The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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Few things annoyed Froude more than the attacks of Macaulay and
other Liberals on Cranmer. This was not merely sentimental
attachment on Froude's part to the compiler of the Prayer Book. He
looked on the Marian Martyrs as the precursors of the Long
Parliament and of the Revolution, the champions of liberty in church and
State. He would have felt that he was doing less than his duty if he
had taught his pupils mere facts. Those facts had a lesson, for them
as well as for him, and his sense of what the lesson was had
deepened with years. He had observed in his own day an event which
made much the same impression upon him as study of the French
Revolution had made upon Carlyle. When the Second Empire perished at
Sedan, Froude saw in the catastrophe the judgment of Providence upon
a sinister and tortuous career. If the duty of an historian be to
exclude moral considerations, Froude did not fulfil it. That there
were good men on the wrong side he perceived plainly enough. But
that did not make it the right side, nor confuse the difference
between the two.

Froude's second set of Oxford lectures, begun in the Easter Term of
1893, was entitled English Seamen of the Sixteenth Century, and the
name of the first lecture in it, a thoroughly characteristic name,
was The Sea Cradle of the Reformation. He was in his element, and
his success was complete. How Protestant England ousted Catholic
Spain from the command of the ocean, and made it Britannia's realm,
was a story which he loved to tell. "The young King," Henry VIII.,
"like a wise man, turned his first attention to the broad ditch, as
he called the British Channel, which formed the natural defence of
the kingdom." It was "the secret determined policy of Spain to
destroy the English fleet, pilots, masters, and sailors, by means of
the Inquisition." In 1562, according to Cecil, more than twenty
British subjects had been burnt at the stake in Spain for heresy,
and more than two hundred were starving in Spanish prisons. There
was work for Hawkins and Drake. They were both Devonshire men, like
Raleigh.

'Twas ever the way with good Queen Bess,
Who ruled as well as a mortal can,
When she was stogged, and the country in a mess,
To send for a Devonshire man.

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 Devonshire 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 surpassed.

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 coarseness, 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 manuscripts 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
superstition. 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
Assembly 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 sanctity of monks. He turned his satire upon corruption in
high places, and did not spare the Holy See. His residence in
England, his friendship 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
scholarship. "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 passage 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 passages 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 substitute 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 classics, 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 class 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 superstition, 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 statesmanship.

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 asserted
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 Professorships, 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 institution, 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 Shirley, 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 illustrious 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 Devonshire, 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 God. 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
God 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-fishing; 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 Shirley, 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 Devonshire 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
unassuming 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 analyse his style is as difficult as not to feel the
charm of it. It is as smooth as the motion of a ship 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 ship, 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.

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