Chapter V: The Historians of the Century (2)

Lecturing, after the example set chiefly by Coleridge and Hazlitt, was at this time a favourite resource for those men of letters whose line of composition was not of the gainfulest; and Carlyle delivered several courses, some of which are unreported while others survive only in inadequate shapes. But _Heroes and Hero-Worship_ was at first delivered orally, though it was not printed till 1841; and about the same time, or rather earlier, appeared the _Miscellaneous Essays_--a collection of his work at its freshest, least mannered, most varied, and in some respects best. _Chartism_ (1839) and _Past and Present_ (1843) reflected the political problems of the time and Carlyle's interest in them. But it was not till 1845 that a second, in the ordinary sense, great work, _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, was published. Five years passed without anything substantive from him, but in 1850 appeared _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, the most brilliantly satiric, and in 1851 the softest, most finished, and (save theologically) least debatable of all his books, the exquisite biography in miniature called the _Life of Sterling_. Then he engaged, it is difficult to say whether by ill-luck or not, on the last and largest of his great single undertakings, the _History of Frederick the Great_. Fourteen years were passed, as a matter of composition, in "the valley of the shadow of Frederick," as his wife put it: half the time (from 1858 to 1865) saw the actual publication. Shortly after the completion of this, Carlyle visited Edinburgh to receive the Lord Rectorship of his University, and soon after his wife died. He survived her fifteen years, but did nothing more of great importance; indeed, he was seventy-one when this loss happened. Some short things on "John Knox," on "The Early Kings of Norway," and a famous letter on "Shooting Niagara" (the Reform Bill of 1867), with a few more, appeared; but he was chiefly occupied (as far as he was occupied at all) in writing reminiscences, and arranging memorials of Mrs. Carlyle. The publication of these books after his death by the late Mr. Froude led to a violent conflict of opinion both as to the propriety of the publication and as to the character of Carlyle himself.

This conflict fortunately concerns us but little here. It is certain that Carlyle--springing from the lower ranks of society, educated excellently as far as the intellect was concerned, but without attention to such trifles as the habit (which his future wife early remarked in him) of putting bread and butter in his tea, a martyr from very early years to dyspepsia, fostering a retiring spirit and not too social temper, thoroughly convinced that the times were out of joint and not at all thoroughly convinced that he or any one could set them right, finally possessed of an intensely religious nature which by accident or waywardness had somehow thrown itself out of gear with religion--was not a happy man himself or likely to make any one else happy who lived with him. But it is certain also that both in respect to his wife and to those men, famous or not famous, of whom he has left too often unkindly record, his bark was much worse than his bite. And it is further certain that Mrs. Carlyle was no down-trodden drudge, but a woman of brains almost as alert as her husband's and a tongue almost as sharp as his, who had deliberately made her election of the vocation of being "wife to a man of genius," and who received what she had bargained for to the uttermost farthing. There will always be those who will think that Mr. Froude, doubtless with the best intentions, made a very great mistake; that, at any rate for many years after Carlyle's death, only a strictly genuine but judicious selection of the Reminiscences and Memorials should have been published, or else that the whole should have been worked into a real biography in which the frame and setting could have given the relief that the text required. But already, after more than the due voices, there is some peace on the subject; and a temporary wave of neglect, partly occasioned by this very controversy, was to be expected.

That this wave will pass may be asserted with a fulness and calmness of assurance not to be surpassed in any similar case. Carlyle's influence during a great part of the second and the whole of the third quarter of this century was so enormous, his life was so prolonged, and the general tone of public thought and public policy which has prevailed since some time before his death has been so adverse to his temper, that the reaction which is all but inevitable in all cases was certain to be severe in his. And if this were a history of thought instead of being a history of the verbal expression of thought, it would be possible and interesting to explain this reaction, and to forecast the certain rebound from it. As it is, however, we have to do with Carlyle as a man of letters only; and if his position as the greatest English man of letters of the century in prose be disputed, it will generally be found that the opposition is due to some not strictly literary cause, while it is certain that any competitor who is set up can be dislodged by a fervent and well-equipped Carlylian without very much difficulty.

He has been classed here as a historian, and though the bulk of his work is very great and its apparent variety considerable, it will be found that history and her sister biography, even when his subjects bore an appearance of difference, always in reality engaged his attention. His three greatest books, containing more than half his work in bulk,--_The French Revolution_, the _Cromwell_, and the _Frederick_,--are all openly and avowedly historical. The _Schiller_ and the _Sterling_ are biographies; the _Sartor Resartus_ a fantastic autobiography. Nearly all the _Essays_, even those which are most literary in subject--all the _Lectures on Heroes_, the greater part of _Past and Present_, _The Early Kings of Norway_, the _John Knox_, are more or less plainly and strictly historical or biographical. Even _Chartism_, the non-antique part of _Past and Present_, and the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, deal with politics in the sense in which politics are the principal agent in making history, regard them constantly and almost solely in their actual or probable effect on the life-story of the nation, and to no small extent of its individual members. Out of the historic relation of nation or individual Carlyle would very rarely attempt to place, and hardly ever succeeded in placing, any thing or person. He could not in the least judge literature--of which he was so great a practitioner always, and sometimes so great a judge--from the point of view of form: he would have scorned to do so, and did scorn those who did so. His deficiencies in abstract philosophy, whether political, theological, metaphysical, or other, arise directly from this--that he could never contemplate any of these things as abstract, but only in the common conduct of men towards their fellows, towards themselves, and towards God. For Carlyle never "forgot God," though he might speak unadvisedly with his lips of other men's ways of remembering Him. The "human document," as later slang has it, was in effect the only thing that interested him; and he was content to employ it in constructing human history. More than once he put his idea of this history formally under a formal title. But his entire work is a much better exposition of that idea than these particular essays; and it is not easy to open any page of it in which the idea itself is not vividly illustrated and enforced upon the reader.

But once more, this is no place for even a summary, much less for a discussion, of the much discussed Carlylian "Gospel of Work"; of its apostle's less vague, but also less disputable, condemnations of shams and cants; or of the innumerable applications and uses to which he put these doctrines. The important thing for our purpose is that these applications took form in thirty volumes of the most brilliant, the most stimulating, the most varied, the most original work in English literature. The titles of this work have been given; to give here any notion of their contents would take the chapter. Carlyle could be--as in the _Cromwell_, where he sets himself and confines himself to the double task of elucidating his hero's rugged or crafty obscurities of speech and writing and of piecing them into a connected history, or where he wrestles with the huge accumulation of documents about Frederick--as practical as the driest of Dry-as-dusts. But others could equal, though few surpass him, in this. Where he stands alone is in a fantastic fertility of divagation and comment which is as much his own as the clear, neat directness of Macaulay is his. Much of it is due to his gospel, or temper, or whatever it is to be called, of earnest suasion to work and scornful denunciation of cant; something to his wide reading and apt faculty of illustration; but most to his style.

In the early days of his unpopularity this style used to be abused with heat or dismissed with scorn as mere falsetto, copied to a great extent from Richter. It is certain that in Carlyle's very earliest works there is small trace of it; and that he writes in a fashion not very startlingly different from that of any well-read and well-taught author of his time. And it is certain also that it was after his special addiction to German studies that the new manner appeared. Yet it is very far indeed from being copied from any single model, or even from any single language; and a great deal that is in it is not German at all. Something may even be traced to our own more fantastic writers in the seventeenth century, such as Sir Thomas Urquhart in Scotland and Sir Roger L'Estrange in England; much to a Scottish fervour and quaintness blending itself with and utilising a wider range of reading than had been usual with Scotsmen; most to the idiosyncrasy of the individual.

Carlyle's style is not seldom spoken of as compact of tricks and manners; and no doubt these are present in it. Yet a narrow inspection will show that its effect is by no means due so much in reality as in appearance to the retaining of capital letters, the violent breaches and aposiopeses, the omission of pronouns and colourless parts of speech generally, the coining of new words, and the introduction of unusual forms. These things are often there, but they are not always; and even when they are, there is something else much more important, much more characteristic, but also much harder to put the finger on. There is in Carlyle's fiercer and more serious passages a fiery glow of enthusiasm or indignation, in his lighter ones a quaint felicity of unexpected humour, in his expositions a vividness of presentment, in his arguments a sledge-hammer force, all of which are not to be found together anywhere else, and none of which is to be found anywhere in quite the same form. And despite the savagery, both of his indignation and his laughter, there is no greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at home, and he seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like none other,--it is the very sword of Goliath.

And this sword pierces to the joints and marrow as no other of the second division of our authors of the nineteenth century proper pierces, with the exception of that of Tennyson in verse. It is possible to disagree with Carlyle intensely; perhaps it is not possible to agree with him in any detailed manner, unless the agreer be somewhat destitute of individual taste and judgment. But on his whole aspect and tendency, reserving individual expressions, he is, as few are, great. The _diathesis_ is there--the general disposition towards noble and high things. The expression is there--the capacity of putting what is felt and meant in a manner always contemptuous of mediocrity, yet seldom disdainful of common sense. To speak on the best things in an original way, in a distinguished style, is the privilege of the elect in literature; and none of those who were born within, or closely upon, the beginning of the century has had these gifts in English as have the authors of _The Lotos Eaters_ and _Sartor Resartus_.

Only one other writer of history during the century, himself the latest to die of his generation except Mr. Ruskin, deserves, for the union of historical and literary merit, to be placed, if not on a level with Macaulay and Carlyle, yet not far below them; but a not inconsiderable number of historians and biographers of value who distinguished themselves about or since the middle of the century must be chronicled more or less briefly. Two Scottish scholars of eminence, both in turn Historiographers Royal of Scotland, John Hill Burton and William Forbes Skene, were born in the same year, 1809. Burton, who died in 1881, busied himself with the history of his country at large, beginning with the period since the Revolution, and tackling the earlier and more distinctively national time afterwards. He was not a very good writer, but displayed very great industry and learning with a sound and impartial judgment. Skene, on the other hand, was the greatest authority of his time (he lived till 1892) on "Celtic Scotland," which is the title of his principal book. In the same year (or in 1808) was born Charles Merivale, afterwards Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Dean of Ely, who, besides other work, established himself in the same class of historians with Hallam and Milman, Thirlwall and Grote, by his extensive _History of the Romans under the Empire_. On the whole, Merivale (who died in 1894) ranks, both for historical and literary gifts, somewhat below the other members of this remarkable group--a position which is still a very honourable one.

Shortly after these three was born Alexander Kinglake (1811-1891)--a man of very remarkable talents, but something of a "terrible example" in regard to the practice, which has already been noticed as characteristic of the century, of devoting enormously long histories to special subjects and points. Kinglake, who was a native of Somerset, an Eton and Cambridge man, a barrister subsequently, for some years a Member of Parliament, and a man of independent means, first distinguished himself in letters by the very brilliant and popular book of travels in the East called _Eothen_ which was published in 1847. That there is something of manner and trick about this is not to be denied; but it must be allowed that the trick and manner have been followed, apparently with success, in travel-writing for about half a century, while it cannot be fairly said that Kinglake himself had any exact models, though he may have owed something to Beckford and a little to Sterne. It is not very easy to say whether Kinglake's literary reputation would have stood higher or lower if he had written nothing else; but as a matter of fact, before many years were over, he attempted a much more ambitious task in the _History of the Crimean War_, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1863, though the book was not finished till twenty years later. That this history shows no small literary faculties no competent judge can deny. The art of word-painting--a dubious and dangerous art--is pushed to almost its furthest limits; the writer has a wonderful gift of combining the minutest and most numerous details into an orderly and intelligible whole; and the quality which the French untranslatably call _diable au corps_, or, as we more pedantically say, "daemonic energy," is present everywhere. But the book is monstrously out of proportion,--a single battle has something like an entire volume, and the events of some two years occupy eight,--and, clear as the individual pictures are, the panorama is of such endless length that the mind's eye retains no proper notion of it. In the second place, the style, though brilliant, is hard and brassy, full of points that are more suitable to the platform or the newspaper than to the historic page,--not so much polished as varnished, and after a short time intolerably fatiguing. In the third,--and this is the gravest fault of all,--the author's private or patriotic likes or dislikes pervade the whole performance and reduce too much of it to a tissue of extravagant advocacy or depreciation, made more disgusting by the repetition of catch phrases and pet labels somewhat after the manner of Dickens. Sir Stratford Canning, "the great Eltchi," is one of Kinglake's divinities, Lord Raglan another; and an acute and energetic, but not quite heaven-born diplomatist, a most honest, modest, and in difficult circumstances steadfast, if not always judicious soldier, become, the one Marlborough in the council-chamber, the other Marlborough in the field. On the other hand, for this or that reason, Mr. Kinglake had taken a violent dislike to the Emperor Napoleon the Third, and affected, as did some other English Liberals, to consider the _coup d'etat_ as not merely a dubious piece of statecraft, but a hideous and abominable crime. Consequently, he abused all those who took part in it with tedious virulence, which has probably made not a few Englishmen look on them with much more leniency than they deserved. In short, Kinglake, with many of the qualities of the craftsman in an extraordinary degree, was almost entirely deficient in those of the artist. He served as a favourite example to Mr. Matthew Arnold of the deficiency of the British literary temper in accomplishment and grace, and it cannot be denied that Mr. Arnold's strictures were here justified to an extent which was not always the case when he assumed the office of censor.

John Forster, who was born a year later than Kinglake, and died fifteen years before him, was an industrious writer of biographies and biographical history, the friend of a good many men of letters, editor for many years of the _Examiner_, and secretary to the Lunacy Commissioners. He paid particular attention to the period of the Rebellion; his _Arrest of the Five Members_ being his chief work, among several devoted to it. He wrote a _Life of Goldsmith_, and began one of Swift. In contemporary biography his chief performances were lives of Landor and of Dickens, with both of whom he was extremely intimate. In private life Forster had the character of a bumptious busybody, which character indeed the two books just mentioned, even without the anecdotes abundant in more recent books of biography, abundantly establish. And towards the men of letters with whom he was intimate (Carlyle and Browning may be added to Landor and Dickens) he seems to have behaved like a Boswell-Podsnap, while in the latter half of the character he no doubt sat to Dickens himself. But he was an indefatigable literary inquirer, and seems, in a patronising kind of way, to have been liberal enough of the result of his inquiries. He had a real interest both in history and literature, and he wrote fairly enough.

One of the most curious figures among the historians of this century was Henry Thomas Buckle, who was born near Blackheath in 1823, and privately educated. He had ample means, and was fond of books; and in 1857 he brought out the first volume (which was followed by a second in 1861) of a _History of Civilisation_. He did not nearly complete--in fact he only began--his scheme, in which the European part was ultimately intended to be subordinate to the English, and he died of typhus at Damascus in May 1862. The book attained at once, and for some time kept, an extraordinary popularity, which has been succeeded by a rather unjust depreciation. Both are to be accounted for by the fact that it is in many ways a book rather of the French than of the English type, and displays in fuller measure than almost any of Buckle's contemporaries in France itself, with the possible exception of Taine, could boast, the frank and fearless, some would say the headlong and headstrong, habit of generalisation--scorning particulars, or merely impressing into service such as are useful to it and drumming the others out--on which Frenchmen pride themselves, and for the lack of which they are apt to pronounce English historians, and indeed English men of letters of all kinds, plodding and unilluminated craftsmen rather than artists. In Buckle's reflections on Spain and Scotland, he accounts for the whole history of both countries and the whole character of both peoples by local conditions in the first place, and by forms of civil and ecclesiastical government. In respect to these last, his views were crude Voltairianism; but perhaps this is the best and most characteristic example of his method. He was extremely prejudiced; his lack of solid disciplinary education made him unapt to understand the true force and relative value of his facts and arguments; and as his premises are for the most part capriciously selected facts cemented together with an untempered mortar of theory, his actual conclusions are rarely of much value. But his style is clear and vigorous; the aggressive _raiding_ character of his argument is agreeably stimulating, and excellent to make his readers clear up their minds on the other side; while the dread of over-generalisation, however healthy in itself, has been so long a dominant force in English letters and philosophy that a little excess the other way might be decidedly useful as an alterative. The worst fault of Buckle was the Voltairianism above referred to, causing or caused by, as is always the case, a deplorable lack of taste, which is not confined to religious matters.

Edward Augustus Freeman, who was a little younger than Buckle and survived him for thirty years, had some points in common with the historian of civilisation, though his education, interests, and tone in reference to religion were wholly different. Mr. Freeman, who was not at any public school but was a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, very soon devoted himself to the study of early English history, and secured a durable position by his elaborate _History of the Norman Conquest_ (1867-76), which, even though the largest and most important, was only one among scores of works, ending in an unfinished _History of Sicily_. He was, when he died in 1892, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and he had for many years been very influential in determining the course of historical study. He was also, for many years of his life, an active journalist, being especially known as a contributor to the _Saturday Review_, and he sometimes took a very busy part in politics. Mr. Freeman was a student of untiring energy, and will always deserve honourable memory as the first historian who recognised and utilised the value of architecture in supplying historical documents and illustrations. His style was at times picturesque but too diffuse, and disfigured by a habit of allusion as teasing as Macaulay's antithesis or Kinglake's stock phrases. That he was apt to pronounce very strong opinions on almost any question with which he dealt, was perhaps a less drawback to his excellence as a historian than the violently controversial tone in which he was wont to deal with those who happened to hold opinions different from his own. Putting defects of manner aside, there is no question that, for his own special period of English history (the eleventh and twelfth centuries), Mr. Freeman did more than any man had done before him, and as much as any man has done for any other period; while in relation to his further subjects of study, his work, though less trustworthy, is full of stimulus and of information.

His chief pupil John Richard Green, who was born in 1837 and died of consumption in 1883, was a native of Oxford, and was educated there at Magdalen College School and Jesus College. Mr. Green, like Mr. Freeman, was a frequent contributor to the _Saturday Review_, and did some clerical duty in the east of London; but he is best known by his historical work on English subjects, especially the famous _Short History of the English People_, perhaps the most popular work of its class and kind ever written. Mr. Green professed, on a principle which had been growing in favour for some time, to extend the usual conception of historical dealing to social, literary, and other matters. These, however, had never as a fact been overlooked by historians, and the popularity of the book was chiefly due to its judicious selection of interesting facts, to the spirit of the narrative, and to the style, based partly on Macaulay, but infused with a modernness which exactly hit the taste of the readers of our time. Mr. Green afterwards expanded this book somewhat; and his early death cut short a series of more extended monographs, _The Making of England_, _The Conquest of England_, etc., which would have enabled him to display the minute knowledge on which his more summary treatment of the general theme had been based.

Among historians to whom in larger space more extended notice than is here possible would have to be given, perhaps the first place is due to Philip Henry, sixth Earl Stanhope (1805-75), who (chiefly under the title of Lord Mahon, which he bore before his succession to the earldom in 1855) was an active historical writer of great diligence and impartiality, and possessed of a fair though not very distinguished style. The first notable work,--a _History of the War of the Succession in Spain_ (1832),--of Lord Stanhope (who was an Oxford man, took some part in politics, and was a devoted Peelite) was reviewed by Macaulay, and he wrote later several other and minor historical books. But his reputation rests on his _History of Europe from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles_, which occupied him for some twenty years, finishing in 1854. Very much less known to the general, but of singular ability, was William Johnson or Cory, who under the earlier name had attracted considerable public attention as an Eton master and as author of a small but remarkable volume of poems called _Ionica_. After his retirement from Eton and the change of his name, Mr. Cory amused himself with the composition of a _History of England_, or rather a long essay thereon, which was very little read and falls completely out of the ordinary conception of such a book, but is distinguished by an exceptionally good and scholarly style, as well as by views and expressions of great originality. Many others must pass wholly unnoticed that we may finish this chapter with one capital name.

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, who was born at Dartington near Totnes in 1818, on 23rd April (Shakespeare's birthday and St. George's Day), and died in 1894 at the Molt near Salcombe in his native county. Mr. Froude (the youngest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes and the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude who played so remarkable a part in the Oxford Movement, and of William Froude the distinguished naval engineer) was a Westminster boy, and went to Oriel College, Oxford, afterwards obtaining a fellowship at Exeter. Like his elder brother he engaged in the Tractarian Movement, and was specially under the influence of Newman, taking orders in 1844. The great convulsion, however, of Newman's secession sent him, not as it sent some with Newman, but like Mark Pattison and a few more, into scepticism if not exactly negation, on all religious matters. He put his change of opinions (he had previously written under the pseudonym of "Zeta" a novel called _Shadows of the Clouds_) into a book entitled _The Nemesis of Faith_, published in 1849, resigned his fellowship, gave up or lost (to his great good fortune) a post which had been offered him in Tasmania, and betook himself to literature, being very much, except in point of style, under the influence of Carlyle. He wrote for _Fraser_, the _Westminster_, and other periodicals; but was not content with fugitive compositions, and soon planned a _History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada_. The first volumes of this appeared in 1856, and it was finished in 1869. Meanwhile Froude from time to time collected his essays into volumes called _Short Studies_, which contain some of his very best writing. His next large work was _The English in Ireland_, which was published in three volumes (1871-74). In 1874-75 Lord Carnarvon sent him on Government missions to the Cape, an importation of a French practice into England which was not very well justified by the particular instance. Between 1881 and 1884 he was occupied as Carlyle's literary executor in issuing his biographical remains. Later _Oceana_ and _The English in the West Indies_ contained at once sketches of travel and political reflections; and in 1889 he published an Irish historical romance, _The Two Chiefs of Dunboy_. He was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in succession to Mr. Freeman, and his two latest works, _Erasmus_, published just before, and _English Seamen_ some months after his death, contain in part the results of the appointment.

It is a vulgar observation that the natural element of some men appears to be hot water. No English author of the century justifies this better than Mr. Froude. His early change of faith attracted to him a very considerable share of the obloquy which usually (and perhaps not so unreasonably as is sometimes thought) attaches to violent revolutions of opinion on important points. His _History_ was no sooner published than most acrimonious attacks were made upon it, and continued for many years, by a school of historical students with the late Mr. Freeman at their head. His Irish book, coinciding with the rise of "Home Rule" sentiment in Ireland, brought upon him furious enmity from the Irish Nationalist party and from those who, at first or by and by, sympathised with them in England. His colonial visits and criticisms not merely attracted to him the animosity of all those Englishmen who espoused the politics of non-intervention and non-aggrandisement, but aroused lively irritation in the Colonies themselves. About his discharge of his duties as Carlyle's executor, a perfect tempest of indignation arose; it being alleged that he had either carelessly, or through bad taste, or with deliberate treachery, revealed his dead friend's and master's weaknesses and domestic troubles to the public view.

With some of the causes of this odium we are fortunately here dispensed from dealing. Theological and political matters, in so far as they are controversial, are altogether outside of our scope. The question of the dealing with Carlyle's "Remains" is one rather of ethics than of literature proper, and it is perhaps sufficient to make, in reference to it, the warning observation that Lockhart, who is now considered by almost all competent critics as a very pattern of the union of fidelity and good taste towards both his subject and his readers, was accused, at the appearance of his book, of treachery towards Scott.

But it must be confessed that if Mr. Froude's critics were unfair (and they certainly were) he himself gave only too abundant opening to fair criticism. That his first great book (not perhaps any of his others) was planned on an unduly large scale, and indulged in far too extensive dissertation, divagation, and so forth, was rather the fault of his time than of himself. Grote and Macaulay had obtained, the first considerable, the latter immense popularity by similar prolixity; and Carlyle was about, in the _Frederick_, to follow the fashion. But whereas all these three, according to the information open to them, were and are among the most painfully laborious researchers and, with a fair allowance, the most faithful recorders among historians, Mr. Froude displayed an attention to accuracy which his warmest admirers must allow to be sadly, and which enemies asserted to be scandalously insufficient. He has been called by well-affected critics "congenitally inaccurate," and there is warrant for it. Nor did any one of his three great models come short of him in partiality, in advocacy, in the determination to make the reader accept his own view first of all.

He was, in the earlier part of his career at any rate, a very poor man, whereas Macaulay was in easy, and Grote in affluent circumstances, and he had not Carlyle's Scotch thrift. But the carelessness of his dealing with documents had more in it than lack of pence to purchase assistance, or even than lack of dogged resolve to do the drudgery himself. His enemies of course asserted, or hinted, that the added cause was dishonesty at the worst, indifference to truth at the best. As far as dishonesty goes they may be summarily non-suited. The present writer once detected, in a preface of Mr. Froude's to a book with which the introducer was thoroughly in sympathy, repeated errors of quotation or allusion which actually weakened Mr. Froude's own argument--cases where he made his own case worse by miscitation. To the very last, in his _Erasmus_ itself, which he had prepared at some pains for the press, his work would always abound in the most astonishing slips of memory, oversights of fact, hastinesses of statement. There is probably no historian of anything like his calibre in the whole history of literature who is so dangerous to trust for mere matters of fact, who gives such bad books of reference, who is so little to be read with implicit confidence in detail. Had his critics confined themselves to pointing this out, and done him justice in his other and real merits, little fault could have been found with them. But it is impossible not to see that these merits were, at least in some cases, part of his crime, in the eyes of those who did not like him; in others were of a kind which their natural abilities did not qualify them to detect.

The first of these merits--the least it may be in some eyes, not so in others--was a steadfast, intense, fiery patriotism, which may remind us of that which Macaulay in a famous passage has ascribed to Chatham in modern times and to Demosthenes of old. This quality differed as much from the flowery and conventional rhetoric not uncommon in writers of some foreign nations, as from the smug self-satisfaction which was so frequent in English speakers and authors of his own earlier time. No one probably of Mr. Froude's day was less blind to English faults than he was; no one more thoroughly grasped and more ardently admired the greatness of England, or more steadfastly did his utmost in his own vocation to keep her great.

His second excellence--an excellence still contested and in a way contestable, but less subject than the first to personal and particular opinion--was his command of the historic grasp, his share of the historic sense. I have seen these terms referred to as if they were chatter or claptrap; while the qualities which they denote are very often confounded with qualities which, sometimes found in connection with them, may exist without either. The historic sense may be roughly described as the power of seizing, and so of portraying, a historic character, incident, or period as if it were alive not dead; in such a manner that the fit reader, whether he is convinced or not that the things ever did happen, sees that they might and probably must have happened. Some of the most estimable and excellent of historians have not had even a glimmering of this sense: they have at best laboriously assembled the materials out of which, sooner or later, some one with the sense will make a live history. But Thucydides and Herodotus had it; Tacitus had it, and even Sallust; it betrays itself in the most artless fashion in Villehardouin and Joinville, less artlessly in Comines; Clarendon had it; Gibbon had it; Carlyle had it as none has had it before or since. And Mr. Froude had it; not much less though more fitfully than Carlyle. It is not in the least necessary to agree with his views; it is possible to regard his facts with the most anxious suspicion. You may think that the case made out for King Henry is pretty weak, and the case made out against Queen Mary is much weaker. But Mr. Froude is among the rare Deucalions of historic literature: he cannot cast a stone but it becomes alive.

Thirdly, and still rising in the scale of incontestability, though even so contested, I believe, by some, is the merit of style. 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 upon green tastes. It has neither the popular and slightly brusque appeal of Macaulay or Kinglake, nor the unique magnificence of Mr. Ruskin, nor 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.

NOTE.--As examples of the almost enforced omissions referred
to in the text may be mentioned earlier Archdeacon Coxe, the
biographer of Marlborough and the historian of the House of
Austria; later, Finlay (1799-1875), the valiant successor of
Gibbon, and the chronicler of the obscure and thankless
fortunes of the country called Greece, after it had ceased
to be living. Professor Sir J. R. Seeley, Kingsley's
successor at Cambridge (1834-94), equally distinguished in
his professional business, and as a lay theologian in a
sense rather extra-orthodox than unorthodox; and Sir John
Stirling-Maxwell, no mean historian either in the general
sense or in the special department of Art. It is open to any
one to contend that each and all of these as well deserve
notice as not a few dealt with above; yet if they were
admitted others still could hardly be excluded.