JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE 295
no horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not come to pass. Revolutions, reformations — those vast movements into which heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were the dawn of the millennium — have not borne the fruit which they looked for. Millenniums are still faraway."
History should be true to life; it can only approximate truth to past fact. " If the drama is the grandest when the action is the least explicable by laws, because then it best resembles life, then history will be the grandest also under the same conditions." "For the mere hard purposes of his- tory, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the most effective books ever written." "Wherever possible, let us not be told about this man or that. Let us hear the man himself speak, let us see him act, and let us be left to form our own opinions about him." "The supreme excellence of the Elizabethan literature is in its purely objective character; and the most perfect English history which exists is to be found, in my opinion, in the historical plays of Shakspere. . . . Shak- spere's object was to exhibit as faithfully as he could the exact character of the great actors in the national drama — the circumstances which surround them, and the motives, internal and external, by which they were influenced. To know this is to know all. . . . No such directness of in- sight, no such breadth of sympathy, has since been applied to the writing of English history. "
Fronde considered a "constructive philosophy of history impossible as yet; for a long time to come study must be confined to analysis." He "objected to all historical theories as calculated to vitiate the observation of facts without which such speculations are not worth the paper they are written upon." "Neither history nor any other knowledge can be obtained except by scientific methods." He was under no illusions in regard to himself. Three years ago he wrote: "For the rest, I do not pretend to impartiality. ... In every conclusion which we form, in every conviction which is forced upon us, there is still a subjective element. . . .
