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The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

H >> Herbert Paul >> The Life of Froude




Froude's own judgment is given in a letter to Lady Derby, which
contains also much interesting speculation on South African
politics. Lord Derby, it will be remembered, was at that time
Secretary of State for the Colonies.

"October 14th, 1884.--Carlyle in London comes out this week. I loved
and honoured him above all living men, and with this feeling I have
done my best to produce a faithful likeness of him. This is a
consolation to me, if the only one I am likely to have. We shall
see. I am very anxious about South Africa. I have written twice at
length to Lord Derby. Unfortunately my view is the exact opposite to
that which is generally taken. Lord D. is evidently being driven
into active measures against his will. My fear is that there will be
some half-action insufficient to crush the Dutch, and sufficient to
exasperate them. He relies on the promised support of the Colonial
Ministry. They may promise, but I will believe only when I see it
that a Cape Ministry and Legislature will oppose the Boers in
earnest. They will encourage us to entangle ourselves, as they did
with the Diamond Fields, and then leave us to get out of the mess as
we can. South Africa cannot be self-governed in connection with this
country, except with the good-will of the Dutch population. Enough
may have been done, however, to quiet Parliament (which knows
nothing about the matter) in the approaching Session--and that, I
suppose, is the chief consideration. Carnarvon writes to me
preliminary, I suppose, to some attack when Government meets. I have
told him exactly what I have told Lord D. I hope I may turn out
mistaken, but the course of things so far has generally confirmed my
opinion whenever I have seen my way to forming one. I shall be glad
to hear what you think about the book. From you I shall get the
friendliest judgment that the circumstances admit of, and if you are
dissatisfied I shall know what to look for from others. The last two
hundred pages are the most interesting. The drift of the whole is
that Carlyle was by far the most remarkable man of his time--that
five hundred years hence he will be the only one of us all whose
name will be so much as remembered, while perhaps he may be one who
will have reshaped in a permanent form the religious belief of
mankind. Therefore he ought to be known exactly as he was. The
argument will not be felt by those who disbelieve in his greatness,
and the idolaters--those who pretend to worship without believing-
will be savagest of all. Idols must be draped in fine clothes, and
are reduced to nothing by mere human garments."

Perhaps the fullest, and certainly the least reserved, account of
Froude's own feelings about the book is contained in a letter to
Mrs. Charles Kingsley:

"I tell Longmans to-day to send you the book. If you can find time,
I shall like to hear the independent impression it makes upon you.
Only remember this: that it was Carlyle's own determination (or at
least desire) to do justice to his wife, and to do public penance
himself--a desire which I think so noble as to obliterate in my own
mind the occasion there was for it. I have long known the worst, and
Charles knew it generally. We all knew it, and yet the more
intimately I knew Carlyle, the more I loved and admired him; and
some people, Lord Derby, for instance, after reading the Life, can
tell me that their opinion of him is rather raised than diminished.
There is something demonic both in him and her which will never be
adequately understood; but the hearts of both of them were sound and
true to the last fibre. You may guess what difficulty mine has been,
and how weary the responsibility. You may guess, too, how dreary it
is to me to hear myself praised for frankness, when I find the world
all fastening on C.'s faults, while the splendid qualities are
ignored or forgotten. Let them look into their own miserable souls,
and ask themselves how they could bear to have their own private
histories ransacked and laid bare. I deliberately say (and I have
said it in the book), that C.'s was the finest nature I have ever
known. It is a Rembrandt picture, but what a picture! Ruskin, too,
understands him, and feels too, as he should, for me, if that
mattered, which it doesn't in the least."

A few years after publication the Reminiscences ran out of print,
and Froude was anxious to bring out a corrected edition. Mrs.
Alexander Carlyle, however, wished for another editor. The copyright
was Froude's, and no one could reprint the book in Great Britain
without his consent. At that time there was no international
copyright between the United Kingdom and the United States. A
distinguished American professor, Mr. Eliot Norton, was invited by
Mary Carlyle to re-edit the book beyond the Atlantic, and he
undertook the task. Froude always thought that Professor Norton
should have communicated with him, and the public will probably be
of the same opinion. In the end, however, Froude voluntarily
assigned the copyright to Mrs. Carlyle, who then had possession of
the papers, and Mr. Norton's edition appeared in England, published
by Macmillan, six years after Carlyle's death. It proved to be very
like the first, though some errors of the press were corrected and
also some slips of the pen. The disputed memoir was not omitted, nor
was anything of the slightest interest added by Mr. Norton to the
book. In his Preface he attacked Froude for fulfilling Carlyle's own
wishes, of which he seems to have known little or nothing, and, by
way of further justification for his interference, he added the
following paragraph:

"The first edition of the Reminiscences was so carelessly printed as
to do grave wrong to the sense. The punctuation, the use of capitals
and italics, in the manuscript, characteristic of Carlyle's method
of expression in print, were entirely disregarded. In the first five
pages of the printed text there were more than a hundred and thirty
corrections to be made of words, punctuation, capitals, quotation
marks, and such like; and these pages are not exceptional."

This looks like a formidable indictment, and in the literal sense of
the words it may be true. I have compared the first five pages of
the two editions, and there are a good many changes in the use of
capitals and italics. But except one obvious misprint of a single
letter, "even" for "ever," there is nothing which does "grave wrong"
to the sense, or affects it in any way. "And these pages," as Mr.
Norton says, with another meaning, "are not exceptional." The later
reminiscences were not easy to decipher. Carlyle's handwriting was
seriously affected by age, he wrote upon both sides of very thin
paper, and I have seen several letters of his which bear out
Froude's assertion that, after his hand began to shake, "it became
harder to decipher than the worst manuscript which I have ever
examined." In preparing the book Froude had to use a magnifying
glass, and in many cases the true reading was a matter of opinion.
In one case, however, it was not. Sir Henry Taylor, the most serene
and dignified of men, found himself charged in Carlyle's sketch of
Southey with the unpleasant attribute of "morbid vivacity," and not
only with morbid vivacity simpliciter, or per se, but "in all senses
of that deep-reaching word." Mr. Norton restored the true reading,
which was "marked veracity," though, on the other hand, he replaced
the statement, omitted by Froude, that Taylor, who had died between
the two editions, was "not a well-read or wide-minded man." It must
be admitted that in this instance Froude allowed a proof which made
nonsense to pass, and that Mr. Norton did a public service by
correcting the phrase. Froude's occasional carelessness in revision
is a common failing enough. What made it remarkable in him was the
combination of liability to these lapses with intensely laborious
and methodical habits.

Although Froude's legal connection with Carlyle's family ceased with
the assignment to Carlyle's niece of the copyright in the
Reminiscences, the names of the two men are as inseparably
associated as Boswell's and Johnson's, Lockhart's and Scott's,
Macaulay's and Trevelyan's, Morley's and Gladstone's. Some readers,
such as Tennyson and Lecky, thought that Froude had revealed too
much. Others, such as John Skelton and Edward FitzGerald, believed
that he had raised Carlyle to a higher eminence than he had occupied
before. Froude himself felt entire confidence both in the greatness
of Carlyle's qualities and in the permanence of his fame. That was
why he thought that the revelation of small defects would do more
good than harm. A faultless character, even if he himself could have
reconciled it with his conscience to draw one, would not have been
accepted as genuine, would not have been treated as credible. The
true character, in its strength and its weakness, would command
belief, and admiration too. If Froude were alive, he would say that
the time had not yet come for a final judgment, and might not come
for a hundred years. Still, I think it will be conceded that the
twenty years which have elapsed since he accomplished his task are
a period of growth rather than decadence in the number and zeal of
Carlyle's admirers. This is no doubt in large measure due to
Carlyle's own books. He has been called the father of modern
socialism, and credited with the destruction of political economy. I
am too much out of sympathy with these views to judge them fairly.
But I suppose it cannot be denied that Carlyle fascinates thousands
who do not accept him as an infallible, or even as a fallible,
guide, or that they, as well as his disciples, devour the pages of
Froude.

Nothing annoyed Carlyle more than to be told that he confounded
might with right. He declared that, on the contrary, he had never
said, and would never say, a word for power which was not founded on
justice. Cromwell was as good as he was great, and he had never
glorified Frederick, unless to write a book about a man is
necessarily to glorify him. This prevalent misconception of
Carlyle's gospel, so prevalent that it deceived no less keen a
critic than Lecky, was completely dissipated by Froude. No one can
read his Life intelligently without perceiving that Carlyle's real
foe was materialism. The French Revolution was to him the central
fact of modern history, and at the same time a supreme judgment of
Heaven upon a society given up to unrestrained licentiousness.
Whether he was right or wrong is not the point. He was as far as
possible from being, in the modern sense, a scientific historian.
Yet in some respects he was utilitarian enough. The condition of
England was to him more important than any constitutional change,
any triumph in diplomacy, or any victory in war, and this fact
explains apparently inconsistent admiration of Peel, who though a
Parliamentary statesman, had accomplished a solid achievement for
the benefit of the people. Carlyle in his own writings is an almost
insoluble enigma. To have given the true solution is the supreme
merit of Froude.*

--
* John Nichol, a name still dear in Scotland, formerly Professor
of Literature at the University of Glasgow, who wrote on Carlyle
for Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters in 1892, says in his preface:
"Every critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligation to Mr. Froude
as every critic of Byron to Moore, or of Scott to Lockhart .... I must
here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the
persistent, often virulent, attach directed against a loyal friend,
betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith, and the defective reticence
that often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But
Mr. Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on Sir Walter Scott,
requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with the
most ample authority; that the restrictions under which he was first
entrusted with the MSS. of the Reminiscences and the Letters and
Memorials (annotated by Carlyle himself as if for publication) were
withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached
a practical injunction to communicate the whole."
--


CHAPTER IX

BOOKS AND TRAVEL

The two passions of Froude's life were Devonshire and the sea.
"Summer has come at last," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley from Salcombe
in the middle of September, "after two months of rain and storm. The
fields from which the wrecks of the harvest were scraped up mined
and sprouting now lie basking in stillest sunshine, as if wind and
rain had never been heard of. The coast is extremely beautiful, and
I, in addition to the charms of the place, hear my native tongue
spoken and sung in the churches in undiminished purity." Carlyle
often kept him in London when he would much rather have been
elsewhere. But, wherever he was, he had a ready pen, and his
thoughts naturally clothed themselves in a literary garb. His
enjoyment of books, especially old books, was intense. Reading,
however, is idle work, and idleness was impossible to Froude. On his
return from South Africa, where everything was being done which he
thought least wise, he took up a classical subject, and began to
write a book about Caesar. He read Cicero, Plutarch, Suetonius,
Caesar himself, and produced early in 1879 a volume which was always
a particular favourite of his own. "I believe," he said to Skelton,
"it is the best book I have ever written." The public did not
altogether agree with him, and it never became so popular as Short
Studies.

Yet it is undoubtedly a brilliant performance, with just the
qualities which might have been expected to make it popular, and a
second edition was soon required. It is interesting from the first
page to the last, and its whole object is to show that the Roman
world in the last days of the Republic was very like the English
world under Queen Victoria. In Rome itself it has a steady sale. The
general reader, however, was not wrong in thinking that these
eloquent pages are below the level of Froude at his best. There is a
hard metallic glitter in the style, and a forced comparison of
ancient with modern things not really parallel, which make the whole
narrative artificial and unreal. Lord Dufferin said, with his
natural acuteness, "It is interesting, and forcibly written, but one
feels he is not a safe guide. As they say of the mansions of
Ireland, 'they are always within a hundred yards of the best
situation,' so one feels that Froude is never quite in the bull's-
eye in the view he gives."*

--
* Lyall's Life of Dufferin, vol. ii. p. 244.
--

Those who criticised the book as if it were a formal and historical
narrative showed a lack of humour, which is a sense of proportion.
Macaulay might almost as well be judged by his Fragment of a Roman
Tale. Froude himself calls his Caesar a sketch, and it is scarcely
more authoritative than the pamphlet of Louis Napoleon on the same
subject. On the other hand, it is quite untrue that Froude had not
read Cicero's letters. He had read those which bore upon his
subject, and he quotes them freely enough. The fault of his Caesar
is that he makes a wrong start. Points of resemblance between the
first century before the Christian era and the nineteenth century
after it may of course be found. But the differences are essential
and fundamental. A society which rests upon servitude cannot be like
a society which rests upon freedom. Christianity has modified the
whole lives of those who do not profess it, and has created a
totally new atmosphere, even if it be not in all respects a better
one. Representative government, whether it be a good thing or a bad
thing, is at least a thing which counts. Caesar could hardly have
understood the idea of an indissoluble marriage, of a limited
monarchy, of equality before the law.

One strange similitude Froude did, in deference to outraged
susceptibilities, omit, and only the first edition contains a formal
comparison of Julius Caesar with Jesus Christ. No irreverence was
intended. It was Froude's enthusiasm for Caesar that carried him
away. Still, the instance is only an extreme form of what comes from
pushing parallels below the surface. It is only a shade less
misleading, though many shades less startling, to represent Caesar
as a virtuous philanthropist abstemious habits who perished in a
magnanimous effort to rescue the people from the tyranny of nobles.
The people in the modern sense were slaves, and the Republic at
least ensured that there should be some protection against military
despotism, to which in due course its abolition led. That Caesar was
intellectually among the greatest men of all time is beyond
question. Both strategist and as historian he is supreme. His
"thrasonical boast" was sober truth, and he stands above military or
literary criticism, a lesson and a model. But he was steeped in all
the vices of his age, and his motive was personal ambition. The
Republic did not give him sufficient scope, and therefore he would
have destroyed it, if he had not been himself destroyed.

Froude adopted the position of a great German professor and
historian, Theodor Mommsen, whose prejudices were as strong as his
learning was profound. He went with Mommsen in adoration of Caesar,
and in depreciation of Cicero. That Cicero used one sort of language
in public speeches, and another sort in private correspondence, is
true, and is notorious because some of his most intimate letters
have been preserved. But it is not peculiar to him. The man who
talked in public as he talked in private would have small sense of
fitness. The man who talked in private as he talked in public would
have small sense of humour. Although Cicero's humour was not brilliant,
he had sufficient taste to preserve him from pedantry and
from solecisms. His devotion to the Republic was perfectly sincere;
and if he changed in his behaviour to Caesar, it was because Caesar
changed in his behaviour to the Republic. Froude's specific charge
of rapid tergiversation is disproved by dates. The speech for
Marcellus, with its over-strained flattery of the conqueror, was
delivered, not "within a few weeks of his murder," but eighteen
months before that event, at a time when Cicero still hoped that
Caesar would be moderate. If Cicero's Republic was a narrow
oligarchy, it was also the only form of constitutional and civilian
government which he knew or could imagine. He failed to preserve it.
He was murdered like Caesar himself. Neither of them believed that
political assassination was a crime. Cicero's only regret was that
Antony had not been killed with Caesar. Antony's chief desire, which
he accomplished, was to kill Cicero. The idea that Cicero was a mere
declaimer, who did not count, never occurred either to Caesar or to
Antony. It was left for Professor Mommsen to discover. Froude,
always on the look-out for examples of his theory, or his father's
theory, that orators must be useless and mistaken, seized it with an
eager gasp. An agreeable looseness of treatment pervades the book,
and "patricians" appear as wealthy leaders of fashionable society,
being in fact a small number of old Roman families, who might be
poor, or in trade, and could not legally under the Republic be
increased in number, resembling rather a Hindu caste than any
institution of Western Christendom. In Caesar's time they had almost
died out, and the aristocracy of the day was an aristocracy of
office. The book, however, though far from faultless, though in some
respects misleading, has a singular fascination, the charm of a
picture drawn by the hand of a master with consummate skill. As an
historical study, what the French call une etude, it deserves a very
high place, and it contains one sentence which all democrats would
do well to learn:

"Popular forms are possible only when individual men can govern
their own lives on moral principles, and when duty is of more
importance than pleasure, and justice than material expediency."

That represents the best side of Carlyle's teaching; the
subordination of material objects, the supremacy of the moral law.
Carlyle, however, did not care for the book, as appears in the
following letter from Froude to Lady Derby:

"April 26th, 1879.--You are a most kind critic. If I have succeeded
in creating interest in so old a subject my utmost wishes are
accomplished. I am very curious indeed to hear what Lord D. says. I
can guess that he thinks I ought to have said more in defence of the
Constitutionalists, and that I have hardly used Cicero. Carlyle
reduced me to the condition of a 'drenched hen'--to use one of his
own images. He told me that the book was not clear, that 'he got no
good of it'--in fact, that it was 'a failure.' It may be a failure,
but 'want of clearness' is certainly not the cause. I fancy he
wanted something else which he did not find, and he would not give
himself the trouble to examine what he did find."

Froude contributed in 1880 to Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters a
critical and biographical sketch of Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress,
as the work of a Dissenter, had been excluded from the Rectory at
Dartington. But Froude was not long in supplying the deficiency for
himself, and his literary appreciation of Bunyan's style was
accompanied by a sincere sympathy with the Puritan part of his
faith. All religious people, he thought, might find common ground in
Bunyan, a man who lived for religion, and for nothing else. Yet even
here Froude's Erastianism, and respect for authority, come into
play. He gravely defends Bunyan's imprisonment in Bedford gaol,
which lasted, with some intermissions, from 1660 to 1672, as
necessary to enforce respect for the law. That such a man as Charles
Stuart should have had power to punish such a man as John Bunyan for
preaching the word of God is a strange comment on the nature of a
Christian country. But it cannot be denied that Charles and his
judges, Sir Matthew Hale among them, provided the leisure to which
we owe the best religious allegories in the language. Nor can it be
said that Froude's apology for the confinement Bunyan is so
repugnant to reason and justice as Gibbon's apology for the
martyrdom of Cyprian.

The General Election of 1880 was regarded by Froude with mixed
feelings.

"I am glad," he wrote to Lady Derby on the 9th of April, 1880, "that
there is to be an end of 'glory and gunpowder,' but my feelings
about Gladstone remain where they were. When you came into power in
1874, I dreamed of a revival of real Conservatism which under wiser
guiding might and would have lasted to the end of the century. This
is gone--gone for ever. The old England of order and rational
government is past and will not return. Now I should like to see a
moderate triumvirate--Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, and your
husband, with a Cabinet which they could control. This too may
easily be among the impossibilities, but I am sure that at the
bottom of its heart the country wants quiet, and a Liberal
revolutionary sensationalism will be just as distasteful to
reasonable people as 'Asian Mysteries,' tall talk, and ambitious
buffooneries."

Lord Derby became more and more Liberal, until in December, 1882, he
joined Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. Before that decisive step, however,
it became evident in which direction he was tending, and Froude
wrote to Lady Derby on the 5th of March:

"I will call on Tuesday about 5. I have not been out of town, but my
afternoons have been taken up with a multitude of small engagements,
and indeed I have been sulky too, and imagined Lord D. had delivered
himself over to the enemy. But what right have I to say anything
when I am going this evening to dine with Chamberlain? I like
Chamberlain. He knows his mind. There is no dust in his eyes, and he
throws no dust in the eyes of others."

Of the great struggle between Lords and Commons over the franchise
in 1884, Froude wrote to the same correspondent on the 31st of July:

"As to what has happened since I went away, I for my own humble part
am heartily pleased, for it will clear the air. If we are to have
democracy, as I suppose we are, let us go into it with our eyes
open. I don't like drifting among cataracts, hiding the reality from
ourselves by forms which are not allowed either sense or power. That
I suppose to be Lord Salisbury's feeling. I greatly admired his
speech in Cannon Street, which reminded me of a talk I had with him
long ago at Hatfield. If the result is a change in the Constitution
of the House of Lords which will make it a real power, no one will
be more sorry than Chamberlain, whose own wish is to keep it in the
condition of ornamental helplessness. Lord Derby himself can hardly
wish to see the country entirely in the hands of a single
irresponsible Chamber elected by universal suffrage--and of such a
Chamber, which each extension of the suffrage brings to a lower
intellectual level."

The following letter was written from Salcombe just after the
General Election of 1886 and the defeat of Home Rule:

"A Devonshire farmer fell ill of typhus fever once. He had
quarrelled with a neighbour, and the clergyman told him that he must
not die out of charity, and must see the man and shake hands with
him. He agreed. The man came. They were reconciled, and he was going
away again when the sick farmer called him back to the bed-side.
'Mind you,' he said, 'if so be as I get over this here, 'tis to be
as 'twas.'

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