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The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

H >> Herbert Paul >> The Life of Froude




Rossetti's fine burden:

Lands are swayed by a king on a throne,
The sea hath no king but God alone:

might be a motto for the title-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
documents with greater zest. That he did not know his period nobody
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 circumstances 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
bloody 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 ship 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 documents, 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 passage 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 passing 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
passing 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 space; 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
classical 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 passed 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 passed 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 assured. 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 classical 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 assailants 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
friendship. 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 refreshing 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 passing 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 circumstances 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 God 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 God, 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 passed 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 passages, 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 Saturday 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
noblest part in the teaching of Carlyle. Titled 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 friendships much has been said. They were numerous, and
drawn from very different classes. 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 Fanny,--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. God 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, "Shirley," and the present Sir Theodore
Martin, the biographer of the Prince Consort, whom some still prefer
to associate 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 associates, 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 Devonshire 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.

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