The Life of Froude | Page 5

and he doubtless fancied that in torturing Anthony's body he was helping Anthony's soul. To alter two words in the fierce couplet of the satirist,
He said his duty, both to man and God, Required such conduct, which seemed very odd.
Anthony was threatened, in the true inquisitorial spirit, with a series of floggings, until he should confess what he had not done. At last, however, he was set down as incorrigibly stupid, and given up as a bad job. The Archdeacon arrived at the conclusion that his youngest son was a fool, and might as well be apprenticed to a tanner. Having hoped that he would be off his hands as a student of Christ Church at sixteen, he was bitterly disappointed, and took no pains to conceal his disappointment.
To Anthony himself it seemed a matter of indifference what became of him, and a hopeless mystery why he had been brought into the world. He had no friend. The consumption in the family was the boy's only hope. His mother had died of it, and his brother Robert, who had been kind to him, and taught him to ride. It was already showing itself in Hurrell. His own time could not, he thought, be long. Meanwhile, he was subjected to petty humiliations, in which the inventive genius of Hurrell may be traced. He was not, for instance, permitted to have clothes from a tailor. Old garments were found in the house, and made up for him in uncouth shapes by a woman in the village. His father seldom spoke to him, and never said a kind word to him. By way of keeping him quiet, he was set to copy out Barrow's sermons. It is difficult to understand how the sternest disciplinarian, being human, could have treated his own motherless boy with such severity. The Archdeacon acted, no doubt, upon a theory, the theory that sternness to children is the truest kindness in the long run.
Well might Macaulay say that he would rather a boy should learn to lisp all the bad words in the language than grow up without a mother. Froude's interrupted studies were nothing compared to a childhood without love, and there was nobody to make him feel the meaning of the word. Fortunately, though his father was always at home, his brother was much away, and he was a good deal left to himself after Robert's death. Hurrell did not disdain to employ him in translating John of Salisbury's letters for his own Life of Becket. No more was heard of the tanner, who had perhaps been only a threat. While he wandered in solitude through the woods, or by the river, his health improved, he acquired a passion for nature, and in his father's library, which was excellent, he began eagerly to read. He devoured Sharon Turner's History of England, and the great work of Gibbon. Shakespeare and Spenser introduced him to the region of the spirit in its highest and deepest, its purest and noblest forms. Unhappily he also fell in with Byron, the worst poet that can come into the hands of a boy, and always retained for him an admiration which would now be thought excessive. By these means he gained much. He discovered what poetry was, what history was, and he learned also the lesson that no one can teach, the hard lesson of self-reliance.
This was the period, as everybody knows, of the Oxford Movement, in which Hurrell Froude acted as a pioneer. Hurrell's ideal was the Church of the Middle Ages represented by Thomas Becket. In the vacations he brought some of his Tractarian friends home with him, and Anthony listened to their talk. Strange talk it seemed. They found out, these young men, that Dr. Arnold, one of the most devoutly religious men who ever lived, was not a Christian. The Reformation was an infamous rebellion against authority. Liberalism, not the Pope, was antichrist. The Church was above the State, and the supreme ruler of the world. Transubstantiation, which the Archdeacon abhorred, was probably true. Hurrell Froude was a brilliant talker, a consummate dialectician, and an ardent proselytising controversialist. But his young listener knew a little history, and perceived that, to put it mildly, there were gaps in Hurrell's knowledge.
When he heard that the Huguenots were despicable, that Charles I. was a saint, that the Old Pretender was James III., that the Revolution of 1688 was a crime, and that the Non-jurors were the true confessors of the English Church, it did not seem to square with his reading, or his reflections. Perhaps, after all, the infallible Hurrell might be wrong. One fear he had never been able to instil into his brother, and that was the fear of death. When asked what would happen if he were suddenly called