BOOKS.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.* THIS is a very delightful and refreshing book. It might have been reduced a little in bulk—for though certainly not subjectively heavy, objectively it is somewhat fat—with gain rather than loss. A few flaws might have been removed, some criticism of Froude's writings might have been omitted, and some more of the facts of his life, or touches of his character and conversation, introduced. But these are trifles, comparatively unimportant flecks on what is one of the best and happiest portraits we have seen painted with that most graphic of instruments, the pen, for a long time. "The truth lovingly told,"—this was what the elder Richmond, so success- ful in the delineation of many men of mark and character of the last generation, used to say be aimed at. And this is what we have here. Fortunately, Froude was a man who could easily bear the truth, and in Mr. Paul he has found exactly the right biographer. Froude was a characteristic Englishman, a scholar, a gentleman, and a Christian. A clergyman's son, born in Devonshire and bred at Oxford, be fell under the pre- eminently Oxonian spell of Newman, but anon emerged a strong Protestant, yet, still more truly, of Disraeli's "religion of all sensible men."
With most of this Mr. Paul thoroughly sympathises. All of it he understands. And even when he is less in sympathy he writes with a singular and felicitous fairness, and a real fondness for his hero which enables him, without being blind to his foibles, to be thoroughly and genially kind to his many virtues. He writes about him as Fronde would have wished to be written about,—with masculine sense and discrimina- tion, yet with affection and generosity. If he makes a few mistakes here and there, it may be said of him as was said of Froude himself, II a vu Pate. This is in all essentials the real Fronde.
Froude's story is a simple, and, on the whole, as lives go, a very happy one. The son of a well-to-do English clergyman of the old gentlemanly high-and-dry type, Arch- deacon of Totnes, Rector of Dartington—having his home, therefore, in one of the most beautiful spots in England, and beside one of the loveliest of English rivers—Froude spent a boyhood of mingled pain and pleasure. His mother died early. After a precocious childhood, he was sent to Westminster, but returned bullied into apparent stupidity. His famous brother Hurrell—the founder, as some called him, of the Oxford Movement—seems also to have dominated him mentally and physically. Then he went to Oriel College. There he enjoyed himself, fell in love, first with Homer and Pindar's odes, and then with a young lady, whom, however, he was not allowed to marry. Then he came deeply under the influence, already potent, of Newman. A tutorship now took him into the family of a devout Irish Evangelical, a Mr. Cleaver. The Evangelical character impressed him very favourably, but he could not subscribe to their tenets. He returned to Oxford, was elected a Fellow of Exeter College, took deacon's orders, and began to assist Newman in rewriting The Lives of the Saints.
But much as to the last he always loved Newman, his real bent was all the other way. He took deacon's orders, but he soon found that he was suited to be neither a Romanist nor a priest. For a time he lost his spiritual anchorage—or more strictly, dragged his anchor—and wrote The Nemesis of Faith. William Sewell, the founder of Radley, a theatrical person,
* The Life of Froude. By Herbert Paul. London : Sir Isaac Pitman and Bona. [iC.B. net.]
though in many ws,jis estimable and not without genius, in a theatrical manner put it in the fire in the Exeter College hall, and Froude was called upon to resign, and resigned, his Fellow- ship. Charles Kingsley, most generous of men, took him in when his family and many other friends forsook him. He fell in love with Mrs. Kingsley's sister, Miss Charlotte Grenfell, he married and gave himself to literature. His historical work began characteristically in the Westminster Review, and with an essay on "England's Forgotten Worthies," suggested, as Mr. Paul says, "by a new and very bad edition of Hakluyt." To trace the steps by which he was led on to write, and wrote, his magnum opus, and became recognised as one of the first historians and most brilliant authors of his time, is notnecessary. Mr. Paul is very just, both to his merits and his faults. His first merit was his style. James Mill, says Lord Beaconsfield somewhere, wrote a history of India, which was so dull that everybody supposed it must be accurate ; and as few read it, it was many years before it was discovered that it was no more accurate than many better written works. Mr. Froude's history, says Mr. Paul, was so brilliantly written that people thought it must be incorrect. Mr. Paul devotes much space to the story of the famous controversy with Mr. Freeman and the Saturday Review. Matthew Arnold in one of his letters calls Freeman in his airy way a "ferocious pedant." To adopt the phrase seriously would be unfair to a man of high ability and character to whom England owes much. But Freeman was not urbane, he was certainly aggressive, and he was equally certainly reiterative; and he attacked Froude in unmeasured language many times over. The challenge which Froude, when at last he turned to bay, threw down, Freeman never took up. Both historians have now become themselves part of history. It was a strange irony of fortune that Froude should at the age of seventy-four succeed Freeman as Regius Professor at Oxford. They became thus equal in fate. As to their renown, though they are very different, justice can be done to both. Mr. Andrew Lang, a critic as just as he is graceful in expression, sums up the matter in some admirable sentences which Mr. Paul quotes, ending thus;—" No historian was more honest than Mr. Fronde, though few or none of his merit have been so fallible." That he was a real student, and made genuine original research of a kind that Freeman, who depended entirely on printed texts, never attempted, his labours in the archives of Simancas were sufficient to prove. Of his style all the educated world could judge and has judged. Mr. Paul quotes a splendid passage on the decay and passing of mediaevalism. There are many others he might have quoted, notably the description of the setting sail of the Armada, an echo perhaps of Thucydides's account of the great Athenian fleet leaving the Piraeus for Syracuse, but an echo so beautiful as amply to justify itself.
Another famous "question" in Froude's literary career is that as to the publication of the Life and Letters of Carlyle and his wife. With this, too, Mr. Paul deals in a very masterly way. Most unprejudiced people will agree that Fronde not only meant to do nothing save justice and honour to Carlyle, at all times pre-eminently his hero, but that essentially, and in the end, he did him nothing but justice, and that if the story had been left where he left it, it would have been the better for all parties.
A more serious charge than either literary or personal perfidy, for it is one not so absurd, is that of inaccuracy and of hasty, and in a sense slipshod, composition. Mr. Paul admits that in his Erasmus Froude is guilty of somewhat loose scholarship. And it is true not only of Erasmus, but of a good deal of his other writing. He wrote too much and on too many topics to write all equally well. He had the merits of, but also the faults often attributed to, popular writers. He wrote to produce a general effect and impression, and he produced it. After all, in many things, perhaps specially in history, it is often the general impression which is most true, just as poetry, in Aristotle's famous phrase, is truer than history. But in some kinds of history, where the more precise impression is attainable, it ought to be attained. And Froude was not as careful as he might have been to attain it. His Disraeli, for those who love a sketch by Froude, is excellent, but it is not, as Mr. Paul frankly admits, the whole truth. The same might be said of his handling of the Irish question and of the South African question. He saw great main features. He had intuitions of high value, but he did not
really grapple in a businesslike way with details, and was swayed not so much by prejudice as by predilection. It might be said with still more truth of his Julius Caesar, about which Mr. Paul says honestly that it is scarcely more authori- tative than Louis Napoleon's pamphlet on the same subject. The author himself, oddly enough, made of it a pet child.
Mr. Paul's own love and loyalty to Oxford have evidently coloured what is one of the most delightful chapters in his book, the Oxford chapter ; yet he is probably right in attributing to this stage, late as it came, and brief as was its duration, the importance that he does. It was no mere "appendix in small print," to use Lord Dufferin's phrase, to Froude's career as a man of letters and affairs. It was recognised by him as being, and was, a reconciliation and crowning which gave a satisfaction and completeness to his life. Feeling this strongly himself, enjoying for a few years what was to him a veritable renovation in the "fountain of youth," "in a short time he was able to fulfil," as Mr. Paul says, "a long time." He made a real mark on the intellectual temper of the undergraduates and younger graduates, and set up, if he did not set, a standard of style in lecturing and writing ; while the actual products of the period were such as any man of seventy-four and upward might have been proud to achieve. Mr. Paul says truly that Lord Salisbury's nomination, like Lord Rosebery's choice of Lord Acton for Cambridge, was an example which justified the patronage of the Crown. It is well that Professorships should be filled up in more ways than one. It is certainly well that one of these ways should be by recommendation of the Prime Minister.
The portrait prefixed to this volume does justice to some aspects of Fronde,—to his strength, his proper pride, his loftiness, the flash of his eye, the courage of conviction so characteristic of him. But as Mr. Paul says of the wonder- fully incisive description of him in 1875 by Sir George Colley quoted in this volume, it is a sombre picture. it does not do full justice to his chivalry and courtesy, his kindly sympathy, and mobile play of interest. Froude was, in truth, a fine specimen of that English race which he has in many a shining page depicted so finely,—a scholar, a student, yet no recluse, but with a keen eye and a warm heart for all the varied drama of life, as well as for the beauty of Nature ; above all, for the beauty of that element which suited so well his fearless and frank disposition, the English element,— the sea.
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