"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.