Froudes Essays in Literature and History | Page 2

winning when he
proceeded to champion it, and many a better man, one or two greater
men, were saying the same things as he; but they said such things in a
fashion that suggested no violent effort nor any demand for resistance:
it was the peculiar virtue of Froude that he touched nothing without the
virile note of a challenge sounding throughout his prose. On this
account, though he will convince our posterity even less than he does
ourselves, the words of persuasion, the writings themselves will remain:
for he chose the hardest wood in which to chisel, knowing the strength
of his hand.
What was it in him which gave him that strength, and which permitted
him, in an age that would tolerate no formative grasp upon itself, to
achieve a permanent fame? I will not reply to this question by pointing
to the popularity of his History of England; the essays that follow will
afford sufficient material to answer it. He produced the effect he did
and remained in the eminence to which he had climbed, first because
his manner of thought was rigid and of a hard edge; secondly, because
he could use that steel tool of a brain in a fashion that was general; he
could use it upon subjects and with a handling that was comprehensible
to great masses of his fellow-countrymen.
It is not certain that such a man with such interests would have made
his voice heard in any other society. It is doubtful whether he will be
translated with profit. His field was very small, the points of his attack
might all be found contained in one suburban villa. But in our society

his grip and his intensity did fall, and fall of choice, upon such matters
as his contemporaries either debated or were ready to debate. He
therefore did the considerable thing we know him to have done.
I say that his mind was rigid and of a close fibre: it was a mind (to
repeat the metaphor) out of which a strong graying-tool could be forged.
Its blade would not be blunted: it could deal with its material. Of this
character, which I take to be the first essential in his achievement, the
few essays before us preserve an ample evidence.
Thus you will find throughout their pages the presence of that dogmatic
assertion which invariably proceeds from such a mind, and coupled
with such assertion is a continual consciousness that his dogmas are
dogmas: that he is asserting unprovable things and laying down his
axioms before he begins his process of reasoning.
The contrary might be objected by some foreign observer, or by some
one who had a larger acquaintance with European history than had he. I
can imagine a French or an Irish critic pointing to a mass of assertion
with no corresponding admission that it is assertion only: such a critic
might quote even from these few pages phrase after phrase in which
Froude poses as certain what are still largely matters of debate. Thus
upon page 144 he takes it for granted that no miracles have been
worked by contact with the bodies of saints. He takes it for granted on
page 161 that the checking of monastic disorders, and the use of strong
language in connection with them, was peculiar to the generation which
saw at its close the dissolution of the monasteries. He takes it for
granted on page 125 that what we call "manifestations" or what
not,--spirit rappings, table-turnings, and the rest--are deceptions of the
senses to which superstition alone would give credence.
He ridicules (upon p. 128) the tradition of St. Patrick which all modern
research has come to accept. He says downright (upon pp. 186-187)
that the Ancient world did not inquire into the problem of evil. On p.
214 he will have it that the ordinary man rejects, "without hesitation,"
the interference of will with material causes. In other words, he asserts
that the ordinary man is a fatalist--for Froude knew very well that
between the fatalist and the believer in a possibility of miracle there is

no conceivable position. He will have it (on p. 216) that a modern
doctor always regards a "vision" as an hallucination. On p. 217 he
denies by implication the stigmata of St. Francis--and so forth--one
might multiply the instances indefinitely. All Froude's works are full of
them, they are part and parcel of his method--but their number is to no
purport. One example may stand for all, and their special value to our
purpose is not that they are mere assertions, but that they are assertions
which Froude must have known to be personal, disputable, and
dogmatic.
He knew very well that the vast majority of mankind accepted the
virtue of relics, that intellects the