The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

Froude had made history the business of his life, and he had no sooner completed his History of England than he turned his attention to the sister people. The Irish chapters in his great book had been picked out by hostile critics as especially good, and in them he had strongly condemned the cruel misgovernment of an Englishman otherwise so humane as Essex. While he was in Ireland he had examined large stores of material in Dublin, which he compared with documents at the Record Office in London, and he contemplated early in 1871, if not before, a book on Irish history. For this task he was not altogether well qualified. The religion of Celtic Ireland was repugnant to him, and he never thoroughly understood it. In religious matters Froude could not be neutral. Where Catholic and Protestant came into conflict, he took instinctively, almost involuntarily, the Protestant side. In the England of the sixteenth century the Protestant side was the side of England. In Ireland the case was reversed, and the spirit of Catholicism was identical with the spirit of nationality. Irish Catholics to this day associate Protestantism with the sack of Drogheda and Wexford, with the detested memory of Oliver Cromwell. To Froude, as to Carlyle, Cromwell was the minister of divine vengeance upon murderous and idolatrous Papists. His liking for the Irish, though perfectly genuine, was accompanied with an underlying contempt which is more offensive to the objects of it than the hatred of an open foe. He regarded them as a race unfit for self-government, who had proved their unworthiness of freedom by not winning it with the sword. If they had not quarrelled among themselves, and betrayed one another, they would have established their right to independence; or, if there had been still an Act of Union, they could have come in, as the Scots came, on their own terms. For an Englishman to write the history of Ireland without prejudice he must be either a cosmopolitan philosopher, or a passionless recluse. Froude was an ardent patriot, and his early studies in hagiology had led him to the conclusion, not now accepted, that St. Patrick never existed at all. His scepticism about St. Patrick might have been forgiven to a man who had probably not much belief in St. George. But Froude could not help running amok at all the popular heroes of Ireland. In the first of his two papers describing a fortnight in Kerry he went out of his way to depreciate the fame of Daniel O'Connell. "Ireland," he wrote, "has ceased to care for him. His fame blazed like a straw bonfire, and has left behind it scarce a shovelful of ashes. Never any public man had it in his power to do so much good for his country, nor was there ever one who accomplished so little."*

— * Short Studies, vol. ii. p. 241. —

That O'Connell wasted much time in clamouring for Repeal is perfectly true. But he was as much the author of Catholic Emancipation as Cobden was the author of Free Trade, and that fact alone should have debarred Froude from the use of this extravagant language. For though an article in Fraser's Magazine is a very different thing from a serious history, print imposes some obligations, and even two or three casual sentences may show the bent of a man's mind. Whatever Froude wrote on Ireland, or on anything else, was sure to be widely read, and to affect, for good or for evil, the opinion of the British public. It was therefore peculiarly incumbent on him not to flatter English pride by wounding Irish self-respect.

While Froude was writing his English in Ireland he received an invitation to give a series of lectures in the United States. "The Yankees," he says to Skelton,+ "have written to me about going over to lecture to them. I am strongly tempted; but I could not tell the truth about Ireland without reflecting in a good many ways on my own country. I don't fancy doing that, however justly, to amuse Jonathan." These words certainly do not show implacable bitterness against Ireland. Brought face to face with responsibility, Froude always felt the weight of it, and he was never consciously unfair. He was under a strong sense of obligation, which he felt bound to fulfil. It is impossible not to admire the chivalrous and intrepid spirit with which he undertook singlehanded to justify the conduct of his countrymen before the American people, and to persuade them that England had provocation for her treatment of Ireland. Once convinced that his cause was righteous, he never flinched. He believed that false views of the Irish question prevailed in America, and that he could set them right. He did not altogether underrate the magnitude of the enterprise. "I go like an Arab of the desert," he wrote to Skelton a little later: "my hand will be against every man, and therefore every man's hand will be against me."* A belief in Ireland's wrongs was part of the American creed, like the faithlessness of Charles II. and the tyranny of George III. Irish Americans had enormous influence at elections, in Congress, and in the newspapers. Released Fenians, O'Donovan Rossa among them, had been spreading what they called the light, and their own countrymen at all events believed what they said. The American people as a whole were not unfriendly to England. The Alabama Arbitration and the Geneva Award had destroyed the ill feeling that remained after the fall of Richmond. But it was not worth the while of any American politician to alienate the Irish vote, and most Americans honestly thought, not without reason, that the policy of England in Ireland had been abominable. To let sleeping dogs lie might be wise. Once they were unchained, no American hand would help to chain them up again. Froude, however, conceived that circumstances were unusually favourable. The Irish Church had been disestablished, and the Fenian prisoners had been set free. The Irish Land Act of 1870 had recognised the Irish tenant's right to a partnership in the soil. Although Froude had no sympathy, ecclesiastical or political, with Gladstone, he did think that the Land Act was a just and beneficent measure from which good would come. In the firm belief that he could vindicate the statesmanship of his own country before American audiences without sacrificing the paramount claims of truth and justice, he accepted the invitation.

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+ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 149.
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 151.
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After a summer cruise in a big schooner with his friend Lord Ducie, whose hospitality at sea he often in coming years enjoyed, Froude sailed from Liverpool in the Russia at the end of September, 1872, with the distinguished physicist John Tyndall. He was a good sailor, and loved a voyage. In his first letter to his wife from American soil he describes a storm with the delight of a schoolboy. "On Saturday morning it blew so hard that it was scarcely possible to stand on deck. The wind and waves dead ahead, and the whole power of the engines only just able to move the ship against it. It was the grandest sight I ever witnessed—the splendid Russia, steady as if she were on a railway, holding her straight course without yielding one point to the sea—up the long hill-sides of the waves and down into the troughs—the crests of the sea all round as far as the eye could reach in one wild whirl of foam and spray. It was worth coming into the Atlantic to see—with the sense all the time of perfect security."

Froude's visit was in one respect well timed. President Grant had just been assured of his second term, and even politicians had leisure to think of their famous guest. He was at once invited to a great banquet in New York, and found himself lodged with sumptuous hospitality in a luxurious hotel at the expense of the Bureau which had organised the lectures. One newspaper quaintly described him as "looking like a Scotch farmer, with an open frank face and calm mild eyes." His History was well known, for the Scribners had sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. His opinions were of course freely invited, and he did not hesitate to give them. "I talk much Toryism to them all, and ridicule the idea of England's decay, or of our being in any danger of revolution; and with Colonies and India and Commerce, etc., I insist that we are just as big as they are, and have just as large a future before us." Both Froude and his hosts might have remembered with advantage Disraeli's fine saying that great nations are those which produce great men. But the sensual idolatry of mere size is almost equally common on both sides of the Atlantic.

The banquet was given by Froude's American publishers, the Scribners, and his old acquaintance Emerson was one of the company. Another was a popular clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, and a third was the present Ambassador of the United States in London, Mr. Whitelaw Reid. In his speech Froude referred to the object of his visit. He had heard at home that "one of the most prominent Fenian leaders," O'Donovan Rossa, "was making a tour in the United States, dilating upon English tyranny and the wrongs of Ireland." That Froude should cross the seas to confute O'Donovan Rossa must have struck the audience as scarcely credible, until he explained his mission, for as such he regarded it, by asserting that "the judgment of America has more weight in Ireland than twenty batteries of English cannon." When the Irish had the management of their own affairs, he continued, the result was universal misery. They could not govern themselves in the sixteenth century; therefore they could not govern themselves in the nineteenth. If American opinion would only tell the Irish that they had no longer any grievances which legislation could redress, the Irish would believe it, and all would be well.

Though courteously treated as a representative Englishman, Froude had of course no official position, and he hoped that as a private individual his voice might be heard. But, while there were thousands of native Americans who had no love for their Irish fellow-citizens, there were very few indeed who cared to take up England's case against Ireland. The Democratic party were inclined to sympathise with Home Rule as being a mild form of Secession, and the Republican party did not see why Ireland should be refused the qualified independence enjoyed by every State of the Union. In these unfavourable circumstances Froude delivered his first lecture. He made a good point when he described the Irish peasant in Munster or Connaught looking to America as his natural protector. "There is not a lad," he exclaimed, "in an Irish national school who does not pore over the maps of the States which hang on the walls, gaze on them with admiration and hope, and count the years till he too shall set his foot in those famous cities which float before his imagination like the gardens of Aladdin." Nevertheless he asked his hearers and readers to take it from him that Ireland had no longer any good ground of complaint against the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Independence she could not have, and that not because the interests of Great Britain forbade it, which would have been an intelligible argument, but because she was unfit for it herself.

"If I were to sum up in one sentence the secret of Ireland's misfortunes, I should say it lay in this: that while from the first she has resisted England, complained of England, appealed to heaven and earth against the wrongs which England has inflicted on her, she has ever invited others to help her, and has never herself made an effective fight for her own rights …. A majority of hustings votes might be found for a separation. The majority would be less considerable if instead of a voting-paper they were called to handle a rifle."