Freeman’s abstention from the use of manuscript sources was virtually prescribed by his persistence in refusing to work out of his own library, or, as he used to say, out of a room which he could consider to be his library for the time being. As, however, the original authorities for the times with which he chiefly dealt are, with few or unimportant exceptions, all in print, this habit can hardly be considered a defect in his historical qualifications. In handling the sources he was a judicious critic and a sound scholar, thoroughly at home in Greek and Latin, and sufficiently equipped in Anglo-Saxon, or, as he called it, Old English. Of his breadth of view, of the command he had of the whole sweep of his knowledge, of his delight in bringing together things the most remote in place or time, it is superfluous to speak. These merits are perhaps most conspicuously seen in the plan of his treatise on Federal Government, as well as in the execution of that one volume which unfortunately was all he produced of what might 282 have been, if completed, a book of the utmost value. But one or two trifling illustrations of this habit of living in an atmosphere in which the past was no less real to him than the present may be forgiven. When careless friends directed letters to him at “Somerleaze, Wookey, Somerset,” Wookey being a village a quarter of a mile from his house, but on the other side of the river Axe, he would write back complaining that they were “confusing the England and Wales of the seventh century.” When his attention had been called to a discussion in the weekly journals about Shelley’s first wife he wrote to me, “Why will they worry us with this Harrietfrage? You and I have quite enough to do with Helen, and Theodora, and Mary Stuart.” So in addressing Somersetshire rustics during his election campaign in 1868, he could not help on one occasion referring to Ptolemy Euergetes, and on another launching out into an eloquent description of the Landesgemeinde of Uri.
Industry came naturally to Freeman, because he was fond of his own studies and did not think of his work as task work. The joy in reading and writing about bygone times sprang from the intensity with which he realised them. He had no geographical imagination, finding no more pleasure in books of travel than in dramatic poetry. But he loved to dwell in the 283 past, and seemed to see and feel and make himself a part of the events he described. Next to their worth as statements of carefully investigated facts, the chief merit of his books lies in the sense of reality which fills them. The politics of Corinth or Sicyon, the contest of William the Red with St. Anselm, interested him as keenly as a general election in which he was himself a candidate. Looking upon current events with an historian’s eye, he was fond, on the other hand, of illustrating features of Roman history from incidents he had witnessed when taking part in local government as a magistrate; and in describing the relations of Hermocrates and Athenagoras at Syracuse he drew upon observations which he had made in watching the discussions of the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford. This power of realising the politics of ancient or mediæval times was especially useful to him as a writer, because without it his minuteness might have verged on prolixity, seeing that he cared exclusively for the political part of history. It was one of the points in which he rose superior to most of those German students with whom it is natural to compare him. Many of them have equalled him in industry and diligence; some have surpassed him in the ingenuity which they bring to bear upon obscure problems; but few of them have shown the same gift for understanding what the political life of remote times really was. 284 Like Gibbon, Freeman was not a mere student, but also a man with opportunities of mixing in affairs, accustomed to bear his share in the world’s work, and so better able than the mere student can be to comprehend how that work goes forward. Though he was too peculiar in his views and his way of stating them to have been adapted either to the House of Commons or to a local assembly, and would indeed have been wasted upon nineteen-twentieths of the business there transacted, he loved politics and watched them with a shrewdly observant eye. Though he indulged his foibles in some directions, he could turn upon history a stream of clear common sense which sometimes made short work of German conjectures. And he was free from the craving to have at all hazards something new to advance, be it a trivial fact or an unsupported guess. He was accustomed of late years to complain that German scholarship seemed to be suffering from the passion for etwas Neues, and the consequent disposition to disparage work which did not abound with novelties, however empty or transient such novelties might be.
To think of the Germans is to think of industry. Freeman was a true Teuton in the mass of his production. Besides the seven thick volumes devoted to the Norman Conquest and William Rufus, the four thick volumes to Sicily, four large volumes of collected essays, and nine or 285 ten smaller volumes on architectural subjects, on the English constitution, on the United States, on the Slavs and the Turks, he wrote an even greater quantity of matter which appeared in the Saturday Review during the twenty years from 1856 to 1876, and it was by these articles, not less than by his books, that he succeeded in dispelling many current errors and confusions, and in establishing some of his own doctrines so firmly that we now scarcely remember what iteration and reiteration, in season and out of season, and much to the impatience of those who remembered that they had heard these doctrines often before, were needed to make them accepted by the public. Freeman’s swift facility was due to his power of concentration. He always knew what he meant an article to contain before he sat down to his desk; and in his historical researches he made each step so certain that he seldom required to reinvestigate a point or to change, in revising for the press, the substance of what he had written.
In his literary habits he was so methodical and precise that he could carry on three undertakings at the same time, keeping on different tables in his working rooms the books he needed for each, and passing at stated hours from one to the other. It is often remarked that the growth of journalism, forcing men to write hastily and profusely, tends to injure literature 286 both in matter and in manner. In point of matter, Freeman, though for the best part of his life a very prolific journalist, did not seem to suffer. He was as exact, clear, and thorough at the end as he had been at the beginning. On his style, however, the results were unfortunate. It retained its force and its point, but it became diffuse, not that each particular sentence was weak, or vague, or wordy, but that what was substantially the same idea was apt to be reiterated, with slight differences of phrase, in several successive sentences or paragraphs. He was fond of the Psalter, great part of which he knew by heart, and we told him that he had caught too much of the manner of Psalm cxix. This tendency to repetition caused some of his books, and particularly the Norman Conquest and William Rufus, to swell to a portentous bulk. Those treatises, which constitute a history of England from A.D. 1042 to 1100, would be more widely read if they had been, as they ought to have been, reduced to three or four volumes; and as he came to perceive this, he resolved in the last year of his life to republish the Norman Conquest in a condensed form. To be obliged to compress was a wholesome, though unwelcome, discipline, and the result is seen in some of his smaller books, such as the historical essays, and the sketches of English towns, often wonderfully fresh and 287 vigorous bits of work. Anxiety to be scrupulously accurate runs into prolixity, and Freeman so loved his subjects that it pained him to omit any characteristic detail a chronicler had preserved; as he once observed to a distinguished writer who was dealing with a much later period, “You know so much about your people that you have to leave out a great deal, I know so little that I must tell all I know.” The tendency to repeat the same word too frequently sprang from his preference for words of Teutonic origin and his pride in what he deemed the purity of his English. His pages would have been livelier had he felt free to indulge in the humour with which his private letters sparkled; for he was full of fun, though it often turned on points too recondite for the public. But it was only in the notes to his histories, and seldom even there, that he gave play to one of the merits that most commended him to his friends.
So far of his books. He was, however, also Regius Professor of History at Oxford during the last eight years of his life, and thus the head of the historical faculty in his own university which he dearly loved. That he was less effective as a teacher than as a writer may be partly ascribed to his having come too late to a new kind of work, and one which demands the freshness of youth; partly also to the 288 cramping conditions under which professors have to teach at Oxford, where everything is governed by a system of examinations which Freeman was never tired of denouncing as ruinous to study. His friends, however, doubted whether the natural bent of his mind was towards oral teaching. It was a peculiar mind, which ran in a deep channel of its own, and could not easily, if the metaphor be permissible, be drawn off to irrigate the adjoining fields. He was always better at putting his own views in a clear and telling way than at laying his intellect alongside of yours, apprehending your point of view, and setting himself to meet it. Or, to put the same thing differently, you learned more by listening to him than by conversing with him. He had not the quick intellectual sympathy and effusion which feels its way to the heart of an audience, and indeed derives inspiration from the sight of an audience. In his election meetings I noticed that the temper and sentiment of the listeners did not in the least affect him; what he said was what he himself cared to say, not what he felt they would wish to hear. So also in his lecturing he pleased himself, and chose the topics he liked best rather than those which the examination scheme prescribed to the students. Perhaps he was right, for he was of those whose excellence in performance depends upon 289 the enjoyment they find in the exercise of their powers. But even on the topics he selected, he did not take hold of and guide the mind of the students, realising their particular difficulties and needs, but simply delivered his own message in his own way. Admitting this deficiency, the fact remains that he was not only an ornament to the University by the example he set of unflagging zeal, conscientious industry, loyalty to truth, and love of freedom, but also a stimulating influence upon those who were occupied with history. He delighted to surround himself with the most studious of the younger workers, gave them abundant encouragement and recognition, and never grudged the time to help them by his knowledge or his counsel.
Much the same might be said of his lifelong friend and illustrious predecessor in the chair of history (Dr. Stubbs), whom Freeman had been generously extolling for many years before the merits of that admirable scholar became known to the public. Stubbs disliked lecturing; and though once a year he delivered a “public lecture” full of wisdom, and sometimes full of wit also, he was not effective as a teacher, not so effective, for instance, as Bishop Creighton, who won his reputation at Merton College long before he became Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge. But Stubbs, by his mere presence in the University, and by the inexhaustible kindness with 290 which he answered questions and gave advice, rendered great services to the studies of the place. It may be doubted whether, when he was raised to the episcopal bench, history did not lose more than the Church of England gained. Other men of far less ability could have discharged five-sixths of a bishop’s duties equally well, but there was no one else in England, if indeed in Europe, capable of carrying on his historical researches. So Dr. Lightfoot was, as Professor at Cambridge, doing work for Christian learning even more precious than the work which is still affectionately remembered in his diocese of Durham.
Few men have had a genius for friendship equal to Freeman’s. The names of those he cared for were continually on his lips, and their lives in his thoughts; their misfortunes touched him like his own; he was always ready to defend them, always ready to give any aid they needed. No differences of opinion affected his regard. Sensitive as he was to criticism, he received their censure on any part of his work without offence. The need he felt for knowing how they fared and for sharing his thoughts with them expressed itself in the enormous correspondence, not of business, but of pure affection, which he kept up with his many friends, and which forms, for his letters were so racy that many of them were preserved, the fullest record of his life.
This warmth of feeling deserves to be dwelt on, because it explains the tendency to vehemence in controversy which brought some enmities upon him. There was an odd contrast between his fondness for describing wars and battles and that extreme aversion to militarism which made him appear to dislike the very existence of a British army and navy. So his combativeness, and the zest with which he bestowed shrewd blows on those who encountered him, though due to his wholesome scorn for pretenders, and his hatred of falsehood and injustice, seemed inconsistent with the real kindliness of his nature. The kindliness, however, no one who knew him could doubt; it showed itself not only in his care for dumb creatures and for children, but in the depth and tenderness of his affections. Of religion he spoke little, and only to his most intimate friends. In opinion he had drifted a long way from the Anglo-Catholic position of his early manhood; but he remained a sincerely pious Christian.
Though his health had been infirm for some years before his death, his literary activity did not slacken, nor did his powers show signs of decline. There is nothing in his writings, nor in any writings of our time, more broad, clear, and forcible than many chapters of the History of Sicily. Much of his work has effected its purpose, and will, by degrees, lose its place in 292 the public eye. But much will live on into a yet distant future, because it has been done so thoroughly, and contains so much sound and vigorous thinking, that coming generations of historical students will need it and value it almost as our own has done.