HURRELL FROUDE

II

SOME REPRINTED COMMENTS ON HIM AND ON HIS RELATION TO THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

From ‘The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833-1845,’ By R. W. Church, M.A., D.C.L., sometime Dean of St. Paul’s, and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. London: Macmillan & Co., 1891.

[By the kind permission of Miss Church and of Messrs. Macmillan & Co.]

‘What was it that turned [Keble] by degrees into so prominent and so influential a person? It was the result of the action of his convictions and ideas, and still more of his character, on the energetic and fearless mind of a pupil and disciple, Richard Hurrell Froude. Froude was Keble’s pupil at Oriel, and when Keble left Oriel for his curacy at the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1823, he took Froude with him to read for his degree. He took with him ultimately two other pupils, Robert Wilberforce and Isaac Williams of Trinity. One of them, Isaac Williams, has left some reminiscences of the time, and of the terms on which the young men were with their tutor, then one of the most famous men at Oxford. They were terms of the utmost freedom. “Master is the greatest boy of them all,” was the judgment of the rustic who was gardener, groom, and parish clerk to Mr. Keble. Froude’s was a keen logical mind, not easily satisfied, contemptuous of compromises and evasions, and disposed on occasion to be mischievous and aggressive; and with Keble, as with anybody else, he was ready to dispute and try every form of dialectical 236 experiment. But he was open to higher influences than those of logic, and in Keble he saw what subdued and won him to boundless veneration and affection. Keble won the love of the whole little society; but in Froude he had gained a disciple who was to be the mouthpiece and champion of his ideas, and who was to react on himself and carry him forward to larger enterprises and bolder resolutions than by himself he would have thought of. Froude took in from Keble all he had to communicate: principles, convictions, moral rules and standards of life, hopes, fears, antipathies. And his keenly-tempered intellect, and his determination and high courage, gave a point and an impulse of their own to Keble’s views and purposes. As things came to look darker, and dangers seemed more serious to the Church, its faith or its rights, the interchange of thought between master and disciple, in talk and in letter, pointed more and more to the coming necessity of action; and Froude at least had no objections to the business of an agitator. But all this was very gradual; things did not yet go beyond discussion; ideas, views, arguments were examined and compared; and Froude, with all his dash, felt as Keble felt, that he had much to learn about himself, as well as about books and things. In his respect for antiquity, in his dislike of the novelties which were invading Church rules and sentiments, as well as its Creeds, in his jealousy of the State, as well as in his seriousness of self-discipline, he accepted Keble’s guidance and influence more and more; and from Keble he had more than one lesson of self-distrust, more than one warning against the temptations of intellect. “Froude told me many years after,” writes one of his friends, “that Keble once, before parting with him, seemed to have something on his mind which he wished to say, but shrank from saying, while waiting, I think, for a coach. At last he said, just before parting, ‘Froude, you thought Law’s Serious Call was a clever book; it seemed to me as if you had said the Day of Judgement will be a pretty sight.’ This speech, Froude told me, had a great effect on his after life.”[294]

‘At Easter, 1826, Froude was elected Fellow of Oriel. He 237 came back to Oxford, charged with Keble’s thoughts and feelings, and from his more eager and impatient temper, more on the look-out for ways of giving them effect. The next year he became Tutor, and he held the tutorship till 1830. But he found at Oriel a colleague, a little his senior in age and standing, of whom Froude and his friends as yet knew little except that he was a man of great ability, that he had been a favourite of Whately’s, and that in a loose and rough way he was counted among the few Liberals and Evangelicals in Oxford. This was Mr. Newman. Keble had been shy of him, and Froude would at first judge him by Keble’s standard. But Newman was just at this time “moving,” as he expresses it, “out of the shadow of Liberalism.” Living not apart like Keble, but in the same College, and meeting every day, Froude and Newman could not but be either strongly and permanently repelled, or strongly attracted. They were attracted: attracted with a force which at last united them in the deepest and most unreserved friendship. Of the steps of this great change in the mind and fortunes of each of them we have no record: intimacies of this kind grow in College out of unnoticed and unremembered talks, agreeing or differing, out of unconscious disclosures of temper and purpose, out of walks and rides and quiet breakfasts and Common-Room arguments, out of admirations and dislikes, out of letters and criticisms and questions; and nobody can tell afterwards how they have come about. The change was gradual and deliberate. Froude’s friends in Gloucestershire, the Keble family, had their misgivings about Newman’s supposed Liberalism; they did not much want to have to do with him. His subtle and speculative temper did not always square with Froude’s theology. “N. is a fellow that I like more, the more I think of him,” Froude wrote in 1828; “only I would give a few odd pence if he were not a heretic.”[295] But Froude, who saw him every day, and was soon associated with him in the tutorship, found a spirit more akin to his own in depth and freedom and daring, than he had yet encountered. And Froude found Newman just in that maturing state of religious opinion in which a powerful mind like Froude’s would be likely to act decisively. Each acted on the other. 238 Froude represented Keble’s ideas, Keble’s enthusiasm. Newman gave shape, foundation, consistency, elevation to the Anglican theology, when he accepted it, which Froude had learned from Keble. “I knew him first,” we read in the Apologia, “in 1826, and was in the closest and most affectionate friendship with him from about 1829 till his death in 1836.”[296] But this was not all. Through Froude, Newman came to know and to be intimate with Keble; and a sort of camaraderie arose of very independent and outspoken people, who acknowledged Keble as their master and counsellor.

‘“The true and primary author of it” (the Tractarian Movement), we read in the Apologia, “as is usual with great motive powers, was out of sight…. Need I say that I am speaking of John Keble?” The statement is strictly true. Froude never would have been the man he was but for his daily and hourly intercourse with Keble; and Froude brought to bear upon Newman’s mind, at a critical period of its development, Keble’s ideas and feelings about religion and the Church, Keble’s reality of thought and purpose, Keble’s transparent and saintly simplicity. And Froude, as we know from a well-known saying of his,[297] brought Keble and Newman to understand one another, when the elder man was shy and suspicious of the younger, and the younger, though full of veneration for the elder, was hardly yet in full sympathy with what was most characteristic and most cherished in the elder’s religious convictions. Keble attracted and moulded Froude: he impressed Froude with his strong Churchmanship, his severity and reality of life, his poetry, and high standard of scholarly excellence. Froude learned from him to be anti-Erastian, anti-Methodistical, anti-sentimental, and as strong in his hatred of the world, as contemptuous of popular approval, as any Methodist. Yet all this might merely have made a strong impression, or formed one more marked school of doctrine, without the fierce energy which received it and which it inspired. But Froude, in accepting Keble’s ideas, resolved to make them active, public, aggressive; and he found in Newman a colleague whose bold originality responded to his 239 own. Together they worked as Tutors; together they worked when their tutorships came to an end; together they worked when thrown into companionship in their Mediterranean voyage, in the winter of 1832 and the spring of 1833. They came back full of aspirations and anxieties which spurred them on; their thoughts had broken out in papers sent home from time to time to Rose’s British Magazine (“Home Thoughts Abroad”) and the Lyra Apostolica. Then came the meeting at Hadleigh, and the beginning of the Tracts. Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impulse; then Newman took up the work, and the impulse henceforward, and the direction, were his.

‘Doubtless, many thought and felt like them about the perils which beset the Church and religion. Loyalty to the Church, belief in her divine mission, allegiance to her authority, readiness to do battle for her claims, were anything but extinct in her ministers and laity. The elements were all about of sound and devoted Churchmanship. Higher ideas of the Church than the popular and political notion of it, higher conceptions of Christian doctrine than those of the ordinary Evangelical theology—echoes of the meditations of a remarkable Irishman, Mr. Alexander Knox—had in many quarters attracted attention in the works and sermons of his disciple, Bishop Jebb, though it was not till the Movement had taken shape that their full significance was realised. Others besides Keble and Froude and Newman were seriously considering what could best be done to arrest the current which was running strong against the Church, and discussing schemes of resistance and defence. Others were stirring up themselves and their brethren to meet the new emergencies, to respond to the new call. Some of these were in communication with the Oriel men, and ultimately took part with them in organising vigorous measures. But it was not till Mr. Newman made up his mind to force on the public mind, in a way which could not be evaded, the great article of the Creed, “I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church,” that the Movement began. And for the first part of its course, it was concentrated at Oxford. It was the direct result of the searchings of heart and the communings for seven years, from 1826 to 240 1833, of the three men who have been the subject of this chapter.

* * * * *

‘Hurrell Froude[298] soon passed away before the brunt of the fighting came. His name is associated with Mr. Newman and Mr. Keble, but it is little more than a name to those who now talk of the origin of the Movement. Yet all who remember him agree in assigning to him an importance as great as that of any, in that little knot of men whose thoughts and whose courage gave birth to it…. He was early cut off from direct and personal action on the course which things took. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that his influence on the line taken, and on the minds of others, was inconsiderable. It would be more true to say that, with one exception, no one was more responsible for the impulse which led to the Movement; no one had more to do with shaping its distinct aims and its moral spirit and character, in its first stage; no one was more daring and more clear, as far as he saw, in what he was prepared for. There was no one to whom his friends so much looked up with admiration and enthusiasm. There was no “wasted shade”[299] in Hurrell Froude’s disabled, prematurely shortened life.

241 ‘Like Henry Martyn, he was made by strong and even merciless self-discipline over a strong and for a long time refractory nature. He was a man of great gifts, with much that was most attractive and noble; but joined with this there was originally in his character a vein of perversity and mischief, always in danger of breaking out, and with which he kept up a long and painful struggle. His inmost thought and knowledge of himself have been laid bare in the papers which his friends published after his death. He was in the habit of probing his motives to the bottom, and of recording without mercy what he thought his self-deceits and affectations. The religious world of the day made merry over his methods of self-discipline; but whatever may be said of them, (and such things are not easy to judge of), one thing is manifest, that they were true and sincere efforts to conquer what he thought evil in himself, to keep himself in order, to bring his inmost self into subjection to the Law and Will of God. The self-chastening which his private papers show, is no passion or value for asceticism, but a purely moral effort after self-command and honesty of character; and what makes the struggle so touching is its perfect reality and truth. He “turned his thoughts on that desolate wilderness, his own conscience, and said what he saw there.”[300] A man who has had a good deal to conquer in himself, and has gone a good way to conquer it, is not apt to be indulgent to self-deceit or indolence, or even weakness. The basis of Froude’s character was a demand which would not be put off for what was real and thorough; an implacable scorn and hatred for what he counted shams and pretences. “His highest ambition,” he used to say, “was to be a humdrum.”[301] The intellectual and the moral parts of his character were of a piece. The tricks and flimsinesses of a bad argument provoked him as much as the imposture and “flash” of insincere sentiment and fine talking; he might be conscious of “flash” in himself and his friends, and he would admit it unequivocally; but it was as unbearable to him to pretend not to see a fallacy as soon as it was detected, as it would have been to him to arrive at the right answer of a sum or a problem by tampering with the 242 processes. Such a man, with strong affections and keen perception of all forms of beauty, and with the deepest desire to be reverent towards all that had a right to reverence, would find himself in the most irritating state of opposition and impatience with much that passed as religion round him. Principles not attempted to be understood and carried into practice; smooth self-complacency among those who looked down on a blind and unspiritual world; the continual provocation of worthless reasoning and ignorant platitudes; the dull unconscious stupidity of people who could not see that the times were critical, that Truth had to be defended, and that it was no easy or light-hearted business to defend it;—threw him into an habitual attitude of defiance, and half-amused, half-earnest contradiction, which made him feared by loose reasoners and pretentious talkers, and even by quiet easy-going friends, who unexpectedly found themselves led on blindfold, with the utmost gravity, into traps and absurdities, by the wiles of his mischievous dialectic. This was the outside look of his relentless earnestness. People who did not like him or his views, and who, perhaps, had winced under his irony, naturally put down his strong language, which on occasion could certainly be unceremonious, to flippancy and arrogance. But within the circle of those whom he trusted, or of those who needed at any time his help, another side disclosed itself: a side of the most genuine warmth of affection; an awful reality of devoutness, which it was his great and habitual effort to keep hidden; a high simplicity of unworldliness and generosity; and, in spite of his daring mockeries of what was commonplace or showy, the most sincere and deeply felt humility with himself. Dangerous as he was often thought to be in conversation, one of the features of his character which has impressed itself on the memory of one who knew him well, was his “patient, winning considerateness in discussion, which, with other qualities, endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart.”[302] “It is impossible,” writes James Mozley in 1833, with a mixture of amusement, speaking of the views about celibacy which were beginning to be current, “to talk with Froude without committing one’s self on such subjects as 243 these; so that by and by I expect the tergiversants will be a considerable party.” His letters, with their affectionately playful addresses, δαιμόνιε, αἰνότατε, πέπον, Carissime, “Sir, my dear friend,” or “Ἀργείων ὄχ’ ἄριστε, have you not been a spoon?” are full of the most delightful ease and verve and sympathy.

‘With a keen sense of English faults he was, as Cardinal Newman has said, “an Englishman to the backbone”; and he was, further, a fastidious, high-tempered English gentleman, in spite of his declaiming about “pampered aristocrats” and the “gentleman heresy.” His friends thought of him as of the “young Achilles,” with his high courage, and noble form, and “eagle eye,” made for such great things, but appointed so soon to die. “Who can refrain from tears at the thought of that bright and beautiful Froude?” is the expression of one of them[303] shortly before his death, and when it was quite certain that the doom which had so long hung over him was at hand. He had the love of doing for the mere sake of doing what was difficult or even dangerous to do, which is the mainspring of characteristic English sports and games. He loved the sea; he liked to sail his own boat, and enjoyed rough weather, and took interest in the niceties of seamanship and shipcraft. He was a bold rider across country. With a powerful grasp on mathematical truths and principles, he entered with wholehearted zest into inviting problems, or into practical details of mechanical or hydrostatic or astronomical science. His letters are full of such observations, put in a way which he thought would interest his friends, and marked by his strong habit of getting into touch with what was real and of the substance of questions. He applied his thoughts to architecture with a power and originality which at the time were not common. No one who only cared for this world could be more attracted and interested than he was by the wonder and beauty of its facts and appearances. With the deepest allegiance to his home, and reverence for its ties and authority, (a home of the old-fashioned ecclesiastical sort, sober, manly, religious, orderly,) he carried into his wider life the feelings with which he had been brought up; bold as he was, his reason and his character craved for authority, but authority which morally and reasonably 244 he could respect. Mr. Keble’s goodness and purity subdued him, and disposed him to accept, without reserve, his master’s teaching: and towards Mr. Keble, along with an outside show of playful criticism and privileged impertinence, there was a reverence which governed Froude’s whole nature. In the wild and rough heyday of reform, he was a Tory of the Tories. But when authority failed him, from cowardice or stupidity or self-interest, he could not easily pardon it; and he was ready to startle his friends by proclaiming himself a Radical, prepared for the sake of the highest and greatest interests to sacrifice all second-rate and subordinate ones.

‘When his friends, after his death, published selections from his journals and letters, the world was shocked by what seemed his amazing audacity, both of thought and expression, about a number of things and persons which it was customary to regard as almost beyond the reach of criticism. The Remains lent themselves admirably to the controversial process of culling choice phrases and sentences and epithets surprisingly at variance with conventional and popular estimates. Friends were pained and disturbed; foes, naturally enough, could not hold in their overflowing exultation at such a disclosure of the spirit of the Movement. Sermons and newspapers drew attention to Froude’s extravagances, with horror and disgust. The truth is, that if the off-hand sayings in conversation or letters of any man of force and wit and strong convictions about the things and persons that he condemns, were made known to the world, they would by themselves have much the same look of flippancy, injustice, impertinence, to those who disagreed in opinion with the speaker or writer; they are allowed for, or they are not allowed for by others, according to what is known of his general character. The friends who published Froude’s Remains knew what he was; they knew the place and proportion of the fierce and scornful passages; they knew that they really did not go beyond the liberty and the frank speaking which most people give themselves in the abandon and understood exaggeration of intimate correspondence and talk. But they miscalculated the effect on those who did not know him, or whose interest it was to make the most of the advantage given them. They seem to have 245 expected that the picture which they presented of their friend’s transparent sincerity and singleness of aim, manifested amid so much pain and self-abasement, would have touched readers more. They miscalculated in supposing that the proofs of so much reality of religious earnestness would carry off the offence of vehement language, which without these proofs might naturally be thought to show mere random violence. At any rate the result was much natural and genuine irritation, which they were hardly prepared for. Whether on general grounds they were wise in startling and vexing friends, and putting fresh weapons into the hands of opponents by their frank disclosure of so unconventional a character, is a question which may have more than one answer: but one thing is certain, they were not wise, if they only desired to forward the immediate interests of their party or cause. It was not the act of cunning conspirators: it was the act of men who were ready to show their hands, and take the consequences. Undoubtedly, they warned off many who had so far gone along with the Movement, and who now drew back. But if the publication was a mistake, it was the mistake of men confident in their own straightforwardness.

‘There is a natural Nemesis to all over-strong and exaggerated language. The weight of Froude’s judgments was lessened by the disclosure of his strong words, and his dashing fashion of condemnation and dislike gave a precedent for the violence of shallower men. But to those who look back on them now, though there can be no wonder that at the time they excited such an outcry, their outspoken boldness hardly excites surprise. Much of it might naturally be put down to the force of first impressions; much of it is the vehemence of an Englishman who claims the liberty of criticising and finding fault at home; much of it was the inevitable vehemence of a reformer. Much of it seems clear foresight of what has since come to be recognised. His judgments on the Reformers, startling as they were at the time, are not so very different, as to the facts of the case, from what most people on all sides now agree in; and as to their temper and theology, from what most Churchmen would now agree in. Whatever allowances may be made for the difficulties of their time, (and these allowances 246 ought to be very great), and however well they may have done parts of their work, such as the translations and adaptations of the Prayer-Book, it is safe to say that the divines of the Reformation never can be again, with their confessed Calvinism, with their shifting opinions, their extravagant deference to the foreign oracles of Geneva and Zurich, their subservience to bad men in power, the heroes and saints of Churchmen. But when all this is said, it still remains true that Froude was often intemperate and unjust. In the hands of the most self-restrained and considerate of its leaders, the Movement must anyhow have provoked strong opposition, and given great offence. The surprise and the general ignorance were too great; the assault was too rude and unexpected. But Froude’s strong language gave it a needless exasperation.

‘Froude was a man strong in abstract thought and imagination, who wanted adequate knowledge. His canons of judgment were not enlarged, corrected, and strengthened by any reading or experience commensurate with his original powers of reasoning or invention. He was quite conscious of it, and did his best to fill up the gap in his intellectual equipment. He showed what he might have done under more favouring circumstances in a very interesting volume on Becket’s history and letters. But circumstances were hopelessly against him: he had not time, he had not health and strength, for the learning which he so needed, which he so longed for. But wherever he could, he learned. He was quite ready to submit his prepossessions to the test and limitation of facts. Eager and quick-sighted, he was often apt to be hasty in conclusions from imperfect or insufficient premises; but even about what he saw most clearly he was willing to hold himself in suspense, when he found that there was something more to know. Cardinal Newman has noted two deficiencies which, in his opinion, were noticeable in Froude. “He had no turn for theology as such”; and, further, he goes on: “I should say that his power of entering into the minds of others was not equal to his other gifts”: a remark which he illustrates by saying that Froude could not believe that “I really held the Roman Church to be anti-Christian.” The want of this power—in which he stood in such sharp contrast to his friend—might 247 be either a strength or a weakness: a strength, if his business was only to fight; a weakness, if it was to attract and persuade. But Froude was made for conflict, not to win disciples. Some wild solemn poetry, marked by deep feeling and direct expression, is scattered through his letters, kindled always by things and thoughts of the highest significance, and breaking forth with force and fire. But probably the judgment passed on him by a clever friend,[304] from the examination of his handwriting, was a true one: “This fellow has a great deal of imagination, but not the imagination of a poet.” He felt that even beyond poetry there are higher things than anything that imagination can work upon. It was a feeling which made him blind to the grandeur of Milton’s poetry. He saw in it only an intrusion into the most sacred of sanctities….

* * * * *

‘Froude’s first letter to Mr. Newman is in August, 1828. It is the letter of a friendly and sympathising colleague in College work, glad to be free from the “images of impudent undergraduates”; he inserts some lines of verse, talks about Dollond and telescopes, and relates how he and a friend got up at half-past two in the morning, and walked half a mile to see Mercury rise; he writes about his mathematical studies and reading for Orders, and how a friend had “read half through Prideaux and yet accuses himself of idleness”; but there is no interchange of intimate thought. Mr. Newman was at this time, as he has told us, drifting away from under the shadow of Liberalism; and in Froude he found a man who, without being a Liberal, was as quick-sighted, as courageous, and as alive to great thoughts and new hopes as himself. Very different in many ways, they were in this alike, that the commonplace notions of religion and the Church were utterly unsatisfactory to them, and that each had the capacity for affectionate and whole-hearted friendship. The friendship began and lasted on, growing stronger and deeper to the end. And this was not all. Froude’s friendship with Mr. Newman overcame Mr. Keble’s hesitations about Mr. Newman’s supposed 248 Liberalism. Mr. Newman has put on record what he thought and felt about Froude: no one, probably, of the many whom Cardinal Newman’s long life has brought round him, ever occupied Froude’s place in his heart.[305] The correspondence shows in part the way in which Froude’s spirit rose, under the sense of having such a friend to work with, in the cause which, day by day, grew greater and more sacred in the eyes of both. Towards Mr. Keble Froude felt like a son to a father; towards Mr. Newman like a soldier to his comrade, and him the most splendid and boldest of warriors. Each mind caught fire from the other, till the high enthusiasm of the one was quenched in an early death.

‘Shortly after this friendship began, the course of events also began which finally gave birth to the Oxford Movement. The break-up of parties caused by the Roman Catholic Emancipation was followed by the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830, and these changes gave a fresh stimulus to all the reforming parties in England: Whigs, Radicals, and Liberal religionists. Froude’s letters mark the influence of these changes on his mind. They stirred in him the fiercest disgust and indignation, and as soon as the necessity of battle became evident to save the Church (and such a necessity was evident) he threw himself into it with all his heart, and his attitude was henceforth that of a determined and uncompromising combatant. “Froude is growing stronger and stronger in his sentiments every day,” writes James Mozley, in 1832, “and cuts about him on all sides. It is extremely fine to hear him talk. The aristocracy of the country, at present, are the chief objects of his vituperation, and he decidedly sets himself against the modern character of the gentleman, and thinks that the Church will eventually depend for its support, as it always did in its most influential times, on the very poorest classes.” “I would not set down anything that Froude says for his deliberate opinion,” writes James Mozley a year later, “for he really hates the present state of things so excessively that any change would be a relief to him.” … “Froude is staying up, and I see a great deal of him.” … “Froude is most enthusiastic in his plans, and says, ‘What fun it is living 249 in such times as these! how could one now go back to the times of old Tory humbug?’” From henceforth his position among his friends was that of the most impatient and aggressive of reformers, the one who most urged on his fellows to outspoken language and a bold line of action. They were not men to hang back and be afraid, but they were cautious and considerate of popular alarms and prejudices, compared with Froude’s fearlessness. Other minds were indeed moving, minds as strong as his; indeed, it may be, deeper, more complex, more amply furnished, with a wider range of vision and a greater command of the field. But while he lived, he appears as the one who spurs on and incites, where others hesitate. He is the one by whom are visibly most felt the gaudia certaminis, and the confidence of victory, and the most profound contempt for the men and the ideas of the boastful and short-sighted present.

‘In this unsparing and absorbing warfare, what did Froude aim at—what was the object he sought to bring about, what were the obstacles he sought to overthrow?

‘He was accused, as was most natural, of Romanising: of wishing to bring back Popery. It is perfectly certain that this was not what he meant, though he did not care for the imputation of it. He was, perhaps, the first Englishman who attempted to do justice to Rome, and to use friendly language of it, without the intention of joining it. But what he fought for was not Rome, not even a restoration of Unity, but a Church of England such as it was conceived of by the Caroline divines and the Nonjurors. The great break-up of 1830 had forced on men the anxious question: “What is the Church, as spoken of in England? Is it the Church of Christ?” and the answers were various. Hooker had said it was “the nation”; and in entirely altered circumstances, with some qualifications, Dr. Arnold said the same. It was “the Establishment,” according to the lawyers and politicians, both Whig and Tory. It was an invisible and mystical body, said the Evangelicals. It was the aggregate of separate congregations, said the Nonconformists. It was the Parliamentary creation of the Reformation, said the Erastians. The true Church was the communion of the Pope, the pretended Church was a legalised 250 schism, said the Roman Catholics. All these ideas were floating about, loose and vague, among people who talked much about the Church. Whately, with his clear sense, had laid down that it was a divine religious society, distinct in its origin and existence, distinct in its attributes from any other. But this idea had fallen dead, till Froude and his friends put new life into it. Froude accepted Whately’s idea that the Church of England was the one historic uninterrupted Church, than which there could be no other, locally, in England; but into this Froude read a great deal that never was and never could be in Whately’s thoughts. Whately had gone very far in viewing the Church, from without, as a great and sacred corporate body. Casting aside the Erastian theory, he had claimed its right to exist, and if necessary, govern itself, separate from the State. He had recognised excommunication as its natural and indefeasible instrument of government. But what the internal life of the Church was, what should be its teaching and organic system, and what was the standard and proof of these, Whately had left unsaid. And this outline Froude filled up. For this he went the way to which the Prayer-Book, with its Offices, its Liturgy, its Ordination services, pointed him. With the divines who had specially valued the Prayer-Book, and taught in its spirit, Bishop Wilson, William Law, Hammond, Ken, Laud, Andrewes, he went back to the times and the sources from which the Prayer-Book came to us, the early Church, the Reforming Church (for such, with all its faults, it was), of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, before the hopelessly corrupt and fatal times of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which led to the break-up of the sixteenth. Thus, to the great question, What is the Church? he gave without hesitation, and gave to the end, the same answer that Anglicans gave and are giving still. But he added two points which were then very new to the ears of English Churchmen: (1) that there were great and to most people unsuspected faults and shortcomings in the English Church, for some of which the Reformation was gravely responsible; (2) that the Roman Church was more right than we had been taught to think, in many parts both of principle and practice, and that our quarrel with it on these 251 points arose from our own ignorance and prejudices. To people who had taken for granted all their lives that the Church was thoroughly “Protestant” and thoroughly right in its Protestantism, and that Rome was Antichrist, these confident statements came with a shock. He did not enter much into dogmatic questions. As far as can be judged from his Remains, the one point of doctrine on which he laid stress, as being inadequately recognised and taught in the then condition of the English Church, was the Primitive doctrine of the Eucharist. His other criticisms pointed to practical and moral matters: the spirit of Erastianism, the low standard of life and purpose and self-discipline in the clergy, the low tone of the current religious teaching. The Evangelical teaching seemed to him a system of unreal words. The opposite school was too self-complacent, too comfortable, too secure in its social and political alliances; and he was bent on shaming people into severer notions. “We will have a vocabularium apostolicum, and I will start it with four words: ‘pampered aristocrats,’ ‘resident gentlemen,’ ‘smug parsons,’ and ‘pauperes Christi.’ I shall use the first on all occasions; it seems to me just to hit the thing.” “I think of putting the view forward (about new monasteries), under the title of a ‘Project for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.’ Certainly colleges of unmarried priests (who might, of course, retire to a living, when they could and liked) would be the cheapest possible way of providing effectively for the spiritual wants of a large population.” And his great quarrel with the existing state of things was that the spiritual objects of the Church were overlaid and lost sight of in the anxiety not to lose its political position. In this direction he was, as he proclaims himself, an out-and-out Radical, and he was prepared at once to go very far. “If a National Church means a Church without discipline, my argument for discipline is an argument against a National Church; and the best thing we can do is to unnationalise ours as soon as possible”; “let us tell the truth and shame the devil: let us give up a National Church and have a real one.”[306] His criticism did not diminish in severity, or his proposals become less daring, as he felt that his time was growing short 252 and the hand of death was upon him. But to the end, the elevation and improvement of the English Church remained his great purpose. To his friend, as we know, the Roman Church was either the Truth or Antichrist. To Froude it was neither the whole Truth nor Antichrist; but like the English Church itself, a great and defective Church, whose defects were the opposite to ours, and which we should do wisely to learn from, rather than abuse. But, to the last, his allegiance never wavered to the English Church.

‘It is very striking to come from Froude’s boisterous freedom in his letters, to his sermons and the papers he prepared for publication. In his sermons his manner of writing is severe and restrained even to dryness. If they startle, it is by the force and searching point of an idea, not by any strength of words. The style is chastened, simple, calm, with the most careful avoidance of over-statement or anything rhetorical. And so in his papers, his mode of argument, forcible and cogent as it is, avoids all appearance of exaggeration or even illustrative expansion: it is all muscle and sinew; it is modelled on the argumentative style of Bishop Butler, and still more, of William Law. No one could suppose from these papers Froude’s fiery impetuosity, or the frank daring of his disrespectful vocabulary. Those who can read between the lines can trace the grave irony which clung everywhere to his deep earnestness.

‘There was yet another side of Froude’s character which was little thought of by his critics, or recognised by all his friends. With all his keenness of judgment and all his readiness for conflict, some who knew him best were impressed by the melancholy which hung over his life, and which, though he ignored it, they could detect. It is remembered still by Cardinal Newman. “I thought,” wrote Mr. Isaac Williams, “that knowing him, I better understood Hamlet, a person most natural, but so original as to be unlike any one else, hiding depth of delicate thought in apparent extravagances. Hamlet, and the Georgics of Virgil, he used to say, he should have bound together.” “Isaac Williams,” wrote Mr. Copeland, “mentioned to me a remark made on Froude by S. Wilberforce in his early days: ‘They talk of Froude’s fun, but somehow I 253 cannot be in a room with him alone for ten minutes without feeling so intensely melancholy, that I do not know what to do with myself. At Brighstone, in my Eden days, he was with me, and I was overwhelmed with the deep sense which possessed him of yearning which nothing could satisfy, and of the unsatisfying nature of all things.’”[307]

‘Froude often reminds us of Pascal. Both had that peculiarly bright, brilliant, sharp-cutting intellect which passes with ease through the coverings and disguises which veil realities from men. Both had mathematical powers of unusual originality and clearness; both had the same imaginative faculty; both had the same keen interest in practical problems of science; both felt and followed the attraction of deeper and more awful interests. Both had the same love of beauty; both suppressed it. Both had the same want of wide or deep learning; they made skilful use of what books came to their hand, and used their reading as few readers are able to use it; but their real instrument of work was their own quick and strong insight, and power of close and vigorous reasoning. Both had the greatest contempt for fashionable and hollow “shadows of religion.” Both had the same definite, unflinching judgment. Both used the same clear and direct language. Both had a certain grim delight in the irony with which they pursued their opponents. In both it is probable that their unmeasured and unsparing criticism recoiled on the cause which they had at heart. But in the case of both of them it was not the temper of the satirist, it was no mere love of attacking what was vulnerable, and indulgence in the cruel pleasure of stinging and putting to shame, which inspired them. Their souls were moved by the dishonour done to religion, by public evils and public dangers. Both of them died young, before their work was done. They placed before themselves the loftiest and most unselfish objects, the restoration of truth and goodness in the Church: and to that they gave their life and all that they had. And what they called on others to be they were themselves. They were alike in 254 the sternness, the reality, the perseverance, almost unintelligible in its methods to ordinary men, of their moral and spiritual self-discipline.’

[Supplementary Chapter, written by Lord Blachford (Frederic Rogers).[308]]

‘Hurrell Froude was, when I, as an undergraduate, first knew him, in 1828, tall and very thin, with something of a stoop, with a large skull and forehead, but not a large face, delicate features, and penetrating grey eyes, not exactly piercing, but bright with internal conceptions, and ready to assume an expression of amusement, careful attention, inquiry, or stern disgust, but with a basis of softness. His manner was cordial and familiar, and assured you, as you knew him well, of his affectionate feeling, which encouraged you to speak your mind (within certain limits), subject to the consideration that if you said anything absurd it would not be allowed to fall to the ground. He had more of the undergraduate in him than any “don” whom I ever knew: absolutely unlike Newman in being always ready to skate, sail, or ride with his friends, and, if in 255 a scrape, not pharisaical as to his means of getting out of it. I remember, e.g., climbing Merton gate with him in my undergraduate days, when we had been out too late boating or skating. And unless authority or substantial decorum was really threatened he was very lenient: or, rather, had an amused sympathy with the irregularities that are mere matters of mischief or high spirits. In lecture it was, mutatis mutandis, the same man. Seeing, from his Remains, the “high view of his own capacities of which he could not divest himself,” and his determination not to exhibit or be puffed up by it, and looking back on his tutorial manner (I was in his lectures, both in classics and mathematics), it was strange how he disguised, not only his sense of superiority, but the appearance of it, so that his pupils felt him more as a fellow-student than as the refined scholar or mathematician which he was. This was partly owing to his carelessness of those formulæ, the familiarity with which gives even second-rate lectures a position of superiority which is less visible in those who, like their pupils, are themselves always struggling with principles; and partly to an effort, perhaps sometimes overdone, not to put himself above the level of others. In a lecture on the Supplices of Æschylus, I have heard him say tout bonnement: “I can’t construe that: what do you make of it, A. B.?” turning to the supposed best scholar in the lecture; or, when an objection was started to his mode of getting through a difficulty: “Ah! I had not thought of that; perhaps your way is the best.” And this mode of dealing with himself and the undergraduates whom he liked, made them like him, but also made them really undervalue his talent, which, as we now see, was what he meant they should do. At the same time, though watchful over his own vanity, he was keen and prompt in snubs in playful and challenging retort, to those he liked, but in the nature of scornful exposure, when he had to do with coarseness or coxcombry, or shallow display of sentiment. It was a paradoxical consequence of his suppression of egotism that he was more solicitous to show that you were wrong than that he was right. He also wanted, like Socrates or Bishop Butler, to make others, if possible, think for themselves.

‘However, it is not to be inferred that his conversation was 256 made of controversy. To a certain extent it turned that way, because he was fond of paradox. (His brother William used to say that he, William, never felt he had really mastered a principle till he had thrown it into a paradox.) And paradox, of course, invites contradiction, and so controversy. On subjects upon which he considered himself more or less an apostle, he liked to stir people’s minds by what startled them, waking them up, or giving them “nuts to crack.” An almost solemn gravity, with amusement twinkling behind it (not invisible, and ready to burst forth into a bright low laugh when gravity had been played out), was a very frequent posture with him. But he was thoroughly ready to amuse and instruct, or to be amused and instructed, as an eager and earnest speaker or listener on most matters of interest. I do not remember that he had any great turn for beauty of colour; he had none, I think, or next to none, for music, nor do I remember in him any great love of humour; but for beauty of physical form, for mechanics, for mathematics, for poetry which had a root in true feeling, for wit (including that perception of a quasi-logical absurdity of position), for history, for domestic incidents, his sympathy was always lively, and he would throw himself naturally and warmly into them. From his general demeanour (I need scarcely say) the “odour of sanctity” was wholly absent.

‘I am not sure that his height and depth of aim and lively versatility of talent did not leave his compassionate sympathies rather undeveloped; certainly to himself, and, I suspect, largely in the case of others, he would view suffering not as a thing to be cockered up or made much of, though of course to be alleviated if possible, but to be viewed calmly as a Providential discipline for those who can mitigate, or have to endure it. J. H. N. was once reading me a letter just received from him in which (in answer to J. H. N.’s account of his work and the possibility of his breaking down), he said in substance: “I daresay you have more to do than your health will bear, but I would not have you give up anything except perhaps the Deanery” (of Oriel). And then J. H. N. paused, with a kind of inner exultant chuckle, and said: “Ah! there’s a Basil for you”; as if the friendship which sacrificed its friend, as it would 257 sacrifice itself, to a cause, was the friendship which was really worth having.

‘As I came to know him in a more manly way, as a brother Fellow, friend, and collaborateur, the character of “ecclesiastical agitator” was of course added to this. In this capacity his great pleasure was taking bulls by their horns. Like the “gueux” of the Low Countries, he would have met half-way any opprobrious nickname, and I believe coined the epithet “Apostolical” for his party because it was connected with everything in Spain which was most obnoxious to the British public. I remember one day his grievously shocking Palmer of Worcester, a man of an opposite texture, when a council in J. H. N.’s rooms had been called to consider some memorial or other to which Palmer wanted to collect the signatures of many, and particularly of dignified persons, but in which Froude wished to express the determined opinions of a few. Froude stretched out his long length on Newman’s sofa, broke in upon one of Palmer’s judicious harangues about Bishops and Archdeacons and such like, with the ejaculation: “I don’t see why we should disguise from ourselves that our object is to dictate to the clergy of this country; and I, for one, do not want anyone else to get on the box!” He thought that true Churchmen must be few before they were many: that the sin of the clergy in all ages was that they tried to make out that Christians were many when they were only few, and sacrificed to this object the force derivable from downright and unmistakable enforcement of truth in speech or action.

‘As simplicity in thought, word, and deed formed no small part of his ideal, his tastes in architecture, painting, sculpture, rhetoric, or poetry were severe. He had no patience with what was artistically dissolute, luscious, or decorated more than in proportion to its animating idea, wishy-washy, or sentimental. The ornamental parts of his own rooms (in which I lived in his absence) were a slab of marble to wash upon, a print of Rubens’s “Deposition,” and a head (life-size) of the Apollo Belvedere. And I remember still the tall scorn, with something of surprise, with which, on entering my undergraduate room, he looked down on some Venuses, Cupids, 258 and Hebes, which, freshman-like, I had bought from an Italian.

‘He was not very easy even under conventional vulgarity, still less under the vulgarity of egotism; but, being essentially a partisan, he could put up with both in a man who was really in earnest and on the right side. Nothing, however, I think, would have induced him to tolerate false sentiment, and he would, I think, if he had lived, have exerted himself very trenchantly to prevent his cause being adulterated by it. He was, I should say, sometimes misled by a theory that genius cut through a subject by logic or intuition, without looking to the right or left, while common sense was always testing every step by consideration of surroundings (I have not got his terse mode of statement), and that genius was right, or at least had only to be corrected, here and there, by common sense. This, I take it, would hardly have answered if his trenchancy had not been in practice corrected by J. H. N.’s wider political circumspection. He submitted, I suppose, to J. H. N.’s axiom, that if the Movement was to do anything it must become “respectable”; but it was against his nature.

‘He would (as we see in the Remains) have wished Ken to have the “courage of his convictions” by excommunicating the Jurors in William III.’s time, and setting up a little Catholic Church, like the Jansenists in Holland. He was not (as has been observed) a theologian, but he was as jealous for orthodoxy as if he were. He spoke slightingly of Heber as having ignorantly or carelessly communicated with Monophysites. But he probably knew no more about that and other heresies than a man of active and penetrating mind would derive from text-books. And I think it likely enough, not that his reverence for the Eucharist, but that his special attention to the details of Eucharistic doctrine, was due to the consideration that it was the foundation of ecclesiastical discipline and authority: matters on which his mind fastened itself with enthusiasm.’

259

From ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua,’ by John Henry Newman, D.D., of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1873.

[By the kind permission of the Rev. W. P. Neville of the Oratory, and of Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co.]

‘… Hurrell Froude was a pupil of Keble’s, formed by him, and in turn reacting upon him. I knew him first in 1826, and was in the closest and most affectionate friendship with him from about 1829 until his death in 1836. He was a man of the highest gifts: so truly many-sided, that it would be presumptuous in me to attempt to describe him, except under those aspects in which he came before me. Nor have I here to speak of the gentleness and tenderness of nature, the playfulness, the free elastic force and graceful versatility of mind, and the patient winning considerateness in discussion, which endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart; for I am all along engaged upon matters of belief and opinion, and am introducing others into my narrative, not for their own sake, or because I love them and have loved them, so much as because, and so far as, they have influenced my theological views. In this respect, then, I speak of Hurrell Froude, in his intellectual aspect: as a man of high genius, brimful and overflowing with ideas and views, in him original, which were too many and strong even for his bodily strength, and which crowded and jostled against each other, in their effort after distinct shape and expression. And he had an intellect as critical and logical as it was speculative and bold. Dying prematurely, as he did, and in the conflict and transition-state of opinion, his religious views never reached their ultimate conclusion, by the very reason of their multitude and their depth. His opinions arrested and influenced me even when they did not gain my assent. He professed openly his admiration of the Church of Rome, and his hatred of the Reformers. He delighted in the notion of an hierarchical system, of sacerdotal power, and of full ecclesiastical liberty. He felt scorn of the maxim, “The Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants,” and he gloried in accepting 260 Tradition as a main instrument of religious teaching. He had a high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity, and he considered the Blessed Virgin its great Pattern. He delighted in thinking of the Saints; he had a vivid appreciation of the idea of sanctity, its possibility and its heights; and he was more than inclined to believe a large amount of miraculous interference as occurring in the early and middle ages. He embraced the principle of penance and mortification. He had a deep devotion to the Real Presence, in which he had a firm faith. He was powerfully drawn to the Mediæval Church, but not to the Primitive.

‘He had a keen insight into abstract truth; but he was an Englishman to the backbone in his severe adherence to the real and the concrete. He had a most classical taste, and a genius for philosophy and art; and he was fond of historical inquiry, and the politics of religion. He had no turn for theology as such. He set no sufficient value on the writings of the Fathers, on the detail or development of doctrine, on the definite traditions of the Church viewed in their matter, on the teaching of the Ecumenical Councils, or on the controversies out of which they arose. He took an eager courageous view of things, on the whole. I should say that his power of entering into the minds of others did not equal his other gifts: he could not believe, for instance, that I really held the Roman Church to be anti-Christian. On many points, he would not believe but that I agreed with him, when I did not: he seemed not to understand my difficulties. His were of a different kind: the contrariety between theory and fact. He was a High Tory of the Cavalier stamp, and was disgusted with the Toryism of the opponents of the Reform Bill. He was smitten with the love of the Theocratic Church: he went abroad, and was shocked by the degeneracy which he thought he saw in the Catholics of Italy.

‘It is difficult to enumerate the precise additions to my theological creed which I derived from a friend to whom I owe so much. He taught me to look with admiration towards the Church of Rome, and, in the same degree, to dislike the Reformation. He fixed deep in me the idea of devotion to 261 the Blessed Virgin, and he led me gradually to believe in the Real Presence.

* * * * *

‘There were other reasons, besides Mr. Rose’s state of health, which hindered those who so much admired him from availing themselves of his close co-operation in the coming fight. United as both he and they were in the general scope of the Movement, they were in discordance with each other, from the first, in their estimate of the means to be adopted for attaining it. Mr. Rose had a position in the Church, a name, and serious responsibilities; he had direct ecclesiastical superiors; he had intimate relations with his own University, and a large clerical connection through the country. Froude and I were nobodies, with no characters to lose, and no antecedents to fetter us. Rose could not go ahead across country, as Froude had no scruples in doing. Froude was a bold rider: as on horseback, so also in his speculations. After a long conversation with him on the logical bearing of his principles, Mr. Rose said of him, with quiet humour, that “he did not seem to be afraid of inferences.” It was simply the truth. Froude had that strong hold of first principles, and that keen perception of their value, that he was comparatively indifferent to the revolutionary action which would attend on their application to a given state of things; whereas, in the thoughts of Rose, as a practical man, existing facts had the precedence of every other idea, and the chief test of the soundness of a line of policy lay in the consideration whether it would work. This was one of the first questions which, as it seemed to me, on every occasion occurred to his mind. With Froude, Erastianism, that is, the union (so he viewed it) of Church and State, was the parent, or if not the parent, the serviceable and sufficient tool of Liberalism. Till that union was snapped, Christian doctrine never could be safe; and while he well knew how high and unselfish was the temper of Mr. Rose, yet he used to apply to him an epithet, reproachful in his mouth: Rose was “a conservative.” By bad luck, I brought out this word to Mr. Rose in a letter of my own, which I wrote to him in criticism of something he had inserted in his Magazine: I got a vehement rebuke for my 262 pains; for though Rose pursued a conservative line, he had as high a disdain as Froude could have of a worldly ambition, and an extreme sensitiveness of such an imputation. But there was another reason still, and a more elementary one, which severed Mr. Rose from the Oxford Movement. Living movements do not come of committees, nor are great ideas worked out through the post, even though it had been the penny post. This principle deeply penetrated both Froude and myself from the first, and recommended to us the course which things soon took spontaneously, and without set purpose of our own.

* * * * *

‘It was an apparent accident which introduced me to [the Roman Breviary], that most wonderful and most attractive monument of the devotion of Saints. On Hurrell Froude’s death, in 1836, I was asked to select one of his books as a keepsake. I selected Butler’s Analogy; finding that it had been already chosen, I looked with some perplexity along the shelves, as they stood before me, when an intimate friend at my elbow said: “Take that.” It was the Breviary which Hurrell had had with him at Barbados. Accordingly, I took it, studied it, wrote my Tract from it, and have it on my table in constant use till this day.[309] That dear and familiar companion,[310] who thus put the Breviary into my hands, is still in the Anglican Church. So, too, is that early-venerated long-loved friend,[311] together with whom I edited a work which, more perhaps than any other, caused disturbance and annoyance in the Anglican world, Froude’s Remains; yet, however judgments might run as to the prudence of publishing it, I never heard any one impute to Mr. Keble the very shadow of dishonesty or treachery towards his Church in so acting.’

263 From ‘The Cherwell Water-Lily and other Poems,’ by the Rev. Frederick William Faber, M.A., Fellow of University College, Oxford. London: Rivingtons; and Oxford, Parker, 1840.

[By the kind permission of the Rev. Charles Bowden of the London Oratory.]

Verses sent to a Friend with a copy of Froude’s Remains.[312]

From ‘The Evangelical Succession,’ in ‘Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography,’ by the Right Honourable Sir James Stephen, K.C.B. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1849.[313]

[By the kind permission of Herbert Stephen, Esq., and of Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co.]

‘… In obedience to the general law of human affairs, arrived the day of reaction. A new race of students had 264 grown up at Oxford. They were men of unsullied, and even severe virtue; animated by a devotion which, if not very fervent, was at least genuine and grave; conversant with classical literature, and not without pretensions, more or less considerable, to an acquaintance with Christian antiquity. As they paced thoughtfully along those tall avenues, to which, a hundred years before, Whitfield and the Wesleys had been accustomed to retire for meditation, they recoiled, with a mixture of aversion and contempt, from the image of the crowded assemblages, and the dramatic exercises, in which the successors of those great men in the Church of England were performing so conspicuous a part. They revolved, not without indignation, the intellectual barrenness with which that Church had been stricken, from the time when her most popular teachers had not merely been satisfied to tread the narrow circle of the “Evangelical” theology, but had exulted in that bondage as indicating their possession of a purer light than had visited the other ministers of the Gospel. They invoked, with an occasional sigh, but not without many a bitter smile, the reappearance amongst us of a piety more profound and masculine, more meek and contemplative. They believed that such a change in the religious character of their age and country was a divine command, and that a commission had been given to themselves to carry it into effect.

* * * * *

‘… It came to pass, in the Oxonian as in other leagues, that the head moved forward by the impulse of the tail. Step by step in their progress, “the Church,” whom they worshipped, changed her attitude and her aspect. She soon disclaimed her Elizabethan or statutory origin, and then made vehement efforts to escape from her Elizabethan or statutory ceremonial. She assumed the title, and laid claim to the character, of the Primitive Church, or the Church of the Fathers, and at length arrogated to herself the prerogatives of that Catholic or universal Church, which “lifts her mitred front 265 in courts and palaces,” whether at Rome, at Moscow, or at Lambeth, but whose presence is never vouchsafed to any who cannot trace back from Apostolic hands an Episcopal succession.

‘At this stage of the history of the Oxonian league, its progress was quickened and animated by the panic which exhibited itself from one end to the other of the hostile camp. The disciples of Whitfield and of Wesley, united to those of Newton and Scott, of Milner and of Venn, and, reinforced by the whole strength of the Nonconformists, began to throw up, along the whole field of controversy, entrenchments for their own defence, and batteries for the annoyance of their assailants. Amongst the literary missiles cast by the contending hosts against each other, there are few better worth the study of those who wish to estimate the probable result of the conflict, than the Life of Richard Hurrell Froude. It was launched from a catapult under the immediate direction of Messrs. Keble and Newman themselves, and, though it is a book of no great inherent value, it has a considerable interest as the only biography which the world possesses of a confessor of Oxford Catholicism. It contains a vivid picture of the discipline, the studies, the opinions, and the mental habits of his fraternity, and is published by the two great fathers of that school, with the avowal of their “own general coincidence” in the opinions and feelings of their disciple. We have thus a delineation, at full length, of one of those divines who are to effect the conquest which was attempted in vain by the Bellarmines and the Bossuets of former times. If it teaches us nothing else, this biography will at least teach us what is the real extent and urgency of the danger which has so much disturbed the tranquillity of the guardians of the Protestant faith of England.

‘Richard Hurrell Froude was born, as we read, on the “Feast of the Annunciation,” in the year 1803, and died in 1836. He was an Etonian, a Fellow of Oriel College, a priest in Holy Orders of the Church of England, the writer of unsuccessful prize essays, and of journals, letters, and sermons; an occasional contributor to the periodical literature of his theological associates; and, during the last four years of his life, an invalid in search of health, either in the south 266 of Europe or in the West Indies. Such are all the incidents of a life to the commemoration of which two octavo volumes have been dedicated. A more intractable story, if regarded merely as a narrative, was never undertaken. But Mr. Froude left behind him a great collection of papers, which affection would have committed to the fire, though party spirit has given them to the press. The most unscrupulous publisher of diaries and private correspondence never offered for sale a self-analysis more frank or less prepossessing. But the world is invited to gaze on this suicidal portraiture, on account of “the extreme importance of the views, to the development of which the whole is meant to be subservient,” and in order that they may not lose “the instruction derivable from a full exhibition of his character as a witness to those views.” Heavy as are the penalties which the Editors of these volumes have incurred for their disclosure of the infirmities of their friend, the world will probably absolve them if they will publish more of the letters which he appears to have received from his mother, and to have transmitted to them. One such letter which they have rescued from oblivion, is worth far more than all which they have published of her son’s. Though both the parent and the child have long since been withdrawn from the reach of this world’s judgment, it yet seems almost an impiety to transcribe her estimate of his early character, and to add that the less favourable anticipations which she drew from her study of him in youth, were but too distinctly verified in his riper years. She read his heart with a mother’s sagacity, and thus revealed it to himself with a mother’s tenderness and truth.

‘“From his very birth his temper had been peculiar; pleasing, intelligent, and attaching, when his mind was undisturbed, and he was in the company of people who treated him reasonably and kindly; but exceedingly impatient under vexatious circumstances; very much disposed to find his own amusement in teasing and vexing others; and almost entirely incorrigible when it was necessary to reprove him. I never could find a successful mode of treating him. Harshness made him obstinate and gloomy; calm and long displeasure made him stupid and sullen; and kind patience had not sufficient power over his feelings to force him to govern himself. 267 After a statement of such great faults, it may seem an inconsistency to say that he nevertheless still bore about him strong marks of a promising character. In all points of substantial principle his feelings were just and high. He had (for his age) an unusually deep feeling of admiration for everything which was good and noble; his relish was lively, and his taste good, for all the pleasures of the imagination; and he was also quite conscious of his own faults, and (untempted) had a just dislike to them.”’

‘Exercising a stern and absolute dominion over all the baser passions, with a keen perception of the beautiful in nature and in art, and a deep homage for the sublime in morals; imbued with the spirit of the classical authors, and delighting in the exercise of talents which, though they fell far short of excellence, rose as far above mediocrity, Mr. Froude might have seemed to want no promise of an honourable rank in literature, or of distinction in his sacred office. His career was intercepted by a premature death; but enough is recorded to show that his aspirations, however noble, must have been defeated by the pride and moroseness which his mother’s wisdom detected, and which her love disclosed to him; united as they were to a constitutional distrust of his own powers, and a weak reliance on other minds for guidance and support. A spirit at once haughty, and unsustained by genuine self-confidence; subdued by the stronger will or intellect of other men, and glorying in that subjection; regarding the opponents of his masters with an intolerance exceeding their own; and, in the midst of all his animosity towards others, turning with no infrequent indignation on itself,—might form the basis of a good dramatic sketch, of which Mr. Froude might not unworthily sustain the burden. But a “dialogue of the dead,” in which George Whitfield and Richard Froude should be the interlocutors, would be a more appropriate channel for illustrating the practical uses of “the Second Reformation,” and of the “Catholic Restoration,” which it is the object of their respective biographies to illustrate. Rhadamanthus having dismissed them from his tribunal, they would compare together their juvenile admiration of the drama, their ascetic discipline at Oxford, their early dependence on stronger or 268 more resolute minds, their propensity to self-observation and to self-portraiture, their contemptuous opinions of the negro race, and the surprise with which they witnessed the worship of the Church of Rome in lands where it is still triumphant. So far all is peace, and the concordes animæ exchange such greetings as pass between disembodied spirits. But when the tidings brought by the new denizen of the Elysian fields to the reformer of the eighteenth century, reach his affrighted shade, the regions of the blessed are disturbed by an unwonted discord; and the fiery soul of Whitfield blazes with intense desire to resume his wanderings through the earth, and to lift up his voice against the new apostasy.

‘It was with no unmanly dread of the probe, but from want of skill or leisure to employ it, that the self-scrutiny of Whitfield seldom or never penetrated much below the surface. Preach he must; and when no audience could be brought together, he seized a pen and preached to himself. The uppermost feeling, be it what it may, is put down in his journal honestly, vigorously, and devoutly. Satan is menaced and upbraided. Intimations from Heaven are recorded, without one painful doubt of their origin. He prays and exults, anticipates the future with delight, looks back to the past with thankfulness, blames himself simply because he thinks himself to blame, despairs of nothing, fears nothing, and has not a moment’s ill-will to any human being. Mr. Froude conducts his written soliloquies in a different spirit. His introverted gaze analyses with elaborate minuteness the various motives at the confluence of which his active powers receive their impulse, and, with perverted sagacity, pursues the self-examination, until, bewildered in the dark labyrinth of his own nature, he escapes to the cheerful light of day by locking up his journal. A friend (whose real name is as distinctly intimated under its initial letter, as if it were written at length) advises burning confessions. “I cannot make up my mind to that,” observes the penitent; “but I think I can see many points in which it will be likely to do me good to be cut off for some time from these records.” On such a subject the author of The Christian Year was entitled to greater deference. That bright ornament of the College de Propagandâ at 269 Oxford had also gazed on his own heart through the mental microscope, till he had learnt the danger of the excessive use of it. While admonishing men to approach their Creator not as isolated beings, but as members of the Universal Church, and while aiding the inmates of her hallowed courts to worship in strains so pure, so reverent, and so meek, as to answer not unworthily to the voice of hope and reconciliation in which she is addressed by her Divine Head, this “sweet singer” had so brooded over the evanescent processes of his own spiritual nature, as not seldom to render his real meaning imperceptible to his readers, and probably to himself. With how sound a judgment he counselled Mr. Froude to burn his books, may be judged from the following entries in them:

‘“I have been talking a great deal to P.[314] about religion to-day. He seems to take such straightforward practical views of it that, when I am talking to him, I wonder what I have been bothering myself with all the summer, and almost doubt how far it is right to allow myself to indulge in speculations on a subject where all that is necessary is so plain and obvious.”—“Yesterday, when I went out shooting, I fancied I did not care whether I hit or not; but when it came to the point, I found myself anxious, and, after having killed, was not unwilling to let myself be considered a better shot than I described myself. I had an impulse, too, to let it be thought that I had only three shots when I really had had four. It was slight, to be sure, but I felt it.”—“I have read my journal, though I can hardly identify myself with the person it describes. It seems like having someone under one’s guardianship who was an intolerable fool, and exposed himself to my contempt, every moment, for the most ridiculous and trifling motives; and while I was thinking all this, I went into L.’s room to seek a pair of shoes, and on hearing him coming, got away as silently as possible. Why did I do this? Did I think I was doing what L. did not like? or was it the relic of a sneaking habit? I will ask myself these questions again.”—“I have a sort of vanity which aims at my own good opinion, and I look for anything to prove to myself that I am more 270 anxious to mind myself than other people. I was very hungry, but because I thought the charge unreasonable, I tried to shirk the waiter: sneaking!”—“Yesterday I was much put out by an old fellow chewing tobacco and spitting across me; also bad thoughts of various kinds kept presenting themselves to my mind when it was vacant.”—“I talked sillily to-day, as I used to do last Term, but took no pleasure in it, so I am not ashamed. Although I don’t recollect any harm of myself, yet I don’t feel that I have made a clean breast of it.”—“I forgot to mention that I had been looking round my rooms, and thinking that they looked comfortable and nice, and that I said in my heart, ‘Ah, ah! I am warm.’”—“It always suggests itself to me that a wise thought is wasted when it is kept to myself, against which, as it is my most bothering temptation, I will set down some arguments to be called to mind in time of trouble.”—“Now I am proud of this, and think that the knowledge it shows of myself implies a greatness of mind.”—“These records are no guide to me to show the state of my mind afterwards; they are so far from being exercises of humility, that they lessen the shame of what I record, just as professions [of] goodwill to other people reconcile us to our neglect of them.”

* * * * *

‘As it is not by these nice self-observers that the creeds of hoar antiquity, and the habits of centuries are to be shaken; so neither is such high emprise reserved for ascetics who can pause to enumerate the slices of bread and butter from which they have abstained. When Whitfield would mortify his body, he set about it like a man. The paroxysm was short indeed, but terrible. While it lasted, his diseased imagination brought soul and body into deadly conflict, the fierce spirit spurning, trampling, and well-nigh destroying the peccant carcase. Not so the fastidious and refined “witness to the views” of the restorers of the Catholic Church. The strife between his spiritual and animal nature is recorded in his journal in such terms as these: “Looked with greediness to see if there was goose on the table for dinner.”—“Meant to have kept a fast and did abstain from dinner, but at tea eat buttered toast.”—“Tasted nothing to-day till tea-time, and 271 then only one cup and dry bread.”—“I have kept my fast strictly, having taken nothing till near nine this evening, and then only a cup of tea and a little bread without butter, but it has not been as easy as it was last.”—“I made rather a more hearty tea than usual, quite giving up the notion of a fast in W.’s rooms, and by this weakness have occasioned another slip.” Whatever may be thought of the propriety of disclosing such passages as these, they will provoke a contemptuous smile from no one who knows much of his own heart. But they may relieve the anxiety of the alarmists. Luther and Zwingle, Cranmer and Latimer, may still rest in their honoured graves. “Take courage, brother Ridley, we shall light up such a flame in England as shall not soon be put out!” is a prophecy which will not be defeated by the successors of the Oxonian divines who listened to it, so long as they shall be [able?][315] to record, and to publish, contrite reminiscences of a desire for roasted goose, and of an undue indulgence in buttered toast.

‘Yet the will to subvert the doctrines and discipline of the Reformation is not wanting, and is not concealed. Mr. Froude himself, were he still living, might, indeed, object to be judged by his careless and familiar Letters. No such objection can, however, be made by the eminent persons who have deliberately given them to the world on account “of the truth and extreme importance of the views to which the whole is meant to be subservient,” and in which they record their “own general concurrence.” Of these weighty truths take the following examples: “You will be shocked at my avowal that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain that in all matters which seem to us indifferent, or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church which has preserved its traditionary practices unbroken. We cannot know about any seemingly indifferent practice of the Church of Rome that it is not a development of the Apostolic ἦθος, and it is to no purpose to say that we can find no proof of it in the writings of the first six centuries: they must find a disproof if they would do anything.”—“I think people are injudicious 272 who talk against the Roman Catholics for worshipping Saints and honouring the Virgin and images, etc. These things may perhaps be idolatrous: I cannot make up my mind about it.”—“P. called us the Papal Protestant Church, in which he proved a double ignorance, as we are Catholics without the Popery, and Church of England men without the Protestantism.”—“The more I think over that view of yours about regarding our present Communion Service, etc., as a judgement on the Church, and taking it as the crumbs from the Apostles’ table, the more I am struck with its fitness to be dwelt upon as tending to check the intrusion of irreverent thoughts, without in any way interfering with one’s just indignation.”—“Your trumpery principle about Scripture being the sole rule of faith in fundamentals (I nauseate the word), is but a mutilated edition, without the breadth and axiomatic character, of the original.”—“Really I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more, and have almost made up my mind that the Rationalist spirit they set afloat is the ψευδοπροφήτης of the Revelations.”—“Why do you praise Ridley? Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer?”—“I wish you could get to know something of S. and W.” (Southey and Wordsworth), “and un-Protestantise, un-Miltonise them.”—“How is it WE are so much in advance of our generation?” Spirit of George Whitfield! how would thy voice, rolled from “the secret place of thunders,” have overwhelmed these puny protests against the truths which it was the one business of thy life to proclaim from the rising to the setting sun!

* * * * *

‘Penetrating the design and seizing the spirit of the Gospels, the Reformers inculcated the faith in which the sentient and the spiritual in man’s compound nature had each its appropriate office: the one directed to the Redeemer in His palpable form, the other to the Divine Paraclete in His hidden agency; while, united with these, they exhibited to a sinful, but penitent, race the parental character of the omnipresent Deity. Such is not the teaching of the restored theology. The most eminent of its professors have thrown open the doors of Mr. Froude’s oratory, and have invited all passers-by to notice in his prayers 273 and meditations “the absence of any distinct mention of our Lord and Saviour.” They are exhorted not to doubt that there was a real though silent “allusion to Christ” under the titles in which the Supreme Being is addressed; and are told that “this circumstance may be a comfort to those who cannot bring themselves to assume the tone of many popular writers of this day, who yet are discouraged by the peremptoriness with which it is exacted of them. The truth is, that a mind alive to its own real state often shrinks to utter what it most dwells upon; and is too full of awe and fear to do more than silently hope what it most wishes.”

‘It would indeed be presumptuous to pass a censure, or to hazard an opinion, on the private devotions of any man; but there is no such risk in rejecting the apology which the publishers of those secret exercises have advanced for Mr. Froude’s departure from the habits of his fellow-Christians. Feeble, indeed, and emasculate must be the system, which, in its delicate distaste for the “popular writers of the day,” would bury in silence the Name in which every tongue and language has been summoned to worship and to rejoice. Well may “awe and fear” become all who assume and all who invoke it. But an “awe” which “shrinks to utter”[316] the Name of Him Who was born at Bethlehem, and yet does not fear to use the Name which is ineffable; a “fear” which can make mention of the Father, but may not speak of the Brother, of all;—is a feeling which fairly baffles comprehension. There is a much more simple though a less imposing theory. Mr. Froude permitted himself, and was encouraged by his correspondents, to indulge in the language of antipathy and scorn towards a large body of his fellow-Christians. It tinges his Letters, his Journals, and is not without its influence even on his devotions. Those despised men too often celebrated the events of their Redeemer’s life, and the benefits of His Passion, in language of offensive familiarity, and invoked Him with fond and feeble epithets. Therefore, a good Oxford Catholic must envelope in mystic terms all allusion to Him round Whom, as its centre, the whole Christian system revolves. The line of demarcation between themselves and these coarse sentimentalists 274 must be broad and deep, even though it should exclude those by whom it is drawn, from all the peculiar and distinctive ground on which the standard of the reformed Churches has been erected…. The martyrs of disgust and the heroes of revolutions are composed of entirely opposite materials, and are cast in quite different moulds. Nothing truly great or formidable was ever yet accomplished, in thought or action, by men whose love for truth was not strong enough to triumph over their dislike of the offensive objects with which truth may chance to be associated.

‘Mr. Froude was the helpless victim of such associations. Nothing escapes his abhorrence which has been regarded with favour by his political or religious antagonists. The Bill for the Abolition of Slavery was recommended to Parliament by an Administration more than suspected of Liberalism in matters ecclesiastical. The “witness to Catholic views,” “in whose sentiments, as a whole,” his Editors concur, visits the West Indies, and they are not afraid to publish the following report of his feelings: “I have felt it a kind of duty to maintain in my mind an habitual hostility to the niggers, and to chuckle over the failures of the new system, as if these poor wretches concentrated in themselves all the Whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination that have been ranged on their side.” Lest this should pass for a pleasant extravagance, the Editors enjoin the reader not to “confound the author’s view of the negro cause and of the abstract negro with his feelings towards any he should actually meet”; and Professor Thöluck is summoned from Germany to explain how the “originators of error” may lawfully be the objects of a good man’s hate, and how it may innocently overflow upon all their clients, kindred, and connections. Mr. Froude’s feelings towards the “abstract negro” would have satisfied the learned Professor in his most malevolent mood. “I am ashamed,” he says, “I cannot get over my prejudices against the niggers.”—“Every one I meet seems to me like an incarnation of the whole Anti-Slavery Society, and Fowell Buxton at their head.”—“The thing that strikes me as most remarkable in the cut of these niggers is excessive immodesty, a forward stupid familiarity intended for civility, which prejudices me against them worse even than Buxton’s 275 cant did. It is getting to be the fashion with everybody, even the planters, to praise the emancipation and Mr. Stanley.”

‘Mr. Froude, or rather his Editors, appear to have fallen into the error of supposing that their profession gives them not merely the right to admonish, but the privilege to scold. Lord Stanley and Mr. Buxton have, however, the consolation of being railed at in good company. Hampden is “hated” with much zeal, though, it is admitted, with imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe, and his associates of the Three Days, receive the following humane benediction: “I sincerely hope ‘the march of mind’ in France may yet prove a bloody one.”—“The election of the wretched B. for ——, and that base fellow H. for ——, in spite of the exposure,” etc. Again, the Editors protest against our supposing that this is a playful exercise in the art of exaggeration. “It should be observed,” they say, “as in other parts of this volume, that the author used these words on principle, not as abuse, but as expressing matters of fact, as a way of bringing before his own mind things as they are.”

‘Milton, however, is the special object of Mr. Froude’s virtuous abhorrence. He is “a detestable author.” Mr. Froude rejoices to learn something of the Puritans, because, as he says, “it gives me a better right to hate Milton, and accounts for many of the things which most disgusted me in his (not-in-my-sense-of-the-word) poetry!”—“A lady told me yesterday that you wrote the article on Sacred Poetry, etc. I thought it did not come up to what I thought your standard of aversion to Milton.” … There are much better things in Mr. Froude’s book than the preceding quotations might appear to promise. If given as specimens of his powers, they would do injustice to one whom we willingly would believe to have been a good and able man, a ripe scholar, and a devout Christian; though as illustrations of the temper and opinions of those who now sit in Wycliffe’s seat, they are neither unfair nor unimportant. But they may convince all whom it concerns, that hitherto, at least, Oxford has not given birth to a new race of giants, by whom the Evangelical founders and missionaries of the Church of England are about to be expelled from their ancient authority, or the Protestant world excluded from the light of day and the free breath of Heaven.’

276 From ‘A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble, M.A., Late Vicar of Hursley,’ by the Right Hon. Sir J. T. Coleridge, D.C.L. Oxford. London: James Parker & Co., 1870. [3rd ed.]

[By the kind permission of Messrs. J. Parker & Co.]

‘Of Hurrell Froude Dr. Newman has written: “He was a pupil of Keble’s, formed by him, and in turn reacting upon him.” This sentence is followed by a short and striking account of this extraordinary man, to which it would be unwise in me to attempt any addition, except as it may bear on the object of this memoir. I knew [Hurrell Froude] from a child, and I trace in the somewhat singular composition of his character, what he inherited both from his father, and his highly gifted mother: his father, whom Keble after his first visit to Dartington Parsonage playfully described to me as “very amiable, but provokingly intelligent, one quite uncomfortable to think of, making one ashamed of going gawking as one is wont to do about the world, without understanding anything one sees”; his mother very beautiful in person and delicate in constitution, with a highly expressive countenance, and gifted in intellect with the genius and imagination which his father failed in. Like the one, he was clever, knowing, quick, and handy; like the other, he was sensitive, intellectual, imaginative. He came to Keble full of respect for his character; he was naturally soon won by his affectionateness and simplicity, and, in turn, he was just the young man in whom Keble would at once take an interest and delight, as pupil; and so in fact it was. I find him again and again in Keble’s letters spoken of in the most loving language, yet often not without some degree of anxiety as to his future course: he saw the elements of danger in him, how liable he might be to take a wrong course, or be misunderstood even when taking a right one. Yet his hopes largely prevailed; and especially I remember his rejoicing at his [Froude’s] being elected Fellow of Oriel, thinking that the new society and associations, with the responsibilities of College employment, would tend to keep him safe. That 277 Keble acted on him (I would rather use that term than “formed”) is certain; and even when, in the later years of his short life, symptoms of coming differences in opinion may be traced in his letters, there is no abatement of personal love and reverence, nor, indeed, in a certain sense, of his feeling the weight of Keble’s influence; and though I gather from these that there was more entire agreement with Dr. Newman as to action, yet it seems to me that there still remained a closer intimacy and more filial feeling with regard to Keble….

‘… That Hurrell Froude “re-acted on Keble” is true also, I have no doubt, in a certain sense; it could scarcely be otherwise where there was so much ability and affectionate playfulness, with so much originality on one side; so much humility on the other; and so much love on both. It would be idle to speculate on what might have been, when the hour of trial came which none of those specially engaged probably then foresaw. Before it arrived, Hurrell Froude had sunk under the constitutional malady against which he struggled for four years. What he would have been, and what he would have done, had his life been prolonged, no one can say; it would be unfair to judge him by what he left behind, except as rich grounds of promise. This I believe I may confidently say, that those who knew him best loved him the most dearly, and expected the most from him.

‘… My readers will have observed how Keble writes respecting Hurrell Froude and his Remains. His death was a heavy blow to him, and no wonder: those who knew him but were not on terms of intimacy, could not but regard mournfully the end of one so accomplished, so gifted, so good and so pure; a man of such remarkable promise, worn out in the very prime of life by slow, and wasting, and long-hopeless disease. But it was much more than this with Keble: they were more like elder and younger brothers. Reverence in some sort sanctified Froude’s love for Keble, and moderated the sallies of his somewhat too quick and defiant temper, and imparted a special diffidence to his opposition, in their occasional controversies with each other; while a sort of paternal fondness in Keble gave unusual tenderness to his friendship for Froude, and exaggerated, perhaps, his admiration for his 278 undoubted gifts of head and heart. And these were greater than mere acquaintances would be aware of: for he did not present the best aspects of himself to common observation….