However, impartial history is notoriously dull, whereas that of Froude is so entertaining that to take up a volume is to go on reading, fascinated by his charm, and delighted by a style remote as the poles from Carlyle's. It is as simple as Swift's, admirably lucid, excelling in the gift of narrative, without imitable peculiarities, and as entirely spontaneous as if the author were writing an ordinary letter.
Froude, with his brother Richard, was at Oxford when Newman was the great influence among the junior Fellows (Exeter was Froude's College), and Froude went so far with the Movement as to work at the Lives of some early English Saints. But the innocent legends of their miracles were too much for his belief, despite the excellent evidence for some of those of St. Thomas of Canterbury. His scepticism extended, and his short anti-religious novel, "The Nemesis of Faith" (1849), is said to have been thrown into the fire by a don of his own college.
He turned to History—that of England from the reign of Henry VIII. to the defeat of the Armada, and he resolutely attacked the great masses of Spanish contemporary manuscripts at Simancas. It was a knightly deed, when we think of the handwriting of the period, and the sometimes inextricably bad grammar of the writers. Different modern historians, in one case, give diverse translations of one crucial passage, and it seems that all of them are wrong. But Froude committed many errors which were not perceived by his furious assailant, Freeman (who did not know where to have him), but are conspicuous when we compare his work with his authorities. He is quite untrustworthy; he has taken fragments from three letters of three different dates, and printed them, with marks of quotation, as if they occurred in a single letter. He accuses Mary Stuart of a certain action, on the authority of the English ambassador, and when we read his letter we find him saying that rumour charges Mary with the fact, but that he does not believe it.
Froude describes a dramatic scene in which Elizabeth triumphs over the Scottish envoys sent to plead for Mary's life; and when we examine the authorities, to which an erroneous reference is given, we find in them no such matter, no such scene. The impression given is that Froude read his authorities, let what he read simmer in his mind, let his fancy play freely over it, and then wrote in picturesque and alluring fashion, on the dictates of romance, without ever comparing what he wrote with what his authorities recorded. They are uninteresting, Froude is extremely interesting: as a maker of literature he is in the first rank; as a chronicler of the truth he is not always trustworthy. He did not know his subject "all round"; of Scotland he knew little, and was wedded to the belief that James I. was the first of the Stuart line. He gravely repeats and embellishes Knox's mythical account of the disaster of Solway Moss, but probably the English despatches of the day were not accessible to him. How much of the interest of his book would survive if it were reduced to the sober verities one cannot estimate, but his wonderful power of giving a kind of bird's-eye views of most complicated European situations in politics must remain unmatched.
Froude, against his bias, made it seem almost certain that Elizabeth had guilty foreknowledge of the death of Amy Robsart. He leaned on a letter of the Spanish ambassador, and reading the Spanish for "last month" as "the present month," he left an erroneous impression. At the moment (1856-1869) there seems to have been no English reviewer who had the necessary knowledge; for Freeman merely picked holes in the fringes of Froude's work. Froude wrote "The English in Ireland," wrote books of political observations made in our colonies, and, succeeding Freeman as Professor of Modern History at Oxford, lectured on Erasmus and published his lectures, which were flown upon by the critics. He also wrote a good "Life of Bunyan," and a longer biography of Cæsar. His "Short Studies" are as interesting as his History, which is not likely to be superseded. As a literary view of a great period of history, it has no rival. It is as rich in original research as in portraits of characters. All that it lacks is a final comparison of the results with the authorities.
Edward Augustus Freeman.
Freeman (1823-1892) will always be best known by his long "History of the Norman Conquest," a work which embraces most of our island story before the great event of 1066. The author, a Fellow of Trinity, Oxford, was also a squire in Somerset, and could afford to devote his time to a gentlemanly but usually unremunerative form of literature. His work is protracted, minute, and influenced by a passion for the ideal English in the national character. Prodigiously industrious in his study of the original sources in print; he had a kind of dislike of research in manuscripts. He was well versed in architecture, topography, and local history; he was as much at home in Sicily as in England, with Graeco-Roman as with Norman remains; he was combative, and, in an earlier age, would probably have invited Mr. Robertson to settle the question of the English overlordship of Scotland in the lists. His great work is more profitable to the serious student than interesting to the general reader. He wrote much in "The Saturday Review" without adding to the popularity of that periodical. He was constantly correcting the errors of others, and died during a controversy with Mr. Horace Round on the existence or non-existence of a palisade at the Battle of Hastings (or Senlac). His friend and pupil, J. R. Green (1837-1883), is celebrated for his "Short History of the English People" (1874), a work written in a style rather acrocorinthian, and in its first edition rich in errors, later corrected. The book is written with so much spirit and sympathy that it may tempt many a reader to go more deeply into books less popular. Green had the power of exciting interest in topics generally deemed arid, and, with Freeman, contributed to the success of the History School at Oxford, though even more was due to the work of Bishop Stubbs on charters and constitutional history, and to the tutorial lectures and influence of the late Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, author of a history of the Popes.
William Hickling Prescott.
William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), the celebrated historian of the two greatest adventures of the modern world, was born, like Hawthorne, at Salem, and was educated at Harvard. Here some student threw a piece of bread at him in hall, his eye was struck, and his sight was so much injured that he could only write by aid of a kind of framework with cross lines; while his reading, whether from books or manuscripts, was almost wholly done by proxy. The works were read aloud, he listened; probably had notes made of the passages which he meant to use in his histories, composed his periods and then dictated them to a copyist. His "Ferdinand and Isabella," the history of Spain in her glory, is of 1837. Six years later he published "The Conquest of Mexico" (1843), "The Conquest of Peru" in 1847, and, up till his death in 1859, he was at work on the first decadence of Spain, under Philip II.
In glancing over the list of historical writers in English, from Gibbon downwards, we remark that almost all were men who could afford to deal with a theme so generally unpopular as the past. Hume and Robertson and Gibbon were all, when they worked at history, men in possession of a competence, or more than a competence. So was Hallam, so was Sir Walter Scott; Grote, Prescott, Freeman, Macaulay, were at least equally fortunate, while Carlyle, by dint of the strictest economy, was at least able to wait for years before reaping the emoluments of his labours. The man of letters who must live by his pen must live by hackwork of various kinds, and cannot afford the time to collect and digest his information, to select the little ore from the quarry of documents, and then present in an artistic form the result of his researches. Professors of history who must employ their days by lecturing to and correcting the essays of pupils, "live from the altar" of history, but are almost never great and are never popular historians.