Froudes Essays in Literature and History

Froude's Essays in Literature
and History, by

James Froude This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost
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Title: Froude's Essays in Literature and History With Introduction by
Hilaire Belloc
Author: James Froude
Commentator: Hilaire Belloc
Release Date: April 28, 2006 [EBook #18276]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROUDE'S
ESSAYS ***

Produced by Michael Madden

Essays on History and Literature
By James Anthony Froude

London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1906 ____
Contents
Arnold's Poems (Westminster Review, 1854)
Words about Oxford (Fraser's Magazine, 1850)
England's Forgotten Worthies (Westminster Review, 1852)
The Book of Job (Westminster Review, 1853)
The Lives of the Saints (Eclectic Review, 1852)
The Dissolution of the Monasteries (Fraser's Magazine, 1857)
The Philosophy of Christianity (The Leader, 1851)
A Plea for the Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties (Fraser's
Magazine, 1863)
Spinoza (Westminster Review, 1855)
Reynard the Fox (Fraser's Magazine, 1852)
The Commonplace Book of Richard Hilles (Fraser's Magazine, 1858)
____
INTRODUCTION
Froude had this merit--a merit he shared with Huxley alone of His
contemporaries--that he imposed his convictions. He fought against
resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent animosity. He
exasperated the surface of his time and was yet too strong for that
surface to reject him. This combative and aggressive quality in him,
which was successful in that it was permanent and never suffered a
final defeat should arrest any one who may make a general survey of
the last generation in letters.

It was a period with a vice of its own which yet remains to be detected
and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another fanaticism, in a third
dulness and a dead-alive copying of the past, are the faults which
criticism finds to attack. None of these affected the Victorian era. It
was pure--though tainted with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly
free from violence in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but
it had this grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily)
that thought was restrained upon every side. Never in the history of
European letters was it so difficult for a man to say what he would and
to be heard. A sort of cohesive public spirit (which was but one aspect
of the admirable homogeneity of the nation) glued and immobilised all
individual expression. One could float imprisoned as in a stream of
thick substance: one could not swim against it.
It is to be carefully discerned how many apparent exceptions to this
truth are, if they be closely examined, no exceptions at all. A whole
series of national defects were exposed and ridiculed in the literature as
in the oratory of that day; but they were defects which the mass of men
secretly delighted to hear denounced and of which each believed
himself to be free.
They loved to be told that they were of a gross taste in art, for they
connected such a taste vaguely with high morals and with successful
commerce. There was no surer way to a large sale than to start a
revolution in appreciation every five years, and from Ruskin to Oscar
Wilde a whole series of Prophets attained eminence and fortune by
telling men how something new and as yet unknown was Beauty and
something just past was to be rejected, and how they alone saw truth
while the herd around them were blind. But no one showed us how to
model, nor did any one remark that we alone of all Europe had
preserved a school of water-colour.
So in politics our blunders were a constant theme; but no one marked
with citation, document, and proof the glaring progress of corruption,
or that, for all our enthusiasm, we never once in that generation
defended the oppressed against the oppressor. There was a vast if
unrecognised conspiracy, by which whatever might have prevented

those extreme evils from which we now suffer was destroyed as it
appeared. Efforts at a thorough purge were dull, were libellous, were
not of the "form" which the Universities and the public schools taught
to be sacred. They were rejected as unreadable, or if printed, were
unread. The results are with us to-day.
In such a time Froude maintained an opposing force, which was not
reforming nor constructive in any way, but which will obtain the
attention of the future historian, simply because it was an opposition.
It was an opposition of manner rather than of matter. The matter of it
was common enough even in Froude's chief decade of power. The
cause to which he gave allegiance was already