James Anthony Froude

Essays in Literature & History James Anthony Froude

Huxley alone of his contemporaries that he imposed his convictions. He fought against resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent animosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yet too strong for that surface to reject him. This combative and aggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it was permanent and never suffered a final defeat, should arrest any one 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 be detected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of these affected the Victorian era. It was pure though tainted with a profound hypocrisy ;it was singularly free from violence in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new :but it had this grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily), that thought was restrained upon every side. Never in the history of European letters was it so difficult for a man to say what he would and to be heard. A sort of cohesive public spirit (which was but one aspect of the admirable homogeneity of the nation) glued and immobilised all individual expression. One could float imprisoned as in a stream of thick substance :one could not swim against it. It is to be carefully discerned how many apparent exceptions to this truth are, if they be closely examined, no exceptions at all.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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