In June, 1875, Froude went back to South Africa, this time as an acknowledged emissary of the Government, but by ill luck his arrival coincided with the receipt of the despatch. The effect of this document was prodigious. Molteno considered that he had been personally insulted. The Legislative Assembly was defiant, and greeted the recital of Carnarvon's words with ironical laughter. A Ministerial Minute, signed by Molteno and his colleagues, protested against the Colonial Secretary's intrusion, and especially against his rather ill advised reference to a proposed separation of the eastern from the western provinces of the Cape. It was a fact that Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, where there were very few Dutch, considered that they paid proportionately too much towards the colonial revenues, and desired separate treatment. But the people of Cape Town strongly objected, and it was unwise for the Secretary of State to take a side in local politics. Froude found his position by no means agreeable. Molteno, though never discourteous, received him coldly, and objected to his making speeches. The Governor, who liked to be good friends with his Ministers, gave him no encouragement. The House of Assembly, after proposing to censure Carnarvon in their haste, censured Froude at their leisure. That did him no harm. But he disliked the new position in which he found himself, and in his private journal he expressed his sentiments freely.

He had not been long in Cape Town when he wrote, on the 9th of July, 1875, to his eldest daughter a full and vivid account of the political situation. "I am glad," he said, "that no one is with me who cares for me. No really good thing can be carried out without disturbing various interests. The Governor and Parliament have set themselves against Lord Carnarvon. The whole country has declared itself enthusiastically for him. The consequence is that the opposition, who are mortified and enraged, now daily pour every sort of calumny on my unfortunate head. I don't read more of it than I can help, but some things I am forced to look at in order to answer; and the more successful my mission promises to be, the more violent and unscrupulous become those whose pockets are threatened by it. I wait in Cape Town till the next English steamer arrives, and then I mean to start for a short tour in the neighbourhood. I shall make my way by land to Mossel Bay, and then go on by sea to Port Elizabeth and Natal, where I shall wait for orders from home. Sir Garnet* has written me a very affectionate letter, inviting me to stay with him. Here the authorities begin to be more respectful than they were. Last night there was a State Dinner at Government House, when I took in Lady Barkly. Miss Barkly would hardly speak to me. I don't wonder. She is devoted to her father; I would do exactly the same in her place. I sent you a paper with an account of the dinner, and my speech, but you must not think that the dinner represented Cape Town society generally. Cape Town society, up to the reception at Government House, has regarded me as some portentous object come here to set the country on fire, and to be regarded with tremors by all respectable people. Outside Cape Town, on the contrary, in every town in the country, Dutch or English, I should be carried through the streets on the people's shoulders if I would only allow it, so you see I am in an 'unexampled situation.'+ The Governor's dinner cards had on them 'to meet Mr. Froude.' I am told that no less than eight people who were invited refused in mere terror of me .... Things are in a wild state here, and grow daily wilder. I am responsible for having lighted the straw; and if Lord Carnarvon has been frightened at the first bad news, there will be danger of real disturbance. The despatch has created a real enthusiasm, and excited hopes which must not now be disappointed." "Never," he wrote a few weeks afterwards, "never did a man of letters volunteer into a more extraordinary position than that in which I find myself." Sir Garnet Wolseley stood by him through thick and thin. After Sir Garnet's departure he had no English friend. His local supporters were "all looking out for themselves," and there was not one among them in whom he could feel any real confidence."

— * The present Lord Wolseley. + A favourite expression with Mrs. Carlyle. —

Of Molteno he made no personal complaint, and he always considered him the fittest man for his post in South Africa. But Colonial politicians as a whole were "not gentlemen with whom it was agreeable to be forced into contact." To give the Colony responsible government has been "an act of deliberate insanity" on the part of Lord Kimberley and the Liberal Cabinet. Froude endeavoured loyally and faithfully to carry out the policy of the Colonial Office, and his relations with Lord Carnarvon were relations of unbroken confidence. His objects were purely unselfish and patriotic. It was his misfortune rather than his fault to become involved in local politics, from which it was essential for the success of his mission that he should keep entirely aloof. Circumstances brought him into much greater favour with the Dutch than with his own countrymen, for it was thought, not without reason, that he had brought Carnarvon round to see the truth about the Diamond Fields and the Free State. He made them speeches, and they received him with enthusiasm. With Molteno, on the other hand, he found it impossible to act, and the Governor supported Molteno. Barkly was not unfavourable to Federation. But he perceived that it could not be forced upon a self-governing Colony, and that he himself would be powerless unless he acted in harmony with his constitutional advisers. He, as well as Molteno, refused to attend the dinner at which Froude on his arrival was entertained in Cape Town. Molteno advised Froude not to go, or if he went, not to speak. Froude, however, both went and spoke, claiming as an Englishman the right of free speech in a British Colony. The right was of course incontestable. The expediency was a very different matter. Froude was not accustomed to public speaking, and only long experience can teach that most difficult part of the process, the instinctive avoidance of what should not be said. His brilliant lectures were all read from manuscript, and he had never been in the habit of thinking on his legs. In 1874 he could at least say that he spoke only for himself. In 1875 he committed the Colonial Office, and even the Cabinet, to his own personal opinions, which were not in favour of Parliamentary Government as understood either by Englishmen or by Africanders. He was accused of getting up a popular agitation on behalf of the Imperial authorities against the Governor of the Colony, his Ministers, and the Legislative Assembly of the Cape. He did in fact, under a strong sense of duty, urge Carnarvon to recall Barkly, and to substitute for him Sir Garnet Wolseley, who had temporarily taken over the administration of Natal.

Sir Garnet, however, had no such ambition. Soldiering was the business of his life, and he had had quite enough of constitutionalism in Natal. Barkly was for the present maintained, and Froude regarded his maintenance as fatal to Federation. But Sir Bartle Frere, who succeeded him, was not more fortunate, and the real mistake was interference from home. To Froude his experience of South Africa came as a disagreeable shock. A passionate believer in Greater Britain, in the expansion of England, in the energy, resources, and prospects of the Queen's dominions beyond the seas, the parochialism of Cape Colony astonished and perplexed him. While he was dreaming of a Federated Empire, and Paterson were counting heads in the Cape Assembly, and considering what would be the political result if the eastern provinces set up for themselves. If South Africa were federated, would Cape Town remain the seat of government? To Froude such a question was paltry and trivial. To a Cape Town shopkeeper it loomed as large as Table Mountain. The attitude of Molteno's Ministry, on the other hand, seemed as ominous to him as it seemed obvious to the Colonists. He thought it fatal to the unity of the Empire, and amounting to absolute independence. He did not understand the people with whom he had to deal. Most of them were as loyal subjects as himself, and never contemplated for a moment secession from the Empire. All they claimed was complete freedom to manage their own affairs, to federate or not to federate, as they pleased and when they pleased. They had only just acquired full constitutional rights; and if they sometimes exaggerated the effect of them, the error was venial. If Carnarvon, instead of writing for publication an elaborate and official despatch, had explained his policy to the Governor in private letters, and directed him to sound Molteno in confidence, the Cape Ministers might themselves have proposed a scheme; and if they had proposed it, it would have been carried. Had Froude said nothing at dinners, or on platforms, he might have exercised far more influence behind the scenes. But he was an enthusiast for Federation by means of a South African Conference, and he made a proselytising tour through the Colony. The Dutch welcomed him because he acknowledged their rights. At Grahamstown too, and at Port Elizabeth, he was hailed as the champion of separation for the eastern provinces. The Legislative Assembly at Cape Town, however, was hostile, and the proposed conference fell through. Lord Carnarvon did not see the full significance of the fact that the Confederation of Canada had been first mooted within the Dominion itself.

An interesting account of Froude at this time has been given by Sir George Colley, the brilliant and accomplished soldier whose career was cut short six years afterwards at Majuba:

"I came home from the Cape, and almost lived on the way with Mr. Froude .... It was rather a sad mind, sometimes grand, sometimes pathetic and tender, usually cynical, but often relating with the highest appreciation, and with wonderful beauty of language, some gallant deed of some of his heroes of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. He seemed to have gone through every phase of thought, and come to the end 'All is vanity.' He himself used to say the interest of life to a thinking man was exhausted at thirty, or thirty-five. After that there remained nothing but disappointment of earlier visions and hopes. Sometimes there was something almost fearful in the gloom, and utter disbelief, and defiance of his mind."*

— * Butler's Life of Colley, p. 145. —

The picture is a sombre one. But it must be remembered that the death of his wife was still weighing heavily upon Froude.

A few days after his return to London Froude wrote a long and interesting Report to the Secretary of State, which was laid before Parliament in due course. Few documents more thoroughly unofficial have ever appeared in a Blue Book. The excellence of the paper as a literary essay is conspicuous. But its chief value lies in the impression produced by South African politics upon a penetrating and observant mind trained under wholly different conditions. Froude would not have been a true disciple of Carlyle if he had felt or expressed much sympathy with the native race. He wanted them to be comfortable. For freedom he did not consider them fit. It was the Boers who really attracted him, and the man he admired the most in South Africa was President Brand. The sketch of the two Dutch Republics in his Report is drawn with a very friendly hand. He thought, not without reason, that they had been badly treated. Their independence, which they did not then desire, had been forced upon them by Lord Grey and the Duke of Newcastle. The Sand River Convention of 1852, and the Orange River Convention of 1854, resulted from British desire to avoid future responsibility outside Cape Colony and Natal. As for the Dutch treatment of the Kaffirs, it had never in Froude's opinion been half so bad as Pine's treatment of Langalibalele. By the second article of the Orange River Convention, renewed and ratified at Aliwal after the Basuto war in 1869, Her Majesty's Government promised not to make any agreement with native chiefs north of the Vaal River. Yet, when diamonds were discovered north of the Vaal in Griqualand West, the territory was purchased by Lord Kimberley from Nicholas Waterboer, without the consent, and notwithstanding the protests, of the Orange Free State. But although Lord Kimberley assented to the annexation of Griqualand West in 1871, he only did so on the distinct understanding that Cape Colony would undertake to administer the Diamond Fields, and this the Cape Ministers refused to do, lest they should offend their Dutch constituents.

It was not till 1878, when all differences with the Free State had been settled, and the Transvaal was a British possession, that Griqualand West became an integral part of Cape Colony. In January, 1876, Brand was still asking for arbitration, and Carnarvon was still refusing it.

When he explained the Colonial Secretary's policy to the Colonial Secretary himself Froude came very near explaining it away. The Conference, he said, was only intended to deal with the native question and the question of Griqualand. Was Confederation then a dream? Froude himself, in a private letter to Molteno, dated April 29th, 1875, wrote, "Lord Carnarvon's earnest desire since he came into office has been if possible to form South Africa into a confederate dominion, with complete internal self-government."* That was the whole object of the Conference, which but for that would never have been proposed. That, as Froude truly says in his Report, was one of Molteno's reasons for resisting it. The Cape Premier thought that South Africa was not ripe for Confederation. If Froude had had more practice in drawing up official documents, he would probably have left out this deprecatory argument, which does not agree with the rest of his case. He attributes, for instance, to local politicians a dread that the supremacy of Cape Town would be endangered. But no possible treatment of the natives, or of Griqualand West, would have endangered the supremacy of Cape Town. The Confederation of which Froude and Carnarvon were champions would have avoided tremendous calamities if it could have been carried out. The chief difficulties in its way were Colonial jealousy of interference from Downing Street and Dutch exasperation at the seizure of the Diamond Fields. "You have trampled on those poor States, sir," said a member of the Cape Legislature to Froude, "till the country cries shame upon you, and you come now to us to assist you in your tyranny; we will not do it, sir. We are astonished that you should dare to ask us." Such language was singularly inappropriate to Froude himself, for the Boers never had a warmer advocate than they had in him. But the circumstances in which Griqualand West were annexed will excuse a good deal of strong language. At Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown Froude was welcomed as an advocate of their local independence, which was what they most desired. When, with unusual prudence, he declined to take part in a separatist campaign, their zeal for Confederation soon cooled. On the other hand, the Dutch papers all supported the Conference, although Brand refused to lay his case before it, or to treat with any authority except the British Government at home.

— * Life of Molteno, vol. i. p. 337. —

Neither Froude nor Carnarvon made sufficient allowance for Colonial independence and the susceptibilities of Colonial Ministers. Many of Froude's expressions in public were imprudent, and he himself in his Report apologised for his unguarded language at Grahamstown, where he said that Molteno's reply to Carnarvon's despatch would have meant war if it had come from a foreign state. Yet in the main their policy was a wise one, and they saw farther ahead than the men who worked the political machine at Cape Town. Froude was too sanguine when he wrote, "A Confederate South African Dominion, embracing all the States, both English and Dutch, under a common flag, may be expected as likely to follow, and perhaps at no very distant period." But he added that it would have to come by the deliberate action of the South African communities themselves. That was not the only discovery he had made in South Africa. He had found that the Transavll, reputed then and long afterwards in England to be worthless, was rich in minerals, including gold. He warned the Colonial Office that Cetewayo, with forty thousand armed men, was a serious danger to Natal. He saw clearly, and said plainly that unless South Africa was to be despotically governed, it must be administered with the consent and approval of the Dutch. He dwelt strongly upon the danger of allowing and encouraging natives to procure arms in Griqualand West as an enticement to work for the diamond owners. The secret designs of Sir Theophilus Shepstone he did not penetrate, and therefore he was unprepared for the next development in the South African drama. The South African Conference in London, which he attended during August, 1876, led to no useful result because Molteno, though he had come to London, and was discussing the affairs of Griqualand with Lord Carnarvon, refused to attend it. This was the end of South African Confederation, and the permissive Act of 1877, passed after the Transvaal had been annexed, remained a dead letter on the Statute Book.

Although the immediate purpose of Froude's visits to South Africa was not attained, it would be a mistake to infer that they had no results at all. Early in 1877 the annexation of the Transvaal, to which Froude was strongly opposed, changed the whole aspect of affairs, and from that time the strongest opponents of Federalism were the Dutch. But the credit of settling with the Orange Free State a dispute which might have led to infinite mischief is as much Froude's as Carnarvon's, and as a consequence of their wise conduct President Brand became for the rest of his life a steady friend to the British power in South Africa. Ninety thousand pounds was a small price to pay for the double achievement of reconciling a model State and wiping out a stain upon England's honour.

More than four years after his second return from South Africa, in January, 1880, Froude delivered two lectures to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, in which his view of South African policy is with perfect clearness set forth. He condemns the annexation of the Transvaal, and the Zulu war. He expresses a wish that Lord Carnarvon, who had resigned two years before, could be permanent Secretary for the Colonies. "I would give back the Transvaal to the Dutch," he said. Again, in even more emphatic language, "The Transvaal, in spite of prejudices about the British flag, I still hope that we shall return to its lawful owners."* What is more surprising, he recommended that Zululand should be restored to Cetewayo, or Cetewayo to Zululand. He had predicted in 1875 that Cetewayo would prove a troublesome person, and few men had less of the sentiment which used to be associated with Exeter Hall. The restoration of Cetewayo, when it came was disastrous both to himself and to others. Frere understood the Zulus better than Froude or Colenso. The surrender of the Transvaal, which was a good deal nearer than Froude thought, was at least successful for a time, a longer time than Froude's own life. He did not share Gladstone's ignorance of its value; he knew it to be rich in minerals, especially in gold. But he knew also that Carnarvon had been deceived about the willingness of the inhabitants to become British subjects, and he sympathised with their independence. It illustrates his own fairness and detachment of mind that he should have taken so strong and so unpopular a line when the Boers were generally supposed in England to have acquiesced in the loss of their liberties, and when his hero Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he dedicated his English in Ireland, had declared that the Vaal would run back to the Drakensberg before the British flag ceased to wave over Pretoria.

— * Two Lectures on South Africa, pp. 80, 81, 85. —

Froude's South African policy was to work with the Dutch, and keep the natives in their places. He had no personal interest in the question. It was through Lord Carnarvon that he came in contact with South Africa at all, and there were few statesmen with whom he more thoroughly agreed. When Disraeli came for the second time into office, and for the first time into power, Froude was well pleased.

In 1875, after his legal disqualification had been removed, he was again invited to become a candidate for Parliament. But he did not really know to which party he belonged.

"Four weeks ago," he wrote to Lady Derby on the 3rd of April, "the Liberal Whip (Mr. Adam) asked me to stand for the Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities on very easy terms to myself. I declined, because I should have had to commit myself to the Liberal party, which I did not choose to do. Lord Carnarvon afterwards spoke to me with regret at my resolution. He had a conversation with Mr. D'Israeli, and it was agreed that if possible I should be brought in by a compromise without a contest. But it appeared doubtful afterwards whether the Liberals would consent to this without fuller pledges than I could consent to give. I was asked if I would stand anyhow (contest or not), or whether I would allow myself to be nominated in their interest for any other place when a vacancy should occur. I said, No. (I would stand a contest on the Conservative side, if on any.) I was neither Conservative nor Liberal per se, but would not oppose Mr. D'Israeli. So there this matter lies, unless your people have as good an opinion of me as the others, and want a candidate of my lax description. But indeed I have no wish to go into Parliament. I am too old to begin a Parliamentary life, and infinitely prefer making myself of use to the Conservative side in some other way .... I am at Lord Carnarvon's service if he wishes me to go on with his Colonial affairs. I came home from the Cape to be of use to him."

The Colonial policy of the Liberals Froude had always regarded with suspicion. Even Lord Kimberley's grant of a constitution to the Cape he interpreted as showing a centrifugal tendency, and Cardwell's withdrawal of troops from Canada was all of a piece. Disraeli, on the other hand, who never did anything for the Colonies, had been making a speech about them at Manchester, wherein all manner of Colonial possibilities were suggested. They did not go, if they were ever intended to go, beyond suggestion, and in 1876 the sudden crisis in Eastern affairs superseded all other topics of political interest.

When the Eastern Question was first raised, Froude had taken the side of the Government.

"I like Lord Derby's speech," he wrote to Lady Derby on the 19th of September, 1876, "to the Working Men's Association. So I think the country will when it recovers from its present intoxication. Violent passions which rise suddenly generally sink as fast if there is no real reason for them. It is impossible that the people can fail to recollect in a little while that the reticence of which they complain is under the circumstances inevitable.

"Gladstone and his satellites are using their opportunities, however, with thorough unscrupulousness. It is possible that they may force an Autumn Session, and even force the Ministry to resign- but woe to themselves if they do. They will promise what cannot be carried out, and will perhaps, in fine retribution for the Crimean War, bring the Russians to Constantinople. It will not be a bad thing in itself, but there will be an end of the English Minister who brings it about."

Again, three days later, to the same correspondent:

"I admire the Premier's speech. It is what I expected of him. The Liberal leaders are behaving scandalously, with the exception perhaps of Lord Hartington. The Cabinet I trust will now decide on an Autumn Session to remove so critical a matter out of the hands of irresponsible mobs. I was surprised to hear the war in Servia attributed to the secret societies. Cluseret I know has intended to ask for service with Turkey, with a view to a war, against Russia, and has been withheld only by some differences with General Klapha, the Turco-Hungarian, from doing so. I had a long letter from him to- day, in which he expresses his restlessness characteristically, J'ai la nostalgic de la poudre."

Afterwards Froude followed Carlyle, and went with Russia against Turkey. The "unspeakable Turk" was to be "struck out of the question and Bismarck invited to arbitrate. Such was the oracular deliverance from Cheyne Row, and Froude obeyed the oracle. He attended the Conference at St. James's Hall in December at which Gladstone spoke, and Carlyle's letter was read, sitting for the only time in his life on the same platform with Freeman. Next May, when war between Russia and Turkey had actually begun, when Gladstone was about to move his famous resolutions in the House of Commons, there appeared in The Times* another remarkable letter from the same hand. This time, however, it was no mere question of style, though "our miraculous Premier" was a phrase which stuck. Carlyle evidently had information of some design for giving Turkey the support of the British fleet in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, and was not very discreet in the use he made of it. The Cabinet were supposed to be divided on the question of helping Turkey by material means, which of course meant war with Russia, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, was known to be in favour of peace. A year later Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby had both left the Cabinet rather than be responsible for a vote of credit which meant preparation for war, and for calling out the Reserves.

— * May 5, 1877. —

Froude was in complete sympathy with the retiring ministers, and he regarded it as a profound mistake for England to quarrel with Russia on behalf of a Power which had no business in Europe at all. From his point of view the presence at the Colonial Office of so sympathetic a Minister as Carnarvon was far more important than the difference between the Treaty of San Stefano and the Treaty of Berlin. Of the Afghan War in 1878 he strongly disapproved.

The following extracts from letters to Lady Derby show the phases of thought on the Eastern Question through which Froude passed, and are interesting also because they represent him in an unfamiliar light as the champion of parliamentary Government against the secret diplomacy of Lord Beaconsfield. Arbitrary rule might be very good for Irishmen. As applied to Englishmen Froude disliked it no less than Gladstone or Bright.

"February 16th, 1877.—The Opposition have no hope of making a successful attack on the present Parliament—but they are resolute. They know their own minds, and Gladstone (I know) has said that he has but to hold up his finger to force a dissolution and return as Prime Minister. I too think you are deceived by the London Press. Another massacre and all would be over. The Golden Bridge you speak of I conclude is for Russia; but if it was possible for the Cabinet, without changing its attitude, to make such a bridge, there would be no need of one. England has been, and I fear still is, the one obstacle to measures which would have long ago brought the Turk to his senses. I cannot but feel assured that you have thrown away an opportunity for securing to the Conservative party the gratitude of Europe and the possession of office for a generation. If more mischief happens in Turkey it will be on you that public displeasure will fall, and you may need a bridge for yourselves and not find one. I croak like a raven. Perhaps you may set it down to an almost totally sleepless night."

"April 30th, 1877.—You destroy the last hope to which I had clung, that Lord Derby, though opposed to Russian policy, would not consent to go to war with her. I remain of my old opinion that England (foolishly excited as it always when fighting is going on) will in the long run resent the absurdity and punish the criminality of taking arms in a worthless cause. I am sick of heart at the thought of what is coming, here as well as on the Continent. I have begged Carlyle to write a last appeal to The Times. We must agitate in the great towns, we must protest against what we may be unable to prevent. The Crimean War was innocent compared to what is now threatened, yet three years ago there was scarcely a person in England who did not admit that it was a mistake. I do not know what may be the verdict of the public about a repetition of it at the present moment. I know but too well what will be the verdict five years hence, and the fate which will overtake those who, with however good a motive, are courting the ruin of their party."

"December 22nd, 1877.—-The passion for interference in defence of the Turks seems limited (as I was always convinced that it was) to the idle educated classes. The public meetings which have been, or are to be, go the other way, or at least are against our taking a part on the Turkish side. The demonstrations which Lord B. expected to follow on the first Russian success have not followed. The Telegraph and Morning Post have used their whips on the dead Crimean horse, but it will not stir for them. It will not stir even for the third volume of the Prince Consort's Life. But I am very sorry about it all, for the damage to the Conservative party from the lost opportunity of playing a great and honourable part is, I fear, irretrievable."

"December 27th, 1877.—The accounts from Bulgaria and Armenia turn me sick. These sheep, what have they done? Diplomalists quarrel, and the people suffer. The management of human affairs will be much improved when the people tell their respective Cabinets that if there is fighting to be done the Cabinets must fight themselves, and that the result shall be accepted as final. Nine out of ten great wars might have been settled that way with equal advantage so far as the consequences were concerned, and to the infinite relief of poor humanity."

"March 10th, 1878.—I met Lord D. at the club the other night. He looked As Prometheus might have looked when he was 'Unbound.' He was in excellent spirits and talked brilliantly. Not one allusion to the East, but I guessed that he had a mind at ease."

"April 8th, 1878.—I wish I knew whether the Cabinet has determined on forcing war upon Russia at all events, or if Russia consents to go into the Conference on the English terms; the Cabinet will then bona fide endeavour after an equitable and honourable settlement. Lord B.'s antecedents all point to a determination to make any settlement impossible. He has succeeded so far without provoking the other Powers, but such a game is surely dangerous, backed though he by every fool and knave in England."

"July 15th, 1878.—I gather that the Opposition is too disorganised to resist; and if Parliament endure to be set aside, and allow the destinies of their country to be affected so enormously by the sole action of the Crown and the Cabinet, a change is passing over us the results of which it is impossible to estimate. We do, in fact, take charge of the Turkish Empire as completely as we took the Empire of the Moguls. In a little while we shall have to administer on the Continent as well as in Cyprus, and then will arise a new Asiatic army. This will bring wars with it before long, and a proportionate increase of the power of the Executive Government. If Parliament abdicates its authority now, what may we not anticipate? I have long felt that the House of Commons could not long continue to govern the great concerns of the British Empire as it has done. I certainly did not expect that it would yield without a struggle—nor will it. Sooner or later we shall see a fight against the tendency which is giving so startling an evidence of its existence—and what is to happen then?"

"July 21st, 1878.—Lord Derby's speech was as good as it could possibly be. What he says now all the world will say two years hence. How deeply it cut appeared plainly enough in the scenes which followed. It must be peculiarly distressing to you—distressing in many ways, for I feel as certain as ever that the end of it all will be irreparable damage to the Conservative party. One would like to know Prince Bismarck's private opinion of the Premier and private opinion also of the nation which has taken him for their chosen leader. Of course he will dissolve while the glamour is fresh; and before the effects of the bad champagne with which he has dosed the country begin to appear—first headache and penitence, and then exasperation at the provider of the entertainment."

"November 24th, 1878.—The evil shadow of the Premier extends over the most innocent of our pleasures. I had been looking forward to a few days at Knowsley as the most enjoyable which I should have had during the whole year. Yet I knew how it would be. Daring as he is, he could not venture on an entire defiance of public opinion. Parliament of course would have to meet, and equally of course you and Lord D. would have to come up. I conclude the object to be to get up a Russian war after all. The stress laid by Lord Cranbrook on the reception of the Russian Embassy as the point of the injury will make it very difficult for the Russians to be neutral. If this is what the Ministry really intend, they may have their majority in Parliament docile, but I doubt whether they will have the country with them. I am sure they will not if Hartington and Granville support Lord Lawrence.

"I interpret it all as meaning that the Premier knows that his policy has thoroughly broken down in Europe, and at all risks he means to have another try in the East."

It was Froude's opinion, right or wrong, that Lord Beaconsfield might have settled the Irish question if he had left the Eastern question alone. He understood it, as some of his early speeches show, and he might have "established a just Land Court with the support of all the best land-owners in Ireland."* Why the Land Court established by Gladstone in 1881 was unjust Froude did not explain. Some of the best landlords, if not all, supported it, and it relieved an intolerable situation.

— * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 180. —



CHAPTER VIII

FROUDE AND CARLYLE

When James Spedding introduced Froude to Carlyle he made unconsciously an epoch in English literature. For though Froude was incapable of merging himself in another man, as Spedding merged himself in Bacon, he did more for the author of Sartor Resartus than Spedding did for the author of the Novum Organum. Spedding's Bacon is an impossible hero of unhistorical perfection. Froude's Carlyle, like Boswell's Johnson, is a great man painted as he was. When the original head master of Uppingham described his school as Eton without its faults, there were those who felt for the first time that there was something to be said for the faults of Eton. Carlyle without his paradoxes and prejudices, his impetuous temper and his unbridled tongue would be only half himself. If he were known only through his books, the world would have missed acquaintance with letters of singular beauty, and with the most humourous talker of his age. He was one of two men, Newman being the other, whose influence Froude felt through life, and the influence of Newman was chiefly upon his style. Of Newman indeed he saw very little after he left Oxford, though his admiration and reverence for him never abated. It was not until he came to live in London after the death of his first wife that he grew really intimate with Carlyle. Up to that time he was no more than an occasional visitor in Cheyne Row with a profound belief in the philosophy of that incomparable poem in prose, The French Revolution. Carlyle helped him with his own history, the earlier volumes of which show clear traces of the master, and encouraged him in his literary work.

Mrs. Carlyle was scarcely less remarkable than her husband. Although she never wrote a line for publication, her private letters are among the best in the language, and all who knew her agree that she talked as well as she wrote. Froude thought her the most brilliant and interesting woman he had ever met. The attraction was purely intellectual. Mrs. Carlyle was no longer young, and Froude's temperament was not inflammable. But she liked clever men, and clever men liked her. She was an unhappy woman, without children, without religion, without any regular occupation except keeping house. Her husband she regarded as the greatest genius of his time, and his affection for her was the deepest feeling of his heart. He was at bottom a sincerely kind man, and his servants were devoted to him. But he was troublesome in small matters; irritable, nervous, and dyspeptic. His books harassed him like illnesses, and he groaned under the infliction. If he were disturbed when he was working, he lost all self-control, and his wife felt, she said, as if she were keeping a private mad-house. It was not quite so private as it might have been, for Mrs. Carlyle found in her grievances abundant food for her sarcastic tongue. Whatever she talked about she made interesting, and her relations with her husband became a common subject of gossip. It was said that the marriage had never been a real one, that they were only companions, and so forth. Froude was content to enjoy the society of the most gifted couple in London without troubling himself to solve mysteries which did not concern him.

Thrifty as she was, Mrs. Carlyle was not fitted by physical strength and early training to be the wife of a poor man. She was too anxious a housekeeper, and worried herself nervously about trifles. Her father had been a country doctor, not rich, but able to keep the necessary servants. In Carlyle's home there were no servants at all. His father was a mason, and the work of the house was done by the family. Why should his wife be in a different position from his mother's? There was no reason, in the nature of things. But custom is very strong, and the early years of Mrs. Carlyle's married life were a hard struggle against grinding poverty. Carlyle was grandly indifferent to material things. He wanted no luxuries, except tobacco and a horse. He would not have altered his message to mankind, or his mode of delivering it, for the wealth of the Indies. What he had to say he said, and men might take it or leave it as they thought proper. He never swerved from the path of integrity. He did not know his way to the house of Rimmon. The mere practical ability required to produce such a book as Frederick the Great might have realised a fortune in business. Carlyle just made enough money to live in decent and wholesome comfort.

From the first Carlyle's conversation attracted Froude, and dazzled him. But he felt, as others felt, that submission rather than intimacy was the attitude which it suggested or compelled. There was no republic of letters in Carlyle's house. It was a dictatorship, pure and simple. What the dictator condemned was heresy. What he did not know was not knowledge. Mill was a poor feckless driveller. Darwin was a pretentious sciolist. Newman had the intellect of a rabbit. Herbert Spencer was "the most unending ass in Christendom." "Scribbling Sands and Eliots" were unfit to tie Mrs. Carlyle's shoe-strings. Editing Keats was "currying dead dog." Ruskin could only point out the correggiosity of Correggio. Political economy was the dismal science, or the gospel according to McCrowdie.* Carlyle's eloquent and humourous diatribes were wonderful, laughter-moving, awe-compelling. They did not put his hearers at their ease, and Froude felt more admiration than sympathy.

— * McCulloch, the editor of Adam Smith, was meant —

In 1861, when Froude had been settled in London about a year, he received a visit from the great author himself. Carlyle did not take to many people, but he took to Froude. Perhaps he was touched by the younger man's devotion. Perhaps he saw that Froude was no ordinary disciple, and would be able to carry on the torch when he relinquished it himself. At all events he expressed a wish to see him oftener in his walks, in his rides, in his home. Nothing could be more flattering than such an invitation from such a man. Froude responded cordially, and became an habitual visitor. Like all really good talkers, Carlyle was at his best with a single companion, and there could be no more sympathetic companion than Froude. But there was another object of interest at Cheyne Row, and Froude felt for Mrs. Carlyle sincere compassion. She was often left to herself while her husband wrote upstairs, and she suffered tortures from neuralgia. It seemed to Froude that Carlyle, who never had a day's serious illness, felt more for his own dyspepsia and hypochondria than for his wife's far graver ailments. In this he was very likely unjust, for Carlyle was tenderly attached to his "Jeanie," and would have done anything for her if he had thought of it. But he was absorbed in Friederich, whose battles he would fight over again with the tired invalid on sofa. If woman be the name of frailty, the name of vanity is man. Carlyle was fond of his wife, but he was thinking of himself. His "Niagaras of scorn and vituperation" were a vent for his own feelings, a sort of moral gout. The apostle of silence recked not his own rede, nor did he think of the impression which his purely destructive preaching might make upon other people. He himself found in the eternities and immensities some kind of substitute for the Calvinistic Presbyterianism of his childhood. To her it was idle rhetoric and verbiage. He had taken away her dogmatic beliefs, and had nothing to put in their place. Her "pale, drawn, suffering face" haunted Froude in his dreams. In 1862 Mrs. Carlyle's health broke down, and for a year her case seemed desperate. Her doctor sent her away to St. Leonard's, and in no long time she apparently recovered. After that her husband took more care of her, and provided her with a carriage. But her constitution had been shattered, and she died suddenly as she drove through Hyde Park on the 21st of April, 1866, while Carlyle was at Dumfries, resting after the delivery of his Rectorial Address to the University of Edinburgh.

Carlyle's bereavement drove him into more complete dependence upon Froude's sympathy and support. The lonely old man brooded over his loss, and over his own short-comings. He shut himself up in the house to read his wife's diaries and papers. He found that without meaning it he had often made her miserable. In her journal for the 21st of June, 1856, he read, "The chief interest of to-day expressed in blue marks on my wrists!"* He realised that he had almost driven her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation. "For the next few years," says Froude, "I never walked with him without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his mind." Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated. His letters, and his wife's, show that he was a most affectionate husband when nothing had occurred to deprive him of his self-command. But he had at times been cruelly inconsiderate, and he wished to do penance for his misdeeds. A practical Christian would have asked God to pardon him, and made amends by active kindness to his surviving fellow- creatures. Carlyle took another course. In 1871, five years after his wife's death, he suddenly brought Froude a large bundle of papers, containing a memoir of Mrs. Carlyle by himself, a number of her letters, and some other biographical fragments. Froude was to read them, to keep them, and to publish them or not, as he pleased, after Carlyle was dead.+

— * This passage was suppressed by Froude when he published Mrs. Carlyle's Diary and Letters. But he kept the copy made by Carlyle's niece under his superintendence, which still exists; and as an incorrect version has appeared since his death, I give the correct one now. + "I long much, with a tremulous, deep, and almost painful feeling, about that other Manuscript which you were kind enough to read at the very first. Be prepared to tell me, with all your candour, the pros and contras there."—Carlyle to Froude, 26th of September, 1871. From The Hill, Dumfries. —

Well would it have been for Froude's peace of mind if he had handed the parcel back again, and refused to look at it. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil scarcely yielded more fatal fruit. He read the papers, however, and "for the first time realised what a tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been." That he exaggerated the purport of what he read is likely enough. When there are quarrels between husband and wife, a man naturally inclines to take the woman's side. Froude, as he says himself, was haunted by Mrs. Carlyle's look of suffering, physical rather than mental, and it would necessarily colour his judgment of the facts. At all events his conclusion was that Carlyle had just ground for remorse, and that in collecting the letters he had partially expiated his offence. When Mrs. Carlyle's Correspondence came to be published it was seen that there were two sides to the question, and that, if he had leisure to think of what he was doing, Carlyle could be the most considerate of husbands. Irritable and selfish he might be. Deliberately cruel he never was. Froude, with his accustomed frankness, told Carlyle at once what he thought. Mrs. Carlyle's letters should be published, not alone, but with the memoir composed by himself.

Carlyle had originally intended that this memoir, or sketch, as it rather is, should be preserved, but not printed. Afterwards, however, he gave it to Froude, and added an express permission to do as he liked with it. Froude was not content with his own opinion. He consulted John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith and of Dickens, a common friend of Carlyle and himself. Forster read the documents, and promised that he would speak to Carlyle about them, giving no opinion to Froude, but intimating that he should impress upon Carlyle the need for making things clear in his will. This most sensible advice was duly taken, and Carlyle's will, signed on the 6th of February, 1873, which nominated Forster and his own brother John as executors, contained the following passage:

"My manuscript entitled 'Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle' is to me in my now bereaved state, of endless value, though of what value to others I cannot in the least clearly judge; and indeed for the last four years am imperatively forbidden to write farther on it, or even to look farther into it. Of that manuscript my kind, considerate, and ever faithful friend, James Anthony Froude (as he has lovingly promised me) takes precious charge in my stead. To him therefore I give it with whatever other fartherances and elucidations may be possible, and I solemnly request of him to do his best and wisest in the matter, as I feel assured he will. There is incidentally a quantity of autobiographic record in my notes to this manuscript; but except as subsidiary and elucidative of the text I put no value on such. Express biography of me I had really rather that there should be none. James Anthony Froude, John Forster, and my brother John, will make earnest survey of the manuscript and its subsidiaries there or elsewhere in respect to this as well as to its other bearings; their united utmost candour and impartiality, taking always James Anthony Froude's practicality along with it, will evidently furnish a better judgment than mine can be. The manuscript is by no means ready for publication; nay, the questions how, when (after what delay, seven, ten years) it, or any portion of it, should be published are still dark to me; but on all such points James Anthony Froude's practical summing up and decision is to be taken as mine." No expression of confidence could well be stronger, no discretion could well be more absolute. So far as one man can substitute another for himself, Carlyle substituted Froude.

Froude was under the impression that Carlyle had given him the letters because he wanted them to be published, and did not want to publish them. Embarrassing as the position was, he accepted it in tranquil ignorance of what was to come. Two years after the receipt of the memoirs and letters there arrived at his house a box of more letters, more memoirs, dimes, odds and ends, put together without much arrangement in the course of a long life. He was told that they were the materials for Carlyle's biography, and was begged to undertake it forthwith. So far as his own interests were concerned, he had much better have declined the task. His History of England had given him a name throughout Europe, and whatever he wrote was sure to be well received. His English in Ireland was approaching completion, and he had in his mind a scheme for throwing fresh light on the age of Charles V. Principal Robertson's standard book was in many respects obsolete. The subject was singularly attractive, and would have furnished an excellent opportunity for bringing out the best side of the Roman Catholic Church, which in Charles's son, Philip, so familiar in Froude's History of England, was seen at its worst or weakest. Charles was to him an embodiment of the Conservative principle, which he regarded as the strongest part of Catholicism, and as needed to counteract the social upheaval of the Reformation. Such a book he could write in his own way, independent of every one. The biographer of Carlyle, on the other hand, would be involved in numerous difficulties, could hardly avoid giving offence, and must sacrifice years of his life to employment more onerous, as well as less lucrative, than writing a History of his own. Carlyle, however, was persistent, and Froude yielded. After Mrs. Carlyle's death they had met constantly, and the older man relied upon the younger as upon a son.

Froude sat down before the mass of documents in the spirit which had encountered the manuscripts of Simancas. No help was accorded him. He had to spell out the narrative for himself. On one point he did venture to consult Carlyle, but Carlyle shrank from the topic with evident pain, and the conversation was not renewed. It appeared from Mrs. Carlyle's letters and journals that she had been jealous of Lady Ashburton, formerly Lady Harriet Baring, and by birth a Sandwich Montagu. "Lady Ashburton," says Charles Greville, writing on the occasion of her death in 1857, "was perhaps, on the whole, the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had acquired no small reputation for ability and wit .... She was, or affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose literary celebrity or talents constituted their only attraction, and, while they were gratified by the attentions of the great lady, her vanity was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the principal. It is only justice to her to say that she treated her literary friends with constant kindness and the most unselfish attentions. They and their wives and children (when they had any) were received at her house in the country, and entertained there for weeks without any airs of patronage, and with a spirit of genuine benevolence as well as hospitality."*

— * The Greville Memoirs, vol. iii. pp. 109, 110. —

But Lady Ashburton and Mrs. Carlyle did not get on. As Carlyle's wife the latter would doubtless have been welcome enough at the Grange. Being much cleverer than Lady Ashburton, she seemed to dispute a supremacy which had not hitherto been challenged, and the relations of the two women were strained. Carlyle, on the other hand, had become, so Froude discovered from his wife's journal, romantically, though quite innocently, attached to Lady Ashburton, and this was one cause of dissension at Cheyne Row. There was nothing very dreadful in the disclosure. Carlyle was a much safer acquaintance for the other sex than Robert Burns, whose conversation carried the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and Mrs. Carlyle's jealousy was not of the ordinary kind. Still, the incident was not one of those which lighten a biographer's responsibility. Froude has himself explained, in a paper not intended for publication, the light in which it appeared to him. "Intellectual and spiritual affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally looked on these at least as exclusively her own. She had once been his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage which had been once hers was given to another." Froude's posthumous championship of Mrs. Carlyle may have led him to magnify unduly the importance of domestic disagreements. But however that may be, the opinions which he formed, and which Carlyle gave him the means of forming, did not increase the attractions of the duty he had undertaken to discharge.

Froude's own admiration of Carlyle was, it must always be remembered, not in the least diminished by what he read. He still thought him the greatest man of his age, and believed that his good influence would expand with time. That there should be spots on the sun did not disturb him, especially as moral perfection was the last thing he had ever attributed to Carlyle. Meanwhile his position was altered, and altered, as it seems, without his knowledge. Carlyle's original executors were his brother, Dr. Carlyle, and John Forster. Forster died in 1876, and by a codicil dated the 8th of November, 1878, Froude's name was put in the place of his, Sir James Stephen, the eminent jurist, afterwards a judge of the High Court, being added as a third. At that time Froude was engaged, to Carlyle's knowledge, upon the first volume of the Life. At Carlyle's request he had given up the editorship of Fraser's Magazine, which brought him in a comfortable income of four hundred a year, and he had wholly devoted himself to the service of his master. Carlyle expected that he would soon follow his wife. He survived her fifteen years, during which he wrote little, for his right hand was partly paralysed, and continually meditated upon the future destiny of the memorials entrusted to Froude.

In 1879 Dr. Carlyle died, leaving Froude and Stephen the sole executors under the will. Late in the autumn of that year Carlyle suddenly said to Froude, "When you have done with those papers of mine, give them to Mary." Mary was his niece Mary Aitken, Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, who had lived in Cheyne Row to take care of her uncle since her aunt's death, and was married to her cousin. Carlyle speaks of her with great affection in his will, "for the loving care and unwearied patience and helpfulness she has shown to me in these my last solitary and infirm years." It was natural that he should think of her, and should contemplate leaving her more than the five hundred pounds specified in his original will. But this particular request was so startling that Froude ought to have made further inquiries. The papers had been given to him, and he might have destroyed them. They had been, without his knowledge, left in the will to John Carlyle, who was then dead. Carlyle's mind was not clear about the fate of his manuscripts. Froude, however, acquiesced, and did not even ask that Carlyle should put his intentions on paper. At this time, while he was writing the first volume of the Life, Froude made up his mind to keep back Mrs. Carlyle's letters, with her husband's sketch of her, to suppress the fact that there had been any disagreement between them, but to publish in a single volume Carlyle's reminiscences of his father, of Edward Irving, of Francis Jeffrey, and of Robert Southey. To this separate publication Carlyle at once assented. But in November, 1880, when he was eighty-five, and Mrs. Carlyle had been fourteen years in her grave, he asked what Froude really meant to do with the letters and the memoir. Forced to make up his mind at once, and believing that publication was Carlyle's own wish, he replied that he meant to publish them. The old man seemed to be satisfied, and no more was said. Froude drew the inference that most people would, in the circumstances, have drawn. He concluded that Carlyle wished to relieve himself of responsibility, to get the matter off his mind, to have no disclosure in his lifetime, but to die with the assurance that after his death the whole story of his wife's heroism would be told.

On the 4th of February, 1881, Carlyle died. Froude, Tyndall, and Lecky attended his quiet funeral in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan, where he lies with his father and mother. Dean Stanley had offered Westminster Abbey, but the family had refused. Carlyle was buried among his own people, who best understood him, and whom he best understood. The two volumes of reminiscences at once appeared, including sketches of Irving and Jeffrey, with the memoir of Mrs. Carlyle. But even before the publication of these volumes, which came out early in March, a question, which was ominous of future trouble, arose out of copyright and title to profits. A fortnight after Carlyle's death Froude's co-executor, Mr. Justice Stephen, had a personal interview with Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, in the presence of her husband, and of Mr. Ouvry, who was acting as solicitor for all parties. On this occasion Mrs. Carlyle said that Froude had promised her the whole profits of the Reminiscences, that her uncle had approved of this arrangement, and that she would not take less. Thus the first difference between Froude and the Carlyle family related to money. Mrs. Carlyle did not know that the memoirs of her aunt would be among the reminiscences, and the sum which had promised her was the speculative value of an American edition, which was never in fact realised.

In lieu of this he offered half the English profits, and brought out the Reminiscences, "Jane Welsh Carlyle" being among them. They were eagerly read, not merely by all lovers of good literature, but by all lovers of gossip, good or bad. Carlyle's pen, like Dante's, "bit into the live man's flesh for parchment." He had a Tacitean power of drawing a portrait with a phrase which haunted the memory. James Carlyle, the Annandale mason, was as vivid as Jonathan Oldbuck himself. But it was upon Mrs. Carlyle that public interest fastened. The delineation of her was most beautiful, and most pathetic. There were few expressions of actual remorse, and Carlyle was not the first man to feel that the value of a blessing is enhanced by loss. But there was an undertone of something more than regret, a suspicion or suggestion of penitence, which set people talking. It is always pleasant to discover that a preacher of righteousness has not been a good example himself, and "poor Mrs. Carlyle" received much posthumous sympathy, as cheap as it was useless. Whether Froude should have published the memoir is a question which may be discussed till the end of time. He conceived himself to be under a pledge. He had given his word to a dead man, who could not release him. It seems, however, clear that he should have taken the course least injurious to Carlyle's memory, and in such a very delicate matter he might well have asked advice. From the purely literary point of view there could be no doubt at all. Not even Frederick the Great, that storehouse of "jewels five words long," contains more sparkling gems than these two precious little volumes. Froude speaks in his preface of having made "requisite omissions." A few more omissions might have been made with advantage, especially a brutal passage about Charles Lamb and his sister, which Elia's countless admirers find it hard to forgive. Mrs. Procter, widow of Barry Cornwall, the poet, and herself a most remarkable woman, was so much annoyed by the description of her mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, and her step-father, the editor of Bacon,* that she published some early and rather obsequious letters written to them by Carlyle himself. But the chief outcry was raised by the revelation of Carlyle's most intimate feelings about his wife, and about his own behaviour to her. There was nothing very bad. He was driven to accuse himself of the crime that, when he was writing Frederick and she lay ill on the sofa, he used to talk to her about the battle of Mollwitz. Froude was naturally astonished at the effect produced, but then Froude knew Carlyle, and the public did not.

— * Carlyle's Miscellanies, i. 223-230. —

Trouble, however, awaited him of a very different kind. After the publication of the Reminiscences, on the 3rd of May, 1881, he returned to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle the manuscript note-book which contained the memoir of her aunt, as Carlyle had requested him to do. At the end of it, on separate and wafered paper, following rather vague surmise that, though he meant to burn the book, it would probably survive him and be read by his friends, were these words:

"In which event, I solemnly forbid them, each and all, to publish this Bit of Writing as it stands here; and warn them that without fit editing no part of it should be printed (nor so far as I can order, shall ever be); and that the 'fit editing' of perhaps nine- tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become impossible.

"T. C. (Saturday, July 28th, 1866)."

Mary Carlyle at once wrote to The Times, and accused Froude of having violated her uncle's express directions. It would have been better if Froude had himself quoted this passage, and explained the subsequent events which made it obsolete. But he never suspected any one, and believed at the time of publication in the entire friendliness of the Carlyle family. His answer to the charge of betraying a trust was simple and satisfactory. Carlyle had changed his mind. This is clear from the fact that he gave Froude the memoir in 1871, five years after it was written, to do as he pleased with; and still clearer from the conversation in 1880, when Froude told him that he meant to publish, and Carlyle said "Very well." Moreover, the will, a formal and legal document, expressly gave Froude entire discretion in the matter. Froude replied at first with temper and judgment. But when Mrs. Carlyle persisted in her insinuations, and implied a doubt of his veracity, he gave way to a very natural resentment, and made a rash offer. He had, he said, brought out the memoir by Carlyle's own desire. He should do the same with Mrs. Carlyle's letters, for the same reason. "The remaining letters," he went on to say, "which I was directed to return to Mrs. Carlyle so soon as I had done with them, I will restore at once to any responsible person whom she will empower to receive them from me. I have reason to complain of the position in which I have been placed with respect to these MSS. They were sent to me at intervals without inventory or even a memorial list. I was told that the more I burnt of them the better, and they were for several years in my possession before I was aware that they were not my own. Happily I have destroyed none of them, and Mrs. Carlyle may have them all when she pleases." Froude can hardly have reflected upon the full significance of what he was saying. He had at this time been long engaged upon the biography of Carlyle, and a considerable part of it was finished. If he had then given back his materials, his labour would have been wasted, and Carlyle's own personal injunction would have been disobeyed. Carlyle's memory would also have suffered parable injury. It is said, and it squares with the facts, that Mary Carlyle and her friends, whose literary judgment was not quite equal to Carlyle's own, desired to substitute as his biographer some learned professor in Scotland.* If that were their object, they are to be congratulated upon their failure. For the offer was not carried out. As a bare promise without consideration it was not of course valid in law, and since no one had acted upon it, its withdrawal did no one any harm. There were also legal difficulties which made its fulfilment impossible. According to counsel's opinion, dated the 13th of May, 1881, Carlyle's request that the papers should be restored was "an attempted verbal testamentary disposition, which had no legal authority." The documents belonged not to Froude personally, but to himself and Fitz-james Stephen, as joint executors, and Stephen has left it on record that he would not have consented to their return until Froude's task was accomplished.

— * David Masson, the editor of Milton, I have been told, but I do not know. —

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's view was not shared by other and older members of her uncle's family. During the summer of 1881 Froude received from Carlyle's surviving brother, James, and his surviving sister, Mrs. Austin, a letter dated the 8th of August, and written from Ecclefechan, in which he was implored not to give up his task of writing the Life, and assured of their perfect reliance upon him. This assurance is the more significant because it was given after the publication of the Reminiscences. It was renewed on James Carlyle' s part through his son after the appearance of Mrs. Carlyle's letters in 1883, and by Mrs. Austin through her daughter upon receiving the final volumes of the biography in 1884. Miss Austin wrote at her mother's request on the 25th of October, 1884, "My uncle at all times placed implicit confidence in you, and that confidence has not, I am sure, in any way been abused. He always spoke of you as his best and truest friend." Time has amply vindicated Carlyle's opinion, and his discretion in the choice of a biographer.

As Mrs. Alexander Carlyle considered the publication of the memoir, which is by far the most interesting part of the Reminiscences, to be an impropriety, and a breach of faith, it might have been supposed that she would repudiate the idea of deriving any profit from the book. On the contrary, she attempted to secure the whole, and refused to take a part, declaring that Froude had promised to give her all. Froude's recollection was that, thinking Carlyle's provision for his niece insufficient,* he had promised her the American income, which he had been told would be large, though it turned out to be very small indeed, in acknowledgment of her services as a copyist. Ultimately he made her the generous offer of fifteen hundred pounds, retaining only three for himself. She accepted the money, though she denied that it was a gift. In the opinion of Mr. Justice Stephen, which is worth rather more than hers, it was legally a gift, though there may have been in the circumstances a moral obligation. But Mary Carlyle put forward another clam, of which the executors heard for the first time in June, 1881. She then said that in 1875, six years before his death, her uncle had orally given her all his papers, and handed her the keys of the receptacles which contained them.

— * The provision for Mary Carlyle in the will of 1873 was, however, materially increase by the codicil of 1878, under which she received the house in Cheyne Row after the death of her uncle John, who died before her uncle Thomas. —

Her recollection, however, must have been erroneous. For the bulk of the papers had been in Froude's possession since the end of 1873, or at latest the beginning of 1874, and were not in the drawers or boxes which the keys would have opened. On the strength of her own statement, which was never tested in a court of law and was inconsistent with the clause in Carlyle's will leaving his manuscripts to his brother John, Mrs. Carlyle demanded that Froude should surrender the materials for his biography, and not complete it. He put himself into the hands of his co-executor, who successfully resisted the demand, and Froude, in accordance with Carlyle's clearly expressed desire, kept the papers until he had done with them. In a long and able letter to Froude himself, printed for private circulation in 1886, Mr. Justice Stephen says, with natural pride, "It was my whole object throughout to prevent a law- suit for the determination of what I felt was a merely speculative question, and to defeat the attempt made to prevent you from writing Mr. Carlyle's life, and I am happy to say I succeeded." The public will always be grateful to the Judge, for there was no one living except Froude who had both the knowledge and the eloquence that could have produced such a book as his. Of the Reminiscences Froude wrote to Skelton, "To me in no one of his writings does he appear in a more beautiful aspect; and so, I am still convinced, will all mankind eventually think."

His own frame of mind at this period is vividly expressed in a letter to Max Muller, dated the 8th of December, 1881. After some references to Goethe's letters, and German copyright, he continues:

"So much ill will has been shown me in the case of other letters that I walk as if on hot ashes, and often curse the day when I undertook the business. I had intended, when I finished my English history, to set myself quietly down to Charles the Fifth, and spend the rest of my life on him. I might have been half through by this time, and the world all in good humour with me. My ill star was uppermost when I laid this aside. There are objections to every course which I can follow. The arguments for and against were so many and so strong that Carlyle himself could not decide what was to be done, and left it to me. He could see all sides of the question. Other people will see one, or one more strongly than another, whatever it may be; and therefore, do what I will, a large body of people will blame me. Nay, if I threw it up, a great many would blame me. What have I done that I should be in such a strait? But I am sixty-four years old, and I shall soon be beyond it all."

The first two volumes of the biography, covering the earlier half of Carlyle's life, when his home was in Scotland, from 1795 to 1835, appeared in 1882 and added to the hubbub. The public had got on a false scent, and gossip had found a congenial theme. Carlyle was in truth one of the noblest men that ever lived. His faults were all on the surface. His virtues were those which lie at the foundation of our being. For the common objects of vulgar ambition he had a scorn too deep for words. He never sought, and he did not greatly value, the praise of men. He had a message to deliver, in which he profoundly believed, and he could no more go beyond it, or fall short of it, than Balaam when he was tempted by Balak. Contemporaries without a hundredth part of his talent, even for practical business, attained high positions, or positions which the world thought high. Carlyle did not envy them, was not dazzled by them, but held to his own steadfast purpose of preaching truth and denouncing shams. His generosity to his own family was boundless, and he never expected thanks. He was tender-hearted, forgiving, kind, in all great matters, whenever he had time to think. Courage and truth made him indifferent to fashion and popularity. Popularity was not his aim. His aim was to tell people what was for their good, whether they would hear or whether they would forbear. Froude had so much confidence in the essential greatness of the man that he did not hesitate to show him as he was, not a prodigy of impossible perfection, but a sterling character and a lofty genius. Therefore his portrait lives, and will live, when biographies written for flattery or for edification have been consigned to boxes or to lumber-rooms.

Froude was only following the principles laid down by Carlyle himself. In reviewing Lockhart's Life of Scott, Carlyle emptied the vials of his scorn, which were ample and capacious, upon "English biography, bless its mealy mouth." The censure of Lockhart for "personalities, indiscretion," violating the "sanctities of private life," was, he said, better than a good many praises. A biographer should speak the truth, having the fear of God before his eyes, and no other fear whatever. That Lockhart had done, and in the eyes Carlyle, who admired him as he admired few it was a supreme merit. For the hypothesis Lockhart "at heart had a dislike to Scott, had done his best in an underhand, treacherous manner to dis-hero him," he expressed, as he well might, unbounded contempt. It seems incredible now that such a theory should ever, in or out of Bedlam, have been held. Perhaps it will be equally incredible some day that a similar view should have been taken of the relations between Froude and Carlyle.

It is no disparagement of Lockhart's great book to say that in this respect of telling the truth he had an easy task. For Scott was as faultless as a human creature can be. Every one who knew him loved him, and he loved all men, even Whigs. His early life, prosperous and successful, was as different as possible from Carlyle's. It was not until the years were closing in upon him that misfortune came, and called out that serene, heroic fortitude which his diary has made an everlasting possession for mankind. Carlyle once said in a splenetic mood that the lives of men of letters were the most miserable records in literature, except the Newgate Calendar. There could be no more striking examples to the contrary than Scott's life and his own. Perhaps Froude went too far in the direction indicated by Carlyle himself; abounded, as the French say, too much in Carlyle's sense. In his zeal to paint his hero, as his hero's hero wished to be painted, with the warts, he may have made those disfiguring marks too prominent. That a great man often has many small faults is a truism which does not need perpetual insistence. Froude is rather too fond, like Carlyle himself, of taking up and repeating a single phrase. When, for example, Carlyle's mother said, half in fun, that he was "gey ill to deal wi'," she was not stating a general proposition, but referring to a particular, and not very important, case of diet. When Miss Welsh, who was in love with Edward Irving, told Carlyle in 1823 that she could only love him as a brother, and could not marry him, it is a too summary judgment, and not compatible with Froude's own language elsewhere, to say that had they left matters thus it would have been better for both of them. If she said at the end of her life, "I married for ambition, Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him- and I am miserable,"* she said also, many times over, that he was the tenderest of husbands, and that no mother could have watched her health with more solicitude. He gave what he had to give. He could not give what he had not. "Of all the men whom I have ever seen," said Froude, "Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of humanity." The fact is that his natural eloquence was irrepressible. If Miss Edgeworth's King Corny had the gout, nature said "Howl," and he howled. If Carlyle had indigestion, he broke into picturesque rhetoric about the hag which was riding him no-whither. A far characteristic passage than his mother's "gey to deal wi'" is his own simple confession to his father, "When I shout murder, I am not always being killed."+

— * Life, i. 302. + Life, i. 209. —

That Froude's ideas of a biographer's duty were the same as his own Carlyle had good reason to know. Froude had stated them plainly enough in Fraser's Magazine, which Carlyle always saw, for June, 1876. He prefaced an article on the present Sir George Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, a daring attack upon that historian for the very faults that were attributed to himself, with the following sentences: "Every man who has played a distinguished part in life, and has largely influenced either the fortunes or the opinions of his contemporaries, becomes the property of the public. We desire to know, and we have a right to know, the inner history of the person who has obtained our confidence." This doctrine would not have been universally accepted. Tennyson, for instance, would have vehemently denied it. But it is at least frankly expressed, and Carlyle must have known very well what sort of biography Froude would write.

If Froude dwelt on Carlyle's failings, it was because he knew that his reputation would bear the strain. He has been justified by the result, for Carlyle's fame stands higher to-day than it ever stood before. That man, be he prince or peasant, is not to be envied who can read Froude's account of Carlyle's early life without feeling the better for it. It is by no means a cheerful story. The first forty years of Carlyle's existence, when the French Revolution had not been published, were an apparently hopeless struggle against poverty and obscurity. Sartor Resartus was scarcely understood by any one, and though his wife saw that it was a work of genius, it seemed to most people unintelligible mysticism. With the splendid exception of Goethe, hardly any one saw at that time what Carlyle was. He was too transcendental for The Edinburgh Review, to which he had occasionally contributed, and the payment for Sartor in Fraser's Magazine was beggarly.* For some years after his marriage in 1826 Carlyle was within measurable distance of starvation. Jeffrey had to explain to him, or did explain to him, that he was unfit for any public employment. He could not dig. To beg he was ashamed. When his father died in 1832 he refused to touch a penny of what the old man left, lest there should not be enough for his brothers and sisters. His personal dignity made it impossible for any stranger to assist him, except by giving him work. He worked incessantly, devouring books of all sorts, especially French and German, translating Wilhelm Meister so superbly well as to make it almost an English book. There was no greater intellect then in the British Islands than Carlyle's and very few with which it could be compared. Yet it was difficult for him to earn a bare subsistence for his wife and himself. Froude has brought out with wonderful power and beauty the character which in Carlyle was above and beyond all the gifts of his mind. If he was a severe critic of others, he was a still sterner judge of himself. It would have been easy for him to make money by writing what people wanted to read. He was determined that if they read anything of his, they should read what would do them good. His isolation was complete. His wife encouraged him and believed in him. Nobody could help him.

— * I need hardly say that this was long before Froude's connection with Fraser. —

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.

Carlyle, unlike Coleridge, was a real moralist, and it was duty, not hope, that guided his pen. Health he had, though he never would admit it, and with excellent sense he invested his first savings in a horse. His frugal life was at least wholesome, and the one comfort with which he could not dispense was the cheap comfort of tobacco. Idleness would have been impossible to him if he had been a millionaire, and labour was his refuge from despondency. Like most humourists, he had low spirits, though his "genial sympathy with the under side of things," to quote his own definition of the undefinable, must have been some solace for his woes. He could read all day without wearying, so that he need never be alone. As a talker no one surpassed him, or perhaps equalled him at his best, in London or even in Annandale. What ought to have struck all readers of these volumes was the courage, the patience, the dignity, the generosity, and the genius of this Scottish peasant. What chiefly struck too many of them was that he did not get on with his wife.

Froude's defence is first Carlyle's precept, and secondly his own conviction that the truth would be advantageous rather than injurious to Carlyle. Carlyle's way of writing about other people, for instance Charles Lamb, Saint Charles, as Thackeray called him, is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those passages he would have done well. His own personal conduct is a lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one to read. "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would be still noisier, still more inane.

Next year the gossips had a still richer feast. In 1883 Froude, faithful to his trust, brought out three volumes Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The true and permanent interest of this book is that it introduced the British and American public to some of the most brilliantly witty and amusing epistles that the language contains. Indeed, there are very few letter-writers in any language who can be compared with Mrs. Carlyle. Inferior to her husband in humourous description, as in depth of thought, she surpassed him in liveliness of wit, in pungency of satire, and in terseness of expression. Her narrative is inimitable, and sometimes, as in the account of her solitary visit to her old home at Haddington twenty-three years after her marriage, her dramatic power is overwhelming. Carlyle himself had been familiar to the public for half a century through his books. Until Mrs. Carlyle's letters appeared the world knew nothing of her at all, except through her husband's sketch. Considering that good letter-writers are almost as rare as good poets, and that Jane Carlyle is one of the very best, the general reader might have been simply grateful, as perhaps he was. But for purposes of scandal the value of the book was the light it threw upon the matrimonial squabbles, actual or imaginary, of two remarkable persons. Mrs. Carlyle had long been dead, and her relations with her husband were of no importance to any one. But the trivial mind grasps at trivialities, and will not be satisfied without them. Thousands who were quite incapable of appreciating the letters as literature could read between the lines, and apply the immortal principle that a warming-pan is a cover for hidden fire. Unfortunately, Carlyle's heart-broken ejaculations over his dead wife's words leant themselves to theories and surmises. He thought that he had not made enough of her when she was alive, and apparently he wanted the world to know that he thought so. Yet the bulk of the letters are not those of an unhappy, oppressed, down- trodden woman, nor of a woman unable to take care of herself. Some few are intensely miserable, almost like the cries of a wounded animal, and these, even in extracts, might well have been omitted. Mrs. Carlyle would not have written them if she had been herself, and in a collection of more than three hundred they would not have been missed. Some thought also that there were too many household details.* On the whole, however, these letters, with the others published in the Life, are a rich store-house, and they retain their permanent value, untouched by ephemeral rumour.

— * "A good woman," I remember Lord Bowen saying of Mrs. Carlyle, "with perhaps an excessive passion for insecticide." —

I doubt if he bathed before he dressed. A brasier? the pagan, he burned perfumes! You see, it is proved, what the neighbours guessed: His wife and himself had separate rooms.

Carlyle had been dead more than twenty years before the controversies about all that was unimportant in him flickered out and died an unsavoury death. The vital fact about him and his wife is that they contributed, if not equally, at least in an unparalleled degree, to the common stock of genius. But for Froude we might never have known that Mrs. Carlyle had genius at all. Through him we have a series of letters not surpassed by Lady Mary Wortley's, or by any woman's except Madame de Sevigne's.

Then in 1884 Froude completed his task with Carlyle' s Life in London, a biographical masterpiece if ever there was one. It is written on the same principle of telling the truth, painting the warts. But it brings out even more clearely than its predecessor the essential qualities of Carlyle. In one way this was easier. The period of fruitless struggle was almost over when Carlyle left Craigenputtock in 1834. After the appearance of The French Revolution in 1838 he was famous, and every one who read anything read that book. Southey read it six times. Dickens carried it about with him, and founded on it his Tale of Two Cities. Thackeray wrote an enthusiastic review of it. Its wisdom and eloquence were a treasure to Dr. Arnold, who knew, if any man did, what history was. It was like no other book that had ever been written, and critics were driven to talk of Aeschylus or Isaiah. Such comparisons profit little or nothing. The French Revolution is an original book by a man who believed in God's judgment upon sin. The memoirs of Madame Dubarry might have suggested it; but it came from Carlyle's own heart and soul.

Professors may prove to their own satisfaction that it is not history at all, and Carlyle has been posthumously convicted of miscalculating the distance from Paris to Varennes. It remains one of the books that cannot be forgotten, that fascinate all readers, even the professors themselves. And yet, greater than the book itself is Carlyle's behaviour when the first volume had been lost by Mill. Mill, himself in extreme misery, had to come and tell the author. He stayed a long time, and when he had gone Carlyle said to his wife, "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is to us." Maximus in maximis; minimus in minimis; such was Carlyle, and as such Froude exhibits him, not concealing the fact that in small matters he could be very small.

The two personalities of Carlyle and his wife are so fascinating that there may be some excuse for regarding even their quarrels, which were chiefly on her side,* with interest. But Frederick the Great will survive these broils, and so long as Carlyle's books are read his biography will be read too, as his best extraneous memorial, just, eloquent, appreciative, sincere. Carlyle was no model of austere, colourless consistency. His reverent admiration of Peel, whom he knew, is quite irreconcilable with his savage contempt of Gladstone, whom he did not know. Peel was a great parliamentary statesman, and Gladstone was his disciple. Both belonged equally to the class which Carlyle denounced as the ruin of England, and rose to supreme power through the representative system that he especially abhorred. On no important point, while Peel was alive, did they differ. "On the whole," said Gladstone, "Peel was the greatest man I ever knew," and in finance he was always a Peelite. That a man who was four times Prime Minister of England could have been a canting hypocrite, deceiving himself and others, implies that the whole nation was fit for a lunatic asylum. Carlyle seldom studied a political question thoroughly, and of public men with whom he was acquainted only through the newspapers he was no judge. Personal contact produced estimates which, though they might be harsh, hasty, and unfair, were always interesting, and sometimes marvellously accurate. Of Peel, for instance, though he saw him very seldom, he has left a finished portrait, not omitting the great Minister's humour, for any trace of which the Peel papers may be searched in vain.

— * "Both he and she were noble and generous, but his was the soft heart and hers the stern one."—-Carlyle's Life in London, vol. ii. p. 171. —

The same can be said of Thirlwall, barring the groundless insinuation that he was dishonest in accepting a bishopric. A very different sort of bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, Carlyle liked for his cleverness, though here too he could not help suggesting that on the foundation, or rather baselessness, of the Christian religion, "Sam" agreed with him. The great historian of the age he did not appreciate at all. But, then, he never met Macaulay. "Some little ape called Keble," is not a happy formula for the author of the Christian Year, and this is one of the phrases which I think Froude might well have omitted, as meaning no more than a casual execration. Yet how minute are these defects, when set beside the intrinsic grandeur of the central figure in the book. Carlyle mixed with all sorts and conditions of men and women, from the peasants of Annandale to the best intellectual society of London. He was always, or almost always, the first man in the company, not elated, nor over-awed," standing on the adamantine basis of his manhood, casting aside all props and shoars." From snobbishness, the corroding vice of English society, he was, though he once jocularly charged himself with it, entirely free. He judged individuals on their merits with an eye as piercing and as pitiless as Saint Simon's. On pretence and affectation he had no mercy. Learning, intellect, character, humility, integrity, worth, he held always in true esteem. As Froude says, and it is the final word, Carlyle's "extraordinary talents were devoted, with an equally extraordinary purity of purpose, to his Maker's service, so far as he could see and understand that Maker's will." He led "a life of single-minded effort to do right and only that of constant truthfulness in word and deed."

That the man who wrote these sentences at the close of a book with which they are quite in keeping should have been reviled as a traitor to Carlyle's memory is strange indeed. To Froude it was incredible. Conscious of regarding Carlyle as the greatest moral and intellectual force of his time, he could not have been more astonished if he had been charged with picking a pocket. For criticism of his own judgment he was prepared. He knew well that acute differences of opinion might arise. The dishonesty and malignity imputed to him were outside the habits of his life and the range of his ideas. He lived in a society where such things were not done, and where nobody was suspected of doing them. He had fulfilled, to the best of his ability, Carlyle's own injunctions, and he had faithfully portrayed as he knew him the man whom of all others he most revered. He was bewildered, almost dazed, at what seemed to him the perverse and unscrupulous recklessness of his accusers. Anonymous and abusive letters reached him daily; some even of his own friends looked coldly on him. He was a sensitive man, and he felt it deeply. He shrank from going out unless he knew exactly whom he was to meet. But his pride came to his rescue, and he preferred suffering injustice in silence to discussing in public, as though it admitted of doubt, the question whether he was an honest man. He did, however, invite the opinion of his co-executor, an English judge, a close friend of Carlyle, and a man whose personal integrity was above all suspicion. Although the calumnies which gave Froude so much distress have long sunk into an oblivion of contempt, and require no formal refutation, the conclusive verdict of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen may be fitly quoted here:

"For about fifteen years I was the intimate friend and constant companion of both of you [Carlyle and Froude], and never in my life did I see any one man so much devoted to any other as you were to him during the whole of that period of time. The most affectionate son could not have acted better to the most venerated father. You cared for him, soothed him, protected him, as a guide might protect a weak old man down a steep and painful path. The admiration you have habitually expressed for him was unqualified. You never said to me one ill-natured word about him down to this day. It is to me wholly incredible that anything but a severe regard for truth, learnt to a great extent from his teaching, could ever have led you to embody in your portrait of him a delineation of the faults and weaknesses which mixed with his great qualities."*

— * My Relations with Carlyle, p. 62. —

Calling witnesses to the character of such a man as Froude is itself almost an insult. But there is one judgment so valuable and so emphatic that I cannot refrain from citing it. The fifteenth Earl of Derby held such a high position in the political world that his literary attainments have been comparatively neglected. He was in truth an omnivorous reader and a cool, sagacious critic, who was not led astray by enthusiasm, and never said more than he felt. Writing to Froude on the 20th of October, 1884, Lord Derby described the Life of Carlyle as the most interesting biography in the English language, and added, "I think you have finally silenced the foolish talk about indiscretion, and treachery to a friend's memory. It is clear that you have done only, and exactly, what Carlyle wished done: and to me it is also apparent that he and you were right: that his character could not have been understood without a full disclosure of what was least attractive in it: and that those defects—the product mainly of morbid physical conditions—do not really take away from his greatness, while they explain much that was dark, at least to me, in his writings." Lord Derby's opinions were not lightly formed, and he was as much guided by pure reason as mortal man can be.