Froudes Essays in Literature and History | Page 6

way in which the Divinity of our Lord fought its way
into the leading brains of Europe, as appears upon page 192 of this
book. It is as good as Boissier; there runs all through it knowledge,
proportion, and something which, had he been granted a little more
light, or been nurtured in an intellectual climate a little more sunny,
would have been vision itself:--
"The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work compared to
which the first creation appears but a trifling difficulty, what could He
be but God? Who but God could have wrested His prize from a power
which half the thinking world believed to be His coequal and co-eternal
adversary? He was God. He was man also, for He was the second

Adam--the second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born,
that no original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed;
and being Himself sinless, He showed in the nature of His person after
His resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us
except for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity,
the bodies of each of 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