"The Saturday Review temperament," he wrote, "is ten thousand thousand times more damnable than the worst of Swinburne's skits. Modern respectability is so utterly without God, faith, heart; it shows so singular an ingenuity in and injuring everything that is noble and good, and so systematic a preference for what is mean and paltry, that I am not surprised at a young fellow dashing his heels into the face of it …. When there is any kind of true genius, we have no right to drive it mad. We must deal with it wisely, justly, fairly."*
— * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 137. —
Froude was an excellent editor; appreciative, discriminating, and alert. He prided himself on Carlyle's approval, though perhaps Carlyle was not the best judge of such things. His energy was multifarious. Besides his History and his magazine, he found time for a stray lecture at odd times, and he could always reckon upon a good audience. His discourse at the Royal Institution in February, 1864, on "The Science of History," for which he was "called an atheist," is in the main a criticism of Buckle, the one really scientific historian. According to Buckle, the history of mankind was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the past that made the impossibility of predicting the future. Great men were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle more erratic in their behaviour. Political economy was history in little, illustrating the regularity of human, like all other natural, forces. But can we predict historical events, as we can predict an eclipse? That is Froude's answer to Buckle, in the form of a question.
"Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made the greatest progress are the arts of destruction." It is difficult to see the atheism in all this, but the common sense is plain enough. Froude belonged to the school of literary historians, such as were Thucydides and Tacitus, Gibbon and Finlay, not to the school of Buckle, or, as we should now say, of Professor Bury.
In 1865 Froude removed from Clifton Place, Hyde Park, to Onslow Gardens in South Kensington, where he lived for the next quarter of a century. In 1868 the students of St. Andrews chose him to be Lord Rector of the University, and on the 23rd of March, 1869, he delivered his Inaugural Address on Education, which compared the plain living and high thinking of the Scottish Universities with the expensive and luxurious idleness that he remembered at Oxford. Froude was delighted with the compliment the students had paid him, and they were equally charmed with their Rector. In fact, his visit to St. Andrews produced in 1869 a suggestion that he should become the Parliamentary representative of that University and of Edinburgh. But the injustice of the law as it then stood disqualified him as a candidate. His deacon's orders, the shadowy remnant of a mistaken choice, stood in his way. Next year, in 1870, Bouverie's Act passed, and Froude was one of the first to take advantage of it by becoming again, what he had really never ceased to be, a layman. As he did not enter the House of Commons, it is idle to speculate on what might have been his political career. Probably it would have been undistinguished. He was not a good speaker, and he was a bad party man. His butler, who had been long with him, and knew him well, was once asked by a canvassing agent what his master's politics were. "Well," he said reflectively, "when the Liberals are in, Mr. Froude is sometimes a Conservative. When the Conservatives are in, Mr. Froude is always a Liberal." His own master, Carlyle, had been in early life an ardent reformer, and had hoped great things from the Act of 1832. Perhaps he did not know very clearly what he expected. At any rate he was disappointed, and, though he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Peel alter the abolition of the Corn Laws, he regarded the Reform Act of 1867 with indignant disgust.
Froude had a fitful and uncertain admiration for Disraeli. Gladstone he never liked or trusted, and did not take the trouble to understand. He had been brought up to despise oratory, he had caught from Carlyle a horror of democracy, he disliked the Anglo-Catholic party in the Church of England, and Gladstone's financial genius was out of his line. The Liberal Government of 1868 was in his opinion criminally indifferent to the Colonies. An earnest advocate of Federation, he did not see that the best way of retaining colonial loyalty was to preserve colonial independence intact. Nevertheless Froude was a pioneer of the modern movement, still in progress, for a closer union with the scattered parts of the British Empire. He feared that the Colonies would go if some effort were not made to retain them, and he turned over in his mind the various means of building up a federal system. Although Canadian Federation was emphatically Canadian in its origin, and had been adopted in principle by Cardwell during the Government of Lord Russell, it was Lord Carnarvon who carried it out, and he had no warmer supporter than Froude.
Of Froude's favourite recreations at this time the best account is to be found in his two Short Studies on A Fortnight in Kerry. From 1868 to 1870 he rented from Lord Lansdowne a place called Derreen, thirty-six miles from Killarney, and seventeen from Kenmare, where he spent the best part of the summer and autumn. If Froude did not altogether understand the Irish people, at least the Irish Catholics, and had no sympathy with their political aspirations, he loved their humour, and the scenery of "the most beautiful island in the world" had been familiar to him from his early manhood. In one of his youthful rambles he had been struck down by small-pox, and nursed with a devotion which he never forgot. Yet between him and the Celt, as between him and the Catholic, there was a mysterious, impassable barrier. They had not the same fundamental ideas of right and wrong. They did not in very truth worship the same God. But of Froude and the Irish I shall have to speak more at length hereafter. In Kerry he enjoyed himself, while at the same time he finished his History of England, and his description of the country is enchanting.
"A glance out of the window in the morning showed that I had not overrated the general charm of the situation. The colours were unlike those of any mountain scenery to which I was accustomed elsewhere. The temperature is many degrees higher than that of the Scotch highlands. The Gulf Stream impinges full upon the mouths of its long bays. Every tide carries the flood of warm water forty miles inland, and the vegetation consequently is rarely or never checked by frost even two thousand feet above the sea-level. Thus the mountains have a greenness altogether peculiar, stretches of grass as rich as water-meadows reaching between the crags and precipices to the very summits. The rock, chiefly old red sandstone, is purple. The heather, of which there are enormous masses, is in many places waist deep." Yachting and fishing, fishing and yachting, were the staple amusements at Derreen. Nothing was more characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air. Sport, in the proper sense of the term, he also loved. "I always consider," he said, "that the proudest moment of my life was, when sliding down a shale heap, I got a right and left at woodcocks." For luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never cared at all. But let him once more explain himself in his own words. "I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my five brace of grouse. I see no amusement in dawdling over a lowland moor where the packs are as thick as chickens in a poultry-yard. I like better than most things a day with my own dogs in scattered covers, when I know not what may rise—a woodcock, an odd pheasant, a snipe in the out-lying willow-bed, and perhaps a mallard or a teal. A hare or two falls in agreeably when the mistress of the house takes an interest in the bag. I detest battues and hot corners, and slaughter for slaughter's sake. I wish every tenant in England had his share in amusements which in moderation are good for us all, and was allowed to shoot such birds or beasts as were bred on his own farm, any clause in his lease to the contrary notwithstanding." Considering that this passage was written ten years before the Ground Game Act, it must be admitted that the sentiment is remarkably liberal. The chief interest of these papers,* however, is not political, but personal. They show what Froude's natural tastes were, the tastes of a sportsman and a country gentleman. He had long outgrown the weakness of his boyhood, and his physical health was robust. With a firm foot and a strong head he walked freely over cliffs where a false step would have meant a fall of a thousand feet. No man of letters was ever more devoted to exercise and sport. Though subject, like most men, and all editors, to fits of despondency, he had a sound mind in a healthy frame, and his pessimism was purely theoretical.
— * Short Studies, vol. ii. pp. 217-308. —
Froude's History, the great work of his life, was completed in 1870. He deliberately chose, after the twelve volumes, to leave Elizabeth at the height of her power, mistress of the seas, with Spain crushed at her feet. As he says himself, in the opening paragraph of his own Conclusion, "Chess-players, when they have brought their game to a point at which the result can be foreseen with certainty, regard their contest as ended, and sweep the pieces from the board." Froude had accomplished his purpose. He had rewritten the story of the Reformation. He had proved that the Church of England, though in a sense it dated from St. Austin of Canterbury, became under Henry VIII. a self-contained institution, independent of Rome and subject to the supremacy of the Crown.