From ‘Reminiscences chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement,’ by the Rev. T. Mozley, M.A. 2 vols. Longmans, Green & Co., 1882.[385]

[By the kind permission of Mrs. T. Mozley, and of Messrs. Longmans & Co.]

‘If there ever could be any question as to the master spirit of this Movement, which now would be a very speculative question indeed, it lies between John Henry Newman and Richard Hurrell Froude. Froude was a man, such as there are now and then, of whom it is impossible for those that have known him to speak without exceeding the bounds of common admiration and affection. He was elder brother of William, the distinguished engineer, who died lately, after rendering, and while still rendering, most important services to the Admiralty, and of Anthony, the well-known historian, the sons of Archdeacon Froude, a scholar and no mean artist. Richard came to Oriel from Eton, a school which does not make every boy a scholar, if it even tries to do so, but which somehow implants in every nature a generous ambition of one kind or other.

‘As an undergraduate, he waged a ruthless war against sophistry and loud talk, and he gibbeted one or two victims, labelling their sophisms with their names. Elected to a Fellowship, and now the companion of Newman and Pusey, not to speak of elders and juniors, he had to wield his weapons more reverentially and warily. But he had no wish to do otherwise…. Froude’s voice combined the gravity and authority of age with all the charms of youth, for he might be at once reasoning with a senate, and amusing a circle of children…. He was a bold rider. He would take a good leap when he had the chance, and would urge his friends to follow him, mostly in vain…. Froude delighted in taking his friends for a gallop in Blenheim Park, to the no small peril of indifferent riders, for the horses became wild, and went straight under the low hanging branches of the wide-spreading oaks.

‘His figure and manner were such as to command the confidence and affection of those about him. Tall, erect, very thin, never resting or sparing himself, investigating and explaining with unwearied energy, incisive in his language, and with a certain fiery force of look and tone, he seemed a sort of angelic presence to weaker natures. He slashed at the shams, phrases, and disguises in which the lazy or the pretentious veil their real ignorance or folly. His features readily expressed every varying mood of playfulness, sadness, and awe. There were those about him who would rather writhe under his most cutting sarcasms than miss their part in the workings of his sympathy and genius.

‘Froude was a Tory, with that transcendental idea of the English gentleman which forms the basis of Toryism. He was a High Churchman of the uncompromising school, very early taking part with Anselm, Becket, Laud, and the Nonjurors. Woe to anyone who dropped in his hearing such phrases as the Dark Ages, superstition, bigotry, right of private judgement, enlightenment, march of mind, or progress. When a stray man of science fell back on “law,” or a “subtle medium,” or any other device for making matter its own lord and master, it was as if a fox had broken cover: there ensued a chase and no mercy. Luxury, show, and even comfort he despised and denounced. He very consistently urged that the expenses of Eton should be kept down so low as to enable every ordinary incumbent to send his sons there to be trained for the ministry. All his ideas of College life were frugal and ascetic. Having need of a press for his increasing papers and books, he had one made of plain deal. It must have been Woodgate who came in one day, and finding some red chalk, ornamented the press with grotesque figures, which long were there. Froude and Newman induced several of the Fellows to discontinue wine in the Common Room. As they had already had a glass or two at the high table, they did not require more. There was only one objection to the discontinuance, but it was fatal at last; and that was its inconvenience when strangers were present. This preference of tea to wine was no great innovation in Oriel. When I came up at Easter, 1825, one of the first standing jokes against the College, all over the University, was the “Oriel teapot,” supposed to be always ready, the centre of the Oriel circle, and its special inspiration. How there ever came to be such an idea I cannot guess, but wherever I went, when I passed the wine, I was asked whether I would not prefer some tea, much to the amusement of the table.

‘Self-renunciation in every form [Froude] could believe in; most of all in a gentleman, particularly one of a good Devonshire family. His acquaintance with country gentlemen had been special, perhaps fortunate. He had not been in the north[386] of England, in the eastern counties, or in the midlands. It was therefore in perfect simplicity that, upon hearing one day the description of a new member in the Reformed Parliament, he exclaimed: “Fancy a gentleman not knowing Greek!” I chanced one day to drop, most inconsiderately, that all were born alike, and that they were made what they are by circumstances and education. Never did I hear the end of that. No retraction or qualification would avail….

‘… In July, 1832, the History of the Arians was ready for the press, and as Newman was now relieved of his College duties, he was more a man of leisure than he had ever been, and was also in more need of rest. Hurrell Froude (as Richard was always called, though there was another Hurrell in the family) had now to submit to be ruled by his anxious relatives. He must spend the winter on the Mediterranean and its shores, … and Newman was easily persuaded to go with him. In these days, it requires little persuasion to induce ordinary people who happen to be free from pressing engagements, to accept the offer of a Continental trip, especially southward, in the winter. But this did rather take Newman’s friends by surprise: the only reason they could suppose was his great anxiety for Hurrell Froude…. He never made a tour for pleasure’s sake, for health’s sake, or for change’s sake. He did move about a good deal, but it was to the country parsonages to which so many of his friends were early relegated….

‘… It must have been soon after Froude’s return from the Mediterranean that I had with him one of our old talks about architecture. He was as devoted to science and as loyal to it as any materialist could be. But architecture and science are very apt to be at variance, and Froude was always disposed to side with the latter. As for Greek architecture, there is no science in it except the mystery of proportion and a certain preternatural and overpowering conception of beauty. The Temple of Egesta, which won the hearts of our travellers, has no more science in its construction than Stonehenge. But Roman architecture was for all the world, for its gods as well as for its mortals. The arch, and still more the vault, were mighty bounds into the time to come.

‘Always leaning on tradition where possible, Froude wished to believe the pointed arch the natural suggestion of a row of round arches seen in perspective. Of course, a deep round arch in a thick wall only shows its roundness when you stand directly before it, but seems pointed from any other direction. I remember ventilating this idea to Sir Richard Westmacott and Turner, the great painter, at the former’s table, and I remember also the great contempt with which the latter dismissed such mechanical ideas from the realm of the picturesque. But it was the dome that chiefly exercised Froude’s mind. It was a positive pain to him that so grand a building as the Parthenon should have been constructed, as he believed, in such ignorance of science. His notion was that if Agrippa had known the qualities of the catenary curve he would have used it, instead of the semi-circular curve: that is, in this instance, the spherical vault…. Had any common utilitarian made such a suggestion I should not have thought it worth notice. I only mention it as showing the scientific character of Froude’s tastes. The objections are obvious and overwhelming. In the first place, beauty must lead in architecture, and construction must obey…. Spherical domes are the crux and the pitfall of architecture. They involve false construction and positive deception…. Froude had a soul for beauty; but he did not like shams. He did not like a thing to seem what it was not. Few buildings are prepared to stand such a test. Amiens Cathedral, for example, the first love of the English tourist, is nothing more than an iron cage filled in with stone…. Robert Wilberforce had been much impressed with Cologne Cathedral and with the galleries of early art at Munich. It is an illustration of the turning of the tide, and of the many smaller causes contributing to the Movement, that in 1829, German agents (one of them with a special introduction to Robert Wilberforce) filled Oxford with very beautiful and interesting tinted lithographs of mediæval paintings, which have probably, long ere this, found their way to a thousand parsonages: a good many to Brompton Oratory!… About the same time, there came an agent from Cologne with very large and beautiful reproductions of the original design for the Cathedral, which it was proposed to set to work on, with a faint hope of completing it before the end of the century. Froude gave thirty guineas for a set of the drawings, went wild over them, and infected not a few of his friends with mediæval architecture. As an instance of the way in which religious sentiment was now beginning to be disassociated from practical bearings and necessities, Froude would frequently mention the exquisitely finished details at York Minster and other Churches, in situations where no eye but the eye of Heaven could possibly reach them…. He was most deeply interested in architecture, but it is plain that he was more penetrated and inspired by St. Peter’s[387] than even by Cologne Cathedral. After spending three days with me in taking measurements, tracings, mouldings, and sketches of St. Giles at Oxford, one of the purest specimens of Early English, he devoted a good deal of time at Barbados to designing some homely Tuscan addition to Codrington College….

‘It was now [1833] deep in Long Vacation, but no period in the annals of Oxford was ever more pregnant with consequences than the next two months. The returning travellers had lost time. The world had got the start of them, and they had to make up for it. Froude’s imagination teemed with new ideas, new projects, topics likely to tell or worth trying; to be tried, indeed, and found variously successful. They came from him like a shower of meteors, bursting out of a single spot in a clear sky, for they had been pent up. Every post had brought the travellers some account of fresh “atrocities.” The Examiner was the only paper that talked sense. Conservative Churchism Froude now utterly abhorred. In passing through France, he had listened with hopefulness to the dream that a deeper descent into republicanism than that represented by Louis Philippe, would land that country in High Churchism. How could the Church of England now be saved? By working out the oath of canonical obedience? By a lay synod, pending the apostasy of Parliament? By a race of clergy living less like country gentlemen? By dealing in some way or other with the appointment of Bishops? By a systematic revival of religion in large towns; in particular, by colleges of unmarried priests? By Excommunication? By working upon the pauperes Christi? By writing up the early Puritans, who had so much to say for themselves against the tyranny of Elizabeth? By preaching Apostolic Succession? By the high sacramental doctrine? By attacking State interference in matters spiritual? By an apostolic vocabulary giving everything its right name? By recalling the memory of the Gregorian age?

‘It was perhaps a happy diversion of his thoughts that he had so much to say on other topics, such as architecture, and the construction of ships and dock-gates. It was now plain that he had brought home with him not only his own fervid temperament, but some of the heat of sunny climes, where indeed he had not taken proper care of his health, or any care at all. Like most other Englishmen, he would not be indoors by sunset, or put on warmer clothing when the thermometer dropped 20 or 30°. It happened to be an exceptionally cold winter in the Mediterranean. As far as regards health, the experiment had been a failure.

‘One thing, however, is quite clear from his Letters and other remains; and, as he was all this time somewhat in advance of Newman, it has a bearing on his mental history. Froude came home even more utterly set against Roman Catholics than he had been before. His conclusion was that they held the Truth in unrighteousness; that they were “wretched Tridentines everywhere,” and of course, ever since the Reformation; that the conduct and behaviour of the clergy was such that it was impossible they could believe what they professed, that they were idolaters in the sense of substituting easy and good-natured divinities for the God of Truth and Holiness.

‘Froude stayed in England just long enough to take a present part in the great Movement, and to contribute to it, and then, as he sorrowfully said of himself, “like the man who ‘fled full soon, on the first of June, but bade the rest keep fighting,’” he found himself compelled by his friends to leave England for the West Indies.

‘All these vivid expressions, delivered with the sincerity of a noble child or a newly-converted savage, chimed in with Newman’s state of feeling, and struck deep into his very being, to bring forth fruit. Yet in neither Froude nor Newman could now be discovered the least suspicion of what these outbursts might lead to, for at every point they found Rome irreconcilable and impossible.

*   *   *   *   *

‘Froude, who had now bidden farewell to Toryism, much in the same key as he had written of old Tyre and the Cities of the Plain, was contributing to the Tracts, from Barbados, and also freely criticising them when they seemed to him to temporise, or to fall into modern conventionalisms. In fact he was keeping Newman, nothing loth, up to the mark.

‘In May, 1835, he returned from Barbados. On landing, he found a letter from Newman calling him to Oxford, where there were several friends soon to part for the Long Vacation. His brother Anthony was summoned from his private tutor, Mr. Hubert Cornish. Froude came, full of energy and fire, sunburnt, but a shadow. The tale of his health was soon told. He had a “button in his throat” which he could not get rid of, but he talked incessantly. With a positive hunger for intellectual difficulties, he had been studying Babbage’s calculating machine, and he explained, at a pace which seemed to accelerate itself, its construction, its performances, its failures, and its certain limits. Few, if any, could follow him, still less could they find an opening for aught they had to say, or to beg a minute’s law. He never could realise the laggard pace of duller intelligences. I have not the least doubt he did his best to explain Babbage’s machine to his black Euclid class at Codrington College, and that without ever ascertaining the result in their minds….

‘… Froude was brimful of irony, and always ready to surprise and even shock men of a slower temperament, when he could by a smile smooth or disarm them. As he talked, so he wrote in his letters. The Editors of his Remains were under a temptation, which they construed into a necessity, to reproduce him as he really had been, to the very words and the life, and let his words take their chance. Upon the whole, they were right; for no one ever charged, or could now charge, on Froude, that his expressions had brought anyone to Rome, or could doubt that Froude himself was Anglican to the last….

‘… There had never been seen at Oxford, indeed seldom anywhere, so large and noble a sacrifice of the most precious gifts and powers to a sacred cause. The men who were devoting themselves to it were not bred for the work, or from one school. They were not literary toilers or adventurers glad of a chance, or veterans ready to take to one task as lightly as to another, equally zealous to do their duty, and equally indifferent to the form. They were not men of the common rank, casting a die for promotion. They were not levies or conscripts, but in every sense volunteers. Pusey, Keble, and Newman had each an individuality capable of a development, and a part beyond that of any former scholar, poet, or theologian in the Church of England. Each lost quite as much as he gained by the joint action of the three. It is hard to say what Froude might have been, or might not have been, had he lived but a few more years, and been content to cast in his lot with common mortals bound by conditions of place and time.’