The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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Froude neither was nor aimed at being practical politican. His
object, in which he succeeded, was to kindle in the public mind at
home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his
own heart was full. Although the measure of Colonial loyalty was
given afterwards in the South African War, the despatch of troops
from Sydney to the Soudan in 1885 showed that ties of sentiment are
the strongest of all. It was those ties, rather than any political
or commercial bond, which Froude desired to strengthen. No one would
have liked less to live in a Colony. Colonial society did not suit
him. Colonial manners were not to his mind. But to meet governing
men, like Sir Henry Norman, a "warm Gladstonian," by the way, was
always a pleasure to him, and as a symbol of England's greatness he
loved her territory beyond the seas.

The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, published in 1889, was Froude's one mature
and serious attempt at a novel. For distinction of style and beauty
of thought it may be compared with the greatest of historical
romances. If it was the least successful of his books, the failure
can be assigned to the absence of women, or at least of love, which
ever since Dr. Johnson's definition, if not before, has been
expected in a novel. The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his
favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth
century. The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring.
Goring "belonged to an order of men who, if they had been allowed
fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory of an
evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the Cromwellians
had died out of the land, and was not to be revived by a single
enthusiast." He was murdered, and Froude could point his favourite
moral that the woes of the sister country would be healed by the
appearance of another Cromwell, which he had to admit was
improbable. The Irish hero, Morty Sullivan, has been in France, and
is ready to fight for the Pretender. He did no good. Few Irishmen,
in Froude's opinion, ever did any good. But in The Two Chiefs of
Dunboy, if anywhere, Froude shows his sympathy with the softness of
the Irish character, and Morty's meditations on his return from
France are expressed as only Froude could express them. Morty was
walking with his sister by the estuary of the Kenmare River opposite
Derrynane, afterwards famous as the residence of Daniel O'Connell,
"For how many ages had the bay and the rocks and the mountains
looked exactly the same as they were looking then? How many
generations had played their part on the same stage, eager and
impassioned as if it had been erected only for them! The half-naked
fishermen of forgotten centuries who had earned a scanty living
there; the monks from the Skelligs who had come in on high days in
their coracles to say mass for them, baptize the children, or bury
the dead; the Celtic chief, with saffron shirt and battle-axe,
driven from his richer lands by Norman or Saxon invaders, and
keeping hold in this remote spot on his ragged independence; the
Scandinavian pirates, the overflow of the Northern Fiords, looking
for new soil where they could take root. These had all played their
brief parts there and were gone, and as many more would follow in
the cycles of the years that were to come, yet the scene itself was
unchanged and would not change. The same soft had fed those that
were departed, and would feed those that were to be. The same
landscape had affected their imaginations with its beauty or awed
them with its splendours; and each alike had yielded to the same
delusion that the valley was theirs and was inseparably connected
with themselves and their fortunes. Morty's career had been a stormy
one .... He had gone out into the world, and had battled and
struggled in the holy cause, yet the cause was not advanced, and it
was all nothing. He was about to leave the old place, probably for
ever. Yet there it was, tranquil, calm, indifferent whether he came
or went. What was he? What was any one? To what purpose the
ineffectual strivings of short-lived humanity? Man's life was but
the shadow of a dream, and his work was but the heaping of sand
which the next tide would level flat again."

Wordsworth's "pathetic fallacy" that the moods of nature correspond
with the moods of man has seldom found such eloquent illustration as
in Morty's vain imaginings. Morty himself was shot dead by English
soldiers in revenge for the murder of Goring. The story is a dismal
and tragic one. But the best qualities of the Irish race are there,
depicted with true sympathy, and perhaps this volume may be held to
confirm Carlyle's opinion, expressed in a letter to Miss Davenport
Bromley, that even The English in Ireland was "more disgraceful to
the English Government by far than to the Irish savageries." Froude,
indeed, never forgot the kindness of the Kerry peasants who nursed
him through the small-pox. He would have done anything for the
Irish, except allow them to govern themselves.

In 1890 Froude contributed to the series of The Queen's Prime
Ministers, edited by Mr. Stuart Reid, a biographical study of Lord
Beaconsfield. He wrote to Mr. Reid on the subject:

". . . Lord Beaconsfield wore a mask to the generality of mankind.
It was only when I read Lothair that I could form any notion to
myself of the personality which was behind. I once alluded to that
book in a speech at a Royal Academy banquet. Lord Beaconsfield was
present, and was so far interested in what I said that he wished me
to review Endymion in the Edinburgh, and sent me the proof-sheets of
it before publication. Edymion did not take hold of me as Lothair
did, and I declined, but I have never lost the impression which I
gathered out of Lothair. It is worse than useless to attempt the
biography of a man unless you know, or think you know, what his
inner nature was .... I am quite sure that Lord Beaconsfield had a
clearer insight than most men into the contemporary constitution of
Europe--that he had a real interest in the welfare and prospects of
mankind; and while perhaps he rather despised the great English
aristocracy, he probably thought better of them than of any other
class in England. I suppose that like Cicero he wished to excel, or
perhaps more like Augustus to play his part well in the tragic
comedy of life. I do not suppose that he had any vulgar ambition at
all .... "

The feelings with which he approached this not altogether congenial
task are described in the following passages from letters to Lady
Derby:

.... "THE MOLT, September 14th, 1889.

"If my wonderful adventure into the Beaconsfield country comes off,
I shall want all the help which Lord D. offered to give me. I do not
wonder that he and you were both startled at the proposition, and I
am not at all sure that in a respectable series of Victorian Prime
Ministers I should be allowed to treat the subject in the way that I
wish. The point is to make out what there was behind the mask. Had
it not been for Lothair I should have said nothing but a charlatan.
But that altered my opinion, and the more often I read it the more I
want to know what his real nature was. The early life is a blank
filled up by imaginative people out of Vivian Grey. I am feeling my
way indirectly with his brother, Ralph D'Israeli, and whether I go
on or not will depend on whether he will help me."

"THE MOLT, November 12th, 1889,

"The difficulty is to find out the real man that lay behind the
sphynx-like affectations. I have come to think that these
affectations (natural at first) came to be themselves affected as a
useful defensive armour which covered the vital parts. Anyway, the
study of him is extremely amusing. I had nothing else to do, and I
can easily throw what I write into the fire if it turns out
unsatisfactory."

Although the book was necessarily a short one, it is too
characteristic to be lightly dismissed. When Froude gave Mr. Reid
the manuscript, he said, "It will please neither Disraeli's friends
nor his foes. But it is at least an honest book." He heard, with
more amusement than satisfaction, that it had pleased Gladstone. For
the political estimate of a modern and Parliamentary statesman
Froude lacked some indispensable qualifications. He knew little, and
cared less, about the House of Commons, in which the best years of
Disraeli's life were passed. He despised the party system, of which
Disraeli was at once a product and a devotee. He had no sympathy
with Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy, and the colonial policy
which he would have substituted for it was outside Lord
Beaconsfield's scope. He had adopted from Carlyle the theory that
Disraeli and Gladstone were both adventurers, the difference between
them being that Disraeli only deceived others, whereas Gladstone
deceived also himself. But Gladstone had ignored whereas Disraeli,
with singular magnanimity, had offered to the author of Shooting
Niagara a pension and a Grand Cross of the Bath.

It was, however, as a man of letters rather than as a politician
that Disraeli fascinated Froude, so much so that he is betrayed into
the paradox of representing his hero as a lover of literature rather
than politics. Disraeli sometimes talked in that way himself, as
when he was persuading Lightfoot to accept the Bishopric of Durham, and
remarked, "I, too, have sacrificed inclination to duty." But he
was hardly serious, and even in his novels it is the political parts
that survive. Although Froude had found it impossible to review
Endymion, the book is very like the author, and can only be
appreciated by those who have been behind the scenes in politics.
Froude's idea of Disraeli as a man with a great opportunity who
threw it away, who might have pacified Ireland and preferred to
quarrel with Russia, was naturally not agreeable to Disraelites, and
as a general rule it is desirable that a biographer should be able,
to write from his victim's point of view. Yet, all said and done,
Froude's Beaconsfield is a work of genius, the gem of the series.
Professional politicians, with the curious exception of Gladstone,
thought very little of it. It was not written for them. Disraeli was
a many-sided man, so that there is room for various estimates of his
character and career. Of his early life Froude had no special
knowledge. He was not even aware that Disraeli had applied for
office to Peel. He shows sometimes an indifference to dry details,
as when he makes Gladstone dissolve Parliament in 1873 immediately
after his defeat on the Irish University Bill, and represents Russia
as having by her own act repealed the Black Sea Clauses in the
Treaty of Paris. Startling too is his assertion that the Parliament
of 1868 did nothing for England or Scotland, on account of its
absorption in Irish affairs. But he was not writing a formal
history, and these points did not appeal to him at all. He drew with
inimitable skill a picture of the despised and fantastic Jew, vain
as a peacock and absurdly dressed, alien in race and in his real
creed, smiling sardonically at English ways, enthusiasms, and
institutions, until he became, after years of struggle and obloquy, the
idol of what was then the proudest aristocracy in the world.

Disraeli's peculiar humour just suited Froude's taste. Disraeli
never laughed. Even his smile was half inward. The irony of life, and of
his own position, was a subject of inexhaustible amusement to him.
There was nothing in his nature low, sordid, or petty. It was not
money, nor rank, but power which he coveted, and at which he aimed.
Irreproachable in domestic life, faithful in friendship, a placable
enemy, undaunted by failure, accepting final defeat with philosophic
calm, he played with political passions which he did not share, and
made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as
he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything
stuffy and commonplace. From a constitutional history of English
politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not
his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In
any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the principal
figure. In the Congress of Berlin, where he did nothing, or next to
nothing, he attracted the gaze of every one, not for anything he
said there, but because he was there at all. If he had left an
autobiography, it would be priceless, not for its facts, but for its
opinions. That Froude thoroughly understood him it would be rash to
say. But he did perceive by sympathetic intuition a great deal that
an ordinary writer would have missed altogether. For instance, the
full humour of that singular occasion when Benjamin Disraeli
appeared on the platform of a Diocesan Conference at Oxford, with
Samuel Wilberforce in the chair, could have been given by no one
else exactly as Froude gave it. Nothing like it had ever happened
before. It is scarcely possible that anything of the kind can ever
happen again. Froude found the origin of the Established Church in
the statutes of Henry VIII. Gladstone found it, or seemed to find
it, in the poems of Homer. In Disraeli's eyes its pedigree was
Semitic, and it ministered to the "craving credulity" of a sceptical
age, undisturbed by the provincial arrogance that flashed or flared
in an essay or review.

"In the year 1864," says Froude, "Disraeli happened to be on a visit
at Cuddesdon, and it happened equally that a Diocesan Conference was
to be held at Oxford at the time, with Bishop Wilberforce in the
chair. The clerical mind had been doubly exercised, by the
appearance of Colenso on the 'Pentateuch' and Darwin on the 'Origin
of Species.' Disraeli, to the surprise of every one, presented
himself in the theatre. He had long abandoned the satins and silks
of his youth, but he was as careful of effect as he had ever been,
and had prepared himself in a elaborately negligent. He lounged into
the assembly in a black velvet shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat,
as if he had been accidentally passing through the town. It was the
fashion with University intellect to despise Disraeli as a man with
neither sweetness nor light; but he was famous, or at least
notorious, and when he rose to speak there was a general curiosity.
He began in his usual affected manner, slowly and rather pompously,
as if he had nothing to say beyond perfunctory platitudes. The
Oxford wits began to compare themselves favourably the dullness of
Parliamentary orators; when first one sentence and then another
startled them into attention. They were told that the Church was not
likely to be disestablished. It would remain, but would remain
subject to a Parliament which would not allow an imperium in
imperio. It must exert itself and reassert its authority, but within
the limits which the law laid down. The interest grew deeper when he
came to touch on the parties to one or other of which all his
listeners belonged. High Church and Low Church were historical and
intelligible, but there had arisen lately, the speaker said, a party
called the Broad, never before heard of. He went on to explain what
Broad Churchmen were."

Disraeli's gibes at Colenso and Maurice are too well known to need
repetition here. The equally famous reference to Darwin will bear to
be quoted once more, at least as an introduction for Froude's
incisive comment.

"What is the question now placed before society with a glibness the
most astounding? The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I,
my lord, am on the side of the angels."

"Mr. Disraeli," so Froude continues, "is on the side of the angels.
Pit and gallery echoed with laughter. Fellows and tutors repeated
the phrase over their port in the common room with shaking sides.
The newspapers carried the announcement the next morning over the
length and breadth of the island, and the leading article writers
struggled in their comments to maintain a decent gravity. Did
Disraeli mean it, or was it but an idle jest? and what must a man be
who could exercise his wit on such a subject? Disraeli was at least
as much in earnest as his audience. The phrase answered its purpose.
It has lived and become historical when the decorous protests of
professional divines have been forgotten with the breath which
uttered them. The note of scorn with which it rings has preserved it
better than any affectation of pious horror, which indeed would have
been out of place in the presence of such an assembly."

I have taken the liberty of giving such emphasis as italics can
confer to two brief passages in this brilliant description, because
they express Froude's real opinion of Diocesan Conferences and those
who frequented them.* Disraeli's audience applauded, partly in
admiration of his wit, and partly because, they thought that he was
amusing them at the expense of the latitudinarians they abhorred.
Froude's appreciation came from an opposite source. He regarded
Disraeli not as a flatterer, but as a busy mocker, laughing at the
people thought he was laughing with them. He made no attempt at a
really critical estimate of the most baffling figure in English
politics. He fastened on the picturesque aspects of Disraeli's
career, and touched them with an artist's hand. As to what it all
meant, or whether it meant anything, he left his readers as much, in
the dark as they were before. My own theory, if one must have a
theory, is that one word explains Disraeli, and that that word is
"ambition." If so, he was one of the most marvellously successful
men that ever lived. If not, and if a different standard should be
applied, other consequences would ensue. Froude gives no help in the
solution of the problem. What he does is to portray the original
genius which no absurdities could cover, and no obstacles could
restrain. Disraeli the "Imperialist" had no more to do with building
empires than with building churches, but he was twice Prime Minister
of England.

--
* Disraeli's contempt for italics is well known. He called them "the
last resort of the forcible Feebles."
--

Froude's Sea Studies in the third series of his collected essays are
chiefly a series of thoughts on the plays of Euripides. But, like so
much of his writing, they are redolent of the ocean, on which and
near which he always felt at home. The opening sentences of this
fresh and wholesome paper are too characteristic not to be quoted.

"To a man of middle age whose occupations have long confined him to
the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library, there is something
unspeakably delightful in a sea voyage. Increasing years, if they
bring little else that is agreeable with them, bring to some of us
immunity from sea-sickness. The regularity of habit on board a ship,
the absence of dinner parties, the exchange of the table in the
close room for the open deck under an awning, and the ever-flowing
breeze which the motion of the vessel forbids to sink into a calm,
give vigour to the tired system, restore the conscious enjoyment of
elastic health, and even mock us for the moment with the belief that
age is an illusion, and that 'the wild freshness' of the morning of
life has not yet passed away for ever. Above our heads is the arch
of the sky, around us the ocean, rolling free and fresh as it rolled
a million years ago, and our spirits catch a contagion from the
elements. Our step on the boards recovers its buoyancy. We are
rocked to rest at night by a gentle movement which soothes you into
the dreamless sleep of childhood, and we wake with the certainty
that we are beyond the reach of the postman. We are shut off, in a
Catholic retreat, from the worries and anxieties of the world."

This is not the language of a man who ever suffered seriously from
sea-sickness, and Froude's face had an open-air look which never
suggested "the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library." But he was
of course a laborious student, and nothing refreshed him like a
voyage. On the yacht of his old friend Lord Ducie, as Enthusiastic a
sailor and fisherman as himself, he made several journeys to Norway,
and caught plenty of big salmon. He has done ample justice to these
expeditions in the last volume of his essays, which contains The
Spanish Story of the Armada. A country where the mountains are
impassable, and the fiords the only roads, just suited his taste. It
even inspired him with a poem, Rornsdal Fiord, which appeared in
Blackwood for April, 1883, and it gave him health, which is not
always, like poetry, a pure gift of nature.

The life of society, and of towns, never satisfied Froude. Apart
from his genius and his training, he was a country gentleman, and
felt most at home when he was out of doors.

From Panshanger he wrote to Lady Derby:

"How well I understand what you felt sitting on the top of the
Pyrenees. We men are but a sorry part of the creation. Now and then
there comes to us a breath out of another order of things; a sudden
perception--coming we cannot tell how--of the artificial and
contemptible existence we are all living; a longing to be out of it
and have done with it--by a pistol-shot if nothing else will do. I
continually wonder at myself for remaining in London when I can go
where I please, and take with me all the occupations I am fit for.
Alas! it is oneself that one wants really to be rid of. If we did
not ourselves share in the passions and follies that are working
round us we should not be touched by them. I have made up my mind to
leave it all, at all events, as soon as Mr. Carlyle is gone; but the
enchantment which scenery, grand or beautiful, or which simple
country life promises at a distance, will never abide--let us be
where we will. It comes in moments like a revelation; like the faces
of those whom we have loved and lost; which pass before us, and we
stretch our hands to clasp them and they are gone. I came here
yesterday for two or three days. The house is full of the young
generation. They don't attract me .... Whatever their faults,
diffidence is not one of them. Macaulay's doctrine of the natural
superiority of each new generation to its predecessor seems most
heartily accepted and believed. The superb pictures in the house are
a silent protest against the cant of progress. You look into the
faces of the men and the women on the walls and can scarcely believe
they are the same race with us. I have sometimes thought 'the
numbers' of the elect have been really fulfilled, and that the rest
of us are left to gibber away an existence back into an apehood
which we now recognise as our real primitive type."

From the Molt, on the other hand, he wrote:

"It is near midnight. I have just come in from the terrace. The moon
is full over the sea, which is glittering as if it was molten gold.
The rocks and promontories stand out dear and ghost-like. There is
not a breath to rustle the leaves or to stir the painted wash upon
the shore. Men and men's doings, and their speeches and idle
excitement, seem all poor, transient, and contemptible. Sea and
rocks and moonlight looked just as they look to-night before Adam
sinned in Paradise. They remain--we come and go, hardly more
enduring than the moth that flutters in through the window, and we
are hardly of more consequence."

CHAPTER X

THE OXFORD PROFESSORSHIP

ON the 16th of March, 1892, Froude's old antagonist, Freeman, who
had been Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford since Stubbs's
elevation to the Episcopal Bench in 1884, died suddenly in Spain.
The Prime Minister, who was also Chancellor of the University,
offered the vacant Chair to Froude, and after some hesitation Froude
accepted it. The doubt was due to his age. "There are seventy-four
reasons against it," he said. Fortunately he yielded. "The
temptation of going back to Oxford in a respectable way," he wrote
to Skelton, "was too much for me. I must just do the best I can, and
trust that I shall not be haunted by Freeman's ghost." Lord
Salisbury did a bold thing when he appointed Froude successor to
Freeman. Froude had indeed a more than European reputation as a man
of letters, and was acknowledged to be a master of English prose.
But he was seventy-four, five years older than Freeman, and he had
never taught in his life, except as tutor for a very brief time in
two private families. The Historical School at Oxford had been
trained to believe that Stubbs was the great historian, that Freeman
was his prophet, and that Froude was not an historian at all. Lord
Salisbury of course knew better, for it was at Hatfield that some of
Froude's most thorough historical work had been done. Still, it
required some courage to fly in the face of all that was pedantic in
Oxford, and to nominate in Freeman's room the writer that Freeman
had spent the best years of his life in "belabouring." Some critics
attributed the selection to Lord Salisbury's sardonic humour, or
pronounced that, as Lamb said of Coleridge's metaphysics, "it was
only his fun." Some stigmatised it as a party job. Gladstone's
nominee Freeman, had been a Home Ruler, Froude was a Unionist; what
could be clearer than the motive? But both nominations could be
defended on their own merits, and a Regius Professorship should not
be the monopoly of a clique.

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