John Forster, who was born a year later than Kinglake, and died fifteen years before him, was an industrious writer of biographies and biographical history, the friend of a good many men of letters, editor for many years of the Examiner, and secretary to the Lunacy Commissioners. He paid particular attention to the period of the Rebellion; his Arrest of the Five Members being his chief work, among several devoted to it. He wrote a Life of Goldsmith, and began one of Swift. In contemporary biography his chief performances were lives of Landor and of Dickens, with both of whom he was extremely intimate. In private life Forster had the character of a bumptious busybody, which character indeed the two books just mentioned, even without the anecdotes abundant in more recent books of biography, abundantly establish. And towards the men of letters with whom he was intimate (Carlyle and Browning may be added to Landor and Dickens) he seems to have behaved like a Boswell-Podsnap, while in the latter half of the character he no doubt sat to Dickens himself. But he was an indefatigable literary inquirer, and seems, in a patronising kind of way, to have been liberal enough of the result of his inquiries. He had a real interest both in history and literature, and he wrote fairly enough.
One of the most curious figures among the historians of this century was Henry Thomas Buckle, who was born near Blackheath in 1823, and privately educated. He had ample means, and was fond of books; and in 1857 he brought out the first volume (which was followed by a second in 1861) of a History of Civilisation. He did not nearly complete—in fact he only began—his scheme, in which the European part was ultimately intended to be subordinate to the English, and he died of typhus at Damascus in May 1862. The book attained at once, and for some time kept, an extraordinary popularity, which has been succeeded by a rather unjust depreciation. Both are to be accounted for by the fact that it is in many ways a book rather of the French than of the English type, and displays in fuller measure than almost any of Buckle's contemporaries in France itself, with the possible exception of Taine, could boast, the frank and fearless, some would say the headlong and headstrong, habit of generalisation—scorning particulars, or merely impressing into service such as are useful to it and drumming the others out—on which Frenchmen pride themselves, and for the lack of which they are apt to pronounce English historians, and indeed English men of letters of all kinds, plodding and unilluminated craftsmen rather than artists. In Buckle's reflections on Spain and Scotland, he accounts for the whole history of both countries and the whole character of both peoples by local conditions in the first place, and by forms of civil and ecclesiastical government. In respect to these last, his views were crude Voltairianism; but perhaps this is the best and most characteristic example of his method. He was extremely prejudiced; his lack of solid disciplinary education made him unapt to understand the true force and relative value of his facts and arguments; and as his premises are for the most part capriciously selected facts cemented together with an untempered mortar of theory, his actual conclusions are rarely of much value. But his style is clear and vigorous; the aggressive raiding character of his argument is agreeably stimulating, and excellent to make his readers clear up their minds on the other side; while the dread of over-generalisation, however healthy in itself, has been so long a dominant force in English letters and philosophy that a little excess the other way might be decidedly useful as an alterative. The worst fault of Buckle was the Voltairianism above referred to, causing or caused by, as is always the case, a deplorable lack of taste, which is not confined to religious matters.
Edward Augustus Freeman, who was a little younger than Buckle and survived him for thirty years, had some points in common with the historian of civilisation, though his education, interests, and tone in reference to religion were wholly different. Mr. Freeman, who was not at any public school but was a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, very soon devoted himself to the study of early English history, and secured a durable position by his elaborate History of the Norman Conquest (1867-76), which, even though the largest and most important, was only one among scores of works, ending in an unfinished History of Sicily. He was, when he died in 1892, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and he had for many years been very influential in determining the course of historical study. He was also, for many years of his life, an active journalist, being especially known as a contributor to the Saturday Review, and he sometimes took a very busy part in politics. Mr. Freeman was a student of untiring energy, and will always deserve honourable memory as the first historian who recognised and utilised the value of architecture in supplying historical documents and illustrations. His style was at times picturesque but too diffuse, and disfigured by a habit of allusion as teasing as Macaulay's antithesis or Kinglake's stock phrases. That he was apt to pronounce very strong opinions on almost any question with which he dealt, was perhaps a less drawback to his excellence as a historian than the violently controversial tone in which he was wont to deal with those who happened to hold opinions different from his own. Putting defects of manner aside, there is no question that, for his own special period of English history (the eleventh and twelfth centuries), Mr. Freeman did more than any man had done before him, and as much as any man has done for any other period; while in relation to his further subjects of study, his work, though less trustworthy, is full of stimulus and of information.
His chief pupil John Richard Green, who was born in 1837 and died of consumption in 1883, was a native of Oxford, and was educated there at Magdalen College School and Jesus College. Mr. Green, like Mr. Freeman, was a frequent contributor to the Saturday Review, and did some clerical duty in the east of London; but he is best known by his historical work on English subjects, especially the famous Short History of the English People, perhaps the most popular work of its class and kind ever written. Mr. Green professed, on a principle which had been growing in favour for some time, to extend the usual conception of historical dealing to social, literary, and other matters. These, however, had never as a fact been overlooked by historians, and the popularity of the book was chiefly due to its judicious selection of interesting facts, to the spirit of the narrative, and to the style, based partly on Macaulay, but infused with a modernness which exactly hit the taste of the readers of our time. Mr. Green afterwards expanded this book somewhat; and his early death cut short a series of more extended monographs, The Making of England, The Conquest of England, etc., which would have enabled him to display the minute knowledge on which his more summary treatment of the general theme had been based.
Among historians to whom in larger space more extended notice than is here possible would have to be given, perhaps the first place is due to Philip Henry, sixth Earl Stanhope (1805-75), who (chiefly under the title of Lord Mahon, which he bore before his succession to the earldom in 1855) was an active historical writer of great diligence and impartiality, and possessed of a fair though not very distinguished style. The first notable work,—a History of the War of the Succession in Spain (1832),—of Lord Stanhope (who was an Oxford man, took some part in politics, and was a devoted Peelite) was reviewed by Macaulay, and he wrote later several other and minor historical books. But his reputation rests on his History of Europe from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, which occupied him for some twenty years, finishing in 1854. Very much less known to the general, but of singular ability, was William Johnson or Cory, who under the earlier name had attracted considerable public attention as an Eton master and as author of a small but remarkable volume of poems called Ionica. After his retirement from Eton and the change of his name, Mr. Cory amused himself with the composition of a History of England, or rather a long essay thereon, which was very little read and falls completely out of the ordinary conception of such a book, but is distinguished by an exceptionally good and scholarly style, as well as by views and expressions of great originality. Many others must pass wholly unnoticed that we may finish this chapter with one capital name.
One of the greatest historians of the century, except for one curious and unfortunate defect, and (without any drawback) one of the greatest writers of English prose during that century, was James Anthony Froude, who was born at Dartington near Totnes in 1818, on 23rd April (Shakespeare's birthday and St. George's Day), and died in 1894 at the Molt near Salcombe in his native county. Mr. Froude (the youngest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes and the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude who played so remarkable a part in the Oxford Movement, and of William Froude the distinguished naval engineer) was a Westminster boy, and went to Oriel College, Oxford, afterwards obtaining a fellowship at Exeter. Like his elder brother he engaged in the Tractarian Movement, and was specially under the influence of Newman, taking orders in 1844. The great convulsion, however, of Newman's secession sent him, not as it sent some with Newman, but like Mark Pattison and a few more, into scepticism if not exactly negation, on all religious matters. He put his change of opinions (he had previously written under the pseudonym of "Zeta" a novel called Shadows of the Clouds) into a book entitled The Nemesis of Faith, published in 1849, resigned his fellowship, gave up or lost (to his great good fortune) a post which had been offered him in Tasmania, and betook himself to literature, being very much, except in point of style, under the influence of Carlyle. He wrote for Fraser, the Westminster, and other periodicals; but was not content with fugitive compositions, and soon planned a History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada. The first volumes of this appeared in 1856, and it was finished in 1869. Meanwhile Froude from time to time collected his essays into volumes called Short Studies, which contain some of his very best writing. His next large work was The English in Ireland, which was published in three volumes (1871-74). In 1874-75 Lord Carnarvon sent him on Government missions to the Cape, an importation of a French practice into England which was not very well justified by the particular instance. Between 1881 and 1884 he was occupied as Carlyle's literary executor in issuing his biographical remains. Later Oceana and The English in the West Indies contained at once sketches of travel and political reflections; and in 1889 he published an Irish historical romance, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. He was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in succession to Mr. Freeman, and his two latest works, Erasmus, published just before, and English Seamen some months after his death, contain in part the results of the appointment.
It is a vulgar observation that the natural element of some men appears to be hot water. No English author of the century justifies this better than Mr. Froude. His early change of faith attracted to him a very considerable share of the obloquy which usually (and perhaps not so unreasonably as is sometimes thought) attaches to violent revolutions of opinion on important points. His History was no sooner published than most acrimonious attacks were made upon it, and continued for many years, by a school of historical students with the late Mr. Freeman at their head. His Irish book, coinciding with the rise of "Home Rule" sentiment in Ireland, brought upon him furious enmity from the Irish Nationalist party and from those who, at first or by and by, sympathised with them in England. His colonial visits and criticisms not merely attracted to him the animosity of all those Englishmen who espoused the politics of non-intervention and non-aggrandisement, but aroused lively irritation in the Colonies themselves. About his discharge of his duties as Carlyle's executor, a perfect tempest of indignation arose; it being alleged that he had either carelessly, or through bad taste, or with deliberate treachery, revealed his dead friend's and master's weaknesses and domestic troubles to the public view.
With some of the causes of this odium we are fortunately here dispensed from dealing. Theological and political matters, in so far as they are controversial, are altogether outside of our scope. The question of the dealing with Carlyle's "Remains" is one rather of ethics than of literature proper, and it is perhaps sufficient to make, in reference to it, the warning observation that Lockhart, who is now considered by almost all competent critics as a very pattern of the union of fidelity and good taste towards both his subject and his readers, was accused, at the appearance of his book, of treachery towards Scott.
But it must be confessed that if Mr. Froude's critics were unfair (and they certainly were) he himself gave only too abundant opening to fair criticism. That his first great book (not perhaps any of his others) was planned on an unduly large scale, and indulged in far too extensive dissertation, divagation, and so forth, was rather the fault of his time than of himself. Grote and Macaulay had obtained, the first considerable, the latter immense popularity by similar prolixity; and Carlyle was about, in the Frederick, to follow the fashion. But whereas all these three, according to the information open to them, were and are among the most painfully laborious researchers and, with a fair allowance, the most faithful recorders among historians, Mr. Froude displayed an attention to accuracy which his warmest admirers must allow to be sadly, and which enemies asserted to be scandalously insufficient. He has been called by well-affected critics "congenitally inaccurate," and there is warrant for it. Nor did any one of his three great models come short of him in partiality, in advocacy, in the determination to make the reader accept his own view first of all.
He was, in the earlier part of his career at any rate, a very poor man, whereas Macaulay was in easy, and Grote in affluent circumstances, and he had not Carlyle's Scotch thrift. But the carelessness of his dealing with documents had more in it than lack of pence to purchase assistance, or even than lack of dogged resolve to do the drudgery himself. His enemies of course asserted, or hinted, that the added cause was dishonesty at the worst, indifference to truth at the best. As far as dishonesty goes they may be summarily non-suited. The present writer once detected, in a preface of Mr. Froude's to a book with which the introducer was thoroughly in sympathy, repeated errors of quotation or allusion which actually weakened Mr. Froude's own argument—cases where he made his own case worse by miscitation. To the very last, in his Erasmus itself, which he had prepared at some pains for the press, his work would always abound in the most astonishing slips of memory, oversights of fact, hastinesses of statement. There is probably no historian of anything like his calibre in the whole history of literature who is so dangerous to trust for mere matters of fact, who gives such bad books of reference, who is so little to be read with implicit confidence in detail. Had his critics confined themselves to pointing this out, and done him justice in his other and real merits, little fault could have been found with them. But it is impossible not to see that these merits were, at least in some cases, part of his crime, in the eyes of those who did not like him; in others were of a kind which their natural abilities did not qualify them to detect.