The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

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."*