The Life of Froude. Herbert W. Paul
very short time unless they took orders, and Froude's Fellowship was in that sense a clerical one. They were ordained as a matter of course, the Bishop requiring no other title. They were not expected, unless they wished it, to take any parochial duty, and the notion that they had a "serious call" to keep their Fellowships can only be described as absurd. Froude had no other profession in view, and he persuaded himself that a Church established by law must allow a wider range of opinion than a voluntary communion could afford to tolerate. As we have seen, he had defended Tract Ninety, and he claimed for himself the latitude which he conceded to Newman. It was in his case a mistake, as he very soon discovered. But the system which encouraged it must bear a large part of the blame. Meanwhile he had been employed by Newman on an uncongenial task. After the discontinuance of Tracts for the Times, Newman projected another series, called Lives of the Saints. The idea was of course taken from the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum. But Newman had a definite polemical purpose. Just as he felt the force of Hume's argument against the probability of miracles, so he realised the difficulty of answering Gibbon's inquiry when miracles ceased. Had they ever ceased at all? Many Roman Catholics, if not the most enlightened and instructed, thought not. Newman conceived that the lives of English and Irish saints held much matter for edification, including marvels and portents of various kinds. He desired that these things should be believed, as he doubtless believed them. They proved, he thought, if they could be proved themselves, that supernatural power resided in the Church, and when the Church was concerned he laid his reason aside.
He was extraordinarily sanguine. "Rationalise," he said to Froude, "when the evidence is weak, and this will give credibility for others, when you can show that the evidence is strong." Froude chose St. Neot, a contemporary of Alfred, in whose life the supernatural played a comparatively small part. He told his story as legend, not quite as Newman wanted it. "This is all," he said at the end, "and perhaps rather more than all, that is known of the life of the blessed St. Neot." His connection with the series ceased. But his curiosity was excited. He read far and wide in the Benedictine biographies. No trace of investigation into facts could he discover. If a tale was edifying, it was believed, and credibility had nothing to do with it. The saints were beatified conjurers, and any nonsense about them was swallowed, if it involved the miraculous element. The effect upon Froude may be left to his own words. "St. Patrick I found once lighted a fire with icicles, changed a French marauder into a wolf, and floated to Ireland on an altar stone. I thought it nonsense. I found it eventually uncertain whether Patricius was not a title, and whether any single apostle of that name had so much as existed."
Froude's scepticism was too indiscriminate when it assailed the existence of St. Patrick, which is not now doubted by scholars, baseless as the Patrician legends may be. Colgan's Lives of Irish Saints had taken him back to Ireland, that he might examine the scenes described. He visited them under the best guidance; and Petre, the learned historian of the Round Towers, showed him a host of curious antiquities, including a utensil which had come to be called the Crown of Brian Boru. Legendary history made no impression upon Froude. The actual state of Ireland affected him with the deepest interest. A population of eight millions, fed chiefly upon potatoes, and multiplying like rabbits, light-hearted, reckless, and generous, never grudged hospitality, nor troubled themselves about paying their debts. Their kindness to strangers was unbounded. In the wilds of Mayo Froude caught the smallpox, and was nursed with a devotion which he always remembered, ungrateful as in some of his writings about Ireland he may seem. After his recovery he wandered about the coast, saw the station of Protestant missionaries at Achill, and was rowed out to Clare Island, where a disabled galleon from the Armada had been wrecked. His studies in hagiology led him to consider the whole question of the miraculous, and he found it impossible to work with Newman any more. A religion which rested upon such stories as Father Colgan's was a religion nurtured in lies.
All this, however, had nothing to do with the Church of England by law established, and Froude was ordained deacon in 1845. The same year Newman seceded, and was received into the Church of Rome. No similar event, before or since, has excited such consternation and alarm. So impartial an observer as Mr. Disraeli thought that the Church of England did not in his time recover from the blow. We are only concerned with it here as it affected Froude. It affected him in a way unknown outside the family. Hurrell Froude, who abhorred private judgment as a Protestant error, had told his brothers that when they saw Newman and Keble disagree they might think for themselves. He felt sure that he was thereby guarding them against thinking for themselves at all. But now the event which he considered impossible had happened. Newman had gone to Rome. Keble remained faithful to the Church of his baptism. Which side Hurrell Froude would have taken nobody could say. He had died a clergyman of the Church of England at the age of thirty-three, nine years before. Anthony Froude had no inclination to follow Newman. But neither did he agree with Keble. He thought for himself. Of his brief clerical career there exists a singular record in the shape of a funeral sermon preached at St. Mary's Church, Torquay, on the second Sunday after Trinity, 1847. The subject was George May Coleridge, vicar of the parish, the poet's nephew, who had been cut off in the prime of life while Froude acted as his curate. The sermon itself is not remarkable, except for being written in unusually good English. The doctrine is strictly orthodox, and the simple life of a good clergyman devoted to his people is described with much tenderness of feeling.
This sermon, of which he gave a copy to John Duke Coleridge, the future Lord Chief Justice of England, was Froude's first experiment in authorship, and it was at least harmless. As much cannot be said for the second, two anonymous stories, called Shadows of the Clouds and The Lieutenant's Daughter. The Lieutenant's Daughter has been long and deservedly forgotten. Shadows of the Clouds is a valuable piece of autobiography. Without literary merit, without any quality to attract the public, it gives a vivid and faithful account of the author's troubles at school and at home, together with a slight sketch of his unfortunate love-affair.
Froude was a born story-teller, with an irresistible propensity for making books. The fascination which, throughout his life, he had for women showed itself almost before he was out of his teens; and in this case the feeling was abundantly returned. Nevertheless he could, within a few years, publish the whole narrative, changing only the names, and then feel genuine surprise that the other person concerned should be pained. He was not inconsiderate. Those who lived with him never heard from him a rough or unkind word. But his dramatic instinct was uncontrollable and had to be expressed. The Archdeacon read the book, and was naturally furious. If he could have been in any way convinced of his errors, which may be doubted, to publish an account of them was not the best way to begin. Reconciliation had been made impossible, and Anthony was left to his own devices. His miscellaneous reading was not checked by an ordination which imposed no duties. Goethe sent him to Spinoza, a "God-intoxicated man," and a philosophical genius, but not a pillar of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Vestiges of Creation, which had appeared in 1844, woke Oxford to the discovery that physical science might have something to say about the origin, or at least the growth, of the universe. The writer, Robert Chambers, whose name was not then known, so far anticipated Darwin that he dispensed with the necessity for a special creation of each plant and animal. He did not, any more than Darwin, attack the Christian religion, and he did not really go much farther than Lucretius. But he had more modern lights, he understood science, and he wrote in a popular style. He made a lively impression upon Froude, who learnt from him that natural phenomena were due to natural causes, at the same time that he acquired from Spinoza a disbelief in the freedom of the will. When Dr. Johnson said, "Sir, we know that the will is free, and there's an end on't," he did not understand the question. We all know that the will is free to act. But is man free to will? If everything about a man were within our cognisance, we could predict his conduct in given circumstances as certainly as a chemist can foretell the effect of mixing an acid with an alkali. I have no intention of expressing any opinion of my own upon this subject. The important thing is that Froude became in the philosophic sense a Determinist, and his conviction that Calvin was in that respect the best philosopher among theologians strengthened his attachment to the Protestant cause.
Protestantism apart, however, Froude's position as a clergyman had become intolerable. He had been persuaded to accept ordination for the reason, among others, that the Church could be reformed better from within than from without.
But there were few doctrines of the Church that he could honestly teach, and the straightforward course was to abandon