The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

I have taken the liberty of giving such emphasis as italics can confer to two brief passages in this brilliant description, because they express Froude's real opinion of Diocesan Conferences and those who frequented them.* Disraeli's audience applauded, partly in admiration of his wit, and partly because, they thought that he was amusing them at the expense of the latitudinarians they abhorred. Froude's appreciation came from an opposite source. He regarded Disraeli not as a flatterer, but as a busy mocker, laughing at the people thought he was laughing with them. He made no attempt at a really critical estimate of the most baffling figure in English politics. He fastened on the picturesque aspects of Disraeli's career, and touched them with an artist's hand. As to what it all meant, or whether it meant anything, he left his readers as much, in the dark as they were before. My own theory, if one must have a theory, is that one word explains Disraeli, and that that word is "ambition." If so, he was one of the most marvellously successful men that ever lived. If not, and if a different standard should be applied, other consequences would ensue. Froude gives no help in the solution of the problem. What he does is to portray the original genius which no absurdities could cover, and no obstacles could restrain. Disraeli the "Imperialist" had no more to do with building empires than with building churches, but he was twice Prime Minister of England.

— * Disraeli's contempt for italics is well known. He called them "the last resort of the forcible Feebles." —

Froude's Sea Studies in the third series of his collected essays are chiefly a series of thoughts on the plays of Euripides. But, like so much of his writing, they are redolent of the ocean, on which and near which he always felt at home. The opening sentences of this fresh and wholesome paper are too characteristic not to be quoted.

"To a man of middle age whose occupations have long confined him to the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library, there is something unspeakably delightful in a sea voyage. Increasing years, if they bring little else that is agreeable with them, bring to some of us immunity from sea-sickness. The regularity of habit on board a ship, the absence of dinner parties, the exchange of the table in the close room for the open deck under an awning, and the ever-flowing breeze which the motion of the vessel forbids to sink into a calm, give vigour to the tired system, restore the conscious enjoyment of elastic health, and even mock us for the moment with the belief that age is an illusion, and that 'the wild freshness' of the morning of life has not yet passed away for ever. Above our heads is the arch of the sky, around us the ocean, rolling free and fresh as it rolled a million years ago, and our spirits catch a contagion from the elements. Our step on the boards recovers its buoyancy. We are rocked to rest at night by a gentle movement which soothes you into the dreamless sleep of childhood, and we wake with the certainty that we are beyond the reach of the postman. We are shut off, in a Catholic retreat, from the worries and anxieties of the world."

This is not the language of a man who ever suffered seriously from sea-sickness, and Froude's face had an open-air look which never suggested "the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library." But he was of course a laborious student, and nothing refreshed him like a voyage. On the yacht of his old friend Lord Ducie, as Enthusiastic a sailor and fisherman as himself, he made several journeys to Norway, and caught plenty of big salmon. He has done ample justice to these expeditions in the last volume of his essays, which contains The Spanish Story of the Armada. A country where the mountains are impassable, and the fiords the only roads, just suited his taste. It even inspired him with a poem, Rornsdal Fiord, which appeared in Blackwood for April, 1883, and it gave him health, which is not always, like poetry, a pure gift of nature.

The life of society, and of towns, never satisfied Froude. Apart from his genius and his training, he was a country gentleman, and felt most at home when he was out of doors.

From Panshanger he wrote to Lady Derby:

"How well I understand what you felt sitting on the top of the Pyrenees. We men are but a sorry part of the creation. Now and then there comes to us a breath out of another order of things; a sudden perception—coming we cannot tell how—of the artificial and contemptible existence we are all living; a longing to be out of it and have done with it—by a pistol-shot if nothing else will do. I continually wonder at myself for remaining in London when I can go where I please, and take with me all the occupations I am fit for. Alas! it is oneself that one wants really to be rid of. If we did not ourselves share in the passions and follies that are working round us we should not be touched by them. I have made up my mind to leave it all, at all events, as soon as Mr. Carlyle is gone; but the enchantment which scenery, grand or beautiful, or which simple country life promises at a distance, will never abide—let us be where we will. It comes in moments like a revelation; like the faces of those whom we have loved and lost; which pass before us, and we stretch our hands to clasp them and they are gone. I came here yesterday for two or three days. The house is full of the young generation. They don't attract me …. Whatever their faults, diffidence is not one of them. Macaulay's doctrine of the natural superiority of each new generation to its predecessor seems most heartily accepted and believed. The superb pictures in the house are a silent protest against the cant of progress. You look into the faces of the men and the women on the walls and can scarcely believe they are the same race with us. I have sometimes thought 'the numbers' of the elect have been really fulfilled, and that the rest of us are left to gibber away an existence back into an apehood which we now recognise as our real primitive type."

From the Molt, on the other hand, he wrote:

"It is near midnight. I have just come in from the terrace. The moon is full over the sea, which is glittering as if it was molten gold. The rocks and promontories stand out dear and ghost-like. There is not a breath to rustle the leaves or to stir the painted wash upon the shore. Men and men's doings, and their speeches and idle excitement, seem all poor, transient, and contemptible. Sea and rocks and moonlight looked just as they look to-night before Adam sinned in Paradise. They remain—we come and go, hardly more enduring than the moth that flutters in through the window, and we are hardly of more consequence."