The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

Froude's religious position is best stated in his own words, written when he was in South Africa, to a member of his family:

"I know by sad experience much of what is passing in your mind. Although my young days were chequered with much which I look back on with regret and shame, still I believe I always tried to learn what was true, and when I had found it to stick to it. The High Church theology was long attractive to me, but then I found, or thought I found, that it had no foundation, and indeed that very few of its professors in their heart of hearts believed what they were saying. Apostolic Succession, Sacramental Grace, and the rest of it, are very pretty, but are they facts? Is it a fact that any special mysterious power is communicated by a Bishop's hands? Is it a fact that a child's nature is changed by water and words—or that the bread when it is broken ceases to be bread? We cannot tell that it is not so, you say. But can we tell that it is so? and we ought to be able to tell before we believe it. All that fell away from me when I came in contact with the Cleavers and their friends. Their views never commended themselves to me wholly; but at least they were spiritual and not material. And election is a fact, although they express it oddly—and so is reprobation—and so is what they say of free will, and so is conversion. It is true that we bring natures into the world which are moulded by circumstances and by their own tendencies, as clay in the hands of the potter. Look round you and see that some are made for honour and some for dishonour. So far I agree with the Evangelicals still, and I agree too with them that if what they call faith—that is, a distinct conviction of sin, a resolution to say to oneself "Sammy, my boy, this won't do,"* a perception and love for what is right and good, and a loathing of the old self—can be put into one, and by the grace of God we see that it can be and is—the whole nature is changed, is what we call regenerated. This is certain—and it is to me certain also that the world and we who live in it, with all these mysterious conditions of our being, are no creation of accident or blind law. We were created for purposes unknown to us by Almighty God, who is using us and training us for His own objects—objects wholly unconceivable by us, but nevertheless which we know to exist, for Intelligence never works but for an end.

— * The reference is to Thackeray's story of a hairdresser named Samuel, who remarked, "Mr. Thackeray, there comes a time in the life of every man when he says to himself, 'Sammy, my boy, this won't do.'" The story was an especial favourite of Froude's. —

"Of other things which are popularly called religion, I have my opinion positive and negative. But religion to me is not opinion it is certainty. I cannot govern my actions or guide my deepest convictions by probabilities. The laws which we are to obey and the obligations to obey them are part of my being of which I am as sure as that I am alive. The things to argue about are by their nature uncertain, and therefore it is to me inconceivable that in them can lie Religion. I cannot tell whether these thoughts will be of any help to you. But it is better, in my judgment, to remain a proselyte of the gate—resolute to remain there till one receives a genuine conviction of some truths beyond—than for imagined relief from the pain of suspense to take up by an act of will a complete system of belief, Catholic or Calvinistic, and insist to one's own soul that it is, was, and shall be the whole and complete truth. Some people do this—deliberately blind their eyes, and because they never see again declare loudly that no one else can see. Other people, less happy, find by experience that they cannot believe what they have taken to in this way, and fly for a change to the next theory and then to the next. I remain for myself unconvinced of much which is generally called the essential part of things; but convinced with all my heart of what I regard as essential."

Froude made no secret of his religious opinions and they may be collected from his numerous books, especially perhaps from The Oxford Counter-Reformation. A curious paper, first published in 1879, called "A Siding at a Railway Station," is one of his most direct utterances on the subject. It will be found in the fourth series of Short Studies, and is in many respects the most remarkable of them all. "Some years' ago," it begins, "I was travelling by railway, no matter whence or whither." The railway is life, and the siding at which the train was suddenly stopped is the end that awaits all travellers through this world. The examination of the luggage is the judgment which will be passed upon all human actions hereafter. Wages received are placed on one side, and value to mankind of service rendered on the other. Naturally working men come out best. The worst show is made by idle and luxurious grandees. Authors occupy a middle position, and in Froude's own books "chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean as if no compositor had ever laboured in setting type for it. Pale and illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly prided myself. A few passages, however, survived here and there at long intervals. They were those on which I had laboured least and had almost forgotten, or those, as I observed in one or two instances, which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly journals." The hit at The Saturday Review is amusing enough, and Froude goes on to plead successfully that though he may have been ignorant, prejudiced, or careless, no charge of dishonesty could be established against him. Apart from his own personal case, the allegory means little more than the gospel of work which is the noblest part in the teaching of Carlyle. Titled personages come off badly, and the most ridiculous figure in the motley throng is an Archbishop. Not much sympathy is shown with any one, except with a widow who hopes to rejoin her husband, and sympathy is all that Froude can give her.

Of Froude's friendships much has been said. They were numerous, and drawn from very different classes. Beginning at Oxford, they increased rather than diminished throughout his life, notwithstanding the gaps which death inevitably and inexorably made. To one Fellow of Exeter who stood by him in his troubles, George Butler, afterwards Canon of Winchester, he remained always attached. Dean Stanley throughout life he loved, and another clerical friend, Cowley Powles. Of the many persons who felt Clough's early death as an irreparable calamity there was hardly one who felt it more than Froude. His affectionate reverence for Newman was proof against a mental and moral antagonism which could not be bridged. After Kingsley's death he wrote, from the Molt, to Mrs. Kingsley: "Dearest Fanny,—You tell me not to write, so I will say nothing beyond telling you how deeply I am affected by your thought of me. The old times are as fresh in my mind as in yours. You and Charles were the best and truest friends I ever had. We shall soon be all together again. God bless you now and in eternity.

"Your affectionate. J. A. FROUDE."

"Cowley Powles is here. It was he who first took me to Eversley."

It was when he came to London that Froude enlarged the circle of his friends, Carlyle being the greatest and the chief. Among the contributors to Fraser's Magazine those whom he knew best were the late Sir John Skelton, "Shirley," and the present Sir Theodore Martin, the biographer of the Prince Consort, whom some still prefer to associate with those delightful parodies, the Bon Gaultier Ballads. The enumeration of Froude's London acquaintances would be merely a social chronicle, with the supplement of some names, such as General Cluseret's, quite outside the ordinary groove. He could get on with any one, and he was interested in every one who had interesting qualities. After his second marriage his dinner-parties in Onslow Gardens were famous for their brilliancy and charm. His magnetic personality drew from people whatever they had, while his ease of manner made them feel at home. It was perhaps because he never pretended to know anything that only scholars realised how much he knew, and that he seemed to be not so much a man of letters as a man of the world. Of all the friends he made in later life there was not one that he valued more highly than Lord Wolseley. "I have been staying," he wrote to his daughter, from South Africa, "with Sir Garnet Wolseley and his brilliant staff. It was worth a voyage to South Africa to make so intimate an acquaintance with him." After his second return from the Cape, when his social life in London was taken up again, with his eldest daughter in her step- mother's place, there were added to the military and naval officers he had met, the Irish Protestants, who regarded him as their champion, and the wide circle of his ordinary associates, an Africander contingent, made up of all parties in that troubled area. There were, in fact, few phases of human life with which Froude was not familiar, from Devonshire fishermen to Cabinet Ministers. Although he knew and admired Mr. Chamberlain, his greatest political friends were Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby, with whom he almost invariably agreed. The man of science whom, after his own brother, he knew best, was Tyndall. Men of letters were familiar to him in every degree. Among the houses where he was a frequent and welcome guest were Knowsley, Highclere, Tortworth, and Castle Howard. In his own family there were troubles and bereavements. His eldest son, who died before him, gave him much trouble and anxiety. His second daughter died of consumption a few months after her stepmother, while he was in South Africa alone. Otherwise, his relations with his children were perfect and unbroken, for no father was more beloved and adored. Indeed, all intelligent children delighted in his company, because they could not help understanding him, and yet he paid them the acceptable compliment of talking to them as if they were grown up.

There is nothing in the world more evanescent than good conversation. Froude was one of the best and most agreeable talkers of his day. He could talk to old and young, to men, women, and children, to Devonshire seamen or labourers, to the most highly cultivated society of Oxford or London, with equal ease and equal enjoyment. He never tried to monopolise the conversation, and yet somehow the chief share fell naturally to him. If he were bored, he could be as silent as the grave. But when his interest was roused, and most things roused it, he always had something pointed and forcible to say. He was not always a sympathetic hearer. Once he sat between two extremely intellectual women who considered themselves leaders of advanced thought. When they left the room after dinner he turned to a friend of mine, and said simply, "I think all these bigots ought to be burnt." Such deplorable intolerance was happily rare. Less rare, perhaps, were his irresistible sense of the ludicrous and irrepressible tendency to sarcasm. Of a famous clergyman he said, "At least they have not put him into a bishop's apron, the emblem of our first parents' shame." "What can education do for a man," he once asked, "except enable him to tell a lie in five ways instead of one?" As a rule, Froude, like most good talkers, listened well, and responded readily. If he had not Carlyle's rich, exuberant humour, he was also without the prophet's leaning to dogmatism and anathema. Sardonic irony was his nearest approach to an offensive weapon, and even in that he was sparing. But he had a look which seemed to say, "Don't offer me any theories, or creeds, or speculations, for I have tried them all."