Froude's own judgment is given in a letter to Lady Derby, which contains also much interesting speculation on South African politics. Lord Derby, it will be remembered, was at that time Secretary of State for the Colonies.

"October 14th, 1884.—Carlyle in London comes out this week. I loved and honoured him above all living men, and with this feeling I have done my best to produce a faithful likeness of him. This is a consolation to me, if the only one I am likely to have. We shall see. I am very anxious about South Africa. I have written twice at length to Lord Derby. Unfortunately my view is the exact opposite to that which is generally taken. Lord D. is evidently being driven into active measures against his will. My fear is that there will be some half-action insufficient to crush the Dutch, and sufficient to exasperate them. He relies on the promised support of the Colonial Ministry. They may promise, but I will believe only when I see it that a Cape Ministry and Legislature will oppose the Boers in earnest. They will encourage us to entangle ourselves, as they did with the Diamond Fields, and then leave us to get out of the mess as we can. South Africa cannot be self-governed in connection with this country, except with the good-will of the Dutch population. Enough may have been done, however, to quiet Parliament (which knows nothing about the matter) in the approaching Session—and that, I suppose, is the chief consideration. Carnarvon writes to me preliminary, I suppose, to some attack when Government meets. I have told him exactly what I have told Lord D. I hope I may turn out mistaken, but the course of things so far has generally confirmed my opinion whenever I have seen my way to forming one. I shall be glad to hear what you think about the book. From you I shall get the friendliest judgment that the circumstances admit of, and if you are dissatisfied I shall know what to look for from others. The last two hundred pages are the most interesting. The drift of the whole is that Carlyle was by far the most remarkable man of his time—that five hundred years hence he will be the only one of us all whose name will be so much as remembered, while perhaps he may be one who will have reshaped in a permanent form the religious belief of mankind. Therefore he ought to be known exactly as he was. The argument will not be felt by those who disbelieve in his greatness, and the idolaters—those who pretend to worship without believing- will be savagest of all. Idols must be draped in fine clothes, and are reduced to nothing by mere human garments."

Perhaps the fullest, and certainly the least reserved, account of Froude's own feelings about the book is contained in a letter to Mrs. Charles Kingsley:

"I tell Longmans to-day to send you the book. If you can find time, I shall like to hear the independent impression it makes upon you. Only remember this: that it was Carlyle's own determination (or at least desire) to do justice to his wife, and to do public penance himself—a desire which I think so noble as to obliterate in my own mind the occasion there was for it. I have long known the worst, and Charles knew it generally. We all knew it, and yet the more intimately I knew Carlyle, the more I loved and admired him; and some people, Lord Derby, for instance, after reading the Life, can tell me that their opinion of him is rather raised than diminished. There is something demonic both in him and her which will never be adequately understood; but the hearts of both of them were sound and true to the last fibre. You may guess what difficulty mine has been, and how weary the responsibility. You may guess, too, how dreary it is to me to hear myself praised for frankness, when I find the world all fastening on C.'s faults, while the splendid qualities are ignored or forgotten. Let them look into their own miserable souls, and ask themselves how they could bear to have their own private histories ransacked and laid bare. I deliberately say (and I have said it in the book), that C.'s was the finest nature I have ever known. It is a Rembrandt picture, but what a picture! Ruskin, too, understands him, and feels too, as he should, for me, if that mattered, which it doesn't in the least."

A few years after publication the Reminiscences ran out of print, and Froude was anxious to bring out a corrected edition. Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, however, wished for another editor. The copyright was Froude's, and no one could reprint the book in Great Britain without his consent. At that time there was no international copyright between the United Kingdom and the United States. A distinguished American professor, Mr. Eliot Norton, was invited by Mary Carlyle to re-edit the book beyond the Atlantic, and he undertook the task. Froude always thought that Professor Norton should have communicated with him, and the public will probably be of the same opinion. In the end, however, Froude voluntarily assigned the copyright to Mrs. Carlyle, who then had possession of the papers, and Mr. Norton's edition appeared in England, published by Macmillan, six years after Carlyle's death. It proved to be very like the first, though some errors of the press were corrected and also some slips of the pen. The disputed memoir was not omitted, nor was anything of the slightest interest added by Mr. Norton to the book. In his Preface he attacked Froude for fulfilling Carlyle's own wishes, of which he seems to have known little or nothing, and, by way of further justification for his interference, he added the following paragraph:

"The first edition of the Reminiscences was so carelessly printed as to do grave wrong to the sense. The punctuation, the use of capitals and italics, in the manuscript, characteristic of Carlyle's method of expression in print, were entirely disregarded. In the first five pages of the printed text there were more than a hundred and thirty corrections to be made of words, punctuation, capitals, quotation marks, and such like; and these pages are not exceptional."

This looks like a formidable indictment, and in the literal sense of the words it may be true. I have compared the first five pages of the two editions, and there are a good many changes in the use of capitals and italics. But except one obvious misprint of a single letter, "even" for "ever," there is nothing which does "grave wrong" to the sense, or affects it in any way. "And these pages," as Mr. Norton says, with another meaning, "are not exceptional." The later reminiscences were not easy to decipher. Carlyle's handwriting was seriously affected by age, he wrote upon both sides of very thin paper, and I have seen several letters of his which bear out Froude's assertion that, after his hand began to shake, "it became harder to decipher than the worst manuscript which I have ever examined." In preparing the book Froude had to use a magnifying glass, and in many cases the true reading was a matter of opinion. In one case, however, it was not. Sir Henry Taylor, the most serene and dignified of men, found himself charged in Carlyle's sketch of Southey with the unpleasant attribute of "morbid vivacity," and not only with morbid vivacity simpliciter, or per se, but "in all senses of that deep-reaching word." Mr. Norton restored the true reading, which was "marked veracity," though, on the other hand, he replaced the statement, omitted by Froude, that Taylor, who had died between the two editions, was "not a well-read or wide-minded man." It must be admitted that in this instance Froude allowed a proof which made nonsense to pass, and that Mr. Norton did a public service by correcting the phrase. Froude's occasional carelessness in revision is a common failing enough. What made it remarkable in him was the combination of liability to these lapses with intensely laborious and methodical habits.

Although Froude's legal connection with Carlyle's family ceased with the assignment to Carlyle's niece of the copyright in the Reminiscences, the names of the two men are as inseparably associated as Boswell's and Johnson's, Lockhart's and Scott's, Macaulay's and Trevelyan's, Morley's and Gladstone's. Some readers, such as Tennyson and Lecky, thought that Froude had revealed too much. Others, such as John Skelton and Edward FitzGerald, believed that he had raised Carlyle to a higher eminence than he had occupied before. Froude himself felt entire confidence both in the greatness of Carlyle's qualities and in the permanence of his fame. That was why he thought that the revelation of small defects would do more good than harm. A faultless character, even if he himself could have reconciled it with his conscience to draw one, would not have been accepted as genuine, would not have been treated as credible. The true character, in its strength and its weakness, would command belief, and admiration too. If Froude were alive, he would say that the time had not yet come for a final judgment, and might not come for a hundred years. Still, I think it will be conceded that the twenty years which have elapsed since he accomplished his task are a period of growth rather than decadence in the number and zeal of Carlyle's admirers. This is no doubt in large measure due to Carlyle's own books. He has been called the father of modern socialism, and credited with the destruction of political economy. I am too much out of sympathy with these views to judge them fairly. But I suppose it cannot be denied that Carlyle fascinates thousands who do not accept him as an infallible, or even as a fallible, guide, or that they, as well as his disciples, devour the pages of Froude.

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

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

CHAPTER IX

BOOKS AND TRAVEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following letter was written from Salcombe just after the General Election of 1886 and the defeat of Home Rule:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nullum cum victis certamen, et aethere cassis.

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

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

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

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

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

— * P. 393. —

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

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

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

— * Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. —

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

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

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

— * January 15th, 1887. + February 1st. —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So far Froude's predictions have been realised. When he wrote, the Imperial Federation League had just been formed, and Lord Rosebery was arguing for Irish Home Rule as part of a much wider scheme. Except Australia, which is homogeneous, like the Dominion of Canada, the British Empire is no nearer Federation, and Ireland is no nearer Home Rule, than they were then. The depression of the sugar trade in the West Indian Islands has been met by a treaty which raises the price of sugar at home, and makes those Colonies proportionately unpopular with the working classes. It has since been proposed to carry the principle farther, and tax the British workman for the benefit of Colonial manufacturers. For these strange results of imperial thinking neither Froude nor any of his contemporaries were prepared. But they correspond accurately, especially the second of them, with the "attempt made by politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves," against which Froude warned his countrymen. Froude was no scientific economist. He believed in "free trade within the Empire," which is not free trade. He was for an imperial tariff, a thing made in Germany, and called a Zollverein. But his practical experience and personal observation taught him that proposals for closer union with the Colonies must come from the Colonies themselves. The negroes were a difficulty. They were not really fit for self-government, as the statesmen of the American Union had found. Personal freedom, the inalienable right of all men and all women, is a very different thing from the possession of a vote. As for India, the idea of Home Rule there had receded a long way into the distance since the sanguine predictions of Macaulay. Perhaps Froude never quite worked out his conceptions of the federal system which he would have liked to see. In Australia it would have been plain sailing. In Canada it was already established. In South Africa it would have embodied the union of British with Dutch, and prevented the disasters which have since occurred. In the West Indies it would have raised problems of race and colour which are more prudently agitated at a greater distance from the Black. Republic of Hayti. Imperial Federalists not yet explained what they would do with India.

Froude neither was nor aimed at being practical politican. His object, in which he succeeded, was to kindle in the public mind at home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his own heart was full. Although the measure of Colonial loyalty was given afterwards in the South African War, the despatch of troops from Sydney to the Soudan in 1885 showed that ties of sentiment are the strongest of all. It was those ties, rather than any political or commercial bond, which Froude desired to strengthen. No one would have liked less to live in a Colony. Colonial society did not suit him. Colonial manners were not to his mind. But to meet governing men, like Sir Henry Norman, a "warm Gladstonian," by the way, was always a pleasure to him, and as a symbol of England's greatness he loved her territory beyond the seas.

The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, published in 1889, was Froude's one mature and serious attempt at a novel. For distinction of style and beauty of thought it may be compared with the greatest of historical romances. If it was the least successful of his books, the failure can be assigned to the absence of women, or at least of love, which ever since Dr. Johnson's definition, if not before, has been expected in a novel. The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth century. The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring. Goring "belonged to an order of men who, if they had been allowed fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory of an evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the Cromwellians had died out of the land, and was not to be revived by a single enthusiast." He was murdered, and Froude could point his favourite moral that the woes of the sister country would be healed by the appearance of another Cromwell, which he had to admit was improbable. The Irish hero, Morty Sullivan, has been in France, and is ready to fight for the Pretender. He did no good. Few Irishmen, in Froude's opinion, ever did any good. But in The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, if anywhere, Froude shows his sympathy with the softness of the Irish character, and Morty's meditations on his return from France are expressed as only Froude could express them. Morty was walking with his sister by the estuary of the Kenmare River opposite Derrynane, afterwards famous as the residence of Daniel O'Connell, "For how many ages had the bay and the rocks and the mountains looked exactly the same as they were looking then? How many generations had played their part on the same stage, eager and impassioned as if it had been erected only for them! The half-naked fishermen of forgotten centuries who had earned a scanty living there; the monks from the Skelligs who had come in on high days in their coracles to say mass for them, baptize the children, or bury the dead; the Celtic chief, with saffron shirt and battle-axe, driven from his richer lands by Norman or Saxon invaders, and keeping hold in this remote spot on his ragged independence; the Scandinavian pirates, the overflow of the Northern Fiords, looking for new soil where they could take root. These had all played their brief parts there and were gone, and as many more would follow in the cycles of the years that were to come, yet the scene itself was unchanged and would not change. The same soft had fed those that were departed, and would feed those that were to be. The same landscape had affected their imaginations with its beauty or awed them with its splendours; and each alike had yielded to the same delusion that the valley was theirs and was inseparably connected with themselves and their fortunes. Morty's career had been a stormy one .... He had gone out into the world, and had battled and struggled in the holy cause, yet the cause was not advanced, and it was all nothing. He was about to leave the old place, probably for ever. Yet there it was, tranquil, calm, indifferent whether he came or went. What was he? What was any one? To what purpose the ineffectual strivings of short-lived humanity? Man's life was but the shadow of a dream, and his work was but the heaping of sand which the next tide would level flat again."

Wordsworth's "pathetic fallacy" that the moods of nature correspond with the moods of man has seldom found such eloquent illustration as in Morty's vain imaginings. Morty himself was shot dead by English soldiers in revenge for the murder of Goring. The story is a dismal and tragic one. But the best qualities of the Irish race are there, depicted with true sympathy, and perhaps this volume may be held to confirm Carlyle's opinion, expressed in a letter to Miss Davenport Bromley, that even The English in Ireland was "more disgraceful to the English Government by far than to the Irish savageries." Froude, indeed, never forgot the kindness of the Kerry peasants who nursed him through the small-pox. He would have done anything for the Irish, except allow them to govern themselves.

In 1890 Froude contributed to the series of The Queen's Prime Ministers, edited by Mr. Stuart Reid, a biographical study of Lord Beaconsfield. He wrote to Mr. Reid on the subject:

". . . Lord Beaconsfield wore a mask to the generality of mankind. It was only when I read Lothair that I could form any notion to myself of the personality which was behind. I once alluded to that book in a speech at a Royal Academy banquet. Lord Beaconsfield was present, and was so far interested in what I said that he wished me to review Endymion in the Edinburgh, and sent me the proof-sheets of it before publication. Edymion did not take hold of me as Lothair did, and I declined, but I have never lost the impression which I gathered out of Lothair. It is worse than useless to attempt the biography of a man unless you know, or think you know, what his inner nature was .... I am quite sure that Lord Beaconsfield had a clearer insight than most men into the contemporary constitution of Europe—that he had a real interest in the welfare and prospects of mankind; and while perhaps he rather despised the great English aristocracy, he probably thought better of them than of any other class in England. I suppose that like Cicero he wished to excel, or perhaps more like Augustus to play his part well in the tragic comedy of life. I do not suppose that he had any vulgar ambition at all .... "

The feelings with which he approached this not altogether congenial task are described in the following passages from letters to Lady Derby:

.... "THE MOLT, September 14th, 1889.

"If my wonderful adventure into the Beaconsfield country comes off, I shall want all the help which Lord D. offered to give me. I do not wonder that he and you were both startled at the proposition, and I am not at all sure that in a respectable series of Victorian Prime Ministers I should be allowed to treat the subject in the way that I wish. The point is to make out what there was behind the mask. Had it not been for Lothair I should have said nothing but a charlatan. But that altered my opinion, and the more often I read it the more I want to know what his real nature was. The early life is a blank filled up by imaginative people out of Vivian Grey. I am feeling my way indirectly with his brother, Ralph D'Israeli, and whether I go on or not will depend on whether he will help me."

"THE MOLT, November 12th, 1889,

"The difficulty is to find out the real man that lay behind the sphynx-like affectations. I have come to think that these affectations (natural at first) came to be themselves affected as a useful defensive armour which covered the vital parts. Anyway, the study of him is extremely amusing. I had nothing else to do, and I can easily throw what I write into the fire if it turns out unsatisfactory."

Although the book was necessarily a short one, it is too characteristic to be lightly dismissed. When Froude gave Mr. Reid the manuscript, he said, "It will please neither Disraeli's friends nor his foes. But it is at least an honest book." He heard, with more amusement than satisfaction, that it had pleased Gladstone. For the political estimate of a modern and Parliamentary statesman Froude lacked some indispensable qualifications. He knew little, and cared less, about the House of Commons, in which the best years of Disraeli's life were passed. He despised the party system, of which Disraeli was at once a product and a devotee. He had no sympathy with Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy, and the colonial policy which he would have substituted for it was outside Lord Beaconsfield's scope. He had adopted from Carlyle the theory that Disraeli and Gladstone were both adventurers, the difference between them being that Disraeli only deceived others, whereas Gladstone deceived also himself. But Gladstone had ignored whereas Disraeli, with singular magnanimity, had offered to the author of Shooting Niagara a pension and a Grand Cross of the Bath.

It was, however, as a man of letters rather than as a politician that Disraeli fascinated Froude, so much so that he is betrayed into the paradox of representing his hero as a lover of literature rather than politics. Disraeli sometimes talked in that way himself, as when he was persuading Lightfoot to accept the Bishopric of Durham, and remarked, "I, too, have sacrificed inclination to duty." But he was hardly serious, and even in his novels it is the political parts that survive. Although Froude had found it impossible to review Endymion, the book is very like the author, and can only be appreciated by those who have been behind the scenes in politics. Froude's idea of Disraeli as a man with a great opportunity who threw it away, who might have pacified Ireland and preferred to quarrel with Russia, was naturally not agreeable to Disraelites, and as a general rule it is desirable that a biographer should be able, to write from his victim's point of view. Yet, all said and done, Froude's Beaconsfield is a work of genius, the gem of the series. Professional politicians, with the curious exception of Gladstone, thought very little of it. It was not written for them. Disraeli was a many-sided man, so that there is room for various estimates of his character and career. Of his early life Froude had no special knowledge. He was not even aware that Disraeli had applied for office to Peel. He shows sometimes an indifference to dry details, as when he makes Gladstone dissolve Parliament in 1873 immediately after his defeat on the Irish University Bill, and represents Russia as having by her own act repealed the Black Sea Clauses in the Treaty of Paris. Startling too is his assertion that the Parliament of 1868 did nothing for England or Scotland, on account of its absorption in Irish affairs. But he was not writing a formal history, and these points did not appeal to him at all. He drew with inimitable skill a picture of the despised and fantastic Jew, vain as a peacock and absurdly dressed, alien in race and in his real creed, smiling sardonically at English ways, enthusiasms, and institutions, until he became, after years of struggle and obloquy, the idol of what was then the proudest aristocracy in the world.

Disraeli's peculiar humour just suited Froude's taste. Disraeli never laughed. Even his smile was half inward. The irony of life, and of his own position, was a subject of inexhaustible amusement to him. There was nothing in his nature low, sordid, or petty. It was not money, nor rank, but power which he coveted, and at which he aimed. Irreproachable in domestic life, faithful in friendship, a placable enemy, undaunted by failure, accepting final defeat with philosophic calm, he played with political passions which he did not share, and made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything stuffy and commonplace. From a constitutional history of English politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the principal figure. In the Congress of Berlin, where he did nothing, or next to nothing, he attracted the gaze of every one, not for anything he said there, but because he was there at all. If he had left an autobiography, it would be priceless, not for its facts, but for its opinions. That Froude thoroughly understood him it would be rash to say. But he did perceive by sympathetic intuition a great deal that an ordinary writer would have missed altogether. For instance, the full humour of that singular occasion when Benjamin Disraeli appeared on the platform of a Diocesan Conference at Oxford, with Samuel Wilberforce in the chair, could have been given by no one else exactly as Froude gave it. Nothing like it had ever happened before. It is scarcely possible that anything of the kind can ever happen again. Froude found the origin of the Established Church in the statutes of Henry VIII. Gladstone found it, or seemed to find it, in the poems of Homer. In Disraeli's eyes its pedigree was Semitic, and it ministered to the "craving credulity" of a sceptical age, undisturbed by the provincial arrogance that flashed or flared in an essay or review.

"In the year 1864," says Froude, "Disraeli happened to be on a visit at Cuddesdon, and it happened equally that a Diocesan Conference was to be held at Oxford at the time, with Bishop Wilberforce in the chair. The clerical mind had been doubly exercised, by the appearance of Colenso on the 'Pentateuch' and Darwin on the 'Origin of Species.' Disraeli, to the surprise of every one, presented himself in the theatre. He had long abandoned the satins and silks of his youth, but he was as careful of effect as he had ever been, and had prepared himself in a elaborately negligent. He lounged into the assembly in a black velvet shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat, as if he had been accidentally passing through the town. It was the fashion with University intellect to despise Disraeli as a man with neither sweetness nor light; but he was famous, or at least notorious, and when he rose to speak there was a general curiosity. He began in his usual affected manner, slowly and rather pompously, as if he had nothing to say beyond perfunctory platitudes. The Oxford wits began to compare themselves favourably the dullness of Parliamentary orators; when first one sentence and then another startled them into attention. They were told that the Church was not likely to be disestablished. It would remain, but would remain subject to a Parliament which would not allow an imperium in imperio. It must exert itself and reassert its authority, but within the limits which the law laid down. The interest grew deeper when he came to touch on the parties to one or other of which all his listeners belonged. High Church and Low Church were historical and intelligible, but there had arisen lately, the speaker said, a party called the Broad, never before heard of. He went on to explain what Broad Churchmen were."

Disraeli's gibes at Colenso and Maurice are too well known to need repetition here. The equally famous reference to Darwin will bear to be quoted once more, at least as an introduction for Froude's incisive comment.

"What is the question now placed before society with a glibness the most astounding? The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels."

"Mr. Disraeli," so Froude continues, "is on the side of the angels. Pit and gallery echoed with laughter. Fellows and tutors repeated the phrase over their port in the common room with shaking sides. The newspapers carried the announcement the next morning over the length and breadth of the island, and the leading article writers struggled in their comments to maintain a decent gravity. Did Disraeli mean it, or was it but an idle jest? and what must a man be who could exercise his wit on such a subject? Disraeli was at least as much in earnest as his audience. The phrase answered its purpose. It has lived and become historical when the decorous protests of professional divines have been forgotten with the breath which uttered them. The note of scorn with which it rings has preserved it better than any affectation of pious horror, which indeed would have been out of place in the presence of such an assembly."

I have taken the liberty of giving such emphasis as italics can confer to two brief passages in this brilliant description, because they express Froude's real opinion of Diocesan Conferences and those who frequented them.* Disraeli's audience applauded, partly in admiration of his wit, and partly because, they thought that he was amusing them at the expense of the latitudinarians they abhorred. Froude's appreciation came from an opposite source. He regarded Disraeli not as a flatterer, but as a busy mocker, laughing at the people thought he was laughing with them. He made no attempt at a really critical estimate of the most baffling figure in English politics. He fastened on the picturesque aspects of Disraeli's career, and touched them with an artist's hand. As to what it all meant, or whether it meant anything, he left his readers as much, in the dark as they were before. My own theory, if one must have a theory, is that one word explains Disraeli, and that that word is "ambition." If so, he was one of the most marvellously successful men that ever lived. If not, and if a different standard should be applied, other consequences would ensue. Froude gives no help in the solution of the problem. What he does is to portray the original genius which no absurdities could cover, and no obstacles could restrain. Disraeli the "Imperialist" had no more to do with building empires than with building churches, but he was twice Prime Minister of England.

— * Disraeli's contempt for italics is well known. He called them "the last resort of the forcible Feebles." —

Froude's Sea Studies in the third series of his collected essays are chiefly a series of thoughts on the plays of Euripides. But, like so much of his writing, they are redolent of the ocean, on which and near which he always felt at home. The opening sentences of this fresh and wholesome paper are too characteristic not to be quoted.

"To a man of middle age whose occupations have long confined him to the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library, there is something unspeakably delightful in a sea voyage. Increasing years, if they bring little else that is agreeable with them, bring to some of us immunity from sea-sickness. The regularity of habit on board a ship, the absence of dinner parties, the exchange of the table in the close room for the open deck under an awning, and the ever-flowing breeze which the motion of the vessel forbids to sink into a calm, give vigour to the tired system, restore the conscious enjoyment of elastic health, and even mock us for the moment with the belief that age is an illusion, and that 'the wild freshness' of the morning of life has not yet passed away for ever. Above our heads is the arch of the sky, around us the ocean, rolling free and fresh as it rolled a million years ago, and our spirits catch a contagion from the elements. Our step on the boards recovers its buoyancy. We are rocked to rest at night by a gentle movement which soothes you into the dreamless sleep of childhood, and we wake with the certainty that we are beyond the reach of the postman. We are shut off, in a Catholic retreat, from the worries and anxieties of the world."

This is not the language of a man who ever suffered seriously from sea-sickness, and Froude's face had an open-air look which never suggested "the unexhilarating atmosphere of a library." But he was of course a laborious student, and nothing refreshed him like a voyage. On the yacht of his old friend Lord Ducie, as Enthusiastic a sailor and fisherman as himself, he made several journeys to Norway, and caught plenty of big salmon. He has done ample justice to these expeditions in the last volume of his essays, which contains The Spanish Story of the Armada. A country where the mountains are impassable, and the fiords the only roads, just suited his taste. It even inspired him with a poem, Rornsdal Fiord, which appeared in Blackwood for April, 1883, and it gave him health, which is not always, like poetry, a pure gift of nature.

The life of society, and of towns, never satisfied Froude. Apart from his genius and his training, he was a country gentleman, and felt most at home when he was out of doors.

From Panshanger he wrote to Lady Derby:

"How well I understand what you felt sitting on the top of the Pyrenees. We men are but a sorry part of the creation. Now and then there comes to us a breath out of another order of things; a sudden perception—coming we cannot tell how—of the artificial and contemptible existence we are all living; a longing to be out of it and have done with it—by a pistol-shot if nothing else will do. I continually wonder at myself for remaining in London when I can go where I please, and take with me all the occupations I am fit for. Alas! it is oneself that one wants really to be rid of. If we did not ourselves share in the passions and follies that are working round us we should not be touched by them. I have made up my mind to leave it all, at all events, as soon as Mr. Carlyle is gone; but the enchantment which scenery, grand or beautiful, or which simple country life promises at a distance, will never abide—let us be where we will. It comes in moments like a revelation; like the faces of those whom we have loved and lost; which pass before us, and we stretch our hands to clasp them and they are gone. I came here yesterday for two or three days. The house is full of the young generation. They don't attract me .... Whatever their faults, diffidence is not one of them. Macaulay's doctrine of the natural superiority of each new generation to its predecessor seems most heartily accepted and believed. The superb pictures in the house are a silent protest against the cant of progress. You look into the faces of the men and the women on the walls and can scarcely believe they are the same race with us. I have sometimes thought 'the numbers' of the elect have been really fulfilled, and that the rest of us are left to gibber away an existence back into an apehood which we now recognise as our real primitive type."

From the Molt, on the other hand, he wrote:

"It is near midnight. I have just come in from the terrace. The moon is full over the sea, which is glittering as if it was molten gold. The rocks and promontories stand out dear and ghost-like. There is not a breath to rustle the leaves or to stir the painted wash upon the shore. Men and men's doings, and their speeches and idle excitement, seem all poor, transient, and contemptible. Sea and rocks and moonlight looked just as they look to-night before Adam sinned in Paradise. They remain—we come and go, hardly more enduring than the moth that flutters in through the window, and we are hardly of more consequence."



CHAPTER X

THE OXFORD PROFESSORSHIP

ON the 16th of March, 1892, Froude's old antagonist, Freeman, who had been Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford since Stubbs's elevation to the Episcopal Bench in 1884, died suddenly in Spain. The Prime Minister, who was also Chancellor of the University, offered the vacant Chair to Froude, and after some hesitation Froude accepted it. The doubt was due to his age. "There are seventy-four reasons against it," he said. Fortunately he yielded. "The temptation of going back to Oxford in a respectable way," he wrote to Skelton, "was too much for me. I must just do the best I can, and trust that I shall not be haunted by Freeman's ghost." Lord Salisbury did a bold thing when he appointed Froude successor to Freeman. Froude had indeed a more than European reputation as a man of letters, and was acknowledged to be a master of English prose. But he was seventy-four, five years older than Freeman, and he had never taught in his life, except as tutor for a very brief time in two private families. The Historical School at Oxford had been trained to believe that Stubbs was the great historian, that Freeman was his prophet, and that Froude was not an historian at all. Lord Salisbury of course knew better, for it was at Hatfield that some of Froude's most thorough historical work had been done. Still, it required some courage to fly in the face of all that was pedantic in Oxford, and to nominate in Freeman's room the writer that Freeman had spent the best years of his life in "belabouring." Some critics attributed the selection to Lord Salisbury's sardonic humour, or pronounced that, as Lamb said of Coleridge's metaphysics, "it was only his fun." Some stigmatised it as a party job. Gladstone's nominee Freeman, had been a Home Ruler, Froude was a Unionist; what could be clearer than the motive? But both nominations could be defended on their own merits, and a Regius Professorship should not be the monopoly of a clique.

Lord Salisbury's choice of Froude was indeed, like Lord Rosebery's subsequent choice of Lord Acton for Cambridge, an example which justified the patronage of the Crown. A Prime Minister has more courage than an academic board, and is guided by larger considerations. Froude was one of the most distinguished living Oxonians, and yet Oxford had not even given him an honorary degree. Membership the Scottish Universities Commission in 1876 was the only official acknowledgment of his services to culture that he had ever received, and that was more of an obligation than a compliment. "Froude," said Jowett, "is a man of genius. He has been abominably treated." Lord Salisbury had made amends. Himself a man of the highest intellectual distinction, apart from the offices he happened to hold, he had promoted Froude to great honour in the place he loved best, and the most eminent of living English historians returned to Oxford in the character which was his due.

The new Professor gave up his house in London, and settled at Cherwell Edge, near the famous bathing-place called Parson' s Pleasure.* He found the University a totally different place from what it was when he first knew it. Dr. Arnold, who died in 1842, the year after his appointment, was the earliest Professor whose lectures were famous, or were attended, and Dr. Arnold did exactly as he pleased. There was no Board of Studies to supervise him, and it was thought rather good of a Professor to lecture at all. Now the Board of Studies was omnipotent, and a Professor's time was not his own. He was bound in fact to give forty-two lectures in a year, and to lecture twice a week for seven weeks in two terms out of the three. The prospect appalled him. "I never," he wrote to Max Muller,+ "I never gave a lecture on an historical subject without a fortnight or three weeks of preparation, and to undertake to deliver forty-two such lectures in six months would be to undertake an impossibility. If the University is to get any good out of me, I must work in my own way." He did not, however, work in his own way, and the University got a great deal of good out of him all the same.

— * The house is now, oddly enough, a Catholic convent. + April 18th, 1892. —

Lord Salisbury, in making Froude the offer, spoke apologetically of the stipend as small, but added that the work would be light. The accomplished Chancellor was imperfectly informed. The stipend was small enough: the work was extremely hard for a man of seventy-four. Froude's conscientiousness in preparation was almost excessive. Every lecture was written out twice from notes for improvement of style and matter. His audiences were naturally large, for not since the days Mr. Goldwin Smith, who resigned in 1866, had anything like Froude's lectures been heard at Oxford. When I was an undergraduate, in the seventies, we all of course knew that Professor Stubbs had a European reputation for learning. But, except to those reading for the History School, Stubbs was a name, and nothing more. Nobody ever dreamt of going to hear him. Crowds flocked to hear Froude, as in my time they flocked to hear Ruskin.

One sex was as well represented as the other. Froude had left the dons celibate and clerical. He found them, for the most part, married and lay. There was every variety of opinion in the common rooms, and every variety of perambulators in the parks. London hours had been adopted, and the society, though by no means frivolous or ostentatious, was anything rather than monastic. At Oxford, as in London, Froude was almost always the best talker in the room. He had travelled, not so much in Europe as in America and the more distant parts of the British Empire. He had read almost everything, and known almost every one. His boyish enthusiasm for deeds of adventure was not abated. He believed in soldiers and sailors, especially sailors. Creeds, Parliaments, and constitutions did not greatly attract or keenly interest him. Old as he was by the almanac, he retained the buoyant freshness of youth, and loved watching the eights on the river as much as any undergraduate. The chapel services, especially at Magdalen, brought back old times and tastes. As Professor of History he became a Fellow of Oriel, where he had been a commoner in the thick of the Oxford Movement. If the Tractarian tutors could have heard the conversation of their successors, they would have been astonished and perplexed. Even the Essayists and Reviewers would have been inclined to wish that some things could be taken for granted. Modern Oxford was not altogether congenial to Froude. While he could not be called orthodox, he detested materialism, and felt sympathy, if not agreement, with Evangelical Protestants. Like Bacon, he would rather believe all the legends of the Talmud than that this universal frame was without a mind.

Of the questions which absorbed High Churchmen he said, "One might as well be interested in the amours of the heathen gods." On the other hand, he had no sympathy with the new school of specialists, the devotees of original research. He believed in education as a training of the mental faculties, and thought that undergraduates should learn to use their own minds. "I can see what books the boys have read," he observed, after examining for the Arnold Prize, "but I cannot see that they make any use of what they have read. They seem to have power of assimilation." The study of authorities at first hand, to which he had given so much of his own time, he regarded as the work of a few, and as occupation for later years. The faculty of thinking, and the art of writing, could not be learned too soon.

Few indeed were the old friends who remained at Oxford to welcome him back. Max Muller was the most intimate of them, and among his few surviving contemporaries was Bartholomew Price, Master of Pembroke, a clergyman more distinguished in mathematics than in theology. The Rector of Exeter* gave a cordial welcome to the most illustrious of its former Fellows. The Provost of Oriel+ was equally gracious. In the younger generation of Heads his chief friends were the Dean of Christ Church,^ now Bishop of Oxford, and the President of Magdalen.# But the Oxford of 1892 was so unlike the Oxford of 1849 that Froude might well feel like one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. And if there had been many changes in Oxford, there had been some also in himself. He had long ceased to be, so far as he ever was, a clergyman. He had been twice married, and twice left a widower. His children had grown up. His fame as an author extended far beyond the limits of his own country, and of Europe. He had made Carlyle's acquaintance, become his intimate friend, and written a biography of him which numbered as many readers as The French Revolution itself. He had lectured in the United States, and challenged the representatives of Irish Nationalism on the history of their own land. He had visited most of the British Colonies, and promoted to the best of his ability the Federation of South Africa. Few men had seen more, or read more, or enjoyed a wider experience of the world. What were the lessons which after such a life he chiefly desired to teach young Englishmen who were studying the past? The value of their religious reformation, and the achievements of their naval heroes. The Authorised Version and the Navy were in his mind the symbols of England's greatness. Greater Britain, including Britain beyond the seas, was the goal of his hopes for the future progress of the race. There were in Oxford more learned men than Froude, Max Muller for one. There was not a single Professor, or tutor, who could compare with him for the multitude and variety of his experience. Undergraduates were fascinated by him, as everybody else was. The dignitaries of the place, except a stray Freemanite here and there, recognised the advantage of having so distinguished a personage in so conspicuous a Chair. Even in a Professor other qualities are required besides erudition. Stubbs's Constitutional History of England may be a useful book for students. Unless or until it is rewritten, it can have no existence for the general reader; and if the test of impartiality be applied, Stubbs is as much for the Church against the State as Froude is for the State against the Church. When Mr. Goldwin Smith resigned the Professorship of Modern History, or contemplated resigning it Stubbs wrote to Freeman, "It would be painful to have Froude, and worse still to have anybody else." He received the appointment himself, and held it for eighteen years, when he gave way to Freeman, and more than a quarter of century elapsed before the painful event occurred. By that time Stubbs was Bishop of Oxford, translated from Chester, and had shown what a fatal combination for a modern prelate is learning with humour. If Froude had been appointed twenty years earlier, on the completion of his twelve volumes, he might have made Oxford the great historical school of England. But it was too late. The aftermath was wonderful, and the lectures he delivered at Oxford show him at his best. But the effort was too much tor him, and hastened his end.