High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Whereas Clough’s life was derailed by resigning his fellowship, Froude’s was enhanced and his horizons expanded. He was unshaken, and unshakeable, in his beliefs, and proceeded to build a career as a historian and critic founded on his opposition to religious cant. Within months he had married Charlotte Grenfell, sister of Kingsley’s wife. He also at last (thanks to Clough, who made the introduction) met Carlyle, and grew to share his views on religion, politics and even the destruction of the old feudal arrangements by the Industrial Revolution. Yet however far he embraced some of Carlyle’s ideas he did not seek to emulate his tone or his style. Froude’s great work of the twenty or so years after he left Exeter was his history of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, a work that owed little or nothing to The French Revolution, a book Froude nonetheless greatly admired.

  Froude’s History is one of the great works of the nineteenth century, though so radical in its approach that Harriet Martineau said it ‘disgusts us much, amidst all its cleverness and real interest. He might learn from Macaulay (with all his faults) not to obtrude himself and his sensibilities on the reader.’121 She did, however, concede that the work was ‘a great effort at rehabilitating himself with “the world”.’ It was originally published in twelve volumes. It ends not with the death of Elizabeth, but with the defeat of the Armada in 1588. This is consistent with the main theme of the work, to display the triumph of the Reformation and the loathsomeness of Catholicism: themes familiar from the Nemesis. Although, for its time, high in standards of scholarship, using a wealth of contemporary documents, it is also laced with Froude’s profound anti-Catholicism: one only has to read some of his descriptions of Mary Tudor and her works to begin almost to taste the bile.

  In pursuing plotters who sought to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne, Mary is said by Froude to have ‘the bit between her teeth, and, resisting all efforts to check or guide her, was making her own way with obstinate resolution’.122 Awaiting the arrival of her bridegroom from Spain she is ‘ill with hysterical longings’.123 When he arrives she is his ‘haggard bride, who now, after a life of misery, believed herself at the open gate of paradise.’124 One reason why Froude was, and still should be, regarded as a master of prose is the ability in so few words to convey his belief that the Catholic Queen was ugly, wretched and stupid. Of her reign he writes, with the feeling of a man who has himself undergone a minor martyrdom: ‘The Catholics, therefore, were committed to continue their cruelties till the cup of iniquity was full; till they had taught the educated laity of England to regard them with horror; and till the Romanist superstition had died, amidst the execrations of the people, of its own excess.’125

  The History was widely feted and read; it played an essential role in defining the English nation as a Protestant nation, and in building a more solid idea among the educated and literate English of themselves and their nationhood. Above all, it took the debate about the national culture from the spiritual realm, where it had lingered between 1830 and 1850, and related it to the secular realities of the modern, real world that was the incidental inheritor of the long-running feud over doctrine and faith. The use of history by the Victorians to confirm the Anglican settlement and to politicise religion, thereby enhancing its secular role, was not entirely initiated by Froude: Macaulay had gone there just before him. However, Macaulay had dealt with the second episode of the doctrinal struggle, in writing of the Glorious Revolution, whereas Froude had returned almost to its origins.

  V

  There was also a strand in the Church of England that was receptive to ideas, happy to regard orthodoxy as being flexible, and that wanted to bring religion to the people and to put it at the service of the people rather than use it as a form of social control. One such churchman, in the intellectual league just below Arnold, Clough and Froude, is their contemporary Charles Kingsley, best remembered now as the clergyman who trumpeted the evils of child labour in The Water-Babies. Kingsley, son of the Rector of Chelsea, was, however, a more experienced and shrewd propagandist than that book – no mere work of children’s fiction but, as we shall see, remarkable as a clergyman’s defence of Darwinism – suggests. Kingsley was fortunate to be a Cambridge man and not at Oxford, avoiding being sucked in to the Tractarian controversy. Instead, he was increasingly absorbed by the relationship between Christianity and politics, and became a disciple of the founder of English Christian socialism, Frederick Denison Maurice. Kingsley was attracted by the analysis made by Christian Socialists that socialism was inherent not just in the teachings of Jesus Christ – notably in his identification with the poor and the dispossessed – but was even to be found in parts of the Old Testament. Two of his novels, Yeast and Alton Locke, show his strong Christian socialist principles and his sympathy for Chartism. Mill, who did not give praise readily, told Kingsley in 1859 that he was ‘a man who is himself one of the good influences of the age, and whose sincerity I cannot doubt’.126

  Two childhood experiences shaped Kingsley. At Clifton preparatory school in 1831–2 he witnessed the Bristol riots; then, later, he had cholera, which gave him a lifelong interest in that most compelling question for the Victorians, sanitary reform and the prevention of disease. Kingsley had all the earnestness of his generation. ‘I am more happy now than I have been for a long time,’ he wrote to his mother in an undated letter of around 1835, ‘but I do not like to talk about it but to prove it by my conduct. I am keeping a journal of my actions and thoughts and I hope it will be useful to me.’127 In 1838 he went up to Cambridge. He began to have doubts while there, the product as much of his isolated lifestyle as of his theology. He became a chain-smoker (an addiction that would eventually kill him, in his mid-fifties) as a means of overcoming his pathological shyness and soothing his religious agonies. While still a student he met his future wife, Fanny Grenfell, whose own religious devotion helped mend his. He was ordained as a curate upon graduating in 1842. Fanny had clearly been tempted by news coming out of Oxford, as Kingsley – a hard-line Protestant – disclosed in a letter to his mother in 1841. Having read a review of Tracts for the Times, he complained that ‘these men are Jesuits, taking the oath to the Articles with moral reservations . . . all the worst doctrinal features of popery that Newman professes to believe in. Help me to wean her [Fanny] from this pernicious superstition.’128

  It was Maurice who exerted the main influence over Kingsley. Fanny had introduced Kingsley to Maurice’s writings before their marriage in 1844; as she had to the works of Carlyle. Maurice had been born a Unitarian but grew up in a family riven with religious disputes. At Cambridge he had moved towards Anglicanism, and had been one of the founders of the Apostles, through which he met Tennyson, of whom he became a close and lifelong friend. After graduating, Maurice went to Oxford for further study, where he met Gladstone, and was baptised there in 1831. He was ordained in January 1834. Until the early 1850s he defended subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles as an open expression of the terms upon which academic life at Oxford and Cambridge would be conducted, which he found preferable to the matter not being openly discussed. He did however find the Tracts ‘more unpleasant than I quite like to acknowledge to myself or others,’ he wrote in 1837.129

  He was, from his time as an undergraduate, inspired by the radical political ideas of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who led him towards Christian socialism. He and Kingsley met when Maurice rented Kingsley’s father’s rectory in Chelsea, just as Kingsley settled into his own parish at Eversley in Hampshire. Maurice became chaplain of Guy’s Hospital in 1836, and professor of English at King’s College, London, in 1840. In 1846 he would become professor of theology at King’s College, London. A committed educationist – he advocated the Church devoting more money and energy to educating the poor – he would also be a founder of Queen’s College in Harley Street when it opened in 1848 as the first higher education institution for women. Through philanthropists and reformers such as Octavia Hill and Emily Davies, who would become disciples, he would have an i
mmense influence on social improvements in Britain throughout the mid-nineteenth century.

  He and Kingsley began to correspond on theological questions, with Maurice as teacher and Kingsley as pupil. He taught Kingsley that Christianity required a social as well as a spiritual dimension. Kingsley was by nature receptive. Having taken over his parish aged just twenty-five, and after the incumbency of a dissolute cleric who absconded with the parish funds, Kingsley had imposed his own social dimension on his flock as a means of improving their living conditions and morals. This had included his establishing a lending library and a loan club to further basic education and self-reliance. Maurice became godfather to the Kingsleys’ second child, and in 1848 Kingsley, with Maurice’s help, became a part-time professor of English at Queen’s College.

  Kingsley attended the great Chartist meeting at Kennington. He put up a poster addressed to the militants and signed ‘A Working Parson’. This resulted in his being banned from preaching in the Diocese of London, even though he had made it clear he opposed force and deplored violence as a means to the Chartists’ aims. J. C. Hare, a friend of Kingsley’s, wrote to him after his second letter to the Chartists to say how ‘pained’ he was by part of it, ‘so much so that on reading it last Thursday, before the publication of No 4, I wrote to Maurice earnestly entreating him to get the leaflet cancelled, if possible. He said it was too late, and that he did not concur in my objections.’130

  Hare objected to his claim that the clergy had misrepresented the Bible, and ‘have by no means fulfilled their political duties in England’. He was concerned because ‘if there be any feeling universal among the Chartists, it is an almost intense dislike and distrust of the clergy . . . your letter will grievously encourage this feeling. The Chartists will say, there is a parson himself confessing that all his brother parsons are cheating and juggling us: and the mischief thus affected will be more than the Politics for the People will remedy in a twelvemonth.’ Kingsley and Maurice went much further than Hare could conceive in supporting Chartism, which they were developing into Christian socialism, a creed of which Maurice would be the spiritual leader. By 1850 Maurice accepted the term ‘Christian socialist’ to describe his movement, in which Kingsley was his vicar on earth and, through his writings, chief propagandist. It spurred him on, he said, ‘to the conflict we must engage in sooner or later with the unsocial Christians and the unchristian Socialists.’131

  Kingsley and Maurice felt capitalism to be fundamentally flawed. They recoiled from the utilitarian doctrines of Jeremy Bentham, which saw man and his labour principally as commodities, and abhorred the exploitation of the working class. In September 1851 Kingsley lectured in London on the importance of getting a trades union organisation into agriculture. He acquired a popular reputation among the more literate working classes agitating for reform. One, W. H. Johnson (‘Anthony Collins’), wrote to him in January 1858 to say that ‘speaking for the intelligent minority of the working classes I can only say that at any visit to Blackburn you would meet with a suitable reception from the many who read your works with profit and pleasure.’132 Johnson said he was an atheist who had edited the London Investigator (‘and other Atheistic journals’) and that ‘I find it my greatest pleasure of an evening or a Sunday in collecting my young infidel friends at my home and reading to them Alton Locke, or Yeast, or Hypatia.’

  Several bouts of illness in the early 1850s limited Kingsley’s active radicalism. He was increasingly absorbed in novel-writing, and the propagation of Christianity became more important to him than the propagation of socialism. Westward Ho!, published in 1855, is a historical fiction about the Armada, and its propagandising is for Protestantism. Kingsley told Maurice in 1851 that he wished to ‘set forth Christianity as the only really democratic creed’.133 However, Maurice had such influence over Kingsley that the latter addressed the former in letters as ‘my dear Master’.134 Kingsley, referring to Ruskin’s articles that would be published as Unto This Last, described himself to Maurice as having ‘a sound reverence for political economy of John Stuart Mill’s school, and have no leaning towards Mr Ruskin’s Cornhill views’ (the word ‘ravings’ is crossed out).135

  Writing to Maurice about The Water-Babies in May 1863, sending him a copy, Kingsley said: ‘I have tried, in all sorts of queer ways, to make children and grown folks understand that there is a quite miraculous and divine element underlying all physical nature; and that nobody knows anything about anything, in the sense in which he may know God in Christ, and right and wrong. And if I have wrapped up my parable in seeming Tom-fooleries, it is because so only could I get the pill swallowed by a generation who are not believing with anything like their whole heart in the Living God.’136 He added: ‘Remember that the Physical science in the book is not nonsense.’ He later told Maurice he had been reading T. H. Huxley; as we shall see, he intended the book also as a defence of Darwin against his critics, a cause of which Huxley was leader.137

  In the last fifteen or so years of his life Kingsley enjoyed royal patronage. This was less because the Queen was impressed with his Chartist sympathies than because the Prince Consort admired his commitment to sanitary reform, to Protestantism and for a sympathy he had betrayed for German culture. In 1859 he became chaplain to the Queen and in the following year, again thanks to Albert (who was Chancellor of the university) Regius professor of history at Cambridge. He lasted nine years at Cambridge and it was not a happy time: his health, undermined by tobacco, was fragile, he found the work too much for him, and he was short of money to educate his children. He also had to endure a long public argument with Newman, whom he accused in a review of Froude’s History of England in 1864 of having said that truth for its own sake need not be a virtue of Catholic clergy. Newman was outraged, failed to obtain satisfaction, and ended up writing the Apologia Pro Vita Sua to justify himself and defend his integrity.

  In 1873, again with royal connivance, he moved to a comfortable canonry at Westminster Abbey: but within two years, aged just fifty-five, he was dead, of an inflammation of the lung. Into that short life, however, Kingsley packed an astonishing amount. In his vocation as a parish clergyman he was exemplary and greatly admired. He had a profound effect on the development of Christian socialism. He was a highly regarded novelist and essayist. He was a campaigner for sanitary and health reform. He was also, in such spare time as he had, an amateur of science, a botanist, and a close scrutineer of the works of Darwin. His energy, and the example he set by it, were prodigious. As such, he typified the Victorian way of getting things done, and of seeking progress.

  VI

  The agonising done by intellectuals about religion in the mid-nineteenth century may have seemed comical to men such as Lytton Strachey, but it was far from comical to those concerned. Nor was the pain confined to deep intellectuals who wrestled with theological niceties. In his long poem In Memoriam, begun after the sudden death from a brain haemorrhage of his Trinity friend Arthur Hallam in 1833 but not published until 1850, Alfred Tennyson wrote that ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds’.

  In Memoriam was written over a period of more than fifteen years, years that coincided with the great crisis of faith among intellectuals in early Victorian England. It was published in the year Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate. The poem’s original title was The Way of the Soul, and its purpose was to help Tennyson cope with his grief at losing Hallam, who had been destined to marry his sister and become his brother-in-law. The poem deals with the religious doubt that severe loss can occasion: but ends with the poet feeling reconciled to his Christian faith, at least at that stage in a life that still had half its course to run. George Eliot, writing about it in 1855, proclaimed that ‘the deepest significance of the poem is the sanctification of human love as a religion.’138 Tennyson’s faith may have been simpler than Clough’s, Arnold’s, Froude’s or Kingsley’s, but the feelings it occasioned were no less keen.

  Queen Victoria saw nothing s
ecular in In Memoriam, regarding it next to the Bible as her greatest comfort in her widowhood. Tennyson had an audience of her at Osborne four months after the Consort’s death to discuss the work. Albert had liked it, and Tennyson knew his enthusiasm had been partly why he was invited to take the Laureateship. One cannot doubt Tennyson’s religious sincerity when he wrote it: but it required a more subtle intellect than the Queen’s to understand that the poet regarded what he wrote as a testament to a feeling at a specific juncture in his life, not as a creed to stand for all time. As with much else in the matter of faith, appearances were not quite everything. Tennyson exemplifies, too, the fluid nature of faith in the second half of the nineteenth century and in an age of rapid change, and is typical of many of his contemporaries in so doing.

  In Memoriam is a very clear public statement about religion, dealing in part with the struggles of the soul about faith. By contrast, two poems by Clough and Arnold reflect upon the struggles of the intellect about religion that the two men articulated so extensively in prose, notably in their letters. Clough’s ‘Say Not, the Struggle Naught Availeth’, which appears to have been written in Rome in the late spring or early summer of 1849, and Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (written, it is thought, in 1851 but not published until 1867) are among the most intense manifestations of the high Victorian mind in verse. Each says succinctly what Froude, in elegant prose but at almost distressing self-analytical length, says in The Nemesis of Faith. In Memoriam, which by its scope and subject matter has become the definitive mid-Victorian poem, was completed in 1849 but its genesis pre-dates both these poems.