The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

Perhaps I may be permitted in this connection to describe my one and only experience of Froude and his ways. It was after dinner, and the talk had fallen into the hands, or the mouth, of an eminent administrator, who seemed to be a pillar, a model of talent and virtue. His language was copious, his subject "schoolmaster Bishops," and the services they had rendered to the Church of England. Bishop Blomfield, for example, had procured the appointment of the Ecclesiastical Commission. There might, for aught we knew, be endless examples, and the prospect was appalling. The host was a Roman Catholic, and the guests were not ecclesiastical. Froude came to the rescue. In a gentle voice, and with the air of an anxious inquirer, he asked whether Dr. Blomfield had happened to acquaint the Commissioners with the nature and extent of his own emoluments. Then, without pausing for a reply, he added, still gently, "Because it always used to be said that there were only two persons who knew what the Bishop of London's income was; himself and the devil." The remark may not have been a new one. It was not offered as such, but it served its purpose, for the interrupted lecture was never resumed.

Froude's vast reading and his wide human experience enabled him to hold his own in any company, but he never paraded his knowledge, or lay in wait to trip people up. Although the prospect of going out worried him, and his first impulse was to refuse an invitation, he enjoyed society when he was in it, being neither vain nor shy. At Oxford he could not dine out. Late hours interfered with his work. But he was hospitable both to tutors and to undergraduates, liking to show himself at home in the old place. Except for the failure of his health, perhaps in spite of it, his enjoyment of his Oxford professorship was unmixed. He did not hold it long enough to feel the brevity of the generations which makes the real sadness of the place. Many ghosts he must have seen, but he had reached an age when men are prepared for them, and his academic career in the forties had come to such an unfortunate end that comparison of the past with the present can only have been cheerful and honourable. He found a Provost of Oriel and a Rector of Exeter who could read his books, and appreciate them, without prejudice against the author. But indeed, though he was capable of being profoundly bored, he was at his ease in the most diverse societies, and no form of conversation not absolutely foolish came amiss to him. He had read so many books, and seen so much of the world, he held such strong opinions, and expressed them with such placid freedom, that he never failed to command attention, or to deserve it. Contemptuous enough, perhaps too contemptuous, of human frailties, he at least knew how to make them entertaining, and his urbane irony dissolved pretentious egoism.

It is a familiar saying that men's characters and habits are formed in the earliest years of their lives. Froude was by profession and by choice a man of letters. He loved writing, and whatever he read, or heard, or saw, turned itself without effort into literary shape. The occupations and amusements of his life can be traced in his Short Studies. But he had not been reared in a literary atmosphere. He had been brought up among horses and dogs, with grooms and keepers, on the moors and the sea. He describes it himself as "the old wild scratch way, when the keeper was the rabbit-catcher, and sporting was enjoyed more for the adventure than for the bag." He never lost his love of sport, and he gave his own son the same training he had himself. Even in his last illness he liked the young man to go out shooting, and always asked what sport he had had. His own father had been a country gentleman, as well as a clergyman, and his brothers, while their health lasted, all rode to hounds. He himself never forgot how he had been put by Robert on a horse without a saddle, and thrown seventeen times in one afternoon without hurting himself on the soft Devonshire grass. He went out shooting with his brothers long before he could himself shoot. For his first two years at Oxford he had done little except ride, and boat, and play tennis. At Plas Gwynant he was as much out of doors as in, and even to the last his physical enjoyment of an expedition in the open air was intense. Yet this was the same man who could sit patiently down at Simancas in a room full of dusty, disorderly documents, ill written in a foreign tongue, and patiently decipher them all. If a healthy mind in a healthy body be, as the Roman satirist says, the greatest of blessings, Froude was certainly blessed. The hardness of his frame, and the soundness of his nerves, gave him the imperturbable temper which Marlborough is said to have valued more than money itself. Of money Froude was always careful, and he was most judicious in his investments. He held the Puritan view of luxury as a thing bad in itself, and the parent of evil, relaxing the moral fibre. The sternness of temperament he had inherited from his father was concealed by an easy, sociable disposition, inclined to make the best of the present, but it was always there. In the struggle between Knox and Mary Stuart all his sympathies are with Knox, who had the root of the matter in him, Calvinism and the moral law. Few imaginative artists could have resisted as he did the temptation to draw a dazzling picture of Mary's charms and accomplishments, scholarship and statesmanship, beauty and wit. Froude felt of her as Jehu felt of Jezebel, that she was the enemy of the people of God. So with his own contemporaries, such as Carlyle's "copper captain," Louis Napoleon.

He was never dazzled by the blaze of the Tuileries and the glare of temporary success. He might have said after Boileau, J' appelle un chat un chat, et Louis un fripon.

The peculiarity of Froude's nature was to combine this firm foundation with superficial layers of cynicism, paradox, and irony, as in his apology for the rack, his character of Henry VIII., his defence of Cranmer's churchmanship, and Parker's. He shared with Carlyle the belief that conventional views were sham views, and ought to be exposed. Ridicule, if not a test of truth, is at all events a weapon against falsehood, and has done much to clear the air of history. Froude's sense of humour was rather receptive than expansive, and he did not often display it in his writings. Tristram Shandy he knew almost by heart, and he never tired of Candide, or Zadig.

Voltaire's wit and Sterne's humour have not in their own lines been surpassed. But sure as Froude's taste was in such matters, he did not himself enter the lists as a competitor. He was too much occupied with his narrative, or his theory, as the case might be, to spare time for such diversion by the way. He was too earnest to be impartial.

Where is the impartial historian to be found? Macaulay said in Hallam. The clerical editor of Bishop Stubbs's Letters thinks that Hallam, who was an Erastian, had a violent prejudice against the Church. His impartial historian is Stubbs, for the simple reason that he agrees with him. Froude was for England against Rome and Spain. He could oppose the foreign policy of an English Government when he thought it wrong, as in the case of the Crimean War, and of Disraeli's aggressive Imperialism in 1877. But the English cause in the sixteenth century he regarded as national and religious, making for freedom and independence of policy and thought. To be free, to understand, to enjoy, said Thomas Hill Green, is the claim of the modern spirit. Froude would not have admitted that man in the philosophic sense was free, or that he could ever hope to understand the ultimate causes of things. And, though no man was more capable of enjoying the present moment, he would have sternly denied that pleasure, however refined, could be a legitimate aim in life. He was a disciple of the porch, and not of the garden. It was deeds of chivalry and endurance that he held up to the admiration of mankind. The hero of his History, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was not a man of brilliant gifts or dazzling attainments, but a sober, solid, servant of duty and of the State. To most people Burghley is a far less interesting figure than his haughty and splendid sovereign, or the beautiful and seductive queen against whom he protected her. Froude judged Burghley, as he judged Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, by the standards of political integrity and personal honour. The secret of Froude's influence and the source of his power is that beneath the attraction of his personality and the seductiveness of his writing there lay a bedrock of principle which could never be moved.

Professor Sanday, who preached the first University sermon at Oxford after Froude's death, referred to his "fifty years of unwearied literary activity." The period of course included, and was meant to include, The Nemesis of Faith.

"We all know," continued Dr. Sanday, "how the young and ardent Churchman followed his reason where it seemed to lead, and sacrificed a Fellowship, and, as it seemed, a career, to scruples of conscience …. Now we can see that the difficulties which led to it were real difficulties. It was right and not wrong that they should be raised and faced." It is the fashion to regard scruples of conscience as morbid, and the last man who troubled himself about a test was not a young and ardent Churchman, but Charles Bradlaugh. Froude was "ever a fighter," who wished always to fight fair. He preferred resigning his Fellowship to fighting for it on purely legal grounds, and holding it, if he could have held it, in the teeth of the College Statutes. More than twenty years elapsed before the tests which condemned him were abolished, and in that time there must have been many less orthodox Fellows than he. It was more than twenty years before he could lay aside the orders which in a rash moment under an evil system he had assumed. But he was a preacher, though a lay one, and his life was a struggle for the causes in which he believed. Ecclesiastical controversies never really interested him, except so far as they touched upon national life and character. He wished to see the work, of the sixteenth century continued in the nineteenth by the naval power and the Colonial possessions of England. "England" with him meant not merely that part of Great Britain which lies south of the Tweed, but all the dominions of the Sovereign, the British Empire as a whole. What Seeley called the expansion of England was to him the chief fact of the present, and the chief problem of the future. Events since his death have vindicated his foresight. He urged and predicted the Australian Federation, which he did not live to see. To the policy which impeded the Federation of South Africa he was steadily opposed. The moral which he drew from his travels in Australasia, and in the West Indies, was the need for strengthening imperial ties. Lord Beaconsfield's Imperialism was not to his taste, and he disliked every form of aggression or pretence. While he dreaded the intervention of party leaders, and desired the Colonies to take the initiative themselves, he thought that a common tariff was the direction in which true Imperialism should move. Whether he was right or wrong is too large a question to be discussed here. That matter must make its own proof. But in raising it Froude was a pioneer, and, though a man of letters, saw more plainly than practical politicians what were the questions they would have to solve. He despised local jealousies, and took large views. Many men, perhaps most men, contract their horizon with advancing years.

Froude's vision seemed to widen. Through the storms and mists of passion and prejudice which blinded the eyes of Liberals and Conservatives fighting each other at Westminster, he looked to the ultimate union of all British subjects in an England conterminous with the sovereignty of the Crown. It was that England of which he wrote the history. It was knowledge of her past, and belief in her future, that inspired the work of his life.