Part 39

However that may be, it is certain that the "History" placed Mr. Froude in the very front rank of English authors. He had made a path for himself. He refused to accept the thought of what is commonly called a science of history, although his own method of evolving his narrative is very often in faithful conformity with the principles of that science. He had written about political economy, in the very opening of his first volume, in a manner which, if it did not imply an actual contempt for the doctrines of that science, yet certainly showed an impatience of its rule which aroused the anger of the economists. He claimed a reversal of the universal decision of modern history as to the character of Henry VIII. He assailed one of the English Protestant's articles of faith when he denied the virtue of Anne Boleyn. He made mistakes and confessed them, and went to work again. The opening of the Spanish archives in the castle of Simancas flooded him with new lights and required a reconstruction of much that he had done. The progress of his work became one of the literary phenomena of the age. All eyes were on it. The rich romantic splendor of the style, the singular power and impressiveness of the historical portraits, fascinated everybody. Orthodox Protestants looked on him as a sort of infidel or pagan, despite his admiration for Queen Bess, because, with all his admiration, he exposed her meannesses and her falsehoods with unsparing hand. Catholics insisted on regarding him as a mere bigot of Protestantism, although he condemned Anne Boleyn. Mr. Froude has always shown a remarkable freedom from prejudice and bigotry. Some of his closest friends are Catholics and Irishmen. I remember a little personal instance of liberality on his part which is perhaps worth mentioning. There was an official in the Record or State Paper Office of England who had become a Roman Catholic, and was, like most English Catholics, especially if converts, rather bigoted and zealous. This gentleman, Mr. Turnbull, happened to be employed some years ago in arranging, copying, and calendaring the Elizabethan State papers. The Evangelical Alliance Society got up a cry against him. They insisted that to employ a Roman Catholic in such a task was only to place in his hands the means of falsifying a most important period of English history, and they argued that the temptation would be too strong for any man like Mr. Turnbull to resist. There sprang up one of those painful and ignoble disputations which are even still only too common in England when religious bigotry gets a chance of raising an alarm. I am sorry to say that so influential a journal as the "Athenæum" joined in the clamor for the dismissal of Mr. Turnbull, who was not accused of having done anything wrong, but only of being placed in a position which might perhaps tempt some base creatures to do wrong. Mr. Turnbull was a gentleman of the highest honor, and, unfortunately for himself, an enthusiast in the very work which then occupied him. Mr. Froude was then engaged in studying the period of history which employed Mr. Turnbull's labors. The opinions of the two men were utterly at variance. Mr. Turnbull must have thought Froude's work in the rehabilitation of Henry VIII., and the glorification of Elizabeth positively detestable. But Mr. Froude bore public testimony to the honor and integrity of Mr. Turnbull. "Mr. Turnbull," Froude wrote, "could have felt no sympathy with the work in which I was engaged; but he spared no pains to be of use to me, and in admitting me to a share of his private room enabled me to witness the ability and integrity with which he discharged his own duties." Bigotry prevailed, however. Mr. Turnbull was removed from his place, and died soon after, disappointed and embittered. But Froude the man is not Froude the author. The man is free from dislikes and prejudices; the author can hardly take a pen in his hand without being suffused by prejudices and dislikes. Take for example his way of dealing with Irish questions, not merely in his history, but in his miscellaneous writings. Mr. Froude has some little property in the west of Ireland, and resides there for a short time every year. He has occasionally detailed his experiences, and commented on them, in the pages of "Fraser." I shall not give my own view of his apparent sentiments toward Ireland, because I am obviously not an impartial judge; but I shall take the opinion of the London "Spectator," which is. The "Spectator" declares that "it may be not unfairly said that Mr. Froude simply loathes the Irish people; not consciously perhaps, for he professes the reverse. But a certain bitter grudge breaks out despite his will now and then. It colors all his tropes. It adds a sting to the casual allusions of his language. When he wants a figure of speech to express the relation between the two islands, he compares the Irish to a kennel of fox-hounds, and the English to their master, and declares that what the Irish want is a master who knows that he is a master and means to continue master." In his occasional studies of contemporary Ireland from the window of his shooting lodge in Kerry, Mr. Froude exhibits the same strange mixture of candor as to fact and blind prejudice as to conclusion which so oddly characterizes his history. He recounts deliberately the most detestable projects--he himself calls them "detestable;" the word is his, not mine--avowed to him by the agents of great Irish landlords, and yet his sympathy is wholly with the agents and against the occupiers. He tells in one instance, with perfect delight, of a mean and vulgar exhibition of triumphant malice which he says an agent, a friend of his, paraded for the humiliation of an evicted and contumacious tenant. The "Spectator" asks in wonder whether it can be possible that "Mr. Froude, an English gentleman by birth and education, an Oxford fellow, is not ashamed to relate this act as an heroic feat?" Indeed, Mr. Froude seems to associate in Ireland only with the "agent" class, and to take all his views of things from them. His testimony is therefore about as valuable as that of a foreigner who twelve or fifteen years ago should have taken his opinions as to slavery in the South from the judgment and conversation of the plantation overseers. The "Spectator" observed, with calm severity, that Mr. Fronde's unlucky accounts of his Irish experiences were "a comical example of the way in which an acute and profound mind can become dull to the sense of what is manly, just, and generous, by the mere atmosphere of association." Let me say that I am convinced, however, that all this blind and unmanly prejudice is purely literary; that it is taken up and laid aside with the pen. As I have already said, some of Mr. Froude's closest friends are Irishmen--men who are incapable of associating with any one, however eminent, who really felt the coarse and bitter hatred to their country which Mr. Froude in his wilder moments allows his too fluent pen to express. In fact Mr. Froude is nothing of a philosopher. He settles every question easily and off hand by reference to what Stuart Mill well calls the resource of the lazy--the theory of race. Celts are all wrong and Anglo-Saxons are all right, and there is an end of it. If he has any philosophy and science of history, it is this. It explains everything and reconciles all seeming contradictions. Nothing can be at once more comprehensive and more simple. But there is still something to be added to this story of Mr. Froude's Irish experiences; and I mention the whole thing only to illustrate the peculiar character of Mr. Froude's emotional temperament, which so often renders him untrustworthy as a historian. In the particular instance on which the "Spectator" commented, it turned out that Mr. Froude was entirely mistaken. He had misunderstood from beginning to end what his friend the agent told him. The agent, the landlord (a peer of the realm), and others hastened to contradict the historian. There never had been any such eviction or any such offensive display. Mr. Froude himself wrote to acknowledge publicly that he had been entirely mistaken. He seemed indeed to have always had some doubt of the story he was publishing; for he sent a proof of the page to the agent "to be corrected in case I had misunderstood him." But the agent's alterations, "unluckily, did not reach me in time;" and as Mr. Froude could not wait for the truth, he published the error. Thus indeed is history written! This was Mr. Froude's published version of a statement made _viva voce_ to himself; and his version was wrong in every particular--in fact, in substance, in detail, in purport, in everything! I venture to think that this little incident is eminently characteristic, and throws a strong light on some of the errors of the "History of England."

Mr. Froude has taken little or no active part in English politics. I do not remember his having made any sign of personal sympathy one way or the other with any of the great domestic movements which have stirred England in my time. I presume that he is what would be generally called a Liberal; at least it is simply impossible that he could be a Tory. But I doubt if he could very distinctly "place himself," as the American phrase is, with regard to most of the political contentions of the time. I cannot call Mr. Froude a philosophical Radical; for the idea which that suggests is of a school of thought and a system of training quite different from his, even if his tendencies could possibly be called Radical. It is rather a pity that so much of the best and clearest literary intellect of England should be so entirely withdrawn from the practical study of contemporary politics. No sensible person could ask a man like Mr. Froude to neglect his special work, that for which he has a vocation and genius, for the business of political life. But perhaps a better attempt might be made by him and others of our leading authors to fulfil the conditions of the German proverb which recommends that the one thing shall be done and the other not left undone. Mr. Froude has taken a more marked interest in the quasi-political question lately raised touching the connection between England and her colonies. Of recent years a party has been growing up in England who advocate emphatically the doctrine that the business of this country is to educate her colonies for emancipation. These men believe that as time goes on it will become more and more difficult to retain even a nominal connection between distant colonies and the parent country. The Dominion of Canada and the Australian colonies, both separated by oceans from England, are now practically independent. They have their own parliaments, and make their own laws; but England sends out a governor, and the governor has still a nominal control indeed, which in some rare cases he still exercises. Now what is to be the tendency of the future? Will this practical independence tend to bind the colonial system more strongly up into that of the central empire, as the practical independence of the American or the Swiss States keeps them together? Or is the time inevitable when the slight bond must be severed altogether and the great colonies at last declare their independence? Would it, for example, be possible always to maintain the American Union if several thousand miles of ocean divided California in one direction from Washington, and several thousand miles of another ocean lay between Washington and the South? This is the sort of question political parties in England have lately been asking themselves. One party, mainly under an impulse once given by a chance alliance between the Manchester school and Goldwin Smith, affirm boldly that ultimate separation is inevitable, and that we ought to begin to prepare ourselves and the colonies for it. This party made great way for awhile. They said loudly, they announced as a principle, that which had been growing vaguely up in many minds, and which one or two statesmen had long before put into actual form. More than twelve years ago Mr. Gladstone delivered a lecture on our colonial system which plainly pointed to this ultimate severance and bade us prepare for it. Mr. Lowe, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, himself an old colonist, had talked somewhat cynically in the same way. Mr. Bright was well known to favor the idea; so was Mr. Mill. With the sudden and direct impulse given by Mr. Goldwin Smith, the thought seemed to be catching fire. England had voluntarily given up the Ionian Islands to Greece; there was talk of her restoring Gibraltar to Spain. Mr. Lowe had spoken in the House of Commons with utter contempt of those who thought it would be possible to hold Canada in the event of a war with the United States. Governors of colonies actually began to warn their population that the preparation for independence had better begin. Suddenly a reaction set in. A class of writers and speakers came up to the front who argued that the colonies were part of England's very life system; that they were her friends, and might be her strength; that it was only her fault if she had neglected them; and that the natural tendency was to cohesion rather than dissolution. This party roused at once the sympathy of that large class of people who, knowing and caring nothing about the political and philosophical aspects of the question, thought it somehow a degradation to England, a token of decay, a confession of decrepitude, that there should be any talk of the severance of her colonies. Between the two, the tide of separatist feeling has decidedly been rolled back for the present. The humor of the present day is to devise means--schemes of federation or federative representation for example--whereby the colonies may still be kept in cohesion with England. Now, among the men of intellect who have stimulated and fostered this reactionary movement, if it be so--at all events, this movement toward the retention of the colonies--Mr. Froude has been a leading influence. He has advocated such a policy himself, and he has instilled it into the minds of others. He has formed silently a little school who take their doctrines from him and expand them. The colonial question has become popular and powerful. We have every now and then colonial conferences held in London, at which everybody who has any manner of suggestion to make, or crotchet to air, touching the improvement or development of our colonial system, goes and delivers his speech independently of everybody else. In the House of Commons the party is not yet very strong; but if it had a leader there, it would undoubtedly be powerful. There is even already a visible anxiety on the part of cabinet ministers to drop all allusion to the fact that they once talked of preparing the colonies for independence. We now find that it is regarded as unpatriotic, un-English, ungrateful, and I know not what, to say a word about a possible severance, at any time, between the parent country and her colonies. In one of Mr. Disraeli's novels a political party, hard up for a captivating and popular watchword, is thrown into ecstasies when somebody invents the cry of "Our young Queen and our old Constitution." I think the cry of "Our young colonies and our old Constitution" would be almost as taking now. It is curious, however, to note how both the movement and the reaction came from scholars and literary men--not from politicians or journalists. Many eminent men had talked of gradually preparing the colonies for independence; but the talk never became an impulse and a political movement until it came from Mr. Goldwin Smith. On the other hand, countless vociferous persons had always been bawling out that England must never part with a rock on which her flag had waved; but all this sort of thing had no effect until Mr. Froude and his school inaugurated the definite movement of reaction. Mr. Goldwin Smith sent the ball flying so far in one direction, that it seemed almost certain to reach the limit of the field. Mr. Froude suddenly caught it and sent it flying back the way it had come, and beyond the hand which had originally driven it forth. It is not often that the ideas of "literary" men have so much of positive influence over practical controversy in England.

For a long time Mr. Froude has been the editor of "Fraser's Magazine," a periodical which I need not say holds a high position, and to which the editor has contributed some of the finest of his shorter writings. He is assisted in the work of editing by Mr. William Allingham, who is best known as a young poet of great promise, and who is probably the closest personal friend of Alfred Tennyson. "Fraser's" is always ready to open its columns to merit of any kind, and is willing to put before the public bold and original views of many political questions which other periodicals would shrink from admitting. As a rule English magazines, even when they acknowledge a dash of the philosophic in them, are very reluctant to give a place to opinions, however honestly entertained, which differ in any marked degree from those of society at large. The "Fortnightly Review" may be almost regarded as unique in its principle of admitting any expression of opinion which has genuineness and value in it, without regard to its accordance with public sentiment, or even to its inherent soundness. "Fraser," of course, makes no pretension to such deliberate boldness. But "Fraser" will now and then venture to put in an article, even from an uninfluential hand, which goes directly in the teeth of accepted and orthodox political opinion. For example, it is not many months since it published an article written by an English working man ("The Journeyman Engineer," a sort of celebrity in his way) to prove that republicanism is becoming the creed of the English artisan. Now, in any English magazine which professes to be respectable, it is almost as hazardous a thing to speak of republicanism in England as to speak of something indecent or blasphemous. "Fraser" also made itself conspicuous some years ago as a bold and persevering advocate of army reform, and ventured to press certain schemes of change which then seemed either revolutionary or impossible, but which since then have been quietly realized.

I think I have given a tolerably accurate estimate of Mr. Froude's public work in England. I have never heard him make a speech or deliver a lecture, and therefore cannot conjecture how far he is likely to impress an audience with the manner of his discourse; but the matter can hardly fail to be suggestive, original, and striking. I can foresee sharp controversy and broad differences of opinion arising out of his lectures in the United States. I cannot imagine their being received with indifference, or failing to hold the attention of the public. Mr. Froude is a great literary man, if not strictly a great historian. Of course every one must rate Froude's intellect very highly. He has imagination; he has that sympathetic and dramatic instinct which enables a man to enter into the emotions and motives, the likings and dislikings of the people of a past age. His style is penetrating and thrilling; his language often rises to the dignity of a poetic eloquence. The figures he conjures up are always the semblances of real men and women. They are never wax-work, or lay figures, or skeletons clothed in words, or purple rags of description stuffed out with straw into an awkward likeness to the human form. The one distinct impression we carry away from Froude's history is that of the living reality of his figures. In Marlowe's "Faustus" the Doctor conjures up for the amusement of the Emperor a procession of stately and beautiful shadows to represent the great ones of the past. When the shadows of Alexander the Great and his favorite pass by, the Emperor can hardly restrain himself from rushing to clasp the hero in his arms, and has to be reminded by the wizard that "these are but shadows not substantial." Even then the Emperor can scarcely get over his impression of their reality, for he cries:

I have heard it said That this fair lady, whilst she lived on earth, Had on her neck a little wart or mole;