OXFORD
Westminster, it will have been seen, did less than nothing for
Froude. His progress there was no progress at all, but a movement
backwards, physical and mental deterioration. He recovered himself
at home, his father's coldness and unkindness notwithstanding. But
it was not until he went to Oxford that his real intellectual life
began, and that he realised his own powers. In October, 1836, four
months after Hurrell's death, he came into residence at Oriel. That
distinguished society was then at the climax of its fame; Dr. Hawkins
was beginning his long career as Provost; Newman and Church were
Fellows; the Oriel Common Room had a reputation unrivalled in Oxford,
and was famous far beyond the precincts of the University. But of
these circumstances Froude thought little, or nothing. He
felt free. For the first time in his life the means of social
intercourse and enjoyment were at his disposal. His internal
weakness had been overcome, and his health, in spite of all he had
gone through, was good. He had an ample allowance, and facilities
for spending it among pleasant companions in agreeable ways. He had
shot up to his full height, five feet eleven inches, and from his
handsome features there shone those piercing dark eyes which riveted
attention where-ever they were turned. His loveless, cheerless
boyhood was over, and the liberty of Oxford, which, even after the
mild constraint of a public school, seems boundless, was to him the
perfection of bliss. He began to develop those powers of
conversation which in after years gave him an irresistible influence
over men and women, young and old. Convinced that, like his brothers
and sisters, he had but a short time to live, and having
certainly been full of misery, he resolved to make the best of his
time, and enjoy himself while he could. He was under no obligation
to any one, unless it were to the Archdeacon for his pocket-money.
His father and his brother, doubtless with the best intentions, had
made life more painful for him after his mother's death than they
could have made it if she had been alive. But Hurrell was gone, his
father was in Devonshire, and he could do as he pleased. He lived
with the idle set in college; riding, boating, and playing tennis,
frequenting wines and suppers. From vicious excess his intellect and
temperament preserved him. Deep down in his nature there was a
strong Puritan element, to which his senses were subdued.
Nevertheless, for two years he lived at Oxford in contented
idleness, saying with Isaiah, and more literally than the prophet,
"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die."
It was a wholly unreformed Oxford to which Froude came. If it
"breathed the last enchantments of the Middle Age," it was mediaeval
in its system too, and the most active spirits of the place, the
leaders of the Oxford Movement, were frank reactionaries, who hated
the very name of reform. Even a reduction in the monstrous number of
Irish Bishoprics pertaining to the establishment was indignantly
denounced as sacrilege, and was the immediate cause of Keble's
sermon on National Apostasy to which the famous "movement" has been
traced. John Henry Newman was at that time residing in Oriel, not as
a tutor, but as Vicar of St. Mary's. He was kind to Froude for
Hurrell's sake, and introduced him to the reading set. The
fascination of his character acted at once as a spell. Froude
attended his sermons, and was fascinated still more. For a time,
however, the effect was merely aesthetic. The young man enjoyed the
voice, the eloquence, the thinking power of the preacher as he might
have enjoyed a sonata of Beethoven's. But his acquaintance with the
reading men was not kept up, and he led an idle, luxurious life.
Nobody then dreamt of an Oxford Commission, and the Colleges, like
the University, were left to themselves. They were not economically
managed, and the expenses of the undergraduates were heavy. Their
battels were high, and no check was put upon the bills which they
chose to run up with tradesmen. Froude spent his father's: money,
and enjoyed himself. The dissipation was not flagrant. He was never
a sensualist, nor a Sybarite. Even then he had a frugal mind, and
knew well the value of money. "I remember," he says in The Oxford
Counter Reformation, an autobiographical essay--"I remember
calculating that I could have lived at a boarding-house on contract,
with every luxury which I had in college, at a reduction of fifty
per cent."* He was not given to coarse indulgence, and idleness was
probably his worst sin at Oxford. But his innocence of evil was not
ignorance; and though he never led a fast life himself, he knew
perfectly well how those lived who did.
--
* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 180.
--
An intellect like Froude's seldom slumbers long. He had to attend
lectures, and his old love of Homer revived. Plato opened a new
world, a word which never grows old, and becomes fresher the more it
is explored. Herodotus proved more charming than The Arabian Nights.
Thucydides showed how much wisdom may be contained in the form of
history. Froude preferred Greek to Latin, and sat up at night to
read the Philoctetes, the only work of literature that ever moved
him to tears. Aeschylus divided his allegiance with Sophocles. But
the author who most completely mastered him, and whom he most
completely mastered, was Pindar. The Olympian Odes seemed to him
like the Elgin Marbles in their serene and unapproachable splendour.
All this classical reading, though it cannot have been fruitless,
was not done systematically for the schools. Froude had no ambition,
believing that he should soon die. But a reading-party during the
Long Vacation of 1839 resulted in an engagement, which changed the
course of his life.
Hitherto he had been under the impression that nobody cared for him
at all, and that it mattered not what became of him. The sense of
being valued by another person made him value himself. He became
ambitious, and worked hard for his degree. He remembered how the
master of his first school had prophesied that he would be a Bishop.
He did not want to be a Bishop, but he began to think that such
grandeur would not have been predicted of a fool. Abandoning his
idle habits, he read night and day that he might distinguish himself
in the young lady's eyes. After six months her father interfered. He
had no confidence in the stability of this very young suitor's
character, and he put an end to the engagement. Froude was stunned
by the blow, and gave up all hope of a first class. In any case
there would have been difficulties. His early training in
scholarship had not been accurate, and he suffered from the blunders
of his education. But under the influence of excitement he had so
far made up for lost time that he got, like Hurrell, a second class
in the final classical schools. His qualified success gave him, no
satisfaction. He was suffering from a bitter sense of disappointment
and wrong. It seemed to him that he was marked out for misfortune,
and that there was no one to help him or to take any trouble about
him. Thrown back upon himself, however, he conquered his
discouragement and resolved that he would be the master of his fate.
It was in the year 1840 that Froude took his degree. Newman was then
at the height of his power and influence. The Tracts for the Times,
which Mrs. Browning in Aurora Leigh calls "tracts against the
times," were popular with undergraduates, and High Churchmen were
making numerous recruits. Newman's sermons are still read for their
style. But we can hardly imagine the effect which they produced when
they were delivered. The preacher's unrivalled command of English,
his exquisitely musical voice, his utter unworldliness, the fervent
evangelical piety which his high Anglican doctrine did not disturb,
were less moving than his singular power, which he seemed to have
derived from Christ Himself, of reading the human heart. The young
men who listened to him felt, each of them, as if he had confessed
his inmost thoughts to Newman, as if Newman were speaking to him
alone. And yet, from his own point of view, there was a danger in
his arguments, a danger which he probably did not see himself,
peculiarly insidious to an acute, subtle, speculative mind like
Froude's.
Newman's intellect, when left to itself, was so clear, so powerful,
so intense, that it cut through sophistry like a knife, and went
straight from premisses to conclusion. But it was only left to
itself within narrow and definite limits. He never suffered from
religious doubts. From Evangelical Protestantism to Roman
Catholicism he passed by slow degrees without once entering the
domain of scepticism. Dissenting altogether from Bishop Butler's
view that reason is the only faculty by which we can judge even of
revelation, he set religion apart, outside reason altogether. From
the pulpit of St. Mary's he told his congregation that Hume's
argument against miracles was logically sound. It was really more
probable that the witnesses should be mistaken than that Lazarus
should have been raised from the dead. But, all the same, Lazarus
was raised from the dead: we were required by faith to believe it,
and logic had nothing to do with the matter. How Butler would have
answered Hume, Butler to whom probability was the guide of life, we
cannot tell. Newman's answer was not satisfactory to Froude. If Hume
were right, how could he also be wrong? Newman might say, with
Tertullian, Credo quia impossibile. But mankind in general are not
convinced by paradox, and "to be suddenly told that the famous
argument against miracles was logically valid after all was at least
startling."*
--
* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 205.
--
Perplexed by this dilemma, Froude at Oxford as a graduate, taking
pupils in what was then called science, and would now be called
philosophy, for the Honour School of Literae Humaniores. He was soon
offered, and accepted, a tutorship in Ireland. His pupils father,
Mr. Cleaver, was rector of Delgany in the county of Wicklow. Mr.
Cleaver was a dignified, stately clergyman of the Evangelical
school. Froude had been taught by his brother at home, and by his
friends at Oxford, to despise Evangelicals as silly, ignorant,
ridiculous persons. He saw in Mr. Cleaver the perfect type of a
Christian gentleman, cultivated, pious, and well bred. Mrs. Cleaver
was worthy of her husband. They were both models of practical
Christianity. They and their circle held all the opinions about
Catholicism and the Reformation which Newman and the Anglo-Catholics
denounced. The real thing was always among them, and they did not
want any imitation. "A clergyman," says Froude, "who was afterwards
a Bishop in the Irish Church, declared in my hearing that the theory
of a Christian priesthood was a fiction; that the notion of the
Sacraments as having a mechanical efficacy irrespective of their
conscious effect upon the mind of the receiver was an idolatrous
superstition; that the Church was a human institution, which had
varied in form in different ages, and might vary again; that it was
always fallible; that it might have Bishops in England, and dispense
with Bishops in Scotland and Germany; that a Bishop was merely an
officer; that the apostolical succession was probably false as a
fact--and, if a fact, implied nothing but historical continuity. Yet
the man who said these things had devoted his whole life to his
Master's service--thought of nothing else, and cared for nothing
else."*
--
* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 212.
--
Froude had been taught by his brother, and his brother's set, to
believe that Dissenters were, morally and intellectually, the scum
of the earth. Here were men who, though not Dissenters themselves,
held doctrines practically undistinguishable from theirs, and yet
united the highest mental training with the service of God and the
imitation of Christ. There was in the Cleaver household none of that
reserve which the Tractarians inculcated in matters of religion. The
Christian standard was habitually held up as the guide of life and
conduct, an example to be always followed whatever the immediate
consequences that might ensue. Mr. Cleaver was a man of moderate
fortune, who could be hospitable without pinching, and he was
acquainted with the best Protestant society in Ireland. Public
affairs were discussed in his house with full knowledge, and without
the frivolity affected by public men. O'Connell was at that time
supreme in the government of Ireland, though his reign was drawing
to a close. The Whigs held office by virtue of a compact with the
Irish leader, and their Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, Thomas
Drummond, had gained the affections of the people by his sympathetic
statesmanship. An epigrammatic speaker said in the House of Commons
that Peel governed England, O'Connell governed Ireland, and the
Whigs governed Downing Street. It was all coming to an end. Drummond
died, the Whigs went out of office, Peel governed Ireland, and
England too. Froude just saw the last phase of O'Connellism, and he
did not like it. In politics he never looked very far below the
surface of things, and the wrongs of Ireland did not appeal to him.
That Protestantism was the religion of the English pale, and of the
Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster, not of the Irish people, was a
fact outside his thoughts. He saw two things clearly enough. One was
the strength and beauty of the religious faith by which the Cleavers
and their friends lived. The other was the misery, squalor, and
chronic discontent of the Catholic population, then almost twice as
large as after the famine it became. He did not pause to reflect
upon what had been done by laws made in England, or upon the
iniquity of taxing Ireland in tithes for the Church of a small
minority. He concluded simply that Protestantism meant progress, and
Catholicism involved stagnation. He heard dark stories of Ribbonism,
and was gravely assured that if Mr. Cleaver's Catholic coachman,
otherwise an excellent servant, were ordered to shoot his master, he
would obey. Very likely Mr. Cleaver was right, though the event did
not occur. What was the true origin of Ribbonism, what made it
dangerous, why it had the sympathy of the people, were questions
which Froude could hardly be expected to answer, inasmuch as they
were not answered by Sir Robert Peel.
While Froude was at Delgany there appeared the once famous Tract
Ninety, last of the series, unless we are to reckon Monckton
Milnes's One Tract More. The author of Tract Ninety was Newman, and
the ferment it made was prodigious. It was a subtle, ingenious, and
plausible attempt to prove that the Articles and other formularies
of the English Church might be honestly interpreted in a Catholic
sense, as embodying principles which the whole Catholic Church held
before the Reformation, and held still. Mr. Cleaver and his circle
were profoundly shocked. To them Catholicism meant Roman
Catholicism, or, as they called it, Popery. If a man were not a
Protestant, he had no business to remain in the United Church of
England and Ireland. If he did remain in it, he was not merely
mistaken, but dishonest, and sophistry could not purge him from the
moral stain of treachery to the institution of which he was an
officer. Froude's sense of chivalry was aroused, and he warmly
defended Newman, whom he knew to be as honest as himself, besides
being saintly and pure. If he had stopped there, all might have been
well. Mr. Cleaver was himself high-minded, and could appreciate the
virtue of standing up for an absent friend. But Froude went further.
He believed Newman to be legally and historically right. The Church
of England was designed to be comprehensive. Chatham had spoken of
it, not unfairly, as having an Arminian liturgy and Calvinist
articles. When the Book of Common Prayer assumed its present shape,
every citizen had been required to conform, and the policy of
Elizabeth was to exclude no one. The result was a compromise, and
Mr. Cleaver would have found it hard to reconcile his principles
with the form of absolution in the Visitation of the Sick. This was,
in Mr. Cleaver's opinion, sophistry almost as bad as Newman's, and
Froude's tutorship came to an end. There was no quarrel, and, after
a tour through the south of Ireland, where he saw superstition and
irreverence, solid churches, well-fed priests, and a starving
peasantry in rags, Froude returned for a farewell visit to Delgany.
On this occasion he met Dr. Pusey, who had been at Christ Church
with Mr. Cleaver, and was then visiting Bray. Dr. Pusey, however,
was not at his ease He was told by a clerical guest, afterwards a
Bishop, with more freedom than courtesy, that they wanted no Popery
brought to Ireland, they had enough of their own. The sequel is
curious. For while Newman justified Mr. Cleaver by going over to
Rome, his own sons, including Froude's pupil, became Puseyite
clergymen of the highest possible type. Froude returned to Oxford at
the beginning of 1842, and won the Chancellor's Prize for an English
essay on the influence of political economy in the development of
nations. In the summer he was elected to a Devonshire Fellowship at
Exeter, and his future seemed secure. But his mind was not at rest.
It was an age of ecclesiastical controversy, and Oxford was the
centre of what now seems a storm in a teacup. Froude became mixed up
in it. On the one hand was the personal influence of Newman, who
raised more doubts than he solved. On the other hand Froude's
experience of Evangelical Protestantism in Ireland, where he read
for the first time The Pilgrim's Progress, contradicted the
assumption of the Tractarians that High Catholicity was an essential
note of true religion. Gradually the young Fellow became aware that
High Church and Low Church did not exhaust the intellectual world.
He read Carlyle's French revolution, and Hero Worship, and Past and
Present. He read Emerson too. For Emerson and Carlyle the Church of
England did not exist. Carlyle despised it.
Emerson had probably not so much as given it a thought in his life.
But what struck Froude most about them was that they dealt with
actual phaenomena, with things and persons around them, with the
world as it was. They did not appeal to tradition, or to antiquity,
but to nature, and to the mind of man. The French Revolution, then
but half a century old, was interpreted by Carlyle not as
Antichrist, but as God's judgment upon sin.
Perhaps one view was not more historical than the other. But the first
was groundless, and second had at least some evidence in support of it.
God may be, or rather must be, conceived to work through other instruments
besides Christianity. "Neither in Jerusalem, nor on this mountain,
shall men worship the Father." Carlyle completed what Newman had
begun, and the dogmatic foundation of Froude's belief gave way. The
two greatest geniuses of the age, as he thought them, agreeing in
little else, agreed that Christianity did not rest upon reason. Then upon
what did it rest? Reason appeals to one. Faith is the appanage of a
few. From Carlyle Froude went to Goethe, then almost unknown at
Oxford, a true philosopher as well as a great poet, an example of
dignity, a liberator of the human soul.
The Church as a profession is not suitable to a man in Froude's
state of mind. But in Oxford at that time there flourished a lamentable
system which would have been felt to be irreligious if the
authorities of the place had known what religion really was. Most
Fellows lost their Fellowships in a very short time unless they took
orders, and Froude's Fellowship was in that sense a clerical one.
They were ordained as a matter of course, the Bishop requiring no
other title. They were not expected, unless they wished it, to take
any parochial duty, and the notion that they had a "serious call" to
keep their Fellowships can only be described as absurd. Froude had
no other profession in view, and he persuaded himself that a Church
established by law must allow a wider range of opinion than a
voluntary communion could afford to tolerate. As we have seen, he
had defended Tract Ninety, and he claimed for himself the latitude
which he conceded to Newman. It was in his case a mistake, as he
very soon discovered. But the system which encouraged it must bear a
large part of the blame. Meanwhile he had been employed by Newman on
an uncongenial task. After the discontinuance of Tracts for the
Times, Newman projected another series, called Lives of the Saints.
The idea was of course taken from the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum. But
Newman had a definite polemical purpose. Just as he felt the force
of Hume's argument against the probability of miracles, so he
realised the difficulty of answering Gibbon's inquiry when miracles
ceased. Had they ever ceased at all? Many Roman Catholics, if not
the most enlightened and instructed, thought not. Newman conceived
that the lives of English and Irish saints held much matter for
edification, including marvels and portents of various kinds. He
desired that these things should be believed, as he doubtless
believed them. They proved, he thought, if they could be proved
themselves, that supernatural power resided in the Church, and when
the Church was concerned he laid his reason aside.
He was extraordinarily sanguine. "Rationalise," he said to Froude,
"when the evidence is weak, and this will give credibility for
others, when you can show that the evidence is strong." Froude chose
St. Neot, a contemporary of Alfred, in whose life the supernatural
played a comparatively small part. He told his story as legend, not
quite as Newman wanted it. "This is all," he said at the end, "and
perhaps rather more than all, that is known of the life of the
blessed St. Neot." His connection with the series ceased. But his
curiosity was excited. He read far and wide in the Benedictine
biographies. No trace of investigation into facts could he discover.
If a tale was edifying, it was believed, and credibility had nothing
to do with it. The saints were beatified conjurers, and any nonsense
about them was swallowed, if it involved the miraculous element. The
effect upon Froude may be left to his own words. "St. Patrick I
found once lighted a fire with icicles, changed a French marauder
into a wolf, and floated to Ireland on an altar stone. I thought it
nonsense. I found it eventually uncertain whether Patricius was not
a title, and whether any single apostle of that name had so much as
existed."
Froude's scepticism was too indiscriminate when it assailed the
existence of St. Patrick, which is not now doubted by scholars,
baseless as the Patrician legends may be. Colgan's Lives of Irish
Saints had taken him back to Ireland, that he might examine the
scenes described. He visited them under the best guidance; and
Petre, the learned historian of the Round Towers, showed him a host
of curious antiquities, including a utensil which had come to be
called the Crown of Brian Boru. Legendary history made no impression
upon Froude. The actual state of Ireland affected him with the
deepest interest. A population of eight millions, fed chiefly upon
potatoes, and multiplying like rabbits, light-hearted, reckless, and
generous, never grudged hospitality, nor troubled themselves about
paying their debts. Their kindness to strangers was unbounded. In
the wilds of Mayo Froude caught the smallpox, and was nursed with a
devotion which he always remembered, ungrateful as in some of his
writings about Ireland he may seem. After his recovery he wandered
about the coast, saw the station of Protestant missionaries at
Achill, and was rowed out to Clare Island, where a disabled galleon
from the Armada had been wrecked. His studies in hagiology led him
to consider the whole question of the miraculous, and he found it
impossible to work with Newman any more. A religion which rested
upon such stories as Father Colgan's was a religion nurtured in
lies.
All this, however, had nothing to do with the Church of England by
law established, and Froude was ordained deacon in 1845. The same
year Newman seceded, and was received into the Church of Rome. No
similar event, before or since, has excited such consternation and
alarm. So impartial an observer as Mr. Disraeli thought that the
Church of England did not in his time recover from the blow. We are
only concerned with it here as it affected Froude. It affected him
in a way unknown outside the family. Hurrell Froude, who abhorred
private judgment as a Protestant error, had told his brothers that
when they saw Newman and Keble disagree they might think for
themselves. He felt sure that he was thereby guarding them against
thinking for themselves at all. But now the event which he
considered impossible had happened. Newman had gone to Rome. Keble
remained faithful to the Church of his baptism. Which side Hurrell
Froude would have taken nobody could say. He had died a clergyman of
the Church of England at the age of thirty-three, nine years before.
Anthony Froude had no inclination to follow Newman. But neither did
he agree with Keble. He thought for himself. Of his brief clerical
career there exists a singular record in the shape of a funeral
sermon preached at St. Mary's Church, Torquay, on the second Sunday
after Trinity, 1847. The subject was George May Coleridge, vicar of
the parish, the poet's nephew, who had been cut off in the prime of
life while Froude acted as his curate. The sermon itself is not
remarkable, except for being written in unusually good English. The
doctrine is strictly orthodox, and the simple life of a good clergyman
devoted to his people is described with much tenderness of feeling.
This sermon, of which he gave a copy to John Duke Coleridge, the
future Lord Chief Justice of England, was Froude's first experiment
in authorship, and it was at least harmless. As much cannot be said
for the second, two anonymous stories, called Shadows of the Clouds
and The Lieutenant's Daughter. The Lieutenant's Daughter has been
long and deservedly forgotten. Shadows of the Clouds is a valuable
piece of autobiography. Without literary merit, without any quality
to attract the public, it gives a vivid and faithful account of the
author's troubles at school and at home, together with a slight
sketch of his unfortunate love-affair.
Froude was a born story-teller, with an irresistible propensity for
making books. The fascination which, throughout his life, he had for
women showed itself almost before he was out of his teens; and in
this case the feeling was abundantly returned. Nevertheless he
could, within a few years, publish the whole narrative, changing
only the names, and then feel genuine surprise that the other person
concerned should be pained. He was not inconsiderate. Those who
lived with him never heard from him a rough or unkind word. But his
dramatic instinct was uncontrollable and had to be expressed. The
Archdeacon read the book, and was naturally furious. If he could
have been in any way convinced of his errors, which may be doubted,
to publish an account of them was not the best way to begin.
Reconciliation had been made impossible, and Anthony was left to his
own devices. His miscellaneous reading was not checked by an
ordination which imposed no duties. Goethe sent him to Spinoza, a
"God-intoxicated man," and a philosophical genius, but not a pillar
of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Vestiges of Creation, which had
appeared in 1844, woke Oxford to the discovery that physical science
might have something to say about the origin, or at least the
growth, of the universe. The writer, Robert Chambers, whose name was
not then known, so far anticipated Darwin that he dispensed with the
necessity for a special creation of each plant and animal. He did
not, any more than Darwin, attack the Christian religion, and he did
not really go much farther than Lucretius. But he had more modern
lights, he understood science, and he wrote in a popular style. He
made a lively impression upon Froude, who learnt from him that
natural phenomena were due to natural causes, at the same time that
he acquired from Spinoza a disbelief in the freedom of the will.
When Dr. Johnson said, "Sir, we know that the will is free, and
there's an end on't," he did not understand the question. We all
know that the will is free to act. But is man free to will? If
everything about a man were within our cognisance, we could predict
his conduct in given circumstances as certainly as a chemist can
foretell the effect of mixing an acid with an alkali. I have no
intention of expressing any opinion of my own upon this subject. The
important thing is that Froude became in the philosophic sense a
Determinist, and his conviction that Calvin was in that respect the
best philosopher among theologians strengthened his attachment to
the Protestant cause.
Protestantism apart, however, Froude's position as a clergyman had
become intolerable. He had been persuaded to accept ordination for
the reason, among others, that the Church could be reformed better
from within than from without.
But there were few doctrines of the Church that he could honestly
teach, and the straightforward course was to abandon the clerical
profession. Nowadays a man in Froude's plight would only have to
sign a paper, and he would be free. But before 1870 orders, even
deacon's orders, were indelible. Neither a priest nor a deacon could
sit in Parliament, or enter any other learned profession. Froude was
in great difficulty and distress. He consulted his friends Arthur
Stanley, Matthew Arnold, and Arthur Clough. Clough, though a layman,
felt the same perplexity as himself. As a Fellow and Tutor of Oriel
he had signed the Articles. Now that he no longer believed in them,
ought he not to live up his appointments? The Provost, Dr. Hawkins,
induced him to pause and reflect. Meanwhile he published a volume of
poetry, including the celebrated Bothie, about which Froude wrote to
him:
"I was for ever falling upon lines which gave me uneasy twitchings;
e.g. the end of the love scene:
"And he fell at her feet, and buried his face in her apron.
"I daresay the head would fall there, but what an image! It chimes
in with your notion of the attractiveness of the working business.
But our undisciplined ears have divided the ideas too long to bear
to have them so abruptly shaken together. Love is an idle sort of a
god, and comes in other hours than the working ones; at least I have
always found it so. I don't think of it in my working time, and when
I see a person I do love working (at whatever it may be), I have
quite another set of thoughts about her. . . It would do excellently
well for married affection, for it is the element in which it lives.
But I don't think young love gets born then. I only speak for
myself, and from a very limited experience. As to the story, I don't
the least object to it on The Spectator's ground. I think it could
not have been done in prose. Verse was wanted to give it dignity.
But if we find it trivial, the fault is in our own varnished selves.
We have been polished up so bright that we forget the stuff we are
made of."
Clough was in politics a Republican, and sympathised ardently with
the French Revolution of 1848. So did Charles Kingsley, a Cambridge
man, who was at that time on a visit to Exeter. But Kingsley, though
a disciple of Carlyle, was also a hard-working clergyman, who held
that the masses could be regenerated by Christian Socialism. Froude
had no faith in Socialism, nor in Christianity as the Church
understood it. In this year, 1848, Emerson also came to Oxford, and
dined with Clough at Oriel, where they thought him like Newman.
Froude was already an admirer of Emerson's essays, and laid his case
before the American moralist. Emerson gave him, as might have been
expected, no practical advice, but recommended him to read the
Vedas. Nothing mattered much to Emerson, who took the opportunity to
give a lecture in London on the Spiritual Unity of all Animated
Beings. Froude attended it, and there first saw Carlyle, who burst,
characteristically enough, into a shout of laughter at the close.
Carlyle loved Emerson; but the Emersonian philosophy was to him like
any other form of old clothes, only rather more grotesque than most.
In the Long Vacation of 1848 Froude went alone to Ireland for the
third time, and shut himself up at Killarney. From Killarney he
wrote a long account of himself to Clough:
"KILLARNEY, July 15, 1848.
"I came over here where for the present I am all day in the woods
and on the lake and retire at night into an unpleasant hotel, where
I am sitting up writing this and waiting with the rest of the
household rather anxiously for the arrival of a fresh wedded pair.
Next week I move off across the lake to a sort of lodge of Lord
Kenmare, where I have persuaded an old lady to take me into the
family. I am going to live with them, and I am going to have her
ladyship's own boudoir to scribble in. It is a wild place enough
with porridge and potatoes to eat, varied with what fish I may
provide for myself and arbutus berries if it comes to starving. The
noble lord has been away for some years. They will put a deal table
into the said boudoir for me, and if living under a noble roof has
charms for me I have that at least to console myself with. I can't
tell about your coming. There may be a rising in September, and you
may be tempted to turn rebel, you know; and I don't know whether you
like porridge, or whether a straw bed is to your--not 'taste,'
touch is better, I suppose. It is perfectly beautiful here, or it
would be if it wasn't for the swarm of people about one that are for
ever insisting on one's saying so. Between hotel-keeper and carmen
and boatmen and guides that describe to my honour the scenery, and
young girls that insist on my honour taking a taste of the goats'
milk, and a thousand other creatures that insist on boring me and
being paid for it, I am really thankful every night when I get to my
room and find all the pieces of me safe in their places. However, I
shall do very well when I get to my lodge, and in the meantime I am
contented to do ill. I have hopes of these young paddies after all.
I think they will have a fight for it, or else their landlords will
bully the Government into strong measures as they call them--and then
will finally disgust whatever there is left of doubtful loyalty in
the country into open unloyalty, and they will win without fighting.
There is the most genuine hatred of the Irish landlords everywhere
that I can remember to have heard expressed of persons or things. My
landlady that is to be next week told me she believed it was God's
doing. If God wished the people should be stirred up to fight, then
it was all right they should do it; and if He didn't will, why
surely then there would be no fighting at all. I am not sure it
could have been expressed better. I have heard horrid stories in
detail of the famine. They are getting historical now, and the
people can look back at them and tell them quietly. It is very lucky
for us that we are let to get off for the most part with
generalities, and the knowledge of details is left to those who
suffer them. I think if it was not so we should all go mad or shoot
ourselves.
"The echoes of English politics which come over here are very
sickening: even The Spectator exasperates me with its d--d cold-
water cure for all enthusiasm. When I see these beautiful mountain
glens, I quite long to build myself a little den in the middle of
them, and say good-bye to the world, with all its lies and its
selfishness, till other times. I have still one great consolation
here, and that is the rage and fury of the sqireens at the poor
rates; six and sixpence in the pound with an estate mortgaged right
up to high-water mark and the year's income anticipated is not the
very most delightful prospect possible.
"The crows are very fat and very plenty. They sit on the roadside
and look at you with a kind of right of property. There are no
beggars--at least, professional ones. They were all starved-dead,
gone where at least I suppose the means of subsistence will be found
for them. There is no begging or starving, I believe, in the two
divisions of Kingdom Come. I see in The Spectator the undergraduates
were energetically loyal at Commemoration--nice boys--and the dons
have been snubbed about Guizot. Is there a chance for M---? Poor
fellow, he is craving to be married, and ceteris paribus I suppose
humanity allows it to be a claim, though John Mill doesn't. My
wedding party have not arrived. It is impossible not to feel a
kindly interest in them. At the bottom of all the agitation a
wedding sets going in us all there is lying, I think a kind of
misgiving, a secret pity for the fate of the poor rose which is
picked now and must forthwith wither; and our boisterous
jollification is but an awkward barely successful effort at
concealing it. Well, good-bye. I hardly know when I look over
these pages whether to wish you to get them or not.
"Yours notwithstanding,
"J.A.F."
Ireland had been devastated, far more than decimated, by the famine,
and was simmering with insurrection, like the Continent of Europe.
The Corn Laws had gone, and the Whigs were back in office, but they
could do nothing with Ireland. To Froude it appeared as if the
disturbed state of the country were an emblem of distracted Churches
and outworn creeds. Religion seemed to him hopelessly damaged, and
he asked himself whether morality would not follow religion. If the
Christian sanction were lost, would the difference between right and
wrong survive? His own state of mind was thoroughly wretched. The
creed in which he had been brought up was giving way under him, and
he could find no principle of action at all. Brooding ceaselessly
over these problems, he at the same time lowered his physical
strength by abstinence, living upon bread, milk, and vegetables,
giving up meat and wine. In this unpromising frame of mind, and in
the course of solitary rambles, he composed The Nemesis of Faith.*
The book is, both in substance and in style, quite unworthy of
Froude. But in the life of a man who afterwards wrote what the world
would not willingly let die it is an epoch of critical importance.
To describe it in a word is impossible. To describe it in a few
words is not easy. Froude himself called it in after life a "cry of
pain," meaning that it was intended to relieve the intolerable
pressure of his thoughts. It is not a novel, it is not a treatise,
it is not poetry, it is not romance. It is the delineation of a
mood; and though it was called, with some reason, sceptical, its
moral, if it has a moral, is that scepticism leads to misconduct.
That unpleasant and unverified hypothesis, soon rejected by Froude
himself, has been revived by M. Bourget in Le Disciple, and L'Etape.
The Nemesis of Faith is as unwholesome as either of these books, and
has not their literary charm. It had few friends, because it
disgusted free-thinking Liberals as much as it scandalised orthodox
Conservatives. If it were read at all nowadays, as it is not, it
would be read for the early sketches of Newman and Carlyle,
afterwards amplified in memorable pages which are not likely to
perish.
--
* Chapman, 1849.
--
In a letter to Charles Kingsley, written from Dartington on New
Year's Day, 1849, Froude speaks with transparent candour of his
book, and of his own mind:
"I wish to give up my Fellowship. I hate the Articles. I have said I
hate chapel to the Rector himself; and then I must live somehow, and
England is not hospitable, and the parties here to whom I am in
submission believe too devoutly in the God of this world to forgive
an absolute apostasy. Under pain of lost favour for ever if I leave
my provision at Oxford, I must find another, and immediately. There
are many matters I wish to talk over with you. I have a book
advertised. You may have seen it. It is too utterly subjective to
please you. I can't help it. If the creatures breed, they must come
to the birth. There is something in the thing, I know; for I cut a
hole in my heart, and wrote with the blood. I wouldn't write such
another at the cost of the same pain for anything short of direct
promotion into heaven."
Of Kingsley himself Froude wrote* to another clerical friend, friend
of a lifetime, Cowley Powles: "Kingsley is such a fine fellow--I
almost wish, though, he wouldn't write and talk Chartism, and be
always in such a stringent excitement about it all. He dreams of
nothing but barricades and provisional Governments and grand
Smithfield bonfires, where the landlords are all roasting in the fat
of their own prize oxen. He is so musical and beautiful in poetry,
and so rough and harsh in prose, and he doesn't know the least that
it is because in the first the art is carrying him out of himself,
and making him forget just for a little that the age is so entirely
out of joint." A very fine and discriminating piece of criticism.
--
* April 10th, 1849.
--
The immediate effect of The Nemesis, the only effect it ever had,
was disastrous. Whatever else it might be, it was undoubtedly
heretical, and in the Oxford of 1849 heresy was the unpardonable
sin. The Senior Tutor of Exeter, the Reverend William Sewell, burnt
the book during a lecture in the College Hall. Sewell, afterwards
founder and first Warden of Radley, was a didactic Churchman, always
talking or writing, seldom thinking, who contributed popular
articles to The Quarterly Review. The editor, Lockhart, knew their
value well enough. They tell one nothing, he said, they mean
nothing, they are nothing, but they go down like bottled velvet.
Sewell's eccentricities could not hurt Froude. But more serious
consequences followed. The Governing Body of Exeter, the Rector* and
Fellows, called upon him to resign his Fellowship. This they had no
moral right to do, and Froude should have rejected the demand. For
though his name and college were on the title-page of the book, the
book itself was a work of fiction, and he could not justly be held
responsible for the opinions of the characters. Expulsion was,
however, held out to him as the alternative of resignation.
--
* Dr. Richards.
--
"If the Rector will permit me," he wrote from Oxford to Clough,
"tomorrow I cease to be a Fellow of the College. But there is a
doubt if he will permit it, and will not rather try to send me out
in true heretic style. My book is therefore, as you may suppose,
out. I know little of what is said, but it sells fast, and is being
read, and is producing sorrow this time, I understand, as much as
anger, but the two feelings will speedily unite."
If he could have appealed to a court of law, the authorities would
probably have failed for want of evidence, and Froude would have
retained his Fellowship. But he was sensitive, and yielded to
pressure. He signed the paper presented to him as if he had been a
criminal, and shook the dust of the University from his feet. Within
ten years a new Rector, quite as orthodox as the old, had invited
him to replace his name on the books of the college. It was long,
however, before he returned to an Oxford where only the buildings
were the same. Twenty years from this date an atheistic treatise
might have been written with perfect impunity by any Fellow of any
college. Nobody would even have read it if atheism had been its only
recommendation. The wise indifference of the wise had relieved true
religion from the paralysis of official patronage. But in 1849 the
action of the Rector and Fellows was heartily applauded by the
Visitor, Bishop Phillpotts, the famous Henry of Exeter. Their
behaviour was conscientious, and Dr. Richards, the Rector, was a
model of dignified urbanity. It is unreasonable to blame men for not
being in advance of their age.