The Life of Froude Part 9

Nothing annoyed Carlyle more than to be told that he confounded might with right. He declared that, on the contrary, he had never said, and would never say, a word for power which was not founded on justice. Cromwell was as good as he was great, and he had never glorified Frederick, unless to write a book about a man is necessarily to glorify him. This prevalent misconception of Carlyle's gospel, so prevalent that it deceived no less keen a critic than Lecky, was completely dissipated by Froude. No one can read his Life intelligently without perceiving that Carlyle's real foe was materialism. The French Revolution was to him the central fact of modern history, and at the same time a supreme judgment of Heaven upon a society given up to unrestrained licentiousness. Whether he was right or wrong is not the point. He was as far as possible from being, in the modern sense, a scientific historian. Yet in some respects he was utilitarian enough. The condition of England was to him more important than any const.i.tutional change, any triumph in diplomacy, or any victory in war, and this fact explains apparently inconsistent admiration of Peel, who though a Parliamentary statesman, had accomplished a solid achievement for the benefit of the people. Carlyle in his own writings is an almost insoluble enigma. To have given the true solution is the supreme merit of Froude.*

- * John Nichol, a name still dear in Scotland, formerly Professor of Literature at the University of Glasgow, who wrote on Carlyle for Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters in 1892, says in his preface: "Every critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligation to Mr. Froude as every critic of Byron to Moore, or of Scott to Lockhart .... I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the persistent, often virulent, attach directed against a loyal friend, betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith, and the defective reticence that often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr. Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on Sir Walter Scott, requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with the most ample authority; that the restrictions under which he was first entrusted with the MSS. of the Reminiscences and the Letters and Memorials (annotated by Carlyle himself as if for publication) were withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a practical injunction to communicate the whole." -

CHAPTER IX

BOOKS AND TRAVEL

The two pa.s.sions of Froude's life were Devonshire and the sea. "Summer has come at last," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley from Salcombe in the middle of September, "after two months of rain and storm. The fields from which the wrecks of the harvest were sc.r.a.ped up mined and sprouting now lie basking in stillest sunshine, as if wind and rain had never been heard of. The coast is extremely beautiful, and I, in addition to the charms of the place, hear my native tongue spoken and sung in the churches in undiminished purity." Carlyle often kept him in London when he would much rather have been elsewhere. But, wherever he was, he had a ready pen, and his thoughts naturally clothed themselves in a literary garb. His enjoyment of books, especially old books, was intense. Reading, however, is idle work, and idleness was impossible to Froude. On his return from South Africa, where everything was being done which he thought least wise, he took up a cla.s.sical subject, and began to write a book about Caesar. He read Cicero, Plutarch, Suetonius, Caesar himself, and produced early in 1879 a volume which was always a particular favourite of his own. "I believe," he said to Skelton, "it is the best book I have ever written." The public did not altogether agree with him, and it never became so popular as Short Studies.

Yet it is undoubtedly a brilliant performance, with just the qualities which might have been expected to make it popular, and a second edition was soon required. It is interesting from the first page to the last, and its whole object is to show that the Roman world in the last days of the Republic was very like the English world under Queen Victoria. In Rome itself it has a steady sale. The general reader, however, was not wrong in thinking that these eloquent pages are below the level of Froude at his best. There is a hard metallic glitter in the style, and a forced comparison of ancient with modern things not really parallel, which make the whole narrative artificial and unreal. Lord Dufferin said, with his natural acuteness, "It is interesting, and forcibly written, but one feels he is not a safe guide. As they say of the mansions of Ireland, 'they are always within a hundred yards of the best situation,' so one feels that Froude is never quite in the bull's- eye in the view he gives."*

- * Lyall's Life of Dufferin, vol. ii. p. 244. -

Those who criticised the book as if it were a formal and historical narrative showed a lack of humour, which is a sense of proportion. Macaulay might almost as well be judged by his Fragment of a Roman Tale. Froude himself calls his Caesar a sketch, and it is scarcely more authoritative than the pamphlet of Louis Napoleon on the same subject. On the other hand, it is quite untrue that Froude had not read Cicero's letters. He had read those which bore upon his subject, and he quotes them freely enough. The fault of his Caesar is that he makes a wrong start. Points of resemblance between the first century before the Christian era and the nineteenth century after it may of course be found. But the differences are essential and fundamental. A society which rests upon servitude cannot be like a society which rests upon freedom. Christianity has modified the whole lives of those who do not profess it, and has created a totally new atmosphere, even if it be not in all respects a better one. Representative government, whether it be a good thing or a bad thing, is at least a thing which counts. Caesar could hardly have understood the idea of an indissoluble marriage, of a limited monarchy, of equality before the law.

One strange similitude Froude did, in deference to outraged susceptibilities, omit, and only the first edition contains a formal comparison of Julius Caesar with Jesus Christ. No irreverence was intended. It was Froude's enthusiasm for Caesar that carried him away. Still, the instance is only an extreme form of what comes from pushing parallels below the surface. It is only a shade less misleading, though many shades less startling, to represent Caesar as a virtuous philanthropist abstemious habits who perished in a magnanimous effort to rescue the people from the tyranny of n.o.bles. The people in the modern sense were slaves, and the Republic at least ensured that there should be some protection against military despotism, to which in due course its abolition led. That Caesar was intellectually among the greatest men of all time is beyond question. Both strategist and as historian he is supreme. His "thrasonical boast" was sober truth, and he stands above military or literary criticism, a lesson and a model. But he was steeped in all the vices of his age, and his motive was personal ambition. The Republic did not give him sufficient scope, and therefore he would have destroyed it, if he had not been himself destroyed.

Froude adopted the position of a great German professor and historian, Theodor Mommsen, whose prejudices were as strong as his learning was profound. He went with Mommsen in adoration of Caesar, and in depreciation of Cicero. That Cicero used one sort of language in public speeches, and another sort in private correspondence, is true, and is notorious because some of his most intimate letters have been preserved. But it is not peculiar to him. The man who talked in public as he talked in private would have small sense of fitness. The man who talked in private as he talked in public would have small sense of humour. Although Cicero's humour was not brilliant, he had sufficient taste to preserve him from pedantry and from solecisms. His devotion to the Republic was perfectly sincere; and if he changed in his behaviour to Caesar, it was because Caesar changed in his behaviour to the Republic. Froude's specific charge of rapid tergiversation is disproved by dates. The speech for Marcellus, with its over-strained flattery of the conqueror, was delivered, not "within a few weeks of his murder," but eighteen months before that event, at a time when Cicero still hoped that Caesar would be moderate. If Cicero's Republic was a narrow oligarchy, it was also the only form of const.i.tutional and civilian government which he knew or could imagine. He failed to preserve it. He was murdered like Caesar himself. Neither of them believed that political a.s.sa.s.sination was a crime. Cicero's only regret was that Antony had not been killed with Caesar. Antony's chief desire, which he accomplished, was to kill Cicero. The idea that Cicero was a mere declaimer, who did not count, never occurred either to Caesar or to Antony. It was left for Professor Mommsen to discover. Froude, always on the look-out for examples of his theory, or his father's theory, that orators must be useless and mistaken, seized it with an eager gasp. An agreeable looseness of treatment pervades the book, and "patricians" appear as wealthy leaders of fashionable society, being in fact a small number of old Roman families, who might be poor, or in trade, and could not legally under the Republic be increased in number, resembling rather a Hindu caste than any inst.i.tution of Western Christendom. In Caesar's time they had almost died out, and the aristocracy of the day was an aristocracy of office. The book, however, though far from faultless, though in some respects misleading, has a singular fascination, the charm of a picture drawn by the hand of a master with consummate skill. As an historical study, what the French call une etude, it deserves a very high place, and it contains one sentence which all democrats would do well to learn:

"Popular forms are possible only when individual men can govern their own lives on moral principles, and when duty is of more importance than pleasure, and justice than material expediency."

That represents the best side of Carlyle's teaching; the subordination of material objects, the supremacy of the moral law. Carlyle, however, did not care for the book, as appears in the following letter from Froude to Lady Derby:

"April 26th, 1879.-You are a most kind critic. If I have succeeded in creating interest in so old a subject my utmost wishes are accomplished. I am very curious indeed to hear what Lord D. says. I can guess that he thinks I ought to have said more in defence of the Const.i.tutionalists, and that I have hardly used Cicero. Carlyle reduced me to the condition of a 'drenched hen'-to use one of his own images. He told me that the book was not clear, that 'he got no good of it'-in fact, that it was 'a failure.' It may be a failure, but 'want of clearness' is certainly not the cause. I fancy he wanted something else which he did not find, and he would not give himself the trouble to examine what he did find."

Froude contributed in 1880 to Mr. Morley's English Men of Letters a critical and biographical sketch of Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress, as the work of a Dissenter, had been excluded from the Rectory at Dartington. But Froude was not long in supplying the deficiency for himself, and his literary appreciation of Bunyan's style was accompanied by a sincere sympathy with the Puritan part of his faith. All religious people, he thought, might find common ground in Bunyan, a man who lived for religion, and for nothing else. Yet even here Froude's Erastianism, and respect for authority, come into play. He gravely defends Bunyan's imprisonment in Bedford gaol, which lasted, with some intermissions, from 1660 to 1672, as necessary to enforce respect for the law. That such a man as Charles Stuart should have had power to punish such a man as John Bunyan for preaching the word of G.o.d is a strange comment on the nature of a Christian country. But it cannot be denied that Charles and his judges, Sir Matthew Hale among them, provided the leisure to which we owe the best religious allegories in the language. Nor can it be said that Froude's apology for the confinement Bunyan is so repugnant to reason and justice as Gibbon's apology for the martyrdom of Cyprian.

The General Election of 1880 was regarded by Froude with mixed feelings.

"I am glad," he wrote to Lady Derby on the 9th of April, 1880, "that there is to be an end of 'glory and gunpowder,' but my feelings about Gladstone remain where they were. When you came into power in 1874, I dreamed of a revival of real Conservatism which under wiser guiding might and would have lasted to the end of the century. This is gone-gone for ever. The old England of order and rational government is past and will not return. Now I should like to see a moderate triumvirate-Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, and your husband, with a Cabinet which they could control. This too may easily be among the impossibilities, but I am sure that at the bottom of its heart the country wants quiet, and a Liberal revolutionary sensationalism will be just as distasteful to reasonable people as 'Asian Mysteries,' tall talk, and ambitious buffooneries."

Lord Derby became more and more Liberal, until in December, 1882, he joined Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. Before that decisive step, however, it became evident in which direction he was tending, and Froude wrote to Lady Derby on the 5th of March:

"I will call on Tuesday about 5. I have not been out of town, but my afternoons have been taken up with a mult.i.tude of small engagements, and indeed I have been sulky too, and imagined Lord D. had delivered himself over to the enemy. But what right have I to say anything when I am going this evening to dine with Chamberlain? I like Chamberlain. He knows his mind. There is no dust in his eyes, and he throws no dust in the eyes of others."

Of the great struggle between Lords and Commons over the franchise in 1884, Froude wrote to the same correspondent on the 31st of July:

"As to what has happened since I went away, I for my own humble part am heartily pleased, for it will clear the air. If we are to have democracy, as I suppose we are, let us go into it with our eyes open. I don't like drifting among cataracts, hiding the reality from ourselves by forms which are not allowed either sense or power. That I suppose to be Lord Salisbury's feeling. I greatly admired his speech in Cannon Street, which reminded me of a talk I had with him long ago at Hatfield. If the result is a change in the Const.i.tution of the House of Lords which will make it a real power, no one will be more sorry than Chamberlain, whose own wish is to keep it in the condition of ornamental helplessness. Lord Derby himself can hardly wish to see the country entirely in the hands of a single irresponsible Chamber elected by universal suffrage-and of such a Chamber, which each extension of the suffrage brings to a lower intellectual level."

The following letter was written from Salcombe just after the General Election of 1886 and the defeat of Home Rule: "A Devonshire farmer fell ill of typhus fever once. He had quarrelled with a neighbour, and the clergyman told him that he must not die out of charity, and must see the man and shake hands with him. He agreed. The man came. They were reconciled, and he was going away again when the sick farmer called him back to the bed-side. 'Mind you,' he said, 'if so be as I get over this here, 'tis to be as 'twas.'

"I am sorry to see we are taking for granted that we have got over the scare, and that "tis to be as 'twas' in Parliament. If no way can be found of giving effect to the feeling of which has been just expressed, the old enemy will be back again stronger than ever. I, for my small part, shall finally despair of Parliamentary Government, and shall pray for a Chamberlain Dictatorship. I do not think politicians know how slight the respect which is now generally felt for Parliament, or how weary sensible people have grown of it and its factions.

"We are very happy down here. We have lost the Molt, but have a very tolerable subst.i.tute for it. The Halifaxes are at the Molt themselves, and considering what I am, and that he is the President of the Church Union, I think he and I are both astonished to find how well we get on together. The Colonists come next week to Plymouth. I have promised to meet them. Their dinner will be the exact anniversary of the arrival of the Armada off the harbour. That was the beginning of the English naval greatness and of the English Colonial Empire. Think of poor Oceana-75,000 copies of it sold. It stands for something that the English nation is interested in.... But I must not try your eyes any further."

It was in 1881 that Froude, whose connection with Fraser had ceased, wrote for Good Words the series of papers on The Oxford Counter- Reformation which are the best record hitherto published of his college life.* I have already referred to the vivid picture of John Henry Newman contained in one of them. On the 2nd of March, 1881, the aged Cardinal, writing from the Birmingham Oratory, sent a gracious message of acknowledgment. "My dear Anthony Froude," he began, "I have seen some portions of what you have been writing about me, and I cannot help sending you a line to thank you... I thank you, not as being able to accept all you have said in praise of me. Of course I can't. Nor again as if there may not be other aspects of me which you cannot praise, and which you may in a coming chapter of your publication find it a duty, whether I allow them or not, to remark upon. But I write to thank you for such an evidence of your affectionate feelings towards me, for which I was not prepared, and which has touched me very much. May G.o.d's fullest blessings be upon you, and give you all good. Yours affectionately, John H. Cardinal Newman."

- * Short Studies, fourth series, pp. 192-206. -

Froude carefully kept this letter, and, remote as their opinions were, he never varied in his loyal admiration of the ill.u.s.trious Oratorian. That admiration, however, was purely personal, and did not affect in any degree the staunchness of Froude's principles. In 1883 Protestant Germany celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Luther's birth, and Froude wrote for the occasion a short biography of the rebellious monk who changed the history of the world. He founded on the larger Life by Julius Koestlin, which had then just appeared, this little book makes no pretence to original learning or research. It is a polemical pamphlet by a master of English, and a fervent admirer of the ill.u.s.trious Martin. "When the German states revolted against the Roman hierarchy," says Froude in his Preface, "we in England revolted also," and Luther's name was as familiar as Bunyan's to the Protestant Churches of England. The Catholic revival of which Froude had seen so much at Oxford was still in full swing.

"Nevertheless, we are still a Protestant nation, and the majority of us intend to remain Protestant. If we are indifferent to our Smithfield and Oxford martyrs, we are not indifferent to the Reformation, and we can join with Germany in paying respect to the memory of a man to whom we also, in part, owe our deliverance. Without Luther there would have been either no change in England in the sixteenth century, or a change purely political. Luther's was one of those great individualities which have modelled the history of mankind, and modelled it entirely for good. He revived and maintained the spirit of piety and reverence in which, and by which alone, real progress is possible."

Such was the temper in which Froude set about his task, and which made it a labour of love. Besides the great public events in Luther's career which are familiar to all, he gave a charming picture of the affectionate father, the genial host, the eloquent, humourous talker whose fragments of conversation, his Tischreden, are in Germany almost as popular as his hymns. Luther's dominant quality was force, and that was a quality which Froude, like Carlyle, honoured above all others. Luther was not in all respects like a modern Protestant. He had a great respect for authority, when it was genuine, and he believed in transubstantiation, which Leo X. regarded as a juggle to deceive the vulgar. If Luther's appearance before the Diet of Worms was, as Froude says, "the finest scene in human history," it is so because this solitary monk stood not for one form of religion against another, but for truth against falsehood, for earnest belief in divine things against a Church governed by unbelievers. The Renaissance in its most Pagan form had invaded the Vatican, and the Vicar of Christ appeared to Luther as Anti-Christ himself. If Charles V. had been Pope, and Leo X. had been emperor, we might never have heard of Luther. Froude sincerely respected Charles V., and held that Protestant historians had done him less than justice. Although Charles opposed the Reformation, he opposed it honestly, and his faith in his own religion was absolute. He was a Christian gentleman. As he entered Wittenberg after the battle of Mahlberg, some bishop asked him to dig up Luther's body and burn it. "I war not with the dead," he perhaps remembering the grand old Roman line:

Nullum c.u.m victis certamen, et aethere ca.s.sis.

One valuable truth Froude had learned not from Carlyle, but from study of the past, and from his own observation at the Cape. "If," he wrote in Caesar, "there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this, that free nations" cannot govern subject provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their dependencies to share their const.i.tution, the const.i.tution itself will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties." A critic in The Quarterly Review expressed a hope that this would not prove to be true of India. But Froude was not thinking of India. He had in his mind the self-governing Colonies, whose fortunes and future were to him a source of perpetual interest. He loved travel, and as soon as he had shaken off the burden of Carlyle he took a voyage round the world, described, not always with topical accuracy, in Oceana. The name of this delightful volume is of course taken from Harrington, More's successor in the days of the Commonwealth. The contents were a characteristic mixture of history, speculation, and personal experience. Froude had a fixed idea that English politicians, especially Liberal politicians, wanted to get rid of the Colonies. Else why had they withdrawn British troops from Canada and New Zealand? He could not see, perhaps they did not all see themselves, that to give the Colonies complete freedom, and to insist upon their providing, except so far as the Navy was concerned, for their own defence, would strengthen, not weaken, the tie. In proof of his theory he produced some singular evidence, comprising one of the strangest stories that ever was told. He heard it, so he informs us, from Sir Arthur Helps, and reproduces it in his own words.

"A Government had gone out; Lord Palmerston was forming a new Ministry, and in a preliminary Council was arranging the composition of it. He had filled up the other places. He was at a loss for a Colonial Secretary. This name and that was suggested, and thrown aside. At last he said, 'I suppose I must take the thing myself. Come upstairs with me, Helps, when the Council is over. We will look at the maps, and you shall show me where these places are.'"

If Froude's memory of this anecdote be accurate, Helps must, for once, have been drawing upon his imagination. As Clerk of the Council, he had no more to do with forming Cabinets than with appointing bishops. Palmerston was never Colonial Secretary in his life; and among his faults as a Minister, which were positive rather than negative, ignorance of political geography was certainly not included. Many people, however, especially the Tariff Reform League, will consider that the pa.s.sage which immediately succeeds proves Froude to have been in advance of his age. For he argues that trade follows the flag, because "our colonists take three times as much of our productions in proportion to their number as foreigners take." A tour through the Colonies for the purpose of conversing with their most influential statesmen had long been one of his cherished plans. Hitherto he had got no farther than the Cape, where, as we have seen, he became entangled in South African politics, and had to repeat his visit. Now he was bound for Australasia, and on the 6th of December, 1884, he left Tilbury Docks, with his son Ashley, in an Aberdeen packet of four thousand tons. His love of the sea, Elizabethan in its intensity, was heightened by his enjoyment of Greek literature, especially the Odyssey, which he considered ideal reading for a ship, and, as it surely is, on ship or on sh.o.r.e, an incomparable tale of adventure.

Before the end of the year Froude was at Cape Town, renewing his acquaintance with familiar scenes. Many of his former friends were dead, and his courteous enemy, now Sir John Molteno, had left Cape Town as well as public life. The Prime Minister was Mr. Upington, a clever lawyer, afterwards Sir Thomas Upington, and the chief topic was Sir Charles Warren's expedition to Bechua.n.a.land, which happily did not end in war, as Upington apprehended that it would. Sir Hercules Robinson was Governor and High Commissioner, a man after Froude's heart, "too upright to belong to any party," and thoroughly appreciative of all that was best in the Boers. This time Froude's stay was a short one, and early in 1885 he was at Melbourne. Here the burning question was the German occupation of New Guinea, for which Colonial opinion held Gladstone's Government, and Lord Derby in particular, responsible. On the other hand, Lord Derby had suggested Australian Federation, which received a good deal of support, though it led to nothing at the time. On one point Froude seems always to have met with Sympathy. Abuse of Gladstone never failed to elicit a favourable response, and the news of Gordon's death was an opportunity not to be wasted. But when there came rumours of a possible war with Russia over the Afghan frontier, Froude took the side of Russia, or at all events of peace, and contended with his Tory companion, Lord Elphinstone, who was for war. In New Zealand he visited the venerable Sir George Grey, who had violated all precedent by entering local politics, and becoming Prime Minister, after the Duke of Buckingham had recalled him from the Governorship of the Colony. He was not equally successful in his second career, and Froude's unqualified praise of him was resented by many New Zealanders. That the Colonies would be true to the mother country if the mother country were true to them was the safe if somewhat vague conclusion at which the returning traveller arrived. He came home by America, and met with a more formidable antagonist than his old a.s.sailant Father Burke, in the shape of a terrific blizzard.

But hardships had no deterring effect upon Froude, and his love of travel, like his love of the cla.s.sics, suffered no diminution while strength remained. He returned from the Antipodes early in 1885. Before 1886 was out he had started on a voyage to the West Indies, so that his survey of our Colonial possessions might be complete. Ardent imperialist as he was, Froude was not less fully alive than Mr. Goldwin Smith to the difficulties inherent in a policy of Imperial Federation. "All of us are united at present," he had written in Oceana,* "by the invisible bonds of relationship and of affection for our common country, for our common sovereign, and for our joint spiritual inheritance. These links are growing, and if let alone will continue to grow, and the free fibres will of themselves become a rope of steel. A federation contrived by politicians would snap at the first strain." Australian Federation, which Froude did not live to see, was no contrivance of politicians, but the result of spontaneous opinion generated in Australia, and ratified as a matter of course by Parliament at home.

- * P. 393. -

The West Indian Islands had an especial fascination for Froude on account of the great naval exploits of Rodney, Hood, and other British sailors. 'Kingsley's At Last had revived his interest in them; and though Kingsley had long been dead, his memory was fresh among all who knew him. The diary which Froude kept during this journey has been preserved, and I am enabled to make a few extracts from it. On the last day of 1886, while he was crossing the Bay of Biscay, he meditated upon the subject which occupied Cicero at an earlier period of his life. "Last day of the year. One more gone of the few which can now remain to me. Old age is not what I looked for. It is much pleasanter. Physically, except that I cannot run, or jump, or dance, I do not feel much difference, and I don't want to do those things. Spirits are better. Life itself has less worries with it, and seems prettier and truer to me now that I can look at it objectively, without hopes and anxieties on my own account. I have nothing to expect in this world in the way of good. It has given me all that it will or can. I am less liable to illusions. One knows by experience that nothing is so good or so bad as one has fancied, and that what is to be will be mainly what has been. So many of one's friends are dead! Yes, but one will soon die too. Each friend gone is the cutting a link which would have made death painful. It loses its terror as it draws nearer, especially when one thinks what it would be if one were not allowed to die." Tennyson has expressed in t.i.thonus the idea at which Froude glances, and from which he averts his gaze. Carlyle's senility was not enviable, and even that st.u.r.dy veteran Stratford Canning* told Gladstone that longevity was "not a blessing." Like Cephalus at the opening of Plato's Republic, Froude found that he could see more clearly when the mists of sentiment were dispersed.

While at sea Froude pursued his favourite musings on the worthlessness of all orators, from Demosthenes and Cicero to Burke and Fox, from Burke and Fox to Gladstone and Bright. The world was conveniently divided into talking men and acting men. Gladstone had never done anything. He had always talked.

"I wonder whether people will ever open their eyes about all this. The orators go in for virtue, freedom, etc., the cheap cant which will charm the const.i.tuencies. They are generous with what costs them nothing-Irish land, religious liberty, emanc.i.p.ation of n.i.g.g.e.rs-sacrificing the dependencies to tickle the vanity of an English mob and catch the praises of the newspapers. If ever the tide turns, surely the first step will be to hang the great misleaders of the people-as the pirates used to be-along the House of Commons terrace by the river as a sign to mankind, and send the rest for ever back into silence and impotence."

- * Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. -

Whether a man be a pirate is a matter of fact. Whether he be a misleader of the people is a matter of opinion. "Whom shall we hang?" would become a party question, and perhaps a general amnesty for mere debaters is the most practical solution of the problem.

Barbados, which has since suffered severely from the want of a market for its sugar, seemed to Froude's eyes to present in a sort of comic picture the summit of human felicity. "Swarms of n.i.g.g.e.rs on board-delightful fat woman in blue calico with a sailor straw hat, and a pipe in her mouth. All of them perfectly happy, without a notion of morality-piously given too-psalm-singing, doing all they please without scruple, rarely married, for easiness of parting, looking as if they never knew a care .... n.i.g.g.e.rdom perfect happiness. Schopenhauer should come here." Schopenhauer would perhaps have said that "n.i.g.g.e.rs" were happier than other men because they come nearer to the beasts.

As Froude has been accused of injustice to the Church of Rome, it may be as well to quote an entry from his journal at Trinidad:* "Went to Roman Catholic Cathedral-saw a few men and women on their knees at solitary prayers-much better for them than Methodist addresses on salvation." In another place he says:+ "Religion as a motive alters the aspect of everything-so much of the world rescued from Rome and the great enemy. Yet the Roman Church after all is something. It is a cause and a home everywhere-something to care for outside oneself-an something which does not change."

- * January 15th, 1887.

+ February 1st.

- Again at Barbados, on the 17th of February he writes: "By far the most prosperous of the upper cla.s.ses that I have seen in the islands are the Roman Catholic priests and bishops. They stand, step, and speak out with as fine a consciousness of power as in Ireland itself .... Large, authoritative, dignified, with their long sweeping robes. The old thing is getting fast on its feet again. The philosophers and critics have done for Protestantism as a positive, manly, and intellectually credible explanation of the world. The old organism and old superst.i.tion steps into its ancient dominion- finding it swept and garnished."

In San Domingo at sunrise Froude's meditations were far from cheerful: "The sense of natural beauty is nothing where man is degraded." So far Bishop Heber in a well-known couplet.

Froude proceeds: "The perception of beauty is the perception of something which is acting upon and elevating the intellectual nature... It is connected with hope, connected with the consciousness of the n.o.ble element in the human soul; and where it is unperceived, or where there is none to perceive it, or where it falls dead, and fails in its effect, the solitary eye which gazes will find no pleasure, no joy-only distress-as for something calling to him out of a visionary world from which his own race is shut out. We cannot feel healthily alone. The sense of worship, the sense of beauty, the sense of sight, is only alive and keen when shared by others .... It is something not alone, but generated by the action of the object on the soul. Thus in these islands there is only sadness. In New Zealand there was hope and life."

A pa.s.sage from the diary concerning the appointment of Colonial Governors will be regarded by all official persons as obsolete.

"The English nation, if they wish to keep the Colonies, ought to insist on proper men being chosen as Governors .... The Colonial Office is not to blame and will only be grateful for an expression of opinion which will enable them to answer pressure upon them with a peremptory 'Impossible.' Court influence, party influence, party convenience, all equally injurious. A n.o.ble lord is out at elbows; give him a Governorship of a Colony. A party politician must be disappointed in arrangements at home; console him with a Colony. The Colonists feel that no respect is felt for them; anybody will do for a Colony; and whether it is a Crown Colony, or a with responsible government of its own, the effect is equally mischievous. In fact, while they continue liable, and occasionally subject, to treatment of this kind, the feelings insensibly generate which will lead in the end to separation."

The immediate consequence of Froude's West Indian travels was his well-known book The English in the West Indies, to which he gave a second t.i.tle, one that he himself preferred, The Bow of Ulysses. It was ill.u.s.trated from his own sketches, for he had inherited that gift from his father. Being often controversial in tone, and not always accurate in description, it provoked numerous criticisms, though not of the sort which interfere with success. In everything Froude wrote, though least of all in his History, allowance has to be made for the personal equation. He had not Carlyle's memory, nor his unfailing accuracy of eye. Where he wrote from mere recollection, deserting the safe ground of his diary, he was liable to error, and few men of letters have been less capable of producing a trustworthy guide book. The value of Oceana and The Bow of Ulysses is altogether different. They are the characteristic reflections of an intensely vivid, highly cultivated mind, bringing out of its treasure-house things new and old. "The King knows your book," it was said to Montaigne, "and would like to know you." "If the King knows my book," replied the philosopher, "he knows me." Froude is in his books, especially in his books of travel, for in them, more than anywhere else, he thinks aloud. There are strange people in the world. One of them criticised Froude in an obituary notice because, when he went to Jamaica, he sat in the shade reading Dante while he might have been studying the Jamaican Const.i.tution. There may be those who would study the Jamaican Const.i.tution, what there is of it, in the sun, while they might, if they could, read Dante in the shade, and the necrologist in question may be one of them. Froude did not go to study Const.i.tutions, which he could have studied at home. He went to see for himself what the West Indian Colonies were like, and his incorrigible habit of reading the best literature did not forsake him even in tropical climates. He cared only too little for Const.i.tutions even when they were his proper business, as they certainly were not in Jamaica. The object of The English in the West Indies is to make people at home feel an interest in their West Indian fellow-subjects, and that it did by the mere fact of its circulation. His belief that the West Indies should be governed, like the East Indies, despotically, is a subsidiary matter, and the quaint parody of the Athanasian Creed in which he epitomised what he supposed to be the Radical faith is merely an intellectual amus.e.m.e.nt. On the virtues of Rodney, and the future of the Colonies, he is serious, though scarcely practical.

"Imperial Federation," he wrote in 1887, "is far away, if ever it is to be realised at all. If it is to come it will come of itself, brought about by circ.u.mstances and silent impulses working continuously through many years unseen and unspoken of. It is conceivable that Great Britain and her scattered offspring, under the pressure of danger from without, or impelled by some purpose, might agree to place themselves under a single administrative head. It is conceivable that out of a combination so formed, if it led to a successful immediate result, some union of a closer kind might eventually emerge. It is not only conceivable, but it is entirely certain, that attempts made when no such occasion has arisen, by politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves, will fail, and in failing will make the object that is aimed at more confessedly unattainable than it is now."*

- * English in the West Indies, p. 168. -