The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

H >> Herbert Paul >> The Life of Froude

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

CHAPTER II

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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25