Froude\'s Essays in Literature and History

J >> James Froude >> Froude\'s Essays in Literature and History

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27

Essays on History and Literature

By James Anthony Froude

London: J. M. Dent & Co.,
1906
____

Contents

Arnold's Poems (Westminster Review, 1854)

Words about Oxford (Fraser's Magazine, 1850)

England's Forgotten Worthies (Westminster Review, 1852)

The Book of Job (Westminster Review, 1853)

The Lives of the Saints (Eclectic Review, 1852)

The Dissolution of the Monasteries (Fraser's Magazine, 1857)

The Philosophy of Christianity (The Leader, 1851)

A Plea for the Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties
(Fraser's Magazine, 1863)

Spinoza (Westminster Review, 1855)

Reynard the Fox (Fraser's Magazine, 1852)

The Commonplace Book of Richard Hilles (Fraser's Magazine, 1858)
____

INTRODUCTION

Froude had this merit--a merit he shared with Huxley alone of
His contemporaries--that he imposed his convictions. He fought
against resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent
animosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yet
too strong for that surface to reject him. This combative and
aggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it was
permanent and never suffered a final defeat should arrest any
one who may make a general survey of the last generation in letters.

It was a period with a vice of its own which yet remains to be
detected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another
fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the
past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of
these affected the Victorian era. It was pure--though tainted
with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violence
in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had this
grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily)
that thought was restrained upon every side. Never in the history
of European letters was it so difficult for a man to say
what he would and to be heard. A sort of cohesive public spirit
(which was but one aspect of the admirable homogeneity of the
nation) glued and immobilised all individual expression. One
could float imprisoned as in a stream of thick substance: one
could not swim against it.

It is to be carefully discerned how many apparent exceptions to
this truth are, if they be closely examined, no exceptions at
all. A whole series of national defects were exposed and
ridiculed in the literature as in the oratory of that day; but
they were defects which the mass of men secretly delighted to
hear denounced and of which each believed himself to be free.

They loved to be told that they were of a gross taste in art,
for they connected such a taste vaguely with high morals and
with successful commerce. There was no surer way to a large
sale than to start a revolution in appreciation every five years,
and from Ruskin to Oscar Wilde a whole series of Prophets
attained eminence and fortune by telling men how something new
and as yet unknown was Beauty and something just past was to be
rejected, and how they alone saw truth while the herd around them
were blind. But no one showed us how to model, nor did any one
remark that we alone of all Europe had preserved a school of
water-colour.

So in politics our blunders were a constant theme; but no one
marked with citation, document, and proof the glaring progress
of corruption, or that, for all our enthusiasm, we never once
in that generation defended the oppressed against the oppressor.
There was a vast if unrecognised conspiracy, by which whatever
might have prevented those extreme evils from which we now suffer
was destroyed as it appeared. Efforts at a thorough purge were
dull, were libellous, were not of the "form" which the Universities
and the public schools taught to be sacred. They were rejected as
unreadable, or if printed, were unread. The results are with us to-day.

In such a time Froude maintained an opposing force, which was
not reforming nor constructive in any way, but which will obtain
the attention of the future historian, simply because it was an
opposition.

It was an opposition of manner rather than of matter. The matter
of it was common enough even in Froude's chief decade of power.
The cause to which he gave allegiance was already winning when he
proceeded to champion it, and many a better man, one or two greater
men, were saying the same things as he; but they said such things
in a fashion that suggested no violent effort nor any demand for
resistance: it was the peculiar virtue of Froude that he touched
nothing without the virile note of a challenge sounding throughout
his prose. On this account, though he will convince our posterity
even less than he does ourselves, the words of persuasion, the
writings themselves will remain: for he chose the hardest wood in
which to chisel, knowing the strength of his hand.

What was it in him which gave him that strength, and
which permitted him, in an age that would tolerate no formative
grasp upon itself, to achieve a permanent fame? I will not
reply to this question by pointing to the popularity
of his History of England; the essays that follow will
afford sufficient material to answer it. He produced the
effect he did and remained in the eminence to which he
had climbed, first because his manner of thought was rigid
and of a hard edge; secondly, because he could use that
steel tool of a brain in a fashion that was general; he could
use it upon subjects and with a handling that was
comprehensible to great masses of his fellow-countrymen.

It is not certain that such a man with such interests would
have made his voice heard in any other society. It is
doubtful whether he will be translated with profit. His field
was very small, the points of his attack might all be found
contained in one suburban villa. But in our society his
grip and his intensity did fall, and fall of choice, upon such
matters as his contemporaries either debated or were ready
to debate. He therefore did the considerable thing we
know him to have done.

I say that his mind was rigid and of a close fibre: it was
a mind (to repeat the metaphor) out of which a strong
graying-tool could be forged. Its blade would not be
blunted: it could deal with its material. Of this character,
which I take to be the first essential in his achievement, the
few essays before us preserve an ample evidence.

Thus you will find throughout their pages the presence of
that dogmatic assertion which invariably proceeds from such
a mind, and coupled with such assertion is a continual
consciousness that his dogmas are dogmas: that he is asserting
unprovable things and laying down his axioms before he
begins his process of reasoning.

The contrary might be objected by some foreign observer,
or by some one who had a larger acquaintance with European
history than had he. I can imagine a French or an Irish
critic pointing to a mass of assertion with no corresponding
admission that it is assertion only: such a critic might quote
even from these few pages phrase after phrase in which
Froude poses as certain what are still largely matters of
debate. Thus upon page 144 he takes it for granted that
no miracles have been worked by contact with the bodies
of saints. He takes it for granted on page 161 that the
checking of monastic disorders, and the use of strong
language in connection with them, was peculiar to the
generation which saw at its close the dissolution of the
monasteries. He takes it for granted on page 125 that what
we call "manifestations" or what not,--spirit rappings,
table-turnings, and the rest--are deceptions of the senses to
which superstition alone would give credence.

He ridicules (upon p. 128) the tradition of St. Patrick which
all modern research has come to accept. He says downright
(upon pp. 186-187) that the Ancient world did not inquire
into the problem of evil. On p. 214 he will have it that the
ordinary man rejects, "without hesitation," the interference
of will with material causes. In other words, he asserts that
the ordinary man is a fatalist--for Froude knew very well
that between the fatalist and the believer in a possibility of
miracle there is no conceivable position. He will have it (on
p. 216) that a modern doctor always regards a "vision" as
an hallucination. On p. 217 he denies by implication the
stigmata of St. Francis--and so forth--one might multiply
the instances indefinitely. All Froude's works are full of
them, they are part and parcel of his method--but their
number is to no purport. One example may stand for all,
and their special value to our purpose is not that they are
mere assertions, but that they are assertions which Froude
must have known to be personal, disputable, and dogmatic.

He knew very well that the vast majority of mankind
accepted the virtue of relics, that intellects the equals of his
own rejected that determinism to which he was bound, and
that the Pagan world might be presented in a fashion very
different from his own. And in that perpetual--often gratuitous
--affirmation you have no sign of limitation in him but
rather of eagerness for battle.

It is an admirable fault or perhaps no fault at all, or if a
fault an appendage to the most considerable virtue a writer
of his day could have had: the virtue of courage.

See how he thrusts when he comes to lay down the law,
not upon what the narrow experience of readers understands
and agrees with him about, but upon some matter which he
knows them to have decided in a manner opposed to his own.
See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the
sentences in which he asserts that Christianity is Catholic
or nothing:--

". . . This was the body of death which philosophy detected
but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now
came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

"The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are
compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in
the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics,
has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was
the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could
be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from
the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable,
without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But
the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless
organization could begin again from a new original, no pure
material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom
God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the
Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and
around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a
material body grew again of the substance of His mother,
pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when
it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things."

Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity,
where he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of
his readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of
Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and
Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is called
a thing "worn and old" even in Luther's time (upon page 194),
and he definitely prophesies a period when "our posterity"
shall learn "to despise the miserable fabric which Luther
stitched together out of its tatters."

His judgments are short, violent, compressed. They are
not the judgments of balance. They are final not as a goal
reached is final, but as a death-wound delivered. He throws
out sentences which all the world can see to be insufficient
and thin, but whose sharpness is the sharpness of conviction
and of a striving determination to achieve conviction in others
---or if he fails in that, at least to leave an enemy smarting.
Everywhere you have up and down his prose those short
parentheses, those side sentences, which are strokes of offence.
Thus on page 199, "We hear---or we used to hear when the
High Church party were more formidable than they are," &c.;
or again, on page 210, "The Bishop of Natal" (Colenso)
has done such and such things, "coupled with certain
arithmetical calculations far which he has a special aptitude."
There are dozens of these in every book he wrote. They
wounded, and were intended to wound.

His intellect may therefore be compared, as I have compared
it, to an instrument or a weapon of steel, to a chisel
or a sword. It was hard, polished, keen, stronger than what
it bit into, and of its nature enduring. This was the first of
the characters that gave him his secure place in English
letters.

The second is his universality--the word is not over-exact,
but I can find no other. I mean that Froude was the exact
opposite of the sciolist and was even other than the student.
He was kneaded right into his own time and his own people.
The arena in which he fought was small, the ideas he combated
were few. He was not universal as those are universal
who appeal to any man in any country. But he was eager
upon these problems which his contemporaries wrangled over.
He was in tune with, even when he directly opposed, the
class from which he sprang, the mass of well-to-do Protestant
Englishmen of Queen Victoria's reign. Their furniture had
nothing shocking for him nor their steel engravings. He
took for granted their probity, their common sense, and their
reading. He knew what they were thinking about and
therefore all he did to praise or blame their convictions,
to soothe or to exasperate them, told. He could see the
target.

Perpetually this looking at the world from the standpoint
of the men around him makes him say things that irritate
more particular and more acute minds than his own, but I
will maintain that in his case the fault was a necessary fault
and went with a power which permitted him to achieve the
sympathy which he did achieve. He talks of the "Celt"
and the "Saxon," and ascribes what he calls "our failures
in Ireland" to the "incongruity of character" between these
two imaginaries. He takes it for granted that "we are
something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by
an impassable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he must
quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking
of Oxford undergraduates one has "pleasant faces, cheerful
voices, and animal spirits," and at the end of the fine but
partial essay on Spinoza we have six lines which might come
bodily from a leader in the Daily Telegraph, or from any
copy of the Spectator picked up at random.

These are grave faults, but, I repeat, they are the faults of
those great qualities which gave him his position.

And side by side with such faults go an exceptional
lucidity, a good order within the paragraph and in the
succession of the paragraphs. A choice of subject suited to
his audience, an excision of that which would have bored or
bewildered it, a vividness of description wherewith to amuse
and a directness of conclusion wherewith to arrest his readers
--all these he had, beyond perhaps any of his contemporaries.

Occasionally that brotherhood in him leads him to faults
more serious. You get gross commonplace and utterly false
commonplace, of which when he came back to them (if
indeed he was a man who read his own works) he must
have been ashamed:--

"Persecutions come, and martyrdoms, and religious wars;
and, at last, the old faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its
altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.

"Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions,
natural and moral."

Or again, of poor old Oxford:--

"The increase of knowledge, and consequently of morality,
is the great aim of such a noble establishment as this; and
the rewards and honours dispensed there are bestowed in
proportion to the industry and good conduct of those who
receive them."

But the interesting point about these very lapses is that
they remain purely exceptional. They do not affect either
the tone of his writing or the value and intricacy of his
argument. They may be compared to those undignified
and valueless chips of conversational English that pop up
in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an enthusiastic
and wide man.

While, however, one is in the mood of criticism it is not
unjust to show what other lapses in him are connected
with this common sympathy of his and this very comprehension
of his class to which he owed his opportunity and
his effect.

Thus he is either so careless or so hurried as to use--
much too commonly--words which have lost all vitality,
and which are for the most part meaningless, but which go
the rounds still like shining flat sixpences worn smooth.
The word "practical" drops from his pen; he quotes "in a
glass darkly," and speaks of "a picture of human life"; the
walls of Oxford are "time-hallowed"; he enters a church
and finds in it "a dim religious light"; a man of Froude's
capacity has no right to find such a thing there. If he writes
the word "sin" the word "shame" comes tripping after.
It may be that he was a man readily caught by fatigue, or
it may bet it is more probable, that he thought it small
millinery to "travailler le verbe" At any rate the result
as a whole hangs to his identity of spirit with the thousands
for whom he wrote.

To this character of universality attach also faults not only
in his occasional choice of words but in his general style.

The word "style" has been so grossly abused during the
last thirty years that one mentions it with diffidence. Matthew
Arnold well said that when people came to him and asked
to be told how to write a good style he was unable to reply;
for indeed it is not a thing to be taught. It is a by-product,
though a necessary by-product, of good thinking. But when
Matthew Arnold went on to say that there was no such thing
as style except knowing clearly what you wanted to say, and
saying it as clearly as you could, he was talking nonsense.
There is such a thing as style. It is that combination of
rhythm, lucidity, and emphasis, which certainly must not
be consciously produced, but which if it arise naturally from
a man's pen and from his method of thought makes all the
difference between what is readable and what is not readable.
If any one doubt this let him compare the French Bible
with the English--both literal and lucid translations of the
same original; or again let him contrast the prose phrases of
Milton when he is dealing with the claims of the Church
in the Middle Ages with those of Mr. Bryce in the same
connection.

Now I say that just as the excellences of Froude's prose
proceeded from this universality of his so did the errors into
which that prose fell, and it is remarkable that these errors
are slips of detail. They proceed undoubtedly from rapid
writing and from coupling his scholarship with a very general
and ephemeral reading.

A few examples drawn from these essays will prove what
I mean. On the very first page, in the first line of the
second paragraph we have the word "often" coming after the
word "experience," instead of before it. He had written
"experience," he desired to qualify it, and he did not go back
to do what should always be done in plain English, and what
indeed distinguishes plain English from almost every other
language--to put the qualification before the thing qualified;
a peculiarly English mark in this, that it presupposes one's
having thought the whole thing out before writing it down.

On page 3 we have exactly the same thing; "A legend
not known unfortunately to general English readers." He
means of course, "unfortunately not known," but as the
sentence stands it reads as though he had meant to say,
somewhat clumsily, that the method in which English readers
knew the legend was not unfortunate.

He is again careless in the matter of repetitions, both of
the same word, and (what is a better test of ear) of rhymes
within the sentence: we have in one place "which seemed to
give a soul to those splendid donations to learning," and
further on in the same page "a priority in mortality."

On pages 34 and 35 you have "an intensely real conviction."
You are then told that "the most lawless men did
then really believe." Then that the American tribes were
in the eyes of the colonists "real worshippers" of the Devil,
and a few lines later we hear of "the real awfulness of the
world."

The position of the relative is often as slipshod as the
position of the qualicative; thus you will find upon page 37
that the pioneers "grayed out the channels, and at last paved
them with their bones, through which the commerce and
enterprise of England has flowed out of all the world." This
sentence is quite deplorable; it has a singular verb after two
nominatives, and is so framed that one might imagine the
commerce and enterprise of our beloved country to have flown
through those hollow interior channels, with which, I believe,
our larger bones are provided, and in which is to be discovered
that very excellent substance, marrow.

It is singular that, while these obvious errors have excited
so little comment, Froude should have been blamed so often
and by such different authorities for weaknesses of the pen
from which he did not suffer, or which, if he did suffer from
them, at least he had in common with every other writer
of our time and perhaps less than most.

Thus, as an historian he has been accused of two faults
which have been supposed by those who are ill acquainted
with the history of letters to be correlative: a straining
for effect and an inaccuracy of detail. There is not one of
his contemporaries who less forced himself in description
than Froude. Often in Green, very often in Freeman and
always in Carlyle you feel that your author is deliberately
exciting his mind and your own. Violent colours are chosen
and peculiar emphasis--from this Froude was free. He was
an historian.

To the end Froude remained an historian, and an historian
he was born. If we regret that his history was not general,
and that he turned his powers upon such a restricted set of
phenomena, still we must rejoice that there was once in
modern England a man who could sum up the nature of
a great movement. He lacked the power of integration.

He was not an artist. But he possessed to an extraordinary
degree the power of synthesis. He was a craftsman, as the
modern jargon goes. There is not in the whole range of
English literature as excellent a summary of the way in
which the Divinity of our Lord fought its way into the
leading brains of Europe, as appears upon page 192 of this
book. It is as good as Boissier; there runs all through it
knowledge, proportion, and something which, had he been
granted a little more light, or been nurtured in an intellectual
climate a little more sunny, would have been vision itself:--

"The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work
compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling
difficulty, what could He be but God? Who but God could
have wrested His prize from a power which half the thinking
world believed to be His coequal and co-eternal adversary?
He was God. He was man also, for He was the second
Adam--the second starting-point of human growth. He was
virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the
substance which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He
showed in the nature of His person after His resurrection,
what the material body would have been in all of us except
for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its
purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its
likeness."

There's a piece of historical prose which summarises,
teaches, and stamps itself finally upon the mind! Froude
saw that the Faith was the summit and the completion of
Rome. Had he written us a summary of the fourth and
fifth centuries--and had he written it just after reading some
dull fellow on the other side--what books we should have
had to show to the rival schools of the Continent!

Consider the sharp and almost unique judgment passed
upon Tacitus at the bottom of page 133 and the top of
page 134, or again, the excellent sub-ironic passages in which
he expresses the vast advantage of metaphysical debate:
which has all these qualities, that it is true, sober, exact,
and yet a piece of laughter and a contradiction of itself. It
is prose in three dimensions.

That pedantic charge of inaccuracy, with which I have
already dealt in another place, in connection with another
and perhaps a greater man, is not applicable to Froude. He
was hasty, and in his historical work the result certainly was
that he put down things upon insufficient evidence, or upon
evidence but half read; but even in his historical work (which
deals remember, with the most highly controversial part of
English history) he is as accurate as anybody else, except
perhaps Lingard. That the man was by nature accurate,
well read and of a good memory, appears continually throughout
this book, and the more widely one has read one's self,
the more one appreciates this truth.

For instance, there is often set down to Disraeli the remark
that his religion was "the religion of all sensible men." and
upon being asked what this religion might be, that Oriental
is said to have replied, "All sensible men keep that to
themselves." Now Disraeli could no more have made such a
witticism than he could have flown through the air; his
mind was far too extravagant for such pointed phrases.
Froude quotes the story (page 205 of this book) but rightly
ascribes it to Rogers, a very different man from Disraeli--
an Englishman with a mastery of the English language.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27