either discourage inquiry, or leave every one to believe what he pleases- then we shall have no more quarrels, and religion will again take hold of life." The subject was not a new one to Froude. He had lectured on Erasmus and Luther at Newcastle five-and-twenty years before. The contrast between the two reformers is perennially interesting. Goethe, a supreme critic, thought that reform of the Church should have been left to Erasmus, and that Luther was a misfortune.

But then Goethe, though he understood religious enthusiasm, did not see the need for it, and would have tolerated such a Pope as Leo X., who had excellent taste in literature, rather than see issues submitted to the people which should be left for the learned to decide.

The weak point of Froude's Erasmus is the inaccuracy of its verbal scholars.h.i.+p. "Sir," said Dr. Johnson of a loose scholar, "he makes out the Latin from the meaning, not the meaning from the Latin." This biting sarcasm would be inapplicable to Froude, who knew the dead languages, as they are called, well enough to read them with ease and enjoyment. But he took in the general sense of a pa.s.sage so quickly that he did not always, even in translating, stop to consider the precise significance of every word. Literal conformity with the original text is of course not possible or desirable in a paraphrase. What Froude did not sufficiently consider was the difference between the translation and the translator himself, who cannot paraphrase properly unless he renders literally in his own mind. Froude gave abundant proof of his good faith by quoting in notes some of the very pa.s.sages which are incorrectly rendered above. A great deal has been made by a Catholic critic of the fact that the book which checked Ignatius Loyola's "devotional emotions" was not Erasmus's Greek Testament, but his Enchiridion Militis Christiani, Christian Soldier's Manual. This mistake was unduly favourable to the saint. Froude did not mean to imply that it was the actual words of Scripture which had this effect upon Ignatius. He was referring to the great scholar's own notes, which are polemical, and not intended to please monks. The founder of the Jesuits would have doubtless regarded them as most detestable blasphemy. The Enchiridion, on the other hand, is a purely devotional book, though written for a man of the world.

"My object," says Froude in his Preface, "has been rather to lead historical students to a study of Erasmus's own writings than to provide an abbreviated subst.i.tute for them." The students who took the advice will have found that Froude was guilty of some strange inadvertences, such as mistaking through a misprint a foster brother for a collection of the cla.s.sics, but they will not have discovered anything which substantially impairs the value of his work. His paraphrases were submitted to two competent scholars, who drew up a long and rather formidable list of apparently inaccurate renderings. These were in turn submitted to the accomplished Latinist, Mr. Allen of Corpus, who is editing the Letters of Erasmus for the Clarendon Press. Mr. Allen thought that in several cases Froude had given the true meaning better than a more literal translation would give it. There remain a number of rather trivial slips, which do not appreciably diminish the merit of the best attempt ever made to set Erasmus before English readers in his habit as he was. The Latin of Erasmus is not always easy. He wrote it beautifully, but not naturally, as an exercise in imitation of Cicero. Without a thorough knowledge of Cicero and of Terence he is sometimes unintelligible, in a few cases the text of his letters is corrupt, and in others his real meaning is doubtful. One of the most glaring blunders, "idol" for "old," is obviously due to the printer, and a more careful comparison with the Latin would have easily removed them all. But at seventy-six a little laxity may be pardoned, and these were the only Oxford lectures which Froude himself prepared for the press. The publication of English Seamen and the Council of Trent was posthumous.

Between 1867 and 1893 Froude had become more favourable to Erasmus, or more sympathetic with his point of view. It was not that he admired Luther less. On the contrary, his Protestant convictions grew stronger with years, and to the last he raised his voice against the Anglo-Catholic revival. But he seemed to feel with more force the saying of Erasmus that "the sum of religion is peace." He translated and read out to his cla.s.s the whole of the satiric dialogue held at the gate of Paradise between St. Peter and Julius II., in which the wars of that Pontiff are ruthlessly flagellated, and the wicked old man threatens to take the celestial city by storm. Erasmus, averse as he was from violent measures, had no lack of courage, and in his own name he told the truth about the most dignified ecclesiastics. No artifices imposed upon him, and he acknowledged no master but Christ. He translated the arch-sceptic Lucian, about whom Froude has himself written a delightful essay. "I wish," said Froude, "I wish more of us read Lucian now. He was the greatest man by far outside the Christian Church in the second century." Lucian lived in an age when miracles the most grotesque were supported by witnesses the most serious, and when, as he said, the one safeguard was an obstinate incredulity, the ineradicable certainty that miracles did not happen. Erasmus enjoyed Lucian as a corrective of monkish superst.i.tion, though he himself was essentially Christian. A Protestant he never became. He lived and died in communion with Rome, denounced by monks as a heretic, and by Lutherans as a time-server. Paul III. Would have made him a Cardinal if his means had sufficed for a Prince of the Church. Standing between the two extremes, he saw better than any of his contemporaries the real proportions of things, and Froude's last words on the subject were that students would be most likely to understand the Reformation if they looked at it with the eyes of Erasmus. Small faults notwithstanding, there is no one who has drawn a more vivid, or a more faithful, portrait of Erasmus than Anthony Froude.

Of Froude in his Oxford Chair it may fairly be said that in a short time he fulfilled a long time, and made more impression upon the under-graduates in a few months than Stubbs had made in as many years. It was not so much the love of learning that he inspired, though the range of his studies was wide, as enthusiasm for history because it was the history of England. His subjects were really English. Erasmus knew England thoroughly, and would have been an Englishman if he could. The Council of Trent failed to check the Reformation, and England without the Reformation would have been a different country, if not a province of Spain. Froude's lectures were events, landmarks in the intellectual life of Oxford, and the young men who came to him for advice went away not merely with dry facts, but with fructifying ideas. Distasteful as modern Parliamentary politics were to him, the position of the British Empire in the world was the dominant fact in his mind, and he regarded Oxford as a training-ground of imperial statesmans.h.i.+p.

He was not made to run in harness, or to act as a coach for the schools. "The teaching business at Oxford," he wrote to Skelton, after his last term, "goes at high pressure-in itself utterly absurd, and unsuited altogether to an old stager like myself. The undergraduates come about me in large numbers, and I have a.s.serted in some sense my own freedom; but one cannot escape the tyranny of the system."* This is severe, though not perhaps severer than the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Firth. To a critic from the outside it seems that Boards of Studies should have power to relax their own rules, and that the utmost possible relaxation should have been granted in the case of Froude. A famous historian of seventy-four, if qualified to be a Professor at all, must be capable of managing his own work so that it may be most useful and efficient. The restrictions of which Froude, not alone, complained are really incompatible with Regius Professors.h.i.+ps, or at least with the patronage of the Crown. They imply that the teaching branch of the University is to be entirely controlled by expert specialists on the spot. A Regius Professor is a national inst.i.tution, a public man, not like a college tutor, who has purely local functions to discharge. That is a point on which Freeman would have agreed with Froude, and Stubbs would have agreed with both of them. Froude's success in spite of limitations does not show that they were wise, but that genius surmounts obstacles and breaks the barriers which seek to impede it. "To my sorrow I am popular," he said, "and my room is crowded. I know not who they are, and have no means of knowing. So it is not satisfactory. I must alter things somehow.

- * Table Talk of s.h.i.+rley, p. 222. -

I can't yet tell how." The opportunity never came. But he was too old and too wise a man to let such things affect his happiness, and he was happier in Oxford than in London. "Some of the old Dons," he wrote, "have been rather touchingly kind."

There was indeed only one chance of escaping Froude's magnetism, and that was to keep out of his way. The charm of his company was always irresistible. Different as the Oxford of 1893 was from the Oxford of 1843, young men are always the same, and Froude thoroughly understood them. He had enjoyed himself at Oriel not as a reading recluse, but as a boy out of school, and he was as young in heart as ever. Strange is the hold that Oxford lays upon men, and not less strong than strange. Nothing weakens it; neither time, nor distance, nor success, nor failure, nor the revolution of opinion, nor the deaths of friends. Oxford had been unjust to Froude, and had driven out one of her most ill.u.s.trious sons in something like disgrace. Yet he never wavered in his affection for her, and the many vicissitudes of his life he came back to Oriel with the spirits of a boy. The spells of Oxford, like the spells of Medea, disperse the weight of years.

CHAPTER XI

THE END

He lectures on Erasmus were not public; they were delivered in Froude's private house at Cherwell Edge, and attended only by members of the University reading for the Modern History School. His public lectures on the Council of Trent and on English seamen had been so much crowded by men and women, young and old, that candidates for honours in history were scarcely able to find room. Nothing could be more honourable to Froude, or to Oxford, than his enthusiastic reception by his old University at the close of his brilliant and laborious career. But it was too much for him. Like Voltaire in Paris, he was stifled with flowers. His twentieth discourse on Erasmus begins with the pathetic sentence, "This will be my last lecture, for the life of Erasmus was drawing to an end." So was his own. His final task in this world was the preparation of Erasmus for the press. He had been all his life accustomed to work at his own time, and the strain of living by rule at Oxford had told upon him more than he knew. Before the end of the summer term in 1894 he left Oxford for Devons.h.i.+re, worn out and broken down. "Education," he wrote in his last letter to Skelton, "like so much else in these days, has gone mad, and has turned into a large examination mill." He was so much exhausted that he could not go again to Norway with Lord Ducie,* though with characteristic pluck he half thought of paying another visit to Sir George Grey in New Zealand. But it was not to be. During the summer his strength failed, and it became known that the disorder was incurable. With philosophic calmness he awaited the inevitable close, feeling, as he had always felt, that he was in the hands of G.o.d. His religion, very deep, constant, and genuine, was not a spiritual emotion, nor a dogmatic creed, but a calm and steady confidence that, whatever weak mortals might do, the Judge of all the earth would do right. "It is impossible," said Emerson, whom he loved and admired, "for a man not to be always praying." The relations of such men with the unseen are an inseparable part of their daily lives. Froude had no more sympathy with the self-complacent "agnosticism" of modern thought than he had with Catholic authority or ecstatic revivalism. To fear G.o.d and to keep His commandments was with him the whole duty of man. The materialistic hypothesis he rejected as incredible, explaining nothing, meaning nothing, a presumptuous attempt to put ignorance in the place of knowledge.

- * "Ducie wanted me to go to Norway with him, salmon-fis.h.i.+ng; but I didn't feel that I could do justice to the opportunity. In the debased state to which I am reduced, if I hooked a thirty-pound salmon, I should only pray him to get off."-Table Talk of s.h.i.+rley, pp. 222, 223. -

His soul had always dwelt apart. His early training did not encourage spiritual sympathy, and, except in his books, he habitually kept silence on ultimate things. But he had always thought of them; and as he lay dying, in almost the last moments of consciousness, he repeated dearly to himself those great, those superhuman lines which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Macbeth between his wife's death and his own.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle; Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more.

Still later he murmured, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

He died on the 20th of October, 1894, and was buried at Salcombe in his beloved Devons.h.i.+re not far from his beloved sea. He "made his everlasting mansion upon the beached verge of the salt flood." By his own particular desire he was described on his tombstone as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, so deeply did he feel the complete though tardy recognition of the place he had made for himself among English historians. Otherwise he was the most una.s.suming of men, simple and natural in manner, never putting himself forward, patient under the most hostile criticism which did not impugn his personal veracity. Although the malice of Freeman did once provoke him to a retort the more deadly because it was restrained, he suffered in silence all the detraction which followed the reminiscences and the biography of Carlyle. His temper was singularly placable, and he bore no malice. His father and his eldest brother had not treated him wisely or kindly. But neither of Hurrell Froude nor of the Archdeacon did he ever speak except with admiration and respect. His early training hardened him, and perhaps accounts for the indifference to cruelty which sometimes disfigures his pages. He did not know what a mother's affection was before he had a wife and children of his own. Before he became an honour to his family he was regarded as a disgrace to it, and not until the first two volumes of the History appeared did his father believe that there was any good in him. Yet the Archdeacon was always his ideal clergyman, and the Church of England as it stood before the Oxford Movement was his model communion. With the Evangelical party, represented to him by his Irish friend, Mr. Cleaver, he had sympathetic relations, and practical, though not doctrinal, agreement. His temporary leaning towards Tractarianism was no more than personal admiration for Newman, and he took orders not because he was a High Churchman, but because he was a Fellow. Yet it was in some respects a fortunate accident, which, by shutting him out from other professions, drove him into literature. Fiction he soon learned to avoid, for his early experiments in it were failures, and in later years his least successful book, with all its eloquence, was The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. As an historical writer he has few superiors, and his essays are among the most delightful in our tongue. To a.n.a.lyse his style is as difficult as not to feel the charm of it. It is as smooth as the motion of a s.h.i.+p sailing on a calm sea, and yet it is never fiat nor tame.

Although Froude, like Newman, belonged to the Oriel school, he has a spirit which is not of any school, which breathes from the wide ocean and the liquid air. He wrote, for all his scholarly grace, like a man of flesh and blood, not a pedant nor a doctrinaire. Impartial he never was, nor pretended to be. Dramatic he could not help being, and yet his own opinions were seldom concealed. Three or four main propositions were at the root of his mind. He held the Reformation to be the greatest and most beneficent change in modern history. He believed the English race to be the finest in the world. He disbelieved in equality, and in Parliamentary government. Essentially an aristocrat in the proper sense of the term, he cherished the doctrine of submission to a few fit persons, qualified for authority by training and experience. These ideas run through all Froude's historical writing, which takes from them its trend and colour. Whatever else the male Tudors may have been, they were emphatically men; and even Elizabeth, whom Froude did not love, had a commanding spirit. Except poor priest-ridden Mary, who had a Spanish mother and a Spanish husband, they did not brook control, and no one was ever more conscious of being a king than Henry VIII. To him, as to Elizabeth, the Reformation was not dogmatic but practical, the subjection of the Church to the State. The struggle between Pope and sovereign had to be fought out before the struggle between sovereign and Parliament could begin.

Liberals thought that Froude would not have been on the side of the Parliament, and they joined High Churchmen in attacking him. Spiritual and democratic power were to him equally obnoxious. He delighted in Plato's simile of the s.h.i.+p, where the majority are nothing, and the captain rules. His opinions were not popular, except his dislike for the Church of Rome. He is read partly for his exquisite diction, and partly for the patriotic fervour with which he rejoices in the achievements of England, especially on sea.

Rossetti's fine burden:

Lands are swayed by a king on a throne, The sea hath no king but G.o.d alone: might be a motto for the t.i.tle-page of Froude. The fallacy that brilliant writers are superficial accounts for much of the prejudice in academic circles against which Froude had to contend. To him of all men it was inapplicable, for no historian studied original doc.u.ments with greater zest. That he did not know his period n.o.body could pretend. He knew it so much better than his critics that few of them could even criticise him intelligently. That he was not thoroughly acquainted with the periods preceding his own may be more plausibly argued. There must of course be some limit. The siege of Troy can be told without mention of Leda's egg. But if Froude had given a little more time to Henry VII., and all that followed the Battle of Bosworth, he would have approached the fall of Wolsey and the rise of Cromwell with a more thorough understanding of cause and effect. His mind moved with great rapidity, and went so directly to the point that the circ.u.mstances were not always fully weighed. It is possible to see the truth too clearly, without allowance for drawbacks and qualifications. The important fact about Henry, for instance, is that he was a statesman who had to provide for a peaceful succession. But he was also a wilful, headstrong, arbitrary man, spoiled from his cradle by flatterers, and determined to have his own way. Froude saw the absurdity of the Blue-beard delusion, and did immense service in exposing it. He would have given no handle to his Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic enemies if he had acknowledged that there was an explanation of the error. He was sometimes carried away by his own eloquence, and his convictions grew stronger as he expressed them, until the facts on the other side looked so small that they were ignored.

History deals, and can only deal, with consequences and results. Motives and Intentions, however interesting, belong to another sphere. Henry and Cromwell, Mary and Pole, Elizabeth and Cecil, are tried in Froude's pages by the simple test of what they did, or failed to do, for England. Froude detested and despised the cosmopolitan philosophy which regards patriotic sentiment as a relic of barbarism. He was not merely an historian of England, but also an English historian; and holding Fisher to be a traitor, he did not hesitate to justify the execution of a pious, even saintly man. Fisher would no doubt have said that it was far more important to preserve the Catholic faith in England than to keep England independent of Spain. Froude would have replied that unless the nation punished those who sought for the aid of Spanish troops against their own countrymen, she would soon cease to be a nation at all. His critics evaded the point, and took refuge in talk about b.l.o.o.d.y tyrants wreaking vengeance upon harmless old men.

If patriotism be not a disqualification for an historian, Froude had none. Like every other writer, he made mistakes. But he was laborious in research, a master of narrative, with a genius for seizing dramatic points. Above all, he had imagination, without which the vastest knowledge is as a s.h.i.+p without sails, or a bird without wings. His objects, even his prejudices, were frankly avowed, and his prejudices gave way to fresh facts or reasons. The records at Simancas, for instance, completely changed, and changed for the worse, his estimate of Queen Elizabeth's character, and he admitted it at once with his transparent candour. To defend Froude against mendacity seems like an insult to his memory, for if he loved anything it was truth, though he sometimes spoke in a cynical way about the difficulty of attaining it. But such monstrous charges were made against him when he could no longer reply for himself that I may be forgiven for quoting an authority which will command general respect. Mr. Andrew Lang is as scrupulously accurate in statement as he is brilliantly felicitous in style. He has studied the history of the sixteenth century, especially in Scotland, and he disagrees with Froude on many, if not on most, of the points in dispute. Yet this is Mr. Lang's deliberate judgment:

"I have found Mr. Froude often in error; often, as I think, misunderstanding, misquoting, omitting and even adding, but I have never once seen reason to suspect him of conscious misrepresentation, of knowingly giving a false impression. ... It is easy to show that Mr. Froude erred contrary to his bias on occasion, and it must never be forgotten that he did what no consciously dishonest historian could possibly do. He deposited at the British Museum copies, in the original Spanish, of the doc.u.ments, very difficult of access, which he used in his History. By aid of these transcripts, we can find him slipping into errors, and his action in presenting the country with the means of correcting his mistakes proves beyond doubt that he did not consciously make mistakes. There is no way in which this conclusion can be evaded. No historian was more honest than Mr. Froude, though few or none of his merit have been so fallible."

How many historians of his merit have there been? He had no contemporary rival in England, for Carlyle and Macaulay belonged to a previous generation. There was certainly no one living when Froude died who could have written the famous pa.s.sage in the first chapter of his History about the decay of mediaevalism:

"For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still are hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were pa.s.sing away, and the faith and the 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce; and the fair 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 were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone-like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English themselves 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 before the silent figures sleeping on the 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 the middle age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."

Although Froude cared little for music, the rhythm of his sentences is musical, and the organ-note of the opening words in the quotation carries a reminiscence of Tacitus which will not escape the cla.s.sical reader. That is literary artifice, though a very high form of it. The real merit of the paragraph is not so much its eloquence as its insight into the depth of things. Many respectable historians see only the outward lineaments. Froude saw the nation's heart and soul. It was the same with the great man whose biographer Froude became. Carlyle's faults would have been impossible in a character mean or small. They were the defects of his qualities, those

Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,

which do not wait to appear till the last scene of life. Now that more than twenty years have pa.s.sed since the final volumes of the Life were published, it may be said with confidence that Carlyle owes almost as much to Froude as to his own writings for his high and enduring fame. "Though the lives of the Carlyles were not happy," says Froude, "yet, if we look at them from the beginning to the end, they were grandly beautiful. Neither of them probably under other conditions would have risen to as high an excellence as in fact they each actually achieved; and the main question is not how happy men and women have been in this world, but what they have made of themselves."* The loftier a man's own view of mental conceptions and sublunary things, the more will he admire Carlyle as described by Froude. The same Carlyle who made a ridiculous fuss about trifles confronted the real evils and trials of life with a dignity, courage, and composure which inspire humble reverence rather than vulgar admiration. Froude rightly felt that Carlyle's petty grumbles, often most amusing, throw into bright and strong relief his splendid generosity to his kinsfolk, his manly pride in writing what was good instead of what was lucrative, his anxiety that Mill should not perceive what he lost in the first volume of The French Revolution. Whenever a crisis came, Carlyle stood the test. The greater the occasion, the better he behaved. One thing Froude did not give, and perhaps no biographer could. Carlyle was essentially a humourist. He laughed heartily at other people, and not less heartily at himself. When he was letting himself go, and indulging freely in the most lurid denunciations of all and sundry, he would give a peculiar and most significant chuckle which cannot be put into print. It was a warning not to take him literally, which has too often pa.s.sed unheeded. He has been compared with Swift, but he was not really a misanthropist, and no man loved laughter more, or could excite more uproarious merriment in others. I remember a sober Scotsman, by no means addicted to frivolous merriment, telling me that he had come out of Carlyle's house in physical pain from continuous laughter at an imaginary dialogue between a missionary and a negro which Carlyle had conducted entirely himself.

- * Carlyle's Early Life, i. 381. -

Carlyle, it must be remembered, knew Froude's historical methods quite as well as he knew Froude. It was because he knew them, and approved of them, that he asked Froude to be the historian of Cheyne Row. Froude's devotion to him had indeed been singular. During the last decade of his life Carlyle was very feeble, and required constant care. He came to lean upon Froude more and more, requiring his company in walks, and even in omnibuses, until Froude almost ceased to be his own master. The lecturing tour in the United States and the political visits to South Africa were permitted, because they were thought right. But Fraser's Magazine had to be given up, partly that employment might be found for a young man in whom Carlyle was interested, and the project for a new history of Charles V. was perforce abandoned. It has been said, though not by any one who knew the facts, that Froude profited in a pecuniary sense by exchanging history for biography. The exact opposite is the truth. From 1866 to 1869, the last years of his great book, Froude received from Messrs. Longman about fourteen hundred pounds a year, including his salary as editor of Fraser, which he relinquished at Carlyle's bidding. From 1877 to 1884 he did not receive more than seven hundred. Two volumes of history brought in about as much as three of biography, and there is no reason to suppose that Charles V. would have proved less popular than Henry VIII. or Elizabeth. Froude was unusually prosperous and successful as a man of letters, though it is of course impossible for the highest literary work to be adequately paid. He had to deal with liberal publishers, and after 1856 his position as a writer was a.s.sured. The idea that necessity drove him to fill his pockets at the expense of a dead friend's reputation is as preposterous in his case as it would have been in Lockhart's or Stanley's.

Had Froude been the cynic he is often called, he would have borne with callous indifference, as he did bear in dignified silence, the attacks made upon him for his revelations of Carlyle. But Froude was not what he seemed. Behind his stately presence, and lofty manner, and calmly audacious speech, there was a singularly sensitive nature. He would do what he thought right with perfect fearlessness, and without a moment's hesitation. When the consequences followed he was not always prepared for them, and people who were not worth thinking about could give him pain. Human beings are composite creatures, and the feminine element in man is more obvious than the masculine element in woman. Froude had a feminine disposition to be guided by feeling, and to remember old grievances as vividly as if they had happened the day before. He was also a typical west countryman in habit of mind, as well as in face, figure, and speech. His beautiful voice, exquisitely modulated, never raised in talk, was thoroughly Devonian. So too were his imperfect sense of the effect produced by what he said upon ordinary minds, and his love, which might almost be called mischievous, of giving small electric shocks. In the case of Carlyle, however, the out-cry was wholly unexpected, and for a time he was distressed, though never mastered, by it. What he could not understand, what it took him a long time to live down, was that friends who really knew him should believe him capable of baseness and treachery. Now that it is all over, that Froude's biography has taken its place in cla.s.sical literature, and that Mrs. Carlyle's letters are acknowledged to be among the best in the language, the whole story appears like a nightmare. But it was real enough twenty years ago, when people who never read books of any kind thought that Froude was the name of the man that whitewashed Henry VIII. and blackened Carlyle. Froude would probably have been happier if he had turned upon his a.s.sailants once for all, as he once finally and decisively turned upon Freeman. Freeman, however, was an open enemy. A false friend is a more difficult person to dispose of, and even to deny the charge of deliberate treachery hardly consistent with self-respect. Long before Froude died the clamour against him had by all decent people been dropped. But he himself continued to feel the effect of it until he became Professor of History at Oxford. That rehabilitated him, where only he required it, in his own eyes. It was a public recognition by the country through the Prime Minister of the honour he had reflected upon Oxford since his virtual expulsion in 1849, and he felt himself again. From that time the whole incident was blotted from his mind, and he forgot that some of his friends had forgotten the meaning of friends.h.i.+p. The last two years of his life were indeed the fullest he had ever known. Forty-two lectures in two terms at the age of seventy-four are a serious undertaking. Happily he knew the sixteenth century so well that the process of refres.h.i.+ng his memory was rather a pleasure than a task, and he could have written good English in his sleep. Yet few even of his warmest admirers expected that in a year and a half he would compose three volumes which both for style and for substance are on a level with the best work of his prime. It was less surprising, and intensely characteristic, that his subjects should be the Reformation and the sea.

Froude's religious position is best stated in his own words, written when he was in South Africa, to a member of his family:

"I know by sad experience much of what is pa.s.sing in your mind. Although my young days were chequered with much which I look back on with regret and shame, still I believe I always tried to learn what was true, and when I had found it to stick to it. The High Church theology was long attractive to me, but then I found, or thought I found, that it had no foundation, and indeed that very few of its professors in their heart of hearts believed what they were saying. Apostolic Succession, Sacramental Grace, and the rest of it, are very pretty, but are they facts? Is it a fact that any special mysterious power is communicated by a Bishop's hands? Is it a fact that a child's nature is changed by water and words-or that the bread when it is broken ceases to be bread? We cannot tell that it is not so, you say. But can we tell that it is so? and we ought to be able to tell before we believe it. All that fell away from me when I came in contact with the Cleavers and their friends. Their views never commended themselves to me wholly; but at least they were spiritual and not material. And election is a fact, although they express it oddly-and so is reprobation-and so is what they say of free will, and so is conversion. It is true that we bring natures into the world which are moulded by circ.u.mstances and by their own tendencies, as clay in the hands of the potter. Look round you and see that some are made for honour and some for dishonour. So far I agree with the Evangelicals still, and I agree too with them that if what they call faith-that is, a distinct conviction of sin, a resolution to say to oneself "Sammy, my boy, this won't do,"* a perception and love for what is right and good, and a loathing of the old self-can be put into one, and by the grace of G.o.d we see that it can be and is-the whole nature is changed, is what we call regenerated. This is certain-and it is to me certain also that the world and we who live in it, with all these mysterious conditions of our being, are no creation of accident or blind law. We were created for purposes unknown to us by Almighty G.o.d, who is using us and training us for His own objects-objects wholly unconceivable by us, but nevertheless which we know to exist, for Intelligence never works but for an end.

- * The reference is to Thackeray's story of a hairdresser named Samuel, who remarked, "Mr. Thackeray, there comes a time in the life of every man when he says to himself, 'Sammy, my boy, this won't do.'" The story was an especial favourite of Froude's. -

"Of other things which are popularly called religion, I have my opinion positive and negative. But religion to me is not opinion it is certainty. I cannot govern my actions or guide my deepest convictions by probabilities. The laws which we are to obey and the obligations to obey them are part of my being of which I am as sure as that I am alive. The things to argue about are by their nature uncertain, and therefore it is to me inconceivable that in them can lie Religion. I cannot tell whether these thoughts will be of any help to you. But it is better, in my judgment, to remain a proselyte of the gate-resolute to remain there till one receives a genuine conviction of some truths beyond-than for imagined relief from the pain of suspense to take up by an act of will a complete system of belief, Catholic or Calvinistic, and insist to one's own soul that it is, was, and shall be the whole and complete truth. Some people do this-deliberately blind their eyes, and because they never see again declare loudly that no one else can see. Other people, less happy, find by experience that they cannot believe what they have taken to in this way, and fly for a change to the next theory and then to the next. I remain for myself unconvinced of much which is generally called the essential part of things; but convinced with all my heart of what I regard as essential."

Froude made no secret of his religious opinions and they may be collected from his numerous books, especially perhaps from The Oxford Counter-Reformation. A curious paper, first published in 1879, called "A Siding at a Railway Station," is one of his most direct utterances on the subject. It will be found in the fourth series of Short Studies, and is in many respects the most remarkable of them all. "Some years' ago," it begins, "I was travelling by railway, no matter whence or whither." The railway is life, and the siding at which the train was suddenly stopped is the end that awaits all travellers through this world. The examination of the luggage is the judgment which will be pa.s.sed upon all human actions hereafter. Wages received are placed on one side, and value to mankind of service rendered on the other. Naturally working men come out best. The worst show is made by idle and luxurious grandees. Authors occupy a middle position, and in Froude's own books "chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean as if no compositor had ever laboured in setting type for it. Pale and illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly prided myself. A few pa.s.sages, however, survived here and there at long intervals. They were those on which I had laboured least and had almost forgotten, or those, as I observed in one or two instances, which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly journals." The hit at The Sat.u.r.day Review is amusing enough, and Froude goes on to plead successfully that though he may have been ignorant, prejudiced, or careless, no charge of dishonesty could be established against him. Apart from his own personal case, the allegory means little more than the gospel of work which is the n.o.blest part in the teaching of Carlyle. t.i.tled personages come off badly, and the most ridiculous figure in the motley throng is an Archbishop. Not much sympathy is shown with any one, except with a widow who hopes to rejoin her husband, and sympathy is all that Froude can give her.

Of Froude's friends.h.i.+ps much has been said. They were numerous, and drawn from very different cla.s.ses. Beginning at Oxford, they increased rather than diminished throughout his life, notwithstanding the gaps which death inevitably and inexorably made. To one Fellow of Exeter who stood by him in his troubles, George Butler, afterwards Canon of Winchester, he remained always attached. Dean Stanley throughout life he loved, and another clerical friend, Cowley Powles. Of the many persons who felt Clough's early death as an irreparable calamity there was hardly one who felt it more than Froude. His affectionate reverence for Newman was proof against a mental and moral antagonism which could not be bridged. After Kingsley's death he wrote, from the Molt, to Mrs. Kingsley: "Dearest f.a.n.n.y,-You tell me not to write, so I will say nothing beyond telling you how deeply I am affected by your thought of me. The old times are as fresh in my mind as in yours. You and Charles were the best and truest friends I ever had. We shall soon be all together again. G.o.d bless you now and in eternity.

"Your affectionate. J. A. FROUDE."

"Cowley Powles is here. It was he who first took me to Eversley."

It was when he came to London that Froude enlarged the circle of his friends, Carlyle being the greatest and the chief. Among the contributors to Fraser's Magazine those whom he knew best were the late Sir John Skelton, "s.h.i.+rley," and the present Sir Theodore Martin, the biographer of the Prince Consort, whom some still prefer to a.s.sociate with those delightful parodies, the Bon Gaultier Ballads. The enumeration of Froude's London acquaintances would be merely a social chronicle, with the supplement of some names, such as General Cluseret's, quite outside the ordinary groove. He could get on with any one, and he was interested in every one who had interesting qualities. After his second marriage his dinner-parties in Onslow Gardens were famous for their brilliancy and charm. His magnetic personality drew from people whatever they had, while his ease of manner made them feel at home. It was perhaps because he never pretended to know anything that only scholars realised how much he knew, and that he seemed to be not so much a man of letters as a man of the world. Of all the friends he made in later life there was not one that he valued more highly than Lord Wolseley. "I have been staying," he wrote to his daughter, from South Africa, "with Sir Garnet Wolseley and his brilliant staff. It was worth a voyage to South Africa to make so intimate an acquaintance with him." After his second return from the Cape, when his social life in London was taken up again, with his eldest daughter in her step- mother's place, there were added to the military and naval officers he had met, the Irish Protestants, who regarded him as their champion, and the wide circle of his ordinary a.s.sociates, an Africander contingent, made up of all parties in that troubled area. There were, in fact, few phases of human life with which Froude was not familiar, from Devons.h.i.+re fishermen to Cabinet Ministers. Although he knew and admired Mr. Chamberlain, his greatest political friends were Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby, with whom he almost invariably agreed. The man of science whom, after his own brother, he knew best, was Tyndall. Men of letters were familiar to him in every degree. Among the houses where he was a frequent and welcome guest were Knowsley, Highclere, Tortworth, and Castle Howard. In his own family there were troubles and bereavements. His eldest son, who died before him, gave him much trouble and anxiety. His second daughter died of consumption a few months after her stepmother, while he was in South Africa alone. Otherwise, his relations with his children were perfect and unbroken, for no father was more beloved and adored. Indeed, all intelligent children delighted in his company, because they could not help understanding him, and yet he paid them the acceptable compliment of talking to them as if they were grown up.

There is nothing in the world more evanescent than good conversation. Froude was one of the best and most agreeable talkers of his day. He could talk to old and young, to men, women, and children, to Devons.h.i.+re seamen or labourers, to the most highly cultivated society of Oxford or London, with equal ease and equal enjoyment. He never tried to monopolise the conversation, and yet somehow the chief share fell naturally to him. If he were bored, he could be as silent as the grave. But when his interest was roused, and most things roused it, he always had something pointed and forcible to say. He was not always a sympathetic hearer. Once he sat between two extremely intellectual women who considered themselves leaders of advanced thought. When they left the room after dinner he turned to a friend of mine, and said simply, "I think all these bigots ought to be burnt." Such deplorable intolerance was happily rare. Less rare, perhaps, were his irresistible sense of the ludicrous and irrepressible tendency to sarcasm. Of a famous clergyman he said, "At least they have not put him into a bishop's ap.r.o.n, the emblem of our first parents' shame." "What can education do for a man," he once asked, "except enable him to tell a lie in five ways instead of one?" As a rule, Froude, like most good talkers, listened well, and responded readily. If he had not Carlyle's rich, exuberant humour, he was also without the prophet's leaning to dogmatism and anathema. Sardonic irony was his nearest approach to an offensive weapon, and even in that he was sparing. But he had a look which seemed to say, "Don't offer me any theories, or creeds, or speculations, for I have tried them all."

Perhaps I may be permitted in this connection to describe my one and only experience of Froude and his ways. It was after dinner, and the talk had fallen into the hands, or the mouth, of an eminent administrator, who seemed to be a pillar, a model of talent and virtue. His language was copious, his subject "schoolmaster Bishops," and the services they had rendered to the Church of England. Bishop Blomfield, for example, had procured the appointment of the Ecclesiastical Commission. There might, for aught we knew, be endless examples, and the prospect was appalling. The host was a Roman Catholic, and the guests were not ecclesiastical. Froude came to the rescue. In a gentle voice, and with the air of an anxious inquirer, he asked whether Dr. Blomfield had happened to acquaint the Commissioners with the nature and extent of his own emoluments. Then, without pausing for a reply, he added, still gently, "Because it always used to be said that there were only two persons who knew what the Bishop of London's income was; himself and the devil." The remark may not have been a new one. It was not offered as such, but it served its purpose, for the interrupted lecture was never resumed.

Froude's vast reading and his wide human experience enabled him to hold his own in any company, but he never paraded his knowledge, or lay in wait to trip people up. Although the prospect of going out worried him, and his first impulse was to refuse an invitation, he enjoyed society when he was in it, being neither vain nor shy. At Oxford he could not dine out. Late hours interfered with his work. But he was hospitable both to tutors and to undergraduates, liking to show himself at home in the old place. Except for the failure of his health, perhaps in spite of it, his enjoyment of his Oxford professors.h.i.+p was unmixed. He did not hold it long enough to feel the brevity of the generations which makes the real sadness of the place. Many ghosts he must have seen, but he had reached an age when men are prepared for them, and his academic career in the forties had come to such an unfortunate end that comparison of the past with the present can only have been cheerful and honourable. He found a Provost of Oriel and a Rector of Exeter who could read his books, and appreciate them, without prejudice against the author. But indeed, though he was capable of being profoundly bored, he was at his ease in the most diverse societies, and no form of conversation not absolutely foolish came amiss to him. He had read so many books, and seen so much of the world, he held such strong opinions, and expressed them with such placid freedom, that he never failed to command attention, or to deserve it. Contemptuous enough, perhaps too contemptuous, of human frailties, he at least knew how to make them entertaining, and his urbane irony dissolved pretentious egoism.

It is a familiar saying that men's characters and habits are formed in the earliest years of their lives. Froude was by profession and by choice a man of letters. He loved writing, and whatever he read, or heard, or saw, turned itself without effort into literary shape. The occupations and amus.e.m.e.nts of his life can be traced in his Short Studies. But he had not been reared in a literary atmosphere. He had been brought up among horses and dogs, with grooms and keepers, on the moors and the sea. He describes it himself as "the old wild scratch way, when the keeper was the rabbit-catcher, and sporting was enjoyed more for the adventure than for the bag." He never lost his love of sport, and he gave his own son the same training he had himself. Even in his last illness he liked the young man to go out shooting, and always asked what sport he had had. His own father had been a country gentleman, as well as a clergyman, and his brothers, while their health lasted, all rode to hounds. He himself never forgot how he had been put by Robert on a horse without a saddle, and thrown seventeen times in one afternoon without hurting himself on the soft Devons.h.i.+re gra.s.s. He went out shooting with his brothers long before he could himself shoot. For his first two years at Oxford he had done little except ride, and boat, and play tennis. At Plas Gwynant he was as much out of doors as in, and even to the last his physical enjoyment of an expedition in the open air was intense. Yet this was the same man who could sit patiently down at Simancas in a room full of dusty, disorderly doc.u.ments, ill written in a foreign tongue, and patiently decipher them all. If a healthy mind in a healthy body be, as the Roman satirist says, the greatest of blessings, Froude was certainly blessed. The hardness of his frame, and the soundness of his nerves, gave him the imperturbable temper which Marlborough is said to have valued more than money itself. Of money Froude was always careful, and he was most judicious in his investments. He held the Puritan view of luxury as a thing bad in itself, and the parent of evil, relaxing the moral fibre. The sternness of temperament he had inherited from his father was concealed by an easy, sociable disposition, inclined to make the best of the present, but it was always there. In the struggle between Knox and Mary Stuart all his sympathies are with Knox, who had the root of the matter in him, Calvinism and the moral law. Few imaginative artists could have resisted as he did the temptation to draw a dazzling picture of Mary's charms and accomplishments, scholars.h.i.+p and statesmans.h.i.+p, beauty and wit. Froude felt of her as Jehu felt of Jezebel, that she was the enemy of the people of G.o.d. So with his own contemporaries, such as Carlyle's "copper captain," Louis Napoleon.

He was never dazzled by the blaze of the Tuileries and the glare of temporary success. He might have said after Boileau, J' appelle un chat un chat, et Louis un fripon.

The peculiarity of Froude's nature was to combine this firm foundation with superficial layers of cynicism, paradox, and irony, as in his apology for the rack, his character of Henry VIII., his defence of Cranmer's churchmans.h.i.+p, and Parker's. He shared with Carlyle the belief that conventional views were sham views, and ought to be exposed. Ridicule, if not a test of truth, is at all events a weapon against falsehood, and has done much to clear the air of history. Froude's sense of humour was rather receptive than expansive, and he did not often display it in his writings. Tristram Shandy he knew almost by heart, and he never tired of Candide, or Zadig.