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spectacles and asking him as he put each on how things looked to him through them. As, however, he at the same time added how they ought to look if he wished to have his eyes judged worthless for military purposes, it was not hard to arrive at a prosperous conclusion. Some such part does Mr. Froude undertake for our benefit. We must never see the text without his gloss; never be suffered to look at a fact till we have heard from him what we are to find there. He never for an instant hints it as conceivable that what he finds there may not be there at all. Nay, he seems explicitly to accept or to claim that very character of a reader of hidden things against which we are arguing. "Motives," he tells us,* "which in one age are languid and even unintelligible, have been in another alive and all-powerful. To comprehend these differences, to take them up into his imagination, to keep them present before him as the key to what he reads, is the chief difficulty and the chief duty of the student of history."†

Now for a few samples of the manner in which this difficulty has been met and this duty accomplished.‡ We take them almost at random.

St. Thomas, as is well known, when he became Archbishop, insisted, to the King's displeasure, on resigning his chancellorship. This is the fact. Now for the philosophy. “As Chancellor, he had been at the head of the State under the King. As Archbishop in the name of the

* Nineteenth Century, June, 1877, p. 549. The

italics here and throughout these citations are ours.

More than this, he seems elsewhere naively to admit the force of the very impeachment which we are attempting to urge. He writes in the same series of papers (October, p. 393): "In that distant century, when the general history is but outline, and the colors are dim and the lights and shadows fall where modern imagination chooses to cast them." But this is a stray seed of truth falling by the wayside and not bearing any fruit.

It is no part of our present object to point out misrepresentations of fact, and in dealing with Mr. Froude the task would be endless. We are engaged with the system only on which such history is constructed, and with that which serves to illustrate the system.

Church he intended to be head both of State and King; to place the Pope, and himself as the Pope's Legate, in the place of God's vicegerents. When he found it written that by me Kings reign and princes decree judgment,' he appropriated the language to himself, and his single aim was to convert the words thus construed into reality. The first public intimation which he gave of his intentions was the resignation of the chancellorship,'* and to make assurance doubly sure, this account of the matter is backed up by another idea equally philosophical, but as to the proof which is vouchsafed utterly childish, that he wished to avoid an audit of his accounts, in which Mr. Froude pronounces that "he was wise."+

Again, when ruptures began between King and Primate, and when the Pope urged the latter to keep within the laws of the realm, the fact is thus set forth :

"Alexander had no liking for Becket. He had known him long and had no faith in the lately assumed airs of sanctity. . . . On the spot he dispatched a Legate," etc.‡

Presumably, Alexander confided. these motives to Mr. Froude, for he seems never to have intrusted them to any one else.

Again, the same Pontiff, who, as seems to common eyes, did his best to find a middle course which, without sacrifice of principle, should not exasperate the King, is thus depicted for his pains by the keener glance of the philosopher :

"Harassed on both sides, knowing perfectly well on which side good sense and justice lay, yet not daring to declare Becket wrong and accept what after all that had passed would be construed into a defeat of the Church, the unfortunate Alexander drifted on."§

The side of good sense and justice

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being, it is needless to observe, the side of the historian, and the only ground for asserting that the Pope saw it to be so, being that the same authority judges that he ought to have so seen it.

Not to multiply examples, we take another from the finale of the history.

We all know the fact of the tremendous revulsion of feeling caused by the Archbishop's murder, the triumph of his cause, and the penitence of the King. We also know that contemporary writers assert in terms the most explicit, that miracles were wrought by his relics or over his tomb, of which they, the writers, were eye-witnesses. Now let us treat these facts philosophically.

"Martyr for the Church of Christ or turbulent incendiary justly punished? . . . That was the alternative that lay before the Christian world. Benedict of Canterbury. . . . relates the influences by which alone the popular verdict was decided in the Archbishop's favor." Mr. Froude goes on to tell us that "miracles come when they are needed." But he considerately adds that "" "they come not of fraud, but of an impassioned credulity, which creates what it is determined to find."

And having thus made clear the principle, he is ready to descend into the region of "facts."

"In the eyes of Europe the cause for which Becket fell was the cause of sacerdotalism as against the prosaic virtues of justice and common sense. Every superstitious mind in Christendom was at work immediately generating supernatural evidence.

Either the laws of nature were suspended, or for the four years which followed his death the power and the wish were gone to distinguish truth from falsehood.* The most ordinary events were transfigured. That ver

* In which latter case it certainly is clear that the

task must needs devolve upon some other century, such as ours, of making a history for the twelfth which it was obviously quite incapable of supplying for itself.

sion of any story was held to be the truest which gave most honor to the martyr. . . . The monks sought their pallets with one thought in the minds of all of them. Was the Archbishop a saint, or was he a vain dreamer? God only could decide.”

And the way being thus scientifically made straight, the vision which one of these monks relates himself to have seen can be safely introduced.

And the writer who can put this down as history is described as our most illustrious living historian.

But it is not with particular examples that we are mainly concerned. We are attacking the system which underlies such histories, be they right or wrong in their particular conclusions. Our protest is against the pretension of a writer to do what cannot possibly be done: to lay down in this manner motives and causes which neither are recorded, nor which "the facts themselves necessarily suggest."

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Now in the matter of St. Thomas we have seen what, on Mr. Froude's showing, were the unmistakable merits of the case. His was the cause of sacerdotalism as against "the prosaic virtues of justice and common sense." And it was this plainly and broadly "in the eyes of Europe," so that no one, we presume, who knows anything of the facts could hesitate thus to esteem it. More than this, Becket was seeking to usurp a power not justly his. It ""* 'encroachment. If he were right, "then kings and cabinets ought to be superseded at once by commissions of bishops."† He sought to secure, "not the purity of the Church, but the privilege and supremacy of the Church:" the King, "always moderate"§ (Henry the Second), was moved to action only by the clear evidence which the Archbishop forced upon him, that justice was to be withheld in the case

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of clerics, and that "they might commit murder upon murder, robbery upon robbery, and the law would be unable to touch them."

In fact it is abundantly made evident that the case of the Monarch against the Prelate was that of justice against injustice.

But while this is so, it is a little puzzling to a reader accustomed to take his explanations as well as his facts on trust, to find that the same facts have suggested another quite opposite, albeit presumably quite as philosophical a judgment. What is a plain man to think if, after what we have just given, he stumble across the following?

"Times were changed in England since the Second Henry walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury. The clergy had won the battle then because they deserved to win it. They were not free from fault and weakness, but they felt the meaning of their profession. Their hearts were in their vows, their authority was exercised more justly, more nobly than the authority of the crown; and, therefore, with inevitable justice, the crown was compelled to stoop before them."

And assuredly the bewilderment does not grow less on finding that this latter account, no less than the former, comes from the pen of Mr. James Anthony Froude. The one he gave to the world in the year 1856 in his History of England,* the other this year in the pages of a Review. History has been changed between these dates because Mr. Froude has changed his spectacles. One thing seems clear. If now he is teaching us history, then twenty years ago he was perverting its most obvious lessons. If, in 1856, he was speaking with any authority, then is he a slanderer in 1877. And surely the historical method which leads to such awkward dilemmas can hardly commend itself to sober common sense. But Mr. Froude is, after all, for us * Vol. i, p. 81.

but an example to illustrate an evil which influences writers far more worthy of our consideration than is that unscrupulous partisan. We must enter our protest in the remainder of this paper against what of the same evil system we find in the work of an historian who has obtained, and to a great extent most deservedly obtained, an exceptionally wide hold on the public mind,Mr. John Richard Green.

In some respects, indeed, Mr. Green's Short History of the English People is a yet more striking instance of the bad system we deprecate than is even anything of Mr. Froude's. The latter does, at least, give us references and notes, and the notes occasionally flatly contradict for us the text to which they are appended. The former, after a very general indication of "authorities," presents to us all the substance of his volume purely on his own ipse dixit.

And some few circumstances cannot but suggest to our minds a doubt as to whether that authority be always truly philosophical. First, as to the selection of authorities. In his seventh chapter on the Reformation we read as follows:

is

"The main authority Foxe's Book of Martyrs. In spite of endless errors of Puritan prejudices and deliberate suppressions of the truth

its mass of facts and wonderful charm of style will always give a great importance to the work of Foxe."

In the name of sober history, what is this? What is the meaning of facts in conjunction with the name of a witness who is acknowledged to be not only deceived, but deceiving? What does it matter as to his historical credibility whether he lie picturesquely or ungracefully? What sort of a view of his duties can that historian have who can thus naively introduce a "main authority?"

But we pass from authorities to the use of the same, and with one instance thereof we shall be content.

We take the instance of Sir Thomas ary," more "largely human ;" in

More.

In Mr. Green's treatment of More's history there seems to be portrayed in brief all the evil which follows from the adoption of the philosophical method of historiography.

The philosophical historian must trace events to their causes, and the actions of men to their motives. He must, therefore, to a great extent, forget the individuality of men to manœuvre them like puppets in platoons. He considers them as spokes of a wheel--members of a party following its evolutions—and their individual history as being explicable primarily through it. In More's case the party in question is that of the "New Learning."

Given the fact that More and Fisher were friends of Colet and Erasmus, and that Erasmus was a stepping-stone to the Reformation, it becomes abundantly clear that the Chancellor and the Bishop must have been some time or other near the Reformation too. The drama for the purposes of the picturesquely philosophical historian must be constructed on broad lines easily followed by the eye of the audience, just as a scene-painter must deal in bold strokes. That More while delighting in the new fields of human learning which the "Renascence" (as Mr. Green calls it) opened for him, still believed as firmly as his forefathers in those sacred truths for the divinity of which he wrote and died—is an explanation of facts too petty, not sufficiently scientific, for the needs of the modern mind. Instead of this, we are invited to believe that men of the "New Learning throughout Europe formed a quasi-homogeneous whole, or at least that their minds manoeuvred together with the regularity of a flock of plover. Their principles were common, though local circumstances might give various developments to those principles. In Italy the New Learning was more "liter

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England more moral, more religious, more practical in its bearings, both upon society and politics."'* Accordingly all these men of the New Learning, from More to Erasmus, were at one in their general aims, moral, religious, and practical, which aims the said New Learning evinced by steadily backing the cause of the Reformation. What then turned the particular man of this body with whom is our present concern, against-and so very decidedly against-the cause which he was so prepared to befriend? Not any weak and antiquated ideas of the truth of one Creed as opposed to another, but the extremely un-newlearned character of Luther's reply to Henry the Eighth.

So

To More especially, with his keener perception of its future effect, this sudden revival of a purely theological and dogmatic spirit, severing Christendom into warring camps, and annihilating all hopes of union and tolerance, was especially hateful. The temper which hitherto had seemed endearing, gentle, and happy,' suddenly gave way." great in fact was the shock that he forgot the New Learning himself. "His answer to Luther's attack upon the King sank to the level of the work it answered."§ Nay, so extraordinary was the revulsion of his feelings at seeing dogma thus survive, that under its influence he went and laid his head on the block for the sake of dogma.

Now we are not so much concerned in arguing that such an account is puerile and ridiculous, as in pointing out that such stuff is the necessary product of the 'philosophical writing of history.

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Where explanations have to be given of everything they must be found, and as they are not generally found ready to hand they have to be

* Short History of the English People, p. 298. † P. 315. P. 319. P. 316.

made. The manufacture is an interesting process, and in these days may almost claim rank as a fine art. We are far from saying that there is always or even generally deliberate unfairness on the part of the manufacturer, but we remember Dr. Lingard's phrase about the writer who "will impose upon his readers and probably upon himself." We find a good instance of our meaning in the materials to support his view of his character which Mr. Green brings from More's Utopia.

This "wonderful book," Mr. Green tells us, *reveals to us the heart of the New Learning." In the kingdom of "Nowhere (as he rather affectedly translates the title)† the "humorist philosopher" found realized by "the mere efforts of natural human virtue these ends of security, brotherhood, and freedom for which the very institution of society seemed to have been framed," in contrast to "a world where fifteen hundred years of Christian teaching had produced social injustice, religious intolerance, and political tyranny."

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"From Christendom More turned with a smile to Nowhere.' In 'Nowhere' the aim of legislation is to secure the welfare, social, industrial, intellectual, religious, of the community at large.' And amongst these topics, "his treatment of the religious question was in a special manner in advance of his age. "The religion of Nowhere' was in marked contrast with the faith of Christendom. It rested simply on nature and reason . . Christianity indeed had already reached Utopia, but it had few priests; religion found its centre rather in the family than in the congregation. . ... More than a century before William of Orange, More discerned and proclaimed the

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great principle of religious toleration."'*

qualm

For our own part we must confess to a very uncomfortable within our soul as to the reliance to be placed on the exposition of authorities and documents unknown to us when we find this treatment of one that we know. To put it broadly, we conceive it to be impossible more utterly to travesty'More's scope and teaching in this celebrated work.

For if this account is worth anything at all it means that Sir Thomas More meant the Utopia to be, as is here represented, a picture of a state of things which he considers to be ideal, or at least to be far better than the state of things in Christendom. But reading the work itself, can we think that he so meant it?

For in the first place, he himself tells us exactly the opposite. After hearing the narrative of Raphael the traveller, who describes the unknown island and its inhabitants, the author adds:† "Many things occurred to me both concerning the manners and laws of that people that seemed very absurd, as well in their way of making war as in their notions of religion and divine matters.' And, indeed, for an ordinary unphilosophical reader this piece of information could hardly be needed, seeing that the chief point in Utopian warfare was to bribe subjects to assassinate their leaders, and leaders to betray their trust, while in religion they are remarkably free, some of them worshipping the sun, others the moon or one of the planets," and some "such men as have been eminent in former times for virtue or glory, not only as ordinary deities, but as the Supreme God."

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