THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XI., No. 63.—JUNE, 1870.
MR. FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.[52]
If we accept general encomium and popular demand as criteria of excellence, it is evident that Mr. Froude must be the first historian of the period. That, with a vivid pen, he possesses a style at once clear and graphic; that his fulness of knowledge and skill in description are exceptional; that his phrase is brilliant, his analysis keen, and that with ease and spirit, grace and energy, pictorial and passionate power, he combines consummate art in imagery and diction, we have been told so often and by so many writers that it would seem churlish not to accord him very high merit. Then, too, Mr. Froude is very much in earnest. Whatever he does he does with all his might, and in his enthusiasm often fairly carries his reader along with him.
But, in common with those who seek, not literary excitement, but the facts of history, we go at once to the vital question, Is the work truthful? Is it impartial? If not, its author's gifts are perverted, his attainments abused, and their fruits, so bright and attractive to the eye, are filled with ashes.
Impartial! Difficult indeed, is the attainment of that admirable equilibrium of judgment which secures perfect fairness of decision, and whose essential condition precedent is the thorough elimination of personal preference and party prejudice. And here is the serious obstacle in writing a history of England; for there are few, very few, of the great historical questions of the sixteenth century that have not left to us living men of to-day a large legacy of hopes, doubts, and prejudices—nowhere so full of vitality as in England, and in countries of English tongue. Not that we mean to limit such a difficulty to one nation or to one period; for it is not certain that we free ourselves from the spell of prejudice by taking refuge in a more remote age. It might be thought that, in proportion as we go back toward antiquity, leaving behind us to-day's interests, the historian's impartiality would become perfect. And yet, there are few writers of whom even this is true. Reverting historically to the cradle of Christianity, it cannot be asserted of Gibbon.
Nor can it be said even of modern historians of nations long extinct, in common with which one might suppose the people of this century had not a single prejudice. Take, for instance, all the English historians of ancient Greece, whose works (that of Grote being an honorable exception) are so many political pamphlets arguing for oligarchy against democracy, elevating Sparta at the sacrifice of Athens, and thrusting at a modern republic through the greatest of the Hellenic commonwealths. If Merivale is thought to treat Roman history with impartiality, the same cannot be said of many modern European writers, who, disguising modern politics in the ancient toga and helmet, cannot discuss the Roman imperial period without attacking the Cæsars of Paris, St. Petersburg, and Berlin.
The great religious questions which agitated England in the sixteenth century are not dead. They still live, and for the Anglican, the Puritan, and the Catholic have all the deep interest of a family history. It might, therefore, be unreasonable to demand from Mr. Froude a greater degree of dispassionate inquiry and calm treatment of subjects that were "burning questions" in the days of Henry and Elizabeth, than we find in Milman and Gillies, when they discuss the political life of Athens and Lacedæmon. So far from exacting it, we should be disposed to be most liberal in the allowance of even a strongly expressed bias. But after granting all this, and even more, we might yet not unreasonably demand a system which is not a paradox, a show at least of fairness, and a due regard for the proprieties of historical treatment.
Mr. Froude's first four volumes present the history of half the reign of Henry VIII., a prince "chosen by Providence to conduct the Reformation," and abolish the iniquities of the papal system.
The historical Tudor king known of all men before the advent of Mr. Froude with his modern appliances of hero-worship and muscular Christianity, "melted so completely" in our new historian's hands that his despotism, persecution, diplomatic assassinations, confiscations, divorces, legalized murders, bloody vagrancy laws, tyranny over conscience, and the blasphemous assumption of spiritual supremacy are made to appear as the praiseworthy measures of an ascetic monarch striving to regenerate his country and save the world.
There was such a sublimity of impudence in a paradox presented with so much apparently sincere vehemence that most readers were struck with dumb astonishment. A fascinated few declared the deodorized infamy perfectly pure. Some, pleased with pretty writing, were delighted with poetic passages about "daisies," and "destiny," "wild spirits" and "August suns" that "shone in autumn." Many liked its novelty, some admired its daring, and some there were who looked upon the thing as an enormous joke. All these formed the great body of readers.