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The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voltaire's wit and Sterne's humour have not in their own lines been
surpassed. But sure as Froude's taste was in such matters, he did
not himself enter the lists as a competitor. He was too much
occupied with his narrative, or his theory, as the case might be, to
spare time for such diversion by the way. He was too earnest to be
impartial.

Where is the impartial historian to be found? Macaulay said in
Hallam. The clerical editor of Bishop Stubbs's Letters thinks that
Hallam, who was an Erastian, had a violent prejudice against the
Church. His impartial historian is Stubbs, for the simple reason
that he agrees with him. Froude was for England against Rome and
Spain. He could oppose the foreign policy of an English Government
when he thought it wrong, as in the case of the Crimean War, and of
Disraeli's aggressive Imperialism in 1877. But the English cause in
the sixteenth century he regarded as national and religious, making
for freedom and independence of policy and thought. To be free, to
understand, to enjoy, said Thomas Hill Green, is the claim of the
modern spirit. Froude would not have admitted that man in the
philosophic sense was free, or that he could ever hope to understand
the ultimate causes of things. And, though no man was more capable
of enjoying the present moment, he would have sternly denied that
pleasure, however refined, could be a legitimate aim in life. He was
a disciple of the porch, and not of the garden. It was deeds of
chivalry and endurance that he held up to the admiration of mankind.
The hero of his History, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was not a man
of brilliant gifts or dazzling attainments, but a sober, solid,
servant of duty and of the State. To most people Burghley is a far
less interesting figure than his haughty and splendid sovereign, or
the beautiful and seductive queen against whom he protected her.
Froude judged Burghley, as he judged Elizabeth Tudor and Mary
Stuart, by the standards of political integrity and personal honour.
The secret of Froude's influence and the source of his power is that
beneath the attraction of his personality and the seductiveness of
his writing there lay a bedrock of principle which could never be
moved.

Professor Sanday, who preached the first University sermon at Oxford
after Froude's death, referred to his "fifty years of unwearied
literary activity." The period of course included, and was meant to
include, The Nemesis of Faith.

"We all know," continued Dr. Sanday, "how the young and ardent
Churchman followed his reason where it seemed to lead, and
sacrificed a Fellowship, and, as it seemed, a career, to scruples of
conscience .... Now we can see that the difficulties which led to it
were real difficulties. It was right and not wrong that they should
be raised and faced." It is the fashion to regard scruples of
conscience as morbid, and the last man who troubled himself about a
test was not a young and ardent Churchman, but Charles Bradlaugh.
Froude was "ever a fighter," who wished always to fight fair. He
preferred resigning his Fellowship to fighting for it on purely
legal grounds, and holding it, if he could have held it, in the
teeth of the College Statutes. More than twenty years elapsed before
the tests which condemned him were abolished, and in that time there
must have been many less orthodox Fellows than he. It was more than
twenty years before he could lay aside the orders which in a rash
moment under an evil system he had assumed. But he was a preacher,
though a lay one, and his life was a struggle for the causes in
which he believed. Ecclesiastical controversies never really
interested him, except so far as they touched upon national life and
character. He wished to see the work, of the sixteenth century
continued in the nineteenth by the naval power and the Colonial
possessions of England. "England" with him meant not merely that
part of Great Britain which lies south of the Tweed, but all the
dominions of the Sovereign, the British Empire as a whole. What
Seeley called the expansion of England was to him the chief fact of
the present, and the chief problem of the future. Events since his
death have vindicated his foresight. He urged and predicted the
Australian Federation, which he did not live to see. To the policy
which impeded the Federation of South Africa he was steadily
opposed. The moral which he drew from his travels in Australasia,
and in the West Indies, was the need for strengthening imperial
ties. Lord Beaconsfield's Imperialism was not to his taste, and he
disliked every form of aggression or pretence. While he dreaded the
intervention of party leaders, and desired the Colonies to take the
initiative themselves, he thought that a common tariff was the
direction in which true Imperialism should move. Whether he was
right or wrong is too large a question to be discussed here. That
matter must make its own proof. But in raising it Froude was a
pioneer, and, though a man of letters, saw more plainly than
practical politicians what were the questions they would have to
solve. He despised local jealousies, and took large views. Many men,
perhaps most men, contract their horizon with advancing years.

Froude's vision seemed to widen. Through the storms and mists of
passion and prejudice which blinded the eyes of Liberals and
Conservatives fighting each other at Westminster, he looked to the
ultimate union of all British subjects in an England conterminous
with the sovereignty of the Crown. It was that England of which he
wrote the history. It was knowledge of her past, and belief in her
future, that inspired the work of his life.

THE END

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