WRITE of Freeman as one of the historical and political authors whose works have had a prominent place in my own education, and to whom I am deeply indebted; and yet I trust I can write of him impartially.

It cannot justly be said that Freeman

was

a

He was a profound thinker. thorough Englishman, with some of the characteristic limitations of the English mind. He was not a philosopher, nor an idealist, but "a plain, blunt man," on whose original nature was grafted a splendid classical and historical culture. He rebuked young Oxford, when professor there, for the "chatter about Shelley," which to him was but poor stuff when compared with such themes as the dominion of the great Karl, the invasion of Duke William, the position of the Burgundian kingdom, or the forgotten conquests of Carthage. We may well doubt whether Mr. Freeman ever read Shelley in his life; and we may be morally certain that the "Epipsychidion" or the "Lines written in the Euganean Hills" would have been as absolutely unintelligible to him as the theory of quaternions to a non-mathematical mind like my own. It is useless to argue these points. There will, let us hope, be people like Freeman. and others like Shelley so long as the world stands. But there is no reason why the one set should quarrel with the other. In the world of letters there are many mansions.

The first time I ever saw Freeman was at Cambridge (the English Cambridge), on a fine day of May in 1872. He had come to deliver the Rede Lecture before the University, on "The Unity of History"; and as I had always had from my earliest days a passion for seeing any celebrated man, I made my way into the Senate House, where the great man was welcomed by a crowd of black-gowned university

men and by a considerable gathering of the ladies who grace Cambridge with their presence in what has been conventionally termed the "merry month of May." I was particularly struck with Freeman's massive head, leonine aspect, and deep, full voice, which resounded in sonorous periods through that ugly, pseudo-classic building. I afterwards saw him, when the lecture was over, walking through the courts of St. John's College with his friend Professor Babington, the venerable Professor of Botany, and was irreverently amused at the shortness of the historian's legs, which rendered his walking not very unlike the waddling of a duck, while he was pointing all the time at the red brick gables of one of the older courts and probably gesticulating on architecture.

The qualities which Freeman showed most conspicuously throughout his lifetime were solidity and thoroughness of work and the most extraordinary industry. If genius consists in an infinite capacity for taking pains (which it doesn't), then was Freeman one of the most striking men of genius of the century. The mere amount of work he got through fills one with amazement. His writings fill no fewer than thirty-seven volumes; and while some of these, like the little book on "William the Conqueror" or that on "The Growth of the English Constitution," are small, the five large tomes of the "Norman Conquest," the fragmentary "History of Federal Government," and the "Historical Geography of Europe " involve an amount of hard toil in the actual making, quite apart from the preparation in reading and research, which only those who have themselves done a fair measure of writing can possibly appreciate. It is, I believe, the case that Freeman at one time actually lost the use of his righthand fingers through sheer overwork. No typical German professor ever did more severe tasks. He could "toil ter-ribly," it was said of Sir Walter Raleigh;

the same verdict might be passed on Freeman.

But Freeman's work was not only heavy, it was thorough and exact. Α distinguished historical scholar once said to me of Freeman's friend, Bishop Stubbs, whose great "Constitutional History" is one of the opera magna of our time, that he had never made a single mistake. I believe the same thing might be said of Freeman himself. He had the instinct for facts and the perfect sense of accuracy. I am not prepared to assert that there is not a single error in any one of Freeman's thirty-seven volumes; but I never came across or heard of one. His observation, whether of old manuscripts or of ancient buildings, was as painstaking and exact in every detail as was the observation of Darwin of the facts of natural history. Freeman had, therefore, the first qualification for a historian - accuracy a quality in which his old rival and now successor in the chair of Modern History at Oxford is singularly deficient. It would, indeed, have added a pang to death had Freeman known that James Anthony Froude was to be his successor.

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Another great quality which marks Freeman out as belonging to the newer school of historians is his impartiality and rigid reverence for truth. Gibbon, of course, stands alone in solitary grandeur the greatest historian by far that England, or perhaps the modern world, ever produced. But the other wellknown English historians, until the new historical school arose at Oxford, are mostly vehement partisans. Macaulay's brilliant and ever-charming narrative is a glorification of whiggism. Mitford wrote a history of Greece (to be had now at second-hand book-shops) from the point of view of an English Tory. Grote answered it from the point of view of a philosophical Radical, in what has been described as "the most gigantic party pamphlet ever produced." Hume's "History of England" is a piece of sceptical eighteenth century Toryism; while Robertson, now little read, was Whiggish in his tendenz. Godwin's "History of the Commonwealth" was the attempt of an English Republican to set forth the case

for Martyn and Vane against that for Cromwell. Carlyle, on the other hand, produced a splendid Cromwelliad, nearer the truth, it may be, than Godwin, but obviously biased by the writer's anti-democratic sentiment. Mr. Froude devoted a picturesque style and no little energy to a glowing romance, in which the halo of heroism, if not of saintship, was cast round the figure of Henry VIII. This romance he humorously named a "History of England." He also produced another work on Irish history, crammed with inaccuracies and wrong inferences from beginning to end, which Mr. Lecky, with his cold, rigid devotion to truth, has riddled through and through with the redhot shot of historical criticism.

It has been much the same in modern France. Take up any French history of the Revolution, with the exception of Mignet's succinct narrative, and you find a party pamphlet. Thiers glorified Napoleon, and Louis Blanc the democratic Rousseau tradition; while M. Taine, under a cloak of impartiality and philosophic method, has obviously delved into the Revolutionary documents with the distinct intention of proving that the leaders of the Revolution were among the most ignoble scoundrels whom the stirring of the social scum ever brought to the surface. Tocqueville's calm and lucid survey of the Ancien Régime suggests that the great author of La Democratie en Amérique ought to have been the historian of the French Revolution. It has been reserved for an English writer, Mr. H. Morse Stephens, to produce a work on that great theme which, though not brilliant, is most painstaking and accurate, full of information as to the events in the provinces as well as the doings in Paris, characterized all through (so far as it has yet gone) by excellent judgment and by genuine impartiality.

Although I should be far from desiring that a historian should never write as an avowed Conservative, like Hume or Mitford, or should write as an avowed Radical or Democrat, like Grote or Freeman, yet I am persuaded that no historian can produce a work of permanent value unless his intellectual sympathies are fairly progressive. For history is not

a narrative of events, but a rationale of the process of growth. Now we see that in biology the men who were dead set against the evolutionary conception of life, men like Cuvier, e. g., although they may have done excellent work in observation and classification, have yet lost their hold on the scientific mind. Their influence is dead, because they were on the wrong track. It is the men like Goethe, St. Hilaire, Wallace, Darwin, who had a fruitful idea, who had grasped the conception of orderly progress through the interaction of forces inherent in organisms themselves apart from external mechanical agencies—it is these great naturalists who have really given the vast impetus to the science of the nineteenth century. And in the same way, I conceive, no man who is boggling over antediluvian politics, or who fails to conceive that what we call the democratic movement is inevitable, or who fails to realize that there is a movement at all— no such man can be a great historian. We shall relegate the writings of such an one to the dusty top shelf where those uncut volumes of Hume are placidly reposing.

I may bereminded of Gibbon's Toryism, of Gibbon who supported George III. against the American Colonies, and who sat for a brief time among the Tory squires in the old unreformed House of Commons. It will be remembered that Gibbon threw over, in obedience to his father's wishes, a lady whom he desired to marry. "I sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son," he says in his autobiography. So there was, I venture to think, a Gibbon the Tory and a Gibbon the philosophic historian, and the first never intruded into the domain of the second. All through Gibbon's great work we have the sense of the inevitable destiny of the great fabric of the Roman Empire, the growing weakness of the vital organs, the birth of new ideas, the ever-growing, resistless might of the barbarous tribes, the sense of dissolution. The historian who built the great "bridge between the old world and the new" cannot be accused of any lack of the sense of inevitable movement.

Now Mr. Freeman as a historian had the twofold advantage of being strictly

accurate and impartial, while yet sympathizing with the general world-movement. His sympathy does not go the length of believing that everything which has happened was, as a matter of fact, the very best thing that could conceivably have happened. Perhaps no one really does hold such a creed, although some optimists occasionally speak as if they did. Mr. Freeman holds, e. g., that it would have been a very happy thing for Europe had the old Burgundian kingdom remained intact as a bulwark between Germany and a France much smaller than we know it to-day. In such a case there would have been no wars of the Grand Monarque, no Franco-German war, no possibility of that coming Franco-German war which Europe dreads to-day. If a man believes that every historical event was absolutely the very best that could have taken place, it is hard to see where he gets his incentive to reform. What I claim for Freeman is that he is reasonably sympathetic with democratic progress, and that he is conscious that historical events are not isolated phenomena, but are woven into the texture of the world of man.

The danger, of course, in holding this view is that of counting individuals as nothing, and the movement (conceived of as a sort of distinct entity) everything. It is the opposite error to Carlyle's heroworship, where great and wonderful individuals are made to do and be everything. Freeman appears to me to hold a very even balance between these two extremes. He can see the immense value of the personal contributions of such statesmen as Perikles, Karl the Great, Simon of Montfort, Washington, and yet he invariably subordinates even these to the organic life of which they were but a part, however necessary and imposing. Surely this is the true view. The Carlylean view is merely a traditional relic of the early Pagan legends of God-descended heroes, a Herakles, a Curtius, a Thor, who could perform by a divine magic what ordinary human beings could not do. It is a notion quite fatal to democracy, fatal to humanity, as Mazzini showed in his searching criticism of Carlyle. If we are incapable of self-government and

must wait until the deus ex machina is pleased, in some unaccountable fashion, to reveal himself and pull the wheels of the chariot of state out of the mire, then indeed the world's whole course is backward, and instead of celebrating Columbus and the French National Convention in this year 1892, we should retire to the interior of our respective tubs with a headpiece of ashes and clad in a funereal and inexpensive suit of sackcloth.

But neither, on the other hand, is it possible to contend that the great leap forward in representative government in the thirteenth century could have taken place as it did without the aid of the great Earl Simon. Peter the Great impressed his personality upon the imperial system of Russia in its whole subsequent development. The present Italian kingdom, with all its vices and virtues, was undoubtedly brought into being by the personal ability of Cavour, whose astute and not too scrupulous diplomacy was, thirtythree years ago, one of the most powerful factors in Europe. Gambetta personally crushed the designs of the French monarchical faction in 1877. Perhaps the partial truth contained in each view is best seen by comparing the careers of two famous men in the last century. Turgot was one of the greatest statesmen and one of the most virtuous men who ever lived, and yet even he could not save the rotten, falling French monarchy. On the other hand, the American Revolution was (at least so I believe) inevitable. And yet how differently it might have worked itself out, with how much greater difficulty and amid what far greater political chaos, had it not been for the practical sagacity of Washington. Both views form the complete truth, and I think it will be generally found that both are adequately recognized in the works of Mr. Freeman.

And still further, supreme among Freeman's excellent historical qualities is his determination to view every movement from the standpoint of human welfare. He is never dazzled by successful crime; he always puts the final question, Was it right? Not, indeed, that he interprets right in any hard, narrow fashion. He makes allowances for times and seasons. In his essay on "The Reign of Edward

III.," e. g., he condemns Brougham for bringing that monarch before the tribunal of "abstract right"—a hopelessly erroneous method of estimating any great historical character, as we see in the case of the peddling sneers directed by some who claim to be regarded as "thinkers" against some of the great men of ancient Hebrew-story, like Moses and David. The crimes of such men were subsidiary incidents in their careers, for which they made what atonement they could — and what more can a man do? But Louis Napoleon's crime of the coup d'état was no mere incident, but the very expression of his whole career, the seed from which he reaped twenty years' harvest of tyranny. For such a vile deed, foul in every way, the denunciations of Victor Hugo were not too strong. And it is a high eulogy on Freeman to record that, at the fallen and exiled tyrant's death, when the English press, as usual, was beslobbering the dead man's bier with its crocodile tears, the historian spoke out plainly, calling things by their right names, attacking no private character, but dealing faithfully with public deeds. And if you search through the whole of Freeman's historical writings, you will everywhere discover this high ethical note, this conception of the good of man as being the end for which political personages and machinery exist.

But we must be frank with Freeman, as he was with the records of history. He had his faults, and perhaps he was not quite so conscious of them as we should have liked him to be. He was a little too inclined to play Sir Oracle, and to assume that when he oped his lips the opposition dogs would cease to bark. He was probably very deficient in a sense of humor, and he was inclined, like many learned men, to get rather angry over points in which no moral or intellectual principle, but merely matters of scholarship were concerned. Like the mediæval scholars, he would damn his opponent for his "theory of irregular verbs." Macaulay, with his prodigy of the learned schoolboy, was much the same. This is perhaps merely an exaggeration of a good quality; viz., the puttting of one's conscience into a piece of work, no matter

how far removed from any moral issue it may seem to be. But a restraining influence of good nature would have been an excellent thing for both men. They were deficient in what Matthew Arnold has called "sweet reasonableness." We all remember the savage glee with which Macaulay records how he danced, metaphorically speaking, on the prostrate bodies of the unfortunate Quakers who had come to argue with him on the subject of the character of William Penn. Freeman was cast in a similar mold; both thought they did well to be angry.

Freeman's nature, like that of many righteous persons, was narrow. His contemptuous talk as to "chatter about Shelley" revealed a good deal of his character. If he had been endowed with plenary authority over the whole system of education, many elements would have been omitted in his scheme which deeper thinkers than Freeman considered of vital importance. The ideal, the poetic, the artistic side of human nature would have suffered under such a stalwart censorship. Large and minute as was Freeman's architectural knowledge, we are not long in finding out that he values architecture less for its artistic side than as the handmaid of history. Indeed, it would perhaps be scarcely too much to say that Freeman had absolutely no artistic sense whatsoever. Notwithstanding which, it is possible to derive great pleasure from his sketches of old cities such as Trier, Ravenna, Perigneux, Cahors, and Orange; and his very first published work was one on architecture.

Freeman's youth was spent at Oxford when that "sweet city with her dreaming spires" was under the spell of the High Church revival. That revival undoubtedly imparted a very considerable impetus to historical study, as we find in the works of Freeman's friend, Bishop Stubbs; and Freeman himself doubtless owed much to it. But it does not follow that his mind was imbued with any great spiritual ideas. The Tractarian movement will never be understood so long as it is regarded as primarily religious. It was rather a movement for restoring discipline and beauty, for reviving the sense of ecclesiastical authority in the Anglican Church,

than for advancing the religious idea. Aside from discipline, æsthetic beauty, and the cultivation of the historical sense, the High Church movement has been rather barren. It endowed England with some interesting though not great or enduring poetry from the lyre of Keble, but it furnished no philosophy, it produced no thinker, it merely kept alive, and perhaps deepened, a sentiment. Its one great mind, that of Newman, was logically driven to the Catholic Church, to be followed by the distinguished ecclesiastic whose more recent death was mourned by the poor of England as they never mourned for the loss of any Anglican bishop. And now the old High Church movement is fading away and being replaced by a new movement, the leaders of which are looked askance upon as heretics by the few belated survivors of the elder régime.

I fancy that, spite of the undoubted stimulus given to historical study by the High Church movement, Freeman really derived his most fruitful ideas in history far more from Dr. Arnold, and in a less degree from Mr. Goldwin Smith. Indeed, Freeman has himself admitted the debt he owed to Thomas Arnold,1 who, without being a profound thinker, was a thoroughly healthy man of a fundamentally progressive mind. From him, I imagine, reinforced as Freeman has told us by the ethics of Aristotle and Butler, the historian got his idea of the power of character and moral force in history and his detestation of cruelty and wrong committed under the hypocritical pretence of preserving "moral order." Freeman's nature, in short, like that of most English people, was ethical rather than religious. Hence it is that he betrays little patience with great attempts at a "philosophy of history."

Freeman's culture, too, was somewhat old-fashioned, though his learning was immense. Though politically Liberal, he always claimed to be really Conservative. And he was so, just as his favorite modern statesman, Mr. Gladstone, is. Both relied on precedent, both took old-fashioned views, both were distrustful of heresy. Freeman never looked forward, he went 1 See the Forum, April, 1892.