Froudes History of England | Page 7

life which (as the Hebrew book so cunningly shows) is the
organic development of the family life; or whether he shall treat it (as
we do not) as a mere apologue or myth, he must confess that it is
equally grand in its simplicity and singular in its unexpected result. The
words of the story, taken literally and simply, no more justify the
notion that Canaan's slavery was any magical consequence of the old
patriarch's anger than they do the well-known theory that it was the
cause of the Negro's blackness. Ham shows a low, foul, irreverent,
unnatural temper towards his father. The old man's shame is not a cause
of shame to his son, but only of laughter. Noah prophesies (in the
fullest and deepest meaning of that word) that a curse will come upon
that son's son; that he will be a slave of slaves; and reason and
experience show that he spoke truth. Let the young but see that their
fathers have no reverence for the generation before them, then will they
in turn have no reverence for their fathers. Let them be taught that the
sins of their ancestors involve their own honour so little that they need
not take any trouble to clear the blot off the scutcheon, but may safely
sit down and laugh over it, saying, 'Very likely it is true. If so, it is very

amusing; and if not--what matter?'--Then those young people are being
bred up in a habit of mind which contains in itself all the capabilities of
degradation and slavery, in self-conceit, hasty assertion, disbelief in
nobleness, and all the other 'credulities of scepticism': parted from that
past from which they take their common origin, they are parted also
from each other, and become selfish, self-seeking, divided, and
therefore weak: disbelieving in the nobleness of those who have gone
before them, they learn more and more to disbelieve in the nobleness of
those around them; and, by denying God's works of old, come, by a just
and dreadful Nemesis, to be unable to see his works in the men of their
own day; to suspect and impugn valour, righteousness,
disinterestedness in their contemporaries; to attribute low motives; to
pride themselves on looking at men and things as 'men who know the
world,' so the young puppies style it; to be less and less chivalrous to
women, less and less respectful to old men, less and less ashamed of
boasting about their sensual appetites; in a word, to show all those
symptoms which, when fully developed, leave a generation without
fixed principles, without strong faith, without self- restraint, without
moral cohesion, the sensual and divided prey of any race, however
inferior in scientific knowledge, which has a clear and fixed notion of
its work and destiny. That many of these signs are themselves more and
more ominously showing in our young men, from the fine gentleman
who rides in Rotten Row to the boy-mechanic who listens enraptured to
Mr. Holyoake's exposures of the absurdity of all human things save Mr.
Holyoake's self, is a fact which presses itself most on those who have
watched this age most carefully, and who (rightly or wrongly) attribute
much of this miserable temper to the way in which history has been
written among us for the last hundred years.
Whether or not Mr. Froude would agree with these notions, he is more
or less responsible for them; for they have been suggested by his
'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth.'
It was impossible to read the book without feeling the contrast between
its tone and that of every other account of the times which one had ever
seen. Mr. Froude seems to have set to work upon the principle, too
much ignored in judging of the past, that the historian's success must
depend on his dramatic faculty; and not merely on that constructive
element of the faculty in which Mr. Macaulay shows such astonishing

power, but on that higher and deeper critical element which ought to
precede the constructive process, and without which the constructive
element will merely enable a writer, as was once bitterly but truly said,
'to produce the greatest possible misrepresentation with the least
possible distortion of fact.' That deeper dramatic faculty, the critical, is
not logical merely, but moral, and depends on the moral health, the
wideness and heartiness of his moral sympathies, by which he can put
himself--as Mr. Froude has attempted to do, and as we think
successfully--into the place of each and every character, and not merely
feel for them, but feel with them. He does not merely describe their
actions from the outside, attributing them arbitrarily to motives which
are pretty sure to be the lowest possible, because it is easier