Breaking Loose: Frederick Faber and the Failure of Reserve

Frederick William Faber holds an uneasy position among the Tractarian poets. One of their brightest hopes in the late 1830s and early 1840s, in terms of his considerable poetic gifts which could, it was hoped, be harnessed in the service of religion, he was also (after Newman) the most sensational example of "perversion" from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. After his dramatic conversion in 1845, Faber went on to become one of the most extreme practitioners of ultra-montane Catholicism and the founder of the London Oratory, known for his devotion to Mary and his patron saint, standing for everything that conservative Protestantism most despised. He continued to write poetry and hymns throughout his life and his early works were republished after his conversion, but there are some marked differences between the subject-matter and language of the poems written as an Anglican, and those written or revised as a dedicated Catholic priest. Roman Catholicism appeared to provide Faber with an outlet for his intensely emotional poetics, a license to express passionate love for Christ and Mary. The poems published during his High Anglican years and his comments on his poetics in letters from that time, in contrast, display tension in their expression of strong feeling—particularly when that feeling is directed not to God but to a specific person—and seem to regard emotional release as self-indulgent and potentially dangerous. Much of Faber's early poetry consists of fairly standard Wordsworthian hymns to the beauty of Nature and sentimental memories of his time spent in Oxford, Europe, and the Lakes. But the poems addressed to his male friends and those specifically dealing with Tractarian issues stand out for their intense engagement with feeling and faith, and raise questions about the nature of male friendships and, more generally, about the relation between reserve and release, which were to have significant implications for Anglican poetics in the succeeding decades.

The young Faber, charming, handsome, and (according to himself) fatally attractive to both sexes, was always regarded with some suspicion by the more sedate Tractarian leaders. Where Keble and Pusey largely sought to defuse controversy and downplay the radical and Catholic tendencies of Tractarian thought, Faber courted controversy and was drawn to extremes in both religion and poetry. Where they advocated reserve, submission, humility, and the concealment or repression of intense emotion, and represented these practices in their poetry and sermons, Faber's poems walk a thin line between respectable reserve and flamboyant revelation. As I will argue here, he pushed the boundaries of what could be done and said within a Tractarian mode to the extent that his most striking poems effectively shattered the formal and linguistic confines of Anglican verse. His poems gesture toward the poetic theories of Keble and Isaac Williams, while self-consciously agonizing over their failure to conform to them. Indeed, it is this failure, this sense of transgression, which then becomes the subject matter of many of his finest poems and letters.

Faber was born in 1814 to a family who were largely Evangelical in their beliefs. He attended Harrow and then Oxford, where he was an undergraduate at Balliol from 1832 to 1836 and later a Fellow at University College. Besides his Oxford connections, he knew Wordsworth well as a result of leading reading parties in Ambleside in the late 1830s. In fact, he has been credited with influencing Wordsworth's much debated move toward a more High Church position in his later poems.¹ Faber also worked as tutor to the Harrison family in Ambleside in 1840 and was a deacon there in 1842. In 1843 he followed one of his mentors, Keble, in making the idealistic decision to give up hopes of Oxford preferment in favor of working as a minister to a country parish, Elton. In the event, he remained there for only a short time before conversion. Faber's Oxford years corresponded neatly to the period when Tractarianism was shaped as...