Froudes Essays in Literature and History | Page 4

they were thinking about and
therefore all he did to praise or blame their convictions, to soothe or to
exasperate them, told. He could see the target.
Perpetually this looking at the world from the standpoint of the men
around him makes him say things that irritate more particular and more
acute minds than his own, but I will maintain that in his case the fault
was a necessary fault and went with a power which permitted him to
achieve the sympathy which he did achieve. He talks of the "Celt" and
the "Saxon," and ascribes what he calls "our failures in Ireland" to the
"incongruity of character" between these two imaginaries. He takes it
for granted that "we are something which divides us from mediaeval
Christianity by an impassable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he
must quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking of
Oxford undergraduates one has "pleasant faces, cheerful voices, and
animal spirits," and at the end of the fine but partial essay on Spinoza
we have six lines which might come bodily from a leader in the Daily
Telegraph, or from any copy of the Spectator picked up at random.
These are grave faults, but, I repeat, they are the faults of those great
qualities which gave him his position.
And side by side with such faults go an exceptional lucidity, a good
order within the paragraph and in the succession of the paragraphs. A

choice of subject suited to his audience, an excision of that which
would have bored or bewildered it, a vividness of description
wherewith to amuse and a directness of conclusion wherewith to arrest
his readers --all these he had, beyond perhaps any of his
contemporaries.
Occasionally that brotherhood in him leads him to faults more serious.
You get gross commonplace and utterly false commonplace, of which
when he came back to them (if indeed he was a man who read his own
works) he must have been ashamed:--
"Persecutions come, and martyrdoms, and religious wars; and, at last,
the old faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the new rises
out of the ashes.
"Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions, natural and
moral."
Or again, of poor old Oxford:--
"The increase of knowledge, and consequently of morality, is the great
aim of such a noble establishment as this; and the rewards and honours
dispensed there are bestowed in proportion to the industry and good
conduct of those who receive them."
But the interesting point about these very lapses is that they remain
purely exceptional. They do not affect either the tone of his writing or
the value and intricacy of his argument. They may be compared to
those undignified and valueless chips of conversational English that
pop up in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an enthusiastic and
wide man.
While, however, one is in the mood of criticism it is not unjust to show
what other lapses in him are connected with this common sympathy of
his and this very comprehension of his class to which he owed his
opportunity and his effect.
Thus he is either so careless or so hurried as to use-- much too

commonly--words which have lost all vitality, and which are for the
most part meaningless, but which go the rounds still like shining flat
sixpences worn smooth. The word "practical" drops from his pen; he
quotes "in a glass darkly," and speaks of "a picture of human life"; the
walls of Oxford are "time-hallowed"; he enters a church and finds in it
"a dim religious light"; a man of Froude's capacity has no right to find
such a thing there. If he writes the word "sin" the word "shame" comes
tripping after. It may be that he was a man readily caught by fatigue, or
it may bet it is more probable, that he thought it small millinery to
"travailler le verbe" At any rate the result as a whole hangs to his
identity of spirit with the thousands for whom he wrote.
To this character of universality attach also faults not only in his
occasional choice of words but in his general style.
The word "style" has been so grossly abused during the last thirty years
that one mentions it with diffidence. Matthew Arnold well said that
when people came to him and asked to be told how to write a good
style he was unable to reply; for indeed it is not a thing to be taught. It
is a by-product, though a necessary by-product, of good thinking. But
when Matthew Arnold went on to say that there was no such thing as
style except knowing clearly what you wanted to say, and saying it as
clearly as you