Between 1867 and 1893 Froude had become more favourable to Erasmus, or more sympathetic with his point of view. It was not that he admired Luther less. On the contrary, his Protestant convictions grew stronger with years, and to the last he raised his voice against the Anglo-Catholic revival. But he seemed to feel with more force the saying of Erasmus that "the sum of religion is peace." He translated and read out to his class the whole of the satiric dialogue held at the gate of Paradise between St. Peter and Julius II., in which the wars of that Pontiff are ruthlessly flagellated, and the wicked old man threatens to take the celestial city by storm. Erasmus, averse as he was from violent measures, had no lack of courage, and in his own name he told the truth about the most dignified ecclesiastics. No artifices imposed upon him, and he acknowledged no master but Christ. He translated the arch-sceptic Lucian, about whom Froude has himself written a delightful essay. "I wish," said Froude, "I wish more of us read Lucian now. He was the greatest man by far outside the Christian Church in the second century." Lucian lived in an age when miracles the most grotesque were supported by witnesses the most serious, and when, as he said, the one safeguard was an obstinate incredulity, the ineradicable certainty that miracles did not happen. Erasmus enjoyed Lucian as a corrective of monkish superstition, though he himself was essentially Christian. A Protestant he never became. He lived and died in communion with Rome, denounced by monks as a heretic, and by Lutherans as a time-server. Paul III. Would have made him a Cardinal if his means had sufficed for a Prince of the Church. Standing between the two extremes, he saw better than any of his contemporaries the real proportions of things, and Froude's last words on the subject were that students would be most likely to understand the Reformation if they looked at it with the eyes of Erasmus. Small faults notwithstanding, there is no one who has drawn a more vivid, or a more faithful, portrait of Erasmus than Anthony Froude.
Of Froude in his Oxford Chair it may fairly be said that in a short time he fulfilled a long time, and made more impression upon the under-graduates in a few months than Stubbs had made in as many years. It was not so much the love of learning that he inspired, though the range of his studies was wide, as enthusiasm for history because it was the history of England. His subjects were really English. Erasmus knew England thoroughly, and would have been an Englishman if he could. The Council of Trent failed to check the Reformation, and England without the Reformation would have been a different country, if not a province of Spain. Froude's lectures were events, landmarks in the intellectual life of Oxford, and the young men who came to him for advice went away not merely with dry facts, but with fructifying ideas. Distasteful as modern Parliamentary politics were to him, the position of the British Empire in the world was the dominant fact in his mind, and he regarded Oxford as a training-ground of imperial statesmanship.
He was not made to run in harness, or to act as a coach for the schools. "The teaching business at Oxford," he wrote to Skelton, after his last term, "goes at high pressure—in itself utterly absurd, and unsuited altogether to an old stager like myself. The undergraduates come about me in large numbers, and I have asserted in some sense my own freedom; but one cannot escape the tyranny of the system."* This is severe, though not perhaps severer than the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Firth. To a critic from the outside it seems that Boards of Studies should have power to relax their own rules, and that the utmost possible relaxation should have been granted in the case of Froude. A famous historian of seventy-four, if qualified to be a Professor at all, must be capable of managing his own work so that it may be most useful and efficient. The restrictions of which Froude, not alone, complained are really incompatible with Regius Professorships, or at least with the patronage of the Crown. They imply that the teaching branch of the University is to be entirely controlled by expert specialists on the spot. A Regius Professor is a national institution, a public man, not like a college tutor, who has purely local functions to discharge. That is a point on which Freeman would have agreed with Froude, and Stubbs would have agreed with both of them. Froude's success in spite of limitations does not show that they were wise, but that genius surmounts obstacles and breaks the barriers which seek to impede it. "To my sorrow I am popular," he said, "and my room is crowded. I know not who they are, and have no means of knowing. So it is not satisfactory. I must alter things somehow.
— * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 222. —
I can't yet tell how." The opportunity never came. But he was too old and too wise a man to let such things affect his happiness, and he was happier in Oxford than in London. "Some of the old Dons," he wrote, "have been rather touchingly kind."
There was indeed only one chance of escaping Froude's magnetism, and that was to keep out of his way. The charm of his company was always irresistible. Different as the Oxford of 1893 was from the Oxford of 1843, young men are always the same, and Froude thoroughly understood them. He had enjoyed himself at Oriel not as a reading recluse, but as a boy out of school, and he was as young in heart as ever. Strange is the hold that Oxford lays upon men, and not less strong than strange. Nothing weakens it; neither time, nor distance, nor success, nor failure, nor the revolution of opinion, nor the deaths of friends. Oxford had been unjust to Froude, and had driven out one of her most illustrious sons in something like disgrace. Yet he never wavered in his affection for her, and the many vicissitudes of his life he came back to Oriel with the spirits of a boy. The spells of Oxford, like the spells of Medea, disperse the weight of years.
CHAPTER XI
THE END
He lectures on Erasmus were not public; they were delivered in Froude's private house at Cherwell Edge, and attended only by members of the University reading for the Modern History School. His public lectures on the Council of Trent and on English seamen had been so much crowded by men and women, young and old, that candidates for honours in history were scarcely able to find room. Nothing could be more honourable to Froude, or to Oxford, than his enthusiastic reception by his old University at the close of his brilliant and laborious career. But it was too much for him. Like Voltaire in Paris, he was stifled with flowers. His twentieth discourse on Erasmus begins with the pathetic sentence, "This will be my last lecture, for the life of Erasmus was drawing to an end." So was his own. His final task in this world was the preparation of Erasmus for the press. He had been all his life accustomed to work at his own time, and the strain of living by rule at Oxford had told upon him more than he knew. Before the end of the summer term in 1894 he left Oxford for Devonshire, worn out and broken down. "Education," he wrote in his last letter to Skelton, "like so much else in these days, has gone mad, and has turned into a large examination mill." He was so much exhausted that he could not go again to Norway with Lord Ducie,* though with characteristic pluck he half thought of paying another visit to Sir George Grey in New Zealand. But it was not to be. During the summer his strength failed, and it became known that the disorder was incurable. With philosophic calmness he awaited the inevitable close, feeling, as he had always felt, that he was in the hands of God. His religion, very deep, constant, and genuine, was not a spiritual emotion, nor a dogmatic creed, but a calm and steady confidence that, whatever weak mortals might do, the Judge of all the earth would do right. "It is impossible," said Emerson, whom he loved and admired, "for a man not to be always praying." The relations of such men with the unseen are an inseparable part of their daily lives. Froude had no more sympathy with the self-complacent "agnosticism" of modern thought than he had with Catholic authority or ecstatic revivalism. To fear God and to keep His commandments was with him the whole duty of man. The materialistic hypothesis he rejected as incredible, explaining nothing, meaning nothing, a presumptuous attempt to put ignorance in the place of knowledge.
— * "Ducie wanted me to go to Norway with him, salmon-fishing; but I didn't feel that I could do justice to the opportunity. In the debased state to which I am reduced, if I hooked a thirty-pound salmon, I should only pray him to get off."—Table Talk of Shirley, pp. 222, 223. —