us are transfigured after its likeness."
There's a piece of historical prose which summarises, teaches, and stamps itself finally upon the mind! Froude saw that the Faith was the summit and the completion of Rome. Had he written us a summary of the fourth and fifth centuries--and had he written it just after reading some dull fellow on the other side--what books we should have had to show to the rival schools of the Continent!
Consider the sharp and almost unique judgment passed upon Tacitus at the bottom of page 133 and the top of page 134, or again, the excellent sub-ironic passages in which he expresses the vast advantage of metaphysical debate: which has all these qualities, that it is true, sober, exact, and yet a piece of laughter and a contradiction of itself. It is prose in three dimensions.
That pedantic charge of inaccuracy, with which I have already dealt in another place, in connection with another and perhaps a greater man, is not applicable to Froude. He was hasty, and in his historical work the result certainly was that he put down things upon insufficient evidence, or upon evidence but half read; but even in his historical work (which deals remember, with the most highly controversial part of English history) he is as accurate as anybody else, except perhaps Lingard. That the man was by nature accurate, well read and of a good memory, appears continually throughout this book, and the more widely one has read one's self, the more one appreciates this truth.
For instance, there is often set down to Disraeli the remark that his religion was "the religion of all sensible men." and upon being asked what this religion might be, that Oriental is said to have replied, "All sensible men keep that to themselves." Now Disraeli could no more have made such a witticism than he could have flown through the air; his mind was far too extravagant for such pointed phrases. Froude quotes the story (page 205 of this book) but rightly ascribes it to Rogers, a very different man from Disraeli-- an Englishman with a mastery of the English language.
Look again at this remark upon page 20, "The happy allusion of Quevedo to the Tiber was not out of place here:--the fugitive is alone permanent.'" How many Englishmen know that Du Bellay's immortal sonnet was but a translation of Quevedo? You could drag all Oxford and Cambridge to-day and not find a single man who knew it.
Note the care he has shown in quoting one of those hackneyed phrases which almost all the world misquotes, "Que mon nom soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre." Of a hundred times that you may see those words of Danton's written down, you will perhaps not see them once written down exactly as they were said.
So it is throughout his work. Men still living in the Universities accuse him vaguely of inexactitude as they will accuse Jowett of ignorance, and these men, when one examines them closely, are found to be ignorant of the French language, to have read no philosophy between Aristotle and Hobbes, and to issue above their signatures such errors of plain dates and names as make one blush for English scholarship and be glad that no foreigner takes our historical school seriously.
There is always left to any man who deals with the writings of Froude, a task impossible to complete but necessarily to be attempted. He put himself forward, in a set attitude, to combat and to destroy what he conceived to be--in the moment of his attack--the creed of his countrymen. He was so literary a man that he did this as much by accepting as by denying, as much by dating from Elizabeth all we are as by affirming unalterable material sequence and the falsity of every transcendental acceptation. His time smelt him out even when he flattered it most. Even when he wrote of the Revenge the England of his day--luckily for him--thought him an enemy.
Upon the main discussion of his life it is impossible to pass a judgment, for the elements of that discussion are now destroyed; the universities no longer pretend to believe. And "free discussion" has become so free that the main doctrines he assailed are no longer presented or read without weariness in the class to which he appealed and from which he sprang.
The sects, then, against which he set himself are dead: but upon a much larger question which is permanent, and which in a sort of groping way he sometimes handled, something should be said here, which I think has never been said before. He was perpetually upon the borderland of the Catholic Church.
Between him and the Faith there stood no distance of space, but rather a high thin wall; the high thin wall of his own desperate conviction. If you will turn to page 209 of this book you will see it said of the denial of the Sacrament by the Reformers and of Ridley's dogma that it was bread only "the commonsense of the country was of the same opinion, and illusion was at an end." Froude knew that the illusion was not at an end. He probably knew (for we must continue to repeat that he was a most excellent historian) that the "commonsense of the country" was, by the time Ridley and the New English Church began denying the real presence, and turning that denial into a dogma, profoundly indifferent to all dogmas whatsoever. What "the common-sense of the country" wanted was to keep out swarthy men, chivalrous indeed but imperialists full of gold who owned nearly all the earth, but who, they were determined, should not own England.
Froude was fond of such assertions, his book is full of them, and they are more than mere violence framed for combat; they are in their curious way definite expressions of the man's soul; for Froude was fond of that high thin wall, and liked to build it higher. He was a dogmatic rationalist--one hesitates to use a word which has been so portentously misused. Renan before dying came out with one of his last dogmas; it was to this effect, that there was not in the Universe an intelligent power higher than the human mind. Froude, had he lived in an atmosphere of perfectly free discussion as Renan did, would have heartily subscribed to that dogma.
Why then do I say that he was perpetually on the borderland of the Catholic Church? Because when he leaves for a moment the phraseology and the material of his youth and of his neighbourhood, he is perpetually striking that note of interest, of wonder, and of intellectual freedom which is the note of Catholicism.
Let any man who knows what Catholicism may be read carefully the Essay on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Essay on the Philosophy of Christianity which succeeds it in this book, but which was written six years before. Let him remember that nothing Froude ever wrote was written without the desire to combat some enemy, and, having made allowance for that desire, let him decide whether one shock, one experience, one revelation would not have whirled him into the Church. He was, I think, like a man who has felt the hands of a woman and heard her voice, who knows them so thoroughly well that he can love, criticise, or despise according to his mood; but who has never seen her face.
And he was especially near to the Church in this: that having discussed a truth he was compelled to fight for it and to wound actively in fighting, He was an agent, He did, He saw that the mass of stuff clinging round the mind of wealthy England was decaying, He turned with regret towards the healthy visions of Europe and called them illusions because they were not provable, and because all provable things showed a flee other than that of the creed and were true in another manner. He despised the cowardice --for it is cowardice--that pretends to intellectual conviction and to temporal evidence of the things of the soul. He saw and said, and he was right in saying, that the City of God is built upon things incredible.
"Incredibilia nec crederim, nisi me compelleret ecclesiae auctoritas"
H. BELLOC.
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The following is a list of the published works of J. A. Froude. "Life of St. Neot" ("Lives of the English Saints," edited by J. H. Newman), 1844. "Shadows of the Clouds" (Tales), by Zeta (pseud.), 1847. "A Sermon (on 2 Cor. vii. 10) preached at St. Mary's Church on the Death of the Rev. George May Coleridge," 1847. Article on "Spinoza" (Oxford and Cambridge Review), 1847. "The Nemesis of Faith" (Tale), 1849. "England's Forgotten Worthies" (Westminster Review), 1852. "Book of Job" (Westminster Review), 1853. "Poems of Matthew Arnold" (Westminster Review), 1854. "Suggestions on the Best Means of Teaching English History" ("Oxford Essays," &c.), 1855. "History of England," 12 vols., 1856-1870 "The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character," 1865. "Inaugural Address delivered to the University of St. Andrews, March 19, 1869," 1869. "Short Studies on Great Subjects," 1867, 2 vols., series 2-4, 1872-83 (articles from Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, &c.). "The Cat's