s
self-discipline over a strong and for a long time refractory nature. He
was a man of great gifts, with much that was most attractive and noble;
but joined with this them was originally in his character a vein of
perversity and mischief, always in danger of breaking out, and with
which he kept up a long and painful struggle. His inmost thought and
knowledge of himself have been laid bare in the papers which his friends
published after his death. He was in the habit of probing his motives to
the bottom, and of recording without mercy what he thought his
self-deceits and affectations. The religious world of the day made merry
over his methods of self-discipline; but whatever may be said of them,
and such things are not easy to judge of, one thing is manifest, that
they were true and sincere efforts to conquer what he thought evil in
himself, to keep himself in order, to bring his inmost self into
subjection to the law and will of God. The self-chastening, which his
private papers show, is no passion or value for asceticism, but a purely
moral effort after self-command and honesty of character; and what makes
the struggle so touching is its perfect reality and truth. He "turned
his thoughts on that desolate wilderness, his own conscience, and said
what he saw there."[20] A man who has had a good deal to conquer in
himself, and has gone a good way to conquer it, is not apt to be
indulgent to self-deceit or indolence, or even weakness. The basis of
Froude's character was a demand which would not be put off for what was
real and thorough; an implacable scorn and hatred for what he counted
shams and pretences. "His highest ambition," he used to say, "was to be
a humdrum."[21] The intellectual and the moral parts of his character
were of a piece. The tricks and flimsinesses of a bad argument provoked
him as much as the imposture and "flash" of insincere sentiment and fine
talking; he might be conscious of "flash" in himself and his friends,
and he would admit it unequivocally; but it was as unbearable to him to
pretend not to see a fallacy as soon as it was detected, as it would
have been to him to arrive at the right answer of a sum or a problem by
tampering with the processes. Such a man, with strong affections and
keen perception of all forms of beauty, and with the deepest desire to
be reverent towards all that had a right to reverence, would find
himself in the most irritating state of opposition and impatience with
much t