Others there were, though, who declined to accept results which were violations of morality, and verdicts against evidence obtained by systematic vilification of some of the best, and the elevation of some of the worst men who ever lived, and by a blind idolatry incapable of discerning flaw or stain in the unworthy object of its worship; who saw Mr. Froude's multifarious ignorance of matters essential for a historian to know, and his total want of that judicial quality of mind, without which no one, even though possessed of all knowledge, can ever be an historian. They resolved that such an historical system as this was a nuisance to be abated, and that the new and unworthy man-worship should be put an end to. Accordingly the idol was smashed;[53] and in the process, the idol's historian left so badly damaged as to render his future availability highly problematical.
The Scotch treatment was of instant efficacy; for we find Mr. Froude coming to his work on the fifth volume in chastened frame of mind and an evidently corrected demeanor. He narrates the reigns of Mary and Edward VI. with style and tone subdued, and in what musicians designate as tempo moderato.
With the seventh volume we reach the accession of Queen Elizabeth. We opened it with some curiosity; for it was understood from Mr. Froude, at the outset of his historical career, that he intended to present Elizabeth as "a great nature destined to remould the world," and that he was prepared to visit with something like astonishment and unknown pangs all who should dare question the immaculate purity of her virtue. It is not improbable that the contemplation of the strewn and broken fragments of the paternal idol materially modified this purpose—a change on which Mr. Froude must more than once have fervently congratulated himself as he gradually penetrated deeper into the treasures of the State paper collections, and stared with stiffened jaw at the astounding revelations of Simancas.
We need not wonder that the historian altered his programme; and that instead of going on to the "death of Elizabeth," to record the horrors of that most horrible of death-bed scenes, he should close his work with the wreck of the Spanish Armada.
The researches of our American historian, Motley, were terribly damaging to Elizabeth; and in the preparation of his seventh volume, Mr. Froude comes upon discoveries so fatal to her that he is evidently glad to drop his showy narrative and fill his pages with letters of the Spanish ambassador, who gives simple but wonderfully vivid pictures of scenes at the English court.
Future historians will doubtless take heed how they associate with the reputation of the sovereign any glory they may claim for England under Elizabeth, remembering that she was ready to marry Leicester notwithstanding her strong suspicion, too probably assurance, of his crime, (Amy Robsart's murder,) and that in the language of one of Mr. Froude's English critics, "She was thus in the eye of heaven, which judges by the intent and not the act, nearer than Englishmen would like to believe to the guilt of an adulteress and a murderess."
But Mr. Froude plucks up courage, and, true to his first love, while appearing to handle Elizabeth with cruel condemnation, treats her with real kindness.
We have all heard of Alcibiades and his dog, and of what befell that animal. Mr. Froude assumes an air of stern severity for those faults of Elizabeth for which concealment is out of the question—her mean parsimony, her insincerity, her cruelty, her matchless mendacity—while industriously concealing or artistically draping her more repulsive offences.
But we have not started out to treat Mr. Froude's work as a whole. A chorus of repudiation from the most opposite schools of criticism has so effectually covered his attempted apotheosis of a bad man with ridicule and contempt that no further remark need be made on that subject. As to Elizabeth, the less said the better, if we are friendly to her memory.
Careful perusal of Mr. Froude's first six volumes will convince any competent judge that he is not a historian, but, as yet, only in training to become one. He plunged into a great historical subject without the requisite knowledge or the necessary preparation. In his earlier volumes his very defective knowledge of all history before the sixteenth century led him into the most grotesque blunders—errors in general and in details, in geography, jurisprudence, titles, offices, and military affairs. So far from meriting the compliment paid him, of accurate knowledge, acquired in the "course of his devious theological career," of the tenets and peculiar observances of the leading religious sects, it is precisely in such matters that he seriously fails in accuracy.