The Life of Froude Part 10

So far Froude's predictions have been realised. When he wrote, the Imperial Federation League had just been formed, and Lord Rosebery was arguing for Irish Home Rule as part of a much wider scheme. Except Australia, which is h.o.m.ogeneous, like the Dominion of Canada, the British Empire is no nearer Federation, and Ireland is no nearer Home Rule, than they were then. The depression of the sugar trade in the West Indian Islands has been met by a treaty which raises the price of sugar at home, and makes those Colonies proportionately unpopular with the working cla.s.ses. It has since been proposed to carry the principle farther, and tax the British workman for the benefit of Colonial manufacturers. For these strange results of imperial thinking neither Froude nor any of his contemporaries were prepared. But they correspond accurately, especially the second of them, with the "attempt made by politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves," against which Froude warned his countrymen. Froude was no scientific economist. He believed in "free trade within the Empire," which is not free trade. He was for an imperial tariff, a thing made in Germany, and called a Zollverein. But his practical experience and personal observation taught him that proposals for closer union with the Colonies must come from the Colonies themselves. The negroes were a difficulty. They were not really fit for self-government, as the statesmen of the American Union had found. Personal freedom, the inalienable right of all men and all women, is a very different thing from the possession of a vote. As for India, the idea of Home Rule there had receded a long way into the distance since the sanguine predictions of Macaulay. Perhaps Froude never quite worked out his conceptions of the federal system which he would have liked to see. In Australia it would have been plain sailing. In Canada it was already established. In South Africa it would have embodied the union of British with Dutch, and prevented the disasters which have since occurred. In the West Indies it would have raised problems of race and colour which are more prudently agitated at a greater distance from the Black. Republic of Hayti. Imperial Federalists not yet explained what they would do with India.

Froude neither was nor aimed at being practical politican. His object, in which he succeeded, was to kindle in the public mind at home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his own heart was full. Although the measure of Colonial loyalty was given afterwards in the South African War, the despatch of troops from Sydney to the Soudan in 1885 showed that ties of sentiment are the strongest of all. It was those ties, rather than any political or commercial bond, which Froude desired to strengthen. No one would have liked less to live in a Colony. Colonial society did not suit him. Colonial manners were not to his mind. But to meet governing men, like Sir Henry Norman, a "warm Gladstonian," by the way, was always a pleasure to him, and as a symbol of England's greatness he loved her territory beyond the seas.

The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, published in 1889, was Froude's one mature and serious attempt at a novel. For distinction of style and beauty of thought it may be compared with the greatest of historical romances. If it was the least successful of his books, the failure can be a.s.signed to the absence of women, or at least of love, which ever since Dr. Johnson's definition, if not before, has been expected in a novel. The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth century. The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring. Goring "belonged to an order of men who, if they had been allowed fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory of an evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the Cromwellians had died out of the land, and was not to be revived by a single enthusiast." He was murdered, and Froude could point his favourite moral that the woes of the sister country would be healed by the appearance of another Cromwell, which he had to admit was improbable. The Irish hero, Morty Sullivan, has been in France, and is ready to fight for the Pretender. He did no good. Few Irishmen, in Froude's opinion, ever did any good. But in The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, if anywhere, Froude shows his sympathy with the softness of the Irish character, and Morty's meditations on his return from France are expressed as only Froude could express them. Morty was walking with his sister by the estuary of the Kenmare River opposite Derrynane, afterwards famous as the residence of Daniel O'Connell, "For how many ages had the bay and the rocks and the mountains looked exactly the same as they were looking then? How many generations had played their part on the same stage, eager and impa.s.sioned as if it had been erected only for them! The half-naked fishermen of forgotten centuries who had earned a scanty living there; the monks from the Skelligs who had come in on high days in their coracles to say ma.s.s for them, baptize the children, or bury the dead; the Celtic chief, with saffron shirt and battle-axe, driven from his richer lands by Norman or Saxon invaders, and keeping hold in this remote spot on his ragged independence; the Scandinavian pirates, the overflow of the Northern Fiords, looking for new soil where they could take root. These had all played their brief parts there and were gone, and as many more would follow in the cycles of the years that were to come, yet the scene itself was unchanged and would not change. The same soft had fed those that were departed, and would feed those that were to be. The same landscape had affected their imaginations with its beauty or awed them with its splendours; and each alike had yielded to the same delusion that the valley was theirs and was inseparably connected with themselves and their fortunes. Morty's career had been a stormy one .... He had gone out into the world, and had battled and struggled in the holy cause, yet the cause was not advanced, and it was all nothing. He was about to leave the old place, probably for ever. Yet there it was, tranquil, calm, indifferent whether he came or went. What was he? What was any one? To what purpose the ineffectual strivings of short-lived humanity? Man's life was but the shadow of a dream, and his work was but the heaping of sand which the next tide would level flat again."

Wordsworth's "pathetic fallacy" that the moods of nature correspond with the moods of man has seldom found such eloquent ill.u.s.tration as in Morty's vain imaginings. Morty himself was shot dead by English soldiers in revenge for the murder of Goring. The story is a dismal and tragic one. But the best qualities of the Irish race are there, depicted with true sympathy, and perhaps this volume may be held to confirm Carlyle's opinion, expressed in a letter to Miss Davenport Bromley, that even The English in Ireland was "more disgraceful to the English Government by far than to the Irish savageries." Froude, indeed, never forgot the kindness of the Kerry peasants who nursed him through the small-pox. He would have done anything for the Irish, except allow them to govern themselves.

In 1890 Froude contributed to the series of The Queen's Prime Ministers, edited by Mr. Stuart Reid, a biographical study of Lord Beaconsfield. He wrote to Mr. Reid on the subject: "... Lord Beaconsfield wore a mask to the generality of mankind. It was only when I read Lothair that I could form any notion to myself of the personality which was behind. I once alluded to that book in a speech at a Royal Academy banquet. Lord Beaconsfield was present, and was so far interested in what I said that he wished me to review Endymion in the Edinburgh, and sent me the proof-sheets of it before publication. Edymion did not take hold of me as Lothair did, and I declined, but I have never lost the impression which I gathered out of Lothair. It is worse than useless to attempt the biography of a man unless you know, or think you know, what his inner nature was .... I am quite sure that Lord Beaconsfield had a clearer insight than most men into the contemporary const.i.tution of Europe-that he had a real interest in the welfare and prospects of mankind; and while perhaps he rather despised the great English aristocracy, he probably thought better of them than of any other cla.s.s in England. I suppose that like Cicero he wished to excel, or perhaps more like Augustus to play his part well in the tragic comedy of life. I do not suppose that he had any vulgar ambition at all .... "

The feelings with which he approached this not altogether congenial task are described in the following pa.s.sages from letters to Lady Derby:

.... "THE MOLT, September 14th, 1889.

"If my wonderful adventure into the Beaconsfield country comes off, I shall want all the help which Lord D. offered to give me. I do not wonder that he and you were both startled at the proposition, and I am not at all sure that in a respectable series of Victorian Prime Ministers I should be allowed to treat the subject in the way that I wish. The point is to make out what there was behind the mask. Had it not been for Lothair I should have said nothing but a charlatan. But that altered my opinion, and the more often I read it the more I want to know what his real nature was. The early life is a blank filled up by imaginative people out of Vivian Grey. I am feeling my way indirectly with his brother, Ralph D'Israeli, and whether I go on or not will depend on whether he will help me."

"THE MOLT, November 12th, 1889,

"The difficulty is to find out the real man that lay behind the sphynx-like affectations. I have come to think that these affectations (natural at first) came to be themselves affected as a useful defensive armour which covered the vital parts. Anyway, the study of him is extremely amusing. I had nothing else to do, and I can easily throw what I write into the fire if it turns out unsatisfactory."

Although the book was necessarily a short one, it is too characteristic to be lightly dismissed. When Froude gave Mr. Reid the ma.n.u.script, he said, "It will please neither Disraeli's friends nor his foes. But it is at least an honest book." He heard, with more amus.e.m.e.nt than satisfaction, that it had pleased Gladstone. For the political estimate of a modern and Parliamentary statesman Froude lacked some indispensable qualifications. He knew little, and cared less, about the House of Commons, in which the best years of Disraeli's life were pa.s.sed. He despised the party system, of which Disraeli was at once a product and a devotee. He had no sympathy with Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy, and the colonial policy which he would have subst.i.tuted for it was outside Lord Beaconsfield's scope. He had adopted from Carlyle the theory that Disraeli and Gladstone were both adventurers, the difference between them being that Disraeli only deceived others, whereas Gladstone deceived also himself. But Gladstone had ignored whereas Disraeli, with singular magnanimity, had offered to the author of Shooting Niagara a pension and a Grand Cross of the Bath.

It was, however, as a man of letters rather than as a politician that Disraeli fascinated Froude, so much so that he is betrayed into the paradox of representing his hero as a lover of literature rather than politics. Disraeli sometimes talked in that way himself, as when he was persuading Lightfoot to accept the Bishopric of Durham, and remarked, "I, too, have sacrificed inclination to duty." But he was hardly serious, and even in his novels it is the political parts that survive. Although Froude had found it impossible to review Endymion, the book is very like the author, and can only be appreciated by those who have been behind the scenes in politics. Froude's idea of Disraeli as a man with a great opportunity who threw it away, who might have pacified Ireland and preferred to quarrel with Russia, was naturally not agreeable to Disraelites, and as a general rule it is desirable that a biographer should be able, to write from his victim's point of view. Yet, all said and done, Froude's Beaconsfield is a work of genius, the gem of the series. Professional politicians, with the curious exception of Gladstone, thought very little of it. It was not written for them. Disraeli was a many-sided man, so that there is room for various estimates of his character and career. Of his early life Froude had no special knowledge. He was not even aware that Disraeli had applied for office to Peel. He shows sometimes an indifference to dry details, as when he makes Gladstone dissolve Parliament in 1873 immediately after his defeat on the Irish University Bill, and represents Russia as having by her own act repealed the Black Sea Clauses in the Treaty of Paris. Startling too is his a.s.sertion that the Parliament of 1868 did nothing for England or Scotland, on account of its absorption in Irish affairs. But he was not writing a formal history, and these points did not appeal to him at all. He drew with inimitable skill a picture of the despised and fantastic Jew, vain as a peac.o.c.k and absurdly dressed, alien in race and in his real creed, smiling sardonically at English ways, enthusiasms, and inst.i.tutions, until he became, after years of struggle and obloquy, the idol of what was then the proudest aristocracy in the world.

Disraeli's peculiar humour just suited Froude's taste. Disraeli never laughed. Even his smile was half inward. The irony of life, and of his own position, was a subject of inexhaustible amus.e.m.e.nt to him. There was nothing in his nature low, sordid, or petty. It was not money, nor rank, but power which he coveted, and at which he aimed. Irreproachable in domestic life, faithful in friendship, a placable enemy, undaunted by failure, accepting final defeat with philosophic calm, he played with political pa.s.sions which he did not share, and made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything stuffy and commonplace. From a const.i.tutional history of English politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the princ.i.p.al figure. In the Congress of Berlin, where he did nothing, or next to nothing, he attracted the gaze of every one, not for anything he said there, but because he was there at all. If he had left an autobiography, it would be priceless, not for its facts, but for its opinions. That Froude thoroughly understood him it would be rash to say. But he did perceive by sympathetic intuition a great deal that an ordinary writer would have missed altogether. For instance, the full humour of that singular occasion when Benjamin Disraeli appeared on the platform of a Diocesan Conference at Oxford, with Samuel Wilberforce in the chair, could have been given by no one else exactly as Froude gave it. Nothing like it had ever happened before. It is scarcely possible that anything of the kind can ever happen again. Froude found the origin of the Established Church in the statutes of Henry VIII. Gladstone found it, or seemed to find it, in the poems of Homer. In Disraeli's eyes its pedigree was Semitic, and it ministered to the "craving credulity" of a sceptical age, undisturbed by the provincial arrogance that flashed or flared in an essay or review.

"In the year 1864," says Froude, "Disraeli happened to be on a visit at Cuddesdon, and it happened equally that a Diocesan Conference was to be held at Oxford at the time, with Bishop Wilberforce in the chair. The clerical mind had been doubly exercised, by the appearance of Colenso on the 'Pentateuch' and Darwin on the 'Origin of Species.' Disraeli, to the surprise of every one, presented himself in the theatre. He had long abandoned the satins and silks of his youth, but he was as careful of effect as he had ever been, and had prepared himself in a elaborately negligent. He lounged into the a.s.sembly in a black velvet shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat, as if he had been accidentally pa.s.sing through the town. It was the fashion with University intellect to despise Disraeli as a man with neither sweetness nor light; but he was famous, or at least notorious, and when he rose to speak there was a general curiosity. He began in his usual affected manner, slowly and rather pompously, as if he had nothing to say beyond perfunctory plat.i.tudes. The Oxford wits began to compare themselves favourably the dullness of Parliamentary orators; when first one sentence and then another startled them into attention. They were told that the Church was not likely to be disestablished. It would remain, but would remain subject to a Parliament which would not allow an imperium in imperio. It must exert itself and rea.s.sert its authority, but within the limits which the law laid down. The interest grew deeper when he came to touch on the parties to one or other of which all his listeners belonged. High Church and Low Church were historical and intelligible, but there had arisen lately, the speaker said, a party called the Broad, never before heard of. He went on to explain what Broad Churchmen were."

Disraeli's gibes at Colenso and Maurice are too well known to need repet.i.tion here. The equally famous reference to Darwin will bear to be quoted once more, at least as an introduction for Froude's incisive comment.

"What is the question now placed before society with a glibness the most astounding? The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels."

"Mr. Disraeli," so Froude continues, "is on the side of the angels. Pit and gallery echoed with laughter. Fellows and tutors repeated the phrase over their port in the common room with shaking sides. The newspapers carried the announcement the next morning over the length and breadth of the island, and the leading article writers struggled in their comments to maintain a decent gravity. Did Disraeli mean it, or was it but an idle jest? and what must a man be who could exercise his wit on such a subject? Disraeli was at least as much in earnest as his audience. The phrase answered its purpose. It has lived and become historical when the decorous protests of professional divines have been forgotten with the breath which uttered them. The note of scorn with which it rings has preserved it better than any affectation of pious horror, which indeed would have been out of place in the presence of such an a.s.sembly."

I have taken the liberty of giving such emphasis as italics can confer to two brief pa.s.sages in this brilliant description, because they express Froude's real opinion of Diocesan Conferences and those who frequented them.* Disraeli's audience applauded, partly in admiration of his wit, and partly because, they thought that he was amusing them at the expense of the lat.i.tudinarians they abhorred. Froude's appreciation came from an opposite source. He regarded Disraeli not as a flatterer, but as a busy mocker, laughing at the people thought he was laughing with them. He made no attempt at a really critical estimate of the most baffling figure in English politics. He fastened on the picturesque aspects of Disraeli's career, and touched them with an artist's hand. As to what it all meant, or whether it meant anything, he left his readers as much, in the dark as they were before. My own theory, if one must have a theory, is that one word explains Disraeli, and that that word is "ambition." If so, he was one of the most marvellously successful men that ever lived. If not, and if a different standard should be applied, other consequences would ensue. Froude gives no help in the solution of the problem. What he does is to portray the original genius which no absurdities could cover, and no obstacles could restrain. Disraeli the "Imperialist" had no more to do with building empires than with building churches, but he was twice Prime Minister of England.

- * Disraeli's contempt for italics is well known. He called them "the last resort of the forcible Feebles." -

Froude's Sea Studies in the third series of his collected essays are chiefly a series of thoughts on the plays of Euripides. But, like so much of his writing, they are redolent of the ocean, on which and near which he always felt at home. The opening sentences of this fresh and wholesome paper are too characteristic not to be quoted.

"To a man of middle age whose occupations have long confined him to the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library, there is something unspeakably delightful in a sea voyage. Increasing years, if they bring little else that is agreeable with them, bring to some of us immunity from sea-sickness. The regularity of habit on board a ship, the absence of dinner parties, the exchange of the table in the close room for the open deck under an awning, and the ever-flowing breeze which the motion of the vessel forbids to sink into a calm, give vigour to the tired system, restore the conscious enjoyment of elastic health, and even mock us for the moment with the belief that age is an illusion, and that 'the wild freshness' of the morning of life has not yet pa.s.sed away for ever. Above our heads is the arch of the sky, around us the ocean, rolling free and fresh as it rolled a million years ago, and our spirits catch a contagion from the elements. Our step on the boards recovers its buoyancy. We are rocked to rest at night by a gentle movement which soothes you into the dreamless sleep of childhood, and we wake with the certainty that we are beyond the reach of the postman. We are shut off, in a Catholic retreat, from the worries and anxieties of the world."

This is not the language of a man who ever suffered seriously from sea-sickness, and Froude's face had an open-air look which never suggested "the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library." But he was of course a laborious student, and nothing refreshed him like a voyage. On the yacht of his old friend Lord Ducie, as Enthusiastic a sailor and fisherman as himself, he made several journeys to Norway, and caught plenty of big salmon. He has done ample justice to these expeditions in the last volume of his essays, which contains The Spanish Story of the Armada. A country where the mountains are impa.s.sable, and the fiords the only roads, just suited his taste. It even inspired him with a poem, Rornsdal Fiord, which appeared in Blackwood for April, 1883, and it gave him health, which is not always, like poetry, a pure gift of nature.

The life of society, and of towns, never satisfied Froude. Apart from his genius and his training, he was a country gentleman, and felt most at home when he was out of doors.

From Panshanger he wrote to Lady Derby:

"How well I understand what you felt sitting on the top of the Pyrenees. We men are but a sorry part of the creation. Now and then there comes to us a breath out of another order of things; a sudden perception-coming we cannot tell how-of the artificial and contemptible existence we are all living; a longing to be out of it and have done with it-by a pistol-shot if nothing else will do. I continually wonder at myself for remaining in London when I can go where I please, and take with me all the occupations I am fit for. Alas! it is oneself that one wants really to be rid of. If we did not ourselves share in the pa.s.sions and follies that are working round us we should not be touched by them. I have made up my mind to leave it all, at all events, as soon as Mr. Carlyle is gone; but the enchantment which scenery, grand or beautiful, or which simple country life promises at a distance, will never abide-let us be where we will. It comes in moments like a revelation; like the faces of those whom we have loved and lost; which pa.s.s before us, and we stretch our hands to clasp them and they are gone. I came here yesterday for two or three days. The house is full of the young generation. They don't attract me .... Whatever their faults, diffidence is not one of them. Macaulay's doctrine of the natural superiority of each new generation to its predecessor seems most heartily accepted and believed. The superb pictures in the house are a silent protest against the cant of progress. You look into the faces of the men and the women on the walls and can scarcely believe they are the same race with us. I have sometimes thought 'the numbers' of the elect have been really fulfilled, and that the rest of us are left to gibber away an existence back into an apehood which we now recognise as our real primitive type."

From the Molt, on the other hand, he wrote:

"It is near midnight. I have just come in from the terrace. The moon is full over the sea, which is glittering as if it was molten gold. The rocks and promontories stand out dear and ghost-like. There is not a breath to rustle the leaves or to stir the painted wash upon the sh.o.r.e. Men and men's doings, and their speeches and idle excitement, seem all poor, transient, and contemptible. Sea and rocks and moonlight looked just as they look to-night before Adam sinned in Paradise. They remain-we come and go, hardly more enduring than the moth that flutters in through the window, and we are hardly of more consequence."

CHAPTER X

THE OXFORD PROFESSORSHIP

ON the 16th of March, 1892, Froude's old antagonist, Freeman, who had been Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford since Stubbs's elevation to the Episcopal Bench in 1884, died suddenly in Spain. The Prime Minister, who was also Chancellor of the University, offered the vacant Chair to Froude, and after some hesitation Froude accepted it. The doubt was due to his age. "There are seventy-four reasons against it," he said. Fortunately he yielded. "The temptation of going back to Oxford in a respectable way," he wrote to Skelton, "was too much for me. I must just do the best I can, and trust that I shall not be haunted by Freeman's ghost." Lord Salisbury did a bold thing when he appointed Froude successor to Freeman. Froude had indeed a more than European reputation as a man of letters, and was acknowledged to be a master of English prose. But he was seventy-four, five years older than Freeman, and he had never taught in his life, except as tutor for a very brief time in two private families. The Historical School at Oxford had been trained to believe that Stubbs was the great historian, that Freeman was his prophet, and that Froude was not an historian at all. Lord Salisbury of course knew better, for it was at Hatfield that some of Froude's most thorough historical work had been done. Still, it required some courage to fly in the face of all that was pedantic in Oxford, and to nominate in Freeman's room the writer that Freeman had spent the best years of his life in "belabouring." Some critics attributed the selection to Lord Salisbury's sardonic humour, or p.r.o.nounced that, as Lamb said of Coleridge's metaphysics, "it was only his fun." Some stigmatised it as a party job. Gladstone's nominee Freeman, had been a Home Ruler, Froude was a Unionist; what could be clearer than the motive? But both nominations could be defended on their own merits, and a Regius Professorship should not be the monopoly of a clique.

Lord Salisbury's choice of Froude was indeed, like Lord Rosebery's subsequent choice of Lord Acton for Cambridge, an example which justified the patronage of the Crown. A Prime Minister has more courage than an academic board, and is guided by larger considerations. Froude was one of the most distinguished living Oxonians, and yet Oxford had not even given him an honorary degree. Membership the Scottish Universities Commission in 1876 was the only official acknowledgment of his services to culture that he had ever received, and that was more of an obligation than a compliment. "Froude," said Jowett, "is a man of genius. He has been abominably treated." Lord Salisbury had made amends. Himself a man of the highest intellectual distinction, apart from the offices he happened to hold, he had promoted Froude to great honour in the place he loved best, and the most eminent of living English historians returned to Oxford in the character which was his due.

The new Professor gave up his house in London, and settled at Cherwell Edge, near the famous bathing-place called Parson' s Pleasure.* He found the University a totally different place from what it was when he first knew it. Dr. Arnold, who died in 1842, the year after his appointment, was the earliest Professor whose lectures were famous, or were attended, and Dr. Arnold did exactly as he pleased. There was no Board of Studies to supervise him, and it was thought rather good of a Professor to lecture at all. Now the Board of Studies was omnipotent, and a Professor's time was not his own. He was bound in fact to give forty-two lectures in a year, and to lecture twice a week for seven weeks in two terms out of the three. The prospect appalled him. "I never," he wrote to Max Muller,+ "I never gave a lecture on an historical subject without a fortnight or three weeks of preparation, and to undertake to deliver forty-two such lectures in six months would be to undertake an impossibility. If the University is to get any good out of me, I must work in my own way." He did not, however, work in his own way, and the University got a great deal of good out of him all the same.

- * The house is now, oddly enough, a Catholic convent.

+ April 18th, 1892.

- Lord Salisbury, in making Froude the offer, spoke apologetically of the stipend as small, but added that the work would be light. The accomplished Chancellor was imperfectly informed. The stipend was small enough: the work was extremely hard for a man of seventy-four. Froude's conscientiousness in preparation was almost excessive. Every lecture was written out twice from notes for improvement of style and matter. His audiences were naturally large, for not since the days Mr. Goldwin Smith, who resigned in 1866, had anything like Froude's lectures been heard at Oxford. When I was an undergraduate, in the seventies, we all of course knew that Professor Stubbs had a European reputation for learning. But, except to those reading for the History School, Stubbs was a name, and nothing more. n.o.body ever dreamt of going to hear him. Crowds flocked to hear Froude, as in my time they flocked to hear Ruskin.

One s.e.x was as well represented as the other. Froude had left the dons celibate and clerical. He found them, for the most part, married and lay. There was every variety of opinion in the common rooms, and every variety of perambulators in the parks. London hours had been adopted, and the society, though by no means frivolous or ostentatious, was anything rather than monastic. At Oxford, as in London, Froude was almost always the best talker in the room. He had travelled, not so much in Europe as in America and the more distant parts of the British Empire. He had read almost everything, and known almost every one. His boyish enthusiasm for deeds of adventure was not abated. He believed in soldiers and sailors, especially sailors. Creeds, Parliaments, and const.i.tutions did not greatly attract or keenly interest him. Old as he was by the almanac, he retained the buoyant freshness of youth, and loved watching the eights on the river as much as any undergraduate. The chapel services, especially at Magdalen, brought back old times and tastes. As Professor of History he became a Fellow of Oriel, where he had been a commoner in the thick of the Oxford Movement. If the Tractarian tutors could have heard the conversation of their successors, they would have been astonished and perplexed. Even the Essayists and Reviewers would have been inclined to wish that some things could be taken for granted. Modern Oxford was not altogether congenial to Froude. While he could not be called orthodox, he detested materialism, and felt sympathy, if not agreement, with Evangelical Protestants. Like Bacon, he would rather believe all the legends of the Talmud than that this universal frame was without a mind.

Of the questions which absorbed High Churchmen he said, "One might as well be interested in the amours of the heathen G.o.ds." On the other hand, he had no sympathy with the new school of specialists, the devotees of original research. He believed in education as a training of the mental faculties, and thought that undergraduates should learn to use their own minds. "I can see what books the boys have read," he observed, after examining for the Arnold Prize, "but I cannot see that they make any use of what they have read. They seem to have power of a.s.similation." The study of authorities at first hand, to which he had given so much of his own time, he regarded as the work of a few, and as occupation for later years. The faculty of thinking, and the art of writing, could not be learned too soon.

Few indeed were the old friends who remained at Oxford to welcome him back. Max Muller was the most intimate of them, and among his few surviving contemporaries was Bartholomew Price, Master of Pembroke, a clergyman more distinguished in mathematics than in theology. The Rector of Exeter* gave a cordial welcome to the most ill.u.s.trious of its former Fellows. The Provost of Oriel+ was equally gracious. In the younger generation of Heads his chief friends were the Dean of Christ Church,^ now Bishop of Oxford, and the President of Magdalen.# But the Oxford of 1892 was so unlike the Oxford of 1849 that Froude might well feel like one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. And if there had been many changes in Oxford, there had been some also in himself. He had long ceased to be, so far as he ever was, a clergyman. He had been twice married, and twice left a widower. His children had grown up. His fame as an author extended far beyond the limits of his own country, and of Europe. He had made Carlyle's acquaintance, become his intimate friend, and written a biography of him which numbered as many readers as The French Revolution itself. He had lectured in the United States, and challenged the representatives of Irish Nationalism on the history of their own land. He had visited most of the British Colonies, and promoted to the best of his ability the Federation of South Africa. Few men had seen more, or read more, or enjoyed a wider experience of the world. What were the lessons which after such a life he chiefly desired to teach young Englishmen who were studying the past? The value of their religious reformation, and the achievements of their naval heroes. The Authorised Version and the Navy were in his mind the symbols of England's greatness. Greater Britain, including Britain beyond the seas, was the goal of his hopes for the future progress of the race. There were in Oxford more learned men than Froude, Max Muller for one. There was not a single Professor, or tutor, who could compare with him for the mult.i.tude and variety of his experience. Undergraduates were fascinated by him, as everybody else was. The dignitaries of the place, except a stray Freemanite here and there, recognised the advantage of having so distinguished a personage in so conspicuous a Chair. Even in a Professor other qualities are required besides erudition. Stubbs's Const.i.tutional History of England may be a useful book for students. Unless or until it is rewritten, it can have no existence for the general reader; and if the test of impartiality be applied, Stubbs is as much for the Church against the State as Froude is for the State against the Church. When Mr. Goldwin Smith resigned the Professorship of Modern History, or contemplated resigning it Stubbs wrote to Freeman, "It would be painful to have Froude, and worse still to have anybody else." He received the appointment himself, and held it for eighteen years, when he gave way to Freeman, and more than a quarter of century elapsed before the painful event occurred. By that time Stubbs was Bishop of Oxford, translated from Chester, and had shown what a fatal combination for a modern prelate is learning with humour. If Froude had been appointed twenty years earlier, on the completion of his twelve volumes, he might have made Oxford the great historical school of England. But it was too late. The aftermath was wonderful, and the lectures he delivered at Oxford show him at his best. But the effort was too much tor him, and hastened his end.

- * Dr. Jackson. + Mr. Monro. ^ Dr. Paget. # Mr. Warren. -

It must not be supposed that Froude felt only the burden. His powers of enjoyment were great, and he thoroughly enjoyed Oxford. He had left it forty years ago under a cloud. He came back in a dignified character with an a.s.sured position. He liked the familiar buildings and the society of scholars. The young men interested and amused him. Ironical as he might be at times, and pessimistic, his talk was intellectually stimulating. His strong convictions, even his inveterate prejudices, prevented his irony from degenerating into cynicism. History, said Carlyle, is the quintessence of innumerable biographies, and it was always the human side of history that appealed to Froude. He once playfully compared himself with the Mephistopheles of Faust, sitting in the Professor's chair. But in truth he saw always behind historical events the directing providence of G.o.d. Newman held that no belief could stand against the destructive force of the human reason, the intellectus sibi permissus. Froude felt that there were things which reason could not explain, and that no revelation was needed to trace the limits of knowledge. Sceptical as he was in many ways, he had the belief which is fundamental, which no scientific discovery or philosophic speculation can shake or move. Creeds and Churches might come or go. The moral law remained where it was. His own creed is expressed in that which he attributes to Luther. "The faith which Luther himself would have described as the faith that saved is the faith that beyond all things and always truth is the most precious of possessions, and truthfulness the most precious of qualities; that when truth calls, whatever the consequence, a brave man is bound to follow."*

- * Short Studies, iii. 189. -

Although Froude was probably happier at Oxford than he had been at any time since 1874, the regulations of his professorship worried him, as they had worried Stubbs and Freeman. They seemed to have been drawn on the a.s.sumption that a Professor would evade his duties, and behave like an idle undergraduate. Froude, on the contrary, interpreted them in the sense most adverse to himself. The authorities of the place, or some of them, would have had him spare his pains, and colourably evade the statute by talking instead of lecturing. But Froude was too conscientious to seek relief in this way. Whatever he had to do he did thoroughly, conscientiously, and as well as he could. There is no trace of senility in his professorial utterances. On the contrary, they are full of life and fire. Yet Froude was by no means entirely engrossed in his work. He had time for hospitality, and for making friends with young men. He loved his familiar surroundings, for nothing can vulgarise Oxford. He found men who still read the cla.s.sics as literature, not to convict Aeschylus of violating Dawes's Canon, or to get loafers through the schools. He was not in all respects, it must be admitted, abreast of modern thought. His education had been unscientific, and he cared no more for Darwin than Carlyle did. He had learnt from his brother William, who died in 1879,* the scope and tendency of modern experiments, and astronomical ill.u.s.trations are not uncommon in his writings. But the bent of his mind was in other directions, and he had never been under the influence of Spencer or of Mill. The Oxford which he left in 1849 was dominated by Aristotle and Bishop Butler. He came back to find Butler dethroned, and more modern philosophers established in his place. Aristotle remained where he was, not the type and symbol of universal knowledge, as Dante conceived him, but the groundwork upon which all later systems had been built. Plato, without whom there would have been no Aristotle, was more closely and reverently studied than ever, partly no doubt through Jowett, and yet mainly because no philosopher can ever get far away from him. Jowett himself, the ideal "Head of a House," who had been at Balliol when Froude was at Oriel, died in the second year of Froude's professorship, after seeing many of his pupils famous in the world. He had lived through the great period of transition in which Oxford pa.s.sed from a monastery to a microcosm. The Act of 1854 had opened the University to Dissenters, reserving fellowships and scholarships, all places of honour and emolument, for members of the Established Church. The Act of 1871 removed the test of churchmanship for all such places, and for the higher degrees, except theological professorships and degrees in divinity. The Act of 1877 opened the Headships of the Colleges, and put an end to prize Fellowships for life. The Provost of Oriel, then Vice- Chancellor, was a layman. Marriage did not terminate a Fellowship, which, unless it were connected with academic work, lasted for seven years, and no longer. The old collegiate existence was at an end. Many of the tutors were married, and lived in their own houses. When Gladstone revisited Oxford in 1890, and occupied rooms in college as an Honorary Fellow of All Souls, nothing pleased him less than the number of women he encountered at every turn. They were not all the wives and daughters of the dons, who in Gladstone's view had no more right to such appendages than priests of the Roman Church; there were also the students at the Ladies' Colleges, who were allowed to compete for honours, though not to receive degrees.

- * "My brother," Froude wrote to Lady Derby, "though his name was little before the public, was well known to the Admiralty and indeed in every dock-yard in Europe. He has contributed more than any man of his time to the scientific understanding of ships and shipbuilding. His inner life was still more remarkable. He resisted the influence of Newman when all the rest of his family gave way, refusing to become a Catholic when they went over, and keeping steadily to his own honest convictions. To me he was ever the most affectionate of friends. The earliest recollections of my life are bound up with him, and his death takes away a large past of the little interest which remained to me in this most uninteresting world. The loss to the Admiralty for the special work in which he was engaged will be almost irreparable." -

Froude, who brought his own daughters with him, entered easily into the changed conditions. He was not given to lamentation over the past, and if he regretted anything it was the want of Puritan earnestness, of serious purpose in life. He had an instinctive sympathy with men of action, whether they were soldiers, sailors, or statesmen. For mere talkers he had no respect at all, and he was under the mistaken impression that they governed the country through the House of Commons. He never realised, any more than Carlyle, the vast amount of practical administrative work which such a man as Gladstone achieved, or on the other hand the immense weight carried in Parliament by practical ability and experience, as distinguished from brilliancy and rhetoric. The history which he liked, and to which he confined himself, was antecedent to the triumph of Parliament over the Crown. Warren Hastings, he used to say, conquered India; Burke would have hanged him for doing it. The House of Lords acquitted Hastings; and so far from criticising the doubtful policy of the war with France in 1793, Burke's only complaint of Pitt was that he did not carry it on with sufficient vigour. The distinction between talkers and doers is really fallacious. Some speeches are actions. Some actions are too trivial to deserve the name. But if Froude was incapable of understanding Parliamentary government, he very seldom attempted to deal with it. The English in Ireland is a rare and not a fortunate, exception. The House of Tudor was far more congenial to him than either the House of Stuart or the House of Brunswick.

Froude delivered his Inaugural Lecture on the 27th of October, 1892. The place was the Museum, which stands in the parks opposite Keble, and the attendance was very large. In the history of Oxford there have been few more remarkable occasions. Although the new Professor had made his name and writings familiar to the whole of the educated world, his immediate predecessor had vehemently denied his right to the name of historian, and had a.s.sured the public with all the emphasis which reiteration can give that Froude could not distinguish falsehood from truth. If anything could have brought Freeman out of his grave, it would have been Froude's appointment to succeed him. It is the custom in an Inaugural Lecture to mention in eulogistic language the late occupant of the chair. No man was less inclined to bear malice than Froude. His disposition was placable, and his temperament calm. Freeman had grossly and frequently insulted him without the faintest provocation. But he had long since taken his revenge, such as it was, and he could afford to be generous now. He discovered, with some ingenuity, a point of agreement in that Freeman, like himself, was a champion of cla.s.sical education. Therefore, "along with his asperities," he had "strong masculine sense," and had voted for compulsory Greek. If the right of suffrage were restricted to men who knew Greek as well as Froude or Freeman, the decisions of Congregation at Oxford, and of the Senate at Cambridge, would command more respect.

Froude must have been reminded by the obligatory reference to Freeman that a man of seventy-four was succeeding a man of sixty- nine. The Roman Cardinals were, he said, in the habit of electing an aged Pontiff with the hope, not always fulfilled, that he would die soon. He had no belief that such an expectation would be falsified in his own case, and he undertook, with obvious sincerity, not to hold the post for a single day after he had ceased to be capable of efficiently discharging his functions. To history his own life had been devoted, and it would indeed have been strange if he could not give young men some help in reading it. His own great book might not be officially recommended for the schools. It was unofficially recommended by all lovers of good literature and sound learning. Like most people who know the meaning of science and of history, he denied that history was a science. There were no fixed and ascertained principles by which the actions of men were determined. There was no possibility of trying experiments. The late Mr. Buckle had not displaced the methods of the older historians, nor founded a system of his own. "I have no philosophy of history," added Froude, who disbelieved in the universal applicability of general truths. Here, perhaps, he is hardly just to himself. The introductory chapter to his History of the Reformation, especially the impressive contrast between modern and mediaeval England, is essentially philosophical, so much so that one sees in it the student of Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon. History to Froude, like the world to Jaques, was a stage, and all the men and women merely players. But a lover of Goethe knows well enough that the drama can be philosophical, and Shakespeare, the master of human nature, has drawn nothing more impressive than the close of Wolsey's career. "The history of mankind is the history of great men," was Carlyle's motto, and Froude's. It is a n.o.ble one, and to discredit great men with low motives is the vice of ign.o.ble minds. The reign of Henry VIII., after Wolsey's fall, was rich in horrors and in tragical catastrophes. But it was not a mere carnival of l.u.s.t and blood. High principles were at stake, and profound issues divided parties, beside which the levity of Anne Boleyn and the eyes of Jane Seymour were not worth a moment's thought. Hobbes wondered that a Parliament man worth thousands of pounds, like Hampden, to pay twenty shillings for ship-money, as if the amount had anything to do with the principle that taxes could only be levied by the House of Commons. Henry's vices are dust in the balance against the fact that he stood for England against Rome. It is one of Froude's chief merits that he never fails to see the wood for the trees, never forgets general propositions to lose himself in details. A novice whose own mind is a blank may read whole chapters of Gardiner without discovering that any events of much significance happened in the seventeenth century. He will not read many pages of Froude before he perceives that the sixteenth century established our national independence.

Two of Froude's pet hobbies may be found in his Inaugural Lecture. There is the theory that judgment falls upon idleness and vice, which he adopted from Carlyle. There is his own doctrine that the Statute Book furnishes the most authentic material of history. It is no answer to say that preambles are inserted by Ministers, who put their own case and not the case of the nation. In the use or reception of all evidence allowance must be made for the source from which it comes. But even Governments do not invent out of their own heads, or put into statutes what is foreign to the public mind. They employ the arguments most likely to prevail, and these must be closely connected with the circ.u.mstances of the day. No recital in an Act of parliament can prove incontestably that the monasteries were stews, or worse. That such a thing could be plausibly alleged, and generally believed, is itself important, and history must take account of popular views. Debates were not reported in the sixteenth century, nor was freedom of speech in Parliament recognised by the Crown. There was nothing to ensure a fair trial for the victims of a royal prosecution, and testimony obtained by torture was accepted as authentic. All these are facts, and to neglect them is to go astray. But they do not prove that every public doc.u.ment is untrustworthy; or that the words of a statute have no more to do with reality than the words of a romance. It is a question of degree. Historical narrative could not be written under the conditions most properly imposed upon criminal proceedings in a court of law. If nothing which cannot be proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt is admitted into the pages of history, they will be bare indeed. It is significant that Froude laid down in 1892 the same propositions for which he had contended in the Oxford Essays of 1855. He had suffered many things in the meantime of The Sat.u.r.day Review, but he held to his old opinions with unshaken tenacity. All Froude's changes were made early in life. When once he had shaken himself free of Tractarianism, The Nemesis of Faith, and Elective Affinities, he remained a Protestant, Puritan, sea-loving, priest-hating Englishman.

The subject with which Froude began his brief career as Professor was the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent has been described by one of the great historians of the world, Fra Paolo Sarpi, whom Macaulay considered second only to Thucydides. Entirely ineffective for the purpose of securing universal concord, it did in reality separate Protestant from Catholic Europe, and establish Papal authority over the Church of Rome. When the Council met, the Papacy was no part of orthodox Catholicism, and Henry VIII. never dreamt that in repudiating the jurisdiction of the Pope he severed himself from the Catholic Church. If Luther had been only a heretic, the Council might have put him down. But he had behind him the bulk of the laity, and Cardinal Contarini told Paul III. that the revolt against ecclesiastical power would continue if every priest submitted. "The Reformation," said Froude at the beginning of his first course, in November, 1892, "is the hinge on which all modern history turns." He traced in it the rise of England's greatness. When he came back in his old age to Oxford, it was to sound the trumpet-note of private judgment and religious liberty, as if the Oxford Movement and the Anglo-Catholic revival had never been. Froude could not be indifferent to the moral side of historical questions, or accept the doctrine that every one is right from his own point of view. The Reformation did in his eyes determine that men were responsible to G.o.d alone, and not to priests or Churches, for their opinions and their deeds. It also decided that the Church must be subordinate to the State, not the State to the Church. This is called Erastianism, and is the bugbear of High Churchmen. But there is no escape from the alternative, and the Church of Rome has never abandoned her claim to universal authority. Against it Henry VIII. and Cromwell, Elizabeth and Cecil, set up the supremacy of the law, made and administered by laymen. As Froude said at the close of his first course, in the Hilary Term of 1893, "the principles on which the laity insisted have become the rule of the modern Popes no longer depose Princes, dispense with oaths, or absolve subjects from their allegiance. Appeals are not any more carried to Rome from the national tribunals, nor justice sold there to the highest bidder." Justice was sold at Rome before the existence of the Catholic Church, or even the Christian religion. It has been sold, as Hugh Latimer testified, in England herself. But with the English Court's independence of the Holy See came the principles of civil and religious freedom.

Few things annoyed Froude more than the attacks of Macaulay and other Liberals on Cranmer. This was not merely sentimental attachment on Froude's part to the compiler of the Prayer Book. He looked on the Marian Martyrs as the precursors of the Long Parliament and of the Revolution, the champions of liberty in church and State. He would have felt that he was doing less than his duty if he had taught his pupils mere facts. Those facts had a lesson, for them as well as for him, and his sense of what the lesson was had deepened with years. He had observed in his own day an event which made much the same impression upon him as study of the French Revolution had made upon Carlyle. When the Second Empire perished at Sedan, Froude saw in the catastrophe the judgment of Providence upon a sinister and tortuous career. If the duty of an historian be to exclude moral considerations, Froude did not fulfil it. That there were good men on the wrong side he perceived plainly enough. But that did not make it the right side, nor confuse the difference between the two.

Froude's second set of Oxford lectures, begun in the Easter Term of 1893, was ent.i.tled English Seamen of the Sixteenth Century, and the name of the first lecture in it, a thoroughly characteristic name, was The Sea Cradle of the Reformation. He was in his element, and his success was complete. How Protestant England ousted Catholic Spain from the command of the ocean, and made it Britannia's realm, was a story which he loved to tell. "The young King," Henry VIII., "like a wise man, turned his first attention to the broad ditch, as he called the British Channel, which formed the natural defence of the kingdom." It was "the secret determined policy of Spain to destroy the English fleet, pilots, masters, and sailors, by means of the Inquisition." In 1562, according to Cecil, more than twenty British subjects had been burnt at the stake in Spain for heresy, and more than two hundred were starving in Spanish prisons. There was work for Hawkins and Drake. They were both Devonshire men, like Raleigh.

'Twas ever the way with good Queen Bess, Who ruled as well as a mortal can, When she was stogged, and the country in a mess, To send for a Devonshire man.