Part 6

And so it was. A book which at present would call forth no remark, no controversy, was discussed in all the newspapers, and raised a storm all over England. Bishops shook their heads, nay even their fists, at the young heretic, and even those among his contemporaries at Oxford who ought to have sympathised with him, and were in fact quite as unorthodox as he was, did not dare to stand up for him or lend him a helping hand. Stanley alone never said an unkind word of him. The worst was that Froude not only lost his fellowship, but when he had accepted the Headmastership of a college far away in Tasmania, his antagonists did not rest till his appointment had been cancelled. Froude unfortunately was poor, and his father, a venerable and well-to-do Archdeacon, was so displeased with his son that he stopped the allowance which he had formerly made him. It seems almost as if the poverty of a victim gave increased zest and enjoyment to his pursuers. Froude had to sell his books one by one, and was trying hard to support himself by his pen. This was then not so easy a matter as it is now. At that very time, however, I received a cheque for £200 from an unknown hand, with a request that I would hand it to Froude to show him that he had friends and sympathisers who would not forsake him. It was not till many years later that I discovered the donor, and Froude was then able to return him the money which at the time had saved him from drowning. I should like to mention the name, but that kind friend in need is no longer among the living, and I have a feeling that even now he would wish his name to remain unknown. This is by no means the only instance of true English generosity which I have witnessed. But at the time I confess that I was surprised, for I did not yet know how much of secret goodness, how much of secret strength there is in England, how much of that real public spirit, of that chivalrous readiness to do good and to resist evil without lifting the vizor. Froude had a hard struggle before him, and, being a very sensitive man, he suffered very keenly. Several times I remember when I was walking with him and friends or acquaintances of his were passing by without noticing him, he turned to me and said: “That was another cut.” I hardly understood then what he meant, but I felt that he meant not only that he had been dropped by his friends, but that he felt cut to the quick. Persecution, however, did not dishearten him; on the contrary, it called forth his energies, and the numerous essays from his pen, now collected under the title “Short Studies on Great Subjects,” show how he worked, how he thought, how he followed the course that seemed right to him without looking either right or left. Bunsen, who was at the time the Prussian Minister in London, and had heard from me about Froude, took a deep interest in him, and after consulting with Archdeacon Hare and Frederick Maurice, suggested that he should spend a few years at a German university. I was asked to bring my young friend to Carlton Terrace, where Bunsen received him with the truest kindness. What he tried to impress on him was that the questions which disturbed him required first of all a historical treatment, and that before we attempt to solve difficulties we should always try to learn how they arose. Froude was on the point of going to Germany with the assistance of some of Bunsen’s friends when other prospects opened to him in England. But frequently in later life he referred to his interview with Bunsen and said, “I never knew before what it meant that a man could drive out devils.”

I confess I was somewhat surprised when Froude suddenly told me of his plan of writing a History of England, beginning with Henry VIII. My idea of a historian was that of a professor who had read and amassed materials during half his life, and at the end produced a ponderous book, half text, half notes. But, hazardous as the idea of writing a History of England seemed to me for so young a man, I soon perceived that Froude had an object in writing, and he certainly set to work with wonderful perseverance. Few of his critics have given him credit for what he did at Simancas and at the Record Office in London. I have seen him at work, morning and evening, among piles of notes and extracts. I know how the pages which are such pleasant light reading were written again and again till he was satisfied. Often I had to confess to him that I never copied what I had once written, and he was outspoken enough to tell me, “But you ought; and you will never write good English if you don’t.” He learnt Spanish, French, and German, so as to be able to read new and old books in these languages. He always kept up his classical reading, and translated, as far as I remember, several Greek texts from beginning to end. To these he afterwards referred, and quoted from them, without always, as he ought, going back again to the original Greek.

It is not for me to say that he did not make mistakes, and that he was not weak in some branches of historical knowledge. I cannot deny that in his translations also there are mistakes, arising from haste rather than from ignorance. But who has ever examined any translation from any language, without finding signs of what seems carelessness or ignorance? Four eyes see more than two. We have translations of Plato and Aristotle in Latin and in almost every language of Europe. The text has been critically examined for hundreds of years, and every difficult passage has been explained again and again. But is there any one translation which could be called immaculate? Was not even the last translation of Plato which is so deservedly popular, characterised by the late Rector of Lincoln, in the well-known words of a French writer, as _très belle, mais peu fidèle_? Now, while the true scholar, when examining a new translation, rejoices over every new happy rendering, the ill-natured critic, particularly if he wants to display his own superior knowledge, can easily pick out a number of passages where a mistake has been made, or where he thinks that a mistake has been made, and then proceed to show that the very best Greek scholar of the day does not know “what every schoolboy ought to know,” etc. There are many passages in Greek and other authors that admit of more than one translation. If the translator adopts one and rejects another, the game of the critic is easy enough: he has only to adopt the rejected rendering, and his triumph is secured. If that is so in Greek, how much more is it the case in translating passages from faded documents written in antiquated Spanish, nay, even letters of Erasmus written in his peculiar Latin, or statutes in Norman-French.

Translation is a difficult art, and scholars, particularly those who know the language from which, or the language into which, they translate as well as their own, consider a good translation almost impossible. I have had some experience in translating, and I know something of the treatment which translators may expect from conceited critics. The Sacred Books of the East, translated by myself and a number of friends, the best scholars I could find, have not escaped that kind of pedantic criticism. Impartial and honest critics have recognised the difficulties under which scholars labour in translating, often for the first time, ancient texts, whether Greek or Sanskrit. It is easy enough to translate a text, after it has once been translated; it is easy even to improve in a few places on the translations of the first pioneers. But to translate for the first time an ancient text, badly edited or not yet edited at all, is a totally different thing, and those who undertake it have a right not only to the indulgence, but to the gratitude of all who come after them. No one in our sphere of studies would call himself a scholar who has not edited a text never edited before, or at least translated a text that never was translated before. There are some critics who think they have done their duty if they can discover a few flaws in a translation, though they cannot even appreciate the labours and the brilliant though silent discoveries of a first translator. The work that has to be done by a first translator of an ancient text is often the work of a real decipherer. He has to grope his way through Egyptian darkness like the first interpreter of an Egyptian or Babylonian inscription. He cannot help making mistakes. But though we know now how often even a Champollion (died 1832) was mistaken, do we not feel ashamed if we read what another most eminent Egyptologist and Coptic scholar, Amadeo Peyron (died 1870), the head of the Egyptian Museum at Turin, said of Champollion? “I have known Champollion,” he said, “the so-called decipherer of hieroglyphics, very well, from his first visits to our Museum. I took him for an ordinary swindler, and his publications have afterwards confirmed me in my views. His philological labours have remained to me unsolved riddles.”[7]

I have lately had another experience. I had to revise my translation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” and I was surprised to see how many passages there were which I had to alter, not because I did not know either German or English, but because in many places a translation can only be approximately faithful; and it is only a happy thought that enables us now and then to approach nearer to the German original, though in that case often at the expense of the English idiom.

In the case of Froude, we must remember that, whatever he wrote, he had to meet not a single critic only, but a whole army. As far as one could see, a kind of association had been formed for the suppression of his “History.” Those who were behind the scenes know how certain of his rivals and enemies actually banded themselves together, as if against a common enemy. Now, I remember seeing in _Fraser’s Magazine_, then edited by Froude, a review of Green’s “History of the English People,” with pages and pages of mistakes in names, in dates, in facts. Yet, the same writers who delighted in picking holes in Froude’s “History” from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, kept up a constant chorus of applause for Green’s “History of the English People”—no doubt rightly so; but why not mete the same measure to others also? One of his reviewers openly confessed that if he took the trouble of reading a book carefully, he could not afford to review it in one paper only, he had to write at least five or six articles to make it pay. This Φρουδοφονία, as it was called, went on year after year, but, strange to say, Froude’s work was not killed by it; on the contrary, it became more and more popular. In fact, together with his other works, it enabled him to live independently and even comfortably by his pen. Things have come to such a pass that, if we may trust the experience of publishers, nothing sells so well as a well-abused book, while laudatory notices seem to produce little or no effect. The public, it seems, has grown too wise. Even such powerful adjectives as epoch-making (_Epoche-machend_), monumental and even _pyramidal_, fall flat. _Epoche-machend_ has too often been found out to mean no more than _Poche-machend_ (_Poche_ in German means _claque_), and _monumental_ has once or twice proved a misprint for _momental_ or momentary. Few scholars would agree with M. Le Bon that “works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination, as fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts.” This is a French exaggeration. But neither are books of history meant to be mere chronicles. History is surely meant to teach not only facts, but lessons also; and, though historians may say that facts ought to speak for themselves, they will not speak without a _vates sacer_. I am the last man to stand up for an unscholarlike treatment of history, or of anything else. But as I do not call a man a scholar who simply copies and collates MSS., makes indices or collects errata, I doubt whether mere _Quellenstudium_ will make a historian. _Quellenstudium_ is a _sine quâ non_, but it is not everything; and whereas the number of those who can ransack archives and libraries is large, the world has not been rich in real historians whom it is a delight to listen to, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and, may we not add, Macaulay and Froude? None of these historians, not even Gibbon, has escaped criticism, but how poor should we be without them!

Sir Walter Raleigh, when he was writing his “History of the World” in the Tower of London, overheard two boys quarrelling over the facts of an incident that had happened the day before; and he said to himself: “If these two boys cannot agree on an event which occurred almost before their own eyes, how can any one be profited by the narration which I am writing, of events which occurred in ages long past?” The answer which the critical historian would give to Raleigh would probably be: “Go and examine the two boys; find out their home, their relations, their circumstances, particularly the opportunities they had of seeing what they profess to have seen; and try to discover whether there was any bias in their minds that could have made them incline towards one side rather than the other. Give all that evidence, and then you are a real historian.” But is that true, and were any of the great historians satisfied with that? Was not their heart in their work, and is the heart ever far from what we call bias? Did not Herodotus, in describing the conflict between Greece and Asia, clearly espouse the cause of Greece? I know he has been called the father of lies rather than of history; but he has survived for all that. Did not Thucydides throughout his history write as the loyal son of Athens? Was Tacitus very anxious to find out all that could be said in favour of Tiberius? Was even Gibbon, in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” quite impartial? Ranke’s “History of the Popes,” may be very accurate, but for thousands who read Macaulay and Froude is there one who reads Ranke, except the historian by profession? History is not written for historians only. Macaulay wrote the history of the English Restoration as a partisan, and Froude made no secret on which side he would have fought, if he had lived through the storms of the English Reformation. If Macaulay had been one of the two boys of Sir Walter Raleigh, he would probably not have discovered some of the dark shadows on the face of William III. which struck the other boy; while some critics might possibly say of Froude that in drawing the picture of Henry VIII. he may have followed now and then the example of Nelson in the use of his telescope. Still, in describing such recent periods as the reign of Henry VIII., historians cannot, at all events, go very far wrong in dates or names. Froude may have been wrong in embracing the cause of Henry VIII. and accepting all the excuses or explanations which could be given for his violent acts. But Froude is, at all events, honest, in so far that no one can fail to see where his sympathies lie, so that he really leaves us free to decide what side we ourselves should take.

When the historian has to analyse prominent characters, and bring them again full of life on the stage of history, is it not the artist, nay the poet, who has to do the chief work, and not the mere chronicler? In Froude’s case the difficulty was very great. The contemporary estimates of Henry’s character were most conflicting, and without taking a line of his own, without claiming in fact the same privilege which Henry’s contemporaries claimed, whether friends or foes, it would have been impossible for him to create a character that should be consistent and intelligible. There was nothing too fiendish to be told of the English king by the Papal party, and yet we cannot help asking how such a caitiff, as he is represented to have been by Roman Catholic agents, could have retained the love of the English people and secured the services of some of the best among the noblemen and gentlemen of his time? If we take upon ourselves to reject all reports of Royal Commissioners in Henry’s reign as corrupt and mendacious, would it be worth while to write any history of the English people at all? It is, no doubt, an ungrateful task to whitewash a historical character that has been besmirched for years by a resolute party. Yet it has to be done from time to time, from a sense of justice, and not from a mere spirit of opposition. Carlyle’s heroes were nearly all the best-abused men in Christendom: Frederick the Great, Cromwell, and Goethe. Every one of these characters was lying, as Carlyle said himself, under infinite dung; yet every one of them is now admired by thousands, because they trust in Carlyle. It was the same Carlyle who encouraged Froude in his work of rehabilitating Bluff King Hal, and we ought, at all events, to be grateful to him for having enabled us to know all that can be said by the king’s advocates. If Froude wrote as a partisan, he wrote, at the same time, as a patriot, and if a patriot sees but one side of the truth, some one else will see the other.

Can we imagine any history of our own times written from the pole star, and not from amid the turmoil of contending parties? Would a history of the reign of Queen Victoria, written by Gladstone, be very like a history written by Disraeli? However, these squabbles of reviewers about the histories of Macaulay and Froude are now almost entirely forgotten, while the historical dramas which Macaulay and Froude have left us, remain, and Englishmen are proud of possessing two such splendid monuments of the most important periods of their history. Macaulay’s account of William III. remained unfinished, and it is characteristic of Froude that, if I understood him rightly, he gave up the idea of finishing the reign of Queen Elizabeth, because, as an Englishman, he was disappointed in her character towards the end of her reign.

I saw much of Froude again during the last years of his life, when he returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of History, having been appointed by Lord Salisbury. “It is the first public recognition I have received,” he used to say. He rejoiced in it, and he certainly did credit to Lord Salisbury’s courageous choice. His lectures were brilliant, and the room was crowded to the end. His private lectures also were largely attended, and he was on the most friendly and intimate terms with some of his pupils.

There is no place so trying for a professor as Oxford. Froude’s immediate predecessors, Goldwin Smith, Stubbs, and Freeman, were some of the best men that Oxford has produced. Their lectures were excellent in every respect. Yet every one of them had to complain of the miserable scantiness of their audiences at Oxford. The present Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Stubbs, in his “Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediæval and Modern History” (1886), states what may sound almost incredible, that he had sometimes to deliver his lectures “to two or three listless men.” The same may be said of some of the best lectures delivered in the University. The young men are encouraged in each college to attend the lectures delivered by the tutors, and are given to understand that professorial lectures “do not pay” in the examinations. These examinations are chiefly in the hands of college tutors. Professor Stubbs was not given to complain about anything that might seem to concern himself, yet he confesses that “sometimes he felt hurt that in the combined lecture list he found the junior assistant tutor advertising a course on the same subject, or at the same hours, as his own.” Nay, he goes so far in his modesty as to say: “It may be better that there should be a dozen or fifteen college lecturers working away with large classes, when I have only a few stray men,” but the real friends of the University would hardly think so. As things are at present, it has been said, and, I believe, truly said, that nearly all professorial lectures might be abolished, and the studies of the undergraduates would go on just the same. Oxford suffers in this respect from a real _embarras de richesse_. The University is rich enough, though by no means so rich as it was formerly, to keep up a double staff of teachers, professorial and tutorial. It supports sixty-five professors, readers, and lecturers, and probably four or five times as many tutors. Many of the tutors are quite equal to the professors, nay, it may be, even superior to them, but the most popular tutor, whose lectures, when in college, were crowded, has to be satisfied with two or three listless men as soon as he has been raised to the professoriate. Froude’s lectures formed an exception, but even this was quoted against him.

Froude was not only the most fascinating lecturer, but the most charming companion and friend. His conversation was like his writings. It never tired one, it never made one feel his superiority. His store of anecdotes was inexhaustible, and though in his old age they were sometimes repeated, they were always pleasant to listen to. He enjoyed them so thoroughly himself, he chuckled over them, he covered his eyes as if half ashamed of telling them. They are all gone now, and a pity it is, for most of them referred to what he had actually seen, not only to what he had heard, and he had seen and heard a good deal, both in Church and State. He knew the little failings of great men, he knew even the peccadilloes of saints, better than anybody. He was never ill-natured in his judgments, he knew the world too well for that, and it is well, perhaps, that many things which he knew should be forgotten. He himself insisted on all letters being destroyed that had been addressed to him, and from a high sense of duty, left orders that his own letters, addressed to his friends, should not be divulged after his death. Though he left an unfinished autobiography, extremely interesting to the few friends who were allowed to read it, those who decided that it should not be published have acted, no doubt, wisely and entirely in his spirit.