The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

— * Dr. Jackson. + Mr. Monro. ^ Dr. Paget. # Mr. Warren. —

It must not be supposed that Froude felt only the burden. His powers of enjoyment were great, and he thoroughly enjoyed Oxford. He had left it forty years ago under a cloud. He came back in a dignified character with an assured position. He liked the familiar buildings and the society of scholars. The young men interested and amused him. Ironical as he might be at times, and pessimistic, his talk was intellectually stimulating. His strong convictions, even his inveterate prejudices, prevented his irony from degenerating into cynicism. History, said Carlyle, is the quintessence of innumerable biographies, and it was always the human side of history that appealed to Froude. He once playfully compared himself with the Mephistopheles of Faust, sitting in the Professor's chair. But in truth he saw always behind historical events the directing providence of God. Newman held that no belief could stand against the destructive force of the human reason, the intellectus sibi permissus. Froude felt that there were things which reason could not explain, and that no revelation was needed to trace the limits of knowledge. Sceptical as he was in many ways, he had the belief which is fundamental, which no scientific discovery or philosophic speculation can shake or move. Creeds and Churches might come or go. The moral law remained where it was. His own creed is expressed in that which he attributes to Luther. "The faith which Luther himself would have described as the faith that saved is the faith that beyond all things and always truth is the most precious of possessions, and truthfulness the most precious of qualities; that when truth calls, whatever the consequence, a brave man is bound to follow."*

— * Short Studies, iii. 189. —

Although Froude was probably happier at Oxford than he had been at any time since 1874, the regulations of his professorship worried him, as they had worried Stubbs and Freeman. They seemed to have been drawn on the assumption that a Professor would evade his duties, and behave like an idle undergraduate. Froude, on the contrary, interpreted them in the sense most adverse to himself. The authorities of the place, or some of them, would have had him spare his pains, and colourably evade the statute by talking instead of lecturing. But Froude was too conscientious to seek relief in this way. Whatever he had to do he did thoroughly, conscientiously, and as well as he could. There is no trace of senility in his professorial utterances. On the contrary, they are full of life and fire. Yet Froude was by no means entirely engrossed in his work. He had time for hospitality, and for making friends with young men. He loved his familiar surroundings, for nothing can vulgarise Oxford. He found men who still read the classics as literature, not to convict Aeschylus of violating Dawes's Canon, or to get loafers through the schools. He was not in all respects, it must be admitted, abreast of modern thought. His education had been unscientific, and he cared no more for Darwin than Carlyle did. He had learnt from his brother William, who died in 1879,* the scope and tendency of modern experiments, and astronomical illustrations are not uncommon in his writings. But the bent of his mind was in other directions, and he had never been under the influence of Spencer or of Mill. The Oxford which he left in 1849 was dominated by Aristotle and Bishop Butler. He came back to find Butler dethroned, and more modern philosophers established in his place. Aristotle remained where he was, not the type and symbol of universal knowledge, as Dante conceived him, but the groundwork upon which all later systems had been built. Plato, without whom there would have been no Aristotle, was more closely and reverently studied than ever, partly no doubt through Jowett, and yet mainly because no philosopher can ever get far away from him. Jowett himself, the ideal "Head of a House," who had been at Balliol when Froude was at Oriel, died in the second year of Froude's professorship, after seeing many of his pupils famous in the world. He had lived through the great period of transition in which Oxford passed from a monastery to a microcosm. The Act of 1854 had opened the University to Dissenters, reserving fellowships and scholarships, all places of honour and emolument, for members of the Established Church. The Act of 1871 removed the test of churchmanship for all such places, and for the higher degrees, except theological professorships and degrees in divinity. The Act of 1877 opened the Headships of the Colleges, and put an end to prize Fellowships for life. The Provost of Oriel, then Vice- Chancellor, was a layman. Marriage did not terminate a Fellowship, which, unless it were connected with academic work, lasted for seven years, and no longer. The old collegiate existence was at an end. Many of the tutors were married, and lived in their own houses. When Gladstone revisited Oxford in 1890, and occupied rooms in college as an Honorary Fellow of All Souls, nothing pleased him less than the number of women he encountered at every turn. They were not all the wives and daughters of the dons, who in Gladstone's view had no more right to such appendages than priests of the Roman Church; there were also the students at the Ladies' Colleges, who were allowed to compete for honours, though not to receive degrees.

— * "My brother," Froude wrote to Lady Derby, "though his name was little before the public, was well known to the Admiralty and indeed in every dock-yard in Europe. He has contributed more than any man of his time to the scientific understanding of ships and shipbuilding. His inner life was still more remarkable. He resisted the influence of Newman when all the rest of his family gave way, refusing to become a Catholic when they went over, and keeping steadily to his own honest convictions. To me he was ever the most affectionate of friends. The earliest recollections of my life are bound up with him, and his death takes away a large past of the little interest which remained to me in this most uninteresting world. The loss to the Admiralty for the special work in which he was engaged will be almost irreparable." —

Froude, who brought his own daughters with him, entered easily into the changed conditions. He was not given to lamentation over the past, and if he regretted anything it was the want of Puritan earnestness, of serious purpose in life. He had an instinctive sympathy with men of action, whether they were soldiers, sailors, or statesmen. For mere talkers he had no respect at all, and he was under the mistaken impression that they governed the country through the House of Commons. He never realised, any more than Carlyle, the vast amount of practical administrative work which such a man as Gladstone achieved, or on the other hand the immense weight carried in Parliament by practical ability and experience, as distinguished from brilliancy and rhetoric. The history which he liked, and to which he confined himself, was antecedent to the triumph of Parliament over the Crown. Warren Hastings, he used to say, conquered India; Burke would have hanged him for doing it. The House of Lords acquitted Hastings; and so far from criticising the doubtful policy of the war with France in 1793, Burke's only complaint of Pitt was that he did not carry it on with sufficient vigour. The distinction between talkers and doers is really fallacious. Some speeches are actions. Some actions are too trivial to deserve the name. But if Froude was incapable of understanding Parliamentary government, he very seldom attempted to deal with it. The English in Ireland is a rare and not a fortunate, exception. The House of Tudor was far more congenial to him than either the House of Stuart or the House of Brunswick.

Froude delivered his Inaugural Lecture on the 27th of October, 1892. The place was the Museum, which stands in the parks opposite Keble, and the attendance was very large. In the history of Oxford there have been few more remarkable occasions. Although the new Professor had made his name and writings familiar to the whole of the educated world, his immediate predecessor had vehemently denied his right to the name of historian, and had assured the public with all the emphasis which reiteration can give that Froude could not distinguish falsehood from truth. If anything could have brought Freeman out of his grave, it would have been Froude's appointment to succeed him. It is the custom in an Inaugural Lecture to mention in eulogistic language the late occupant of the chair. No man was less inclined to bear malice than Froude. His disposition was placable, and his temperament calm. Freeman had grossly and frequently insulted him without the faintest provocation. But he had long since taken his revenge, such as it was, and he could afford to be generous now. He discovered, with some ingenuity, a point of agreement in that Freeman, like himself, was a champion of classical education. Therefore, "along with his asperities," he had "strong masculine sense," and had voted for compulsory Greek. If the right of suffrage were restricted to men who knew Greek as well as Froude or Freeman, the decisions of Congregation at Oxford, and of the Senate at Cambridge, would command more respect.

Froude must have been reminded by the obligatory reference to Freeman that a man of seventy-four was succeeding a man of sixty- nine. The Roman Cardinals were, he said, in the habit of electing an aged Pontiff with the hope, not always fulfilled, that he would die soon. He had no belief that such an expectation would be falsified in his own case, and he undertook, with obvious sincerity, not to hold the post for a single day after he had ceased to be capable of efficiently discharging his functions. To history his own life had been devoted, and it would indeed have been strange if he could not give young men some help in reading it. His own great book might not be officially recommended for the schools. It was unofficially recommended by all lovers of good literature and sound learning. Like most people who know the meaning of science and of history, he denied that history was a science. There were no fixed and ascertained principles by which the actions of men were determined. There was no possibility of trying experiments. The late Mr. Buckle had not displaced the methods of the older historians, nor founded a system of his own. "I have no philosophy of history," added Froude, who disbelieved in the universal applicability of general truths. Here, perhaps, he is hardly just to himself. The introductory chapter to his History of the Reformation, especially the impressive contrast between modern and mediaeval England, is essentially philosophical, so much so that one sees in it the student of Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon. History to Froude, like the world to Jaques, was a stage, and all the men and women merely players. But a lover of Goethe knows well enough that the drama can be philosophical, and Shakespeare, the master of human nature, has drawn nothing more impressive than the close of Wolsey's career. "The history of mankind is the history of great men," was Carlyle's motto, and Froude's. It is a noble one, and to discredit great men with low motives is the vice of ignoble minds. The reign of Henry VIII., after Wolsey's fall, was rich in horrors and in tragical catastrophes. But it was not a mere carnival of lust and blood. High principles were at stake, and profound issues divided parties, beside which the levity of Anne Boleyn and the eyes of Jane Seymour were not worth a moment's thought. Hobbes wondered that a Parliament man worth thousands of pounds, like Hampden, to pay twenty shillings for ship-money, as if the amount had anything to do with the principle that taxes could only be levied by the House of Commons. Henry's vices are dust in the balance against the fact that he stood for England against Rome. It is one of Froude's chief merits that he never fails to see the wood for the trees, never forgets general propositions to lose himself in details. A novice whose own mind is a blank may read whole chapters of Gardiner without discovering that any events of much significance happened in the seventeenth century. He will not read many pages of Froude before he perceives that the sixteenth century established our national independence.

Two of Froude's pet hobbies may be found in his Inaugural Lecture. There is the theory that judgment falls upon idleness and vice, which he adopted from Carlyle. There is his own doctrine that the Statute Book furnishes the most authentic material of history. It is no answer to say that preambles are inserted by Ministers, who put their own case and not the case of the nation. In the use or reception of all evidence allowance must be made for the source from which it comes. But even Governments do not invent out of their own heads, or put into statutes what is foreign to the public mind. They employ the arguments most likely to prevail, and these must be closely connected with the circumstances of the day. No recital in an Act of parliament can prove incontestably that the monasteries were stews, or worse. That such a thing could be plausibly alleged, and generally believed, is itself important, and history must take account of popular views. Debates were not reported in the sixteenth century, nor was freedom of speech in Parliament recognised by the Crown. There was nothing to ensure a fair trial for the victims of a royal prosecution, and testimony obtained by torture was accepted as authentic. All these are facts, and to neglect them is to go astray. But they do not prove that every public document is untrustworthy; or that the words of a statute have no more to do with reality than the words of a romance. It is a question of degree. Historical narrative could not be written under the conditions most properly imposed upon criminal proceedings in a court of law. If nothing which cannot be proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt is admitted into the pages of history, they will be bare indeed. It is significant that Froude laid down in 1892 the same propositions for which he had contended in the Oxford Essays of 1855. He had suffered many things in the meantime of The Saturday Review, but he held to his old opinions with unshaken tenacity. All Froude's changes were made early in life. When once he had shaken himself free of Tractarianism, The Nemesis of Faith, and Elective Affinities, he remained a Protestant, Puritan, sea-loving, priest-hating Englishman.

The subject with which Froude began his brief career as Professor was the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent has been described by one of the great historians of the world, Fra Paolo Sarpi, whom Macaulay considered second only to Thucydides. Entirely ineffective for the purpose of securing universal concord, it did in reality separate Protestant from Catholic Europe, and establish Papal authority over the Church of Rome. When the Council met, the Papacy was no part of orthodox Catholicism, and Henry VIII. never dreamt that in repudiating the jurisdiction of the Pope he severed himself from the Catholic Church. If Luther had been only a heretic, the Council might have put him down. But he had behind him the bulk of the laity, and Cardinal Contarini told Paul III. that the revolt against ecclesiastical power would continue if every priest submitted. "The Reformation," said Froude at the beginning of his first course, in November, 1892, "is the hinge on which all modern history turns." He traced in it the rise of England's greatness. When he came back in his old age to Oxford, it was to sound the trumpet-note of private judgment and religious liberty, as if the Oxford Movement and the Anglo-Catholic revival had never been. Froude could not be indifferent to the moral side of historical questions, or accept the doctrine that every one is right from his own point of view. The Reformation did in his eyes determine that men were responsible to God alone, and not to priests or Churches, for their opinions and their deeds. It also decided that the Church must be subordinate to the State, not the State to the Church. This is called Erastianism, and is the bugbear of High Churchmen. But there is no escape from the alternative, and the Church of Rome has never abandoned her claim to universal authority. Against it Henry VIII. and Cromwell, Elizabeth and Cecil, set up the supremacy of the law, made and administered by laymen. As Froude said at the close of his first course, in the Hilary Term of 1893, "the principles on which the laity insisted have become the rule of the modern Popes no longer depose Princes, dispense with oaths, or absolve subjects from their allegiance. Appeals are not any more carried to Rome from the national tribunals, nor justice sold there to the highest bidder." Justice was sold at Rome before the existence of the Catholic Church, or even the Christian religion. It has been sold, as Hugh Latimer testified, in England herself. But with the English Court's independence of the Holy See came the principles of civil and religious freedom.