The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

— * 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.