High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  He was also starved by having food kept from him by the older boys; his clothes were either torn or stolen, and so were his books. Inevitably, as he recalled, ‘I learnt nothing’. This ‘den of horrors’ went on for three-and-a-half-years.92 Eventually, returning home for the Christmas holidays at the end of 1833, Anthony was told he would not be going back: but Archdeacon Froude was ‘irritated’, having had copious bad reports from the headmaster, to whom the boy had been a disappointment. Just as Archdeacon Froude felt no sense of responsibility for having sent his son to such a shocking place, neither did Williamson, the headmaster at the time, feel he had anything to be ashamed of in having allowed such a regime. It would get worse after Froude left and, despite reforms in the 1840s, would still shock the Clarendon Commission in 1862 when they examined it as part of their inquiry into the public schools.93

  The Archdeacon decided Anthony had pawned the missing clothes and books. ‘I was severely beaten, my eldest brother standing by and approving.’94 Hurrell appears to have derived as much happiness as his father from Anthony’s suffering. The boy was ordered by Archdeacon Froude to sign a confession about pawning his effects, but Anthony could not lie, despite being promised a second thrashing unless he did ‘confess’. The Archdeacon then handed the question of Anthony’s future over to Hurrell, who pronounced the boy stupid, and suggested he be sent either to a ‘cheap school in Yorkshire’ – which sounds as if it were Dotheboys Hall – or apprenticed to a tanner. ‘I do not think that I resented all this,’ Froude writes. ‘I had so poor an opinion of myself that on the whole I supposed it was all right.’

  The boy took comfort in appearing to be going down with tuberculosis, which had swept away various relatives and was beginning to do its work on the odious Hurrell. Anthony’s sickness kept him at home for two years, in which he did a mountain of reading – he was given some divines to read and started to look at history for pleasure – but was largely ignored by his father and forbidden any companions. However, his father did note his reading, and let him go up to Oriel College, Oxford. He arranged to go into residence in the summer of 1836. This would bring Anthony back into close contact with Hurrell, who had been ordained and was a fellow there. Hurrell was also a near contemporary of Newman, and a pupil of Keble. He had introduced the two men to each other and had, therefore, played a key role in the Oxford Movement. Hurrell himself had become a committed Tractarian, working closely with Newman on the development of doctrine, and working out his own hatred of the Reformation, not least because of what he considered to be its effect on destroying the medieval feudal society that had become such a cult among his generation.

  Anthony had no exposure to Hurrell at Oxford, however. His brother died of tuberculosis at their father’s house in Devon in February 1836, just before his thirty-third birthday. The bereavement made Archdeacon Froude yet more taciturn and sour, if that were possible. Newman had met Anthony through Hurrell, and had visited the Dartington parsonage. He soon saw in the younger brother another potential disciple. Anthony was seduced at first. ‘The Newmanites have claimed and made good a right to hold all Catholic doctrines except the supremacy of the Pope . . . I was willing to listen to it, and to my sorrow I did.’95 On Froude’s arrival at Oriel Newman went out of his way to be hospitable. Froude, though, resisted: to him Newman’s credo had both highlighted the failure of Archdeacon Froude’s approach to Christianity, but had also made an extremist of his deceased brother – an extremism made all the more obvious when, two years after Hurrell’s death, Newman and Keble published his Remains in two separate tranches of two volumes each, containing his pro-Catholic outpourings in the shape mainly of letters to his confederates, none intended for publication.

  Anthony’s contrary feelings, not least his admiration for the Reformation, were expressed in his semi-autobiographical epistolary novel, The Nemesis of Faith, published in 1849: though Froude never went so far as his fictional creation, Markham Sutherland, in embracing Tractarianism wholeheartedly before casting it off. In 1842 Froude had become a fellow of Exeter, and, through their common interest in German thought and theology, was attracted to the writings of Carlyle. This gave him a common interest with Clough and Arnold.

  Froude shared with Sutherland his reluctance to take holy orders. He had had to become a deacon in 1845 in order to retain his fellowship, and it was expected he would be ordained. However, he soon realised he could not; and that he was barred, because of his diaconate, from pursuing any other profession: he had wanted to read medicine. Like Clough, he struggled with an academic career at Oxford while being unsure of his beliefs. ‘Some better foundation must be looked for than a corrupt and corrupting Papacy, but what else and where?’ By the autumn of 1845 Newman had joined the Catholic Church; Froude could not follow, and could not proceed to full ordination in the Anglican Church, and was forbidden by law, as a clergyman, from becoming a doctor. He almost went to Ireland to seek an academic post, and toyed with emigrating to Tasmania to become a headmaster. Instead he continued in his fellowship, and turned his hand to writing fiction. His first novel, Shadows of the Clouds (sometimes known as The Spirit’s Trials) contained a subtle, and accurate, fictional depiction of his father, which therefore caused his father and other surviving members of his family to send him to Coventry. Undeterred, he worked at his second attempt in the genre, The Nemesis of Faith, from the autumn of 1847. He also frequently discussed with Clough their shared difficulties.

  The Nemesis offended almost every interested party, except radicals such as Frederick Denison Maurice, the leading Christian socialist, who rather approved of it. ‘It is a very awful and I think may be a very profitable book,’ Maurice wrote to his disciple, Charles Kingsley, on 9 March 1849. ‘God would not have permitted it to go forth if He did not mean good to come out of it . . . it brings us to the root of things.’96 Mainstream Anglicans felt it proved the corrupting and damaging effects of Tractarianism; to those who were part of the Oxford Movement or sympathetic to its aims it was heretical. One, William Sewell, the senior tutor of Exeter, saw an undergraduate with a copy of it on 27 February 1849, snatched it and threw it on the fire. Later that day Froude resigned his fellowship. Age had not mellowed Archdeacon Froude. His son now too old to suffer his flagellomania, the Archdeacon cut him off without a penny instead.

  It may be wrong to interpret Froude’s resignation of his position at Exeter as a response to Sewell’s insult. He received a ‘peremptory demand’ from the Rector and the college authorities for his resignation.97 He had written to Kingsley on New Year’s Day 1849 of his dissatisfaction with England – he mentioned the Tasmanian notion – and he told him: ‘I wish to give up my Fellowship. I hate the Articles. I have said I hate Chapel to the Rector himself.’98 He warned Kingsley – a superior novelist, whose Yeast was recently out – that his own novel was imminent, and said that ‘it is too utterly subjective to please you’. Kingsley, however, would be almost the only figure of note to come to Froude’s aid when the storm broke.

  On the last Sunday in February Froude found himself preached against in that chapel. He told Clough on 25 February that he hoped to resign his fellowship the next day – the day before Sewell burnt the book; though he feared the college would dismiss him ‘in true heretic style’ before he had the chance to go of his own volition.99 Not for the first time, he told Clough, Froude found that ‘I am generally an object of much abhorrence’.100 Exeter washed their hands of Froude willingly: and the Tasmanian prospect vanished, so angry were the elders of Hobart at Froude’s blasphemy.

  The Nemesis was, in its time, shocking. It is partly autobiographical, and where it veers from autobiography becomes melodramatic. Sutherland, the hero, is bullied into holy orders by his father, though only finally submits on the recommendation of his friend Arthur, to whom the letters in the novel are addressed, and who acts as their editor. He has been under the influence of the Oxford Movement and of Newman and is tricked into exposing himself by some parishioners. He resigns his liv
ing and goes abroad. There he meets a married woman who cares deeply about his doubts, which have altered Sutherland’s religious outlook from Anglo-Catholicism to outright scepticism. The woman has a boorish husband, and she and Sutherland fall in love: but the woman has a daughter, and will not leave her husband. The little girl catches a chill and dies, as Victorian children did. Sutherland sees what has happened as divine punishment for his sin (in Froude’s compass, one sort of infidelity inevitably led to another) and contemplates suicide, a course he is talked out of by another friend who is said to represent the influence of Newman over him. He heads for a monastery instead; the bereaved mother for a convent. No one lives happily ever after.

  Sewell did not burn the book so much because of its tacky storyline, as for its depiction of a clergyman taking orders in a state of doubt and immediately betraying his faith once there. Sutherland is not only a heretic, he also lapses into socialism – ‘an ever increasing multitude of miserable beings must drag on their wretched years in toil and suffering that a few may be idle and enjoy,’ he tells Arthur.101 ‘If there be no hope for them; if tomorrow must be as today, and they are to live but to labour, and when their strength is spent, are but to languish out an unpensioned old age on a public charity which degrades what it sustains; if this be indeed the lot which, by an irrevocable degree, it has pleased Providence to stamp upon the huge majority of mankind, incomparably the highest privilege which could be given to any one of us is to be allowed to sacrifice himself to them, to teach them to hope for a more just hereafter, and to make their present more endurable by raising their minds to endure it.’

  The religious opinions expressed were, however, toxic. ‘Before I can be made a clergyman,’ Sutherland tells Arthur, ‘I must declare that I unfeignedly believe all “the canonical writings of the Old Testament”; and I cannot.’102 With distaste and disbelief he adds that ‘I suppose, we are to believe that all those books were written by men immediately inspired by God to write them, because He taught them good for the education of mankind; that whatever is told in those books as a fact is a real fact, and that the Psalms and Prophecies were composed under the dictation of the Holy Spirit.’ As far as Sutherland, and Froude, were concerned, there were ‘scientific difficulties and critical difficulties, and, worse than all, metaphysical difficulties’ that made such belief impossible. ‘I will not, I must not, believe that the all-just, all-merciful, all-good God can be such a being as I find him there described,’ he continued. For, in the Old Testament that Sutherland and Froude repudiate, God is instead ‘jealous, passionate, capricious, revengeful, punishing children for their fathers’ sins, tempting men, or at least permitting them to be tempted into blindness and folly, and then destroying them.’ He protests: ‘This is not a being to whom I could teach a poor man to look up to out of his sufferings in love and hope.’103

  Arnold told his mother that he found the Nemesis ‘unpleasant: but for all this shrieking and cursing at him I have the profoundest contempt.’104 Ironically, one who attacked Froude was Carlyle, whom he had, like Arnold and Clough, hero-worshipped, and of whom he would write a revolutionary biography thirty years later. ‘Froude’s book is not – except for wretched people, strangling in white neckcloths, and Semitic thrums – worth its paper and ink,’ the Sage wrote on 4 April 1849, five weeks after Sewell had burnt it.105 ‘What on Earth is the use of a wretched mortal’s vomiting up all his interior crudities, dubitations, and spiritual agonising belly-aches, into the view of the Public, and howling tragically, “See!” Let him, in the Devil’s name, pass them, by the downward or other methods, in his own water-closet, and say nothing whatever!’ A master of vituperation, Carlyle resorted to scatological metaphor only rarely, which suggests he was genuinely upset: perhaps it was the fault of Froude’s exclamation in the Nemesis that ‘Carlyle! Carlyle only raises questions he cannot answer, and seems best contented if he can make the rest of us as discontented as himself.’106 This was alarmingly near the truth, and echoed Clough’s famous criticism of the Sage. Perhaps before his explosion against Froude Carlyle had not read so far as page 156, where his disciple writes that ‘I shall not in this place attempt to acknowledge all I owe to this very great man’.107

  Froude decided to try to make the most of being in the desert, and adopted a revisionist attitude to faith that excited the book-burners further. ‘Why is it thought so very wicked to be an unbeliever? Rather, why is it assumed that no-one can have difficulties unless he be wicked?’ he asked.108 The answer was inflammatory: ‘Because an anathema on unbelief has been appended as a guardian of the creed. It is one way, and doubtless a very politic way, of maintaining the creed, this of anathema. When everything may be lost unless one holds a particular belief, and nothing except vulgar love of truth can induce one into questioning it, common prudence points out the safe course; but really it is but a vulgar evidence, this of anathema.’ A little later, in what is cast as a fragment of the ramblings of Sutherland’s distressed mind, he even hints that what is understood by ‘sin’ is something some cannot avoid. ‘Actions are governed by motives. The power of motives depends on character, and character on the original faculties and the training which they received from the men or things among which they have been bred. Sin, therefore, as commonly understood, is a chimera.’109

  As Sutherland describes first the genius of Newman, and how he fell under the spell of his insights – he writes that any member of Newman’s congregation would think he was referring in sermons specifically to him, so targeted did the words seem – he also describes how he began to see through Catholicism. He describes the moment of revelation: ‘It is a problem heavier than has been yet laid on theologians to make what the world has now grown into square with the theory of Catholicism. And presently as we began to leave the nest, and, though under his [Newman’s] eye, fly out and look about for ourselves, some of us began to find it so.’110 In his autobiographical notes, Froude would say it was his reading of Carlyle that steered him from Tractarianism, and more besides: ‘So Carlyle’s teaching passed into me, eventually to transform the entire scheme of my thought and displace the beliefs in which I had been bred.’111

  The assault that follows in the Nemesis on the Catholic Church shows an extreme version of the resistance to Newmanism, by a former devotee. Sutherland writes that ‘it is not only necessary to talk of hating the Reformation, but one must hate it with a hearty good-will as a rending of the body of Christ.’112 He asserts that nations that have stayed Catholic have become ‘comparatively powerless’ while Protestant nations have ‘uniformly risen’; that ‘the Catholic church since the Reformation has produced no great man of science, no statesman, no philosopher, no poet’; that modern historical methods had invalidated all authorities that professed the doctrine of infallibility.

  Moving, it seems, ever more to an extreme, Sutherland announces that ‘the personal character of the people in all Roman Catholic countries is poor and mean; that they are untrue in their words, unsteady in their actions, disrespecting themselves in the entire tenor of their life and temper.’ This was thanks to the ‘moral dependence’ in which they had been trained, ‘to the conscience being taken out of their own hands and deposited with priests; to the disrespect with which this life is treated by the Catholic theory; the low esteem in which the human will and character are considered; and, generally to the condition of spiritual bondage in which they are held.’113 Even Sutherland realises he may be pushing it to say all this, so claims merely that even if it cannot be said for certain, it is ‘to be believed nevertheless’.

  Many Anglican clergy would have agreed with him: Dr Arnold, arch-critic of Newman, would have found little to trouble him. However, Sutherland – and indeed Froude – is pursuing an inevitable course of logic. ‘My arguments’, he observes, ‘told not only against Catholicism, but against Christianity, considered as historical and exclusive.’114 He felt that the devil was, under Christianity, painted as ‘the main director of what seemed greatest and most powe
rful’ in a world that the religion showed to be a place of ‘trial and temptation’. He attacked the Bible because it ‘everywhere denounced the world as the enemy of God, not as the friend of God’.

  Perhaps most toxic, in an age of growing secularism, was his proclamation that ‘the hold of Christianity was on the heart, and not on the reason.’115 Newman had instructed his followers to undertake ‘the surrender of reason’, not least because ‘daily more and more unreasonable appeared to modern eyes so many of the doctrines to which the Church was committed.’116 He became disputatious with Newman, exposing one of his fundamental flaws: ‘Reason could only be surrendered by an act of reason’.

  What finally convinced him to break with Newman was hearing his mentor say from the pulpit: ‘Scripture says the earth is stationary and the sun moves; science, that the sun is stationary and that the earth moves.’ Froude realised that the casuistry with which Newman interpreted the meaning of the Bible destroyed his own faith: and if words were open to all sorts of interpretations, then ‘Scripture, instead of a revelation, becomes a huge mysterious combination of one knows not what . . . this is carrying out the renunciation of reason with a vengeance.’117 He deplored the notion that ‘Unbelief was a sin, not a mistake, and deserved not argument, but punishment.’118 In that phrase Froude sums up the effect on faith of the intellectual advances of the modern world, and the need to cast out the last remnants of medievalism. Sewell’s decision to burn his book made the point as eloquently, had Sewell realised it. Froude told Matthew Arnold in the summer of 1853 that ‘the Nemesis ought never to have been published’.119 Forty years later, when (shortly before his death) he was making his autobiographical notes, Froude took a different view, and saw what had happened as a catharsis. ‘Having thrown the Nemesis out of me, I had recovered my mental spirits and I was able to face the future without alarm or misgiving.’120