The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

If patriotism be not a disqualification for an historian, Froude had none. Like every other writer, he made mistakes. But he was laborious in research, a master of narrative, with a genius for seizing dramatic points. Above all, he had imagination, without which the vastest knowledge is as a ship without sails, or a bird without wings. His objects, even his prejudices, were frankly avowed, and his prejudices gave way to fresh facts or reasons. The records at Simancas, for instance, completely changed, and changed for the worse, his estimate of Queen Elizabeth's character, and he admitted it at once with his transparent candour. To defend Froude against mendacity seems like an insult to his memory, for if he loved anything it was truth, though he sometimes spoke in a cynical way about the difficulty of attaining it. But such monstrous charges were made against him when he could no longer reply for himself that I may be forgiven for quoting an authority which will command general respect. Mr. Andrew Lang is as scrupulously accurate in statement as he is brilliantly felicitous in style. He has studied the history of the sixteenth century, especially in Scotland, and he disagrees with Froude on many, if not on most, of the points in dispute. Yet this is Mr. Lang's deliberate judgment:

"I have found Mr. Froude often in error; often, as I think, misunderstanding, misquoting, omitting and even adding, but I have never once seen reason to suspect him of conscious misrepresentation, of knowingly giving a false impression. … It is easy to show that Mr. Froude erred contrary to his bias on occasion, and it must never be forgotten that he did what no consciously dishonest historian could possibly do. He deposited at the British Museum copies, in the original Spanish, of the documents, very difficult of access, which he used in his History. By aid of these transcripts, we can find him slipping into errors, and his action in presenting the country with the means of correcting his mistakes proves beyond doubt that he did not consciously make mistakes. There is no way in which this conclusion can be evaded. No historian was more honest than Mr. Froude, though few or none of his merit have been so fallible."

How many historians of his merit have there been? He had no contemporary rival in England, for Carlyle and Macaulay belonged to a previous generation. There was certainly no one living when Froude died who could have written the famous passage in the first chapter of his History about the decay of mediaevalism:

"For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still are hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the fair earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone—like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English themselves a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedrals, only before the silent figures sleeping on the tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive, and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of the middle age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."

Although Froude cared little for music, the rhythm of his sentences is musical, and the organ-note of the opening words in the quotation carries a reminiscence of Tacitus which will not escape the classical reader. That is literary artifice, though a very high form of it. The real merit of the paragraph is not so much its eloquence as its insight into the depth of things. Many respectable historians see only the outward lineaments. Froude saw the nation's heart and soul. It was the same with the great man whose biographer Froude became. Carlyle's faults would have been impossible in a character mean or small. They were the defects of his qualities, those

Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,

which do not wait to appear till the last scene of life. Now that more than twenty years have passed since the final volumes of the Life were published, it may be said with confidence that Carlyle owes almost as much to Froude as to his own writings for his high and enduring fame. "Though the lives of the Carlyles were not happy," says Froude, "yet, if we look at them from the beginning to the end, they were grandly beautiful. Neither of them probably under other conditions would have risen to as high an excellence as in fact they each actually achieved; and the main question is not how happy men and women have been in this world, but what they have made of themselves."* The loftier a man's own view of mental conceptions and sublunary things, the more will he admire Carlyle as described by Froude. The same Carlyle who made a ridiculous fuss about trifles confronted the real evils and trials of life with a dignity, courage, and composure which inspire humble reverence rather than vulgar admiration. Froude rightly felt that Carlyle's petty grumbles, often most amusing, throw into bright and strong relief his splendid generosity to his kinsfolk, his manly pride in writing what was good instead of what was lucrative, his anxiety that Mill should not perceive what he lost in the first volume of The French Revolution. Whenever a crisis came, Carlyle stood the test. The greater the occasion, the better he behaved. One thing Froude did not give, and perhaps no biographer could. Carlyle was essentially a humourist. He laughed heartily at other people, and not less heartily at himself. When he was letting himself go, and indulging freely in the most lurid denunciations of all and sundry, he would give a peculiar and most significant chuckle which cannot be put into print. It was a warning not to take him literally, which has too often passed unheeded. He has been compared with Swift, but he was not really a misanthropist, and no man loved laughter more, or could excite more uproarious merriment in others. I remember a sober Scotsman, by no means addicted to frivolous merriment, telling me that he had come out of Carlyle's house in physical pain from continuous laughter at an imaginary dialogue between a missionary and a negro which Carlyle had conducted entirely himself.

— * Carlyle's Early Life, i. 381. —

Carlyle, it must be remembered, knew Froude's historical methods quite as well as he knew Froude. It was because he knew them, and approved of them, that he asked Froude to be the historian of Cheyne Row. Froude's devotion to him had indeed been singular. During the last decade of his life Carlyle was very feeble, and required constant care. He came to lean upon Froude more and more, requiring his company in walks, and even in omnibuses, until Froude almost ceased to be his own master. The lecturing tour in the United States and the political visits to South Africa were permitted, because they were thought right. But Fraser's Magazine had to be given up, partly that employment might be found for a young man in whom Carlyle was interested, and the project for a new history of Charles V. was perforce abandoned. It has been said, though not by any one who knew the facts, that Froude profited in a pecuniary sense by exchanging history for biography. The exact opposite is the truth. From 1866 to 1869, the last years of his great book, Froude received from Messrs. Longman about fourteen hundred pounds a year, including his salary as editor of Fraser, which he relinquished at Carlyle's bidding. From 1877 to 1884 he did not receive more than seven hundred. Two volumes of history brought in about as much as three of biography, and there is no reason to suppose that Charles V. would have proved less popular than Henry VIII. or Elizabeth. Froude was unusually prosperous and successful as a man of letters, though it is of course impossible for the highest literary work to be adequately paid. He had to deal with liberal publishers, and after 1856 his position as a writer was assured. The idea that necessity drove him to fill his pockets at the expense of a dead friend's reputation is as preposterous in his case as it would have been in Lockhart's or Stanley's.

Had Froude been the cynic he is often called, he would have borne with callous indifference, as he did bear in dignified silence, the attacks made upon him for his revelations of Carlyle. But Froude was not what he seemed. Behind his stately presence, and lofty manner, and calmly audacious speech, there was a singularly sensitive nature. He would do what he thought right with perfect fearlessness, and without a moment's hesitation. When the consequences followed he was not always prepared for them, and people who were not worth thinking about could give him pain. Human beings are composite creatures, and the feminine element in man is more obvious than the masculine element in woman. Froude had a feminine disposition to be guided by feeling, and to remember old grievances as vividly as if they had happened the day before. He was also a typical west countryman in habit of mind, as well as in face, figure, and speech. His beautiful voice, exquisitely modulated, never raised in talk, was thoroughly Devonian. So too were his imperfect sense of the effect produced by what he said upon ordinary minds, and his love, which might almost be called mischievous, of giving small electric shocks. In the case of Carlyle, however, the out-cry was wholly unexpected, and for a time he was distressed, though never mastered, by it. What he could not understand, what it took him a long time to live down, was that friends who really knew him should believe him capable of baseness and treachery. Now that it is all over, that Froude's biography has taken its place in classical literature, and that Mrs. Carlyle's letters are acknowledged to be among the best in the language, the whole story appears like a nightmare. But it was real enough twenty years ago, when people who never read books of any kind thought that Froude was the name of the man that whitewashed Henry VIII. and blackened Carlyle. Froude would probably have been happier if he had turned upon his assailants once for all, as he once finally and decisively turned upon Freeman. Freeman, however, was an open enemy. A false friend is a more difficult person to dispose of, and even to deny the charge of deliberate treachery hardly consistent with self-respect. Long before Froude died the clamour against him had by all decent people been dropped. But he himself continued to feel the effect of it until he became Professor of History at Oxford. That rehabilitated him, where only he required it, in his own eyes. It was a public recognition by the country through the Prime Minister of the honour he had reflected upon Oxford since his virtual expulsion in 1849, and he felt himself again. From that time the whole incident was blotted from his mind, and he forgot that some of his friends had forgotten the meaning of friendship. The last two years of his life were indeed the fullest he had ever known. Forty-two lectures in two terms at the age of seventy-four are a serious undertaking. Happily he knew the sixteenth century so well that the process of refreshing his memory was rather a pleasure than a task, and he could have written good English in his sleep. Yet few even of his warmest admirers expected that in a year and a half he would compose three volumes which both for style and for substance are on a level with the best work of his prime. It was less surprising, and intensely characteristic, that his subjects should be the Reformation and the sea.