Читать книгу The Oxford Movement; Twelve Years, 1833-1845 - R. W. Church - Страница 13

The names of those who took the lead in this movement are familiar—Keble, Newman, Pusey, Hugh James Rose, William Palmer. Much has been written about them by friends and enemies, and also by one of themselves, and any special notice of them is not to the purpose of the present narrative. But besides these, there were men who are now almost forgotten, but who at the time interested their contemporaries, because they were supposed to represent in a marked way the spirit and character of the movement, or to have exercised influence upon it. They ought not to be overlooked in an account of it. One of them has been already mentioned, Mr. Hurrell Froude. Two others were Mr. Isaac Williams and Mr. Charles Marriott. They were all three of them men whom those who knew them could never forget—could never cease to admire and love.

Hurrell Froude 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.

Richard Hurrell Froude was born in 1803, and was thus two years younger than Mr. Newman, who was born in 1801. He went to Eton, and in 1821 to Oriel, where he was a pupil of Mr. Keble, and where he was elected Fellow, along with Robert Wilberforce, at Easter 1826. He was College Tutor from 1827 to 1830, having Mr. Newman and R. Wilberforce for colleagues. His health failed in 1831 and led to much absence in warm climates. He went with Mr. Newman to the south of Europe in 1832–33, and was with him at Rome. The next two winters, with the intervening year, he spent in the West Indies. Early in 1836 he died at Dartington—his birthplace. He was at the Hadleigh meeting, in July 1833, when the foundations of the movement were laid; he went abroad that winter, and was not much in England afterwards. It was through correspondence that he kept up his intercourse with his friends.

Thus 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"[19] in Hurrell Froude's disabled, prematurely shortened life.

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 them 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."[20] 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."[21] 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 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 anytime 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."[22] "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 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 shortly before his death, and when it was quite certain that the doom which had so long hung over him was at hand.[23] 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 whole-hearted 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 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 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 straight-forwardness.

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 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 premisses; 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 antichristian." The want of this power—in which he stood in such sharp contrast to his friend—might 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,[24] 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, 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.