Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/18

 Inaugural of 1884 than Froude's Inaugural of 1892. The one was the sermon of a prophet who had his message to deliver, who was righteously indignant with a generation which, as he thought, refused to make all history its province, and was in bondage to the curriculum of the schools. Froude's lecture, on the other hand, was not couched in such terms of earnest denunciation: it was paradoxical, witty, full of persiflage and half-ironical apologetics. 'How do I come to be here, Regius Professor of the University of Oxford?' he asked, and then answered, with a smile, 'I was tempted—and I fell' But putting aside his very clever and rather touching personal explanation of his attitude to Oxford and Oxford's attitude to him, the main thesis of Froude's lecture was a defence of the personal and dramatic treatment of history. He fully appreciated all that had been said or written against his methods and his manner, and set himself cheerfully to defend them. I was carried away at the moment by his eloquent plea in favour of the view that history must be written as literature, that it is the historian's duty to present his work in a shape that will be clearly comprehensible to as many readers as possible, that dull, pedantic, over-technical diction is an absolute crime, since by it possible converts to the cause of history may be turned back and estranged. To Froude's other view, that the influence of the personality of the historian cannot possibly be eliminated, that he must state the case as it appears to him, not as it might appear to some other-self destitute of convictions and prejudices, I found myself giving a logical negative, but a practical approval. Logically no doubt one ought to agree with Lord Acton and Dr. Bury, and to conceive of the historian as a passionless creature set only on chroni-