The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

"Imperial Federation," he wrote in 1887, "is far away, if ever it is to be realised at all. If it is to come it will come of itself, brought about by circumstances and silent impulses working continuously through many years unseen and unspoken of. It is conceivable that Great Britain and her scattered offspring, under the pressure of danger from without, or impelled by some purpose, might agree to place themselves under a single administrative head. It is conceivable that out of a combination so formed, if it led to a successful immediate result, some union of a closer kind might eventually emerge. It is not only conceivable, but it is entirely certain, that attempts made when no such occasion has arisen, by politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves, will fail, and in failing will make the object that is aimed at more confessedly unattainable than it is now."*

— * English in the West Indies, p. 168. —

So far Froude's predictions have been realised. When he wrote, the Imperial Federation League had just been formed, and Lord Rosebery was arguing for Irish Home Rule as part of a much wider scheme. Except Australia, which is homogeneous, like the Dominion of Canada, the British Empire is no nearer Federation, and Ireland is no nearer Home Rule, than they were then. The depression of the sugar trade in the West Indian Islands has been met by a treaty which raises the price of sugar at home, and makes those Colonies proportionately unpopular with the working classes. It has since been proposed to carry the principle farther, and tax the British workman for the benefit of Colonial manufacturers. For these strange results of imperial thinking neither Froude nor any of his contemporaries were prepared. But they correspond accurately, especially the second of them, with the "attempt made by politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves," against which Froude warned his countrymen. Froude was no scientific economist. He believed in "free trade within the Empire," which is not free trade. He was for an imperial tariff, a thing made in Germany, and called a Zollverein. But his practical experience and personal observation taught him that proposals for closer union with the Colonies must come from the Colonies themselves. The negroes were a difficulty. They were not really fit for self-government, as the statesmen of the American Union had found. Personal freedom, the inalienable right of all men and all women, is a very different thing from the possession of a vote. As for India, the idea of Home Rule there had receded a long way into the distance since the sanguine predictions of Macaulay. Perhaps Froude never quite worked out his conceptions of the federal system which he would have liked to see. In Australia it would have been plain sailing. In Canada it was already established. In South Africa it would have embodied the union of British with Dutch, and prevented the disasters which have since occurred. In the West Indies it would have raised problems of race and colour which are more prudently agitated at a greater distance from the Black. Republic of Hayti. Imperial Federalists not yet explained what they would do with India.

Froude neither was nor aimed at being practical politican. His object, in which he succeeded, was to kindle in the public mind at home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his own heart was full. Although the measure of Colonial loyalty was given afterwards in the South African War, the despatch of troops from Sydney to the Soudan in 1885 showed that ties of sentiment are the strongest of all. It was those ties, rather than any political or commercial bond, which Froude desired to strengthen. No one would have liked less to live in a Colony. Colonial society did not suit him. Colonial manners were not to his mind. But to meet governing men, like Sir Henry Norman, a "warm Gladstonian," by the way, was always a pleasure to him, and as a symbol of England's greatness he loved her territory beyond the seas.

The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, published in 1889, was Froude's one mature and serious attempt at a novel. For distinction of style and beauty of thought it may be compared with the greatest of historical romances. If it was the least successful of his books, the failure can be assigned to the absence of women, or at least of love, which ever since Dr. Johnson's definition, if not before, has been expected in a novel. The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth century. The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring. Goring "belonged to an order of men who, if they had been allowed fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory of an evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the Cromwellians had died out of the land, and was not to be revived by a single enthusiast." He was murdered, and Froude could point his favourite moral that the woes of the sister country would be healed by the appearance of another Cromwell, which he had to admit was improbable. The Irish hero, Morty Sullivan, has been in France, and is ready to fight for the Pretender. He did no good. Few Irishmen, in Froude's opinion, ever did any good. But in The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, if anywhere, Froude shows his sympathy with the softness of the Irish character, and Morty's meditations on his return from France are expressed as only Froude could express them. Morty was walking with his sister by the estuary of the Kenmare River opposite Derrynane, afterwards famous as the residence of Daniel O'Connell, "For how many ages had the bay and the rocks and the mountains looked exactly the same as they were looking then? How many generations had played their part on the same stage, eager and impassioned as if it had been erected only for them! The half-naked fishermen of forgotten centuries who had earned a scanty living there; the monks from the Skelligs who had come in on high days in their coracles to say mass for them, baptize the children, or bury the dead; the Celtic chief, with saffron shirt and battle-axe, driven from his richer lands by Norman or Saxon invaders, and keeping hold in this remote spot on his ragged independence; the Scandinavian pirates, the overflow of the Northern Fiords, looking for new soil where they could take root. These had all played their brief parts there and were gone, and as many more would follow in the cycles of the years that were to come, yet the scene itself was unchanged and would not change. The same soft had fed those that were departed, and would feed those that were to be. The same landscape had affected their imaginations with its beauty or awed them with its splendours; and each alike had yielded to the same delusion that the valley was theirs and was inseparably connected with themselves and their fortunes. Morty's career had been a stormy one …. He had gone out into the world, and had battled and struggled in the holy cause, yet the cause was not advanced, and it was all nothing. He was about to leave the old place, probably for ever. Yet there it was, tranquil, calm, indifferent whether he came or went. What was he? What was any one? To what purpose the ineffectual strivings of short-lived humanity? Man's life was but the shadow of a dream, and his work was but the heaping of sand which the next tide would level flat again."

Wordsworth's "pathetic fallacy" that the moods of nature correspond with the moods of man has seldom found such eloquent illustration as in Morty's vain imaginings. Morty himself was shot dead by English soldiers in revenge for the murder of Goring. The story is a dismal and tragic one. But the best qualities of the Irish race are there, depicted with true sympathy, and perhaps this volume may be held to confirm Carlyle's opinion, expressed in a letter to Miss Davenport Bromley, that even The English in Ireland was "more disgraceful to the English Government by far than to the Irish savageries." Froude, indeed, never forgot the kindness of the Kerry peasants who nursed him through the small-pox. He would have done anything for the Irish, except allow them to govern themselves.

In 1890 Froude contributed to the series of The Queen's Prime
Ministers, edited by Mr. Stuart Reid, a biographical study of Lord
Beaconsfield. He wrote to Mr. Reid on the subject:

". . . Lord Beaconsfield wore a mask to the generality of mankind. It was only when I read Lothair that I could form any notion to myself of the personality which was behind. I once alluded to that book in a speech at a Royal Academy banquet. Lord Beaconsfield was present, and was so far interested in what I said that he wished me to review Endymion in the Edinburgh, and sent me the proof-sheets of it before publication. Edymion did not take hold of me as Lothair did, and I declined, but I have never lost the impression which I gathered out of Lothair. It is worse than useless to attempt the biography of a man unless you know, or think you know, what his inner nature was …. I am quite sure that Lord Beaconsfield had a clearer insight than most men into the contemporary constitution of Europe—that he had a real interest in the welfare and prospects of mankind; and while perhaps he rather despised the great English aristocracy, he probably thought better of them than of any other class in England. I suppose that like Cicero he wished to excel, or perhaps more like Augustus to play his part well in the tragic comedy of life. I do not suppose that he had any vulgar ambition at all …. "

The feelings with which he approached this not altogether congenial task are described in the following passages from letters to Lady Derby:

…. "THE MOLT, September 14th, 1889.