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)____
Froude had this merit—a merit he shared with Huxley alone ofHis contemporaries—that he imposed his convictions. He foughtagainst resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violentanimosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yettoo strong for that surface to reject him. This combative andaggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it waspermanent and never suffered a final defeat should arrest anyone 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 bedetected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in anotherfanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of thepast, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None ofthese affected the Victorian era. It was pure—though taintedwith a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violencein its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had thisgrievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily)that thought was restrained upon every side. Never in the historyof European letters was it so difficult for a man to saywhat he would and to be heard. A sort of cohesive public spirit(which was but one aspect of the admirable homogeneity of thenation) glued and immobilised all individual expression. Onecould float imprisoned as in a stream of thick substance: onecould not swim against it.
It is to be carefully discerned how many apparent exceptions tothis truth are, if they be closely examined, no exceptions atall. A whole series of national defects were exposed andridiculed in the literature as in the oratory of that day; butthey were defects which the mass of men secretly delighted tohear 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 andwith successful commerce. There was no surer way to a largesale than to start a revolution in appreciation every five years,and from Ruskin to Oscar Wilde a whole series of Prophetsattained eminence and fortune by telling men how something newand as yet unknown was Beauty and something just past was to berejected, and how they alone saw truth while the herd around themwere blind. But no one showed us how to model, nor did any oneremark that we alone of all Europe had preserved a school ofwater-colour.
So in politics our blunders were a constant theme; but no onemarked with citation, document, and proof the glaring progressof corruption, or that, for all our enthusiasm, we never oncein that generation defended the oppressed against the oppressor.There was