The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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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.

CHAPTER III

LIBERTY

Froude's position was now, from a worldly point of view, deplorable.
For the antagonism of High Churchmen he was of course prepared.
"Never mind," he wrote to Clough of The Nemesis, "if the Puseyites
hate it; they must fear it, and it will work in the mind they have
made sick." But he was also assailed in the Protestant press as an
awful example of what the Oxford Movement might engender. His book
was denounced on all sides, even by freethinkers, who regarded it as
a reproach to their cause. The professors of University College,
London, had appointed him to a mastership at Hobart Town in
Australia, for which he applied the year before in the hope that
change of scene might help to re-settle his mind. On reading the
attacks in the newspapers they pusillanimously asked him to
withdraw, and he withdrew. A letter to Clough, dated the 6th of
March, 1849, explains his intellectual and material position at this
time in a vivid and striking manner.

"I admire Matt. to a very great extent, only I don't see what
business he has to parade his calmness, and lecture us on
resignation, when he has never known what a storm is, and doesn't
know what to resign himself to. I think he only knows the shady side
of nature out of books. Still I think his versifying, and generally
his aesthetic power is quite wonderful .... On the whole he shapes
better than you, I think, but you have marble to cut out, and he has
only clay .... Do you think that if the Council do ask me to give up
I might fairly ask Lord Brougham as their President to get me helped
instead to ever so poor an honest living in the Colonies? I can't
turn hack writer, and I must have something fixed to do. Congreve is
down-hearted about Oxford: not so I. I quite look to coming back in
a very few years."

The Archdeacon, conceiving that the best remedy for free thought was
short commons, stopped his son's allowance. Froude would have been
alone in the world, if the brave and generous Kingsley had not come
to his assistance. Like a true Christian, he invited Froude to his
house, and made him at home there. To appreciate the magnanimity of
this offer we must consider that Kinglsey was himself suspected of
being a heretic, and that his prominent association with Froude
brought him letters of remonstrance by every post. He said nothing
about them, and Froude, in perfect ignorance of what he was
inflicting upon his host, stayed two months with him at Ilfracombe
and Lynmouth. Yet Kingsley did not, and could not, agree with
Froude. He was a resolved, serious Christian, and never dreamt of
giving up his ministry. He did not in the least agree with Froude,
who made no impression upon him in argument. He acted from kindness,
and respect for integrity.

Froude, however, could not stay permanently with the Kingsleys. His
father would have nothing to do with him, and in his son's opinion
was right to leave him with the consequences of his own errors. But
the outcry against him had been so violent and excessive as to
provoke a reaction. Froude might be an "infidel," he was not a
criminal, and in resigning his Fellowship he had shown more honesty
than prudence. His position excited the sympathy of influential
persons. Crabb Robinson, though an entire stranger to him, wrote a
public protest against Froude's treatment. Other men, not less
distinguished, went farther. Chevalier Bunsen, the Prussian
Minister, Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, and others
whose names he never knew, subscribed a considerable sum of money
for maintaining the unpopular writer at a German university while he
made a serious study of theological science. But he had had enough
of theology, and the munificent offer was declined, though Bunsen
harangued him enthusiastically for five hours in Carlton Gardens on
the exquisite adaptation of Evangelical doctrines to the human soul,
until Froude began to suspect that they must have originated in the
soul itself.

At this time a greater change than the loss of his Fellowship came
upon Froude. While staying with the Kingsleys at Ilfracombe, he met
Mrs. Kingsley's sister, Charlotte Grenfell, the Argemone of Yeast, a
lady of somewhat wilful, yet most brilliant spirit, with a small
fortune of her own. Miss Grenfell had joined the Church of Rome two
years before, and at that time thought of entering a convent. This
idea was extremely distasteful to her sister and her sister's
husband. Their favourite remedy for feminine caprice was marriage,
and they soon had the satisfaction of seeing Miss Grenfell become
Mrs. Froude. There were some difficulties in the way, for Froude's
prospects were by no means assured, and Mrs. Kingsley felt
occasional scruples. But Froude had confidence in himself, and when
his mind was made up he would not look back.

"You remember," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley, in 1849, "I warned you
that I intended to take my own way in life, doing (as I always have
done) in all important matters just what I should think good, at
whatever risk of consequences, and taking no other person's opinion
when it crossed with my own. Now in this matter I feel certain that
the way to save Charlotte most pain is to shorten the struggle, and
that will be best done by being short, peremptory, and decided in
allowing no dictation and no interference .... Charlotte herself is
really magnificent. Every letter shows me larger nobleness of heart.
You cannot go back now, Mrs. Kingsley."

Mrs. Kingsley did not go back, and Froude had his way. Before the
wedding, however, another and a novel experience awaited him. His
misfortunes aroused the interest of a rich manufacturer at
Manchester, Mr. Darbishire, who offered him a resident tutorship,
and would have taken him into his own firm, even, as it would seem,
into his own family, if he had desired to become a man of business,
and to live in a smoky town. But Froude was engaged to be married,
and had a passionate love of the country. His keen, clear, rapid
intelligence would probably have served him well in commercial
affairs when once he had learnt to understand them. He was reserved
for a very different destiny, and he gratefully declined Mr.
Darbishire's offer. Nevertheless, his stay at Manchester as private
tutor had some share in his mental development. He made acquaintance
with interesting persons, such as Harriet Martineau, Geraldine
Jewsbury, Mrs. Gaskell, and William Edward Forster, then known as a
young Quaker who had devoted himself, in the true Quaker spirit of
self-sacrifice, to relieving the sufferers from the Irish famine.
Besides Manchester friends, Froude imbibed Manchester principles. He
had been half inclined to sympathise with the socialism of Louis
Blanc and other French revolutionists. Manchester cured him. He
adopted the creed of individualism, private enterprise, no
interference by Government, and free trade. In these matters he did
not, at that time, go with Carlyle, as in ecclesiastical matters he
had not gone with Newman. His mind was intensely practical, though
in personal questions of self-interest he was careless, and even
indifferent. Henceforth he abandoned speculation, as well
philosophical as theological, and reverted to the historical studies
of his youth. Philosophy at Oxford in those days meant Plato,
Aristotle, and Bishop Butler. Froude was a good Greek scholar, and
he had the true Oxford reverence for Butler. But he had not gone
deeper into philosophy than his examinations and his pupils
required. He liked positive results, and metaphysicians always
suggested to him the movements of a squirrel in a cage.

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