The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

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.

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.

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