Born, at Dartington, Devon, 23 April 1818. At Westminster School, 1830–33. Matric. Oriel Coll., Oxford, 10 Dec. 1835. B.A., 28 April 1842; Chancellor’s Eng. Essay Prize, 1842; Fellow of Exeter Coll., 1842–49; M.A., 2 March 1843. Ordained Deacon, 1844. Contrib. to “Westminster Rev.” Rector of St. Andrews Univ., and Hon. LL.D., 23 March 1869. For some time editor of “Fraser’s Mag.” Resigned Deaconship, under Clerical Disabilities Act, 21 Sept. 1872. Lectured in U.S.A., 1872. On political mission to Cape of Good Hope, Dec. 1874 to March 1875. Travelled in Australia, 1885; and in West Indies. Regius Prof. of Modern Hist. Oxford, 1892. Died 20 Oct. 1894. Works: “Shadows of the Clouds” (under pseud: “Zeta”), 1847; “A Sermon … on the death of the Rev. G. M. Coleridge,” 1847; “The Nemesis of Faith,” 1849 (2nd edn. same year); “The Book of Job” (from “Westm. Rev.”), 1854; “Suggestions on the best means of teaching English History,” 1855; “History of England” (12 vols.), 1856–70; “Short Studies on Great Subjects” (2 vols.), 1867; second ser., 1871; third ser., 1877; fourth ser., 1883; “Inaugural Address” at St. Andrews, 1869; “The Cat’s Pilgrimage,” 1870; “Calvinism,” 1871; “The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century” (3 vols.), 1872–74; “Cæsar,” 1879; “Bunyan,” 1880; “Two Lectures on South Africa,” 1880; “Thomas Carlyle: history of the first forty years of his life” (2 vols.), 1882; “Luther,” 1883; “Thomas Carlyle: history of his life in London” (2 vols.), 1884; “Oceana,” 1886; “The English in the West Indies,” 1888 (2nd edn. same year); “Liberty and Property” [1888]; “The Two Chiefs of Dunboy,” 1889; “Lord Beaconsfield,” 1890; “The Divorce of Catharine of Arragon,” 1891; “The Spanish Story of the Armada,” 1892 (2nd edn. same year); “Life and Letters of Erasmus,” 1894 (2nd edn. same year). Posthumous: “English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century,” 1895; “Lectures on the Council of Trent,” 1896 (2nd edn. same year). He edited: “The Pilgrim,” by W. Thomas, 1861; Carlyle’s “Reminiscences,” 1881–82; J. W. Carlyle’s “Letters and Memorials,” 1883.

Personal

  Mr. Froude to me is simply the writer of certain books. Whatever I have said about him has arisen naturally from his writings. I believe those writings to be, in more ways than one, misleading and dangerous, and I have spoken accordingly. But of Mr. Froude, apart from his writings, I know nothing, except one or two facts which are known to everyone. Mr. Froude thinks that I feel for him “personal dislike,” if not “fanatical hatred.” Such a feeling, in any strictly personal sense, is impossible on my part. I never saw Mr. Froude; I never had any dealings with him, except that I think he and I once, long ago, exchanged a pair of very formal letters; he has never done me personally either good or harm. The only things that I have said that could be twisted into an “invective” or “aspersions” on his personal character are two. I charged him with “fanatical hatred towards the English Church, at all times and in all characters;” I do not think that these words were too strong. Mr. Froude’s habitual way of speaking of the English Church and its ministers in all ages is a way of speaking which I should be sorry to use of Buddhist Lamas or of Mussulman Mollahs. I said, what is certainly true, that I know nothing to be compared to Mr. Froude’s ecclesiastical bitterness. I said that I guessed that such “a degree of hatred must be peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it, perhaps peculiar to the one man who first wrote ‘Lives of the Saints,’ and then ‘Shadows of the Clouds.’” The reference is to publicly known facts in Mr. Froude’s life—facts which seem to me to have had their effect on his writings…. He plainly believes himself to be an injured innocent, as he plainly believes himself to be an accurate historian. The truth is that, in controversy just as in history, Mr. Froude is pursued by his usual ill-luck—by that hard destiny which makes it impossible for him accurately to report anything. His controversial case against me now, just like his St. Alban’s Annals, or his Life of Thomas, is made up of misconceptions and misquotations of every kind.

  I do not think that a single being in Oriel interfered in the slightest degree with Anthony Froude’s religious convictions while he was there. For the time I was at college with him I had relations with him as Censor Theologicus in which capacity I might be supposed at liberty to make any demands on Anthony’s faith or submission. But all I had to do was to look over his sermon notes, and satisfy myself as well as I could that he had been at one of the university sermons, and had given some attention to it. In this capacity I can answer for it that nothing remarkable passed between me and Anthony, unless it be that Anthony, having once hurt his knee, begged leave to analyse any sermon I might name instead of walking to St. Mary’s.

  My Dear Old Man,—Yes, old we are, but there are few old men who have made such a good fight for it as you have. After all, from the first day of our life, our life is but a constant fight with death…. However, there are few men who, after that allotted time, could walk the hours that you could, and now produce another book as you have. I was so pleased to get it, and I am beginning to read it. Many thanks for it…. I hope you will go on fighting. I do the same, though one feels that, after all, the best of life is gone, and there is little left worth fighting for. Still Aunt Eh seems very happy on her small allowance of vitality.

  Froude was something more than the most accomplished prose writer of his time. He was a man of the world, who lived a full and various life. There was no trace of the bookworm on him, nothing of that awkwardness which the mere student often betrays in the company of his fellow-men and of women…. He liked out-doors, loved nature, loved certain out-door sports, and practised them. When he chose he could be a man of affairs, and had a practical business-like sagacity which did not fail him when the occasion arose.

  Mr. Froude’s death is a personal infliction upon the Old World and the New. He had many friends, and not a few enemies, in both hemispheres. He was a strenuous man who enjoyed himself in many ways, and could adapt himself to a great variety of circumstances. With sorrow he was indeed well acquainted—he knew what it was to be both bitterly disappointed and cruelly wounded. He carried about with him in all his wanderings much sad human experience; his philosophy of life was more sombre than sweet. I do not think anybody who knew him would have described him as a happy man. But for all that he managed to enjoy himself heartily enough.

  Had Arthur Stanley lived, a corner would have been found for Anthony Froude within the walls of the Abbey; but probably it is better as it is. The son of Devon will sleep the sounder “upon the beached verge of the salt flood,” within hearing of the surf that beats upon Bolt Head and the Start.

  I was ushered into the drawing-room, where were two young ladies, the daughters of Mr. Froude. The room struck me as very quaint and pretty, antique and tasteful. I was cordially welcomed, and was just enjoying a cup of tea when Mr. Froude came into the room. A fine man, above the ordinary height, and with a certain stateliness of aspect, younger-looking than I had expected. He must have been about seventy; well-knit, but slender; a fine head and brow, with abundant grey, not white, hair; handsome eyes, brown and well opened, with a certain scrutiny or watchfulness in their regard—eyes which look you well and searchingly in the face, but where you might come to see now and then a dreamy and far-off softness, telling of thoughts far from present surroundings and present companionship. The eyes did not reassure me at that first interview, though they attracted me strangely. The upper part of the face undeniably handsome and striking, but on the mouth sat a mocking bitterness, or—so it seemed to me—a sense of having weighed all things, all persons, all books, all creeds, and all the world has to give, and having found everything wanting in some essential point; a bitterness, hardly a joylessness, but an absence of sunshine in the lower part of the face. A smile without much geniality, with rather a mocking causticity, sometimes seen; and the facial lines are austere, self-contained, and marked. Laughter without mirth—I would not like to say without kindness—but Froude’s kindness always appeared to me in much quieter demonstrations. His manners struck me as particularly fine and courteous but if one was of a timid nature, one need only look in his face and fear.

  Of the group, James Anthony Froude was the oldest, and he was at Oxford just at the time when the Tractarian Movement was exciting all generous minds. Greatly under the influence of Newman in the forties, Froude took orders, and was closely connected with the High Church party. With this group Freeman also, though less prominently, was and remained allied, and his anger was excited when Froude, instead of following Newman to Rome, or staying with the agitated Anglican remnant, announced his entire defection from the religious system by the publication of the “Nemesis of Faith” in 1849. From this time forth the indignation of Freeman was concentrated and implacable, and lasted without intermission for more than forty years. The duel between these men was a matter of such constant public entertainment that it claims mention in a history, and distinctly moulded the work of both these interesting artists.

  My first recollections of Mr. Froude carry me back to some of the earlier years of my literary work in London. He used to attend occasionally at the meetings of the Newspaper Press Fund Committee, where his handsome, thoughtful face, his retiring ways, and his grave meditative demeanour reminded me somehow—I cannot tell why—of Nathaniel Hawthorne, as I had known him years before in Liverpool. But Froude had really none of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shyness and love for habitual silence. His manner when he got into conversation was always bright and genial, often became even careless and joyous, and presented a curious contrast with the gravity and stillness of his habitual demeanour.

  My friendship with Froude lasted as long as he lived. He was a warm and sincere friend, always ready with word or deed to help one who needed it, and one of the men for whom I retain the warmest feeling of all I knew at this epoch of my life.

  That he could be very charming in personal intercourse, and that he was cordially beloved by men who knew him most intimately, is nearly all that I can say. I may add, however, one remark: Froude impressed casual observers as somehow enigmatic. He was reticent to the outer circle at least, and incurred the usual penalty. Men who are shy and sensitive are often misjudged by their neighbours: they are supposed to be supercilious because they shrink from irritating topics, and cynical because they keep their enthusiasm for the few really sympathetic hearers. I have heard Froude accused of Jesuitism, of insinuating opinons which he would shrink from openly expressing, and even of a malicious misrepresentation of the man whom he chose as his prophet. I believe such a view to be entirely mistaken.

The Nemesis of Faith, 1849

  S. Sutton came in, and we had a talk about Anthony Froude’s astonishing book, “The Nemesis of Faith,” which has made an ugly stir, and has been publicly burned at Oxford, and so on. I guess it is a legitimate outcome of the Oxford party’s own dealings; for I remember how a few years since he was warmly associated with them, soon afterwards employed in writing some of the lives of the saints, then by degrees growing disgusted at the falseness of their modus operandi. All this must have given what was good and Truth-seeking in him a terrible shake, and now comes out this “Nemesis,” which is a wild protest against all authority, Divine and human.

  In “Nemesis of Faith” he controverted, under the form of a novelette, the inspiration of the Bible and revealed religion. In these Darwinian days such a work would produce little sensation. In those days of lingering orthodoxy, and coming from a clerical pen, it produced a marked sensation, not, we may suppose, greatly to the dissatisfaction of the writer, since spiritual agony of a very serious kind is not apt to vent itself in novelettes. The “Nemesis of Faith” and the pair of novelettes entitled “Shadows of the Clouds” are beautifully written, though rather lachrymose, and, taken together with Froude’s later tale, “The Two Chiefs of Dunboy,” and with the powers of delineating character, emotion, and action displayed in his histories, seem to show he would have been very great as a writer of fiction.

  A book [“Nemesis of Faith”] which at present would call forth no remark, no no controversy, was discussed in all the newspapers, and raised a storm all over England. Bishops shook their heads, nay even their fists, at the young heretic, and even those among his contemporaries at Oxford who ought to have sympathized with him, and were in fact quite as unorthodox as he was, did not dare to stand up for him or lend him a helping hand. Stanley alone never said an unkind word of him. The worst was that Froude not only lost his fellowship, but when he had accepted the Headmastership of a college far away in Tasmania, his antagonists did not rest till his appointment had been cancelled. Froude unfortunately was poor, and his father, a venerable and well-to-do Archdeacon, was so displeased with his son that he stopped the allowance which he had formerly made him. It seems almost as if the poverty of a victim gave increased zest and enjoyment to his pursuers. Froude had to sell his books one by one, and was trying hard to support himself by his pen. This was then not so easy a matter as it is now. At that very time, however, I received a cheque for £200 from an unknown hand, with a request that I would hand it to Froude to show him that he had friends and sympathisers who would not forsake him. It was not till many years later that I discovered the donor, and Froude was then able to return him the money which at the time had saved him from drowning.

History of England, 1856–70

  You are really unjust to Froude. Even if his idea of Henry VIII is mistaken, his picture of English life is not affected by that. There are chapters in his work that are really masterly—the Irish rebellion, the Charterhouse Monks; and he has described the secret workings of the Reformation among the common people with genuine feeling and sympathy. Froude’s idea of Henry VIII seems to me too problematical. But at all events Henry was one of the most popular kings, and has his admirers not only in Froude but in his people, and in such historians as Sharon Turner, and such philosophers as Carlyle. I have a great affection for Froude, for I know him with all his faults, and know that he prays and works. Kingsley is a more brilliant nature, but his relation to Froude has never been that of a teacher; on the contrary, that of an admirer.

  I am in Froude’s eleventh volume, which you cannot lay down when you have once taken it up. It is only disagreeable to find Elizabeth growing more and more odious at every page of her history.

  He has imagination; he has that sympathetic and dramatic instinct which enables a man to enter into the emotions and motives, the likings and dislikings of the people of a past age. His style is penetrating and thrilling; his language often rises to the dignity of a poetic eloquence. The figures he conjures up are always the semblances of real men and women. They are never wax-work, or lay figures, or skeletons clothed in words, or purple rags of description stuffed out with straw into an awkward likeness to the human form. The one distinct impression we carry away from Froude’s history is that of the living reality of his figures…. What is there in literature more powerful, more picturesque, more complete and dramatic than Froude’s portrait of Mary Queen of Scots? It stands out and glows and darkens with all the glare and gloom of a living form, that now appears in sun and now in shadow. It is almost as perfect and as impressive as any Titian. But can any reasonable person doubt that the picture on the whole is a dramatic and not an historical study?

  Since the appearance of Macaulay’s great work no volumes on English history have awakened so great a popular interest as these. The period of the Reformation in England is not only of great political importance, but is filled with such incidents as encourage a spirited narration. The characteristics of the period, therefore, in the hands of a literary artist of Mr. Froude’s skill could not fail to result in the production of a work of great popularity. The author’s style is remarkable for its perspicuity, his narrative is vivacious, his theories are ingenious, and his sympathies are intense. In consequence of these peculiarities, the pages of the work often have more of the characteristics of an essay than of a history, and the author appears to write as an advocate rather than a judge. While these features increase the spirit of the narration, they detract from the value of the work as an authority…. Numerous errors have been brought to light by the vigorous criticisms to which Mr. Froude’s work has been subjected. But the principal fault of the history is not in its errors in matters of detail so much as in its constant tendency to one-sidedness. The likes and dislikes of the author are too intense to allow him ever to be strictly judicial. Hence, while this history never fails to interest, it always leaves the impression that there is still something of importance to be said in reply.

  I think our friend Mr. Froude, whose history we all read, is a little unfair toward Queen Bess, as he was a little over-fair, and white-wash-i-ly disposed in the case of Henry VIII.: both tendencies being attributable to a mania this shrewd historian has—for unripping and oversetting established forms of belief. I think that he not only bears with a greedy zeal upon her too commonly manifest selfishness and heartlessness, but that he enjoys putting little vicious dabs of bad color upon her picture—as when he says, “she spat, and swore like a trooper.” Indeed it would seem that this clever biographer had carried a good deal of his fondness for “Vicious dabs” in portraiture into his more recent post-mortem exhibits; as if it were his duty and pleasure to hang out all sorts of soiled linen, in his office of Clean Scrubber. Yet, I wish to speak with all respect of the distinguished historian—whose vigor is conspicuous—whose industry is remarkable, whose crisp sentences are delightful, but whose accuracy is not of the surest; and whose conscience does, I think, sometimes go lame—under strain of his high, rhetorical canter.

  A very remarkable book, perhaps since Macaulay’s time the most excellently written historical work that has been added to English literature. Mr. Froude is a strong partisan—probably his work would not be nearly as interesting if he were not so—and he had collected much new and valuable matter from the archives of Simancas. The bias, however, of his writing is perhaps almost too strong, and it is difficult to thoroughly appreciate his work unless one entirely agrees with him. It had been our lot to enter deeply into a small incident contained in the extensive scope of his “History;” we afterwards read his account of the same episode founded undoubtedly upon the original papers we had been studying, and we were lost in wonder at the extraordinary art with which he had developed the dry bones of a little considered incident into a very picturesque passage, and the strange bent of mind which had obscured all but one side of the story of this inconsiderable event. But as we have often repeated, facts really depend on the way they are looked at, and Mr. Froude has unquestionably made admirable use of his materials in forming so eminently readable a history.

  In spite of their literary merits, which are unquestionably great, the volumes comprising the reign of Henry VIII. must, as a history, be laid aside. The subject, so full of tragic and criminal interest, still waits for an historian. When he comes we wish him Froude’s narrative and pictorial power combined with the strict adherence to fact and a sound sense of justice…. Froude has also, it must be said, given way to prejudice—perhaps it would be fairer as well as kinder to say, to the influence of his creative imagination—in the case of Mary, Queen of Scots. He has dressed her up as an incarnation of guile and falsehood…. The ruthlessness of his antipathy to the Queen of Scots is shown in the execution scene, where he tells us, and with evident gusto, that as the headsman held up the head the wig fell off and showed that the enchantress was an old woman made up to look young and wore false hair. That scene, however, and, in a different way, the defeat of the Armada, are masterpieces of description. The gifts of pictorial and narrative power, of skill in painting character, of clear, eloquent, and graceful language, Froude had to a degree which places him in the first rank of literary artists. That which he had not in so abundant a measure was the gift of truth. Happily for him, nine readers out of ten would care more for the gifts of which he had the most than for the gift of which he had the least.

  If the average reader were asked to name Froude’s special quality, he would probably reply that he is uniformly interesting. With some confidence one may hazard the guess that the twelve volumes of the “History of England” have been read from cover to cover by more persons than any other consecutive English work of equal length written during the last half-century.

  The critics were divided. Froude was a man who usually either carried his readers wholly with him or alienated them. Those who loved clear, vigorous, pointed English, keen intelligence and life-like portraiture, were delighted with the book. Students, familiar with the original documents and able to criticise details, regarded it with very different eyes. Both sides were right in their principal assertions, and both were prone to forget that there was another aspect of the case. On the one hand, it has been established beyond the reach of reasonable dispute that Froude was habitually and grossly inaccurate. It is indeed doubtful whether any other historian, with any title to be considered great, can be charged with so many grave errors. Froude is inaccurate first of all in his facts. He does not take the trouble to verify, he misquotes, he is not careful to weigh evidence. But moreover, he is inaccurate in what may be called his colour. He paints his picture in the light of his own emotions and prejudices, he is rather the impassioned advocate than the calm judge. He would not only have acknowledged this, but he would have defended himself; and there is something to be said for his view…. A history is a piece of literature as well as a record of facts; and as literature Froude’s work stands very high. In the first place, he is great in style. Not that his English is of the kind that calls attention to itself. It is seldom magnificent, but it is always adequate, and the reader never feels himself jarred by want of taste or befogged by obscurity either of thought or expression.

  History, indeed, has never enlisted a more brilliant pen, and whatever may be thought regarding Froude’s merits as a working historian, no one will dispute the high distinction of his style, or his supreme excellence in the region of historic art. It is true that nothing like the popularity of Macaulay has fallen to his lot, nor can we wonder. Nevertheless, not even in Macaulay’s hands has the drama of history been more vividly portrayed, or its characters and events been made to appeal more strongly to the imagination of the reader. Froude’s colours glow upon the canvas with an extraordinary brilliancy, and in spite of protests, burn themselves into the memory, so that the historic figures already imprinted there insensibly take tone from the stronger portraits which he has placed beside them.

  As a writer of English prose he had few equals in the nineteenth century; and the ease and gracefulness of his style, his faculty for dramatic presentation, and command of the art of picturesque description have secured for his “History” a permanent place in English prose literature. On the other hand, while appealing to the prejudices of a large class of readers and to the æsthetic sense of all, he has failed to convince students of the fidelity of his pictures or the truth of his conclusions. Indeed, Froude himself hardly seems to have regarded truth as attainable in history.

Thomas Carlyle, 1882–84

  We have vainly striven to fashion some conceivable hypothesis why Mr. Froude has not done what any one else would have done. He had here the most valuable materials for the biography of the man he wished to commemorate; he is endowed by nature with all the powers needed for a worthy commemoration; and he has so used these materials, that when the biography comes, all his great literary power will hardly prevent his work from falling flat. He has acted like the discoverer of a gold mine, who should cart away tons of the earth in which the ore is embedded before beginning to separate any. He has given wanton and reckless pain, has hurt tender recollections and sacred feelings, and he has bereaved us all of a noble ideal that was most dear and precious; but we must remember that he has not yielded to any comprehensible temptation in doing so; on the contrary, he has made the task he has yet to fulfill less interesting, both to himself and his readers. It is not as in the publication of a book to which these Reminiscences have been compared—the Greville Memoirs. They, at least, were a contribution, of a certain kind, to literature; it never occurred to the reader that any other use could be made of them than giving them with more or less revision to the public…. We write thus with no intention of sarcasm, but in a real desire to discover that an eminent historian has not acted with reckless cruelty in giving this book to the world. If he really knew what he was doing, it was an act of literary cruelty in some respects without a parallel.

  I humbly think his “Reminiscences” as given to the world by his executor, Mr. Froude, is a very unsatisfactory book, and does not show the sunny side of his character—that society would have lost very little if it had been suppressed; indeed, the writer himself seems haunted by a suspicion that it would have been “so best.” It inculcates no sentiment akin to religion, impresses no feeling of loyalty, and if any of the virtues are advocated it is so rather in the manner of a lawyer who finds a few words concerning them in his brief. His domestic relations, I have reason to know, were not healthful, and his frequent allusions to his wife, whom he here calls his “darling,” and concerning whom he writes much, but says little, I fear are to be regarded rather as a confession that requires absolution than the outpouring of a loving soul that perpetually mourns separation, while not a solitary word occurs to intimate the hope of a reunion hereafter. If “truth will be cheaply bought at any price,” so well; but I greatly fear the book teaches more of what should be avoided than of what it would be wise to imitate and copy.

  I am in the midst of Froude—two new volumes of Carlyle. Very interesting I find them, and him more problematic than ever, but fine on the whole. A kind of sentimental Ajax furens. I don’t think that sincerity towards his hero justifies Froude in printing Carlyle’s diatribes (result of dyspepsia mainly)—about Gladstone, for example. In a world where there is so much unavoidable pain, why add to the avoidable? Gladstone won’t mind, but his wife and daughters?

  What a strange, wild production is poor Carlyle’s “Remains,” and yet what a genius he was! (A book called “Obiter Dicta” is worth reading about him and others). What amused me most was that Froude tells us he came in his last days to think Athanasius was quite right about the “Ομοουσία,” and that Christianity would have become a myth without it. Froude I consider his bête noire, delighting to drag out all his coarsest dicta.

  Jeremy Bentham, in the interest of mankind and to the furtherance of science, left his body to be dealt with by the surgeons, and then to be preserved to the gaze of the world in the museum of University College. Thomas Carlyle has chosen to leave his life and his home, his aches and his sores, his grumblings and his washing-bills, to the impartial verdict of posterity. In Mr. Froude he has found a trustee who is ready to carry out his wishes without flinching. The Shakespearean wealth of imagery that Carlyle carried about with him into every detail of the supper-table or the wardrobe, the scrupulosity of the disciple, and his abundant power as a colourist, have contrived to present a series of pictures which, to those not accustomed to the methods of psychological portrait painting, may give the effect of a caricature. It is as if the living body of Thomas Carlyle were subjected to the resources of modern science, and the untrained public were called in to stand at the instruments. The microphone is used to enlarge his speech. The grunt or the pshaw that escapes the best of us at times is heard, by Mr. Froude’s scientific appliances, as the roaring of a wounded buffalo. The old man’s laugh, which in life was so cheery, comes up to us as out of a phonograph, harsh as the mockery of the devils that Dante heard in Malebolge. The oxyhydrogen microscope is applied to the pimples on his chin, or the warts on his thumb, and they loom to us as big as wens or cancers. The electric light is thrown upon the bared nerve; the photograph reveals the excoriations or callosities of every inch of skin. Poor Swift suffered something of the kind, and Rousseau; and one cannot but regret that, to a brain so far more sane, to a nature so far more robust than theirs, it has been needful to apply a somewhat similar resource.

  Hardly had the sods begun to join themselves over the grave in the Ecclefechan burying-ground when there came forth, under Mr. Froude’s editorship, hurriedly printed and full of the most slovenly press-errors, those two volumes of Carlyle’s own “Reminiscences,” consisting of papers selected from his manuscripts, which are certainly among the most interesting things Carlyle ever wrote, and would have been received as such with delight by all the world, had it not been for unexpected portions and particles of their contents the publication of which acted in many quarters like the opening of a bag of wasps…. It is these nine volumes of Carlyle Reminiscence and Biography, edited or written by Mr. Froude, that have done the mischief, if mischief it be. The Carlyle of the present day for all the world is not that ideal sage and patriarch of letters that went to his grave in peaceful dignity and amid universal honours four years ago, but is Mr. Froude’s Carlyle, the Carlyle of those nine volumes…. Wherever Mr. Froude himself becomes the narrator or commentator, his mood is too uniformly like that of a man driving a hearse. The contrast in this respect between what is from his own pen and much of the documentary material he digests and edits is very remarkable. There is gloom enough, seriousness enough, in the matter of the documents; but they are not all gloomy or serious. They abound with the picturesque, the comic, the startlingly grotesque, or the quaintly pleasant; some of them actually swim in humour, or sparkle with wit. These Mr. Froude faithfully prints, and perhaps relishes; but they do not seem to have any influence on his own gait or countenance in his office of biographer. This is unfortunate. No mind not profoundly in earnest itself could understand Carlyle or represent him properly to others; but, if ever there was a life that required also some considerable amount of humour in the bystander for correct apprehension and interpretation of its singularities it was Carlyle’s.

  On December 23, 1880, Froude informed me that he had begun to print Carlyle’s “Reminiscences.” He had allowed me to read the earlier sketches some years previously, and I had been delighted by their idiomatic force and freshness. The pictures of the old homely Scottish life were, it seemed to me, racy of the soil. Now he asked me to revise them as they went through the press, with reference more particularly to various Scotch names and idioms in the early sheets. “I therefore venture to hope that you will look through the pages, and mark anything that seems doubtful to you.” This I did, aided by Dr. John Brown. Only the proofs of the Scotch section of the book were corrected by me: had I seen the others I might possibly have suggested the omission of one or two passages; but surely the “ootbrak” of outraged decorum which followed the publication was out of all proportion to the offence,—if offence there was.

  The biography throughout shows that he was even keenly sensible to Carlyle’s arrogance, and yet felt it as a valuable support. Carlyle might be rough, but he could sweep away any misgivings with delightful positiveness. When Froude became aware of the revelations in Mrs. Carlyle’s journal he could feel, even more keenly than most people, the painful side. But then they illustrated just his masterful temper, which, if sometimes startling, was yet so comfortable a support to a weaker brother…. He went on to read earlier letters with the preconception and, according to the best authority to misrepresent the whole story materially, and to Carlyle’s disadvantage. Such a faculty for misrepresentation is too often shown in his history, and the fact shows that he might yield to it without any bad intention. In truth, he seems to have expected that his readers would be as ready as himself to condone Carlyle’s faults of temper, and regard his posthumous confession as so “supremely honourable” as to be an ample atonement for the offence. He, unluckily, succeeded in exaggerating the faults, without carrying his readers along with him in the implied apology. They did not appreciate the charm, which to him was so obvious, of the despotic side of Carlyle’s character. That was the real difficulty. Froude was, I believe, as loyal to his master’s memory as he had been affectionate to him in life. The loyalty did not prevent him from facing the shades as well as the lights, and he was quite right in his desire to delineate both in his portrait. What he did not see was that the merit which, for him, altogether overbalanced the faults, was not a merit at all for the outside world.

General

  The Robert-Houdin of modern English writers, and author of that popular serial novel grimly entitled “The History of England,” appears to be only at home in an element of paradox, and in the clever accomplishments of some literary tour de force. “Calvinism: An Address delivered at St. Andrews, March 17, 1871, by James Anthony Froude, M.A.,” is his latest performance. Always liberal in his assumption of premises, no one need be surprised that the author should claim Calvinism to have been “accepted for two centuries in all Protestant countries as the final account of the relations between man and his Maker,” and should represent that “the Catholics whom it overthrew” assail it, etc…. Mr. Froude does not appear by his writings to have an unvarying standard of morality. Apparently incapable of judging actions as they are, he measures them by his personal like or dislike of the actors. Always the advocate, never the philosophical historian, he presents but one side of a case. Certain personages in history are with him always right, certain others are always wrong. Even the crimes of the former are meritorious, or, at worse, indifferent, while the indifferent sayings and doings of the latter are sins of deepest die. We may see this tendency exemplified in the address before us which seeks to make Calvinism lovely. The author says, in plain terms, that it was not more criminal in a Calvinist to burn a witch than for any other person to invite a spirit-rapper to dinner. Of course he expresses the opinion euphuistically and in mellifluous phrase, but, nevertheless, he does express it.

  It is a startling and incongruous conjunction in the theological sphere. The men are both unusually distinguished in their respective ages, both are stars, and stars of the first magnitude, but they move in diametrically opposite spheres—wide as the poles asunder. East and west, north and south, do not indicate a more thorough and irreconcilable antithesis than “The Nemesis of Faith” and Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion.” One is forced to cast about, to discover, if it be possible, what could have attracted or entrapped a man so unequivocally pronounced elsewhere, into a flagrant self-contradiction. Had the northern air, the keen religious atmosphere, surcharged with Calvinism, which envelops, not St. Andrews alone, but Scotland in its entire length and breath, touched and turned the brain of the athletic doubter? Be it as it may, here is pro tanto an avowed vindication and glorification of Calvin and Calvinism by one who is deemed to stand at the extreme opposite pole from both.

  It is a melancholy essay [“Progress”], for its tone is that of profound skepticism as to certain influences and means of progress upon which we in this country most rely. With the illustrative arguments of Mr. Froude’s essay I do not purpose specially to meddle; I recall it to the attention of the reader as a representative type of skepticism regarding progress which is somewhat common among intellectual men, and is not confined to England…. If Mr. Froude’s essay is anything but an exhibition of the scholarly weapons of criticism, it is the expression of a profound disbelief in the intellectual education of the masses of the people…. Mr. Froude runs lightly over a list of subjects upon which the believer in progress relies for his belief, and then says of them that the world calls this progress, he calls it only change.

  Some of his dramatic passages are equal to any in our historical literature.

  Mr. Froude ranks among historical writers. His attractive style, his vivid imagination, his warm partisanship are admitted; his historical accuracy has been questioned. Meline, in defending Mary, Queen of Scots, against Froude, obtained from the State Paper Office documents cited by this English writer, and proved, as English judges mildly expressed it, that Mr. Froude did not seem to know the value of quotation marks; in fact, that he garbled documents by suppressing passages and making paragraphs read on consecutively which in the original had no relation to each other. Of our present position Mr. Froude speaks vaguely. But as a prophet he is sublime. Historian he may not be; philosophical observer of the present he may not be; but as a prophet he surpasses all we have hitherto read. He foresees the future with unerring eye. What we American Catholics will do under any possible contingency, at any period of time, is as clear to him as noonday. Starting with the absurd theory that we Catholics are opposed to the Constitution, and with the false assertion that our Church had condemned it, he cries like some tragic ranter on a provincial stage: “Give them the power and the Constitution will be gone.”… From the specimen afforded, we must decline to consider Mr. Froude as an historian, at least where American topics are concerned, and we submit the question, with all deference, to the various historical societies from Maine to California, convinced that they will decide as we have.

  Had Mr. Froude’s articles on “Romanism and the Irish Race in the United States” appeared anonymously, they would have been allowed to pass by unheeded, as a very ordinary contribution to anti-Catholic sensational literature. Our ears are so familiar with the outcries and screams of the alarmist that we do not take the trouble to stop to ask him for the grounds of his terror.

  Mr. Froude is probably the most popular historian since Macaulay, although his popularity is far indeed from that of Macaulay. He is widely read where Mr. Freeman would seem intolerably learned and pedantic, and Mr. Lecky too philosophic to be lively. His books have been the subject of the keenest controversy. His picture of Henry VIII. set all the world wondering. It set an example and became a precedent. It founded a new school in history and biography—what we may call the paradoxical school; the school which sets itself to discover that some great man had all the qualities for which the world had never before given him credit, and none of those which it had always been content to recognize as his undoubted possession. The virtues of the misprized Tiberius; the purity and meekness of Lucrezia Borgia; the disinterestedness and forbearance of Charles of Burgundy: these and other such historical discoveries naturally followed Mr. Froude’s illustration of the domestic virtues, the exalted chastity, and the merciful disposition of Henry VIII. Mr. Froude has, however, qualities which raise him high above the level of the ordinary paradoxical historian. He has a genuine creative power. We may refuse to believe that his Henry VIII. is the Henry of history, but we cannot deny that Mr. Froude makes us see his Henry as vividly as if he stood in life before us. A dangerous gift for an historian; but it helps to make a great literary man. Mr. Froude may claim to be regarded as a great literary man, measured by the standard of our time. He has imagination; he has that sympathetic and dramatic instinct which enables a man to enter into the emotions and motives, the likings and dislikings, of people of a past age. His style is penetrating and thrilling; his language often rises to the dignity of a poetic eloquence. The figures he conjures up are always the resemblance of real men and women. They are never waxwork, or lay-figures, or skeletons clothed in words, or purple rags of description stuffed out with straw into an awkward likeness of the human form. The one distinct impression we carry away from Mr. Froude’s history is that of the living reality of his figures.

  Though this volume [“Cæsar”] bears a modest title, it is one of great popular interest. Few persons at all interested in ancient history will find themselves willing, after getting a taste of the book, to put it down until they have completed it. It would be easy for a severe critic to point out faults in the work. But its faults are not those of a dangerous kind. It is at least something to have written a book on a great subject which many people will be interested in reading. The author’s point of view is essentially the same as Mommsen’s. He believes that the nation was in a hopeless state of demoralization, and that, if recovery was possible, it was possible only through the efforts of Julius Cæsar. He is more temperate in his condemnation of Cicero, but the facts he presents are much more effective than Mommsen’s harsh words. In the opinion of Froude, “Nature half made a great man and left him incomplete.” With “magnificent talents, high aspirations, and a true desire to do right,” Cicero united “an infirmity of will, a passion, a cunning, a vanity, and an absence of manliness and veracity.” On the whole, the picture of Cicero is probably one of the best ever drawn in few words.

  He certainly derived much of his style from Newman, for it is hard to say whom else he could have derived it from. It is far more imaginative and poetic; far more capable of carrying the reader away, and placing him in a new and unexpected position, than the style of any one else about him.

  Consider the great will-power Mr. James Anthony Froude has brought to bear upon the distortion of history. Note the facility with which he ignores the virtues of Mary Stuart; see the perfections he finds in Queen Elizabeth; and there is that “great blot of blood and grease on the history of England,” Henry VIII.; Mr. Froude can’t perceive it; it is to his mind an unsullied page, and Henry VIII. a humane ruler and a profound statesman. In like spirit can Mr. Froude read a quotation until it begins to tell against his preconceived notion, drop out words that damage the view he would hold, garble sentences to suit his purposes, and play such pranks with quotation-marks as to make him the laughing-stock of all conscientious historians.

  There is probably no finer example of the right use of the historic imagination. There is certainly none which has put the pedants more completely to shame.

  Whatever people may think of Froude as an historian, no one can resist the charm of his style. It is a feminine rather than a masculine style, and challenges no comparison with that of Tacitus, Gibbon, or even Macaulay. But in its way it is perfection. It is singular that nobody seems to have noted its source. It was formed in the school of John Henry Newman, and recalls that of the master in its ease, grace, limpid clearness, and persuasiveness. Even Newman’s mannerisms and artifices recur…. It is pretty apparent, when he touches on general history, that he had not much prepared himself by the study of it for dealing with a particular period. If he had, he could scarcely have failed to know what a debasement of the currency was, or taken it for a loan from the mint. Hence he misses his historical bearings…. Daring and startling paradox will always amuse and excite, though perhaps there is no easier method of counterfeiting genius. But, taken seriously, Froude’s apologies for the crimes, brutalities, perfidies, and hypocrisies of Henry VIII. can awaken but one feeling in any man of sound understanding and unperverted heart.

  Near the close of 1863 I was invited by Froude to visit him, in consequence of an article of mine sent, by Carlyle’s suggestion, to Fraser (“The Transcendentalist of Concord”), and for eighteen years I enjoyed his friendship. I continued writing for Fraser so long as he was its editor. His characteristic liberality was a good deal pressed by my articles during the civil war in America and the period of reconstruction. He was not quite a captive of Carlyle on the negro question; he regarded slavery as an evil, but he had the instinctive dislike of a philosophical historian to revolutionary of militant methods of reform. At the time, many of his views on American questions appeared to me merely academic, but I have since often had to reflect on the greater foresight with which he apprehended some of the sequelæ of a reform secured, however, inevitably, by force. Moreover, Froude was able to quote some of the most eminent abolitionists in America against the policy of “coercing the South,” such sentiments having been freely uttered before the attack on Fort Sumter.

  Froude wrote history as he conceived it with a power rarely equalled. His pages pulse with life. But though he drew from sources of the highest value, many of them never before utilized, he lacked a sound critical method of dealing with them. In this respect his later volumes show a marked improvement over the earlier ones. Unbiased perception seems at times to have been simply beyond his powers; the facts of his own narrative he often saw as no one else saw them. Objective description he professed to aim at, but rarely attained for he approached his material too much in the spirit of an artist. In his pictures the shadows are too deep and the lights are too richly glowing. A sentimentalist by nature, he was deficient in sobriety and poise of judgment, and he lacked the patience for accuracy in details. He had little interest in modern social or political science, and to the reader of the present day one of the most serious deficiencies of his work is its failure to give adequate attention to the constitutional and economic aspects of the period.

  Which for scholarly finish ranks with the inimitable “Eothen” of Kinglake. In “Oceana,” Mr. Froude as a man of letters is seen at his best; and at his best Mr. Froude had few rivals. No other writer of our day, not Cardinal Newman himself, had, as I think, such an easy mastery of our mother tongue,—in no other writer were masculine vigour and feminine delicacy so blended in the expression of what may be called, intellectual emotion. The thought was personal; the personality was unique. From the purely literary point of view “Oceana” is indeed a masterpiece. Froude complained in it, as he complained in his letters (as we have seen), of being an old man: but there is no trace of age in the book.

  With all his faults thick as autumn leaves upon him, Froude was a great writer well equipped to play a great part. It may be his fate to stand corrected, just as it is Freeman’s fate to be superseded, but he will long continue to be read—who can doubt it?—not merely for the vivacity of his too often misleading descriptions and for the masculine vigour of his style, but for the interest of his peculiar point of view, the piquancy of his philosophy, the humour of his commentary, for his quick insight into certain phases of faith and shades of character…. The first thing that must strike the mind of anyone who looks at Froude’s writings as a whole is their amazing sameness of object, or, at all events, point of view. It is always the same nail he is hammering on the head. It reminds one of Pope’s ruling passion. It crops up everywhere and at all time, firing his zeal wherever he is. What is that object? Why, to counteract what he calls “the Counter-Reformation;” to denounce monkery; to unfrock priests by stripping them of all sacramental pretensions; to topple over everything standing between man and the Force which called him into being; to preach good works and plain homespun morality.

  One of the greatest historians of the century, except for one curious and unfortunate defect, and (without any drawback) one of the greatest writers of English prose during that century, was James Anthony Froude…. I have sometimes doubted whether Mr. Froude at his best has any superior among the prose writers of the last half of this century. His is not a catching style; and in particular it does not perhaps impress itself on green tastes. It has neither the popular and slightly brusque appeal of Macaulay or Kinglake, nor the unique magnificence of Mr. Ruskin, not the fretted and iridescent delicacy of some other writers. It must be frankly confessed that, the bulk of his work being very great and his industry not being untiring, it is unequal, and sometimes not above (it is never below) good journey-work. But at its best it is of a simply wonderful attraction—simply in the pure sense, for it is never very ornate, and does not proceed in point of “tricks” much beyond the best varieties of the latest Georgian form. That strange quality of “liveliness” which has been noticed in reference to its author’s view of history, animates it throughout. It is never flat; never merely popular; never merely scholarly; never merely “precious” and eccentric. And at its very best it is excelled by no style in this century, and approached by few in this or any other, as a perfect harmony of unpretentious music, adjusted to the matter that it conveys, and lingering on the ear that it reaches.

  Froude cannot be called a master of style in the sense in which Gibbon, or Newman, or Macaulay deserves the name. There are few pages in his writings of which we could say with certainty, were they shown to us for the first time, that Froude, and Froude alone, could have written them. There are many passages, on the other hand, especially in his earlier works, which reveal the disciple…. His vivid imagination enabled him to bring not only scenes, but characters and motives, before the reader, in the most effective, sometimes in the most dramatic form; and it may be noted that more than any other recent English writer he affects that familiar, but dangerous, companion of our youth, the oratio obliqua.

  Froude stands before the English-reading public prominent in three characteristics: First, as a technical prose artist, in which regard he is entitled to be classed with Ruskin, Newman, and Pater; less enthusiastic and elaborately ornamental than the first, less musically and delicately fallacious than the second, and less self-conscious and phrase-caressing than the third, but carrying a solider burden of thought than all three. Second, as a historian of the modern school, which aims by reading the original records to produce an independent view of historical periods. Third, as the most clear-sighted and broad-minded of those whose position near the centre of the Oxford movement and intimacy with the principal actors gave them an insight into its inner nature.

  I take it that he may properly be ranked among the greatest masters of word-painting in the English language. There are passages in his writings—for example, his account of the judicial murder of Sir Thomas More, or of the destruction of the French and Spanish floating batteries before Gibraltar—which have seldom been surpassed in splendour of diction and dramatic power. But here all the praise that can be honestly bestowed upon him ends. He was incapable of critically investigating facts. Nay, he was incapable, congenitally incapable, I believe, even of correctly stating them. A less judicial mind probably never existed. There is hardly a page of his which is not deformed by passion, prejudice, and paradox. He is everywhere an advocate, and an utterly unscrupulous advocate…. It has happened to me, in the course of my poor historical studies, to go over much of the ground trodden by Mr. Froude. And the conclusion to which I was long ago led is that it is never safe to accept any statement upon Mr. Froude’s mere word.

  Froude’s style as a writer is much in his favor. It is not so impressive as Carlyle’s, nor so pleasant-flavored as Thackeray’s; neither does it have the splendor of Burke and Bacon; but for clear crystalline English there is hardly its superior in the present century. Froude is sometimes slightly melodramatic in feeling, but the purity of his language is beyond dispute. It would seem as if he wished to place his case before the world in the plainest possible manner, considering good sense the finest ornament of speech. His writing can be read with great rapidity and yet be perfectly intelligible.

  A history wherein the pursuit of trivial facts is carried to confusion, and where the sense of faithful proportion is ruined by antiquarian curiosity, is little more than a comic photograph as taken in a distorted lens. The details may be accurate, curious, and inexhaustible; but the general effect is that of preposterous inversion. We learn nothing by the process. We are wearied and puzzled. From these things—the Seven Deadly Sins of the Learned—James Anthony Froude was conspicuously free. He never (or hardly ever) wearies us or puzzles us. As a master of clear, vivid, epical narration he stands above all his contemporaries. He claims our interest, brings us face to face with living men and women, leaves on our memory a definite stamp that does not fade, gives our brain much to ponder, to question, to investigate for ourselves. The result is that he is read, attacked, admired, condemned. But he is not put upon the shelf, and he will not be put upon the shelf. He is a popular writer of history, in the teeth of all his critics, and in spite of all his shortcomings—fierce as are the one, and grave as are the other. He is read, and no doubt deserves to be read, as Livy, Froissart, and Voltaire are read, for the sake of his graphic power in narration; which gives him more readers than Freeman, and more public influence than Stubbs or Gneist…. Froude is of course of the followers of Herodotus and Livy in the past and Voltaire and Robertson in the modern world, not of Thucydides and Tacitus, of Gibbon and Macaulay. He has neither the philosophy nor the genius of these ancient historians, nor the marvellous reading and portentous memory of our own historians. But in narration he is equal to the best; and where there is no ambiguity in the facts, and no cause to defend, he has reached a very high point.

  If I call Froude a poet it is because, as I explained before, I do not consider rhyme as essential to poetry. But for really poetical power, for power of description, of making the facts of history alive, of laying bare the deepest thoughts of men and the most mysterious feelings of women, there was no poet or historian of our age who came near him.

  To call Mr. Froude insincere in the ordinary sense of that word would be misleading. He was seldom conscious of anything but perfect sincerity. And yet the perfect sincerity which alone makes written words perennially valuable was never quite reached by him. Byron too, as Carlyle remarked, in the essay on Burns, hated insincerity, heartily detested it, and declared formal war against it in words. Yet he also never quite reached sincerity. “So difficult is it even for the strongest to make this primary attainment, which might seem the simplest of all: to read its own consciousness without mistakes, without errors involuntary or wilful!” Whether Mr. Froude had force of character and intellect enough to have reached perfect sincerity under other circumstances is perhaps doubtful. But his early trainings made it doubly difficult. The habits of make-believe and loose readiness to believe whatever he wished to believe, which he had learned perhaps in boyhood, and afterwards in part at least from his clerical associates, could not be laid aside like a garment, could not, indeed, be laid aside without a far harder struggle than Mr. Froude felt called upon to make. He was in haste to write, and to win success in his writing—what is called success.

  That Froude suffered from constitutional inaccuracy, made strange blunders even in copying a plain document, and often used his authorities in an arbitrary and desultory fashion, seems, however, to be admitted. Yet, if I want to know something of the Elizabethan period I can nowhere find so vivid and interesting a narrative. It is true that Froude’s interest in history was to some extent an afterthought, that he took it up mainly to illustrate certain principles and confined his attention to the topics directly relevant to his purpose. One cannot feel that he has become a contemporary of Elizabeth as Macaulay had made himself a contemporary of Queen Anne, but rather that his excursions into topics outside of the main stream of political events had been incidentally suggested in the course of his reading.

  Like his master, Carlyle, Froude holds a place apart among the historical writers of his age: both the one and the other (due proportion guarded) are in the first place and pre-eminently, prophets and men of letters rather than historical specialists. In choosing to write history, both were primarily determined not by the simple scientific desire of ascertaining what had actually happened in the past, but by the consideration that historical narrative was a suitable vehicle for the expression of their individual views regarding man’s life and destiny. In the case of Froude the distinction is forced upon us at once by the character of his work as a whole, and by the special gifts and temperament of which it is the expression. He belongs to a different order of spirits from Hallam or Macaulay or Freeman; and it is as a literary artist and a teacher of complex and illusive nature that he presents himself equally in his writings and in his mental history.