Dean Farrar : 1831-1903
By CANON CHARLES SMYTH THERE is a story of F. W. Farrar who died fifty years ago this week at a dinner-party shortly after his coming to Westminster, when he was preparing to launch his crusade for what he called " the ameliora- tion of the World." Towards destbrt he took up his parable against the idle rich, and his voice rose higher and higher until be spread silence around him. " What I complain of as a clergyman," he declared, " is that I have to do what no layman has to do : I have to beg and beg in vain. Fashionable ladies come to my church glittering with precious gems; and yet they will not sacrifice one diamond from their proud tiaras in order to save some erring sister from destruction." When he had finished his tirade, there was a sultry and embarrassed silence. Then, from lower down the table, the Master of Balliol piped up: "What I object to as a clergyman is that I have to exaggerate so." A suppressed titter ran round the party. Quickly Dr. Jowett, who was a great gentleman, added more kindly: " I mean that I have to represent the charity for which I am preaching as more important than any other charity; and I do it very badly, because I never succeed." But the shaft had found its mark. Exaggeration was Farrar's element. He did nothing by halves; his command of language was overpowering in its fecundity; his memory was prodigious, if inaccurate; he lived at a high tension; his industry was indefatigable. His Life of Christ was written when he was Headmaster of Marlborough, and he valued the school holidays chiefly for the leisure which they gave him to work at it for thirteen hours a day. When he took his ten children to the seaside in the summer, the family luggage invariably included a ponderous and solidly-constructed book-box containing fifteen cubic feet of formidable volumes, mostly German theology. He had his reward. The book ran through twelve editions in as many months, and was translated into almost every European language. The Master of his own college at Cambridge, "Thompson of Trinity," whose powers of sarcasm were almost legendary, on being told that Farrar had been paid £30,000 for the copyright, remarked : " The other fellow got thirty pieces of silver only."
There was also an apocryphal anecdote of a candidate for holy orders who, in reply to the question, " What do you know of the brethren of the Lord ? wrote: " Holy Scripture says little on this important subject : nor can anything be gathered from the Early Fathers. But full details may be found in Canon Farrar's Life of Christ." Both Imputations were decidedly unfair; but those who disliked Farrar seldom troubled to be fair to him. It is true, however, that, alike in scholarship and in its literary presentation, his taste was not impeccable. Thus, although his paraphrase (with the accompanying footnote) brought out the nice dis- tinction between the Greek words edakrusen and eklausen, a fastidious reader might conceive that " As He followed them His eyes were streaming with silent tears " was, in point of literary artistry, inferior to " Jesus wept." It was Farrar's supreme misfortune that he was a disappointed man. Born at Bombay, the son of a C.M.S. chaplain, he was educated at King William's College, Isle of Man, and at King's College, London, which he entered as a boy of sixteen. There he came under the influence of F. D. Maurice. He won a London University scholarship, and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1850, as a sizar. Throughout his university career, both at London and at Cambridge, he supported him- self entirely by scholarships and exhibitions: his father, returned from India, was an impecunious curate in Clerkenwell. Thrifty, hard-working, earnest, young Farrar covered himself with academic glory, winning the Chancellor's Medal for English Verse, the Le Bas Prize, the Norrisian Prize and, in 1856, a Trinity Fellowship. Meanwhile he had become an assistant master at Harrow, where he wrote Eric, or Little by Little (1858). This was perhaps an indiscretion. Yet, on his record, his future seemed assured. All his friends expected to see him a headmaster within five years. He remained stuck at Harrow for sixteen. In 1867 he stood for the headmastership of Haileybury, but was defeated by a single vote. Not until he was forty, long after his reputation was established in the outside world, did he become Headmaster of Marlborough.
He stayed there from 1871 to 1876; Bishop Winnington- Ingram was among his sixth-form pupils. Then suddenly the prospect of a life of more conspicuous influence opened before him. Although Farrar was a Liberal in politics, Mr. Disraeli offered him a Canonry of Westminster, together with the Rec- tory of St. Margaret's. Of the other five Canons only one could be regarded as a preacher above the ordinary. A sensational course of sermons from the Abbey pulpit on Eternal Hope " (Nov.—Dec. 1877) established Farrar as one of the leading popular preachers of the day.
But it was at St. Margaret's that his best work was done. In the words of one of his old curates, he " made a church, that had probably been saved froin demolition chiefly on account of its historical associations, the centre of an active and vigorous religious life." First, he restored and adorned the dilapidated interior, raising for this the astonishing sum of £30,000 (including a grant of £1,500 from the House of Commons). He turfed the derelict churchyard. He found donors to fill the windows one by one with stained glass, for which he induced contemporary poets—Tennyson, Browning, Whittier—to compose mottoes. When the Rector preached, as he almost invariably did, on Sunday mornings, he attracted enormous and influential congregations: every inch of stand- ing room was occupied. On the Sunday on which a census was taken of church-attendance, St. Margaret's had a larger congregation than either the Abbey or St. Paul's.
Amid all these herculean labours, he found time in 1885 to deliver a course of Bampton Lectures on " Inspiration," which exhibit an outstanding range of erudition, while a steady stream of publications gushed ceaselessly from his facile pen. His prose, powerful, florid and ornate, was essentially an adaptation of the eloquence of the pulpit to the printed page, and it found an eager public on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally in 1890 he received the signal honour of being the first Rector of St. Margaret's to be appointed Chaplain to the Speaker—a fitting tribute to one who had done more than any of his predecessors to revitalise the official connection between the House of Commons and its parish church.
Yet for this gifted and sensitive man promotion tarried. Farrar had been appointed a Canon of Westminster compara- tively young, at forty-five; and his admirers expected to see him a bishop, or at least a dean, within five years. He was old and tired at sixty-four when at last, in 1895, Lord Rosebery offered him the Deanery of Canterbury. Plaintively he regarded his advancement as tardy and inadequate. Four years later muscular atrophy set in, and for the last years of his life he was almost completely paralysed.
In the eyes of his contemporaries Frederick William Farrar was either ridiculous or sublime. Today he is seldom remembered, except as the author of Eric. His more solid achievements are overlooked. Yet as a Harrow master he did more than any other single individual to introduce the teaching of science into the public-school curriculum. He had the powerful-support of such men as Professor Huxley and Pro- fessor Tyndall, but it was Farrar's lecture at the Royal Institution in February, 1867, on " Some Defects in Public School Education," that ensured the triumph of his cause. He was a brilliant populariser in many fields of knowledge. He was one of the great parish priests of the Church of England in the Victorian era. To none of his predecessors and to none of his successors—neither to Milman nor to Henson—does St. Margaret's owe a greater debt. There are many streets in Westminster named after bygone Deans of the Collegiate Church, but Dean Farrar Street alone commemorates a Dean vvhci was not a Dean of Westminster. That in itself is an exceptional tribute, but it is a tribute to an exceptional man.
Previous page
