The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

Nothing annoyed Carlyle more than to be told that he confounded might with right. He declared that, on the contrary, he had never said, and would never say, a word for power which was not founded on justice. Cromwell was as good as he was great, and he had never glorified Frederick, unless to write a book about a man is necessarily to glorify him. This prevalent misconception of Carlyle's gospel, so prevalent that it deceived no less keen a critic than Lecky, was completely dissipated by Froude. No one can read his Life intelligently without perceiving that Carlyle's real foe was materialism. The French Revolution was to him the central fact of modern history, and at the same time a supreme judgment of Heaven upon a society given up to unrestrained licentiousness. Whether he was right or wrong is not the point. He was as far as possible from being, in the modern sense, a scientific historian. Yet in some respects he was utilitarian enough. The condition of England was to him more important than any constitutional change, any triumph in diplomacy, or any victory in war, and this fact explains apparently inconsistent admiration of Peel, who though a Parliamentary statesman, had accomplished a solid achievement for the benefit of the people. Carlyle in his own writings is an almost insoluble enigma. To have given the true solution is the supreme merit of Froude.*

— * John Nichol, a name still dear in Scotland, formerly Professor of Literature at the University of Glasgow, who wrote on Carlyle for Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters in 1892, says in his preface: "Every critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligation to Mr. Froude as every critic of Byron to Moore, or of Scott to Lockhart …. I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the persistent, often virulent, attach directed against a loyal friend, betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith, and the defective reticence that often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr. Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on Sir Walter Scott, requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with the most ample authority; that the restrictions under which he was first entrusted with the MSS. of the Reminiscences and the Letters and Memorials (annotated by Carlyle himself as if for publication) were withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a practical injunction to communicate the whole." —

CHAPTER IX

BOOKS AND TRAVEL

The two passions of Froude's life were Devonshire and the sea. "Summer has come at last," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley from Salcombe in the middle of September, "after two months of rain and storm. The fields from which the wrecks of the harvest were scraped up mined and sprouting now lie basking in stillest sunshine, as if wind and rain had never been heard of. The coast is extremely beautiful, and I, in addition to the charms of the place, hear my native tongue spoken and sung in the churches in undiminished purity." Carlyle often kept him in London when he would much rather have been elsewhere. But, wherever he was, he had a ready pen, and his thoughts naturally clothed themselves in a literary garb. His enjoyment of books, especially old books, was intense. Reading, however, is idle work, and idleness was impossible to Froude. On his return from South Africa, where everything was being done which he thought least wise, he took up a classical subject, and began to write a book about Caesar. He read Cicero, Plutarch, Suetonius, Caesar himself, and produced early in 1879 a volume which was always a particular favourite of his own. "I believe," he said to Skelton, "it is the best book I have ever written." The public did not altogether agree with him, and it never became so popular as Short Studies.

Yet it is undoubtedly a brilliant performance, with just the qualities which might have been expected to make it popular, and a second edition was soon required. It is interesting from the first page to the last, and its whole object is to show that the Roman world in the last days of the Republic was very like the English world under Queen Victoria. In Rome itself it has a steady sale. The general reader, however, was not wrong in thinking that these eloquent pages are below the level of Froude at his best. There is a hard metallic glitter in the style, and a forced comparison of ancient with modern things not really parallel, which make the whole narrative artificial and unreal. Lord Dufferin said, with his natural acuteness, "It is interesting, and forcibly written, but one feels he is not a safe guide. As they say of the mansions of Ireland, 'they are always within a hundred yards of the best situation,' so one feels that Froude is never quite in the bull's- eye in the view he gives."*

— * Lyall's Life of Dufferin, vol. ii. p. 244. —

Those who criticised the book as if it were a formal and historical narrative showed a lack of humour, which is a sense of proportion. Macaulay might almost as well be judged by his Fragment of a Roman Tale. Froude himself calls his Caesar a sketch, and it is scarcely more authoritative than the pamphlet of Louis Napoleon on the same subject. On the other hand, it is quite untrue that Froude had not read Cicero's letters. He had read those which bore upon his subject, and he quotes them freely enough. The fault of his Caesar is that he makes a wrong start. Points of resemblance between the first century before the Christian era and the nineteenth century after it may of course be found. But the differences are essential and fundamental. A society which rests upon servitude cannot be like a society which rests upon freedom. Christianity has modified the whole lives of those who do not profess it, and has created a totally new atmosphere, even if it be not in all respects a better one. Representative government, whether it be a good thing or a bad thing, is at least a thing which counts. Caesar could hardly have understood the idea of an indissoluble marriage, of a limited monarchy, of equality before the law.

One strange similitude Froude did, in deference to outraged susceptibilities, omit, and only the first edition contains a formal comparison of Julius Caesar with Jesus Christ. No irreverence was intended. It was Froude's enthusiasm for Caesar that carried him away. Still, the instance is only an extreme form of what comes from pushing parallels below the surface. It is only a shade less misleading, though many shades less startling, to represent Caesar as a virtuous philanthropist abstemious habits who perished in a magnanimous effort to rescue the people from the tyranny of nobles. The people in the modern sense were slaves, and the Republic at least ensured that there should be some protection against military despotism, to which in due course its abolition led. That Caesar was intellectually among the greatest men of all time is beyond question. Both strategist and as historian he is supreme. His "thrasonical boast" was sober truth, and he stands above military or literary criticism, a lesson and a model. But he was steeped in all the vices of his age, and his motive was personal ambition. The Republic did not give him sufficient scope, and therefore he would have destroyed it, if he had not been himself destroyed.

Froude adopted the position of a great German professor and historian, Theodor Mommsen, whose prejudices were as strong as his learning was profound. He went with Mommsen in adoration of Caesar, and in depreciation of Cicero. That Cicero used one sort of language in public speeches, and another sort in private correspondence, is true, and is notorious because some of his most intimate letters have been preserved. But it is not peculiar to him. The man who talked in public as he talked in private would have small sense of fitness. The man who talked in private as he talked in public would have small sense of humour. Although Cicero's humour was not brilliant, he had sufficient taste to preserve him from pedantry and from solecisms. His devotion to the Republic was perfectly sincere; and if he changed in his behaviour to Caesar, it was because Caesar changed in his behaviour to the Republic. Froude's specific charge of rapid tergiversation is disproved by dates. The speech for Marcellus, with its over-strained flattery of the conqueror, was delivered, not "within a few weeks of his murder," but eighteen months before that event, at a time when Cicero still hoped that Caesar would be moderate. If Cicero's Republic was a narrow oligarchy, it was also the only form of constitutional and civilian government which he knew or could imagine. He failed to preserve it. He was murdered like Caesar himself. Neither of them believed that political assassination was a crime. Cicero's only regret was that Antony had not been killed with Caesar. Antony's chief desire, which he accomplished, was to kill Cicero. The idea that Cicero was a mere declaimer, who did not count, never occurred either to Caesar or to Antony. It was left for Professor Mommsen to discover. Froude, always on the look-out for examples of his theory, or his father's theory, that orators must be useless and mistaken, seized it with an eager gasp. An agreeable looseness of treatment pervades the book, and "patricians" appear as wealthy leaders of fashionable society, being in fact a small number of old Roman families, who might be poor, or in trade, and could not legally under the Republic be increased in number, resembling rather a Hindu caste than any institution of Western Christendom. In Caesar's time they had almost died out, and the aristocracy of the day was an aristocracy of office. The book, however, though far from faultless, though in some respects misleading, has a singular fascination, the charm of a picture drawn by the hand of a master with consummate skill. As an historical study, what the French call une etude, it deserves a very high place, and it contains one sentence which all democrats would do well to learn: